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Why diplomats secretly love WikiLeaks
Steve LeVine, The Oil and the Glory (blog), Foreign Policy
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other U.S. officials have condemned the WikiLeaks document dump — but judging by my email traffic, not all American officials are all that upset. Some, in fact, are delighted with the whole affair, for reasons ranging from professional pride in their handiwork to the opportunity to air longstanding grievances over possibly wrongheaded public perceptions of foreign events.
… Diplomats labor under anonymity that some find unbearable; surely many of them dream of writing the next “Long Telegram.” So it is that another diplomat told me he can barely wait for WikiLeaks to get around to those he has written over the years. “The leaks save me the trouble of FOIAing my cables,” this diplomat told me by email. ” … I’m just anticipating with pleasure seeing some of my reporting.”
(2 December 2010)
Steve LeVine has been a contributor to Energy Bulletin.
Related: From WikiLemons, Clinton Tries to Make Lemonade
-BA
On WikiLeaks and Government Secrecy
Jordan Stancil, The Nation
… It is not clear whether the WikiLeaks disclosures will damage our national interest. During the few years I spent as a Foreign Service officer, in Jerusalem and Berlin, I produced and read a fair number of classified cables, and I understand the rather obvious point that diplomats might get more—and more sensitive—information when their contacts believe that what they say will remain secret. We have heard endless appeals to “common sense” about the need for secrecy on these grounds.
But common sense also tells us that people are more likely to lie, exaggerate and distort when they know they won’t be held accountable for what they said, and that people like to say what their interlocutors want to hear. The annals of diplomatic communication, indeed of all communication, are filled with evidence of this banal insight, which many people seem to have forgotten in their rush to defend government secrecy.
… it is not clear that secrecy favors truth. Sometimes it does; sometimes it does not. In any event, it is not likely that a “chilling effect” from the current leaks will be long lasting; nor will the United States, with the world’s largest military and economy and third-largest population, be shut out of international politics.
… Secrecy is one of the state’s tools that can help in some human rights cases, so to the extent that WikiLeaks succeeds in taking that tool away, it will reduce the likelihood of helpful intervention.
But reducing our ability to keep secrets might also reduce the likelihood of counterproductive or aggressive intervention. What we are talking about here is the ability to interfere in the internal affairs of foreign countries and the extent to which secrecy makes us more or less able to do that.
… There is not a national security reason to keep secret, as a general rule and for an extended period, the interactions between representatives of the US government and representatives of foreign governments. We claim a national security imperative by arguing that foreign politicians would not talk to us if we did not hide what they said from their own constituents and domestic opponents and the governments of third countries. To state this argument is to expose its anti-democratic essence. But this is what Hillary Clinton means when she praises secrecy for permitting what she calls “honest, private dialogue.” She means dialogue among the powerful, safe in the knowledge that they will not be held accountable to their own citizens or legislatures.
One readily understands the desire of foreign—or American—public figures to control, as much as they possibly can, the flow of information concerning their activities and their images. It is much less clear that it is in the American national interest to enable this type of information control, and to prosecute people who try to get around it. On the contrary, the United States could and should use its weight in the world to promote open diplomacy. If we have a mission in international affairs, it should be the encouragement of popular control of government policy, both foreign and domestic, not the management of world affairs behind a veil of secrecy.
(3 December 2010)
WikiLeaks cables are dispatches from a beleaguered America in imperial retreat
Neal Ascherson, Guardian
Envoys provide devastating truths, but world can admire Washington’s patient mission to avert nuclear apocalypse
—
There’s more to the WikiLeaks dispatches than leaks. Look behind them, at the writers, and you see the loyal rearguard of America: an imperial power in retreat.
There was a tradition in our Foreign Office that a retiring ambassador could blow off steam. In a final, exuberant telegram to Whitehall, he could say exactly what he thought of the country he was leaving, and of the folly of the Foreign Office in ignoring his advice.The best telegrams were treasured by young diplomats. But they began to leak into the press. And a few years ago this privilege was suppressed.
