On November 28th, 2010 theWikiLeaks website published more than 250,000 secret documents, which U.S. embassies had sent to the central government, containing "sensitive" information about U.S. operations and relations with foreign governments. This was the beginning of “Cablegate”, which would cause no small embarrassment to the U.S. administration, then led by Barak Obama and already put to the test in the preceding months by the release, again by WikiLeaks, of tens of thousands of documents (including a 17-minute video that became famous as Collateral Murder) showing how the U.S.-led fight against terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan was mostly carried out with indiscriminate killings, torture and war crimes of various kinds.
Most of the
documents are then quite recent (2008-2010) and contain information regarding
U.S. diplomats' dealings with leaders around the world, not without personal
opinions, some of them quite sharp, and comments on possible nuclear and
terrorist threats.Julian Assange's revelations will cost him years of
persecution by the U.S. government, which accuses him of spying and computer
intrusion. Currently, the Australian journalist is awaiting extradition to the
United States, where he faces up to 175 years of prison time.
MAIN
CONTENTS OF THE LEAKED CABLEGRAMS
The number
of documents is huge and the issues that emerge are many. Among them is the
deadlock between Pakistan and the U.S. over nuclear fuel: evidence suggests
that as early as 2007 the U.S. had been carrying out a highly secret (and
unsuccessful) attempt to remove enriched uranium from a Pakistani research
reactor, which the Americans said could have been used to create an illicit
device. In May 2009, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan reported that the country
was rejecting U.S. interference, which was attempting to programme a visit by
technical experts, because "if the local media learned of the fuel
removal, they would 'portray it as the U.S. seizing Pakistan's nuclear
weapons.'"
Italy also
appears in the leaked documents: in 2009, U.S. diplomats in Rome reported an
"extraordinarily close" relationship between then-Russian Prime
Minister Vladimir Putin and then-Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi
("incompetent, vain and ineffective as a modern European leader"),
between whom there was an exchange of "luxurious gifts" and lucrative
energy contracts. Berlusconi was even called "Putin's main spokesman in
Europe."
IN THE
NAME OF FIGHTING TERRORISM EVERYTHING IS ALLOWED
The world
was then in the middle of the post-9/11 fight against terrorism, where the
condition of "permanent war" functional to contain the terrorist
threat of al Qaeda legitimizes military interventions, although circumscribed,
in contexts such as Afghanistan and Iraq, with the consequence of causing a
very high number of victims even among the civilian population. Indeed,
President Obama, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the year before the
WikiLeaks revelations, will be the first president to formalise the "war
on terrorism" as none of his predecessors had done.
Of the
251,287 released cables (a few hundred were initially published and the rest
were leaked in the following months), 11,000 were classified as
"secret," 9,000 were classified as "noforn" (a caption
indicating documents too sensitive to be shared with foreign governments), and
4,000 were identified with both captions. None were "top secret" or
classified. Newspapers of the caliber of the New York Times (among the first to
publicise the event) therefore decided to adopt a somewhat cautious attitude in
dealing with the incident: indeed, the same prestigious newspaper reports
publishing the leaked material after consultation with the U.S. State
Department and omitting sensitive passages, the diffusion of which could
"compromise U.S. intelligence efforts."
"Democracy
without transparency is an empty word," Kristin Hrafnsson, now
editor in chief of WikiLeaks, had declared in 2010. But of the immense effort to
put this principle into action today all that remains is the destroyed life of
the man who acted in the name of this purpose. Indeed, Julian Assange, after
years spent trying to escape U.S. arrest and intelligence attempts to end his
life, is now in Belmarsh maximum security prison in the United Kingdom,
awaiting extradition to the United States. There, his effort for transparency
will most probably earn him 175 years in prison.
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