Trumputin! And the Leak(s)

Opportunistic foreign intervention into domestic democratic processes: it happens.

I’m reading Sterling Seagrave’s epic account of the Philippines under Marcos, The Marcos Dynasty, and just happen to be at the part where Edward Lansdale and the CIA are painstakingly molding Ramon Magsaysay into the magnificent vessel that will contain American aspirations in the Philippines.  Lansdale did everything but tie Magsaysay’s shoes.  Then Magsaysay died in a plane crash and it was time for rinse-and-repeat with Ferdinand Marcos.

Democracies, for all their virtues, are especially vulnerable to manipulation during election season, when pols need money, good press, and, sometimes impunity.  You don’t get those quadrennial opportunities when wrassling with a dictator-for-life. I suspect that’s one reason why the United States, George Soros, et. al. are so keen on promoting democracy overseas.  The process creates an attractive portfolio of weak, venal, and competing clients.

Tempting to exploit that.  Especially for Putin since it’s been bruited about that his bete noire, cookie merchant Victoria Nuland, will be running the State Department if Clinton wins the presidency.

So I’m not averse to the theory that Vladimir Putin is behind the Wikileaks DNC leak.

Putin probably doesn’t consider himself the first offender when it comes to leaking embarrassing and destabilizing info.

He believes that the Panama Papers dump—sluiced by a noble anonymous hacker into that responsible Western whistleblowing conduit, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, for loving curation by mainstream journos, instead of transomed into the hands of that irresponsible and oh-so-interesting gotta-dump-it-all Wikileaks anti-American cowboy channel—was part of an effort to target him.

I think Panama Papers was a US-orchestrated inflection point in the American campaign to destroy international bank secrecy, but whatever.  Plenty of anti-Putin hay was made out of the leak.

More to the point is this report on statements by Senator Bob Corker via Radio Free Europe, natch!

A senior U.S. lawmaker says revelations about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s wealth will be “destabilizing” to his rule as the Russian population becomes increasingly aware of them.

U.S. Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Voice Of America on February 1 that the Russian people "are beginning to realize they have a leader that amassed tremendous personal wealth."

Corker said that revelation was "going to create some additional instability in Russia."

…

Corker’s remarks come in the midst of a diplomatic dispute between Washington and Moscow over a BBC interview given last week by Adam Szubin, the U.S. Treasury's acting secretary for terrorism and financial crimes.

Szubin told the BBC that Putin was "a picture of corruption," and the White House later said that his remarks reflected the views of the Obama administration about Putin.
The Kremlin reacted angrily to the interview and Earnest’s statement, calling it "outrageous and insulting."


Szubin declined to comment on a 2007 CIA report estimating Putin's wealth at $40 billion.

…

Both Russian and Western media outlets during the past year have reported previously undisclosed details about the affluent, well-connected lives led by Putin’s two daughters.

Putin's younger daughter, according to Reuters, also has identified herself as a "spouse" of Kirill Shamalov, the son of wealthy Putin associate Nikolai Shamalov.

The couple is thought to have corporate holdings worth about $2 billion.

Treasury’s “terrorism and financial crimes” operation is in the business of hoovering up financial information by any and all means on America’s enemies, especially by compromising the confidentiality of banks doing sanctions-busting business with Iran.  Undoubtedly, it has acquired a nice thick Putin folder thanks to various savory and unsavory ops, and dropping that file is a threat they like to brandish before Putin.

So, no question Putin coulda done DNCleaks and not lost any sleep over it.

But did he?

Maybe we’ll never know.

I’ve written before on the attribution circus: how it’s necessary to sculpt an incriminating dossier even when all you’ve got is ambiguity and circumstantial evidence, because America can’t have foreigners hacking the bejeezus out its servers and then saying, Well, looks like X but…can’t really say for sure.

Instead, we get cybersecurity companies massaging assumptions and cherrypicking data—and downplaying indications that US government hacking tools have been turned against us-- so they can say “we believe” in an impressively scientific manner.  This conclusion is fed to the media machine and eventually emerges from the journalistic nether parts as “X did it.”

Or, Clinton campaign manager: Russians leaked Democrats’ emails to help Donald Trump.

