Posts Tagged ‘Wikileaks’

Wird vermutlich auch als Kollateralschaden im Dienste der Transparenz abgetan werden:

Last year, early on Christmas Eve morning, representatives from the U.S., United Kingdom, Netherlands, and the European Union arrived for a meeting with Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai. [...] Tsvangirai and his political party, Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), are considered Zimbabwe’s greatest hopes for unseating the country’s long-time de facto dictator Robert Mugabe and bringing democratic reforms to the country.

The topic of the meeting was the sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe by a collection of western countries, including the U.S. and E.U. Tsvangirai told the western officials that, while there had been some progress in the last year, Mugabe and his supporters were dragging their feet on delivering political reforms. To overcome this, he said that the sanctions on Zimbabwe “must be kept in place” to induce Mugabe into giving up some political power.

Later that day, the U.S. embassy in Zimbabwe dutifully reported the details of the meeting to Washington in a confidential U.S. State Department diplomatic cable. And slightly less than one year later, WikiLeaks released it to the world.

The reaction in Zimbabwe was swift. Zimbabwe’s Mugabe-appointed attorney general announced he was investigating the Prime Minister on treason charges based exclusively on the contents of the leaked cable. While it’s unlikely Tsvangirai could be convicted on the contents of the cable alone, the political damage has already been done. The cable provides Mugabe the opportunity to portray Tsvangirai as an agent of foreign governments working against the people of Zimbabwe.

Christopher R. Albon im Atlantic: How WikiLeaks Just Set Back Democracy in Zimbabwe.

Nachtrag: Siehe auch den Guardian: US cable leaks’ collateral damage in Zimbabwe.

Der “Lindwurm” bringt das seltsame Treiben der Schreibtisch-Robin Hoods auf den Punkt:

Wenn aber Websites gehackt bzw. durch Dos-Attacken lahmgelegt werden und man dabei nicht einmal vor der Internetpräsenz eines Rechtsanwalts zurückschreckt, der jene zwei Schwedinnen vertritt, die Assange wegen Vergewaltigung und sexueller Belästigung angezeigt haben, dann hört sich der Spaß auf, dann wird die Grenze zur Kriminalität überschritten, dann wird eine Verachtung für den Rechtsstaat gezeigt, die höchst unsympathisch ist. Dass die mutmaßlichen Opfer von Assange in Internetforen auf das Wüsteste beschimpft werden („Schlampen“ etc), passt in das unschöne Bild einer wild gewordenen Nerd-Szene, die mit Frauen eh nicht gut kann und die, hübsch feig aus der Anonymität heraus und zwischen dem Herunterladen von Animepornos, ein bisserl auf Revoluzzer macht.

Der Lindwurm: Assange und Küssel.

Ein Bundestagsabgeordneter der Linkspartei will Wikileaks Webspace zur Verfügung stellen, als Begründung schreibt er:

Ich bin dagegen der Meinung, dass die ‚Cables‘ eine unschätzbare Möglichkeit darstellen, die arroganten Machtgebaren westlicher Regierungen offenzulegen.

Markus Wolf und Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler wären sicher stolz auf diesen Hinterbänkler.

When I try to question him about the morality of what he’s done, if he worries about unleashing something that he can’t control, that no one can control, he tells me the story of the Kenyan 2007 elections when a WikiLeak document “swung the election”.

The leak exposed massive corruption by Daniel Arap Moi, and the Kenyan people sat up and took notice. In the ensuing elections, in which corruption became a major issue, violence swept the country. “1,300 people were eventually killed, and 350,000 were displaced. That was a result of our leak,” says Assange. It’s a chilling statistic, but then he states: “On the other hand, the Kenyan people had a right to that information and 40,000 children a year die of malaria in Kenya. And many more die of money being pulled out of Kenya, and as a result of the Kenyan shilling being debased.”

Aus dem Guardian, via Foreign Policy.

Christopher Hitchens hat diesen größenwahnsinnigen Egomanen ziemlich zutreffend mit folgenden Worten beschrieben:

The man is plainly a micro-megalomaniac with few if any scruples and an undisguised agenda.

Der EUobserver über WikiLeaks und den Reaktionen aus Brüssel:

“The reports that we have are crap compared to this. These are political, concise, incisive, almost literary,” one EU official told EUobserver on Tuesday on condition of anonymity.

“It sets a benchmark for diplomacy. Our reports are incredibly long and written in a kind of administrative jargon. We have no opinions. We hide our opinions behind bureaucratic language because we are not allowed to have opinions in a highly hierarchical structure.”

EUobserver: EU officials envy quality of US diplomatic cables.

Adam Serwer’s comment on the “Afghan War Diary”:

The remarkable thing about the WikiLeaks documents is that they reinforce what we already know about the war in Afghanistan — the lack of a credible partner, the links between Pakistani intelligence and the forces the U.S. is fighting, the difficulty in building the Afghan Army and police. Which means for all the complaints about the media these days, the coverage of Afghanistan has been broadly accurate. If the war is out of sight and out of mind for most Americans, it isn’t because they aren’t getting a good idea of what’s going on over there.

Adam Serwer at The American Prospect: The Wikileaks Afghan War Diary

See also: Scoop!

See also: The Wiki-leak is more and less important than you think. By Joshua Foust [in short: nothing new, but very dangerous for intel sources].

Further reading (27-7):
Richard Cohen (WaPo): Wikileaks, telling us the obvious in Afghanistan
Andrew Exum (NYT): Getting Lost in the Fog of War
Fred Kaplan (Slate) Not the Pentagon Papers
Daniel Markey (CFR) WikiLeaks: The Revelations That Aren’t

Update (30-7): As expected… Newsweek: Taliban Says It Will Target Names Exposed by WikiLeaks

Update (1-8): Now it’s getting ridiculous. The Guardian: WikiLeaks founder accuses US army of failing to protect Afghan informers