Wikileaks (Continuación)

Internacional,

A British ambassador to Venice in the 17th century observed that “a diplomat is an honest man sent abroad to lie for his country.” But for centuries, diplomats did more than lie. They bribed, they stole, they intercepted dispatches. Perhaps this will come as some consolation to the many American diplomats whose faces have been reddened by the trove of diplomatic cables released this week by WikiLeaks: whatever they’ve done cannot compare in underhandedness with what ambassadors did in the past.

In 16th-century London, for instance, a French ambassador paid another diplomat’s secretary 60 crowns a month to read the dispatches to which the secretary had access.…  Seguir leyendo »

Internacional,

Los historiadores necesitamos años, décadas, para averiguar los hechos más relevantes del pasado, reconstruir el curso de los acontecimientos, sacar a la luz las intenciones de sus protagonistas. Una mirada rigurosa a la historia exige para nosotros, necesariamente, la aplicación de métodos críticos para evaluar las fuentes, la adopción de técnicas reconocidas para presentar y editar el material y un notable ingenio para detectar los errores en la transmisión de la información y determinar la fiabilidad de los testimonios individuales.

Y, de repente, en apenas unos días, la filtración de una masa ingente de material diplomático, obtenida por Wikileaks y divulgada por algunos de los más prestigiosos medios de comunicación internacionales, proporciona una minuciosa crónica de la relación de Estados Unidos de América, el país más poderoso de la Tierra, con el resto del planeta.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesNuevas Tecnologías,

From the standpoint of traditional post-Pentagon Papers, post-Watergate journalism, the decision by The New York Times, along with the Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais and Der Spiegel, to publish news stories based on the purloined State Department documents made available by WikiLeaks was really no decision at all.

News organizations are in the business of publishing news. They can exercise their judgment with regard to whether, in exceptional circumstances — usually those regarding potential loss of life — news might be redacted, delayed or, on extremely rare occasions, permanently withheld. But the likely embarrassment to individuals, or inconvenience to U.S. diplomats, does not even begin to approach this bar.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesNuevas Tecnologías,

Over the weekend, while hosting the largest intelligence leak in history, WikiLeaks was hit by a distributed denial of service attack. Someone, it seemed, was trying to silence the whistleblowing website.

Thanks to the internet's flexible architecture, however, WikiLeaks was able to quickly shift its weight to Amazon.com's Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) servers, ensuring that the 250,000 leaked diplomatic cables remained online. Earlier today, reports circulated that Amazon had bowed to political pressure from US lawmakers and booted WikiLeaks off its servers. And yet, WikiLeaks remains online as I am writing this, having presumably moved to yet another cluster of servers.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo

It is sad and shocking — pitiful, even, in many cases — how Arab leaders are portrayed in the U.S. State Department cables released by WikiLeaks earlier this week.

A few points about the conduct of Arab leaders come to mind, as we learn new details of what they thought, said and did in various diplomatic moments. These points are about competence, accountability, truthfulness and dignity in the realm of leadership — or, as we have here, the shortages of these qualities in so many cases.

The most shocking revelation — not a revelation, really, as many of us had warned about this for decades — is that Arab governments that have spent hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars on buying American and other foreign arms still find themselves totally helpless, vulnerable and fearful in the face of what they see as growing Iranian power and influence in the region.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica, ,

La reacción de Estados Unidos a la publicación por Wikileaks de los cables diplomáticos indica que en ese país es imposible oír su mensaje central: que su aparato imperial persiste en una tarea cada vez más imposible, la extensión de su poder en un mundo que se resiste frente a él.

Sin duda, muchos miembros de la clase política se habrán dado cuenta de que esa resistencia, muchas veces, está descoordinada, que es consecuencia del hecho de que otros pueblos experimentan el mundo desde sus respectivos puntos de vista. Sin embargo, a pesar de su educación y su experiencia, son incapaces de actuar con arreglo a ese análisis que han hecho.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

For me, the leaked American cable traffic on Afghanistan contains few surprises. The cables show a great global foreign service doing its job: reporting, dutifully and sometimes at greater length than strictly necessary, what was happening and what it was hearing. Truths inconvenient for the power in Washington – about US allies and associates in the Afghan enterprise – are told.

