wikileaks - he he he

[yusuf]

Well said DRR.. and Chomsky really nailed it... what we are seeing a bunch of Arab dictators wanting the US to attack some Persian dictators... it's not representative of the people...the Arab populace may decry Israel, and the US but they view their own leaders as the primary cause of their problems.

[mrtoes]

About leaders not being representative of the people definitely, viewing their leaders as the source of their problems that is mostly true, although their leaders do a decent job of deflecting their anger towards external entities and help encourage some seriously creative conspiracy theories. So much like the US and the rest of the world all round then

[fuga]

After the Afghanistan War diaries were published the case was re-opened by the Swedish prosecutors office. Claims of pressure by the US State department were denied.

Can't he find that cable?

-pete

[I-mon]

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/wikileaks-just-made-the-world-more-repressive/article1818157/

WikiLeaks just made the world more repressive
Scott Gilmore
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
Published Tuesday, Nov. 30, 2010 5:00AM EST

I am an aid worker, the kind who rants about transparency, open governments and reforming the United Nations. But, I used to be a diplomat and I used to write secret cables, like the ones being released by WikiLeaks. And I said some very frank and nasty things in those cables.

Why? I was posted to Jakarta. My job was to find out as much as I could about the human rights abuses being committed by the Indonesian military, and to help apply whatever pressure we could to make them stop. I wrote cables back to Ottawa that would raise the hair on the back of your neck, describing abuses that still make me sick years later. These cables gave the Canadian government the ammunition it needed to lean heavily on the Indonesian leadership at the UN and at summits like APEC.

Allow me to illustrate with an example. Every few months, I would visit a little whitewashed school in the hills of Indonesian-occupied East Timor. The young teacher who ran the school would cheerfully bring me into her office, and we would chat about small things while her uniformed students would serve us homemade buns and strong coffee in chipped porcelain. Once the students left and the office door closed, the teacher would open her desk drawer and with a shaking hand give me horrifying photos of disinterred bodies. The Timorese resistance would dig up the fresh graves of torture victims, take photos for evidence, and pass them through their underground networks to this teacher, who would then get them out of the country through me and other diplomats. With that information we knew what the Indonesian military was doing in secret. We could better confront Jakarta, and we could assert more pressure on them to stop.

When we sent the reporting cables back to the Department of Foreign Affairs, they were secret for a reason. If they were published in The Globe and Mail instead, I would have been thrown out of the country in 24 hours and the Indonesian officials would not have permitted a replacement. The local politicians would have hired a rent-a-mob to stone the Canadian embassy. Their leaders would have told the Jakarta media I was a liar and would have blamed the Timorese for feeding me calumny. And the police would have arrested and killed the young teacher before the week was out.

The third most common topic in the WikiLeaks cables is human rights, with American diplomats doing the same thing we were trying to do in Indonesia: Make the world a little better.

That’s hard to swallow for the cyber mob that is celebrating the embarrassment being inflicted on the U.S. government this week. But the damage done to Washington is nothing compared to the pain that is about to be inflicted on the confidential sources in Russia, China and Sudan.

It’s not just the militant activist in Guelph, Ont., reading the cables. It’s the military dictatorships and the secret police in capitals all around the world. In the days and weeks ahead, people who dared to share information with U.S. diplomats will be rounded up. And thousands more who may have been willing to pass on pictures of tortured bodies will keep them in the desk drawer instead.

Ironically, WikiLeaks is inflicting the same collateral damage it so loudly abhors. The “Cablegate” release is not a real victory for a more open world. It will lead to a more closed world, where repressive governments will be more free to commit atrocities against their own people and the people who try to stop them will have even less information to help prevent this. Thankfully, for the Timorese at least, WikiLeaks did not exist in the 1990s.

Scott Gilmore is a former Canadian diplomat and the founder of Peace Dividend Trust, a New York-based charity that finds, tests and implements new ideas for improving aid and peacekeeping.

[Darth Rock&Roll]

I think Scott Gilmore is reading more into it and supplying a lot of supposition.

I also know that wikileaks vets peoples names and doesn't release stuff carte blanche, especially in regards to individuals operating in a manner such as Gilmore is speaking of. His example for instance is NOWHERE to be found and in fact, there is nothing even remotely close to what he is expressing fears of.

It will not make governments more secretive, it DOES make them more accountable for their sayings and doings and frankly that's a good thing.
There are diplomats with far more insight and far many more years of service than Mr.Gilmore's who agree with the concept and material deliveries of wiki leaks.

Also of note is the MSM political bent of the Globe and Mail, which is not a neutral paper at all. it services an extreme left wing bent, as expressed by Mr.Gilmore in his opening lines.

