[Source]

Thanks to @evgenymorozov for the link.

One thing that has been oddly downplayed amid the rage, indignation, etc. triggered by Cablegate is the actual content of the cables themselves. I’ve read only a fraction of them — mostly the ones published by the Guardian — but what comes across mostly is the evidence they provide of the quiet professionalism of US diplomats. These public servants are seen doing their job of listening conscientiously to what they hear in the countries to which they are assigned, and relaying it back to their masters in Washington. Sometimes, it’s clear that they are speaking unpalatable truths to power, because what they find on the ground is not what Washington wants to hear. Or what their informants wish to hear, either.

Take for example the way in which Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, found himself playing a minor role in the cables emanating from the London Embassy. In a conversation with the US Ambassador prior to the UK election, King had professed himself underwhelmed by David Cameron and George Osborne. They had, he told the Ambassador, a “tendency to think about issues only in terms of politics, and how they might affect Tory electorability”.

Many former diplomats have pooh-poohed the revelations in the cables saying that there was nothing in them that was new. The clear implication was that most of this stuff was commonplace in diplomatic circles. Well, maybe it was, but that misses the point entirely. They may have known this stuff but we — i.e. the schmucks who are paying their salaries — didn’t. And sometimes that really matters. For example, I’ve been pissed off for years at the fact that the biggest supporters of Al Qaeda are the Saudis. I’m even more pissed off to learn not only that the US State Department also knows that but that the King of that corrupt and dysfunctional state wants the US to bomb Iran on his behalf.

Sometimes the cables have revealed occasions when the diplomats on the ground have been telling the truth but their Washington masters have been engaging in what looks like lying. Consider the case of US Military operations in Yemen. Here is an excerpt from the transcript of the State Department daily briefing for December 15, 2009, given by P.J. Crowley, who is an Assistant Secretary of State.

QUESTION: On the conflict in Yemen, Houthis say that U.S. warplanes have launched airstrikes in northern Yemen. Is the U.S. involved in any military operations in Yemen?

MR. CROWLEY: No.

QUESTION: No?

MR. CROWLEY: But we – those kinds of reports keep cropping up. We do not have a military role in this conflict.

QUESTION: Okay. Thank you.

And now here’s an excerpt from a January 2010 cable describing a meeting between Gen. David Petraeus and President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen, in which they discuss U.S. airstrikes.

President Obama has approved providing U.S. intelligence in support of ROYG [Republic of Yemen government] ground operations against AQAP targets, General Petraeus informed Saleh. Saleh reacted coolly, however, to the General’s proposal to place USG [U.S. government] personnel inside the area of operations armed with real-time, direct feed intelligence from U.S. ISR [intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance] platforms overhead. “You cannot enter the operations area and you must stay in the joint operations center,” Saleh responded. Any U.S. casualties in strikes against AQAP would harm future efforts, Saleh asserted. Saleh did not have any objection, however, to General Petraeus’ proposal to move away from the use of cruise missiles and instead have U.S. fixed-wing bombers circle outside Yemeni territory, “out of sight,” and engage AQAP [Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] targets when actionable intelligence became available. Saleh lamented the use of cruise missiles that are “not very accurate” and welcomed the use of aircraft-deployed precision-guided bombs instead. “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Saleh said, prompting Deputy Prime Minister Alimi to joke that he had just “lied” by telling Parliament that the bombs in Arhab, Abyan, and Shebwa were American-made but deployed by the ROYG.

According to Salon,

The three strikes mentioned at the end there each occurred in December 2009, the month before the cable was written. The Dec. 17 Abyan attack killed 55 people, 41 one of whom were civilians, including 21 children Amnesty International later reported. Amnesty had also suspected that a U.S. cruise missile was used in the attack because of images of debris found at the scene. This new cable seems to bear out that suspicion.

It’s possible, given that the cable wasn’t sent until January, that Mr Crowley’s replies — given in December — might have been provided in good faith, because the Pentagon hadn’t shared information about what it was up to in Yemen. (After all, one of the defining characteristics of the George W. Bush presidency was the way State was sidelined by the Pentagon.) But what the cable does conclusively show is that the US administration has been very economical with the truth in relation to what it’s doing in Yemen.

Another thing that comes across in the cables is their authors’ obvious belief in American exceptionalism; they do genuinely appear to believe that America is exceptional in its commitment to democracy and human rights, and seem confident that American power is generally applied on the side of justice. In a useful round-up piece in the New York Times, Stephen Erlanger, quoted a well-known French journalist, who had the same thought:

Renaud Girard, a respected reporter for the center-right Le Figaro, said that he was impressed by the generally high quality of the American diplomatic corps. “What is most fascinating is that we see no cynicism in U.S. diplomacy,” he said. “They really believe in human rights in Africa and China and Russia and Asia. They really believe in democracy and human rights. People accuse the Americans of double standards all the time. But it’s not true here. If anything, the diplomats are almost naïve, and I don’t think these leaks will jeopardize the United States. Most will see the diplomats as honest, sincere and not so cynical.”

