The WikiLeaks Mastercard Spoof Is Priceless

Whatever you think of Wikileaks, this video is marvelous, and a very clever fundraising appeal.  It will give you a laugh, and if you believe in the cause, it will point you to where you can donate to help WikiLeaks fight the good fight.   It seems that Julian Assange is not only Robin Hood and The Scarlet Pimpernel wrapped up on one, he is also an advertising genius, or else he knows who to hire.

Personally,  though I applaud truth and transparency in principle, I am not always sure the revelations of WikiLeaks are useful in the long run. Yes, yes, I know that WikiLeaks contributed to the anger that sparked the Arab Spring.  But it did not create that anger, it merely fanned the flames of a fire that was already burning. Many of the leaked documents that constitute " cablegate" amount to not much more than  diplomatic gossip around the international water cooler.

Then, there is the fact that  truth-telling can lead to a lot of collateral damage  Brutal honesty is not always the best course of action and innocent people get caught in the cross-fire.  Think of all those outed CIA agents.  There is a time and a place for prevarication as well as transparency.

Plus there is something I can't put my finger on about Julian Assange that kind of creeps me out-- just a gut reaction. Call it women's intuition.

On the other hand, he is brilliant and ,on principle, I feel good about gadflys and rebellious geeks who bring down the pompous and powerful.

  A Donation to WikiLeaks?  not from me... but the WikiLeaks Mastercard spoof is definitely priceless.

Saudi Royals Have Their Marie Antoinette Moment

source

If you follow the revelations of Wikileaks, you can't help but wonder if Saudi Arabia could be next on the list of Arab nations  to topple a family run regime in favor of democracy.  Clearly, Saudi King Abdullah was wondering too, when in the wake of  doings in Egypt and Tunisia, he hot-footed it home over a week ago  with a hastily put together 37 billion dollar package of financial largesse for Saudis of more modest means.

Though the current king has been, to his credit, trying to reign in the more obvious excesses of the Royal family since he took the throne, Wikileaks has newly released  American diplomatic cables going back to 1996 which show the depth of the problem and , in the current climate in the region, the dangers of it.

Swissinfo.ch  offers details of the November 1996 cable

"The most common mechanism for distributing Saudi Arabia's wealth to the royal family is the formal, budgeted system of monthly stipends that members of the Al Saud family receive, according to the cable. Managed by the Ministry of Finance's "Office of Decisions and Rules", which acts like a kind of welfare office for Saudi royalty, the royal stipends in the mid-1990s ran from about $800 a month for "the lowliest member of the most remote branch of the family" to $200,000-$270,000 a month for one of the surviving sons of Abdul-Aziz Ibn Saud, the founder of modern Saudi Arabia.

Grandchildren received around $27,000 a month, "according to one contact familiar with the stipends" system, the cable says. Great-grandchildren received about $13,000 and great-great- grandchildren $8,000 a month.

"Bonus payments are available for marriage and palace building," according to the cable, which estimates that the system cost the country, which had an annual budget of $40 billion at the time, some $2 billion a year. "

And for those royals for whom a generous allowance is just not enough, there are a variety of shady practices available such as  the royal skimming from the approximately ten billion in annual off budget spending or confiscating the land of ordinary people to resell at inflated prices for government projects, not to mention the tendency of Saudi royals to borrow from commercial banks and simply not repay the loans.

Talk about " let them eat cake"  Compared to these excesses, 37 billion seems like a drop in the bucket.
There is a Facebook call out for a day of rage protest in Saudi Arabia on March 11th.. Circle your calendars folks and fasten your seatbelts, one way or another this is going to be a bumpy ride.

Ron Paul on Wikileaks and Delusional American Foreign Policy

Click here for latest updates on WikiLeaks Saga

 Ron Paul and I are usually poles apart politically, but we do agree on one thing--i.e. the importance of truth and transparency in a free society.  Here's a quote from what Paul had to say last week about Wikileaks and the ongoing Cablegate. situation.  I think he is right on the money.
  

"At its core, the Wikileaks controversy serves as a diversion from the real issue of what our foreign policy should be. But the mainstream media, along with neoconservatives from both parties, insists on asking the wrong questions. When presented with embarrassing disclosures about U.S. spying and meddling, the policy that requires so much spying and meddling is not questioned. Instead the media focuses on how authorities might prosecute the publishers of such information. "

Ron Paul has a lot more to say.   You can read the entire text on his website or listen to the video below.  Here's another snippet to whet your appetite.

