One of America’s finest allies in the Middle East: Last year, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia proposed an unorthodox way to return Guantánamo Bay prisoners to a chaotic country like Yemen without fear that they would disappear and join a terrorist group. The king told a top White House aide, John O. Brennan, that the…
Category Wikileaks
Assange may have a new home
Bravo: Ecuador on Monday offered Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who has enraged Washington by releasing masses of classified U.S. documents, residency with no questions asked. “We are ready to give him residence in Ecuador, with no problems and no conditions,” Deputy Foreign Minister Kintto Lucas told the Internet site Ecuadorinmediato. “We are going to…
Wikileaks may not be quite as bad as al-Qaeda
Another day and so much more Wikileaks news. Currently snowed under with work related to the information dump, so here are a number of relevant links to keep things flowing (here, here, here, here, here, here and here). This is perhaps the funniest and more tragic response thus far: American Conservative standard bearer Sarah Palin…
Canberra just desperate to do America’s bidding, anywhere anytime
Australia is little more than a reliable lackey, keen to follow Washington into every futile war and action they launch: Australia is described as a “rock solid” but uninfluential US ally in secret US government documents made public by the controversial whistle-blowing website, WikiLeaks. A small number of the 250,000 cables have been released, leaving…
So much for the noble power that helps its democratic mates
How Wikileaks themselves introduce the latest revelations: Wikileaks began on Sunday November 28th publishing 251,287 leaked United States embassy cables, the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain. The documents will give people around the world an unprecedented insight into US Government foreign activities. The cables, which date from…
US embassy in Tehran in 1979 had no idea about much
How clueless were the Americans in 1979 when looking at the situation in Iran? A Wikileaks released document explains: PERHAPS THE SINGLE DOMINANT ASPECT OF THE PERSIAN PSYCHE IS AN OVERRIDING EGOISM. ITS ANTECEDENTS LIE IN THE LONG IRANIAN HISTORY OF INSTABILITY AND INSECURITY WHICH PUT A PREMIUM ON SELF-PRESERVATION. THE PRACTICAL EFFECT OF IT…
Handy reminder of reporter’s role in the Wikileaks story
Great piece by Simon Jenkins at the UK Guardian that reminds journalists our job is to expose secrets and not protect governments. Unless, of course, you’re on the official drip-feed: Is it justified? Should a newspaper disclose virtually all a nation’s secret diplomatic communication, illegally downloaded by one of its citizens? The reporting in the…
Israel can handle killed Iranians to end regional threat
How many dead Iranians is an acceptable price to pay for Zionist ambitions? A 2009 American government cable released Sunday by the WikiLeaks website quotes Defense Minister Ehud Barak as telling visiting American officials that a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities was viable until the end of 2010, but after that “any military solution would…
The inside workings of a paranoid super-power
The latest Wikileaks news here, here, here, here, here and here.
The Wikileaks cable drop begins
This is how the US views the world (reporting by the Guardian): The United States was catapulted into a worldwide diplomatic crisis today, with the leaking to the Guardian and other international media of more than 250,000 classified cables from its embassies, many sent as recently as February this year. At the start of a…