Wikileaks

Other than Joy Behar, Julian Assange is probably the only white male who could defeat Obama for the Democrat party’s presidential nomination in 2012.

Joe,

Are you familiar with the blog “Uskowi on Iran”? It’s pretty interesting reading, and from what I’ve seen in the seven months I’ve been following it pretty accurate. Their posts on the latest WikiLeaks dumps have been very interesting.

Quote from the most recent, which is itself a translation lifted from today’s Tabnak:

“These documents (WikiLeasks cables) show that Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, UAE, Jordan, and Egypt have consistently lobbied the US to use military option against Iran. In any case, these published documents are indications of a worrisome situation that our country will face in near future. If these documents are authentic, Iran is facing an undeclared war by its neighbors, the neighbors that want a military confrontation between the US and Iran, and see themselves as beneficiaries of such conflict.”

Given that Achmadinejad’s arch-conservative faction has a pretty precarious hold on power right now (only the supreme leader saved him from impeachment recently) do you think this type of dump might actually end up benefiting the US’s goals of causing Iran to be a more responsible international actor? i.e. if this causes Iran’s leadership to realize that every single other country in the Middle East wants to see them get hit, they might work on moderating provacative behavior?

As far as Assange’s work getting people killed, I agree with you completely. We went through quite a few translators when I was in Iraq for this very reason. And the man himself seems reasonably despicable. But I’m much less certain than you are that Assange is actually a criminal and should be jailed. In recent years the US government has been a bad actor often enough that I don’t think we’re at the point yet where we can just take their word for stuff anymore.

The old line about why do you care if they read your mail if you havent done anything wrong, kind of applies in this case in the reverse. The US govt did a lot very wrong during the Bush administration, and perhaps their mail should be read for a bit.

“I am tremendously concernced about the puerile eruptions of Julian Assange.”

Isn’t that what you do for a living, erupt puerilely at perceived blows to your vanity?

Otherwise, shorter Joe Klein–think of the disfigured women involved. A risk that can keep us in Afghanistan indefinitely and (absent Wikileaks) ignorant of the ugly machinations of empire. Can you link to that charming Time cover again?

“These are not the sort of stories that make it into the news, but they are where the real collateral damage occurs.”

You point to a single expression of outrage you’ve made in the last decade at actual collateral damage from American bombs in wars declared and otherwise, and then you can feign concern about the loss of innocent life. And, no, I don’t mean a throwaway line in a column, I mean a serious engagement with the unmitigated horror we’ve unleashed on the lives of millions of innocent civilians: those dead, maimed (physically and emotionally), and displaced.

“Assange is a criminal. He’s the one who should be in jail.”

Is George Bush or his veep a criminal–do they belong in jail? Your hypocrisy is epic.

If a single foreign national is rounded up and put in jail because of a leaked cable, this entire, anarchic exercise in “freedom” stands as a human disaster.

Err… what?

What exactly is your metric on the value of human life? Predator drone strikes on wedding receptions and the like is okay, yes? Carpet bombing, helicopter gunships shooting reporters, etc etc?

But any fallout due to leaked cables is too much in the name of exposing corruption and incompetence amongst our own members of government (who, incidentally, are the reason why we are putting Afghani women at risk in the first place)? Does it occur to you that if some dissatisfied Private could get access to 250k documents, that the same or other persons could have gotten access to the same files, but we wouldn’t have known about it? How do the saved lives from releasing the docs measure up?

If you are opposed to breaking some eggs, you shouldn’t have ordered the omelet, Joe.

This from The Economist’s Democracy in America blog is worth a read:

To get at the value of WikiLeaks, I think it’s important to distinguish between the government—the temporary, elected authors of national policy—and the state—the permanent bureaucratic and military apparatus superficially but not fully controlled by the reigning government. The careerists scattered about the world in America’s intelligence agencies, military, and consular offices largely operate behind a veil of secrecy executing policy which is itself largely secret. American citizens mostly have no idea what they are doing, or whether what they are doing is working out well. The actually-existing structure and strategy of the American empire remains a near-total mystery to those who foot the bill and whose children fight its wars. And that is the way the elite of America’s unelected permanent state, perhaps the most powerful class of people on Earth, like it….

If secrecy is necessary for national security and effective diplomacy, it is also inevitable that the prerogative of secrecy will be used to hide the misdeeds of the permanent state and its privileged agents. I suspect that there is no scheme of government oversight that will not eventually come under the indirect control of the generals, spies, and foreign-service officers it is meant to oversee. Organisations such as WikiLeaks, which are philosophically opposed to state secrecy and which operate as much as is possible outside the global nation-state system, may be the best we can hope for in the way of promoting the climate of transparency and accountability necessary for authentically liberal democracy. Some folks ask, “Who elected Julian Assange?” The answer is nobody did, which is, ironically, why WikiLeaks is able to improve the quality of our democracy. Of course, those jealously protective of the privileges of unaccountable state power will tell us that people will die if we can read their email, but so what? Different people, maybe more people, will die if we can’t.

Bold mine for Joe Klein

jcapan: A number of posters were defending the inclusion of Joe Klein among the pundit hacks listed in a Slate article that I linked to previously.
.
This is why he should be included. It is that sense that the US is above lawlessness. He forgets all the damage we have done in the world from Nicaragua, Iraq, Vietnam, Chile, et al. His outrage is pointed at one person, ignoring the criminals who over decades put our young men and women in perilous, lethal perdicaments (including his son) and also imperiled millions of others.
.
Where is his outrage about the Bush regime and their criminality? Where is the outrage against Kissinger and others who have profited from our perpetual state of war? He is concerned about State Department privacy but not the incursion into American citizen’s privacy through the Patriot Act. Joe has selective outrage.

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/top-ten-signs-taliban-leader-youre-negotia
.
This should be a help to the State Department. Letterman’s Top Ten Signs the Taliban Leader You’re Negotiating With is an Imposter.
.
Like #6. “You ask, ‘Are you the Taliban leader?’ And he responds, ‘Si”.”

Apr,

I’m only Claude-Rains “shocked” by Joe’s take here. His statism and general military suck-uppery is the stuff of legends. As Glenzilla speculated today: “our major media stars are nothing more than Government spokespeople and major news outlets little more than glorified state-run media.”

On the contrary texty, Assange, apart from the relatively minor matter of being Australian, could make a huge impact on the Republican nomination, for he, with a little help from the press, has shown two Republican axioms to be irrefutable – from a Republican perspective, of course.
Firstly, any dollars spent on foreign policy outside the military and their suppliers is wasted. The releases clearly show the State Department is not doing their job, which is to advise the rest of the world what will happen to them if they fail to meet American foreign policy objectives.
Secondly, the focus of the documents reinforces the Republican axiom that history began sometime in January 2009, hence the calls for the resignation of the current secretary of state. Thus the Afghan war becomes “Obama’s war” and once Americans truly understand the futility and cost of the adventure in Iraq, then that will become “Obama’s war” also.

Klein is probably angry that all the information he has ignored, or deliberately hidden, has been exposed by a real reporter. It isn’t war criminals who are criminals, it is the people brave enough to expose them, in his little mind.

For me, it’s a matter of “what right does the US have to release this information” that frustrates me the most about Julien Assange’s BS. It’s one thing to release the previous documents or even his release of things like “US diplomats are spying on UN Ambassadors”. That is “This is what America is doing”. But what right does America have to release a confidential statement made by one Chinese representative to a South Korean representative regarding their feelings towards North Korea? If it was part of a leak of Chinese documents, I would classify it just like the other 2 leaks. But that’s because it is the activities and opinions of the Chinese government being released to the Chinese people from Chinese sources to open up Chinese transparency. This is the opinions of the Chinese government (and thousands of others) being released to the American people to open up American transparency.

Actually, what’s even more offensive to me is that he actually seems to think he’s a crusader against the evils of American secrecy but when the American government doesn’t have a right to release these documents, how can he be so arrogant as to paint himself as the crusader against the evils of American secrecy? The American government can’t be seen as the bad guy here and his arrogance and self-righteousness is insulting if not flat-out dishonest (it’s not clear to me that he’s got the advanced thought processes capable of recognizing that there might be a line there or a distinction between these documents and the previous dumps).

It will have no impact on the GOP race because there isn’t a dispute on this side. The only spot of disagreement is if the soldier who did the leaking shout be executed for treason or just given life. He is in custody and if only for the politics of it all, won’t ever be released. This is going to have the positive result of forcing the left to deal with the release of state secrets in an adult way. This isn’t the Pentagon Papers. These leaks hurt Obama and the USA. There is no upside for the anti-war, anti-military left in the USA. Team Obama is going to start enforcing the laws in place and may even pass a few new ones to better punish this sort of thing.

There is actually a bit of a political upside for the right in having more material to mock the left. Julian no doubt sees himself as becoming an icon on the left for speaking truth to power and all of that lefty nonsense. A brave one is he. Really? One of the 1st questions asked was why leak USA secrets when human rights abuses are committed intentionally by the Russian’s Chinese and Iranians. For some strange reason lefties aren’t so brave in that regard. It’s much like the current flap over the NEH supported exhibit showing ants climbing over Christ. Why not Mohammad? Funny how that happens? Just one reason why the 1st word most people associate when they think of a lefty is pussy.

