Is the WikiLeaks Cablegate blown out of proportion?

[Theseus1234]

I don't have an article, so I'm putting this here.

So basically what WikiLeaks leaked was a bunch of diplomatic cables between countries, yes? Some of these insights are interesting, such as the Saudis wanting the U.S. to attack Iran and the distrust between Pakistan and the U.S. What I don't get is how most or some of the other stuff is at all important. Hear me out:

What was released was about diplomats. Some of it was substantial, but isn't the rest just opinion? I mean, the whole thing about Sarkozy being authoritarian and Italy's PM or whoever being Putin's lapdog is the opinion of the diplomat. Sure, it may hurt some feelings, but seriously, who cares about the OPINIONS of diplomats? They're job is to carry out the diplomatic will of the United States, which they have done to some degree. Does this bar them from having an opinion?

Let's say I am talking to Jennifer on the behalf of my friend Harold. Now, do I have to LOVE Jennifer in order to talk to her? Of course not. If Jennifer were to find out that I secretly thought I was too bossy, should her opinion of Harold lower at all? Of course not. I don't see how the opinions and impressions of these diplomats matters at all to international politics.

Someone please explain or enlighten me.

[Big War Bird]

It's geopolitical porn.

[skh1]

Out of proportion?

Obama should resign if approved UN spying: WikiLeaks founder
(AFP) – 1 day ago
MADRID — President Barack Obama should resign if it can be shown that he approved spying by US diplomatic figures on UN officials, the founder of WikiLeaks said in an interview published Sunday.
"The whole chain of command who was aware of this order, and approved it, must resign if the US is to be seen to be a credible nation that obeys the rule of law. The order is so serious it may well have been put to the president for approval," Julian Assange told Spanish daily El Pais.
"Obama must answer what he knew about this illegal order and when. If he refuses to answer or there is evidence he approved of these actions, he must resign," he added during an Internet chat interview published online […]

[…]"We are automating that process and will soon have hundreds. If there is a battle between the US military and the preservation of History, we have insured History will win."
Assange said he and others who work for WikiLeaks had received "hundreds" of "specific" death threats from "US military militants".
"That is not unusual, and we have become practiced from past experiences at ignoring such threats from Islamic extremists, African kleptocrats and so on. Recently the situation has changed with these threats now extending to our lawyers and my children," he added.
Assange said he believed the "ripples are just starting to flow throughout the world" from the release of the State Department cables.
"But I believe geopolitics will be separated into pre and post cablegate phases," he said.

A sense of proportion is not something Mr. Assange seems to posess at the moment.

[♔Goodguy1066♔]

Out of proportion?


A sense of proportion is not something Mr. Assange seems to posess at the moment.

Wait, didn't Nixon resign over spying on the opposition or something?

[Nevins]

Wait, didn't Nixon resign over spying on the opposition or something?

People broke into the DNC's headquarters and put phone taps on and suchlike. They got caught redhanded and it was an absolute PR nightmare for the republicans.

[Imperial]

Julian fills himself with delusions of grandeur by saying every time each leak released it will "change the world." Nothing has happened, no riots, nobody cares.

[Tiberios]

Julian fills himself with delusions of grandeur by saying every time each leak released it will "change the world." Nothing has happened, no riots, nobody cares.

My exact thoughts on the subject.

[LSJ]

Some of the things that came from the leaks are important, but they are few in number. It is overblown, but still worth reading for someone interesting in politics and what their government is doing. Anyone who understands politics should understand that there is a lot of lies and deception in the life of a government, especially to its own populace.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Some of the ones I've read include;

- Actual evidence that the US gov't has been using its embassies around the world as a base for espionage. We already knew this, but now we can confirm it.

- US diplomats were told to steal passwords, encryption keys, and collect biometric data on UN members and other diplomats, which is highly illegal in the UN.

- The US threatened and bribed other governments during the Copenhagen summit on climate change to prevent any agreement that the US administration didn't like. That's not how the self-proclaimed 'leader of the free world' should act.

- The biggest threat to Iraq is not Iran, but Saudi influence, as powerful figures attempt to boost Sunni influence and weaken Shia positions, and the country is the biggest source of money for terrorism abroad, which the government has done little to fight.

- The Israeli government lies about what it wants during negotiations about Palestine, and actually has a high degree of support for most of the demands of Fatah.

99% of it is boring and useless, but 1% actually exposes something significant. It's the evidence that makes it big. Before this, we only had assumptions.

