WikiLeaks Cablegate Ten Years Later: A Clear Look at US Foreign Policy World | Breaking news and views from around the world | DW

November 28, 2010 was the day the bomb was dropped – as five leading Western publications began simultaneously spreading secrets from the US Diplomatic Engine Room. Their raw materials: 251,287 documents from the superpower’s State Department, most of them top-secret and top-secret, collected by U.S. embassies around the world. Together, they gave a less-than-beautiful picture of American foreign policy.

Embassy dispatches were made available for publications through the WikiLeaks website for reporting violations. Journalists have never had access to such a large number of secrets at once. Among other things, they proved that Washington instructed its diplomats to spy on people working for the United Nations, including the UN Secretary-General. The cables also revealed that Arab countries called for air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, and that Beijing was losing its patience with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, and included many unpleasant assessments of senior politicians in the host countries of American diplomats.

From ‘Side Kill’ to ‘Cablegate’

“From our point of view, the embassy cables were the culmination of the WikiLeaks leaks for 2010,” recalls journalist Marcel Rosenbach of the German weekly Der Spiegel.

WikiLeaks was founded in 2006 by Julian Assange, but its major breakthrough did not come until 2010. In April, it began publishing a video called “Mass Murder,” a video of two US helicopters’ attacks on civilians in Baghdad – two from Reuters. Among the dead in the attack are journalists. The “Afghan War Notes” and “Iraq War Records,” which were published in cooperation with the international media, provided a harrowing and harsh look behind the well-oiled public relations mechanism of the State Department and the Pentagon, and the harsh reality of these two demolitions. the war.

Initially, the embassy cables were released by WikiLeaks media partners in batches. But the data breach resulted in the Cablegate’s entire cache of unmodified material becoming publicly available and remaining available. Names have not been withheld, including people with whom US diplomats have been communicating – something for which WikiLeaks has been heavily criticized.

Assange became a hero to some and a villain for others

“The material is still topical,” Marcel Rosenbach told DW. “It has become something like a public archive, and it’s still closely related to reporting, even now. We still see references to WikiLeaks and these cables in contemporary reports.”

In the archive, one can read, for example, how a former US official in Brussels in 2009 was stunned “how easy it is to penetrate EU institutions and how resilient these institutions are if they are treated with an adequate understanding of the EU’s coalition-building process.”

Read more: WikiLeaks and Julian Assange: The Neverending Story

Spark for the Arab Spring?

WikiLeaks has also exposed corruption and abuse of power in the Arab world – for example in Tunisia – in great detail. It highlighted the duplication of the government’s stance, whereby the real goals contradict the publicly stated goals. The publication of the embassy cables coincided with the first spark of protest in the Arab world. Rosenbach believes that the telegrams were “at least a factor in what became known as the Arab Spring and all that happened in the months that followed.”

But the WikiLeaks disclosure had consequences for journalism as well, Rosenbach says: “It was an example of a new way of dealing with geopolitical material of potential global significance. It has proven itself as a journalistic standard for dealing with mass leaks like this.” Read more: From Panama To Heaven: The largest data leak of tax evasion in history, WikiLeaks has also changed our understanding of information in general, says Sam Forsth, an information warfare expert at the Peace Research Institute in Frankfurt (PRIF). Forsyth explains that, with WikiLeaks, a non-state actor capable of disrupting international relations has arrived on the scene. Work on a strategic level – but using journalistic techniques. One of the consequences of this, he says, has been intensifying disagreements in the information realm: “Nowadays, everyone understands that you have to control communication. You have to actively produce communication streams that allow you to control the narrative.”

Whistleblower Chelsea Manning

WikiLeaks received its cablegate explosive material from Chelsea Manning. Still known as Bradley at the time, Manning was serving with the US Army in Iraq – and had access to US government databases. “If you had free reign (sic) over clandestine networks … and you saw incredible things … things that belong in the public domain, and not on a stored server in a darkroom in Washington, DC, what would you do?” Manning asked the American hacker Adrian Lamo in a conversation in May 2010, adding that the cables from US embassies and consulates explain “how the Third World is exploiting, in detail, from an internal perspective.”

Manning entered and exited the US court and was jailed for refusing to testify about WikiLeaks

Manning, 23, thought Lamu was trustworthy but was wrong. Lamu betrayed the whistleblower, who was arrested shortly thereafter. Manning was put on trial and sentenced to 35 years in prison but his sentence was commuted after seven years.

Manning’s assessment of the impact of the leaks on senior American diplomats at the time was closer to the goal: “Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world will have a heart attack when they wake up one morning and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy publicly available in a searchable format.”

United States v. Julian Assange

Clinton said in her initial response: “It is an attack on the international community, alliances and partnerships, talks and negotiations that protect global security and promote economic prosperity.” The anger in Washington was palpable: some called for Julian Assange’s assassination. WikiLeaks removed from Amazon servers; PayPal, MasterCard and Visa have prohibited donations to the site; WikiLeaks has been attacked; US politicians have attacked the whistleblowing platform as a terrorist organization. More recently, in 2017, when current US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was still director of the CIA, he denounced WikiLeaks as a “hostile intelligence service.”

US politicians have repeatedly accused WikiLeaks of “blood on their hands,” saying that its opponents have endangered the lives of informants and opposition activists living under authoritarian regimes. Spiegel journalist Marcel Rosenbach explains that “these allegations have proven false,” and the Pentagon itself confirmed this, again and again, months after publication.

Above all, Julian Assange himself came under tremendous pressure when the United States declared him an enemy of the state. Assange then applied for asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he lived for seven years. Now, the publicist is being held in a British high-security prison, pending a court ruling on an American extradition request. If extradited, Assange faces a possible sentence of up to 175 years in prison. Judge Vanessa Barritzer is due to deliver her ruling on January 4.

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