Another small upside to this little story is just another example of the little minds at the NYTs. At some point they’ll come to understand search engines. They refused to cover the story of climategate because, you see, those leaked emails were not intended for public attention. It w/b be unethical and rude. Leaking state communications that could get innocents killed is fine. This is so pathetic on so many levels in a way even a child would feel sorry for the befuddled intellectuals on the editorial board.

I can’t even decide the best part. When the NYTs announced it wasn’t going to cover climategate it was already a month too late. The only fools who didn’t know about the long list of scientific frauds were the twits who read the NYTs. How cool is that? They really thought if they didn’t report it no one would know. The entire conservative media was mocking them then just as they are now on this.

I do agree with Joe that Assange’s commentary is puerile, and (not something Joe would agree with) is in conflict with his putative objective. For Wikileaks to really perform the service it claims to be pursuing, the material should be released without comment, certainly without policy advice for the countries involved. If I were Jimmy Wales, I’d do whatever the WIki equivalent of suing is. This has never been a WIki-like endeavor, and becomes less so the more Assange pursues an agenda beyond exposing material (from any country’s secret files) for citizens to assess for themselves.
.
Of course, it is always ironic, sad, tragic, and blackly humorous to see Joe get all worked up about one tiny subset of human lives put in danger as a collateral effect of Wiki’s collateral damage arising from the exposure of details of brutal American imperialism–a subset that happens to intersect with his part of human society.
.
“A single foreign national” “Human disaster.”
.
Joe does often engage in hyperbolic prose, but one would hope he hesitated, at least briefly, before hitting the post key. Does he really have no idea of the magnitude of human suffering caused by these pointless, endless wars?

One other neat aspect of the ants on Christ thing. Are these whacko’s that clueless regarding the hammer to come down on spending? Obama is about to cut a deal on taxes. His starting position in negotiations is raising taxes on those making more than $250K. Schumer is tryng to broker a deal to make it on anyone over $1M. Chucky sees that as the best he can hope for. Whatever. The dynamic is such that the lelft has lost the argument on taxes and on deficits. We ARE going to lower the deficit and it’s not going to be by raising taxes. Even you fools can figure out what’s left. Put the NEH at the top of that hit parade. Those people are as dumb as rocks. If Obama is able to get them any funding he’s going to have to make major concessions elsewhere. Me, I’ll cut the deal. The NEH is small potatoes within the big picture and it’s always good to have lefty freaks put on a show. I’d just love for Obama to run in 2012 on preserving funding for the NEH.

This is another aspect of 9/11 the left still hasn’t figured out has created a disaster for them. These little ‘piss christ’ things are perfect fodder for the right. When you are willing to mock christians and not muslims you ooze cowardice and hypocrisy. It’s the 1st thing remotely intelligent people look for. Speaking truth to power? You mock yourself!

Joe seems to think that the United States has the right to jail non-citizens for… well for I don’t know what… failing to keep secrets he never agreed to keep in the first place?

While Assange is the provacateur here, Joe Klein is the one expressing the point of view that most encourages lawlessness.

Governments acting in secret can’t help but abuse their powers. How do you obtain the consent of your citizens when you won’t tell them what’s going on?

What seems most at issue with these cables is the notion that diplomacy is best left to a diplomatic class of well educated experts who will handle things for the citizenry if the rest of us will just kindly butt out. Both Joe and Michael Scherer have argued here that the cables make that point. Look, they’re doing great!

Well, I’m not so sure that trying to steal the ATM pins of other diplomats is evidence of that but never mind… I’ll grant Joe and Michael that our diplomats are honestly and competently acting in the best interest of America and that we’re better off for it.

I still need to check! Look, I’m lucky that I found a job that I so far do well at. My supervisors are very happy with my performance so far. But they still give me a review every quarter and they like to see what I’m up to every now and then. Doing my job well and honestly doesn’t exempt me from oversight. It doesn’t exempt anyone in America from oversight. And these people work for us.

Why don’t Americans have the right to know what China does in secret? Maybe I don’t get your objection.

“Assange is a criminal. He’s the one who should be in jail.”

————————————-

For you, Mr. Klein:

“The business of the New York journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his race and his country for his daily bread. You know this and I know it, and what folly is this to be toasting an “Independent Press.” We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping-jacks; they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”

- John Swinton

http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2009/05/11/the-gas-must-flow/

The problem with Julian Assange and Joe Klein is a matter of them being at opposite ends of a continuum. Joe Klein sees no problem with ‘partnering’ with the subjects of his reporting and when making judgments about how much information to release is very cognisant of how it will affect his subjects. Julian Assange OTOH doesn’t appear to give a rats a$$ about the potential consequences of his acts.
.
The truth is that both approaches are ultimately harmful to the cause of factfinding and reporting.

Name one person who has been jailed or killed because of a Wikileaks publishing “secret” documents.

There are tens of thousands (or more) of civilians now dead because of our illegal war on Iraq.

And because of the fury against Wikileaks by world leaders and media figures like yourself, I very much doubt that stories like the one you concocted would not make the news. If one person could be proven to have been killed because of a document Wikileaks published, it would be screamed across the columns of newspapers, magazines and televisions all over the world.

The activities of Assange is no different than those of Senator Leahy and the NYT. What is amusing is that instead of jail for treason Leahy had a committee re-assignment. The NYT usually typical liberal logic (hypocrisy) refused to publish the leaked e-mails about Global warming because they were obtained illegally but did not have the same compunction about Wikileaks.
.
But let’s not forget the outrage from the left over Valerie Plame. They were building hanging gallows over far less offense than Wikileaks. But now we see this same cast of fools applauding the outing of covert operatives from many nations.
.
Nothing like righteous hypocrisy (again) from the left. They yell Fox lies but they continue to lie to themselves.

Is this “collateral damage” not “real” enough for you, Mr. Klein?

http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2010/11/11/circle-ix/

Klein’s only reply to WikiLeaks is fear mongering and personal attack. Seems about par for the course, for a war mongering apologist.

Exactly how is this playing out in a way that improves anything? Other than a few left wing whack jobs calling for Hillary’s head where is there a call for reform of any type? The only result I can see is the soldier responsible for the leak is in a military jail, his hopes of being a cause celeb dashed and looking forward to spending the rest of his natural life in that jail. Perhaps one day he’ll meet KSM and they can take turns being the girlfriend. The other effect is to make the secret-keepers aware they need to do a better job of keeping their secrets. Somehow I doubt Julian was loooking for a way to help the USA improve it’s methodology for keeping it’s intelligence better protected. It’s also clear while not a major issue it can only add to the sense Obama is incompetent. Do our leakers really want to help elect a neocon?

This is the classic example of a circular firing squad the left is so adept at.

Somehow I think if Dick Cheney were to travel to Spain and be arrested you’d support the right of nations to arrest non-citizens, for something they never agreed to.

IN fact there are laws that would allow them to go after Julian but they won’t What Julian has done, and he knew this before he did it, is condemn the leaker to life in a military prison. There will be talk to charging him with Treason and getting the firing squard but the fact is Americans support capital punishment for killers. This kid is too pathetic a figure. Julian played him for a dupe. He’s a lot like Cindy Sheehan. The left found her useful for a while as an anti-war icon. She lost her son as as such was a sympathetic figure. They made her a celebrity. As soon as her served her purpose they dumped her. She was a tool, nothing more. This kid is just another loser. Obama needs to show he’s not a wimp so he’s going to stay in prison a very long time.

and what Glenn said:
.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/01/wikileaks/index.html
.
He provides some context and detail to the human disaster that US foreign policy has generated.
.
“increasingly bloodthirsty two-minute hate session” in reference to the attacks on Assange
.
The Orwell references keep coming, and keep seeming more and more relevant.

Wasn’t the NYTs explanation of their decision to print these leaks just priceless? It’s like they’ve never heard of search engines. They had to know the far more widely disseminated conservative press was going to print their decision on climate gate right next to this release and use their own words to mock them.

Looks like their movie on the Plames bombed along with all of their other anti-war, anti-bush crap. They had to piss away over $500M on at least 20 duds with absolutely nothing to show for it. “W” is on cable and I’ll periodically catch 5 minutes here and there. It’s hilariously bad. Oliver Stone has to be the most bizarre director of all time. It’s amazing how someone can do such good stuff and then so comically bad.

GWB has a really outstanding Op-Ed in the WSJ today urging the Congress to keep up the good work in Africa as far as our Aids and other humanitarian projects. Typically non-partisan, non-political and classy. The juxtaposition between his class and Hollywood sleeze could hardly be more definitive. Bile is a very ugly thing and hugely counter productive as a PR issue. You might want to reflect back on Reagan. You did the exact same ‘he’s as dumb as a rock and evil to boot’ thing back then. How did that work out? Yeah, he was dumb. He cut tax rates from 70% to 28% against your will but he was the idiot. That’s the ticket!

@RD: I would not support allowing a foreign government to arrest a former U.S. Vice President, even one I didn’t like.