As ambassador in Kabul from 2007 to 2009 I knew, and reported to ministers in London, that President Hamid Karzai was suspicious of British efforts and motives in Helmand. On that, as on so many other issues, Karzai is the authentic voice of many of his people.…  Seguir leyendo »

Internacional,

Distintos acontecimientos han demostrado este año que contar la verdad y ejercer el periodismo independiente son actividades de alto riesgo. La reciente crisis del Sáhara, por ejemplo, ha puesto de manifiesto una cosa que ya sabíamos -la alergia que le produce a la clase dirigente marroquí la prensa libre- y otra que quizá no esperábamos: la complacencia de Gobiernos y organismos democráticos con un régimen que evita testigos incómodos cuando decide desmantelar un campamento en la antigua colonia española aunque esta no esté legalmente bajo su protección y/o Administración.

Corren malos tiempos para la información veraz y contrastada y sus enemigos, lamentablemente, no se limitan a ocupar altos cargos en el Magreb.…  Seguir leyendo »

Internacional,

Take it from a Pentagon papers hawk: it's OK to regret the WikiLeaks dump, and to deplore the dumpsters even as you defend, indeed admire, our democratic press and its freedom. It's been 40 years since the New York Times had to defend itself against government censors and threats of prosecution under the espionage acts for publishing a top-secret cache of Pentagon documents tracking the duplicitous path to an unwinnable war in Vietnam.

But that was another century. The leaker then, Daniel Ellsberg, was not breaching secrecy for its own sake, unlike the WikiLeakers of today; he was looking to defeat a specific government policy.…  Seguir leyendo »

Internacional,

Es el sueño del historiador. Es la pesadilla del diplomático. Aquí están, al alcance de todo el mundo, las confidencias de amigos, aliados y rivales, aderezadas con las opiniones francas, a veces brillantes, de diplomáticos estadounidenses. Durante las dos próximas semanas, los lectores de periódicos de todo el mundo van a disfrutar de un banquete con numerosos platos sacados de la historia del presente.

Lo normal es que el historiador tenga que esperar 20 o 30 años para encontrar esos tesoros. En este caso, los cables más recientes tienen poco más de 30 semanas de antigüedad. Y en conjunto forman un auténtico tesoro.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica,

Julian Assange's reckless and arrogant publication on WikiLeaks of some 250,000 sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables violates U.S. law and should be punished - but it should also motivate government officials to more thoroughly examine the problem of leaks and what to do about them.

Assange has already released thousands of documents detailing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. When U.S. officials learned that he was planning to release these cables, they wrote him demanding that he return the documents and "cease publishing" them because doing so would violate U.S. law, risk "countless" lives and otherwise do great harm to the United States.…  Seguir leyendo »

Internacional, ,

Hace poco más de un mes el mundo ya pudo asistir al gran destape informativo que generó Wikileaks, y el tema, curiosamente, tuvo ya entonces diversas facetas. Por un lado, la información desvelada: ¿era realmente revolucionaria a su manera, inédita, ponía sobre la mesa sorpresas espectaculares? Por otro lado, Wikileaks (y su director/promotor) como protagonista de la noticia: ¿qué o quién es Wikileaks? ¿De dónde saca sus recursos y obtiene su información, etcétera? ¿Es tan inasible como parece? ¿Es la versión más radical de que en internet todo es posible (sea verdad o no)? En tercer lugar, incluso algo de culebrón: ¿por qué de repente la cabeza visible de Wikileaks, que decide pasar una temporada en Suecia, se enfrenta a varias denuncias de tipo sexual, una al menos por violación, y por qué la fiscalía sueca primero les da curso, luego las retira, después las da por sobreseídas, y ahora al menos una causa sigue abierta?…  Seguir leyendo »

Internacional,

El presidente Barack Obama y la secretaria de Estado Hillary Rodham Clinton consideran prioritario revitalizar las relaciones de Estados Unidos con el resto del mundo. Han dedicado muchos esfuerzos a fortalecer nuestras alianzas actuales y a construir otras nuevas para hacer frente a los retos comunes -entre ellos el cambio climático, la amenaza que representan las armas nucleares y la lucha contra la enfermedad y la pobreza-, con el fin de garantizar la seguridad general.

