Wikileaks Exposes US Diplomatic Intrigues
- Details
- Category: Imperialism & War
- Created on Sunday, 28 November 2010 18:41
- Written by SPIEGEL Staff
This piece was originally in Spiegel Online.
There is also a browsable database at the guardian.co.uk.
Never before in history has a superpower lost control of such vast amounts of such sensitive information -- data that can help paint a picture of the foundation upon which US foreign policy is built. Never before has the trust America's partners have in the country been as badly shaken. Now, their own personal views and policy recommendations have been made public -- as have America's true views of them.
A Superpower's View of the World
By SPIEGEL Staff
251,000 State Department documents, many of them secret embassy reports from around the world, show how the US seeks to safeguard its influence around the world. It is nothing short of a political meltdown for US foreign policy.
What does the United States really think of German Chancellor Angela Merkel? Is she a reliable ally? Did she really make an effort to patch up relations with Washington that had been so damaged by her predecessor? At most, it was a half-hearted one.
The tone of trans-Atlantic relations may have improved, former US Ambassador to Germany William Timken wrote in a cable to the State Department at the end of 2006, but the chancellor "has not taken bold steps yet to improve the substantive content of the relationship." That is not exactly high praise.
And the verdict on German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle? His thoughts "were short on substance," wrote the current US ambassador in Berlin, Philip Murphy, in a cable. The reason, Murphy suggested, was that "Westerwelle's command of complex foreign and security policy issues still requires deepening."
Such comments are hardly friendly. But in the eyes of the American diplomatic corps, every actor is quickly categorized as a friend or foe. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia? A friend: Abdullah can't stand his neighbors in Iran and, expressing his disdain for the mullah regime, said, "there is no doubt something unstable about them." And his ally, Sheikh bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi? Also a friend. He believes "a near term conventional war with Iran is clearly preferable to the long term consequences of a nuclear armed Iran."
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emissaries also learn of a special "Iran observer" in the Azerbaijan capital of Baku who reports on a dispute that played out during a meeting of Iran's Supreme National Security Council. An enraged Revolutionary Guard Chief of Staff Mohammed Ali Jafari allegedly got into a heated argument with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and slapped him in the face because the generally conservative president had, surprisingly, advocated freedom of the press.
A Political Meltdown
Such surprises from the annals of US diplomacy will dominate the headlines in the coming days when the New York Times, London's Guardian, Paris' Le Monde, Madrid's El Pais and SPIEGEL begin shedding light on the treasure trove of secret documents from the State Department. Included are 243,270 diplomatic cables filed by US embassies to the State Department and 8,017 directives that the State Department sent to its diplomatic outposts around the world. In the coming days, the participating media will show in a series of investigative stories how America seeks to steer the world. The development is no less than a political meltdown for American foreign policy.
Never before in history has a superpower lost control of such vast amounts of such sensitive information -- data that can help paint a picture of the foundation upon which US foreign policy is built. Never before has the trust America's partners have in the country been as badly shaken. Now, their own personal views and policy recommendations have been made public -- as have America's true views of them.
For example, one can learn that German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, the Germany's most beloved politician according to public opinion polls, openly criticizes fellow cabinet member Guido Westerwelle in conversations with US diplomats, and even snitches on him. Or that Secretary of State Clinton wants her ambassadors in Moscow and Rome to inform her whether there is anything to the rumors that Italian President Silvio Berlusconi and Vladimir Putin have private business ties in addition to their close friendship -- whispers that both have vehemently denied.
America's ambassadors can be merciless in their assessments of the countries in which they are stationed. That's their job. Kenya? A swamp of flourishing corruption extending across the country. Fifteen high-ranking Kenyan officials are already banned from traveling to the United States, and almost every single sentence in the embassy reports speaks with disdain of the government of President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga.
Weighing Public Interest against Confidentiality
Turkey hardly comes away any less scathed in the cables. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the cables allege, governs with the help of a cabal of incompetent advisors. Ankara Embassy officials depict a country on a path to an Islamist future -- a future that likely won't include European Union membership.