I have the same instinctive reaction to this release of documents, more or less. “How’s a state supposed to conduct diplomacy if their stuff is going to be released at any time?” But really, who has the ability to stop it? It’s like trying to stop water, or Napster. This might just be the world we’re living in.
-
Plus, as to whether it should be stopped, how would that work? A media organization would sort the disclosures into good and bad ones? (Bear in mind, the US has rebuffed Assange’s efforts to get them to redact these documents). That doesn’t sound like the media’s job. Also, we just launched a catastrophic invasion and occupation of a Middle Eastern country, with the full approval of American media & political establishment. No decisionmaker or opinionator has suffered a single negative consequence for their terrible reporting and terrible judgment. It’s not clear to me why, even if this is the media’s role, we should expect them to be any good at it.
-
They are now extremely vulnerable–indeed, they are likely to be rounded up, defigured or murdered for merely talking to the Americans. This is not improbable, it is likely
-
Well, Joe, you people keep saying that, but there’s zero evidence of it. Also, people are dying in Iraq, and to a lesser extent Afghanistan, because we decided to invade and occupy them. That would have been the key point to prevent that negative outcome.

Regarding Fox, Brent Bair and Megyn Kelly both just recorded record ratings. Brent already has a top job. They’re going to have to get Megyn more airtime. Since their primetime lineup is loaded with stars it would make sense for CNN to grab her or eventually NBC. They’ll almost certainly get a makeover under Comcast. She is young, very attractive, very smart and quick on her feet. Couric is far too expensive and can’t bring ratings.

Stalin famously said that one death was a tragedy, a thousand was merely a statistic.

Most who feel as you do are on the left and they would cheer Bush and Cheney getting arrested. I am no lawyer but I know enough to know nations have agreements regarding criminal behavior. If for example Julian hired someone to kill an American citizen in NYC then he could be legally extradited from his current location back to the USA. The opposite would be equally true. Joe’s point here is if Julians actions directly caused the death of an innocent there is legal culpability in that death. That strikes me as fair and accurate.

My own sense is that if these leaks put as many people in harms way as suggested Jullian is likely to be killed before there are any arrests. For a conservative this is really an odd event. On the one hand it’s not good for the USA to suffer leaks. On the other hand this confirms a lot of things conservatives knew such as the Arabs worry tons more about Iran than Israel. Leftwing linkage of Palestine to other Islamic terrorism was aways a mirage. Also Joe’s point is relevant. This helps Clinton and the State dept. They’re doing their job.

I am tremendously concernced about the puerile eruptions of my government. So we’re even, right?

you people are priceless

This is the classic leftwing firing squad. jullian was supposed to be this generations Daniel Berrigan and this the new Pentagon Papers. It’s no such thing. It’s almost precisely the opposite. julian is a sleezy character. The kid doing the leaking just a pathetic dupe. He’s done a contemptible thing yet you have to feel pity for him. There is nothing good here for the far left. It’s one of those issues that won’t gain Obama anything and lose him left wing support in 2012. It’s really a small story but can only contribute to the sense he’s not in control.

Joe Klein:
.
You write:
.
“Assange is a criminal. He’s the one who should be in jail.”

Q: The most popular question on your own website is related to this. On change.gov it comes from Bob Fertik of New York City and he asks, ‘Will you appoint a special prosecutor ideally Patrick Fitzgerald to independently investigate the greatest crimes of the Bush administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping.’
.
OBAMA: We’re still evaluating how we’re going to approach the whole issue of interrogations, detentions, and so forth. And obviously we’re going to be looking at past practices and I don’t believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards. … My orientation is going to be moving foward.

In the matter of whatever harm may or may not result from whatever crimes may or may not have been committed by Assange or Wikileaks, shouldn’t our orientation be “moving forward?”
.
Shouldn’t we look forward, not backwards?
.
Why this special outrage from the US political press corps, in other words?
.
Why does it seem as if your journalistic interests –maybe even your sympathies– always lie with the state, and not with your information-disseminating brethren?
.
You do realize that, as a journalist, you are professionally related to Assange, don’t you, Joe Klein?

If a single foreign national is rounded up and put in jail because of a leaked cable, this entire, anarchic exercise in “freedom” stands as a human disaster. Assange is a criminal. He’s the one who should be in jail.
.
Either your memory is short or you are inconsistent in the application of whatever principles you use to render judgment. Maybe you don’t remember this:

But jail time? Do we really want to spend our tax dollars keeping Scooter Libby behind bars? I don’t think so. This “perjury” case only exists because of his celebrity–just as the ridiculous “perjury” case against Bill Clinton, which ballooned into the fantastically stupid and destructive impeachment proceedings.
.
Sentence Libby to community service–at Walter Reed Hospital, where he can spend his days comtemplating the broken victims of his ideological arrogance.

When, later, it’s pretty well-known that Libby did lie, covering up a serious security breach on the part of the White House that outed intelligence assets. What is your rationale for the disparity of your judgments of Assange and Libby?

I also found a phrase you used which may be applicable to what you’ve written here, Joe: “pompous bloviation“.

Dirks:
.
Whether or not this guy Assange (or the organization, or the people not in the public eye, whomever) cares about whether people die as a result of his disclosures or not, what makes you say that the release of information is “ultimately harmful to the cause of factfinding and reporting?”
.
How is that possible?

Joe’s problem isn’t governance but politics. His problem is the leaks hurt the left. For example we find out the arab world is far more concerned about Iran than Israel and they want us to take Iran out. That destroys their narrative. Time has been promoting this liberal nonsense about Israel being the root of all terrorism. The right has called this childish nonsense. The various Kings have just spoken. Actually they’ve been speaking. Obama just refuses to listen. Now we know.

A few things here:
1) When someone at your office tells you a personal opinion about his boss (and he might do it in email or it might need to be documented some way), you probably should keep it confidential. After all, it may hinder his career, it may hinder his boss, and it was something that was entirely between you two. It has little or nothing to do with official policy and the general populace shouldn’t interpret it as such. Furthermore, the communication happening may help cut through bureaucracy so that when an emergency happens, you have a contact you feel you can trust or perhaps the opinion is even to help cut through the bureaucracy. Now explode this to the greater spectrum of foreign policy. There are two leaked documents that I think of extensively when I think of this scenario. The first involves the former head of Canada’s spy agency pretty much insulting the Canadian populace and Canadian courts as being too soft on terror (to paraphrase). It paints a negative picture on our spy agency, on our existing government who are often accused of overstepping their bounds and not protecting the rights of Canadians, and on him as a person. However, when I sat down and thought about it, I realized it’s a good thing that he had this opinion. It’s his job to gather this information just as it is the job of the courts to protect the rights of Canadians from government overreach. He has full right to that opinion, and the venting had nothing to do with a change in official policy but rather that he felt the official policy to be restricting his job – it should. Similarly the Chinese officials were expressing their honest opinion and it should not be read as official Chinese policy. It helps us, the western people because we realize that the hardnosed East-West camps or Communist-Capitalist camps aren’t really that hardnosed. That’s nice to hear, but that has nothing to do with official policy. That’s about as close to official policy as someone within the American government talking about his personal Communist sympathies. I don’t think that’s worthy of being leaked – it was a private communication and has nothing to do with official policy. But, all of these would reflect incredibly poorly on the individuals.
.
I’ll have more later, but I’ve gotta run.

Why this special outrage from the US political press corps
-
Because they are the PR wing of the Congressional-military-industrial complex.

Links to your commentary here are being tweeted and re-tweeted, JC.

The political press corps is trying, along with the Administration, to make this about the character of Assange.
.
In doing so, they are helping to make the issue about the character of the political press corps –and the Administration.

“You do realize that, as a journalist, you are professionally related to Assange, don’t you, Joe Klein?”
.
Sublime sarcasm, Stuart. And I’d bet that as a longstanding gatekeeper of (important) information, as directed by his paymasters and established Village conventions, he doesn’t even realize what a very poor relation he actually is.

Stuart.
If for no other reason, then the fact that those in public service who DO require secrecy will clam up even tighter and potential whistleblowers will have even more to worry about. The wholesale release of information without regard to to it’s contents or context actually can work at cross purposes to the cause of openness and transparency.

Why does it seem as if your journalistic interests –maybe even your sympathies– always lie with the state, and not with your information-disseminating brethren?
.
Easy. The intel and diplomatic communities are up in arms about this, so Joe absorbs their sentiments and expands upon them…part-window-part-magnifier, as it were. What Klein is missing, ‘tho, is the other side of the story; why these leaks are going public…

“it would make sense for CNN to grab her”
>
I think she may be too smart for that. Kathleen Parker the pseudo-conservative is getting a real taste of what life at CNN is like. CNN wants a photo-op conservative not one of principle. That way they can argue they are not MSNBC. Spitzer/Parker ratings are down 35% from the last sinking ship. Now Parker is annoyed that the show is mostly focused on Spitzer. This happens every time a conservative drops their principles in the hopes that liberals will like them.

Dirks:
.
I’m going to leave aside the question of whether the release of information causing the authorities to try to tighten their grip on a tsunami of secrets is a bad thing.
.
This, though, is not self-evident, at least to me
.
“The wholesale release of information without regard to to it’s contents or context actually can work at cross purposes to the cause of openness and transparency.”
.
, and so I’m wondering if you can clarify.
.
Are you saying that, because the release of volumes of relatively trivial information may cause a security clampdown, in which more important secrets will be less likely to be leaked out, that means we should really expect Wikileaks or other information/journalist enterprises to get the super-important secrets out (like the NSA spying whistleblower, that the NYTimes sat on before the ’04 election), and not attempt to topple the edifice of the carpet-secretization regime itself?