“This is charming”, says the Economist.

Most Americans don’t grasp the extent to which their country is considered throughout the world a bullying, opportunistic, imperialist power. Mr Girard sounds almost surprised by the “almost naïve” sincerity of American diplomats’ commitment to democracy and human rights. And I think he is right that the intelligence, good humour, and benevolent intentions on display in the cables redounds to the benefit of the American foreign service’s reputation.

The problem is that much of the rest of the world doesn’t see the US in quite that way. They tend to Churchill’s view: that the United States “can always be trusted to do the right thing — once it has exhausted all the other alternatives”.

But, argues the Economist,

Americans by and large trust their military, their foreign service, and even their spy agencies basically because all of them are full of Americans. If the good patriots keeping the world safe for democracy feel they need to keep certain things secret, then they need to keep certain things secret. To splash those secrets all over the internet is simply to interfere with America’s attempt to carry its noble burden, to perform its urgent and necessary task, to make the world a little less safe for democracy. What kind of person would do that?

All of which explains, I suppose, why so many Americans think that WikiLeaks is akin to a terrorist organisation. Sadly, it also explains why they are getting so many things wrong.

LATER: Gideon Rachman, writing in the FT, adds a few more things the cables have told us:

1. The sheer bleakness of America’s view of Russia – and this despite all the happy talk of improved relations and a “reset”.

2. Hillary Clinton’s concern about America’s reliance on Chinese purchases of US Treasuries. In conversation with the aforesaid Rudd, she uses the line “how do you get tough with your banker?”

3. Suggestions that American troops have been embedded with Pakistani troops in the fight in the tribal areas.

4. The delicious confirmation that Britain’s Prince Andrew is, indeed, a complete oaf.

This week’s Observer column.

As Markus Kuhn, a computer security researcher at the Cambridge Computer Lab, pointed out to me, any work “prepared by an officer or employee of the US government as part of that person’s official duties” is not entitled to domestic copyright protection under US law. So, in the US at least, the leaked cables are not protected by copyright and it doesn’t matter whether WikiLeaks owns the rights or not.

But, in a way, that’s the least worrying aspect of Amazon’s behaviour. More troubling is what its actions portend for democracy. Rebecca MacKinnon, a scholar who has written incisively about China’s efforts to censor the net, wrote a sobering essay about this last week. “A substantial, if not critical amount of our political discourse,” she points out, “has moved into the digital realm. This realm is largely made up of virtual spaces that are created, owned and operated by the private sector.”

As far as the law of contract is concerned, Amazon can do what it likes. But this isn’t just about contracts any more. “While Amazon was within its legal rights,” MacKinnon warns, “the company has nonetheless sent a clear signal to its users: if you engage in controversial speech that some individual members of the US government don’t like… Amazon is going to dump you at the first sign of trouble.”

Yep. For years people have extolled cloud computing as the way of the future. The lesson of the last week is simple: be careful what you wish for.

Dan Gillmor has a good piece about this over on Salon.com. Excerpt:

That’s Strike 1 to our faith in the Internet. We are all, to one degree or another, forced to rely on the good will of larger enterprises that host and serve the media we create online. So when a company as big as Amazon — and it’s huge in the Web services arena — yanks down content this way, it is demonstrating that we cannot fully trust it with our content, either. And if Amazon, a powerful enterprise, can be bullied, which one can’t?

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Icy Dolphin, originally uploaded by jjn1.

Trafalgar Square on an icy afternoon.

The Lion in Winter, originally uploaded by jjn1.

Trafalgar Square, on Friday afternoon.

The current row over the latest WikiLeaks trove of classified US diplomatic cables has four sobering implications.

1. The first is that it represents the first really serious confrontation between the established order and the culture of the Net. As the story of the official backlash unfolds – first as DDOS attacks on ISPs hosting WikiLeaks and later as outfits like Amazon and PayPal (i.e. eBay) suddenly “discover” that their Terms of Service preclude them from offering services to WikiLeaks — the contours of the old order are emerging from the rosy mist in which they have operated to date. This is vicious, co-ordinated and potentially comprehensive, and it contains hard lessons for everyone who cares about democracy and about the future of the Net.

As I read the latest news this morning about the increasingly determined attempts to muzzle WikiLeaks, my mind was cast back to a conversation I had in the Autumn of 2000 on an island in the Puget Sound. I was attending a symposium about the political economy of the Internet, and at one stage a colleague and I took a break and sat outside on the deck smoking the politically-incorrect cigars to which he and I were partial.

My friend is one of the wisest people I know. He had a varied career, starting as an army officer and ending up as an internationally renowned scholar in the field of International Relations.

“Do you think”, he asked, “that this new technology is as revolutionary a threat to the established order as these people [at this point he gestured towards the room where the symposium discussion was raging] think?”.