[Nevins]

IMO the wikileaks documents has done a significant amount in bolstering the positive image of the United States, and the men and women of the US diplomatic corps. The image that I see coming out of this are countless acts of networking and working together with nations as different as the UK and China to maintain global stability. Has some of it been embarrassing? Of course, but it is not having the earth shattering impact that some believe that it should or would have.

The reports that are dubbed "embarrassing" because of the less than stellar descriptions of certain heads of state are merely the candid opinions of the people on the spot, who have all the little faults that make them human. If you were writing a report that was NEVER supposed to see the light of day, wouldn't you be brutally honest about what you were writing?

Newsweek's article "Wikileaks Documents Show Just How Strong US Diplomacy Is" is an excellent summation of how I feel about all this.

Excerpt:

The Iranian case offers the most detailed and complex picture of American diplomacy revealed by WikiLeaks so far. China, Russia, Turkey, Arab allies, and European partners are all part of the picture. To push tougher sanctions on Iran through the U.N. Security Council, for instance, the United States had to bring Beijing on board. But China looks to Iran for critical supplies of oil. So the Obama administration went to the Saudis. Did King Abdullah want Uncle Sucker to “cut off the head of the snake” by unleashing a military strike? Well, maybe it would be smarter for Abdullah to guarantee oil for China if Iran threatened to cut off the supply following China’s approval of tougher sanctions. The deal was sealed. As president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations Les Gelb sums up the strategy: “If the world wants to slow or even prevent Iran’s march to nuclear weaponry, this is a key path to doing so.”

[Sphere]

And in an odd way I think this episode is going to have a distinctly negative effect on the freedom of information in the US.

Many Americans, dare I even claim the majority, have been stirred to protect a certain right that is being infringed. That right being the right to have their democratically elected government operate unhindered in the best interests of its People. This has always been balanced by the right of the People to know what their government is doing, and these two rights have been competing with each other in debate and in the courts for as long as we have had a country.

However, the nature of these leaks, how unprocessed, massive and pervasive they are, but most importantly how little to nothing they do in revealing the US government acting against the interest of the people, will I think, swing the pendulum in a bad direction. Public opinion will support a clamp down on the availability of government information in a way that is unhealthy. Much in the same way people got behind a dangerous (and thankfully later curtailed) infringement upon civil rights after the attacks in 2001, I think people would now be more willing to get behind a similar infringement on the right of the People to know what their government is doing.

[Dr. Oza]

its good to get textual evidence for what seems to be common knowledge.. and also. i read the turkey ones but they are very interesting and revealing about the akp.. no one knew that erdogan has 8 swiss accounts or that his kid's education is paid by rich turkish businessmen whose businesses are given special treatment ..etc..

[Hookah Smoking Caterpiller]

I do wish every political scandal wasn't suffixed with the word -gate. It's been 35 years. Be original.

[Claudius Gothicus]

Yes, up until now nothing out of what is ''common knowledge'' regarding international relationships has been revealed.

And any political leader who could in any way feel offended because of the things said by the US embassies is an idiot.

[Sphere]

Wait, didn't Nixon resign over spying on the opposition or something?

Not exactly. Nixon resigned when evidence surfaced (his White House tapes) that Nixon perssonally used his executive autority to impede the FBI investigation into the break in of the Democratic National Commitees office at the Watergate Hotel. (The jist of the "smoking gun tape" was Nixon: "Tell the FBI that following the money trail will get into the whole Bay of Pigs thing, i.e. tell them it's CIA related, its a national security issue, so the FBI shouldn't persue it")

This would be clear abstruction of justice and was going to lead to impeachment procedings. There were several other issues floating around, most to do with how much Nixon knew about what the "Plumbers" were doing, where the money for their "Slush Fund" was coming from, were it was being used to pay for etc. But it was the lying to the FBI about the CIA connection (one that didn't exist, and ironically did not stop the FBI for that matter as the Cuban connection was just a minor part) that was the one piece that forced him out.


Over time, a good amount of evidence and testimony has surfaced strongly suggesting that Nixon was in no way personally ignorant of what the Plumbers were doing, though he was careful to keep himself one level removed from the operations. Still the only solid evidence is of the abstruction of justice after the investigation began.

/tangent

[Caelius]

Of course Wikileaks is overblown.

There's no reason for everyone's panties to be in a twist over the relatively minor stuff in those cables frankly.

Seriously, as someone who has an actual security clearance, who gives a about this "Cablegate". It's no where as important as it's made it out to be. Neither by the news or Assange's leftist supporters.

If the cables were really as a bad of a national security threat and harmful to the US as some would like to hope they are, then the Pentagon would've shut down the site awhile ago. They have the capability to.

