The Guardian’s online coverage of “The U.S. Embassy Cables” leaked by WikiLeaks is very thorough and, as my colleague Joel Meares has already pointed out, a bit harsher towards the U.S. in its framing of the documents than other outlets.
The coverage includes a gossipy feature on Prince Andrew’s reported “rudeness” and a lengthy, more serious piece about how damaging all this is to America’s reputation abroad and how futilely Clinton and other officials are scrambling to repair it. Separate sections within the overall coverage include “The spying game” and “Iran,” so we can expect more pieces on those topics as the cables trickle out this week. Also worth checking out: a mini video documentary about the overall significance of this leak, and an interactive map that helps readers explore the cables by country.
Another particularly interesting (albeit not entirely new) piece is a behind-the-scenes story by David Leigh on how Bradley Manning stole the documents in question. An excerpt:
It was childishly easy, according to the published chatlog of a conversation Manning had with a fellow-hacker. “I would come in with music on a CD-RW labelled with something like ‘Lady Gaga’ … erase the music … then write a compressed split file. No one suspected a thing … [I] listened and lip-synched to Lady Gaga’s Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history.” He said that he “had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months”.
The Datablog invites readers to download the dataset, do their own analysis, and then upload their own visualizations and mashups. The data only includes the date, time, sender and tags for all of the cables, though; the body text of each has been removed. This, and the fact that the server is so overloaded with download requests that it’s giving many people an error message, is inspiring many Datablog readers to sound off in the comments section about censorship. Perhaps when more people are able to download and digest the data, we’ll see some good interpretations of it, but so far the Datablog’s Flickr page for such user-generated projects isn’t showing much action on the WikiLeaks front.
Probably the most compulsively clickable feature of the Guardian’s coverage is its most low-tech one—namely, the live blog keeping up with reaction to the leaks: from politicians and diplomats, from think tank analysts, and from (ha!) the front page of the New York Post. It’s a great aggregation of international discussion, and quite comprehensive. The blog refreshes automatically every minute, and often features The Guardian’s snide commentary. One entry:
6.46pm GMT: And now we go over to the White House briefing room, where Robert Gibbs is telling journalists how terrible these Wikileaks cable disclosures are. “The stealing of classified information is a crime,” says Gibbs, and notes that President Obama “was not pleased”.
And being the White House press corps, the next question is some Washington inside baseball about a meeting between Obama and the Republican leaders tomorrow.
Meanwhile, Guardian media columnist Roy Greenslade gives a quick rundown of the coverage of the story in other major publications in the UK, and asks why so many of their editors seem to be taking the British government at its word that this leak is dangerous and irresponsible. - Lauren Kirchner
Der Spiegel
The German magazine has some English-language coverage up today, a day after it released its first reporting on the state department leaks in print. As with the two previous WikiDumps, Der Spiegel reports on the “explosive revelations” found in the leaks with much color and outrage and a very strong point of view. “If one were to believe the gloomy reports from the embassy in Ankara, Turkey is on a slippery slope to volatile Islamism,” one article says; a piece on the State Department’s orders to gather information from the UN suggests the request goes “well beyond the usual range of diplomatic interests.” Much of the criticism is directed not at the state department or the U.S. government as faceless entities, but at Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as an individual—requests for information about the UN described as “Clinton’s Wish List.”
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