As with the close to 92,000 documents on the war in Afghanistan at the end of July and the almost 400,000 documents on the Iraq war recently released, the State Department cables have also been leaked to the WikiLeaks whistleblower platform -- and they presumably came from the same source. As before, WikiLeaks has provided the material to media partners to review and analyze them.
With a team of more than 50 reporters and researchers, SPIEGEL has viewed, analyzed and vetted the mass of documents. In most cases, the magazine has sought to protect the identities of the Americans' informants, unless the person who served as the informant was senior enough to be politically relevant. In some cases, the US government expressed security concerns and SPIEGEL accepted a number of such objections. In other cases, however, SPIEGEL felt the public interest in reporting the news was greater than the threat to security. Throughout our research, SPIEGEL reporters and editors weighed the public interest against the justified interest of countries in security and confidentiality.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the White House condemned the impending publication of the documents by WikiLeaks as "reckless and dangerous." The cables, which contain "candid and often incomplete information," are not an expression of policy and do not always shape final policy decisions, the statement reads. "Such disclosures put at risk our diplomats, intelligence professionals, and people around the world," the spokesperson said. The fact that "private conversations" are now being made public "can deeply impact not only US foreign policy interests, but those of our allies and friends around the world."
It is now possible to view many political developments around the world through the lens of those who participated in those events. As such, our understanding of those events is deeply enriched. That alone is often enough to place transparency ahead of national regulations regarding confidentiality.
Following the leaks of military secrets from Afghanistan and Iraq, these leaks now put US diplomats on the hot seat. It is the third coup for WikiLeaks within six months, and it is one that is likely to leave Washington feeling more than a bit exposed. Around half of the cables that have been obtained aren't classified and slightly less, 40.5 percent, as classified as "confidential." Six percent of the reports, or 16,652 cables, are labelled as "secret;" and of those, 4,330 are so explosive that they are labelled "NOFORN," meaning access should not be made available to non-US nationals. Taken together, the cables provide enough raw text to fill 66 years worth of weekly SPIEGEL magazines.
Gossip and the Unvarnished Truth
Much in the material was noted and sent because those compiling the reports or their dialogue partners believed, with some certainty, that their transcripts would not be made public for the next 25 years. That may also explain why the ambassadors and emissaries from Washington were so willing to report gossip and hearsay back to State Department headquarters. One cable from the Moscow Embassy on Russian first lady Svetlana Medvedev, for example, states that she is "generating tensions between the camps and remains the subject of avid gossip." It then goes on to report that President Medvedev's wife had already drawn up a list of officials who should be made to "suffer" in their careers because they had been disloyal to Medvedev. Another reports that the wife of Azerbaijan leader Ilham Aliyev has had so much plastic surgery that it is possible to confuse her for one of her daughters from a distance, but that she can barely still move her face.
What makes the documents particularly appealing, though, is that many politicians speak the unvarnished truth, confident as they are that their musings will never be made public.
What, though, do the thousands of documents prove? Do they really show a US which has the world on a leash? Are Washington's embassies still self-contained power centers in their host countries?
In sum, probably not. In the major crisis regions, an image emerges of a superpower that can no longer truly be certain of its allies -- like in Pakistan, where the Americans are consumed by fear that the unstable nuclear power could become precisely the place where terrorists obtain dangerous nuclear material.
There are similar fears in Yemen, where the US, against its better judgement, allows itself to be instrumentalized by an unscrupulous leader. With American military aid that was intended for the fight against al-Qaida, Ali Abdullah Saleh is now able to wage his battle against enemy tribes in the northern part of the country.
Insult to Injury
Even after the fall of Saddam Hussein, it still remained a challenge for the victorious power to assert its will on Iraq. In Baghdad, which has seen a series of powerful US ambassadors -- men the international press often like to refer to as American viceroys -- it is now up to Vice President Joe Biden to make repeated visits to allied Iraqi politicians in an effort to get them to finally establish a respectable democracy. But the embassy cables make it very clear that Obama's deputy has made little headway.
