On Sunday, the online secret-sharing site WikiLeaks began the process of releasing approximately 250,000 previously classified U.S. Department of State documents pertaining to American diplomatic activity across the world. As with their last two document dumps, WikiLeaks shared the documents with a number of news organizations before they were widely released. Here’s a basic rundown of the initial coverage from those outlets and others.
The New York Times
The New York Times might have been left out of the WikiLoop this time around had The Guardian’s investigations executive editor David Leigh not handed them copies of the 250,000 cables dumped by WikiLeaks yesterday. In an editorial, the sole American paper to have early access wrote that it decided to report on the cache and publish select cables because “the documents serve an important public interest, illuminating the goals, successes, compromises and frustrations of American diplomacy in a way that other accounts cannot match.” If that sounds a little tepid next to some of the editorial explanations and exhortations coming from their European counterparts, you may think similarly of some of the reporting.
As we have already noted, a leading Times piece splashed across today’s front page on the increased intelligence-gathering expectations being placed on diplomats and state department personnel glosses over a key—and pretty damning—point the Europeans have made much more of: the state department’s order to effectively spy on UN officials as high up as Ban Ki-moon. The Times’s lead piece, “Leaked Cables Offer Raw Look at U.S. Diplomacy,” leans a little heavily on gossipy inter-embassy burns—“When the head is rotten it affects the whole body” is one leveled at Pakistani president Zardari—and an extraneous-feeling description of a lavish wedding in the Caucasus. And those who feel the paper has oversold the dangers of Iran in previous dumps will find much to rile them here. However, the paper does lay out in more detail than most a formidable catalogue of revelations found within the logs, from the tight relationship between Putin and Berlusconi to American diplomatic efforts to secure resettlement for Guantanamo detainees.
What the Times does best is string together numerous cables to create strong, overarching, multi-year narratives of clandestine meetings and diplomatic assessments around big issues—on day one of the reporting on the leaks, these focused on the path to and concern over Iran’s nuclear ambitions and North Korea’s material support for them. This passage from “Around the World, Distress Over Iran,” is typical of the kinds of narratives, laden with previously unreported detail, the Times pieces together.
Regional distrust had only deepened with the election that year of a hard-line Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
During a meeting on Dec. 27, 2005, with the commander of the United States Central Command, Gen. John P. Abizaid, military leaders from the United Arab Emirates “all agreed with Abizaid that Iran’s new President Ahmadinejad seemed unbalanced, crazy even,” one cable reports. A few months later, the Emirates’ defense chief, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi, told General Abizaid that the United States needed to take action against Iran “this year or next.”
The question was what kind of action.
Previously, the crown prince had relayed the Emirates’ fear that “it was only a matter of time before Israel or the U.S. would strike Iranian nuclear facility targets.” That could provoke an outcome that the Emirates’ leadership considered “catastrophic”: Iranian missile strikes on American military installations in nearby countries like the Emirates.
Now, with Iran boasting in the spring of 2006 that it had successfully accomplished low-level uranium enrichment, the crown prince began to argue less equivocally, cables show. He stressed “that he wasn’t suggesting that the first option was ‘bombing’ Iran,” but also warned, “They have to be dealt with before they do something tragic.”
The paper publishes eighteen redacted cables online, organized in topics that correspond to its big stories published today: “Candid and Frank Assessments,” Iran’s Nuclear Ambition,” and “Diplomats Helping American Spies.” - Joel Meares
The Guardian
The New York Times is putting a big emphasis on State Department "haggling" about Guantanamo prisoners, and attempts to "effectively spy" and create "narratives of clandestine meetings and diplomatic assessments around big issues." And I do admire the responsible way they have handled this story, and how relatively forthcoming they have been about internal and external deliberations on redaction, etc.
But here's a "cable" that I'll bet Scott Shane and the Timesmen won't touch with a ten foot pole. The El-Masri Cable—By Scott Horton (Harper's Magazine):
"From the small mountain of diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks is now slowly putting up at their website, one significant historical document has so far gotten only scant mention. It’s dated February 6, 2007 and directed to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. It reflects a meeting between John M. Koenig, the senior career diplomat at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, and Rolf Nikel, the deputy national security advisor for Germany. The subject was the criminal investigation into the kidnapping and torture of Khaled El-Masri, a German greengrocer from the town of Neu-Ulm, seized in a case of mistaken identity. ...
"Might she and her legal advisor, John Bellinger, have had an interest in the El-Masri case that went beyond their purely professional interest in U.S.-German diplomatic relations? The decision to “snatch” El-Masri and lock him up in the “salt pit” involved the extraordinary renditions program, and it seems as a matter of routine that this would have required not only the approval of the CIA’s top echelon but also the White House-based National Security Council. It’s highly likely that Rice and Bellinger would have been involved in the decision to “snatch” and imprison El-Masri. If authority was given by Rice, then responsibility for the mistake—which might well include criminal law accountability—may also rest with her, and this fact would also not have escaped Koenig as he performed his diplomatic duties."
The New York Times is committed to protect former Bush Administration officials from accountability for their policy of torturing their prisoners - admitted on two different occasions on national television by George W Bush himself. In fact, they seem to be largely ignoring the material from the Bush Administration, kind of whistling in the dark, I imagine, lest they stumble upon a story that they really don't want to tell.
#1 Posted by James, CJR on Tue 30 Nov 2010 at 08:05 AM
In reference to the Daniel Drezner comment quoted:
How can someone conclude there is nothing in the cables when most of them haven't even been released. Monday was only day one of the newspapers who had advance access and Wikileaks, the last I looked, had only put up a couple of hundred of the thousands of documents it has.
#2 Posted by John, CJR on Tue 30 Nov 2010 at 02:08 PM