Did Putin orchestrate DNCleaks?  Maybe, maybe not.  Coulda been the FSB team.  Coulda been China.  Coulda been Anonymous.  Doesn’t matter too much in my opinion.  The dirt was left lying there for somebody to scoop up.

One thing for sure is that the Clinton campaign is desperate to find a bigger villain to shift the focus away from the DNC’s abysmal security practices and sleazy electioneering revealed by the leak.

Cue Trumputin!

Aside from the possibility that Putin passed the DNC trove to Julian Assange to embarrass and discommode Hillary Clinton, I’m considerably more skeptical about the “Donald Trump is Putin’s agent” story that’s been burning up the Internet.

 Trump doesn’t seem to be the kind of guy that could be run safely and reliably as a foreign agent, either directly or through a cut-out like Paul Manafort.  I suspect the US government has a huge embarrassing file on Manafort thanks to his relationship with Dimitry Firtash, the gas industry fixer who was Russia’s main man in Ukraine, but I’m wondering if unpacking Manafort’s and Trump’s interests in Eastern Europe will reveal more than a lust for oligarch cash and the first-hand perspective that the US/NATO anti-Russia policy orchestrated by Hillary Clinton and Victoria Nuland is a dead-end sh*t show.

To me, the most interesting perspective on the allegations of perfidious Russian involvement in the Trump campaign is the effort to gin up an outsized moral panic around the prospect of the Trump presidency.

He’s a grafter and a scammer who probably expects to lose the election and milk his followers for a few more millions over the next decade via a cheesy post-Fox media/political conglomerate.

Trump, I think, would make a terrible president.  But a terrible president whose best as well as worst impulses would be swiftly neutralized by threats of resignation/insubordination/impeachment/mutiny by the Beltway pros if he really tried to color outside the lines.

I don’t think he’s a fascist with the energy or inclination to seize state power as leader of a racist mass movement with paramilitary power employing riot, murder, insurrection, and genocide to achieve supersized ambitions for national and world mastery.

Is anti-Trump hysteria just part of the electoral race to the bottom, the need to make him appear even less attractive than Hillary?

Or is it…something more?

At this point, everybody pause for a moment and put on their tin-foil hats.

OK…everybody ready?  Good.

Here’s my take on the whole megillah.

The Clinton campaign is in a quiet panic that the notorious e-mail server in Hillary Clinton’s basement got hacked and the 33,000 e-mails were exfiltrated for release at the worst possible moment during the election.  Like maybe during the convention in Philadelphia.

The possibility that the leak is coming has been a staple of right-wing sites for weeks if not months.

If the 33,000 deleted e-mails are just yoga appointments and instructions to florists, it’ll be bad but not fatal.

If they reveal embarrassing political and media canoodling, worse, politically survivable, but electoral poison.

If it turns out that there was official business discussed in some e-mails and Clinton’s lawyers deleted them instead of turning them over to the State Department, I think it’s Hello, President Trump.

If the deleted mails contained classified info, then it’s lights out.  Democrats push her to withdraw from the race soon enough so that nice Mr. Kaine can carry the ticket, and Clinton spends the next few years in court.

Nobody knows what could come out, I think.  If there were some skeletons in the e-mail server, only Hillary Clinton and her closest associates know.  For everybody else, it's pucker up, hope for the best, and expect the worst.

All they know is, any leak of e-mails from the Clinton server is bad.  What to do?  What to do?  What’s the plan?  How does the campaign inoculate against such a potentially devastating development?

How about a major redirect, one that turns any leak into evidence of Putin perfidy?  Aha!

Here’s how I think it works.

First, harden the narrative that Putin is backing Trump.  Time to reach out to prestige media!

Instantaneously and simultaneously, serious chin-stroking erupts in the liberal commentariat concerning the seemingly unhealthy relationship between Putin and Trump.

Carrying the flag are Franklin Foer (New Republic: Putin’s Puppet), Paul Krugman (New York Times: Donald Trump: The Siberian Candidate), Jonathan Chait (New York Magazine: Is Donald Trump Working for Russia?), Daniel Drezner (Washington Post: Is Donald Trump a Putin Patsy?)

Jeffrey Goldberg does the Clinton campaign a solid over at the Atlantic with It’s Official: Hillary Clinton is Running Against Vladimir Putin.