Instead, the Americans are forced to endure the endless tirades of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarek, who claims to have always known that the Iraq war was the "biggest mistake ever committed" and who advised the Americans to "forget about democracy in Iraq." Once the US forces depart, Mubarak said, the best way to ensure a peaceful transition is for there to be a military coup. They are statements that add insult to injury.
On the whole, the cables from the Middle East expose the superpower's weaknesses. Washington has always viewed it as vital to its survival to secure its share of energy reserves, but the world power is often quickly reduced to becoming a plaything of diverse interests. And it is drawn into the animosities between Arabs and Israelis, Shiites and Sunnis, between Islamists and secularists, between despots and kings. Often enough, the lesson of the documents that have now been obtained, is that the Arab leaders use their friends in Washington to expand their own positions of power.
Editor's note: DER SPIEGEL's full reporting on the WikiLeaks US diplomatic cables will be published first in the German-language edition of the magazine, which will be available on Monday to subscribers and at newsstands in Germany and Europe. SPIEGEL ONLINE International will publish extended excerpts of SPIEGEL's reporting in English in a series that will launch on Monday.
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Comments (20)
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Guest (gila monster)
PermalinkYou can read all of the cables that have been posted so far <a href="/http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/" rel="nofollow">here</a>. As of tonight only a few hundred of the quarter million cables are posted (none of them from the US embassy in Kathmandu), but the rest are supposed to go up there over the next few months.
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Guest (William Dhalgren)
PermalinkEric: Most of the cables haven't been transcribed and posted yet. Realistically, it will probably be weeks or months until they all are. Playing around with the Guardian database however, I've noted a few things about the Nepal cables.
They start at in 1995, but really start to pick up around 2002. Out of about 2600, almost 1200 are tagged with PTER (Prevention of Terrorism). There are 339 with the specific tag "Maoist" or "Maoist Insurgency". These begin in 2002, and end in late 2005 (consistent with the history of the People's War). There are 118 cables tagged MASS (Military Assistance and Sales), mostly in 2005 and 2006. There are 149 tagged MARR (Military and Defense Arrangements), which seem to begin in earnest in late 2005 and continue to 2010. Only one tagged PROP (Propaganda/Psyops), which based on the other tags seems to have been directed at Tibetan refugees in 2002. There's another tag, KDEM, which is not identified in the Guardian's glossary, that appears 339 times, starting in 2004, but most commonly after 2006.
But thus far, I've really only begun picking apart what any of this means. Most likely we will have to wait until the full cables are posted to find out anything definitive.0 Like -
Guest (Green Red)
PermalinkIt is not solely an American matter. over a decade and half a go, a Trotskist Benjamin Medea who was working i believe with one of the splits of SWP (Socialist Action? Organizer? or Global Exchange meybe?) once gathered few people in San Francisco saying that the more complex computers become like machines to destroy labors' jobs and hurt people the more it also exposes system's nature for it to decay and be exposed.
It is not only a matter of the US Imperialism to be exposed and, such independent exposers do more than fighting a particular system only. they fight the animal nature of class society and all its negative parts. Thought they don't have their own ideology necessarily but, they serve a wide progressive spectrum.0 Like -
Guest (William Dhalgren)
PermalinkA global search for the tag KDEM indicates that it appears 19910 times between 1994 and 2010.
Beginning to skim through the PROP tags. There are 391 of them; the only thing to jump out so far are two from Venezuela in February and October 2004 (perhaps connected to the recall referendum?).
If anyone is interested, I'll post any other tidbits that I stumble across.0 Like -
Guest (chicanofuturet)
Permalink"It is nothing short of a political meltdown for US foreign policy."
Gosh!
Political meltdown for US foreign policy??