“Yes I do”, I replied confidently, because I was in thrall to technological utopianism: like John Perry Barlow, I genuinely believed that the Net was beyond the reach of the established order.

My colleague said nothing but merely puffed on his cigar and gazed out to sea, where an enormous yacht, the property no doubt of a Microsoft billionaire, had anchored. Eventually I said: “What do you think?”. He puffed some more on his cigar, then looked round at me and said, simply: “We’ll see, dear boy. We’ll see.”

At that point my confident Utopianism began to evaporate. And it’s been evaporating ever since.

2. Like most people, I’ve only read a fraction of what’s been published by WikiLeaks, but one thing that might explain the official hysteria about the revelations is the way they comprehensively expose the way political elites in Western democracies have been lying to their electorates. The leaks make it abundantly clear not just that the US-Anglo-European adventure in Afghanistan is doomed (because even the dogs in the street know that, as we say in Ireland), but more importantly that the US and UK governments privately admit that too.

The problem is that they cannot face their electorates — who also happen to be the taxpayers who are funding this folly — and tell them this. The leaked dispatches from the US Ambassador to Afghanistan provide vivid confirmation that the Kharzai regime is as corrupt and incompetent as the South Vietnamese regime in Saigon was when the US was propping it up in the 1970s. And they also make it clear that the US is every bit as much a captive of that regime as it was in Vietnam. (For a vivid account of that see the essay on Vietnam in Barbara Tuchman’s March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam).

The WikiLeaks revelations expose the extent to which the US and its allies see no real prospect of turning Afghanistan into a viable state, let alone a functioning democracy. They show that there is no light at the end of this tunnel. But the political establishments in Washington, London and Brussels cannot bring themselves to admit this. Afghanistan is, in that sense, the same kind of quagmire as Vietnam was. The only differences are that the war is now being fought by non-conscripted troops and we are not carpet-bombing civilians, but otherwise little has changed.

These realities are, of course, plain to see, because even the mainstream media, despite its need always to pay tribute to “our brave troops”, has had to report some of it. But what nobody has known until now — outside of the magic circles of the Beltway, Whitehall and NATO HQ — is that our rulers privately concede the hopelessness of the venture. The implicit cynicism and hypocrisy of this is breathtaking — and it goes a long way towards explaining the irrational fury of our political elites at having it exposed in so brutal and unmediated a fashion.

3. Thirdly, the attack of WikiLeaks ought to be a wake-up call for anyone who has rosy fantasies about whose side cloud computing providers are on. The Terms and Conditions under which they provide both ‘free’ and paid-for services will always give them with grounds for dropping your content if they deem it in their interests to do so. Put not your faith in cloud computing: it will one day rain on your parade.

4. What WikiLeaks is exposing is the way our democratic system has been hollowed out. Governments and Western political elites have been shown to be incompetent (New Labour and Bush Jnr in not regulating the financial sector; all governments in the area of climate change), corrupt (Fianna Fail in Ireland, Berlusconi in Italy; all governments in relation to the arms trade) or recklessly militaristic (Bush Jnr and Tony Blair in Iraq) and yet nowhere have they been called to account in any effective way. Instead they have obfuscated, lied or blustered their way through. And when, finally, the veil of secrecy is lifted in a really effective way, their reaction is to try to silence the messenger — as Noam Chomsky pointed out. In that sense, Simon Jenkins got it exactly right in his Guardian column yesterday:

I have no illusions about the press. I have watched enough dirt swilling down the journalistic sewer to abandon any quest therein for responsibility, accuracy, sensitivity or humility. The great American editor Oz Elliott once lectured graduates at the Columbia School of Journalism on their sacred duty to democracy as the unofficial legislators of mankind. He asked me what I thought of it. I said it was no good to me: I was trained as a reptile lurking in the gutter whose sole job was to “get the bloody story”.

Yet journalism’s stock-in-trade is disclosure. As we have seen this week with WikiLeaks, power loathes truth revealed. Disclosure is messy and tests moral and legal boundaries. It is often irresponsible and usually embarrassing. But it is all that is left when regulation does nothing, politicians are cowed, lawyers fall silent and audit is polluted. Accountability can only default to disclosure. As Jefferson remarked, the press is the last best hope when democratic oversight fails, as it does in the case of most international bodies.

Jenkins was attacked this week in the British press for his defence of WikiLeaks, on the ground that thieves should not revel in their crime by demanding that victims be more careful with their property. “But in matters of public policy”, he replied, “who is thieving what from whom? The WikiLeaks material was left by a public body, the US state department, like a wallet open on a park bench, except that in this case the wallet was full of home truths about the mendacity of public policy.”

Yep.

UPDATE: Interesting example of the State Department pressuring Columbia students against posting or discussing WikiLeaks stuff on Facebook:

In other words, if you want a job with Uncle Sam, lay off the WikiLeaks stuff.

Home is where the art is, originally uploaded by jjn1.

South Kensington, London.