What I’ve found curious about the WikiLeaks story of the past few weeks is how the focus – at least in the U.S. – has been on whether the online publisher of the leaks (Julian Assange) is a champion of transparency, or whether he should be hanged, disemboweled, beheaded, drawn and quartered, and what remains left for the crows. Very little attention – at least in the U.S. – has been on what is revealed in the diplomatic cables leaked. For that you have to go to foreign outlets such as the London Guardian, where you can find a log of the revelations from the leaks, arranged by date and newspaper (note the dearth of U.S. papers). Here are just a few of the revelations that I wish had been reported on and discussed in this country:
• Saudi Arabia put pressure on the US to attack Iran. Other Arab allies also secretly agitated for military action against Tehran.
• Washington is running a secret intelligence campaign targeted at the leadership of the United Nations, including the secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, and the permanent security council representatives from China, Russia, France and the UK.
• China is ready to accept Korean unification and is distancing itself from North Korea which it describes as behaving like a "spoiled child". Cables say Kim Jong-il is a "flabby old chap" losing his grip and drinking.
• US and British diplomats fear that Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme could lead to terrorists obtaining fissile material, or a devastating nuclear exchange with India. Also, small teams of US special forces have been operating secretly inside Pakistan's tribal areas, with Pakistani government approval. And the US concluded that Pakistani troops were responsible for a spate of extra-judicial killings in the Swat Valley and tribal belt, but decided not to comment publicly.
• The US ambassador to Pakistan said the Pakistani army is covertly sponsoring four major militant groups, including the Afghan Taliban and the Mumbai attackers, Laskar-e-Taiba (LeT), and "no amount of money" will change the policy. Also, US diplomats discovered hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Pakistan earmarked for fighting Islamist militants was not used for that purpose.
• Zardari claimed that the brother of Pakistan's opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, "tipped off" LeT about impending UN sanctions after the 2008 Mumbai attacks, allowing the group to empty its bank accounts. British diplomats feared India would respond with force to the attacks but the US thought the UK was "over-reacting".
• Russia is a "virtual mafia state" with rampant corruption and scant separation between the activities of the government and organised crime. Vladimir Putin is accused of amassing "illicit proceeds" from his time in office, which various sources allege are hidden overseas. And he was likely to have known about the operation in London to murder the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, Washington's top diplomat in Europe alleged.
• British and US officials colluded to manoeuvre around a proposed ban on cluster bombs, allowing the US to keep the munitions on British territory, regardless of whether a treaty forbidding their use was implemented. Parliament was kept in the dark about the secret agreement, approved by then-foreign secretary David Miliband.
• One of the biggest objectives at the US embassy in Madrid over the past seven years has been trying to get the criminal case dropped against three US soldiers accused of the killing of a Spanish television cameraman in Baghdad. Telecinco cameraman José Couso was killed on 8 April 2003 during a tank shelling of the Hotel Palestine where he and other journalists were staying while they were covering the Iraq war.
•The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, is erratic, emotional and prone to believing paranoid conspiracy theories, according to frustrated diplomats and foreign statesmen. He has also been accused by his own ministers of complicity in criminal activity, including ordering the physical intimidation of the top official in charge of leading negotiations with the Taliban.
•Afghanistan emerges as a land where bribery, extortion and embezzlement are the norm. Describing the likely lineup of Afghanistan's new cabinet last January, the US embassy noted that the agriculture minister, Asif Rahimi, "appears to be the only minister that was confirmed about whom no allegations of bribery exist".
• A potential "environmental disaster" was kept secret by the US last year when a large consignment of highly enriched uranium in Libya came close to cracking open and leaking radioactive material into the atmosphere.
• Senior Obama administration officials say many millions of dollars are flowing largely unimpeded to extremist groups worldwide and they have received little help in stopping this from allies in the Middle East.
• The cables reveal that a week after Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, assured a top US state department official that his country was not sending weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Obama administration lodged a confidential protest accusing Damascus of doing precisely that.
• Revelations that US officials put pressure on Germany not to arrest Central Intelligence Agency officers involved in the 2003 kidnapping of a German citizen mistakenly identified as a terrorist.
This is just a small number of the cable revelations. Most of the revelations aren’t revelations at all, but rather things we all knew already (Putin’s the real power in Russia, Gadafi’s a nut). And that is the main problem with the leaks, the scatter-shot and massiveness of them. It would have been much more discerning for WikiLeaks (or world newspapers) to much more selectively release the cables according to the topics (Afghanistan, Iraq, China, etc.). As a result of the “dump,” the story (at least in this country) became the “crime” of the leaks and not the content of them.
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