<i>I hardly think so.</i>
"What does the United States really think of German Chancellor Angela Merkel?"
Oh shucks..like the Germans can't figure that one out..
arguments,slaps in the face,rumors,gossip..hillary clintons spy vs spy capers..
angry egytians,furious russian first ladies,plastic surgeries,pissed off kings pissed of at pissed off mullahs..
<i>..really world shaking stuff!</i>
and,I love this conclusion..
"...the lesson of the documents that have now been obtained, is that the Arab leaders use their friends in Washington to expand their own positions of power."
Wow! now that's news!!
hell,I'm surprised they didn't leak anything about Angelina Joile,Brad Pitt,Leonardo De Caprio and Vladimir Putin, or even Oprahs latest weight problems!!
what the hell is this Wikileaks dribble anyway ..National Enquirer for media,intellectuals and intelligence agencies around the world?
I'm not saying all of this "leaked" info is BS..(this wikileaks stuff doesn't impress me at all.I think most communists have a much more profound dialectical analysis of world events than wikileaks.)
(Why doesn't Der Spiegel,NY Times,Le Monde and Pravda ask us..we'll tell them what's going on around the world ..)
what I'm suggesting is that we need to be careful about this type of information..we should develop a more comprehensive type of litmus test to filter through all this so-called "leak" info..0 Like -
Guest (zerohour)
Permalink"I think most communists have a much more profound dialectical analysis of world events than wikileaks."
Wikileaks doesn't provide analysis, it releases data. The data it does release provides with greater details about contradictions between states and within the US state than we would otherwise have.
Your comments are based on a summary that is incomplete; this is even admitted by the article's authors. I've already seen elsewhere, a revelation that Hillary Clinton directed the State Department gather credit card data, passwords and encryption data from state officials and even DNA samples from UN members. Even if communists think such news is just par for the course, many people around the world will find this level of intrusiveness shocking and beyond acceptable norms.
I welcome this as an important contribution to help revolutionaries develop more sophisticated and analyses of state power, and subsequent political strategies - but it's up to us, and not Wikileaks, to do this.0 Like -
Guest (chicanofuturet)
Permalink<i>"Wikileaks doesn’t provide analysis, it releases data."</i>
I'm assuming we all know that "data" related to international relations just doesn't "exist" in a vacuum,that in fact such "data" is dialectically connected to those larger defining forces of global corporate media almost totally owned,controlled and manipulated by the ruling class into a role of supporting and promoting their class outlook and analysis using "news" or other "data".
Der Speigel,NY Times-other world reknown newspapers are not exactly known for being "fair and balanced" when it comes to shaping and delivering "data" to the people.As a matter of fact,they all have rather long and infamous histories of having served as media organs of ruling class anti-communist imperialist propaganda.
We should be careful,avoid becoming unwitting dupes of ruling class media in diffusing their propaganda-not helping them distract and divert the people's attention away from the truly deadly actions of world imperialism and war.No more state department hi-jinks,bread and circuses..no more diplomatic soap operas.
I agree,we should use anything at anytime to strengthen the cause of world revolution and class struggle.
If wikileaks is for "real" we should use their relevant "data" to help the cause of revolution.In this sense I would say it is a positive thing.
<i>I will repeat what I posted before..</i>
"what I’m suggesting is that we need to be careful about this type of information..we should develop a more comprehensive type of litmus test to filter through all this so-called “leak” info.."
<i>"…Not to mention the effect this could have on US international relations."</i>
as far as I'm concerned this is a somewhat naive over estimation of wikileaks power to significantly "effect" US international relations to any critically important degree.
the ruling classes of the world don't give a rat's ass what other international capitalist powers think of them as far as cocktail party innuendo,rumors,gossip.They are bound together by a much more powerful force other than soap opera gossip or silly rumors.A force which unites them against world revolution..that force being Capitalism.
