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(HERALD) WikiLeaks: Great betrayal?

WikiLeaks: Great betrayal?
Thursday, 08 September 2011 02:00

An anonymous word crafter said, "In a game without rules, nothing is certain, and everything is possible." It is important to explain what these Internet-based "wikis" are. According to web definitions, "a wiki is a website that allows the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor."

Sounds complicated. Another definition says wikis are "a type of user-generated and edited website where multiple people can write and manage the content. A great example of this concept is Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia."

But more forthright is this one: "A user-written, - controlled, and - edited site. Anyone with web access can change information appearing on wikis, which can be about broad or specific topics. Wikis are becoming increasingly popular web sites as people search for quality and (hopefully) unbiased information."

[That's not Wikileaks, that's Wikipedia. - MrK]

But the Vienna Convention which crafts diplomatic etiquette is not meant to operate in such gamely fashion, although the gathering of competitive intelligence information is a game.

While it might be Okay to say, "don't shoot the messenger", that is Julian Assange and his website, WikiLeaks we have to interrogate a number of issues within the Zimbabwean context, paying special attention to diplomatic relations between Zimbabwe and the United States of America, and how the US and its allies formulate policy using information they freely get from Zimbabwean citizens, be it Zanu-PF, MDC-T, a university professor or a church minister.

Since this is a continuation of a piece I did on December 7, 2010 titled, "WikiLeaks, Zim and the Aussie factor", I question further why leaked cables from US embassies form the bulk of material on WikiLeaks.

Insightful as the documents might be, it is important to know who in the US administration leaked the more than 250 000 diplomatic cables to Julian Assange? Why did they trust his WikiLeaks? If "wikis" are prone to editing by various people, how can we be sure of the veracity of these documents?

Operating in cyberspace, WikiLeaks could do release the information without necessarily facing threats of litigations. However, is it the same with media house that are regurgitating these cables?

Last week Friday when Assange unilaterally decided to release the documents despite protests from his partners, what exactly was he saying to the world not just Zimbabwe where we have seen great betrayals, back stabbings, double standards and people who look like they have no clue about national security?

Who has benefited from this largesse - us or the government of the United States of America?

Does Assange still stand by what he told the Wall Street Journal in 2006, when he wrote a pair of essays, "State and terrorist conspiracies" and "Conspiracy as governance."
The Wall Street Journal says in the articles, Assange saw the US as an authoritarian conspiracy: "To radically shift regime behaviour we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed," he wrote.

"Conspiracies take information about the world in which they operate," (and) "pass it around the conspirators and then act on the result."

Assange's central plan was that leaks would restrict the flow of information among officials -" conspirators" in his view - making government less effective.
He wrote, "We can marginalise a conspiracy's ability to act by decreasing total conspiratorial power until it is no longer able to understand, and hence respond effectively to its environment . . . An authoritarian conspiracy that cannot think efficiently cannot act to preserve itself."

WikiLeaks also exposes the state of leadership and the challenges therein. Whether by default or not, most cables are on President Mugabe. Are we seeing people who are with him by day, but sup with the enemy at night? Double standards, hypocrisy and opportunism all lumped together?

Dear reader, if you have seen the many turncoats in past few moons, WikiLeaks is not overly surprising. So many turn coats at every moment when someone feels they can make money. And, I bet my bottom dollar that none of those implicated so far care a hoot. It is the past, and they are now at better levels, until another WikiLeaks-type exposes more deeds.

It also made me reflect on what the Zimbabwe Council of Chiefs president Chief Fortune Charumbira said at the Zanu-PF Mutare Conference in December 2010. He told President Mugabe as First Secretary of the party not to put his trust in the large numbers that were at the meeting. He bluntly told the participants that many of them had regalia from different political parties hidden in their houses, and Zanu-PF was just one of them.

Most of them were ordinary people, who are now amazed that their leadership having been selling out the country to the United States left, right and centre.

This is reality. The US diplomatic mission is here to advance its country's permanent interests, and WikiLeaks is buttressing their missions and demonstrating that they are a super power. The US is now an issue in every nation state. We might fight amongst ourselves, but we have to match this or do better.

Mary Kaldor also says, "Politics isn't about friends and enemies . . . you only think in binary terms if you're really afraid."

The Zimbabwean political leadership in the face of these leaks has proved just that. On Tuesday, they assembled in Parliament with President Mugabe officially opening the Fourth Session of the Seventh Parliament. Unlike part of the rowdy crowd that resorted to violence in Africa Unity Square, the opening session went on smoothly. A sign of maturity and a sign that they are not going to be swayed by media reports, no matter how negative?

I have deliberately avoided the content aspect because I have too many issues that I think are being swept under the carpet. It happened with HIV and Aids. When people wanted to interrogate the origins, they were deemed dissidents.

The US is one of the top most interested parties in information, communication technologies. True, they cannot tame the monster they created, but why did they allow Assange to become a prototypical knowledge warrior dedicated to the idea that knowledge can win? Is the US losing the knowledge war since Assange released information a week before the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 bombings? For a country that always claims to do things for the sake of the "people" why is it that these cables with sources were made available to all and sundry, and why did Assange renege on anonymity?

WikiLeaks whose media partners the Guardian, the New York Times, German news magazine Der Spiegel and Spanish daily El Pais says on its website: "As far as we can ascertain, WikiLeaks has never revealed any of its sources. We cannot provide details about the security of our media organisation or its anonymous drop box for sources because to do so would help those who would like to compromise the security of our organisation and its sources.

"What we can say is that we operate a number of servers across multiple international jurisdictions and we do not keep logs. Hence these logs can not be seized.
"Anonymisation occurs early in the WikiLeaks network, long before information passes to our web servers. Without specialised global internet traffic analysis, multiple parts of our organisation must conspire with each other to strip submitters of their anonymity."

But as I said in the December 2010 article, WikiLeaks has demonstrated that cyberspace is now with us, irrespective of where one is. Apart from reconfiguring the political landscape it has helped create new perceptions, revise old ones and totally changed others, at a faster rate than we ever thought.

Those who feel exposed can take solace in the reaction to WikiLeaks from an Indian politician Mayawati who is claimed in the US cables of sending her private jet to pick up a pair of sandals. She denied the claims on Tuesday, and said Assange should be put in a mental asylum.

According to an AFP report Mayawati condemned Julian Assange and said, "Either he is mad or he is playing into the hands of our opposition," she said. "He is doing such mischief deliberately. I request the government of his country to put the owner of WikiLeaks into a mental asylum."

While we also ask whether people can be trusted, and with some worrying about the skeletons in their cupboards, the major issue is how many Assanges are out there, and how far can they prepared to go? Do we have Zimbabwean Assanges? Can they achieve this kind of prominence?

The UN General Assembly is meeting this month in New York. Will WikiLeaks be an issue?

* tendai.manzvanzvike@zimpapers.co.zw

Labels: WIKILEAKS

posted by MrK @ 5:02 PM