Did we keep all the notes on the "breaking the nobles" stuff? Cos we may need'em again.What they meant was breaking the backs of independent nobles, and bringing them under the power of the king. I think that's what GenjiandProust's meant anyway. Although I'm not really sure if that's what happened.
What really is new here that wasn't already news at some time in the past and already documented, confirmed, or outright demonstrated?Do you have citations for all of those being known in the public domain before wikileaks?
[list]
That's not how political rhetoric works. Sure you can argue that there are shades of grey, but you can't argue that people weren't conspiring behind the scenes. There it is documented in black and white. The McDonnald's one may not be all that bad, but how about the fact that Sweeden was a secret member of NATO and that the opposition party promised the US that they wouldn't remove troupes from Afghanistan even while they were campaigning on doing exactly that?One reason that Wikileaks is important is because it takes the wind out of the people who shout "you're a conspiracy theorist."No, it doesn't. The links in this post aren't as black and white as they're being portrayed
Am I mistaken to think that in spite of the general reaction to what wiki-leaks contains is hard facts, most of the information that came to light are individual conversations, suspicions, second hand guesses, perceptions, gossips, projections, and not actual proven facts?Well, you could read them for yourself.
Gee, delmoi, you never read the "Google vs China"Where was it documented that the attacks were ordered by the Chinese government, as opposed to independent hackers?
Obama covering up for the GOP? Obvious since his 91st day.I mean come on, you list the fact that U.S. was not only delivering arms, but actually operating drones and doing strikes in Yemen while telling the local population that everything was being done by the Yemeni government. I have no idea what you're talking about with "Corporate America wooing congress".
US not investigating crimes in Iraq? Old news.
Arms shipments? As old as weapons themselves.
Catholic perverts? pppttthhhh...
Corporate America wooing Congress? Aided by "grassroots" lobbying staffed by temps, no doubt.
Nothing. It's pretty black and white that the US isn't going to allow Spain to legally try American citizens and I can't say I blame them.So you believe it's OK for the US government to kidnap innocent people from various countries, imprison them, and torture them for a few years before dumping them back out of the system after their innocence has become obvious -- and no one involved should face any consequences for their actions?
-Spain/Germany (and now Polish ) investigations an US presure to stop it. US continues to utterly fail to hold those accountable. At the same time it's our responsibility and having other governments start indicting US agents would spawn a domestic political keffiyehs as damage relations with those countries. I don't think it was wrong to pressure these other governments, but I also think shame on us for ignoring the clear violations of law.The crimes happened in those countries, so of course they have jurisdiction
-Generals who hang out with Rolling Stone are more likely to cause real harm to US policy than 250k emails written by their subordinates.The state department doesn't work for the military. At least it's not supposed to.
delmoi: I understand the details well enough to say that you are splitting hairs.Hmm... Yeah, people who actually know things are just "splitting hairs". Right.
Zaragoza has also told us that if a proceeding regarding this matter were underway in the U.S., that would effectively bar proceedings in Spain.posted by wuwei at 11:07 AM on January 1, 2011
link
Of course not, but Spain or another foreign country aren't going to be the ones to do it.You understand that the people kidnapped were residents of Spain, right?
From a moralistic point of view, you're right, it should be equal. From a real world point of view, not gonna happen. You can say that's wrong and unfair and I would tend to agree, but still, ain't gonna happen.Well, it's more likely to happen if the US can't secretly suppress court proceedings in other countries, which is what wikileaks is trying to prevent, by making it more difficult for governments to cover up crimes.
With Manning's name all over the news, Assange cannot promise to provide anonymity to future collaboratorsRight. So you basically have no idea what's going on, do you? I mean, I could point out that Manning bragged about being a Wikileaks source on IRC to Adrain Lamo, who turned him in. But in your mind that would just be "splitting hairs".
Yes, that might change if we discover that Adrian Lamo's chat logs were forgedThe fact that Lamo is changing his story, as well as the fact that Lamo is a nutcase who used deception to commit crimes in the past really makes me wonder about it.