<i> wikileaks...</i>
if there is anything we can use from it to adavnce the cause of world revolution then by all means we should propagandize such information..
all I'm saying here is we should be more deliberate,critical and cautious when dealing with such information being "leaked" to the people.0 Like -
Chicanofuturet:
This is an article from the mainstream journal <em>Spiegel</em> in germany. Obviously their concerns and verdicts are not those of communists like us. It seems a bit odd to polemicize against Der Spiegel.
It is posted here because it is an early summation of these leaks -- which are an important event in the world for many reasons. And posting it marks the fact that we communists should be alert to ways this affects the preparations for revolution in the world. (In ways that, for example, the Pentagon Papers once did.)
We may not care what the cables show about Merkel (in the way that a mainstream <em>German</em> newspaper does), but we can expect that such a huge hemorrhage in U.S. diplomatic traffic will reveal important information (Eric's example of cable traffic on counterinsurgency in Nepal gives a sense of that kind of potential -- which may include information we can't anticipate. Traffic about CIA prisons? torture? rendition? Abu ghraib?).
Already it is known that this includes information on U.S. preparations for attacking Iran... which may make it harder to launch such an attack. Surely such things are not silly gossip and irrelevant to the hopes of creating an antiwar resistance? right?
You write dismissively (i.e. sarcastically):
<blockquote>"pissed off kings pissed of at pissed off mullahs....<em>really world shaking stuff</em>!"</blockquote>
But in fact U.S./Israeli preparations for a surprise attack on Iran is world-shaking stuff, and leaking some confirmation and details of such secret preparations can be (potentially) quite damaging for their efforts. And may make it harder for forces (like Saudi Arabia) to support such attacks. Certainly I can imagine ways it can help alert and mobilize more people (around the world) to oppose and undermine such war preparations.
As such things emerge we will need to evaluate them. Which you seem to agree with.
Beyond that, I'm not sure what you are saying. On one hand you seem to imply this is not an important development. (really? not worth following? posting articles on? not worth exploiting?)
You seem to imply that the leaks may be false, (even putting scare quotes around the word 'leaks"). For example you write:
<blockquote>"all I’m saying here is we should be more deliberate,critical and cautious when dealing with such information being “leaked” to the people."</blockquote>
I'm confused what this means. Obviously we should always be critical and cautious dealing with information. But what does <em>more</em> deliberate, critical and cautious mean? Are you implying that others are being indeliberate, uncritical and reckless? Where?
Then you seem to imply that such information leaks can't potentially affect world events. saying:
<blockquote>"as far as I’m concerned this is a somewhat naive over estimation of wikileaks power to significantly 'effect' US international relations to any critically important degree. The ruling classes of the world don’t give a rat’s ass what other international capitalist powers think of them as far as cocktail party innuendo,rumors,gossip. They are bound together by a much more powerful force other than soap opera gossip or silly rumors. A force which unites them against world revolution..that force being Capitalism."</blockquote>
This is a thesis you should, perhaps, elaborate more -- so others can evaluate it (deliberately, critically and cautiously).
On the surface it seems a bit one-sided -- as if there is all base, no superstructure.
Also, I don't think history shows that capitalism unites the capitalist powers against world revolution (except in some exceptional moments). One of the key features of capitalism is the "manyness of capital" -- its inherent self division into competing blocks and blocs. On a world scale, this manyness has been often been manifested in the rivalry of capitalist nation-states and war blocs of various kinds -- which have often been unable to unite against revolution. (That helped give the opening to revolution in 1917, with the German imperialists helping lenin enter Russia to undermine the Anglo-French war bloc, or which created conditions for the Soviet Union to ally with the Western war bloc against the Axis.)