España es un socio valioso de Estados Unidos, tanto en nuestra relación bilateral como en foros internacionales de la importancia de la OTAN y Naciones Unidas.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAméricaMundoOriente Próximo, ,

Nearly 40 years ago I leaked the Pentagon papers – a top secret 7,000-page study of US decision-making during the Vietnam war which revealed repeated lies and cover-ups by the administration. The Iraq war logs, published this weekend by Wikileaks, could be even more significant.

As with Vietnam, we have again seen evidence of a massive cover-up over a number of years by the American authorities. The logs reveal the human consequences of the continuing Iraq war, which have been concealed from the western public for too long: the countless instances of torture; the killing of hundreds of civilians at roadside checkpoints.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo, ,

El asunto de los documentos secretos sobre la guerra de Afganistán en el periodo 2004-2009, publicados por Wikileaks, The Guardian, Der Spiegel y The New York Times, se puede valorar en función de tres aspectos: las propias revelaciones contenidas en estos documentos, la actitud de los socios de Estados Unidos en la guerra y, tal vez, su posible influencia en la estrategia estadounidense para la región.

Como "revelaciones", no hay duda de que constituyen un magnífico golpe periodístico, pero no aportan ningún elemento que trastoque por completo la idea que podíamos tener del conflicto afgano. En 1973, The Washington Post publicó los extractos de un voluminoso documento encargado por el ministro de Defensa y que permitió establecer el origen de la guerra de Vietnam y mostrar que, desde el principio, ese conflicto había partido de unas bases falsas.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia, ,

Hace apenas unas semanas le preguntaron a Daniel Ellsberg -responsable de filtrar a la prensa los Papeles del Pentágono en 1971- qué habría hecho hoy, en la era de las redes e Internet, si tuviera en sus manos documentos de la misma importancia de aquellos que fueron el principio del fin no solo de la guerra de Vietnam, sino también de la presidencia de Richard Nixon.

Sin dudarlo, Ellsberg, un hombre que casi alcanza los 80 años y que ha hecho del acceso a la información y la transparencia en el Gobierno una misión, respondió: compraría un escáner y los subiría a Internet.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

As soon as the WikiLeaks Afghanistan exposé came to light, it was obvious the usual suspects would start attacking the messenger than discussing the message. David Aaronovitch was quick off the mark, with others following soon enough – implying WikiLeaks was seriously damaging the war effort in Afghanistan.

The rhetoric has now reached absurd levels. The US defence secretary said the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, had "blood on his hands"; people on Fox News have called it "a terrorist organisation"; and one of the Washington Post's columnists called it a "criminal enterprise". The former Bush speechwriter also said he wanted it shut down and Assange to "be brought to justice" by any means necessary, and has previously justified waterboarding.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

Anyone who has spent the past two days reading through the 92,000 military field reports and other documents made public by the whistle-blower site WikiLeaks may be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about. I’m a researcher who studies Afghanistan and have no regular access to classified information, yet I have seen nothing in the documents that has either surprised me or told me anything of significance. I suspect that’s the case even for someone who reads only a third of the articles on Afghanistan in his local newspaper.

Let us review, though, what have been viewed as the major revelations in the documents (which were published in part by The Times, The Guardian of London and the German magazine Der Spiegel):

First, there are allegations made by American intelligence officers that elements within Pakistan’s spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, have been conspiring with Taliban factions and other insurgents.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

Nothing beats raw material for its capacity to home in on truth. These logs are unvarnished and brutal, and it will take some time to digest in full their implications. They describe the reality of the Afghan war, including, apparently, the widespread and increasing use of targeted killings.

In particular, the logs describe the efforts of a secret commando unit, Task Force 373, with its "joint prioritised effects list" of hundreds of senior targets, and its efforts to assassinate the enemy. Contrary to the impression that governments seek to promote, these operations are often unsuccessful and sometimes result in the killing of friendly forces and civilians.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesNuevas Tecnologías, ,

The story of WikiLeaks.org is the story of both the modern whistleblower and the structure of the modern media system. The site is now famous for embracing technology in order to protect sources behind material that might be damaging to institutions as varied as the Church of Scientology, Swiss banks and the US military. Yet despite shocking revelations and damaging material emerging from the site, very little has actually changed because of them. This ought to be troubling, but there is a way to explain it.

Julian Assange, the notoriously elusive Australian mastermind of WikiLeaks, has built the site like any good hacker would.…  Seguir leyendo »