Over in digital media, Talking Points Memo has been pushing the story relentlessly.  Most recent iteration: It Can’t Be Dismissed.

What’s interesting to me is that none of these pieces offer conclusive evidence.  We are in the zone of those two glorious media and rhetorical exemplars, Peggy Noonan and Donald Rumsfeld.

As in:

Is it irresponsible to speculate?  It would be irresponsible not to.
                Peggy Noonan, on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, as to whether Fidel Castro used incriminating phone-sex recordings to blackmail President Bill Clinton into returning miracle dolphin lad Elian Gonzalez to his father in Cuba.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
                Donald Rumsfeld, on why we shouldn’t worry that UN inspectors found no WMD in Iraq pre-invasion.

What is most amusing, profiles-of-courage wise is that both Drezner and Marshall are hedging their bets (or covering their asses) in case the story doesn’t pan out in the body, while pushing the theory in the headline of their articles.

Anyway, Trumputin now part of the zeitgeist and the Clinton campaign has done the best it can to prepare for a leak to drop during convention primetime.

What happens next?  The leak drops at convention time.  Not the server leak.  The DNC leak.

What the heck.  Let’s go.  Time for Stage 2, Baking in the Narrative.

The Clinton campaign has a ready-made response: Putin dunnit.  Because Trump is Putin’s candidate.  As we all know.

Therefore, true significance of these leaks is that Vladimir Putin is trying to elect Donald Trump president of the United States.

Even though, if Putin has the contents of the e-mail server, he’s got an extremely worrisome hold over Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump.

But isn’t it a matter of patriotism to make sure that Trump can’t profit from Russian intervention?

If Russian leaks threaten to knock Hillary Clinton flat, how should the patriotic journo respond?

Maybe it means Donald Trump has to be knocked even flatter, in compensation.  By any means necessary.  To save democracy.

Media, you’ve been tasked.

What Julian Assange Is Doing Is Not So Terrible...

...But What We're Doing to Bradley Manning Is Terrible

There seems to be an increasingly bright line in the foreign affairs realms of the blogosphere separating those who are concerned about the public relations and legal jihad against Julian Assange and the affliction of Bradley Manning, and those who mock, snort, and maintain the proper air of sniggering condescension and ostentatious outrage to please their bespoke sources at the State Department.

On the left, there's an interesting recapitulation of the split between the opponents of the Iraq war and the liberal hawk supporters of the get-Saddam crusade.

Today, in my opinion, Glenn Greenwald, Counterpunch, and Antiwar.com are on the side of the good guys.

From his prosperous perch at Salon, I imagine Glenn Greenwald needs little more than moral support.

But I think Counterpunch and Antiwar.com wouldn't mind some more tangible, financial indication of appreciation.

Please visit their sites to subscribe (in the case of Counterpunch) or make a donation (in the case of Antiwar.com).

Here's an excerpt from a recent interview Daniel Ellsberg gave to Antiwar.com's radio arm:

Horton: Okay, good. So, welcome to the show. Tell me, there’s a lot of talk in the media saying that, “Yeah, well, we all give Dan Ellsberg respect for leaking the Pentagon Papers” – now at least there’s somewhat of a consensus that maybe that was the right thing to do – “but WikiLeaks is a totally different thing. This guy Assange has a terrible agenda to hurt America,” not help it like you wanted to do, and I think that’s at least part of it. What do you think about that?

Ellsberg: Well, Floyd Abrams, who defended the New York Times in front of the Supreme Court in the Pentagon Papers case, where the question was injunction, prior restraint against the New York Times, just had a Wall Street Journal article in which he quoted me, critically I could say, and he says, “Daniel Ellsberg says that there is a myth that Pentagon Papers good, WikiLeaks bad.” And that’s true, I did say that and I do say that and it is a myth.

And then he went on to say, “But the real myth is not that one, but the real myth is that they’re the same.” Well, nobody said they’re the same. Obviously there are all kinds of differences which certainly I can identify as well as anybody. But there are some fundamental similarities, both in the motive and the kind of war there and the need for the revelations that they’re presenting.