So: first, i think that diplomacy may not be the core of world geo-politics, but events in that realm can, certainly, affect world events.
second, there may well be information in these leaks of importance to the world revolution (India's government is already commenting on whether the leaks may potentially affect their position on a number of matters -- since the U.S. is intriguing with India in South Asia).
third, it is an important example of how the internet (and digitalized global info transfer) is creating new kinds of events that are affecting many aspects of politics. Dissidents now have access to large audiences, whistle blowers are harder to silence. government secrets are (apparently) harder to keep. this is worth thinking about in its own right (since it has great potential, and perhaps some danger, for the rev process as well.)
this may prove to be a very big deal -- and we should be alert, because the parts that are important for revolutionary exposure may not be (as you point out) the ones <em>Der Spiegel</em> stresses.0 Like -
Guest (bobh)
PermalinkIf diplomacy and the euphemistic language it employs weren't important to the functioning of imperialism, why would the US and previous imperialist entities pour money into their foreign services and embassies? Sure, they play a role in intelligence gathering, but all capitalist states have used diplomacy as part of business as usual.
It's worth noting that these leaks are receiving MUCH more press attention in the US media than the previous leaks about the military in Iraq and Afghanistan. A lot of the scheming by the US and its allies has been revealed, and it's pretty clear that this is already hurting their campaign against Iran. Why would they be in damage control mode if there were no damage?
Chicanofuturet says
<blockquote>"the ruling classes of the world don’t give a rat’s ass what other international capitalist powers think of them as far as cocktail party innuendo,rumors,gossip. They are bound together by a much more powerful force other than soap opera gossip or silly rumors. A force which unites them against world revolution..that force being Capitalism."</blockquote>
To me this indicates a distorted view of contradictions in the world. The world elites don't care about gossip, they care about power and wealth, and they view the main threats to their money and power as being other elites. That's why they have armies, build military alliances, carry out trade wars, etc. Sure they fear their own people sometimes, that's why they have the police; but armies and embassies are not mainly focused on that threat.
By the way <a href="/http://cryptome.org/0002/wikileaks-feed.htm" rel="nofollow">some people</a> dismiss Wikileaks as an intelligence front. To me that's an example of how political paranoia is a form of naivete. Even if Wikileaks were a CIA front it's clearly out of control...0 Like -
Guest (Tell No Lies)
PermalinkI think Chicanofuturet's comments raise an important question of the role of contingency and accident in history. Mike sums this position up nicely as "all base, no superstructure."
The assumption in Chicanofuturet"s comments is that the personal relations between individuals in power, the flows or obstacles to flows of information, the imperfect knowledge that arises, the personal foibles of people, etc... don't really matter because all those things are just epiphenomena of the deeper structural logics of capitalism and therefore just come out in the wash in the end anyway.
This is, unfortunately in my mind, a view typical of many who call themselves Marxists. Its unfortunate first off because its simply not true. Human societies are extraordinarily complex things that do not obey simple logics. Small events can ramify in all sorts of ways impossible to anticipate even when one is armed with the "science of historical materialism." A second way that it is unfortunate is that it leads many Marxists to think they can safely ignore huge areas of human life.
This goes a long way to explaining the sort of bubble reality that Marxists sometimes construct around themselves. Convinced of their possession of a superior analysis they disregard whole swathes of information that might cause them to rethink particular conclusions. Instead they focus on a much narrower body of information which tends to confirm views already acquired.
This is a sort of confirmation bias and it is in fact completely at odds with a scientific approach to understanding society.
The latest Wikileaks release is likely to be hugely significant in many different ways.
First, it is likely to damge U.S. relations with many governments around the world who will either be angry at U.S. evaluations or embarassed at their revelation. The U.S. will have to divert significant diplomatic resources away from other tasks to do damage control that will likely only be so effective.
Second, some of the revelations are likely to ignite popular anger against various governments which are revealed as essentially acting as tools of the U.S.. A single case is Yemen where it has been revealed that the Yemeni government has agreed to claim responsibility for what are in fact U.S. bombing missions that are killing Yemenis.
