Leaks that blow US’ cover

WikiLeaks and Julian Assange continue to astound with the range and quality of official data leaked to the public. The latest series involves America’s diplomatic community, with the website c
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WikiLeaks and Julian Assange continue to astound with the range and quality of official data leaked to the public. The latest series involves America’s diplomatic community, with the website carrying over a quarter of a million cables and other communications between American diplomats at home and abroad. And this is just the first instalment. More will be published over the next few months.

In short, this means perpetually red faces in the US State Department. As these dispatches are supposed to be confidential, the embassy officers have let themselves go a bit. For instance, the Moscow embassy describes President Dmitry Medvedev as ‘Robin to (prime minister) Vladmir Putin’s Batman’ and Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi as ‘vain, feckless and ineffective’. So there’s no doubt about the embarrassment, but the US government’s claim that the leaks will endanger lives may be groundless. Both WikiLeaks and the five newspapers provided with the archive have said they will publish only selected extracts after a security scrutiny.

At a quick glance, the leaks show no great surprises. That Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, is seen as a corrupt drug baron is no great revelation, nor that the Saudi king wanted the US to bomb Iran to destroy its nuclear programme, nor even that the US has serious doubts that the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline will ever be built.

Nevertheless the information the archives provide is unprecedented and the world they uncover has never been seen before, or only through brief glimpses of declassified documents by some countries. The backrooms of the diplomatic establishment are very different from the polite nothings of official gatherings. In the words of The New York Times, the archives are ‘a secret chronicle of the United States’ relations with the world in an age of war and terrorism’. They show in detail how policies are made or changed, whether by accident or circumstance, and at what point a sensible course of action slips into paranoia, crime, or worse. They show how governments say one thing in public and do something else out of the public eye. For once, we are in a position to know the truth of things and events, and it is an opportunity that should not be missed. It could be argued, perhaps, that some secrecy is necessary to run any government, but it  should be underlined that people have a right to know what their government is doing.

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