Updates on Leak of U.S. Cables, Day 3

Reuters reports that Bank of America shares declined by 3 percent on Tuesday, as investors heard that the largest U.S. bank by assets may be the focus of the next trove of documents to be released by WikiLeaks.

To follow up on our 12:35 p.m. update, about the upcoming “megaleak” of documents from an American bank, our colleagues at the DealBook blog reported this afternoon that Julian Assange said last year that he had obtained data from a Bank of America executive’s hard drive. Interviewed at the Hack In The Box security conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in October 2009, Mr. Assange told IDG News Service:

At the moment, for example, we are sitting on 5GB from Bank of America, one of the executive’s hard drives…. Now how do we present that? It’s a difficult problem. We could just dump it all into one giant Zip file, but we know for a fact that has limited impact. To have impact, it needs to be easy for people to dive in and search it and get something out of it.

Julian Assange’s name has been added to Interpol’s “wanted” list, as the result of an arrest warrant issued by Sweden’s government this month, stemming from the accusations of sexual misconduct made against him by two women

The Guardian reports that Mr. Assange may be in England:

Friends said earlier that Assange was in a buoyant mood, however, despite the palpable fury emanating from Washington over the decision by WikiLeaks to start publishing more than a quarter of a million mainly classified US cables. He was said to be at a secret location somewhere outside London, along with fellow hackers and WikiLeaks enthusiasts….

Assange’s reluctance to emerge in public is understandable. It comes amid a rapid narrowing of his options. Several countries are currently either taking – or actively considering – aggressive legal moves against him. This lengthening list includes Sweden, Australia and now the U.S. – but so far as can be made out, not Britain.

Speaking to the BBC on Tuesday, Daniel Ellsberg, the former defense analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers, derided statements by American officials who said that the leaked diplomatic cables would put lives at risk. In a radio interview, Mr. Ellsberg said:

That’s a script that they roll out, every administration rolls out, every time there’s a leak of any sort. The best justification for secrecy that they can find is that lives are at stake. Actually, lives are at stake as a result of silence and lies, which a lot of these leaks reveal. Certainly the same charges were made about the Pentagon Papers and turned out to be quite invalid over the years, the same things that Hillary Clinton is saying now about WikiLeaks. As a matter of fact.

While diplomats and journalists continue to sift through the details of the cables released this week by WikiLeaks, and argue about whether the disclosures tell us much that well-informed observers didn’t already know or assume, some people have turned to the question of what the purpose of all these leaks might be.

In a recent essay for The New Yorker, Steve Coll directed our attention to the fact that the organization’s founder published by a manifesto of sorts four years ago. Mr. Coll wrote:

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, had a tumultuous youth in Australia and grew into an autodidact with eclectic skills and a deep distrust of hierarchies and governments. In 2006, as he prepared to launch a digital enterprise devoted to the exposure of secrets, he wrote a sort of manifesto about the structure of official conspiracy and its effects on human welfare. He quoted Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Lord Halifax; the writing veers between lucidity and opaqueness. Its tone, familiar from science fiction, echoes the purifying language of purges and revolutions: “We must understand the key generative structure of bad government. We must develop a way of thinking about this structure that is strong enough to carry us through the mire of competing political moralities and into a position of clarity.”

After suggesting that Mr. Assange has overstated the importance of the documents he has released to date, by comparing them to the Pentagon Papers, Mr. Coll added:

WikiLeaks has recently been in discussions with lawmakers in Iceland about trying to concoct the world’s most extensive press-freedom regime there. The idea apparently is to transform Iceland, in the aftermath of its recent, disastrous experiments with offshore banking, into the Cayman Islands of First Amendment-inspired subversion. A volcanic-island nation may well find whistle-blowing to be a compatible flagship industry. And it could provide the project with a sustainable basis for legal legitimacy.

It is not clear, however, that such normalcy within a national system would entirely suit Assange’s purposes. In a part of his manifesto titled “State and Terrorist Conspiracies,” he wrote, “To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly, for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed.” If dissenters hacked and published enough secret information harbored by governments, he went on, this might disrupt what he imagined to be the absolute dependency of governments on flows of hidden data. “An authoritarian conspiracy that cannot think efficiently cannot act to preserve itself against the opponents it induces,” Assange concluded. That is, he believed that he could break governments by siphoning the secrets that nourish them.

On Tuesday afternoon, the official WikiLeaks Twitter feed drew more attention to the manifesto “State and Terrorist Conspiracies,” by calling an academic’s blog post that quotes it at length a “good essay on one of the key ideas behind WikiLeaks.”

Given that Mr. Assange has been accused of anti-Americanism by his critics, it is interesting to note that “State and Terrorist Conspiracies” begins with a quote from the platform Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party adopted when he ran for the presidency in 1912:

Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government, owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.

As Aaron Bady, the author of that blog post WikiLeaks advised its fans to read on Tuesday, pointed out, Teddy Roosevelt has also been credited with coining the word “muckrake,” now commonly used to describe the dogged work of investigative journalists.