And in terms of the charges that are made against them, including by Abrams, but especially by others, again there’s a very great similarity in the situation. People are implying that everyone could see that the Pentagon Papers – which was a history of a single conflict over a period of time; it was focused on one thing and it revealed deception by a succession of administrations – everybody could see that that was a worthy thing to do, or at least, you know, conscientious, and my motives were good, etc. etc. etc. Not everybody saw that at the time. Not the administration, the White House, which called it treason, with a little [laughs] a little more basis – how to say this: I am a citizen. I do owe allegiance to the United States. To say that Julian Assange is guilty of treason has some problems since he’s an Australian citizen.

But anyway, I was called a traitor, which was no more true of me than it is to say Bradley Manning, who is accused now of leaking, sitting in a jail in Quantico – he’s no more a traitor than I am, and I’m not. Neither of them are terrorists any more than I am, and I’m not.

So I did get these comments. I didn’t get the “terrorist” at the time, because that wasn’t in vogue as a demonizing label then 40 years ago, but I would be called a terrorist now. I have no doubt at all, if I put out the same documents now, they would call me a terrorist, because that’s the bad thing now.

Now, more than that, of course, I was – they’re searching now for a law with which to indict Assange for what he did, and of course Assange’s role is that essentially of the New York Times in the case of the Pentagon Papers or of WikiLeaks. There really is no basis in law that they’re going to find that can nail or can entrap or indict Assange that doesn’t apply to the New York Times exactly as well, since they have put out these clearly classified documents to the public.

In fact, they’ve made the choice, along with the other four newspapers, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, and El Pais in Spain – they made the choice so far which documents in this Cablegate series to put out. Assange has put out on his own website essentially only those, with a few exceptions, but almost entirely those that have been chosen to be referred to or put out by these mainstream newspapers.

So there is no judicial basis, no legal basis, for charging Assange with anything that doesn’t apply equally well to the New York Times, and it’s clear that the administration is not anxious to get in a legal fight with the New York Times. So they’re trying to distinguish Assange not only from me and the Pentagon Papers, but from the New York Times, and that’s really pretty impossible to do.

But finally, to get back to the initial point that I was making, in fact all the charges that were made against Assange now – he’s interfering with diplomatic relationships, he’s disrupting diplomacy, he’s producing embarrassing things that make our relations with other countries harder, and he’s endangering the lives of troops – all of those were said about the Pentagon Papers, and that was the basis, after all, for the attempt at prior restraint, which they didn’t do in this occasion, presumably because they just couldn’t. You know, with the electronic means, there was no way of stopping it. But they could have tried to restrain the Times very well from putting out any more, but in the clear recognition that the information would get out anyway from other newspapers and from the Internet.

So, they said at the time, for instance, that the Pentagon Papers were disrupting our relations with Australia because it embarrassed the measures we took to encourage or coerce Australians into sending troops to Vietnam. Actually that’s something they certainly deserved to embarrassed about. They actually started the draft in order to send Australians to Vietnam, which is a scandal, really.

So, as I say, these accusations were made. They were all found to be unfounded in the end, although it was indeed embarrassing to relations. The idea that in these documents there are criticisms by American diplomats of their counterparts [laughs] – and that was not true of the Pentagon Papers? Almost any – most pages at random would find extreme criticisms of the government of Saigon, our puppets in Saigon, for example, and in complaints about our allies, whether they were doing enough in their relationship, one way or the other.

So I come to the point: Condemn this, and you do condemn the Pentagon Papers, and the question is then, was it a good thing or not for the Pentagon Papers to come out? Was it legitimate in a democracy? Did we need it or not? And there were plenty of people who said not, at the time, that it shouldn’t have happened. And those have basically the same point of view that is condemning Assange now.

An article by Jean Casella and James Ridgway from their site Solitary Watch, via Counterpunch, puts Manning's treatment in a sobering perspective:

For the past few weeks, progressive online media sources have been alive with outrage against the conditions in which accused Wikileaker Bradley Manning is being held. Manning is in 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement at a Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia, denied sunlight, exercise, possessions, and all but the most limited contact with family and friends. He has now been in isolation for more than seven months. The cruel and inhuman conditions of his detention, first widely publicized by Glenn Greenwald on Salon and expanded upon by others, are now being discussed, lamented, and protested throughout the progressive blogosphere (ourselves included). Few of those taking part in the conversation hesitate to describe Manning's situation as torture.