Now the WikiLeaks eruption has smothered the world with the secret thoughts of the state department’s ambassadors. Tmorrow’s Observer, focusing on China, reveals fascinating data about Chinese “muscle-flexing, triumphalism and assertiveness” (as the US ambassador put it). But with the cables comes a snapshot of the state department itself. It’s a unique window on America’s search – with diminishing confidence – for a coherent, inspiring account of what the US is trying to achieve in the world.
These diplomats who didn’t want us to know their thoughts are not mere cogs in an imperial machine. Many emerge as wise, courageous, patient, likeable men and women– especially the women, who lead so many US embassies. Their view of their host countries is not rosy. You begin to absorb their vision, in which America is the only adult in a world of grasping, corrupt, unreliable teenagers who cannot be abandoned to their own weakness.
The test of an ambassador is telling truth to those who wield the power – having the guts to tell the department that its plan is a delusion. Here is Anne Patterson in Islamabad, discussing Pakistan’s support for “terrorist and extremist groups” and telling Washington “there is no chance that Pakistan will view enhanced assistance levels in any field as sufficient compensation for abandoning support to these groups”. She states bleakly: “The relationship is one of co-dependency, we grudgingly admit – Pakistan knows the US cannot afford to walk away; the US knows Pakistan cannot survive without our support.”
(4 December 2010)
State Department To Columbia University Students: DO NOT Discuss WikiLeaks On Facebook, Twitter
Rob Fishman, Huffington Post
Talking about WikiLeaks on Facebook or Twitter could endanger your job prospects, a State Department official warned students at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs this week.
An email from SIPA’s Office of Career Services went out Tuesday afternoon with a caution from the official, an alumnus of the school. Students who will be applying for jobs in the federal government could jeopardize their prospects by posting links to WikiLeaks online, or even by discussing the leaked documents on social networking sites, the official was quoted as saying.
“[The alumnus] recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter,” the Office of Career Services advised students. “Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government.”
… While republishing the leaked documents could indeed raise legal issues for students, it was the admonition against social media chatter that riled some at Columbia.
“They seem to be unable to make the distinction between having an opinion and having a contractual obligation to keep a secret,” said Hugh Sansom, a masters student from New York.
Students were taken aback by the email, said Sansom, who described his non-American classmates — nearly half of this year’s incoming class at Columbia speaks a native language other than English — as “amused and surprised.”
… The email, obtained by The Huffington Post, is published in full: [at the original]
(4 December 2010)
US blocks access to WikiLeaks for federal workers
Ewen MacAskill, Guardian
The Obama administration is banning hundreds of thousands of federal employees from calling up the WikiLeaks site on government computers because the leaked material is still formally regarded as classified.
The Library of Congress tonight joined the education department, the commerce department and other government agencies in confirming that the ban is in place.
Although thousands of leaked cables are freely available on the Guardian, New York Times and other newspaper websites, as well as the WikiLeaks site, the Obama administration insists they are still classified and, as such, have to be protected.
The move comes at a time when civil rights and other liberal groups are becoming increasingly critical, inviting parallels with the kind of bans on information imposed by China and other oppressive governments.
(3 December 2010)
Not sure what the point of these bans is. They are comically ineffective, and at the same time, terrible publicity for a country that purports to favor transparency and freedom of information. -BA
Cyber-Con
James Hark, London review of Books
… Obama too seemed to warm to the internet as a tool for geo-politicking. In a speech to Chinese students in November, he answered a planted question about internet censorship (it was submitted via the US Embassy website and asked by the US ambassador): ‘I think that the more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes, because then citizens of countries around the world can call their own government to account.’
… A week later Clinton spoke out even more strongly in defence of internet freedom and the role of the Obama administration in securing it. Seconding Obama’s warning to the Chinese, she argued that new tools and fresh policies were needed ‘to develop our capacity for what we call at the State Department 21st-century statecraft’; announced an initiative to help activists dodge internet surveillance; and urged American companies to take the lead in challenging foreign governments’ demands for censorship. ‘The freedom to connect,’ she said, ‘is like the freedom of assembly, only in cyberspace. It allows individuals to get online, come together, and hopefully co-operate.’
Long essay / book review on the US government’s use of internet technology and social network to achieve foreign policy objectives. The quotes from Obama and Clinton about transparency are ironic, in light of the Wikileaks release of US diplomatic cables. -BA
