Um, I Think It's Time for a Thread on WikiLeaks

"WikiLeaks and its leader, a certain Julian Assange"

Sounds like one of those Damon Wayan malapropisms from In Living Color: "I like this place, it's got a certain julian assange about it."

On the one hand, only idiots believe that stupid national daydream.

Politicians, military leaders, anti-war demonstrators, patriots, journalists, advocates... many of them either believe the myth, claim to believe it, or pay lip service too it. There is a gulf of reality between the rules we claim to fight by and what it takes to win. The honorable warrior/baby killer dichotomy is stupid and naive and yet it pops up all the time.

i think i rescind my earlier otm'ing

Jonah Goldberg is miffed that Gawker misunderstood his Swiftian irony when he asked "a serious question": why hasn't the CIA murdered Assagne?

*Assange

lassagne

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/nov/18/wikileaks-founder-faces-swedish-detention-rape

lol url

U.S. briefs allies on new documents leak: WikiLeaks

The United States has briefed Britain, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Norway and Israel ahead of the expected new release of classified U.S. documents, WikiLeaks said on Thursday, citing local press reports.

The whistle-blowing website said by Twitter that American diplomats briefed government officials of its six allies in advance of the release expected in the next few days.

The next release is expected to include thousands of diplomatic cables reporting corruption allegations against politicians in Russia, Afghanistan and other Central Asian nations, sources familiar with the State Department cables held by WikiLeaks told Reuters on Wednesday.

The allegations are major enough to causee serious embarrassment for foreign governments, the sources said.

The Diplomatic files are going to be released any minute now: http://wlcentral.org/node/358

According to Der Spiegel, just over half of the cables are not subject to classification, 40.5 percent are classified as "confidential" and only six percent or 15,652 dispatches as "secret." 2.5 million U.S. employees have access to SIPRNET material, where these cables originated.

Well, I guess these weren't exactly going to stay hidden for long since top secret america is pretty much this country's biggest growth industry

The material is supposed to be released tonight (misread that, yesterday), but at the moment, Wikileaks is under attack (denial of service)

http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/8920530488926208

Except... it's too late.

http://i51.tinypic.com/xcdgg.png

At the start of a series of daily extracts from the US embassy cables - many of which are designated "secret" – the Guardian can disclose that Arab leaders are privately urging an air strike on Iran and that US officials have been instructed to spy on the UN's leadership.

These two revelations alone would be likely to reverberate around the world. But the secret dispatches which were obtained by WikiLeaks, the whistlebowers' website, also reveal Washington's evaluation of many other highly sensitive international issues.

These include a major shift in relations between China and North Korea, Pakistan's growing instability and details of clandestine US efforts to combat al-Qaida in Yemen.

Among scores of other disclosures that are likely to cause uproar, the cables detail:

• Grave fears in Washington and London over the security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme

• Alleged links between the Russian government and organised crime.

• Devastating criticism of the UK's military operations in Afghanistan.

• Claims of inappropriate behaviour by a member of the British royal family.

Alleged links between the Russian government and organised crime.

ooh BREAKING NEWS there damn

Could say the same zing about any of those 'revelations' to be honest.

this should make interesting reading. Well i say interesting, you'll probably have to wade through screeds of shite looking for the interesting bits.

thank god for journalists eh

Claims of inappropriate behaviour by a member of the British royal family.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=un__imwE3vg

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/world/29cables.html?_r=1&hp

Bargaining to empty the Guantánamo Bay prison: When American diplomats pressed other countries to resettle detainees, they became reluctant players in a State Department version of “Let’s Make a Deal.” Slovenia was told to take a prisoner if it wanted to meet with President Obama, while the island nation of Kiribati was offered incentives worth millions of dollars to take in Chinese Muslim detainees, cables from diplomats recounted. The Americans, meanwhile, suggested that accepting more prisoners would be “a low-cost way for Belgium to attain prominence in Europe.”

American diplomats in Rome reported in 2009 on what their Italian contacts described as an extraordinarily close relationship between Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian prime minister, and Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister and business magnate, including “lavish gifts,” lucrative energy contracts and a “shadowy” Russian-speaking Italian go-between. They wrote that Mr. Berlusconi “appears increasingly to be the mouthpiece of Putin” in Europe. The diplomats also noted that while Mr. Putin enjoys supremacy over all other public figures in Russia, he is undermined by an unmanageable bureaucracy that often ignores his edicts.

They describe the volatile Libyan leader as rarely without the companionship of “his senior Ukrainian nurse,” described as “a voluptuous blonde."

Even in places far from war zones and international crises, where the stakes for the United States are not as high, curious diplomats can turn out to be accomplished reporters, sending vivid dispatches to deepen the government’s understanding of exotic places.

In a 2006 account, a wide-eyed American diplomat describes the lavish wedding of a well-connected couple in Dagestan, in Russia’s Caucasus, where one guest is the strongman who runs the war-ravaged Russian republic of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov.

