Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage.
Leaked cables reveal Saudi minister of petroleum helped craft toothless Copenhagen climate accord
Christopher Mims, Grist
… buried in these cables [just released by Wikileaks] are tantalizing clues about the back-door negotiations that surrounded last year’s Copenhagen climate conference. …
1. Nobody f*#ks with the Saudis
It’s not clear if the following is an actual secret or an open secret, but here goes: A cable dated Jan. 26, 2010, records Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey D. Feltman, of the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, saying that Saudi Arabia’s minister of petroleum, Ali bin Ibrahim Al-Naimi, “was involved in crafting the final agreement” of the Copenhagen Accord.
The cable goes on to note that because Al-Naimi participated in the drafting process, Feltman and the U.S. were “counting on Saudi Arabia to associate itself with the accord by January 31.” That didn’t happen, even though Saudi Arabia’s lead negotiator later declared himself “satisfied” with the Copenhagen accord.
2. Saudi Arabia has the most to lose from any binding emissions targets, and will never sign on to them
The Saudis believe greenhouse-gas regulation is one of the greatest threats to their economic future, right up there with a nuclear Iran and internal political instability.
A second secret cable from ambassador to Saudi Arabia James Smith to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, dated Feb. 11, 2010, lays it out: …
(1 December 2010)
WikiLeaks cables reveal how US manipulated climate accord
Damian Carrington, Guardian
Embassy dispatches show America used spying, threats and promises of aid to get support for Copenhagen accord
—
Hidden behind the save-the-world rhetoric of the global climate change negotiations lies the mucky realpolitik: money and threats buy political support; spying and cyberwarfare are used to seek out leverage.
The US diplomatic cables reveal how the US seeks dirt on nations opposed to its approach to tackling global warming; how financial and other aid is used by countries to gain political backing; how distrust, broken promises and creative accounting dog negotiations; and how the US mounted a secret global diplomatic offensive to overwhelm opposition to the controversial “Copenhagen accord”, the unofficial document that emerged from the ruins of the Copenhagen climate change summit in 2009.
Negotiating a climate treaty is a high-stakes game, not just because of the danger warming poses to civilisation but also because re-engineering the global economy to a low-carbon model will see the flow of billions of dollars redirected.
Seeking negotiating chips, the US state department sent a secret cable on 31 July 2009 seeking human intelligence from UN diplomats across a range of issues, including climate change. The request originated with the CIA. As well as countries’ negotiating positions for Copenhagen, diplomats were asked to provide evidence of UN environmental “treaty circumvention” and deals between nations.
(3 December 2010)
WikiLeaks cables: Seven key things we’ve learned so far
Richard Adams, Guardian
Some in the media glibly dismissed the US embassy cables at first, but such WikiScepticism is on the wane
—
… So what have we learned from the documents? Here’s an incomplete list – incomplete because there are tens of thousands of cables still out there.
1. Silvio Berlusconi ‘profited from secret deals’ with Vladimir Putin …
2. The US pressured Spain over CIA rendition and Guantánamo …
3. US diplomats spied on the UN’s leadership …
4. The scale of Afghan corruption is overwhelming …
5. Hillary Clinton queried Cristina Kirchner’s mental health …
6. The Bank of England governor played backroom politics …
7. The British government remains in thrall to the US …
(3 December 2010)
Related from the Guardian: WikiLeaks cables: UK Conservatives promised to run ‘pro-American regime’. -BA
“We Have Not Seen Anything Yet”: Guardian Editor Says Most Startling WikiLeaks Cables Still to be Released (video, audio and transcript)
Amy Goodman, Democracy Now
…. “In the coming days, we are going to see some quite startling disclosures about Russia, the nature of the Russian state, and about bribery and corruption in other countries, particularly in Central Asia,” says investigations executive editor David Leigh at The Guardian, one of the three newspapers given advanced access to the secret U.S. embassy cables by the whistleblower website WikiLeaks. “We will see a wrath of disclosures about pretty terrible things going on around the world.” Leigh reviews the major WikiLeaks revelations so far, explains how the 250,000 files were downloaded and given to the newspaper on a thumb drive,
… AMY GOODMAN: Mm-hmm. Can you compare the release of these documents, this latest trove of diplomatic cables, to what has been released before, to the Iraq war logs and Afghanistan before that?
DAVID LEIGH: Well, it’s a different quality of material. Those were logs that were pretty well sort of raw snapshots in military jargon of ongoing incidents. They were sort of field reports—“now this is happening, now that is happening.” This is a completely different kind of material. It’s essentially diplomatic dispatches. They’re written in English. They’re written as pieces of connected prose. And they are carefully considered analyses of reports back of what ambassadors and their subordinates in all these foreign countries want to tell Washington is going on.
AMY GOODMAN: One of the pieces you’ve done—and you’ve done many of them on all of these leaks, but this latest one, David, how 250,000 U.S. embassy cables were leaked from a fake Lady Gaga CD to a thumb drive that’s a pocket-sized bombshell, the biggest intelligence leak in history. Take us through it.
DAVID LEIGH: Well, you want me to take you through how—the mechanism of the leak—
AMY GOODMAN: Yes.
DAVID LEIGH:—or the contents of the material? The mechanism of the leak. Well, as we understand it, all this starts with the United States itself. What they did was they created a gigantic database of—an archive of these 250,000 cables, and they put them not only on the State Department’s classified embassy websites, but on SIPRNet, which is the U.S. Defense Department’s military internet. That circulated to, you know, soldiers all across the world, everywhere the United States has got bases. As a result, it was accessible to a junior soldier cleared to the secret level and above, 22-year-old Bradley Manning, according to the subsequent indictment. According to the chat logs Manning had with somebody else, he went in there with a CD marked “Lady Gaga,” reported to lip synch to it and nod his head, I guess, to the time of the nonexistent music, while all the while covertly downloading this stuff. And he walked out with the CD. By the time The Guardian got it, it was on a thumb drive, a tiny little thumb drive, you know, and it had 1.6 gigabytes of material, which contains 250 million words.
(X December 2010)
Ongoing coverage
UK Guardian: The US embassy cables
(one of the Google ads on the site is for a
“Cable Management System
Protect Valuable Electrical Cables Cords & Hose Lines. Order Today!”
– coincidence or someone with a wry sense of humor?
Greg Mitchell at The Nation “Greg Mitchell offers opinion and analysis on the entire media spectrum—MSM, blogosphere, cable news and alt media—all day long.”