It is a really interesting theory, although I think that focusing on how Joe in particular has “gone native” while embedded in the apparatchik community may miss the systemic –incredible, really– new problem of a press corps apparently voluntarily invested in keeping the state’s secrecy regime secure.
.
In other words, regardless of Joe’s individual situation, I don’t think that the Founders had this kind of press in mind when they wrote the Bill of Rights.

Joe Klein, author of this article, supported the Iraq War.

“If a single foreign national is rounded up and put in jail because of a leaked cable, this entire, anarchic exercise in “freedom” stands as a human disaster. Assange is a criminal. He’s the one who should be in jail.”

I think it’s clear the invasion of Iraq was a truly monstrous human disaster. You know, a real one where hundreds of thousands are killed, neighbors turn against one another, millions loose their homes or flee the fighting and whole country and it’s culture are shredded to pieces.

No, Klein has a twisted sense of morality. The criminals who perpetrate real human disasters are the ones who should be in jail, not those trying to shine a light where the guilty try to hide.

The invasion of Iraq was one of history’s great humanitarian acts. Americans sacrificed to put a demonic despot out of power and unable to torture, rape and murder his own people and others. History will respect GWB for his great achievement.

Alright, continuing from before:
.
2) Continuing my previous vein: your privacy isn’t perfect in the diplomatic world. Diplomats have the responsibility to report to their superiors any and all information that may influence future policy. In the case of North Korea, this has to be reported. If it’s the corporate world and you mention something about your boss, you’re not expecting it to end up in an email. In the foreign policy world, if you say something about your boss to the American government, you know you are providing a little piece of information that may allow those negotiators to make a better deal. This information being public makes the person less likely to want to provide that little nugget and hinders negotiators in approaching policy.
.
3) There is an inherent disconnect between good policy and good politics, and when they collide, the decision between doing what’s right and what’s popular are often decided on whether it will be made public. So where’s the problem? What’s right is often bringing people together and settling things down. What’s popular is often playing to your base. Again, I bring up Yemen from our conversation from yesterday. What was right for Yemen to do? Take action against the terrorists or allow action to be taken. The former is significantly more difficult than the latter. What’s popular? Not letting Western Imperialism dominate your nation’s agenda – exerting your independence. Yes, these are hardly cross purposes, but then factor in the fact of the risk and cost to the Yemenese government compared to the risk and cost to the American government – the latter of which already has the forces in the region anyways and wants the attacks to happen more than the Yemenese do. Further more, permitting American air strikes on Yemen soil allows Yemen to quietly leverage that into getting concessions for the benefit of Yemen. However, none of that is close to as important as appearing independent. Solution: let America bomb Yemenese soil with the concessions you want, take credit for bombing to show you’re somewhat independent and benefit from everyone being reasonably happy. How about a different one with far more dire circumstances: Cuban Missile Crisis. An insane number of Soviet and American hardliners were just itching for a war. For obvious reasons, that would have been a bad idea. Neither Kruschev nor JFK wanted a war, but neither wanted to appear weak at home, giving up more than they were willing to. The deal? Soviets remove missiles from Cuba, 6 months later the US does not replace missiles in Turkey. The second half of the deal was not made public until well after the entire incident had faded from memory and everyone already knew Kennedy had done the right thing. But ask yourself: would the deal have been made if JFK knew the deal would be public the next day? Would Kruschev have made the deal knowing that he’d have to explain why the Americans would get to wait 6 months before their provocative nukes were removed? If compromise is where no one is satisfied but everyone expects their leaders to win, the two situations end up completely at odds. An easy example of what happens when these facts result in continued hostility can be seen in the current state of the mid-East peace process.
.
4) There is an inherent disadvantage to free nations. The vast majority of nations are not free. They don’t have to answer to their populace, they don’t have to tell their populace anything, and as such, they can be far more patient. If the expectation is that the US reveals everything, than every time they sit at the bargaining table, they have to “win”. But no nation is going to sit at that table if they know that it’s either lose or get nothing, so they’ll have less and less interest in dealing with the US. Now in America’s case, that’s probably ok – as the #1 economy, they have something to offset it. Consider Iceland for a minute: a small country, recently declared national bankruptcy. There’s next to no reason to deal with them. Free nations end up playing with a massive handicap and end up having a hard time even getting a meeting let alone being permitted to play the game.
.
5) This isn’t a direct democracy. We don’t have a right to a perfect set of information. We both live in Representative Democracies – we have to believe the people we’ve elected will act responsibly. If these documents indicated misbehavior amongst officials, that might be a concern, but then again, these don’t show employee records. If it was misbehavior by elected officials or top level officials, maybe there is something there worth knowing, but that’s not what’s in here. Why might I give distinctions for these? Because those may indicate that our trust in our officials is misplaced. You don’t like it when your boss is reading over your shoulder, reading your emails, and deciding on everything you’ve done. You want to believe your boss trusts you to do your job unless something comes to his attention that clearly shows you aren’t doing your job. How is it any different with elected officials? We, collectively, are their boss. We, collectively, hired them to do their job. We, collectively, have to trust that they will do that job honestly, competently and with the right intentions and unless we find reason to question that trust, we, collectively, should let them do their jobs.
.
6) This isn’t whistle blowing. Whistle blowing isn’t showing us our representatives doing exactly what we expect them to do but showing us our representatives are doing exactly what we think they shouldn’t be doing. Everything else I could say on that point is closely related to 5.
.
7) To my point in 3.1: even if you disagree with every single one of my points here, the fact of the matter is that he has no right to sit on his high horse. Even if you believe that Americans have a right to this information, even if you believe the Chinese have a right to this information, that doesn’t mean American officials have a right to provide this information to their public if the Chinese officials don’t want to provide this information to their public. We have no right to decide the level of openness of another nation nor do we have a right, at an official level, to circumvent it in our own search for openness. WikiLeaks does not fall under the same umbrella of responsibility and thus what it can and cannot do is quote different and so they have no right to the highground

Libby didn’t leak anything. It came out of the state dept via Powells top aide, Richard Armitage. The reason he wasn’t charged with a crime is it wasn’t a crime. There was no security breach. If there was a crime is was Colin Powell sitting silently while the White House was under a federal investigation and he knew who the leaker was and he knew Plame was nothing more than a CIA bureaucrat living and working in DC.

Sorry, I’ve got one more point. These leaks couldn’t have come at a worse time: China’s not ready to throw away North Korea. China is stinging a bit from being outed and since its official position and the position of its actual decision makers is to be in favor of North Korea, China is now in a position where it probably wants to tighten its ties with North Korea and prove without a shadow of a doubt to the rest of the world that it is friends with North Korea. North Korea, feeling the sting of the insult and being bat**** crazy, may equally try and push for more concessions from China as a demonstration of good faith that their alliance is in tact. Such a move presumes that North Korea knows China still sees them as useful. As a result, North Korea gets propped up for a longer period of time and Seoul has to wait longer before it can push for unification. North Korean antics get worse and more deeply ingrained. Yes, it is possible that the communiques may force North Korea to realize they’re losing their only ally and act a touch more responsibility – but again, I point towards the fact that they’re bat**** crazy. Yes, it is possible that North Korea overplays its hand and China either cuts them loose or their tolerance with the Kims weakens further, but with their ego bruised, I find that unlikely. In other words, this information being made public hinders the ability to reach a final settlement between the still-officially-at-war Koreas. Since all of this is happening while North Korea is shelling South Korea, this is far from the time to bolster North Korea’s position

new problem of a press corps apparently voluntarily invested in keeping the state’s secrecy regime secure.

******************************************

It’s not a new problem. It’s a problem that’s always been. Time is every bit as partisan as the DNC. It’s what is leaked that matters. The NYTs didn’t print anything on climategate because the emails were intended to be private. Well that’s absurd. They didn’t print climategate because it destroyed their position. Joe isn’t bothered there’s a leak. He’s bothered because the leak hurts the left. That’s the problem. The biggest scandals of last decade were Paula and Monica. Mickael Isakoff and the editors of Newsweek had each story and sat on them for extended periods. No until they were about to break in another paper did they run their own reporting.

Joe isn’t missing anything. Julian is a left wing nutjob. That’s fine as far as it goes. He’s supposed to be exposing conservative Presidents and conservative sins. Here he’s crossed a line.

Libby didn’t leak anything.
.
Maybe not, but he did cover/lie for whoever made the leak happen. Which was what he was convicted of. Lying. Which is what I actually said.
.
About the rest of your statement, I doubt you have your facts straight.
.
And no, I’m not interested in proving you wrong. You’ve already made up your mind, and it would be a waste of my time trying to change it. Also, rehashing all that is irrelevant to the current discussion.

forgottenlord:
.
Please don’t take this the wrong way, be assured that I’m not being argumentative for its own sake, but something about this passage of yours struck me as…well, very odd:

We don’t have a right to a perfect set of information. We both live in Representative Democracies – we have to believe the people we’ve elected will act responsibly. If these documents indicated misbehavior amongst officials, that might be a concern, but then again, these don’t show employee records. If it was misbehavior by elected officials or top level officials, maybe there is something there worth knowing, but that’s not what’s in here. Why might I give distinctions for these? Because those may indicate that our trust in our officials is misplaced. You don’t like it when your boss is reading over your shoulder, reading your emails, and deciding on everything you’ve done. You want to believe your boss trusts you to do your job unless something comes to his attention that clearly shows you aren’t doing your job. How is it any different with elected officials? We, collectively, are their boss. We, collectively, hired them to do their job. We, collectively, have to trust that they will do that job honestly, competently and with the right intentions and unless we find reason to question that trust, we, collectively, should let them do their jobs.