Just pointing it out as a Canuck who has perspective on that paper and that writer.

[dragonprawn]

I doubt that the allegations are true. It sounds like a plot right out of the KGB manual to silence him. On the other hand, you never know but I really doubt it.

But I read that his own people said it wasn't a "honeypot trap". Who knows. And as liberal as I am I have mixed feelings on the whole wikileaks matter.

[fuga]

Or maybe the Canadian diplomats had less influence than they thought, especially in responding to an occupation that lasted 25 years.

From http://www.enotes.com/genocide-encyclopedia/east-timor:

Indonesia agreed to hold a plebiscite under UN auspices, in August 1999. This concession was attributable less to international pressures than to the fall of Suharto following the Asian economic collapse. The flexible stance adopted by President Habibie and the determined efforts of Kofi Annan, the newly appointed UN Secretary-General, were the key elements in the fortuitous sequence of events that led to East Timor's liberation in September 1999, after twenty-four years of occupation.

Plus, look where the Peace Dividend Trust gets its money: http://www.peacedividendtrust.org/en/index.php?category=31&title=Donors%20and%20Partners

-pete

[Daniel]

And now the hosting company has withdrawn the platform, as "other customers´ accounts were endangered due to attacks." I am sure that the happy people at CYBERCOM would never stoop to hacking.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/blog/20 ... s-everydns

www.sunshinepress.org still works just fine, though.


D.

Sarcasm. Oh yeah, like that´ll work.

[yusuf]

cablegate is back up in europe ..also if anyone is interested some people have put together a full text search capability for all cables that have been released.. they are also keeping a cache

http://cablesearch.org/

btw

[Overlord]

ke ke....go Aussie!

http://www2.theuglydance.com/?v=sdkmwudpw5

Over

[GrahamB]

QnA with Assagne

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/20 ... -wikileaks

[Steve James]

Imo, this issue is more complex than "leaking info is good" or even that it leads to the "truth." I can't say that all information should be available to everyone anytime they want it. I think it'd be stupid to think that we should allow everyone (including our enemies) access to everything we think or say. Okay, we would definitely want to know if/when an enemy planned to attack us. Thus, we have "diplomacy" and "espionage." Yes, often they're the same --but they're inevitably linked. All governments have them, friends and foes. Diplomats say one thing to their counterparts from other countries; and say completely different things among themselves.

Maybe because we all have backgrounds in the martial arts, we think that compliments and insults should be up front. If someone's saying something bad about someone, he should spit it out, not smile in his face and lie. Unfortunately, we feel that way because we "know" that that's just what often happens. Then again, if the ambassador from a certain country is an alcoholic with bad breath and body odor, it might not do anyone any good to mention it.

That brings up the central issue in this case, imo. I.e., it's not about leaks; it's about what is leaked. If wikileaks found plans for the demolition of the Twin Towers by remote controlled aircraft, THAT would be meaningful to most Americans. Or, if illegal assassinations (and I don't imply that any are moral) were authorized, then leaks are good when they lead to criminal prosecutions. If Watergate had not been discovered by a security-guard, then finding out the info later would be beneficial to the people and to "justice."

In this case, I'm not sure whether the particular leaks are more embarrassing than beneficial. Politically, it's uncertain, too. All the politicians/ambassadors involved know for a fact that all sorts of stuff gets proposed or spoken in private. Shucks, everybody knows that from his or her own life. The whole reason for diplomatic pouches and private communications are that the idea is to keep them private.

As for this guy Asange, whether he is or isn't a rapist is irrelevant. Clearly, the gov't (and maybe not just the US's) are afraid of him because they can't control what he releases. Of course, he receives his information from someone --who is doing something illegal and will be charged. Chasing Asange is intimidation. The Swedish gov't is seeking him on rape charges, not the US. He hasn't broken US laws, afaik.

[yusuf]

just in case...

http://213.251.145.96/

[GrahamB]

Assange tells Guardian there is much more, encrypted, and "If something happens to us, the key parts will be released automatically,"

[Darthwing Teorist]

QnA with Assagne

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/20 ... -wikileaks

This says a lot:

rszopa
Annoying as it may be, the DDoS seems to be good publicity (if anything, it adds to your credibility). So is getting kicked out of AWS. Do you agree with this statement? Were you planning for it?
Thank you for doing what you are doing.
Julian Assange small

Julian Assange:
Since 2007 we have been deliberately placing some of our servers in jurisdictions that we suspected suffered a free speech deficit inorder to separate rhetoric from reality. Amazon was one of these cases.