WikiLeaks fun has only just begun
249,992 documents still to go
To hear some people tell it, the diplomatic WikiLeaks are just a damp squib – just backroom gossip fed to Washington from its listening posts around the world. “So diplomats tell bitchy stories about the folks running other countries … who would have thought?’ these critics carp. I doubt if Mark Arbib would dismiss the big document dump in the same glib way.
Typically, the detractors claim that the cables were accessible to two or three million people in the US bureaucracy and allied secret and diplomatic services. Well, no. Only a portion of the cables would fall into that category – those graded as “unclassified” and “Unclassified // for official use only”. There’s also in descending order of availability, stuff catagorised as “Confidential” and “Confidential // noforn [no foreigners]”, “Secret” and “Secret // noforn”. Those cables classed “noforn” are stuff that would have been withheld from, for example, Australia’s ASIO or Britain’s MI6.
Some American right wing isolationist libertarians who rightly oppose the Iraq and Afghanistan adventures are even pushing the “nothing new here folks” line one step further and alleging that WikiLeaks is a CIA conspiracy – a deliberate release of harmless diplomatic gabble designed to distract us, or even to make the US, in some cases, look good.
Of course, theoretically, that is possible, but the possibility is this case is vanishingly small. Maybe the good folk of the anti-war libertarian right would have been satisfied if WikiLeaks was able to publish the CIA’s traffic, and that of the even more secretive wildcat operations run at one time by Donald Rumsfeld’s Office of Special Plans. Trouble is, these cables would report on deniable operations – dirty tricks, black operations and assassinations – stuff so explosively damaging that they would be far more securely kept than the US State Department’s diplomatic traffic. If, for example, an assassination of a troublesome Iraqi identity was actually carried out by US operatives but made to appear as if it were an al’Qaeda job, this ugly fact might even be suspected by US diplomats but they’d be extremely unlikely to record their suspicions in their routine secret traffic.
There was similar carping when WikiLeaks published the Iraq War Logs, which are a cryptic running record of significant day-to-day incidents in which the regular US military was involved. They give a general picture of the progress of the war against the Iraqi insurgency but most importantly they can also shed light on particular incidents that were previously obscured by disinformation and spin.
One example of the helpfulness of the War Logs in establishing the truth is the fact that we now know that the young American businessman Nick Berg was believed, in 2004, to be a terrorist cell leader and was targeted for capture by US forces rather than being accidentally arrested at a routine Iraqi Police checkpoint in Mosul, which was the story put about at the time.
As of 12 December just half of one per cent of the documents in the possession of WikiLeaks have been published on the web – only 1295 items out of 251,287 – so the fun has only just begun! On top of the cables released so far, which you can view on the web, there are a few others that have been given, selectively, to major news organizations, such as the Guardian and the Sydney Morning Herald. Presumably, they’ll be put up on the web as soon as the papers have got their exclusives.
Moreover, the WikiLeakers are proceeding, basically, to make the material available on the web in reverse chronological order. Starting with the most recent communications, they’re proceeding backwards in time and, so far, apart from a tiny handful of older items, they’ve only reached back to 2009.
Things will get really, really, interesting if the material obtained by the hapless Bradley Manning and handed on to WikiLeaks goes as far back as the Iraq invasion and its lead-up.
Personally, I’m waiting to see if there’s any traffic into and out of the original Baghdad Consulate as it was set up immediately after the Yanks overran Baghdad. It’ll be fascinating to see how the then consul, Beth A. Payne, dealt with the arrest and subsequent disappearance of Nick Berg and the concurrent arrest and secret imprisonment of New Zealander, Andreas Schafer, not to mention the Americans’ falling out with Ahmad Chalabi and the events surrounding the generalised Iraqi uprising of May 2004.
• For Nick’s exclusive exposé on the WikiLeaks’ War Logs and the Nick Berg case go to www.brushtail.com.au