The diplomat tells of drunken guests throwing $100 bills at child dancers, and nighttime water-scooter jaunts on the Caspian Sea.

“The dancers probably picked upwards of USD 5000 off the cobblestones,” the diplomat wrote. The host later tells him that Ramzan Kadyrov “had brought the happy couple ‘a five-kilo lump of gold’ as his wedding present.”

A 22 January 2010 cable was signed off by Elizabeth Pitterle, head of intelligence operations. She thanked the London embassy for its intelligence on Duncan's "friendship with ... William Hague", saying it was "particularly insightful and exceptionally well timed, as analysts are preparing finished products on the Conservative leadership for senior policymakers".

The cable called for further intelligence on "Duncan's relationship with Conservative party leader David Cameron and William Hague", and asked:"What role would Duncan play if the Conservatives form a government? What are Duncan's political ambitions?"

Kadyrov is actually in the Chechen GAPDY tribute band, Grozny Bear.

― Neggin' you crapative (NickB), Monday, 6 September 2010 15:46 (2 months ago)

A former hacker, Adrian Lamo, who reported Manning to the US authorities, said the soldier had told him in chat messages that the cables revealed "how the first world exploits the third, in detail".

Let that be a lesson to us all: If you are about to leak hundreds of thousands of secret cables, don't immediately start blabbing about it in detail to a hacker who you conveniently meet at random in an online chat room!

a lot of these seem to lack point and are just leaks of internal documents to show what wikileaks can do

there's no 'quality control' tho, wikileaks will release any old shit

i'd be surprised if they haven't been fed fake stuff by ~agencies~ before

a lot of these seem to lack point and are just leaks of internal documents to show what wikileaks can do

No doubt this will be official US response in a few weeks after "OMG COUNTLESS LIVES ARE AT STAKE!" has gotten enough media attention.

no doubt the wikileaks bro is some rapey looking motherfucker, sorry i mean, i don't give a shit what the official US response will be, im just trying to call it

oh great this again

yup, it's one more go-round for the fearless libertarians and their noble struggle to make public internal government documents

we're way ahead of you in the UK, where the govt itself is releasing detailed public sector budgets in order to discredit the public sector in the right-wing (is there any other kind?) media

uh oh, i've been called a libertarian, i'm super pissed

hiyyyyek

oh great this again

Have you ever considered installing a trolling filter so that you don't have to make snide remarks every time someone writes something you don't like? You might find it freeing.

I think calling out the gov't on using the "this puts lives at risk" argument (however right they may be) is crucial, and we should never stop doing this so long as we are engaged in Endless War.

huh? we shd call out the govt "however right they may be"?

a lot of this current info dump is only tangentially related to the "Endless War" or however you like to melodramatize it

well i agree we shouldn't deny ourselves that agency but i think what adam was getting at was the arbirariness with which the govt trots out that meaningless counter. which yeah, is something to be critical of

i'd kind of like to know how you think "endless war" is a 'melodramatic' term tho - when exactly do you see this ending? maybe "by 2014" i guess lol

http://c1.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/images02/39/l_d78e990a055c453d82f5ef951448c578.jpg

"some day this war's gonna end"

govt trots

Those old Marxism Today bunch get everywhere...

http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/index.html
Currently released so far... 219 / 251,287 ?

I still don't understand what this leak is supposed to accomplish, other than "look what Wikileaks can do" (history mayne OTM). Isn't diplomacy the best way to avoid "Endless War" and to prevent future ones? How does compromising diplomatic trust in the US (and the countries it deals with on a regular basis) supposed to help that?

At the end of the day, I'm sure that the Saudi king -- the champion of human rights and free speech that he is -- will be the first to admit that carrying out diplomacy completely in the public domain will be the most effective way to bring peace to the Middle East.

I don't know what its moral purpose is meant to be anymore. It just seems like reckless posturing more than anything else, and whether the impact of revelation X is positive or negative in the long run isn't even relevant. It's like the Popbitch of geopolitics - juicy gossip dressed up as The Truth.

"other than look what ___ can do" sounds a lot like certain countries' foreign policies.

the best way to prevent misdeeds and corruption is to bring records thereof to the public attention and hold the people involved accountable (lol ok let's not get carried away though). countries and corporations that don't want their misdeeds made public by wikileaks or other whistleblowers shouldn't commit misdeeds or do things they don't want made public (to paraphrase a much-beloved around here writer)

k3vin OTMFM

also i've no idea how diplomatic relations with the US will be adversely affected considering the US hasn't consented to the release of the cables and in fact has been strongly critical of it

i think id have a much better relationship with my friends if they knew every single thing id ever said about them to other people. cant see any problem with that. at all.

"other than look what ___ can do" sounds a lot like certain countries' foreign policies

omg you totally went there

yeah sure, the us went into afghanistan just to show everyone how big its dick was

simple