Let us just stipulate for brevity’s sake for a moment that there is nothing worth knowing in the whole of Wikileaks’ document dumps.
.
Let us also stipulate for the moment that your notion –that, until proven misdeeds otherwise direct, we’re meant to invest total faith in those we elect to power– is somehow consistent with American constitutional principles and the Bill of Rights itself; that representative democracy somehow means we’re to first trust politicians and unelected bureaucrats, as opposed to suspect.
.
Those stipulated, you then go on to say that we’re only meant to hold doubt that politicians and state officials are acting “honestly, competently and with the right intentions” when “we find reason to question that trust.”
.
Assuming for the sake of argument that this is somehow an accurate description of an engaged electorate’s relationship with vast security and financial state apparatuses, have you found no reason at all to question that trust over the past dozen years or so?
.
Is there nothing you have found, independent of this particular set of leaks –or any of Wikileaks’ dumps, for that matter– that would give you any reason to question the trust you assert should be our first, immediate response to the state?
.
Or are you saying that, since you don’t find this particular set of leaks disturbing (stipulating for the moment that there’s nothing important contained, a highly debatable notion) that your full faith in politicians and apparatchiks is completely restored?
.
If events and circumstances deeply related to how officials in every corner of the state “do their jobs” over the past dozen or so years have given you no “reason to question that trust,” then what possibly would?
.
Are you sure you don’t want to rethink this line of reasoning, if I’ve understood it correctly?

I don’t watch the show but early reviews suggest it would be unwatchable. At some point CNN will get a station director who looks at the success of Ailes and copies him. It’s not much of a secret. Appoint good people, make sure they keep it fair and balanced and get out of their way. To this day Brit Hume, Mara Lianson and Juan Williams insist they’ve never had a conversation with Roger Ailes about anything they said or did on air. Brit always understood the best TV was getting people like Juan and Mara next to Barnes and Krauthammer and letting them have their say.

Two weeks ago Stu Bykosfky of the Philly DailyNews, a liberal media critic, watched a week of Olbermann and Oreilly. He counted their conservative and liberal guests each night. Oreilly had 20 consevatives, 11 liberals and 7 libertarians he felt were taking the opposing position a liberal would take. John Strossel is one name I remember in opposiiton but not a liberal. That’s 20 to 18. Olbermann didn’t have a single conservative. I don’t watch eiither but what’s the point of a show where everyone agrees with each other? That I get it doesn’t matter they at least follow their formula up and down their line-up and they have their market segment.

CNN strikes me as a mess and they’ve blown a good franchise. They’re pretending to be objective and unbiased and that’s preposterous. At some point their ad revenue will catchup with their ratings and people will be fired. Any smart director would being in Megyn Kelly and let her do what Fox does. She knows. She get’s it. It’s working for her. She doesn’t need a co-host or any direction.

Actually I can see her on ABC This Week. I think Amanpour is a trainwreck and the ratings are proving it. They get a good host and add another conservative to the roundtable so George Will isn’t alone all of the time they’d own the time slot.

Yeah, we get it rdw. We had to destroy Iraq to save it. You really have this weird concept of what’s “humantarian” (and, oh, BTW, your warfare priaprism is showing – cover yourself, ferchristssake). It apparently involves merely few casualties on the US side – the number of “natives” killed in the process of said “humanitarism” seems to be irrelevant.
.
Unfortunately, we spent years supporting this “demonic despot” when we needed him to counter Iran.
.
See previous discussions of generations of futile foreign policy in this part of the world by many.

It is a really interesting theory, although I think that focusing on how Joe in particular has “gone native” while embedded in the apparatchik community may miss the systemic –incredible, really– new problem of a press corps apparently voluntarily invested in keeping the state’s secrecy regime secure.
.
I don’t (or don’t want to) believe that it’s systemic (a-feature-not-a-bug in nature), rather I see it as sympathetic, meaning “existing or operating through an affinity, interdependence, or mutual association” in nature, not “favorably inclined.”
.
And, yes, there are examples – Judith Miller, for one – that prove that the latter meaning is applicable.
.
In other words, regardless of Joe’s individual situation, I don’t think that the Founders had this kind of press in mind when they wrote the Bill of Rights.
.
Whichever meaning of the word ‘sympathetic’ is meant, I don’t disagree with you. I believe that a free, independent, honest, and critical Press is the fourth branch of our government, even more necessary when the other three branches choose to not be accountable for their actions.

You’re kidding right? How have the majority of Americans sacrificed for the war in Iraq? For Afghanistan even? Innocents are being killed every day–by US forces and mercinaries hired by the US gov’t. The policy in Iraq and Afghanistan seems to be bomb, blow up and shoot enough people and we’ll eventually get the bad guys.
.
But the fact is, the people of Iraq never asked for any kind of foreign intervention. They never asked us to save them. All of those so-called torture chambers that were highlighted at the beginning of the war date back to the war between Iraq/Iran–a war in which the US backed Saddam, I must say. There was proof they had not been used since that Iran/Iraq war ended.
.
The people of Iraq had been free to practice their religion any way they saw fit. Yes, one segment of Islam had been in power and that didn’t make things perfect for the other segment. It wasn’t perfect for the Christians, Hindus and others either. However, most Iraqis will say life was far better when Saddam was in power than it is today–where even Baghdad has electrical power only a few hours a day and many areas of the country have no power.
.
If leaving a country shell-shocked, starved, in the dark (literally), and under the governorship of a Bush-era puppet president is humanitarian, then I’d like to see what isn’t humane in your view. Oh never mind, I think I know the answer to that. It would be if any other country did what the US has done to Iraq and Afghanistan.

There was no cover up and whatever libby lied about it was a crime related to the investigators and not part of the suspected crime itself. The basic facts are well established by both Robert Novak and Richard Armitage and confirmed in the Senate investigation. Richard Armitage is the guy who gave the name and the entire story to Novak. Novak made it clear the entire time while he had promised confidentiality to his source it was not a partisan political figure meaning it wasn’t Rove or Libby. He also made it clear he thought the source was a scumbag for not coming out immediately to clear those two. The report also noted there was no crime committed by Armitage because Plame was not considered an intelligence operative.

That’s what is so cool about this story. It isn’t just that the left is so wrong but that it’s so well documented as a total fraud. Joe Wilson is a horses ass. He lied through his teeth in that NYTs op-ed in a shockingly obvious way. 1st, it would have been impossible for him to disprove Saddam bought yellowcake in Niger. You can’t prove a negative. Worse is they never claimed he bought yellowcake. The claim was he was asking around to see if the opportunity was there. Wilson actually confirmed it. The CIA wasn’t interested until he did. The CIA considered him an amateur. They never paid him or asked for a written report. Valerie has recommended him for the task and put it in writing. She later tried to deny it. Virtually everything they said was a lie easily disproved. I can’t imagine our spies are this stupid.

It gets better. Colin Powell was essentially fired for his malfeasance. This was a huge political problem for the WH and obviously a tragedy for Libby. He and Armitage sat silent for no reason watching them all twist in the wind. It was a shockingly cowardly thing to do. Powell is in that no mans land of being a republican distrusted by other republicans. While this part was covered by the MSM it was covered in great depth by the conservative media. His actions, or lack of action, was vile.

It gets better. The movie Fair Game was a dud. It’ll be out of theaters by week and they’ll be lucky to gross $6M. That won’t cover distribution and marketing expenses. Even if the cast worked for nothing it’s a money loser and no one saw it. That’s got to be 20+ movies with major stars, directors, etc, with good reviews and a positive roll out to totally bomb. More people will have read about what a bomb it was, read again how much of a fraud the story is, than would have seen Sean Penn or Naomi Watts. It just makes the hollywood crowd into a larger freak show. We all get Sean Penn is a lunatic. Is anyone there sane?

this entire, anarchic exercise in “freedom” stands as a human disaster.
.
Sure wish Joe would say this about Afghanistan.

rdw56, you don’t believe that. You’re just trying to get a rise out of us.
.
And I thought US service men and women were asked to sacrifice in order to protect us, not to “to put a demonic despot out of power”. You know full well that the people would never have gone for that. Therefore, you also know that all that BS leading up to the invasion was a lie; and that the ultimate disrespect was done to our soldiers– they were asked to sacrifice under false pretenses. History will not be kind to Bush for that.

Humanitarian acts aren’t soaked in the blood of hundreds of thousands of dead people. It’s this fundamental disconnect, this cognitive dissonance overload, that allowed this crime to be perpetrated. It’s the same disconnect that allows people say they are absolute believers in the rule of law also say “these guys meant well when they ordered torture so that means they aren’t guilty of anything”.

It leaves our country in a sad, sad state. There is nothing “humanitarian” about it.

“At some point CNN will get a station director who looks at the success of Ailes and copies him. It’s not much of a secret.”
.
I don’t think that is likely for 2 reasons: One the entire news and liberal world think Fox (Ailes) is Satan. Second, they don’t have a real interest in adding real conservative voices. All you need t do is listen to some of the rants by some of the “journalists”. Neither if the Ns in CNN stands for news.
.
“They get a good host and add another conservative to the roundtable so George Will isn’t alone all of the time they’d own the time slot.”
.
Again I don’t think it is likely. The networks are not interested in adding conservatives. Besides it is more than a fair fight with one against four most of the time.

