On Wikileaks and Lies

Over the past six or eight months, I've put aside a number of interesting newspaper and magazine articles about WikiLeaks and I'm writing this post in order to pull together a number of quotes and examples from those pieces just in case I need them for teaching or research purposes.

Let's begin with some analysis from former British diplomat Carne Ross in The New Statesman, December 6, 2010. He claims that WikiLeaks has changed world politics forever:

what we have witnessed is something very dramatic in the world of diplomacy - and thus in the way that the world runs its business. We may now date the history of world politics as pre- or post-WikiLeaks....The presumption that governments can conduct their business with one another in secret, away from the prying eyes of the public, died when the leaks started to emerge on 28 November. Diplomats and officials around the world are now realising that anything they say may hit the public sphere - ie, the internet....From now on, it will be ever more difficult for governments to claim one thing and do ­another.

Indeed, as readers of John Mearsheimer's book Why Leaders Lie found out, governments have historically been far more likely to lie to their own people than to other states. It was easier to get away with it.

Micah Sifry asserted in The Nation, March 21, 2011, that domestic lies about foreign policy are pervasive:

Unfortunately there is a large gap between what American officials have told the public about their actions and what they have actually done.

Some of my old blogging about the Iraq war certainly suggested a fair measure of lying.

For a more recent example of an important lie told by the US, in December 2010 journalist Jeremy Scahill found one in WikiLeaks:

Ambassador Richard Holbrooke lied to the world when he said bluntly in July 2010: "People think that the US has troops in Pakistan, well, we don't."

A US special operations veteran who worked on Pakistan issues in 2009 reviewed the Wikileaks cables for The Nation. He said he was taken aback that the cable was not classified higher than "SECRET" given that it confirms the active involvement of US soldiers from the highly-secretive, elite Joint Special Operations Command engaging in combat—not just training—in Pakistan. And offensive combat at that. JSOC operations are compartmentalized and highly classified.

Former Marine company commander Matthew Hoh told an interviewer in October 2010 that US personnel on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq have almost pathologically misled American visitors:

For the bigger picture, reporters are briefed at headquarters by people like me, civilian or military, who do dog and pony shows...PowerPoint presentations and windshield tours to areas of progress. We also show them to Congressional delegations, administration or military staff, academics, development firms and think tanks. There are multiple varieties of briefings and tours, which are updated and tailored depending on the visitor. But the briefings are almost always rosy: acknowledging some difficulties, but predicting success....If you [visitors] do speak with Afghans, they’re on our side or payroll, and tell stories we want to hear. It is extremely rare for a visitor to ever speak to Afghans with a different point of view.

If delegations go out, we take them to what you can call Potemkin villages. These are the places we want people to see, like a school or road we built. Meanwhile, what’s happening a kilometer away is totally different. The Soviets did this. We did this in Iraq and probably in Vietnam.

...The presentations are really for Washington consumption...Congress. You’re not going to tell the ones who fund the war that things aren’t going well.

The US, of course, isn't the only country that lies to its own people. This particular lie, also reported by Scahill last December, may have helped spark internal revolt in Yemen:

"We'll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours," President Saleh told Petraeus during a meeting in early January 2010, according to one cable. Yemen's Deputy Prime Minister Rashad al-Alimi then boasted that he had just "lied" by telling Parliament "that the bombs...were American-made but deployed by" Yemen. According to US Special Operations sources, US teams also conduct targeted killing operations and raids inside Yemen.

Yemeni officials likely regret that decision

However, as former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates admitted in October 2010, WikeLeaks apparently hasn't hurt US security very much:

"...the review to date has not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources and methods compromised by the disclosure."

Obviously, this story is to be continued.


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Tech check

Obviously, these past few weeks and months, members of the media have filed numerous stories about the important role of Facebook, Twitter, cell phones, and other technologies in empowering democratic activists around the world.

This is not fundamentally new. I've been in meetings about the Grawemeyer Award when serious people suggested and discussed the prospect of Twitter (its founders, I suppose) winning the prize because it was such a useful tool during the (failed) Iranian Green uprising. Similarly, a number of former students have contacted me electronically during the past few months to discuss the role of technology in coordinating demonstrations in Egypt and other middle eastern states.

This is a topic I've been thinking, writing, and teaching about for many years. In many respects, I have been a technological optimist and my former students recall the pre-9/11 discussions we had about information technologies and the Chiapas rebellion in Mexico in 1994 (remember Subcomandante Marcos?) and the democratic movement in Indonesia in 1998.

However, it now seems obvious that information technology can be used effectively by non-progressive forces as well. As Chris Lehman wrote recently in The Nation:

plenty of equally unsavory nonstate actors have also adapted to the new networked web—most notoriously in the cellphone-enabled Mumbai terrorist attacks, in which jihadists used Google maps to identify their targets. Mexican crime gangs have used Facebook to compile lists of kidnapping targets, while Indonesians can use a Craigslist-style service to arrange the sale of children’s organs. While Kenya has played host to a vital and influential site called Ushahidi, which helped modernize accurate citizen reporting of violence during the disputed 2007 elections, in that same episode ethnic leaders on both sides of the dispute used text messaging to spread violent attacks on their enemies.

Lehman also discusses the ability of governments to censor the internet and the willingness of western corporations to help them deny access to their populations.

Other pundits are also taking this position. This week, for instance, Harvard's Niall Ferguson's Newsweek piece argues that social networks can "empower the enemies of freedom." "Our most dangerous foes," he writes "are the Islamists who understand how to post fatwas on Facebook, email the holy Quran, and tweet the call to jihad.:

While critics and skeptics like Lehman and Ferguson make some good points, I continue to argue that decentralized information technology is bound to have progressive consequences. Wikileaks demonstrates that it is very difficult even for a powerful national security state to censor sensitive information. Useful technologies are cheap and getting cheaper, making them quite widely available around the globe. Given that participation in open discussion is a recipe for democracy in the public sphere, I do not see how some undesirable users can outweigh the communicative potential of everyone else. Sure, criminals and terrorists can foment hate in their niches of the world wide web, but that's certainly no reason to censor the rest of us. What's Ferguson's take home point?



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Climate change diplomacy

This past week, I've posted twice to the e-ir blog, Climate Politics: IR and the Environment.

Sunday, December 5, I posted "Hot times?" about the latest temperature news (2010 still has a chance to be the warmest year on record, though it will most likely finish behind 1998 and 2005) and my brief (pessimistic) assessment of the ongoing international climate conference in Cancun.

Today, December 9, I posted "Wikileaks and climate diplomacy," which looks at some of the latest leaked cables pertaining to climate change. For any IR scholar, the documents reflect fairly predictable practices. A powerful state like the US pursues its interests by using the resources at its disposal to influence other states. Not really shocking, but revealed for all to see.


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