Meanwhile, here at Solitary Watch, we've been receiving calls and emails from our modest band of readers, all of them saying more or less the same thing: We're glad Bradley Manning's treatment is getting some attention, but what about the tens of thousands of others who are languishing in solitary confinement in U.S. prisons and jails? According to available data, there are some 25,000 inmates in long-term isolation in the nation's supermax prisons, and as many as 80,000 more in solitary in other prisons and jails. Where is the outrage–even among progressives–for these forgotten souls? Where, even, is some acknowledgment of their existence?

...

Frequently, writers and readers make the point that Manning is being subjected to these condition while he is merely accused , rather than convicted, of a crime. Perhaps they need to be introduced to the 15-year-old boy who, along with several dozen other juveniles, is being held is solitary in a jail in Harris County, Texas, while he awaits trial on a robbery charge. He is one of hundreds–if not thousands–of prisoners being held in pre-trial solitary confinement, for one reason or another, on any given day in America. Most of them lack decent legal representation, or are simply too poor to make bail.

We have also seen articles suggesting that the treatment Manning is receiving is worse than the standard for solitary confinement, since he is deprived even of a pillow or sheets for his bed. Their authors should review the case of the prisoners held in the St. Tammany Parish Jail in rural Louisiana. According to a brief by the Louisiana ACLU, "After the jail determines a prisoner is suicidal, the prisoner is stripped half-naked and placed in a 3′ x 3′ metal cage with no shoes, bed, blanket or toilet…Prisoners report they must curl up on the floor to sleep because the cages are too small to let them lie down. Guards frequently ignore repeated requests to use the bathroom, forcing some desperate people to urinate in discarded containers…People have been reportedly held in these cages for days, weeks, and months." The cells are one-fourth the size mandated by local law for caged dogs.

There is, rightly, concern over the damage being done to Manning's mental health by seven months in solitary. Seldom mentioned is the fact that an estimated one-third to one-half of the residents of America's isolation units suffer from mental illness, and solitary confinement cells have, in effect, become our new asylums. Witness the ACLU of Montana's brief on a 17-year-old mentally ill inmate who "was so traumatized by his deplorable treatment in the Montana State Prison that he twice attempted to kill himself by biting through the skin on his wrist to puncture a vein." During his ten months in solitary confinement, he was tasered, pepper sprayed, and stripped naked in view of other inmates, and "his mental health treatment consists of a prison staff member knocking on his door once a week and asking if he has any concerns."

Finally, many have argued that the nature of Manning's alleged crimes renders him a heroic political prisoner, rather than a "common" criminal. Those who take this line might want to look into the "Communications Management Units" at two federal prisons, where, according to a lawsuit filed last year by the Center for Constitutional Rights, prisoners are placed in extreme isolation "for their constitutionally protected religious beliefs, unpopular political views, or in retaliation for challenging poor treatment or other rights violations in the federal prison system." Or they might investigate the aftermath of the recent prison strike in Georgia, in which several inmates have reportedly been thrown into solitary for leading a nonviolent protest against prison conditions.

All of these cases are "exceptional," but only in that they earned the attention of some journalist or advocate. Most prisoners held solitary confinement are, by design, silent and silenced. Most of their stories–tens of thousands of them–are never told at all. And solitary confinement is now used as a disciplinary measure of first resort in prisons and jails across the country, so its use is anything but exceptional.

All across America, inmates are placed in isolation for weeks or months not only for fighting with other inmates or guards, but for being "disruptive" or disobeying orders; for being identified as a gang member (often by a prison snitch or the wrong kind of tattoo); or for having contraband, which can include not only a weapon but a joint, a cell phone, or too many postage stamps. In Virginia, a dozen Rastafarians were in solitary for more than a decade because they refused to cut their dreadlocks, in violation of the prison code. In many prisons, juveniles and rape victims are isolated "for their own protection" in conditions identical to those used for punishment. And for more serious crimes, the isolation simply becomes more extreme, and more permanent: In Louisiana, two men convicted of killing a prison guard have been in solitary confinement for 38 years.

...

The treatment of Bradley Manning, which has introduced many on the left to the torment of solitary confinement, may present an opportunity for them to measure their own humanity. They might begin by asking themselves whether prison torture is wrong, and worthy of their attention and outrage, only when it is committed against people whose actions they admire.