So what?

I opposed the war, but I remember well the run-up; there were all kinds of uncertainties, possibilities and extrapolations, all done in the face of a massive campaign of misinformation from the Bush Administration hell bent on invading. The case against the war was up against two particular conundrums, namely “the cost of being wrong (about Saddam having weapons of mass destruction) was considered perilously high” and the impossiblity of proving a negative. To me, the strongest argument against the war was the near certainty that the Bush Administration was going to muck it up – in that regard, Donald Rumsfeld astomished even me with the depth of his incompentance and poor choices.

But I believe if you go back and look at Joe’s positions in 2003, it is more along the line of “If we are going to do it, let’s do it right” rather a real drum beating polemic of the sort that Bill Kristol (and, for that matter, Tom Friedman) were subjecting us to. Stuff to apologize for, no doubt, but not to render all subsequent judgments invalid.

I think the consequences of the Wikileaks dump must the source of some genuine concern, and are of a higher order than, say, the collateral damamge of the Afghanistan campaign. The military tries – perhaps not hard enough, but it tries – to limit the collateral damage on civilians in its assaults on the Taliban. The generals clearly debate among themselves the relative risks/rewards of certain actions and have to balance the possbility of collateral damage against the safety of their own troops. those are hard choices to make, and I think Petreus and company do a credible job of balancing thiese terrible constraints.

The people who are likely imperiled by the WIkileaks, however, are by and large, people who trusted us, who put themselves on the line in some way shape or form because they shared an agenda with us, whether it is rights for women in Afghanistan or democratization in China, or even soemthing a little less high minded. To the extent, then, this dump represents a betrayal of people to whom we promised confidentiality. Betrayal of this sort is something that the US government cannot allow if it is to play a role in the world – we have every right to consider Assange an enemy of the state.

RDW56, It’s “to disprove Saddam bought yellowcake in Niger.”? In fact, we know the whole episode was a fraud, and it’s silly to pin it on “the left”, what a joke.

Why does the right lack substance in all the arguments they make? Can’t you make a better argument then my two-year old? “No, YOU committed the crime! No YOU’RE so wrong!” I feel sorry for you, life must be a confusing and scary thing for someone with such a simple outlook.

“You’re just trying to get a rise out of us.”
.
That seems to be the case.
.
This individual is apparently proud of themselves when they are able to irritate non-rightists, usually through the onerous repetition of baseless, broad, ideologically-constructed (and often false) assertions.
.
I wouldn’t say that this is trollery per se, but antagonism does seem to be a prime goal.

Rdw, it came out in Libby’s trial that Bush de-classified Plame’s name and Cheney pressured his staff to get it out to the press. The whole episode was undertaken because traditional western intelligence agencies did not believe Saddam was a threat, Iraq had no link to al Qaeda and that there was no WMD program. Non-traditional agencies, like the Office of Special Plans, were created to make alarmist “intelligence reports” designed to scare us into allowing the military to invade and occupy countries, build a network of bases and police the middle east for the next several decades.. just as the neoconservatives planned years earlier.

No I am not trying to get a rise out of you and for the record, that’s not all that hard to do. Living while conservative does the trick.

We removed Saddam because as a despot and a nut we could not risk him in power in a post 9/11 world. There were no false pretenses and the reasons were clearly spelled out in the resolution signed by 80% of the Congress. This resolution is one of the reasons why the stupid Bush was able to outsmart liberals, again, and win a 2nd term easily. The liberal claims of he lied and people died were always counter productive because they were wrong. Calling someone a liar is a nasty charge and never works if you don’t have the evidence. People know the difference between being wrong and lying. This is where History will be very kind to Bush and mock his opposition. It’s funny but also devastating when the ranking democrat on the Senate intelligence committee goes on Meet the Press and declares Bush scares us when he talked about mushroom clouds and Tim Russert asked him to show him the tape because no one at NBC cold find it. What they found was the ranking Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee claim Iraq could produce Mushroom Clouds. Tim asked Jay Rockerfeller to get back to him on the clip of Bush lying. Pity. Tim died before Jay could grt back to him.

In fact, we know the whole episode was a fraud,

***************************************

That’s not true, The Brits to this day stand by their evidence. But no matter what they have we know Joe Wilson was a buffoon. He was asked to go to find out if anyone from Iraq was in Niger sniffing around and he confirmed it. Iraqi agents were in Niger and they were asking for Yellowcake. What he told the NYTs was he conducted an investigation was able to prove they never bought it. Leave aside that’s impossible. Lets also leave aside he was a low level bureaucrat and never an investigator or agent of any type. Fat Joe never left his hotel. This by his own report of what he did. He stayed in the lobby and had lunch with some contacts. This is Get Smart quality work. He is a preposterous figure. To suggest he would be capable of a real investigation is absurd. To suggest he even tried is pathetic. He is the most comical figure of the entire Iraqi war. That Vanity Fair put him on their cover and liberals made a movie about him is perfect. He is a bigger ass than Al gore.

it came out in Libby’s trial that Bush de-classified Plame’s name and Cheney pressured his staff to get it out to the press. The whole episode was undertaken because traditional western intelligence agencies did not believe Saddam was a threat, Iraq had no link to al Qaeda and that there was no WMD program.

******************************************

Are you delusional? Robert Novak broke the story. He printed her name. Novak told us he got it from Richard Armitage. Richard Armitage ADMITTED giving it to Novak. There’s no mystery here. There is nothing remotely confusing here. this is all thoroughly documented. Armitage did not come out until a livid Novak threatened to break his vow. NovaK said repeatedly he did not get it from Rove or Libby. Novak made it clear he thought Armitage was a scumbag.

**************************************************************

Every intelligence agency thought SADDAM had WMDs and it’s want he wanted everyone to think because he was afraid the Iranians or Arabs would take him out otherwise. The Brits, French, Italians and Russians all thought he had WMDs. Moreover this is well documented. This is another gift to GWB. What passes as MSM buffonery cannot be repeated by serious Historians. Joe Klein can report anything he wants and it doesn’t matter. An accredited Historian actually has professional standards. If an academic historian were to write a bio stating Bush lied he had to produce irrevocable proof. Not gossip. Not the opinion of Joe KIein. Clear documentation Bush knew there were not WMDs. If he does provide proof and this is another Dan Rather effort he will be fired and his book pulled. Actually, this happens in real time. The publisher won’t distribute it. Bush lied wasn’t even effective as a media / political strategy. Bush was re-elected easily. As a historical issue it’s meaningless. As liberal as academic historians are they’re not fools. They know with search engines they will be thoroughly investigated. Doris Kerns Goodwin, a very liberal but honest historian was nevertheless less scandalized when it was discovered she plagereized a segment of one of her books. It’s clear now she was sloppy in not providing a footnote but it’s a mistake she’ll never make again. If in 2012 some historian from Princeton say, comes out with a history of the war and reports what you reported they will almost certainly get fired. There will be tremendous pressure on the University, It’s History dept, whatever professional acreditation he has and on the publisher to recall the book and repudiate the historian. They will at a minimum have to go back and make him reprove every claim.

This is so not 1995 any more.

I agree they’ll never want to add conservatives. My suggestion is the time will come when they have no choice. The Washington Post just dumped Newsweek for $1 and they were taken over by a blog that didn’t exist 5 years ago. The guy who bought them is wealthy enough to sustain more losses but it appears he’s going to at least make major changes, if not move to the center.

ABCs This Week is getting hammered in the ratings. I think Amanpour is unwatchable. At some point the advertising revenue drops far enough the program director and Amanpour are gone. The CBS evening news is just as bad off. Limbaugh makes $40M a year. At some point the economics will drive rational behavior. The owners will demand it.

The Washington Post just hired Jennifer Rubin to run a blog. She is terrific and very conservative. I have her as #2 behind Krauthammer. This will enrage many at the Post but it’s a smart move. They know they can’t survive as the NYTs. Krauthammer had the great line about Fox and Ailes, “Imagine that, they found a niche market, a majority of the American people”.

but antagonism does seem to be a prime goal.

******************************************************
enlightenment is the prime goal. I admit I am astonished at how bad the reporting in the MSM is and Time is right there as is Joe Klein. Joe is the stereotypical MSM columnists very impressed with himself yet almost insufferably incompetent. How does he do it? He is a very wealthy man making I’m sure over $300K a year just for this gig.

If you want to understand the parties and politics you have to know how the opposition thinks, how their press operates and how their readers consume information. I just love the clear intellectual superiority. It is a gift from God, for conservatives. You people still think Bush was/is as dumb as a rock while Al Gore is a genius. How is that possible? He was the President of a major league baseball team, two term governor, two term President, Harvard MBA and I am certain you and Joe think George is stupid. So does Ann Richard, Al Gore and John Kerry. How do you do that?

The liberal mind is amazingly elastic. you can train yourself to believe anything.