"State secrecy is anathema to a free society. Why exactly should Americans be prevented from knowing what their government is doing in their name? In a free society we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, however, we are in big trouble. The truth is that our foreign spying, meddling and outright military intervention in the post-World War 2 era has made us less secure, not more, and we have lost countless lives and spent trillions of dollars for our trouble." 

Meanwhile, Julian Assange is readers choice for TIME's annual person of the year award and there is talk of a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize  Something quite big is in the air. I can feel it. Whatever is going on, Ron Paul is right--"in a society where truth becomes treason, we are in big trouble "  You betcha!

Wikileaks vs. The Pentagon Papers

 photo source 

Who says investigative journalism is dead or that the blogosphere doesn't have journalistic clout ? Wikileaks has a reach that the New York Times could only dream of when it published the Pentagon Papers in 1971   Mountains of wiki- data  can circle the globe in minutes in a variety of languages with the potential of making very big worldwide waves.   Here's the announcement  that went up on the site yesterday:

 On Sunday 28th November 2010, Wikileaks began publishing 251,287 leaked United States embassy cables, the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain. The documents will give people around the world an unprecedented insight into the US Government's foreign activities.

The cables, which date from 1966 to the end of February this year, contain confidential communications between 274 embassies in countries throughout the world and the State Department in Washington DC. 15,652 of the cables are classified Secret.
To access the Cable gate, go to http://cablegate.wikileaks.org

The numbers are huge-- the possible ramifications to both world politics and personal privacy are mind boggling. The world is already reeling, but only time will tell whether these diplomatic cables are simply an embarrassment to the international  establishment or will have the kind of far reaching, long lasting effect that the 1971 disclosures of the Pentagon Papers did.

Those 1971 leaks from the Pentagon, proving that the American government not only lied to the American people, but to the Congress as well about the war in Viet Nam  cast a long shadow that extended far beyond the war itself and well into the Nixon Administration.

A lot of the diplomatic cables published yesterday on the Wikileaks site amount to nothing more than juicy " court gossip" like the fact that Libyan leader Mumamar al-Qadhafi keeps a "voluptuous blonde" Ukranian nurse and won't stay in  hotel rooms above the first floor.  There are funny but snarky comments bandied about in diplomatic circles,  like the observation that Russian President, Dimitry Medvedev, " plays Robin to Vladimir Putin's Batman"

But there is also the serious stuff, like the cables from the Saudi Arabian King urging America to bomb Iran to " cut off the head of the snake before it is too late." Reading the  cables also makes it clear just how ill advised and reckless the Bush Administration's  Iraq adventure really was.  Saudi Arabia was always far more worried about Iran than Iraq.  We shall have to wait to see what the reprecussions of all this will be.

Julian Assange vs. Daniel Ellsberg

Julian Assange the founder of Wikileaks is a man on the run who has given up a lot for his principles.  Calls for his prosecution and howls of outrage are echoing around the world and God help him if he ever gets caught. .Daniel Ellsberg would know about that.  Here's a description of what he had to deal with. ( source:  U.S. History.com )

On June 28, 1971, Ellsberg publicly surrendered at the U.S. Attorney's Office in Boston. He was taken into custody believing he would spend the rest of his life in prison; he was charged with theft, conspiracy, and espionage.
In one of Nixon's actions against Ellsberg, G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt broke into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office in September 1971, hoping to find information they could use to discredit him. The revelation of the break-in became part of the Watergate scandal. On May 3, 1972, the White House secretly flew a dozen Cuban CIA "assets" (commandos), to Washington, D.C., with orders to assault or assassinate Ellsberg. They backed out because the crowd was too large.
Because of the gross governmental misconduct, all charges against Ellsberg were eventually dropped, a president eventually resigned, and a large segment of the American populace became disenfranchised and alienated from their government at all levels. 

Some things never change and actions very often have unintended consequences.  We know that Daniel Ellsberg's leak of the Pentagon Papers helped end a war, affected Presidential actions and reputations and created a climate of suspicion about government in the American people that has not gotten better over the years.

The only difference I can see between  The Pentagon Papers and Wikileaks is the speed with which the information can be communicated, the mass of the information itself, and, the fact that the reach of the information is global not just national. The consequences, whatever they are, will come fast and be global in nature too. I don't think we are going to have to wait too long for them either.