As I’m sure most PW readers know, the latest release of classified documents form WikiLeaks hit the media November 28. This time, it’s diplomatic cables rather than military documents, with 243 cables out of 251,287 out so far. The rest will be made available over the weeks and months to come. Eric and I are trying to nail down the exact time of yesterday’s leak. As best as I can determine, the leak was planned for 4:30 ET but the WikiLeaks website was shut down for a bit; the NY Times blog The Lede states Wikileaks was accessible by 5:17 ET. If any readers have more precise information for the time of the leak, please let us know!
Given what Eric has written recently about international geopolitics being the dominant theme of the cluster of planets and points in Sagittarius, it should be an interesting chart to suss out. No doubt the Chiron-Neptune conjunction has a hand in this shedding of light and I’ll be curious to see what aspects Mercury is making, given that the story is all about communication and technology.
In the meantime, here are a couple of tidbits from the coverage at Democracy Now! today:
“Among the findings: Arab leaders are urging the United States to attack Iran; Washington and Yemen agreed to cover up the use of U.S. warplanes to bomb Yemen; the United States is using its embassies around the world as part of a global spy network and asking diplomats to gather intelligence; and much more. We host a roundtable discussion with Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg; Greg Mitchell, who writes the Media Fix blog at The Nation; Carne Ross, a British diplomat for 15 years who resigned before the Iraq war; and As’ad AbuKhalil, a professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus.”
AS’AD ABUKHALIL: What is very striking about all these documents on the Middle East is that the Arab people are not going to be surprised that much. They all along have known that they are ruled by a bunch of liars and deceivers who go to extra lengths to appease and please the United States. What is going to be particularly revealing are the details that show the lengths to which these rulers go in order to please the United States. And we find that they are not capable of making independent decisions. Whatever the instincts of the United States are, those rulers go along with them and, in fact, they seem to compete with one another. For example, in showing how much they are hostile towards Iran.
DANIEL ELLSBERG: Let me put, though, these papers in some perspective. Most of your people, except for Carne Ross and to some extent John Kerry, are really not familiar with the levels of classification here and a lot of silly things have been said about them ignorantly. The fact is that these are quite low level documents. They are equivalent to the fields level documents on the civilian side that we saw in the Afghan and Iraq documents that Wikileaks earlier released. So they’re not the Pentagon Papers in terms of top secret, high level decision making papers. When the Times hypes its documents, or the other papers, as being prepared for high level policy makers, that is just false. Probably no high level policy maker even saw one of these “secret” documents.
CARNE ROSS: I have to disagree with Daniel Ellsberg. I mean, the telegrams that I’ve seen, including the secret classified stuff, is the meat and drink of diplomacy. My foreign secretary read this stuff every day, a thick folder of it, as I did in the foreign office. I don’t know how things work in the U.S. government, but my experience working on Iraq is that the top secret stuff, the intelligence based stuff, is the least accurate form of reporting that you get. What foreign leaders are saying to American diplomats or British diplomats in confidential discussions is enormously important. Records of what King Abdullah said or President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen said would be of great interest to senior officials in the State Department or indeed the NSC or the White House, so I will have disagree with Daniel Ellsberg’s analysis. This stuff is very, very revealing of the every day meat and drink of American diplomacy.
Hey Len —
the 5 newspapers that received the documents in advance from WikiLeaks all had the ability to break stories about the documents before the documents themselves were released on the WikiLeaks site. So i think it’s the time for their appearance to the public on the WikiLeaks site that Eric wants to work with.
i don’t know if i’d quite call myself a scoop queen yet, but i’m working on it. 😉
Amanda (hopefully i have you right as the author this time): Score! Thou art the scoop queen. Peter Parker, Clark Kent, Jimmy Olsen, you have them all beat. The earliest release i know of was the NYT synopsis right around 11 am PDT on Nov 28. Looking forward to whatever chart the PW brain trust settles on. `Tis a hoary question given the denial of service attack on the source.
In the meantime whether Mr. Ellsberg or Ms. Ross are correct in their evaluation, the fact that so much energy is going into shutting down the cause of good faith, truth and transparency speaks volumes. In a way this is a relationship thing. Would you trust a partner that conducts a relationship like we conduct diplomacy?