Wikileaks has become quite controversial. Some people criticize Wikileaks for leaking secret information that could get covert operatives killed. Others believe that it’s necessary to shine a light on what’s going on in foreign relations. Although I have reservations about Wikileaks and especially Julian Assange, count me in the latter camp. Wikileaks is necessary for many reasons, but mainly because our media is not doing its job. It’s not acting as a 4th estate right now. Who is keeping an eye an what we’re doing and trying to make sure we are doing the right thing? Congress has almost completely given up significant oversight.
There’s a lot to read in the newest document dump but most of the newly released memos are diplomatic cables and shine some light on our relationships with various allies. The New York Times has a summary of what the cables contain:
A dangerous standoff with Pakistan over nuclear fuel: Since 2007, the United States has mounted a highly secret effort, so far unsuccessful, to remove from a Pakistani research reactor highly enriched uranium that American officials fear could be diverted for use in an illicit nuclear device. In May 2009, Ambassador Anne W. Patterson reported that Pakistan was refusing to schedule a visit by American technical experts because, as a Pakistani official said, “if the local media got word of the fuel removal, ‘they certainly would portray it as the United States taking Pakistan’s nuclear weapons,’ he argued.”
Thinking about an eventual collapse of North Korea: American and South Korean officials have discussed the prospects for a unified Korea, should the North’s economic troubles and political transition lead the state to implode. The South Koreans even considered commercial inducements to China, according to the American ambassador to Seoul. She told Washington in February that South Korean officials believe that the right business deals would “help salve” China’s “concerns about living with a reunified Korea” that is in a “benign alliance” with the United States.
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A global computer hacking effort: China’s Politburo directed the intrusion into Google’s computer systems in that country, a Chinese contact told the American Embassy in Beijing in January, one cable reported. The Google hacking was part of a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government. They have broken into American government computers and those of Western allies, the Dalai Lama and American businesses since 2002, cables said.
Mixed records against terrorism: Saudi donors remain the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda, and the tiny Persian Gulf state of Qatar, a generous host to the American military for years, was the “worst in the region” in counterterrorism efforts, according to a State Department cable last December. Qatar’s security service was “hesitant to act against known terrorists out of concern for appearing to be aligned with the U.S. and provoking reprisals,” the cable said.
Some of these documents are sensitive. They were labelled with the designation “secret” and “noforn” meaning no foreign national should read them. This information is embarrassing not only to the United States but to several foreign countries. Critics of the leak say that it will make diplomacy more difficult in the future. I just hope it will make the government more accountable to the U.S. people. Our foreign policy since the Bush administration has basically been “trust us we know what we’re doing.” As these documents show, that’s not often the case. The world is difficult to understand and nuanced, not the black and white “with us or against us” that Bush liked to portray. I hope it means we’ll start to have adult conversations in the media and elsewhere about what we want to accomplish in foreign policy.