Wikileaks is Bullsh*t

 Note: This post as e-mailed contains no Wikileaks excerpts.  In order to spare readers who work at universities, companies, and other organizations the potential heartache of having undeclassified Wikileaks material in their e-mail archives, I will remove direct quotes from Wikileaks cables from e-mails I send out from now on.  Material on the China Matters website will be full text.

I’ve come to the conclusion that Wikileaks, more specifically the national security handwringing and pantswetting that has accompanied “Cablegate”, is bullsh*t.

As I followed the Wikileaks archive as it was chivvied across the Internet, I gained the distinct impression that its daily post of cables was not fresh produce in its original packaging.

All that stuff had already been pawed over, repackaged and spun by Wikileaks international media partners—the Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais, Der Spiegel, and through the Guardian, the New York Times.

As the AP reported a few days ago:

The diplomatic records exposed on the WikiLeaks website this week reveal not only secret government communications, but also an extraordinary collaboration between some of the world's most respected media outlets and the WikiLeaks organization.

Unlike earlier disclosures by WikiLeaks of tens of thousands of secret government military records, the group is releasing only a trickle of documents at a time from a trove of a quarter-million, and only after considering advice from five news organizations with which it chose to share all of the material.

"They are releasing the documents we selected," Le Monde's managing editor, Sylvie Kauffmann, said in an interview at the newspaper's Paris headquarters.

WikiLeaks turned over all of the classified U.S. State Department cables it obtained to Le Monde, El Pais in Spain, The Guardian in Britain and Der Spiegel in Germany. The Guardian shared the material with The New York Times, and the five news organizations have been working together to plan the timing of their reports.

They also have been advising WikiLeaks on which documents to release publicly and what redactions to make to those documents, Kauffmann and others involved in the arrangement said.

"The cables we have release correspond to stories released by our main stream media partners and ourselves. They have been redacted by the journalists working on the stories, as these people must know the material well in order to write about it," WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said in a question-and-answer session on The Guardian's website Friday. "The redactions are then reviewed by at least one other journalist or editor, and we review samples supplied by the other organisations to make sure the process is working."

Each publication suggested a way to remove names and details considered too sensitive, and "I suppose WikiLeaks chooses the one it likes," El Pais Editor in Chief Javier Moreno said in a telephone interview from his Madrid office.

As stories are published, WikiLeaks uses its website to release the related cables..

‘Nuff said.

To take the story a step further, the United States government declined to cooperate with Wikileaks directly to vet and redact the material.

That’s understandable.  The US government doesn’t want to give theft of its confidential communications the USG stamp of approval.

So Uncle Sam outsourced the censorship job to “some of the world’s most respected media outlets”.

It makes you wonder if the Guardian really brought in the New York Times so that juicy bits could be brought to public notice without worrying about the UK’s stricter libel laws.

Or maybe the US government passed the word that the NYT would be a more convenient, eager, and reliable censor than the Guardian.

Anyway, it appears Assange is playing along.

Even as politicians call for his head, he’s still slowly dribbling out the cables to meet the journalistic needs of his media partners.

The other shoe that apparently has yet to drop in punditland is the burning question:

If Assange is a high-tech terrorist, what does that make the NYT, Guardian, et al.?  Why isn’t the US government going to court to shut down their reporting and publication activities?

The answer, I think, is this:

Any case against the papers is hopelessly tainted by the fact that the US government consulted on the redactions before publication.  In other words, the US took a pass on shutting down Wikileaks and decided to manage and contain it instead.

In court, you could argue that’s a de facto declassification.

Also, if the US government goes up against the papers—not just the NYT in US jurisdiction, but the other papers in Europe—the papers might decide to choose martyrdom and wrap themselves in the First Amendment or whatever they have over there.

In that case, the US would be facing the release in an antagonistic environment, with the papers much less cooperative about protecting Uncle Sam from embarrassment or worse.

Even as the US State Department and the world press collude to massage the Wikileaks problem, a scapegoat is needed to terrorize other prospective leakers.

That scapegoat is, of course, Mr. Assange.

I wonder how serious the campaign is.  He has proved remarkably elusive to arrest, rendition, or whatever other rough justice national security patriots demand, even though security services in England apparently know of his whereabouts.