Good to see this thread generated some energy after I went to bed. Some of the previous posts on the topic went nowhere. Aside from the contents of this particular batch, this is a huge story. Longing for the next dump targetting a major US bank.

the ranking Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee…
.
how about the republican head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dick Armey? He tells Barton Gellman, on the record, that Cheney pulled him aside and lied to him, eye-to-eye. He spun tales of miniaturized “suitcase” nukes and an operational link between al Qaeda and Iraq -right before the vote on the war resolution:
.
“I remember leaving the meeting with a very deep sadness about my relationship with Dick Cheney … I felt like I deserved better from Cheney than to be bullsh!tted by him.” -link
.
Yes, not only were there lies, there was institutional apparatus put in place and a wide-ranging effort to systematically deceive (with a complicit press) the American people, our soldiers, and Congress.

“Did Dick Cheney … purposely tell me things he knew to be untrue? I seriously feel that may be the case…Had I known or believed then what I believe now, I would have publicly opposed [the war] resolution right to the bitter end, and I believe I might have stopped it from happening.”
- Dick Armey (link)

…retry on that second link..
.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/presidentbush/2008/09/cheney-lied.html

Actually much of it isn’t about wikileaksand it’s not all that big. It’s getting nice pub but it’s a slow news cycle. Once Congress gets to pushing legislation this is going to drop off the scope.

I knew I was going to wear that one the moment I wrote it.
.
To answer your question: yes and no. I think I oversimplified my statement and therein lies the issue. Let’s take John Yoo vs Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/et all. John Yoo is a mid-level bureaucrat who wrote his personal opinion on the reaches of the 4th amendment with regards to terrorists. While I think most of us would consider his conclusions stupid or wrong, I don’t think it is our right to question whether he should’ve written that memo or whether he was wrong in writing the memo. The applicability of knowing he wrote that memo is only important in light of understanding the reasoning behind Bush’s choice to pursue indefinite detentions, et all. Questioning Bush’s overt policy and the beliefs that lead to that policy is a different matter. To bring us back to the employer-employee example, the employer should know what the Employee is doing and what his intention is to do and that he has accomplished such. The employer should not, necessarily, be questioning every minor decision that the employee makes and every opinion and theory the employee’s charges make. The former is proper duties of management, the latter can easily become micromanagement. However, if an employee continuously makes poor choices, or fails to properly address a subordinate who makes poor choices or has a record of incompetence, then corrective actions should be taken.
.
There is, of course, a limit to this comparison. We, the employer only have one real corrective action option which is to vote him out of office. Our information is far more limited as, unlike normal employer-employee relationships, the employee has access to more privileged information. There’s a thousand problems with the analogy and at the end of the day, it goes back to the reality that nothing is clear cut. However, us having access to all of these diplomatic communiques and us having the “right” to them because we, the people, should be permitted to use the data within them to make our next decisions in the election strike me as going too far to the micro-managing end of the spectrum – where our need to involve ourselves at such a low level becomes so great that not only are we limiting the ability of the individual to do their jobs but we may be actively preventing them from doing it. That’s the point I was trying to get to.

stuart: Remember you were defending Klein against being classifed as one of the top hacks awhile back when he admitted he was wrong about Social Securtiy privitization. I gave him no slack as a hack.
Does this typical JK rant put him back into the hack realm Stuart?

“Greetings from Afghanistan”
Wowwww…. Afghanistan…. What a brave intrepid little reporter you are Joe. Thanks for dropping that line so gratuitously.

Anyway, Joe won the ‘Puerile Columnist of the Year’ award for the last 8 years running, so he really knows puerile. In fact, the very line:

“I am tremendously concernced about the puerile eruptions of Julian Assange.”

puts him in strong contention for the 2010 award as well. Way to go, Joe! I can’t wait for you to return to tell us all about all your heroic adventures as a cub reporter in dangerous Afghanistan! I am sure it will make fascinating (if puerile) reading.

Thanks for the memories grape_crush.

rdw56: You are back to having those long, ponderous dialogues with yourself. No linkage. Just grossly overstated judgements put forth in numbingly boring paragraphs. Did you learn nothing about editing yourself in English class?

You’ve got two problems here. Armey was never in the Senate and he never confirmed this conversation. Neither he more Cheney ever said this in public.

There’s hackery and then there’s hackery, I suppose.
.
Let me think about it…

woops, Armey was the House Majority Leader at the time and chairman of the House Select Committee on Homeland Security. Armey said this on the record to Cheney biographer, Gellman- about as “in public” as you can get.

JC-
My sources indicate that they are currently investigating a major English bank, actually.

We are beating a dead horse hear. Cheney denied he said any such thing and that what he said was consistent with what was in the documentation all 535 members of Congress had access too and were briefed. Among the more pathetic aspects of this episode were the members of congress who approved the resolution and then denied having read the supporting information, in some cases deny having access. IN fact every rmember off Congress had full access to everything GWB and Cheney saw as well as breifings. Again this gets to the problem the liberal historian is going to have. Hacks like Time columnists tried to give the impression Congress only had limited access to the intelligence. Congress has full and timely access. If a historian from academia were to try to put that nonsense in a serious biography or any historical recoding they would be discovered almost immediately and face professional charges. It was interesting to see a report on Ward Churchill lose another appeal on his firing. Lazy bastard copied entire tacks of his work from others and got caught. Had he kept a low profile he’s have retired with a $150K pension. This is why search engines are so cool. You can write a program to search anything and everything these hacks write and compare it against everything ever written and know if they plagerized.

Any single Congress person who said after they supported the war they didn’t know the facts or were misled is a liar. For any historian to report the claim they are a fraud and should be fired. They will at a minimum deal with serious charges.

Gellman was not Cheneys biographer. That implies cooperation. There was none. No one around Cheney cooperated. Gellman wrote a book for the left wing. It’s useless as history.

To rdw56: It is imperative to understand that Assange did not out the leaker. The originator of the material did it himself through an act of pride and bragging in a chatroom to the notorious hacker Adrian Lamo, who then snitched on him to the NSA. Nothing to do with Assange.

Very interesting, neorationalist86.

Forbes’ Andy Greenberg: These megaleaks, as you call them, we haven’t seen any of those from the private sector.

Assange: No, not at the same scale as for the military.

AG: Will we?

A: Yes. We have one related to a bank coming up, that’s a megaleak. It’s not as big a scale as the Iraq material, but it’s either tens or hundreds of thousands of documents depending on how you define it.

AG: Is it a U.S. bank?

A: Yes, it’s a U.S. bank.

AG: One that still exists?

A: Yes, a big U.S. bank.

http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2010/11/29/an-interview-with-wikileaks-julian-assange/?boxes=Homepagelighttop

sorry for the formatt–typing 1 handed w/a sleeping koala on my chest

I didn’t say he outted him. I said he played him for a dupe. Julian is the toast of much of Europe and has made quite a bit of money off of his fame. Manning is sitting in a military prison and very likely will do so for another 30 years.

It is a great story isn’t it? I was shocked they found enough money to back Fair Game giving bashing Bush has been such a rotten theme for hollywood. Every movie has been a dud. They lose many and if luck get 150,000 in the choir to come watch. Presumably the actors pass up their big paydays so it’s not too much of a bath but still. I would think knowing you did all of that work and didn’t move the needle even a little bit has to sting.

I get a kick out of the fact liberals were so roiled over this for so long and it meant nothing in the 2004 elections.

“Also during that spring, Dr. (Condi) Rice made a speech when she said, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” and the vice president said, “There’s no doubt that they (Iraq) have [reconstituted their nuclear program].” That had to come from these (less reliable) émigré sources, because we weren’t reporting that. Even the Pentagon wasn’t reporting that, that I saw.
.
They always say, “Well, all these other European services and all these other countries around the world felt the same way.” Well, no, it wasn’t exactly the same way. They were all concerned; there was a general fear that Saddam was building [weapons] because Saddam was Saddam. … It’s the way he kept his enemies inside and outside the country off balance.
.
This general view developed that the inspectors were a bunch of clowns, which wasn’t true. The inspectors are very serious guys, and they actually did an effective job — not perfect, but they were pretty effective. But the intelligence that was coming in was saying that there aren’t any weapons, the actual hard intelligence.
(…)
We had one officer that was working on the Iraqi ops tell one of my chiefs of station, and this was in the fall, “Look, we’ve got information that contradicts this.” This isn’t about intel; it’s not about WMD; we’re into regime change now.”
.
Tyler Drumheller, then Deputy Chief of the CIA’s European Division. (link)

Volunteers from Wikileaks also are working with an investigative journal on a leak involving an English bank. Must be a side project.

Last September 8, I interviewed President Bush’s National Security Adviser, Dr. Condoleezza Rice. I was pressing her on Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s nuclear capabilities.

“We know that he has the infrastructure, nuclear scientists to make a nuclear weapon,” she told me. “And we know that when the inspectors assessed this after the Gulf War, he was far, far closer to a crude nuclear device than anybody thought — maybe six months from a crude nuclear device.”

Dr. Rice then said something that was ominous and made headlines around the world.

“The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

thought of those comments this week following the statement from the chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix, acknowledging that no “smoking gun” has been found yet since the resumption of the weapons inspections. Still, Blix did not offer Iraq a clean bill of health.

*****************************************************************

I am not quite sure what your point is here. Mine has been that in claiming Bush lied the left badly overplayed their hand because if you are going to accuse someone of being a liar you better have the proof or you are just another scumbag. Being wrong does nt make one a liar. Further, in so over-playing your hand you destroyed your own credibility and lost any political edge you might have gained. GWB won in 2004 easily. You didn’t have a shred of proof then and you don’t today. We have an entire galley of liberals who were far more aggressive in stating Saddam had WMDs such as both Clintons Rockerfeller and Kerry. We know Saddam tried to give off this impression to keep regional enemies at bay. Again, no credible Historian will be able to make the claim “bush lied” and remain credible.