Okay... so why are you acting surprised that people in Spain (and Germany, and Italy) would want to prosecute crimes against their own citizens or that took place in their own countries? I don't really understand what kind of argument you are trying to make here...If the Chinese government kidnapped an American citizen of Chinese descent for criticizing it online, you don't think the US government would prosecute the agents who did it if we knew who they were?Sure, if they could get their hands on them.
Twenty-three Americans were tonight convicted of kidnapping by an Italian court at the end of the first trial anywhere in the world involving the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" programme for abducting terrorist suspects.I don't know about the situation in Spain, but in the German case Khalid El-Masri was a German citizen who was kidnapped in Macedoina, flown to Afghanistan and tortured. He wasn't guilty of any crime or associated with any terrorists in any way -- all of this was due to an apparent mistaken identity. The U.S. leaned on the German government not to prosecute the CIA agents who actually kidnapped him.
The former head of the CIA in Milan Robert Lady was given an eight-year jail sentence for his part in the seizure of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, known as Abu Omar, who claimed that he was subsequently tortured in Egypt. Lady's superior, Jeff Castelli, the then head of the CIA in Italy, and two other Americans were acquitted on the grounds that they enjoyed diplomatic immunity.
I'm not really sure what problem is here, in terms of understanding. The U.S. isn't going to let anyone else prosecute Senior Administration officials. I'm astounded that anyone would think that could happen.We are talking about CIA agents who actually did the work, not the top officials in Germany and Italy. Beyond that, how exactly are they supposed to stop it without subverting the legal systems of those countries?
I'm surprised that people are surprised that the US leaned on other countries to prevent trials or prosecutions. Of course they did, it would be news if they didn't.Well... so what? I don't see what point you are making with this.
Oh, it's simple, that America isn't turning over these people to other countries for them to prosecute.Right, but this is totally irrelevant to whether or not the US was subverting the judicial process to prevent them from even being charged. It may not be surprising to you, but it might be surprising to the people in those countries, who may have believed they had an independent judiciary.
That's how the Madrid cable got brought up. Again, it may not be surprising, but the fact that something is not surprising does not mean that everyone believed it before it happened. So for example, even if people in Spain suspected U.S. diplomatic pressure prevented the prosecutions from going forward, that would not have prevented people from saying "oh, that's just a conspiracy theory". But now, that's no longer the case. You can't say that, because it's right there, spelled out on paper.One reason that Wikileaks is important is because it takes the wind out of the people who shout "you're a conspiracy theorist."No, it doesn't. The links in this post aren't as black and white as they're being portrayed, there's a lot of grey there and the repeated insistence by some that it's all horrible and all governments and corporations are completely evil and thank god for wikileaks paints larger portraits of conspiracy theorists.
Correct me if I'm wrong ya'll, be isn't Wikileaks/Assuage's goal to goad governments into overreacting in ways that affect their citizens so that citizens start to fight back, thus bringing the whole corrupt system down?No. You're thinking of Osama bin Laden.
Assange's own words.Nothing in that supports the idea that Assange wants governments to "overreact so their citizens start to fight back". The idea outlined there is just to make it harder for people in power to conspire, and therefore stop doing it.
The question before us is "Is Wikileaks working?", which is dependent on what "working" means; whether it means "revealing evil", "stopping evil", or some combination. The articles explain what Assange means by "working", and explain how revealing evil makes evil much more difficult to do.Um, no, let's review:
Correct me if I'm wrong ya'll, be isn't Wikileaks/Assuage's goal to goad governments into overreacting in ways that affect their citizens so that citizens start to fight back, thus bringing the whole corrupt system down?Now, the answer to that question is no.
Assange's own words.and aeschenkarnos wrote
Here (Conspiracy as Governance and State and Terrorist Conspiracies).Both linked to Conspiracy as Government which doesn't say anything about causing overreactions or even any reaction whatsoever, except for implied capitulation.