Of course it is not news to us that governments do these sorts of things. But we should be careful in assuming that we really know how these things all work. Much of what we know we know precisely because of past revelations, all on a much smaller scale than what we are seeing here. When the Bolsheviks revealed the secret treaties and other skullduggery of their Czarist predecessors it was a big deal. It enriched the analyses of serious historical materialists the way that new data should. It also affected popular consciousness, opening many peoples minds to a Marxist analysis of the workings of capitalist states. And this was especially the case for the peoples effected by the secret deals, in particular the Arab countries secretly carved up between France and the UK in the Sykes-Picot Agreement. The particular instances matter precisely because they have the potential to cause many many more people to understand who their real enemies are and how they operate.0 Like -
Guest (Red Ed)
PermalinkThis morning I read the Greenslade Blog published in the Guardian.UK. The title of the article is "Why do editors committed to press freedom attack Wikileaks?"
Of real concern however is the article last month by Jonah Goldberg, editor-at-large of National Review Online. Goldberg's article, picked up and published in the Chicago Tribune on October 29, 2010, is entitled "Why is Assange still alive?"
Goldberg begins the article asking "Why isn't Julian Assange dead?" and again asks with the article "Why wasn'y Assange garroted in his hotel room years ago?"
Friends of US imperialism understand the importance of WikiLeaks, and have suggestions as to how to deal with those leaks.0 Like -
Guest (David_D)
PermalinkI think we should be very aware that this may be at least in part a counter-intelligence effort on the part of the US. There could be deliberately "leaked" disinformation contained in this dump of data. There is not much of a particularly sensitive nature - so far. It's just important to think twice.
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Guest (Tell No Lies)
PermalinkOf course that is possible. But lets consider the political costs of the following revelations alone:
The analysis of the coup in Honduras declaring it illegal, illegitimate and unconstitutional.
The Yemeni gov't. agreeing to lie to its people and claim resposibility for US bombings.
A highly insulting analysis of the national traits of "Persians" in the midst of Iranian Revolution.
Exposure of the Palestinian Authority's role in squelching investigations of the attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla.
This is just a glimpse at one day's release consisting of 1/100 of the total documents.
Could it be an elaborate counter-intelligence operation? Sure. It could also be the work of Martians. But there should be compelling evidence offered to support such speculation before we treat it seriously. Such evidence might be direct evidence regarding the source of the leak or indirect based on an analysis of the expected political effects of the leaks (if, for example, they build support for an attack on Iran).
I also think we should not underestimate the negative effects on U.S. imperialism simply as a result of the scope of the leak. In addition to being a serious blow to the appearance of U.S. omnipotence this will discourage the sharing of frank analyses within the State Department and thereby hamper the pursuit of U.S. imperial objectives. Also, the more leaks there are like this the more that individuals with access to this sort of information are going to think about releasing it. It is hard to see U.S. intelligence agencies seeing these as acceptable costs in order to plant a story or twelve. (A similar argument can be made I think against "inside job" type 9-11 conspiracies. The political costs of the attacks in shaking the appearance of U.S. invulnerability are simply too high.)0 Like -
Guest (Hegemonik)
Permalink@William, et al.:
The "KDEM" tag stands for "democratization" programs, according to the Foreign Relations Handbook available here: http://www.state.gov/m/a/dir/regs/fah/05fah03/index.htm">http://www.state.gov/m/a/dir/regs/fah/05fah03/index.htm
The specific file for the handbook is here: http://www.state.gov/m/a/dir/regs/fah/05fah03/index.htm">http://www.state.gov/m/a/dir/regs/fah/05fah03/index.htm
Description is as follows:
<blockquote>Use on all documents dealing with democratization in Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Encouraging democratization constitutes an essential component of U.S. policy. The U.S. Government is devoting significant resources to monitor and promote regional trends away from autocratic rule and toward political pluralism. Programs designed to encourage democratization are diverse, and often are cross-discipline in nature, requiring the involvement of several U.S. Government agencies. Also use the appropriate Subject and Geo-Political TAGS. (Action: Appropriate Bureau)</blockquote>
This leads me to believe0 Like
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