The most any of these "leaks" amount to is a bit of a pie in the face for the State Department (especially those guys at the INR) and a few foreign heads of state/officials. Hardly any of what's had people shocked with surprise is something that already wasn't available for public consumption.

I will praise Assange for the media spin master that he his. It's attention whoring at its absolute best in the new Facebook/Twitter age of information sharing, but I think people are trying to project their best hopes of Wikileaks being some new form of the Pentagon Papers in terms of scope and importance when in reality it isn't 1/10 that relevant.

And in an odd way I think this episode is going to have a distinctly negative effect on the freedom of information in the US.

Many Americans, dare I even claim the majority, have been stirred to protect a certain right that is being infringed. That right being the right to have their democratically elected government operate unhindered in the best interests of its People. This has always been balanced by the right of the People to know what their government is doing, and these two rights have been competing with each other in debate and in the courts for as long as we have had a country.

However, the nature of these leaks, how unprocessed, massive and pervasive they are, but most importantly how little to nothing they do in revealing the US government acting against the interest of the people, will I think, swing the pendulum in a bad direction. Public opinion will support a clamp down on the availability of government information in a way that is unhealthy. Much in the same way people got behind a dangerous (and thankfully later curtailed) infringement upon civil rights after the attacks in 2001, I think people would now be more willing to get behind a similar infringement on the right of the People to know what their government is doing.

Oh please....

One of the great ironies of the latest WikiLeaks dump, in fact, is that the industrial quantities of pilfered State Department documents actually show American diplomats doing their jobs the way diplomats should, and doing them very well indeed. When the cables detail corruption at the top of the Afghan government, the Saudi king’s desire to be rid of the Iranian threat, the personality quirks of European leaders, or the state of the Russian mafiacracy, the reporting is very much in line with what the press has already told the public. There’s no big disconnect about the facts; no evidence—in the recent cables at least—that the United States government is trying to deceive the public or itself. And when it comes to taking action, far from confirming the increasingly commonplace image of a waning superpower and a feckless State Department, the WikiLeaks cables show that American diplomats draw on the full range of tools at their disposal, the soft power of persuasion and the hard power of economic and even covert military action, especially in the fight against Al Qaeda.

[Adar]

I think some things are huge. The problem is that journalists are quite useless and think that it is more important to tell the world that the French got ego-issues than it is to tell us that Saudi Arabia wants USA to bomb Iran (so much for the muslim hive-mind...).

In Sweden I also think that it is very important to know that the leader of the Social Democratic party went to the election on a political agenda she did not believe in. And also asked US officials to help her convince more voters to support the war in Afghanistan.

[Jom]

There are three levels of classification for diplomatic cables: confidential, secret, and top secret, or something thereabouts. I can't remember the exact terminology but the point is that Wikileaks did not get their hands on any of the latter category. Everything that they have leaked so far has generally been things that could have been inferred or that were suspected but there was no way of actually confirming suspicions, things like Berlusconi being Putin's puppet or Saudi Arabia clamouring for the USA to do something about Iran. These are things that anyone who moves in international circles would be aware of anyway; they just wouldn't say it out loud.

Top secret is for your real diplomatic scandals and illicit backroom deals, where you would find things like assassinations or sabotage.

These events are still enormously important for revealing this information to the masses, however. As I previously mentioned these sorts of things were apparent to people who moved in the right circles but not for the public at large, so the fact that the information is out in the public domain is quite a coup for public awareness of international diplomacy and how it functions. Ultimately, however, the impact will not be terribly large, as US Defence Secretary Gates said: "Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for US foreign policy? I think fairly modest."

There are some interesting editorials to be had on the topic, and they agree that this scandal won't overly damage America, with the one in Wired even going so far as hailing it as good for democracy in general. I believe it is quite a coup for press freedom and the fact that it could happen at all is a symbol of the freedom accorded to journalism, although the witch hunt that is now being carried out against Assange also highlights the terrible wrath of a government who has been slightly embarrassed. I only hope that a major miscarriage of justice can be prevented.

So: out of proportion? Perhaps. Trivial? Not at all. We just have to find the right balance between the two.

[Vizsla]

Context is important.
Diplomats are human too and they are always trying to impress their bosses. The worst sin they can commit is to have nothing to say. So they pass any minor gossip, incomplete scraps of information, and even things they read in newspapers as their own opinion, repackaging everything as a grand insight.
Overrated? Probably.
Funny though.

[B5C]

The cablegate reports are important, but not was bad compaired to the war reports. Cablegate got us a great insight of world diplomacy:
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Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[Ardruire Iacób]

Cablegate got us a great insight of world diplomacy:
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Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Eh, not really.