State and Terrorist Conspiracies

The Times has just published two new articles based on the leaked cables: my colleague Mark Mazzetti’s “Blackwater Plans Pirate Hunt,” on the security firm’s thwarted attempt to cash in on the hysteria over Somali pirates, and Katrin Bennhold’s report on what American diplomats have written about French President Nicolas Sarkozy, “Cables Praise French Friend With a ‘Mercurial’ Side.”

Given that the cables describe Mr. Sarkozy as “a true friend,” of the United States, but also as a “thin-skinned, authoritarian” and “mercurial” leader, who operates “in a zone of monarch-like impunity,” he may be wondering why he needs enemies.

In a Skype interview “from an undisclosed location” on Tuesday, Julian Assange, the founder and public face of WikiLeaks, told Time magazine that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, “she should resign, if it can be shown that she was responsible for ordering U.S. diplomatic figures to engage in espionage in the United Nations, in violation of the international covenants to which the U.S. has signed up.”

Laura Rozen, who blogs about foreign policy for Politico, observed on Twitter: “Doubt Clinton very interested in his career advice.”

Time posted audio of Mr. Assange’s comments, made during an interview with the magazine’s managing editor, Richard Stengel, on its Web site. The magazine promised to post audio of the entire interview soon.

Mr. Assange also confirmed that the leaked diplomatic cables were redacted “carefully.” His organization was criticized in July for not redacting the names of Afghans before releasing thousands of American military documents on the war in Afghanistan. This time, he said, the cables were “all reviewed and they’re all redacted either by us or by the newspapers concerned.” He also mentioned that, before publication, WikiLeaks “formally asked the State Department for assistance with that. That request was formally rejected.”

In a new article on what the cables reveal about America’s vexed relationship with Pakistan, my colleagues Jane Perlez, David Sanger and Eric Schmitt report:

Less than a month after President Obama testily assured reporters in 2009 that Pakistan’s nuclear materials “will remain out of militant hands,” his ambassador here sent a secret message to Washington suggesting that she was worried about just that.

The ambassador’s concern was a stockpile of highly enriched uranium, sitting for years near an aging research nuclear reactor in Pakistan. There was enough to build several “dirty bombs” or, in skilled hands, possibly enough for an actual nuclear bomb.

In the cable dated May 27, 2009, the ambassador, Anne W. Patterson, reported that the Pakistani government was yet again dragging its feet on an agreement reached two years earlier to have the United States remove the material.

She wrote to senior American officials that the Pakistani government had concluded that “the ‘sensational’ international and local media coverage of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons made it impossible to proceed at this time.” A senior Pakistani official, she said, warned that if word leaked out that Americans were helping remove the fuel, the local press would “certainly portray it as it as the United States taking Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.”

The fuel is still there.

It may be the most unnerving evidence of the complex relationship — sometimes cooperative, often confrontational, always wary — between America and Pakistan nearly 10 years into the American-led war in Afghanistan.

Along with the world’s diplomats and journalists, animators in Taiwan have apparently been pouring over the leaked diplomatic cables. Here is how the Taiwanese news site Apple Daily is explaining the latest WikiLeaks story to its readers – with animation and a good dose of fiction (bonus points to readers who can point out, in the comments thread below, which specific cables this postmodern political cartoon has been inspired by):

Among the cables examined by other news organizations are two that documented concerns American diplomats had about Haiti’s “stubborn” president, René Préval, the French newspaper Le Monde reports. As my colleague David Goodman explains:

Le Monde reports on leaked cables that questioned the character of Haiti’s president, René Préval. An ally of the United States described as “Hait’s indespensible man,” in the cables, Mr. Préval also frustrated American diplomats.

“Relations with him are a challenge,” reads part of a long cable on the Hatian leader, who was described as insular and isolated in the presidential palace. According to Le Monde, one cable added, “He admits that he does not read either the local or international news.” American diplomats observed that Mr. Préval showed little inclination to delegate power on even the smallest matters that arrived on his desk.

Le Monde reports that the cables, from 2007 and 2009, also remarked on the Haitian president’s “weakness” and “general passivity.” After Haiti’s devastating earthquake in January of this year, Mr. Préval’s critics used similar terms to describe his response. My colleagues Ginger Thompson and Marc Lacey reported from Port-au-Prince two weeks after the disaster:

During the greatest disaster Haiti has ever faced, its president has seemed incapable of pulling himself together, much less this deeply divided society.

“What the country has seen since the earthquake is not a leader, but a broken man,” said Mirlande Manigat, a former first lady of Haiti who makes no secret of her presidential aspirations. “He’s not doing. He’s not speaking. He’s not acting. He’s not moving. And if he’s not moving, how’s the country supposed to move?”

In the immediate aftermath of the quake, Mr. Préval seemed to wander around in a daze, lapsing into moments of disorientation. The morning after, he sent a taped message to the nation, his only one so far, to a radio station, dispassionately reporting details of the damage and urging listeners, “Kembe,” the Creole term for “hold on.”

Le Monde also reminds us that French President Nicolas Sarkozy was among the world leaders described in unflattering terms in the cables. On Tuesday, Mr. Sarkozy told ministers that the release of the WikiLeaks documents is the “height of irresponsibility,” The Associated Press reported.