Assange, in the spirit of Dr. Strangelove, has left a Doomsday device: an encrypted archive of all of the quarter million cables with the promise of distributing encryption keys to the world if anything happened to him.

Maybe the plan is just to cover him with self-righteous spittle while a vigorously argued and vetted subset of the cables make their way into public view in parallel with US and foreign damage control.

Then, after the papers have made enough hay, the story disappears.

More from the AP article:

Although WikiLeaks has said it will ultimately post its trove online, The Times said it intends to publish only about 100 or so of the records. And the other news organizations that have the material said they likely will release only a fraction.

"We are releasing only what is interesting," Le Monde's Kauffmann said. "I couldn't tell you the proportion, but the vast majority of these documents are of no journalistic interest."

She said there was "no written contract" among the organizations and WikiLeaks on the use of the material.

"The conditions were that we could ourselves — that's to say our journalists and those at the other newspapers — do our own selection, our own triage," and select which documents to withhold from public view, Kauffmann said.

The media outlets agreed to work together, with about 120 journalists in total working on the project, at times debating which names of people cited in the documents could be published.

"With this, I really think we have taken all the possible precautions," Kauffmann said. "At times, it comes up that we'll discuss it between us, with the other papers, on some points. One of us struck too much out and another said 'Come on, it's about a high official, we can leave his/her name in. There won't be any reprisals.'"

Le Monde and El Pais came into the media partnership late, about a month ago. The Times, Guardian and Spiegel had already done quite a bit of work on the documents and shared it, El Pais' Moreno said.

I wonder if and when the full Wikileaks trove will appear on-line.

I suppose it will have to do with the outcome of the bizarre rape case (I guess you could call it Condom-gate) that Assange is fighting in Sweden, the continued US efforts to villanize him, the invulnerability of his encrypted archive and whether the US, as Alexander Cockburn speculates, decides to end the Wikileaks kabuki by pitching Assange out of a window.

As an interesting sidebar, somebody in the Middle East is apparently capitalizing on the Wikileaks furor to insert some other illicitly acquired diplomatic cables into the public eye.

The leak doesn’t fit in with Assange’s media strategy.  I suppose some freeloader decided, Assange is getting enough heat already, a little more won’t matter.

The leaks were obtained by a pro-Hezbollah newspaper in Lebanon, Al Akhbar.

Apparently, they show America’s favorite Cedar Revolutionaries in a less-than-flattering light.  So it doesn’t appear to likely that the leak is the work of the Middle East’s pre-eminent black ops outfit, Israel.

Here’s a link to Al Akhbar’s Wikileaks page, which forces the reader to demonstrate his or her knowledge of Middle Eastern national flags in order to pick out the relevant subset of cables.

Here’s also a link to the blog of a sympathizer of the Cedar Revolution who is aggrieved by the leak.  The comments provide the usual contentious back-and-forth chewing, and also shed some light on the cables and their impact.

In passing, it is interesting to note that US diplomatic cables are popping up all over the place.  One can speculate that a lot of foreign intelligence services are able to get their hands on material of this sort.

Now, thanks to Wikileaks, the environment and political cover exists to release them into the wild.

Wikileaks: Burn Before Reading

I have an article up at Asia Times on the perspective the Wikileaks diplomatic cables provide on the North Korea situation.

Don't read it if you work for the U.S. government and don't have the appropriate clearance.  You're improperly accessing classified material.

I also have an article in the Counterpunch print edition on the Koreas that quotes from a Wikileaks cable.

Please subscribe to the Counterpunch print edition.

But don't comment on my piece on Facebook or Twitter if you're in school and hope to work for the State Department. 

A Columbia University grad working at the State Department warned his alma mater that things could get sticky if a background check by the State Department revealed that a prospective employee had been dipping his or her beak into the Wikileaks cornucopia.

I was going to write about a funny cable sent by the US embassy in Bishkek, but I decided against it--at least in the stuff I e-mail around.

No point in making trouble for people.

In fact, that e-mail that I sent out a couple days ago--Whose Core Interest Is It Anyway?--better go and delete it.

It quotes from a Wikileak cable.

But you should read this piece by Alexander Cockburn: Julian Assange, Wanted by the Empire Dead or Alive.

