The Wikileaks collection

[JJackson]

My problem is with what I view as relative accountability. In the President and Prime Minister’s cases there is no realistic chance of their being legally held accountable for their actions. Appointing someone who can then tell you that you have an arguable case, which they can help you sell to your public, is rather different to actual risking a ICC trial for illegally invading another country, or ordering someone’s torture, and then having a court weigh that advice and imprison you if they disagree with your legal advisers. If my lawyer tells me he thinks he can get me off any DUI, as long as I keep getting my repeat prescriptions for a medicine that gives false positives on alcohol tests, I need to be very sure because his assertion will be put to the test. Get powerful enough and you only need to be able to spin reasonable doubt not prove it. Even the failure to spin it might loose you re-election but will not land you in jail.

[Steve the Planner]

C'mon, Bob:

Waterboarding has always been considered as torture. The Bush lawyers raised shades of interpretation and causation as a justification for it, but that doesn't change what it is.

Like some of the other posts, I don't disagree that the guy may not be a prick, but you misread the situation to assume that he (and his supporters) do not have a strong moral position which they are striking out for---anti-secrecy.

Whether that conviction is as wrong as an abortion bomber, or one with some reasonable theoretical foundation, there is no doubt that they are driven by a moral conviction---certainly no less than Bush was.

Having said that, I realized from one of last week's cables that the idea of blinking out the names is as absurd as bleeping out a comedian's monologue---everybody in the know gets the joke, just as anyone involved in a meeting with GA Sistani's key spokesmen does not know exactly which one said what---bleeped out or not. The same with all of our local and provincial discourses.

One of the things that really disturbed me about Cidne was the breadth of what was memorialized and its broad internal accessibility (sure to be copied by somebody and passed on to our "allies." The documented knowledge, in a culture with multi-generational knowledge and accountability, that somebody's dad (or grandad) helped a "foreign" government way back in '07, will not earn medals for them....

These leaks will hurt real people, and, to a great extent, as Krauthamer noted last week, substantially limit US access and and free discourse with locals in challenging situations. Maybe it is best, after all, for all parties to understand that in an open architecture world, it is best not to say anything to anyone that you don't expect to read in the Post (or Al-Jazirah) next month?

[Old Eagle]

One of the outcomes of the wikileaks releases to date is that they offer insight to the general public and the rest of the uninitiated into how diplomacy works.

The D of diplomacy is one of the elements of national power. It is the favorite of most of us involved in the M of the DIME rubric. Most of the time, we don't get shot at or blown up when policy makers are using the D instead of the M.

Yes, we try to influence foreign governments and other entities to behave in a manner that supports the U.S. interest. This is occasionally referred to in the press of late as "arm twisting", but I assure you it is usually more subtle and congenial.

Secondly, we report back to Washington on how things look on the ground in a manner direct enough to make our points clear to those in the rear. Decisions that policy makers take require decent input from the "front". Just because you think that your father-in-law is a jerk, you rarely say so to his face, and never in the presence of your spouse. This should really not come as a surprise to anyone who deals with pol-mil issues (or who has a father-in-law).

One of the underlying problems in the current kerfluffle is that the State Department brings a lot of the misunderstanding down on their own heads. Since they don't see themselves as collecting human intelligence, they "file" "reporting cables" that name names and tell tales. Then the Great American Public (GAP) AND the sources get all worked up about something that we have all agreed to make happen.

When one of my sources would tell me that he did not expect his comments to be reported to Washington, I really had to wonder about him.

[91bravojoe]

Bob's World, it's extremely difficult to believe that you, or anybody else, takes the "legal advice" story seriously. Bush didn't order waterboarding because lawyers told him it was legal. He ordered prostitute lawyers to walk the line because he knew he was ordering waterboarding. Of prisoners who had been in custody for many weeks, and who had no fresh data, as a matter of absolute certainty.

The US has prosecuted waterboarding as torture in the past. To pretend that there was a good faith belief that it was legal is merely another example of Bush's war criminal status.