Tuesday, November 30, 2010

More WikiLeaks Revelations

...from around the world.

WikiLeaks: Assessing the 'Damage'
"Then there’s a category of items I count as being of urgent public concern. For example, North Korea has smuggled advanced Russian-made, nuclear-capable missiles to Iran. That’s important to know. Our government hasn’t told us already because it wants to ignore key aspects of the Iran problem, not to mention the North Korea problem. Another example: Leaked cables confirm that Syria supplies Hezbollah. This not only underscores (again) Syria’s status as a jihad-terror-supporting state, but deals yet another blow to the canard that Sunnis (Syria) don’t connive with Shiites (Hezbollah) against infidels (the rest of us). Then there’s Pakistan, which, we now learn, isn’t cooperating with our (formerly) secret plan to secure its nuke materials. (Which should make us wonder what $18 billion in “aid” to a sharia state really buys these days.)

At this very early stage, the greatest “damage” done seems to be mainly to the fictions of “engagement,” “outreach,” and other utopian canards destructive to the continued well-being of this nation."
WikiLeaks Confirms Our Analysis of U.S. Policy and Middle East Politics
"Please forgive me for saying this, but what really amazed me in reading the Wikileaks was how thoroughly they proved points I've been making for years. I wouldn't have had the nerve to say that except that readers have been telling me the same thing."
There is nothing new under the WikiLeaks sun
"Having spent much of the past 24 hours going through the State Department documents released by Wikileaks I can honestly say the most amazing revelation is the lack of revelations in the documents."
[---]
"The fact that the latest Wikileaks data dump does not contain anything new does not make it acceptable. The release of these documents is a crime and we should figure out how to prosecute everyone in that organization to the fullest extent of the law."

Deadly Fictions
"Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has positioned himself as a left-wing whistleblower whose life mission is to call the United States to task for the evil it has wreaked throughout the world. But after poring through the diplomatic cables revealed via the site yesterday, one might easily wonder if Assange isn’t instead a clandestine agent of Dick Cheney and Bibi Netanyahu; whether his muckraking website isn’t part of a Likudnik plot to provoke an attack on Iran"
[---]
"With all due apologies to Oliver Stone (and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey), what the Wikileaks documents reveal is not a conspiracy of any kind but a scary and growing gap between the private assessments of American diplomats and allies in the Middle East and public statements made by U.S. government officials. The publication of these leaked cables is eerily reminiscent of the Pentagon Papers, which exposed a decade-long attempt by U.S. officials to distort and conceal unpalatable truths about the Vietnam War, and manipulate public opinion. The difference is that while the Pentagon Papers substantially vindicated the American left, the Wikileaks cable dump vindicates the right."
Wikileaks: Anti-Israel Foreign Policy Experts Got Saudi Arabia, Other Arab Countries 100% Backwards On Iran Attack
"It didn’t get nearly as much play as it should have, but Obama’s June 2009 meeting with Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah ended with the monarch flying into a tirade and more or less telling the President to get a grip. This was the Riyadh meeting that Obama took on his way to his insulting and failed Cairo Speech, the better to prepare himself by visiting “the place where Islam began.” The sit-down was such a disaster that Dennis Ross was hurriedly brought into the White House and given a broader role, yielding the impression that the President wanted a Middle East adviser who kind of understood something about the Middle East – and didn’t think he had one."
And on
"Out of the 220 Wikileaks has published, there are plenty of juicy titbits but most of the news stories are of the dog-bites-man variety. Few will be surprised to learn, for instance, that Saudi Arabia was pretty keen for the US to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities or that the Americans spy on people at the UN (frankly, I’d be worried if they didn’t).

Though I must say, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia’s suggestion that Guantanamo Bay inmates be implated “with an electronic chip containing information about them and allowing their movements to be tracked with Bluetooth”, noting that “this was done with horses and falcons” was pretty good."
[---]
"As for Assange’s protests that no one’s life would be put at risk, check this out. The name of the source has been redacted. But how many UK-educated engineers from prominent Pre-Revolution Isfahan families who once owned a large factory in Iran and are former national fencing champions of Iran, former presidents of the Iran Fencing
Association and former vice-presidents of an Azerbaijan sports association do you think there are out there?.

Overall though, there is little to justify the screaming headlines of American foreign policy in crisis or being turned upside down. Instead, it’s a case of so far, so blah."
[---]
"It seems to me that Assange is teasing Obama. Whereas the Afghanistan and Iraq war logs could be largely dismissed as Bush era material that didn’t really reflect on Obama, the State Department cables are different.

They go up to 28 February 2010, offering a potential window on Obama’s foreign policy which may well not show it in the sainted light he would prefer. It seems to me that Assange is teasing Obama, letting him know what WikiLeaks has and making him sweat.

Today was round one and the action was pretty tame. But there are plenty more rounds to come and Obama is on the back foot."
and on.

There's repetition in some of these, but each contains some unique analysis, so they are all worth a read in their entirety. All in all though, it seems Julian Assange has just taken away the last pretext that The One's foreign policy has been all about. Betcha weren't counting on that, were you, Julie?

And as far as this one's concerned, he not the only one to think out loud about the necessity of bringing Julian Assange's and WikiLeaks' ridiculous crusade to an end.

Labels: ,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home