A 1998 memo written by al-Qaida military chief Mohammed Atef reveals that Osama bin Laden's group had detailed knowledge of negotiations that were taking place between Afghanistan's ruling Taliban and American government and business leaders over plans for a U.S. oil and gas pipeline across that Central Asian country.Osama bin Laden is rumored to have talked about luring the United States into Afghanistan, also known as the Graveyard of Empires, but I doubt he ever thought of reforming Western governments. He is a religious nutcase who believes in justice for Muslims only, but that doesn't make him much different from people who believe in justice for Americans only. He wanted war between the West and Islam so he could kill all of the non-believers.
The e-mail memo was found in 1998 on a computer seized by the FBI during its investigation into the 1998 African embassy bombings, which were sponsored by al-Qaida. Atef's memo was discovered by FBI counter-terrorism expert John O'Neill, who left the bureau in 2001, complaining that U.S. oil interests were hindering his investigation into al-Qaida. O'Neill, who became security chief at the World Trade Center, died in the Sept. 11 attack.
Atef's memo shines new light on what al-Qaida knew about U.S. efforts to normalize relations with the Taliban in exchange for the fundamentalist government's supporting the construction of an oil and gas pipeline across Afghanistan. As documented in the book I coauthored with Guillaume Dasquie, "Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth," the Clinton and Bush administrations negotiated with the Taliban, both to get the repressive regime to widen its government as well as look favorably on U.S. companies' attempts to construct an oil pipeline. The Bush White House stepped up negotiations with the Taliban in 2001. When those talks stalled in July, a Bush administration representative threatened the Taliban with military reprisals if the government did not go along with American demands. . .
Whatever view you take about WikiLeaks – right or wrong – it means that things will now get out. It has changed things. I'm saying government and authorities need to factor it in. Be more proactive, [by] publishing more stuff, because quite a lot of this is only exciting because we didn't know it. You can't un-invent WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks is part of the phenomenon of the online, empowered citizen ... these are facts that aren't going to go away. Government and authorities need to wise up to that."Its an interesting article, he basically says exactly the same as Assange's old essay: Governments have the choice to either clam up or become more transparent, and becoming more transparent is the only sensible option.
That strikes as a naive line of thought. They're not going to say "Oh no, Wikileaks might get ahold of this, we must not do this," they're going to find different ways of keeping it secret. It's like reading Assuage's description of conspiracies, where conspirators are represented as nails with pieces of twine between them to in symbolize communication. He wants to cut those pieces of twine, cutting ofr communication. The first thing I thought about reading that was "Dude the average person has more than one way to communicate, let alone high tech governments. You're not going to cut off communication, even on the high end encrypted channels, they'll just move to something else."Well, first of all "Government as Conspiracy" is just some article he wrote, it's not, for example Wikileaks mission statement or anything like that.
More than likely, if it's to their benefit, they'll say something. If not they won't, or will outright lie. In both cases, they'll note your demands and make plans to avoid that situation in the future.Right, but again if those people were your roommate in a college dorm, suddenly their ability to communicate freely without you knowing would be cut off significantly. They could only do it when you weren't around.
Interestingly, the flow of news seems to have practically halted. The Guardian, for example, now has far more stories about reaction to the cables than about the contents of the cables themselves.It may be that all the good stories have been published already.
The fact that a faction of the Chinese government is pressing for the US to issue RMB denominated debt tells me that they do, understand what's going on. If they can trick the USG into issuing RMB denominated debt, then the US can't easily make the interest payments.LOL Seriously? The idea that the US would ever issue non-dollar denominated debt, much less RMB-denominated debt is absolutely delusional.
Inertial Fallacy Productions is putting together a Creative Commons-licensed anthology of short (no more than 2600 words) critical responses to the diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks in November/December 2010. You're invited. The resulting volume will be printed in several volumes (as well as digitally published) and used as part of a legal experiment.They also have a map of the embassies from which the cables originated.
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posted by jetsetsc at 8:12 AM on January 1, 2011 [9 favorites]