It talks about how large swaths of the public and media organizations have eagerly bought into the US national security mindset.

Don't worry.

It doesn't have any Wikileaks stuff in it.

So it's OK to read.

I have friends who are uncomfortable with the idea of posting classified documents on the Internet.

I understand that.

But I'm also uncomfortable with how comfortable so many people are with surrendering their right to know.

It's the government's job to keep the secrets.

But it's not our job to make it easier for them.

Whose Core Interest Is It Anyway?

Hmmmmmmmmm…

From an April 2009 US Embassy Beijing cable in the Wikileaks dump as reported by the Guardian:

The United States had its core interests, VFM He asserted, such as U.S. naval vessels that had operated near the Chinese coast.

Now, as anybody with a memory more than a nanosecond recollects, in 2010 the world’s press was filled with reports like this one from the April 23, 2010 New York Times:

China is also pressing the United States to heed its claims in the region. In March, Chinese officials told two visiting senior Obama administration officials, Jeffrey A. Bader and James B. Steinberg, that China would not tolerate any interference in the South China Sea, now part of China’s “core interest” of sovereignty, said an American official involved in China policy. It was the first time the Chinese labeled the South China Sea a core interest, on par with Taiwan and Tibet, the official said.

I should comment that I had previously thought the core interest claim had first surfaced in a July Kyodo News Service dispatch; but there it is.

China never publicly declared a “South China Sea = core interest” policy, raising questions about what it had actually said and meant, but the story acquired unstoppable legs through US government backgrounders to Washington journalists and served as the subtext for the whole “US defends freedom of navigation in the South China Sea” story.

The Wikileaks cable provides some interesting nuance to the core interest angle.

The US Navy continually sails through China’s Economic Exclusion Zone to map the ocean floor and track movements out of China’s submarine base at Hainan, thereby degrading China’s fighting capabilities in the event of a Taiwan scrape and also undercutting the undersea leg of China’s strategic nuclear deterrent.

Was the context of China’s remark, “The South China Sea is a core interest for the US Navy, goshdarnit it’s a core interest for us, too”?  Or were the Chinese saying, “The South China Sea is our core interest, so butt out”?

Maybe an ensuing tranche of Wikileak documents will provide further data.

Since the Wikileak site is apparently hacked to pieces, I suppose we’ll have to rely on the good offices of the Guardian, NY Times, et al to extract further nuggets from the trove of Beijing Embassy cables (apparently some 8000).

The relevant passage from the April 2009 cable is reproduced at the end of this post. [I deleted the cable text; it's on the temporary site China Matters WL Special Edition].

Careful readers will note that the US declines to confirm Tibet as a Chinese “core interest” in other words an area in which it agrees to eschew activities (like providing an international platform for the Dalai Lama) that adversely affect China’s control of the region.

The US Charge d'Affaires, Dan Piccuta, acknowledges that “Tibet is part of China” but reserves the right to meet with the Dalai Lama and otherwise give aid and comfort to the increasingly militant Tibetan émigré community.

In March 2010 the U.S., after much nudging from the Chinese, Messrs. Steinberg and Bader visited Beijing and finally upgraded assurances on Tibet with a categorical statement (as reported by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs) that the US would not support Tibetan independence:

The US side reiterated that it considers Tibet to be a part of China and does not support independence for Tibet.

In return, China agreed to join the UN sanctions-writing process on Iran that the US was so keen about.

This, of course, was the same meeting that the Chinese purportedly made the South China Seas = core interest assertion.

I always was puzzled that the Chinese would screw up their hard-won reset in US-China relations—they even trotted out Henry Kissinger to emphasize they were simply looking for a reaffirmation of the traditional Tibet and Taiwan foundations of US-China relations—by introducing a new, ambiguous, and incendiary claim concerning the South China Sea.

It is also interesting that, in the Chinese Vice Foreign Minister’s formulation, a “core interest” is not a matter of right, but of necessity—a crucial bit of national interest that must be defended even if it isn’t particularly pleasant or logical.

Like US Navy vessels crisscrossing China’s EEZ.

But, if Wang’s report was accurate, by March 2010 the Chinese were contradicting their stance of 2009 by demanding that the US Navy sacrifice a US core interest by departing from the South China Sea.

I wonder.

Maybe Wikileaks will provide the answer.