The conversation in context reveals a reasonable, logical and commonsense statement.

You’ve got nothing. This is like Joe Wilson. He generated a ton of noise and made a lot of money for himself but politically speaking was a loser for the cause. It’s now 2010. Obama has kept all of GWBs policies and all of his people and between the new Congress, the governorships and state legislators there will be more republicans in office than ever and more of them will be conservative. The anti-war, anti-cia, anti-national security movements haven’t won a single battle.

You may be able to cavalierly dismiss lies and disinformation that lead to the deaths of over 1 million people, displaced over 5 million, will cost us trillions, and will be fought over my daughter’s entire lifetime- but I won’t. And Cheney denied telling lies that lead to this destruction?- not surprising to me, not good enough either. Call it respect for our soldiers, respect for human life, a desire to be better.
.
So how does this relate to today? Well, if there was a concerted effort to get into this war despite there being no threat to the American public, why was it done? Why did we invade pismire Iraq- a country where toothless Saddam had to abide by a no-fly-zone in one-third of his country? Why did we stay and build in Afghanistan after AQ was vanquished- a country where the Taliban are nothing more than a rag-tag network of farmers and smugglers with no history of terror nor collaboration with AQ; no army, planes, missiles, etc?
.
The answer: to initiate the neoconservative plan, to police the middle east in order to make it safe for capitalism and eliminate terror. What expensive and dangerous fantasy! And when the same miscreants at the Pentagon that put this dastardly plan into action are calling the shots today, then we’re still following the neoconservative agenda.

Also note Tony Blair remains a bulldog on this issue The UK had very different intelligence. They believed all of the same things and they stand by it. At the time the French and Italians and Russians also believed had WMDs and all agreed Saddam wanted everyone to think he had them. While the UN made an honest effort the concept of them being able to prove they were not hidden somewhere in Iraq was always ridiculous. The fact Saddam refused to cooperate made the assertion bizarre.

Again, history has no choice but to vindicate Bush on the lying charge. What he has always counted on is smart. His point was that either Iraq will become a thriving democracy with the freedoms and prosperity we have in the west or it won’t. They have a ton of ethnic issues but they also have a lot of oil, water and a long history of commerce. It they do this will be a towering achievement.

you just noticing? Whats with the need for all of the links? I cite facts that are common knowledge and if not in your case easy to look up. For example that Richard Armitage was the leaker to Robert Novak. It’s easy to find.

On August 30, 2006, the New York Times reports that the lawyer and other associates of Mr. Armitage confirmed he was Novak’s “initial and primary source” for Plame’s identity

Also Bob Woodward said Armitagetold him the same thing 3 weeks earlier. I assume you are remotely well read so when I remind you Armitage was the leaker of Plames ‘cover’ it doesn’t need a citation. It’s common knowledge and well established fact. Armitage admitted it. Novak confirmed it. If you know know you can look it up.

you just noticing? Whats with the need for all of the links? I cite facts that are common knowledge and if not in your case easy to look up. For example that Richard Armitage was the leaker to Robert Novak. It’s easy to find.

On August 30, 2006, the New York Times reports that the lawyer and other associates of Mr. Armitage confirmed he was Novak’s “initial and primary source” for Plame’s identity

Also Bob Woodward said Armitagetold him the same thing 3 weeks earlier. I assume you are remotely well read so when I remind you Armitage was the leaker of Plames ‘cover’ it doesn’t need a citation. It’s common knowledge and well established fact. Armitage admitted it. Novak confirmed it. If you do not know you can look it up.

He is concerned about State Department privacy but not the incursion into American citizen’s privacy through the Patriot Act. Joe has selective outrage.

***********************************************

It must really steam you that Obama has confirmed and even strengthened the Patriot act and all of GWBs national security measures. Another recurring theme of the MSM for 6 years shot to hell. You probably assumed GWB would have a legacy as a power hungry, thuggish, nasty President but all of the things you thought defined him so apply to Obama as well. And to the Democrat Congress that reapproved the Patriot act and all of his measures. I have to wonder how many academic historians expected to tackle Bush in a few years with the intention of ripping him a new one. Well how are they going to go after him on National Security when the Messiah blessed his every move? You know white iberals will never take on Obama. Hell, they can’t even report the WH leaked Valerie’s name.

Here’s an honest question. I find it amusing liberals are furious Obama didn’t pass a lot more legislation and what he passed was centrist. What did you expect? He’s not a king. What are you going to do when he extends ALL of GWBs tax cuts? you have to know he hates the idea.

If a single foreign national is rounded up and put in jail because of a leaked cable, this entire, anarchic exercise in “freedom” stands as a human disaster. Assange is a criminal. He’s the one who should be in jail.

And what about Bush, Cheney, Rummie, etc. on starting the Iraq war which killed over 100,000 Iraqis? Shouldn’t they also be in jail?

It’s embarrassing to see Joe Klein embarrass himself again. He doesn’t mind getting it wrong on Iraq and watching 10s of 1000s of innocents die. He has to be outraged by someone not covered by our laws exposing our — and, by extension, Joe’s — dirty laundry. We, as a nation, stand exposed as the petty, vindictive, and dangerous — and deadly — player that we are.

Shame on all of us, and most definitely on our cowardly media. What a democracy! We want to behave this way??

Wikileaks wouldn’t be necessary if the mainstream press was doing it’s job.

“Puerile eruptions”, coming from the author of “Primary Colors”, oh really? Of course, Mr. Klein had declined authorship of this tome repeatedly and even staked his “journalistic integrity” on the denial. With lions of journalism like this at the forefront of our mainstream media, we do absolutely need someone outside of this incestuous circle to give us at least some unvarnished truths,
The outing of innocent sources, if that be the case, is inexcusable, but the lack of a truly independent minded critical media as currently is exhibited in the US, that poses a far more serious threat that even terrorism itself. Before Joe “Anonymous” casts stones maybe he should look in the mirror, at least give some intelligent insight into the newsworthy aspects of the disclosures, and then he can add his self-righteous commentary if he wishes with at least a whiff of credibility.

What in the world does that have to do with the article being discussed? Can’t you read or think brainwashed addled brained dodo/

What in the world does that have to do with the article being discussed? Can’t you read or think brainwashed addled brained dodo?

to initiate the neoconservative plan, to police the middle east in order to make it safe for capitalism and eliminate terror. What expensive and dangerous fantasy! And when the same miscreants at the Pentagon that put this dastardly plan into action are calling the shots today, then we’re still following the neoconservative agenda.

****************************

A bit paranoid. Iraq is forming into a capitalist, free market democracy and these can be ugly to watch. South Korea was rather ugly but today they are a modern top 10 economy. Iraq has great oil wealth. water, climate, other mineral assets and a culture of commerce. They’re also corrupt but that’s the middle east. They’ll do fine.

, but the lack of a truly independent minded critical media as currently is exhibited in the US, that poses a far more serious threat that even terrorism itself.

*********************************

You are quite right but who to blame? How about this, blame yourself. The MSM is a trainwreck because you enabled them to become so. As a conservative I think Joe is the worst combination of lazy and stupid such that while he advocates for liberal causes the best he can do is ineffective and the worst counter productive. Joe makes $300K with a prime perch at Time BECAUSE he knows how to feed a shrinking base redmeat. The great irony for me is the more ‘feeding’ he does the smaller his sphere of influence.

Just one example of how you fools deserve what you have. You can’t blame Obama or anyone else for your stupidity. You appointed Al Gore your high priest of Environmentalism. You think he’s the guy so show the rest of us the need to cut down on energy use. He’s a total pig. He puts the rest of us to shame. On a per capita basis the Gore family uses more energy than the typical steel plant. Even if you didn’t know what his electric bill was you did know he lied his way thru life. You knew people like Joe Klein told you Bush was stupid and Gore was smart but you also knew Bush had better marks and was far more academically accomplished. Sure what Joe did in selling the Bush is stupid theme was stupid and evil but that doesn’t excuse you. You choose to ignore the obvious. Joe Klein made out on the deal. George Bush did much better. Joe played you for fools and you willingly and knowingly played your role. You have the MSM you deserve.

Joe Klein,

What you write is based on the assumption that we are in Afghanistan to help people there, to promote democracy there. But in the very cables which you mock, it is shown that this is not true, that the political establishment in Washington know it is not true.

In your warped sense of what is legal, our political leaders in Washington are not responsible for the countless innocent people being killed in Afghanistan and in countless other places.

Information is the currency of a democracy. Your call to persecute journalists and whistle blowers is outrageous, but unfortunately common among the media whose only principle seems to be subervience to power.

What makes you think that he hates the idea of extending the tax cuts to the top 1%? He`s a representative of business and not for the people. As Paul Street correctly puts it, “Message to the Left, Obama hates you.”

When the last lot of Wikileaks came out some time ago it was said that they put people in danger. This seemed a reasonable thimg to say but have there been any reports of assassinations following from these reports? Certainly there is considerable embarrassment but what sort of reflection is it on the security in the U.S? We don’t hear about that do we? Or comment on the deaths in Iraq after the fighting ended. This is William Calley all over again.