Before he lowered the cone of silence recently, Julian Assange, the public face of WikiLeaks, said in an interview with Forbes magazine published this week that his organization planned to shift focus from the American government to industry, with an upcoming “megaleak,” including thousands of documents on the work of “a big U.S. bank,” to be released early next year.

Asked by Forbes, “What do you want to be the result of this release?” Mr. Assange reportedly paused before saying:

I’m not sure.

It will give a true and representative insight into how banks behave at the executive level in a way that will stimulate investigations and reforms, I presume.

Usually when you get leaks at this level, it’s about one particular case or one particular violation. For this, there’s only one similar example. It’s like the Enron emails. Why were these so valuable? When Enron collapsed, through court processes, thousands and thousands of emails came out that were internal, and it provided a window into how the whole company was managed. It was all the little decisions that supported the flagrant violations.

This will be like that. Yes, there will be some flagrant violations, unethical practices that will be revealed, but it will also be all the supporting decision-making structures and the internal executive ethos that cames out, and that’s tremendously valuable. Like the Iraq War Logs, yes there were mass casualty incidents that were very newsworthy, but the great value is seeing the full spectrum of the war.

You could call it the ecosystem of corruption. But it’s also all the regular decision making that turns a blind eye to and supports unethical practices: the oversight that’s not done, the priorities of executives, how they think they’re fulfilling their own self-interest. The way they talk about it.

Ecuador’s deputy foreign minister told a local newspaper on Tuesday that the country would like to invite Julian Assange, the founder and public face of WikiLeaks, to live and work in the Latin American country, but it is having trouble reaching him.

As Reuters reports, the Ecuadorean official, Kintto Lucas, said in an interview with the newspaper Hoy, that his government was attempting to get in touch with the elusive Mr. Assange. “We are inviting him to give conferences and, if he wants, we have offered him Ecuadorean residency,” Mr. Lucas, himself naturalized Uruguayan, said. Asked by Hoy if the offer of residency was a formal invitation from the government, the deputy foreign minister said, “sure.”

Ecuador is not the only country that would like to hear from Mr. Assange. As Reuters also reports, the U.S. Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation of the leak of the diplomatic cables. On Monday, The Washington Post reported on Monday, American authorities are “investigating whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange violated criminal laws in the group’s release of government documents, including possible charges under the Espionage Act.”

Since readers, or visitors to our Web site, continue to submit comments suggesting that The Times was wrong to publish any of the cables or write articles on their contents, we’d encourage anyone with these concerns to read the detailed explanation offered by the editors of The Times on Sunday, in “A Note to Readers: The Decision to Publish Diplomatic Documents,” and the responses to readers’ questions on this subject posted on Monday, in “Answers to Readers’ Questions About State’s Secrets.”

The executive editor of The Times, Bill Keller, also discussed the issue on The Takeaway, a public radio program, on Tuesday.

As we noted on Monday, the editors of the Guardian, Le Monde and El País, which were given access to the cables before WikiLeaks began to publish them, have also explained their thinking in detail.

In a radio interview on The Madeleine Brand Show on Monday, my colleague David Sanger — who has written about what the cables tell us about diplomatic attempts to deal with Iran’s nuclear program and the possible collapse of North Korea — explained that readers who assume that The Times had the power to conceal these documents from public view are incorrect.

As Mr. Sanger noted, when copies of the documents were provided to The Times by the Guardian several weeks ago, it was clear that WikiLeaks was going to publish the documents no matter The Times did. “Whether or not The Times published stories about this, these documents were coming out. They had been leaked out to WikiLeaks, WikiLeaks was posting them. So it was a question of whether we were putting them in context or not, not a question of whether we were revealing them.”

Mr. Sanger also explained that by asking the U.S. government to share its specific concerns about some of the cables, and agreeing to redact some information after discussing the contents in detail with American officials, The Times performed a degree of damage mitigation that might otherwise not have occurred. “Along the way, we passed back to some other foreign publication that also had the documents some requests from the U.S. government about redactions. Many of those seem to have taken place.”

It is not yet clear if WikiLeaks – which was heavily criticized in July for publishing leaked American military reports on the war in Afghanistan without removing the names of Afghans who had cooperated with Western forces – will also make those redactions to the documents before publishing them online.

It is also important to keep in mind that none of the 250,000 documents was marked with the highest degree of classification, and all of them appear to have been made available to as many as 3 million members of the government to read, as the Guardian’s diplomatic correspondent Julian Borger reported. From that huge trove, The Times is publishing just 100 cables that seem to have news value. WikiLeaks appears to have begun the process of publishing the rest of the archive, and has already posted nearly 300 documents on its Web site.

WikiLeaks reported fresh attacks on its Web site on Tuesday morning. In two messages posted on its Twitter feed, WikiLeaks wrote that its was experiencing a distributed denial-of-service attack, apparently aimed at

We are currently under another DDOS attack.

DDOS attack now exceeding 10 Gigabits a second.

Despite the reported attacks, the site remains online and has posted what it says is cable number 294 in an archive of 251,287 documents.