Jew World Order

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Picture: The Times
Source: The Times

ACCORDING to Attorney-General Robert McClelland, Australia is a more dangerous place because of the decision by WikiLeaks to release a US document naming 23 Australians with alleged links to al-Qa’ida on the Arabian Peninsula.

The confidential diplomatic cable was only one of hundreds that relate to Australia dumped on the WikiLeaks website this week. But it was the one that prompted the Gillard government to break its own rule not to comment specifically on leaked documents.

An angry McClelland put out a sharply worded press release pointing out that WikiLeaks had previously chosen to redact names or details that could pose a risk to security operations or safety.

“This has not occurred in this case,” he said, referring to the naming of the suspected extremists. “The publication of any information that could compromise Australia’s national security, or inhibit the ability of intelligence agencies to monitor potential threats, is incredibly irresponsible.”

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Yesterday, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange bit back, saying that McClelland “bemoans having his department publicly caught out, ratting out 23 Australians to the US embassy without due process”.

At first glance, the comments by McClelland appear to be overblown.

A quick glance down the list of the 23 Australians suspected of terrorist connections reveals that many of them, such as Islamic converts Rabiah Hutchinson and Melanie Brown, have been in the media spotlight for years. They would hardly be unaware that they were persons of interest to ASIO.

McClelland’s outburst might have an ulterior motive. Canberra is concerned that WikiLeaks is becoming more careless in the way in which it is releasing the 250,000 US diplomatic cables allegedly provided to it by US Army private Bradley Manning.

In recent days WikiLeaks has published an astonishing 134,000 leaked diplomatic cables, dwarfing its previous releases.

It has published about 140,000 of the 250,000 US diplomatic cables it has in its possession.

WikiLeaks says it is doing this to counter the “misperception” that the organisation has been less active since its initial dump of documents late last year.

But unlike that batch of documents, in this case WikiLeaks does not appear to have taken the same care in redacting the names of people who have acted as sources to US government officials.

This is not a serious issue inside Australia because the naming of politicians such as Mark Arbib and others who have spoken frankly to US diplomats in this country has caused nothing more than mild embarrassment.

But in authoritarian countries such as China or in parts of the Middle East, the naming of US informants can result in punishment such as prison or even death.

“I don’t think there is a public interest in the publication of the names of people who have spoken to US diplomats in those [authoritarian] countries because it potentially endangers people for no good reason,” former Department of Defence official Hugh White says.

When WikiLeaks began releasing the US diplomatic cables last November it did so with selected news outlets, including The New York Times, The Guardian and Le Monde. WikiLeaks worked in tandem with these news outlets to edit the cables to protect the names of some people who had spoken to US officials in sensitive countries.

In general, the editing was efficient and undermined the apocalyptic predictions of Western governments that WikiLeaks would not only be a diplomatic disaster but also an ethical one in relation to sources. But since then WikiLeaks’ relationship with its five selected news outlets has soured considerably and the latest dump of documents has not been vetted in the same way.

The Associated Press said yesterday it had reviewed more than 2000 of the cables recently released by WikiLeaks. They contained the identity of more than 90 sources who had sought protection and whose names the authors of the cables had asked be protected.

“It does have the potential to create further risk for those individuals who have talked to US diplomats,” former US assistant secretary of state for public affairs P. J. Crowley says.

Assange’s Australian lawyer, Rob Stary, agrees that WikiLeaks cables sometimes need to be edited to protect sources.

“There are cases where names should be redacted and there are cases where national security interests are paramount and shouldn’t be revealed,” Stary tells The Australian.

But he insists there is no such argument to justify redacting the names of the 23 Australians suspected of having links to terrorist organisations.

The US embassy cable of January 21 last year reveals that ASIO recommends that 11 individuals be placed on a no-fly list and 12 be placed on a “Selectee” list.

“The names which have been identified [in the cable] have been circulated in the past, we know their identities,” Stary says.

“Sometimes it is important to have some transparency in the process. Those people have been named as a prospective risk to the Australian community and they should have the opportunity to have their matters ventilated to clear their names.

“What we don’t like is the level of secrecy the government is engaged in, in restricting people’s movements without explanation.”

McClelland’s strong objection to the release of the 23 Australian names probably has more to do with the government’s fury at WikiLeaks’ apparently cavalier attitude rather than genuine fears their release could “inhibit the ability of intelligence agencies to monitor potential threats”.

Many of those named are accused of having direct contact with cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, the charismatic American-born preacher connected to some of the more recent high-profile terror attacks.

The list includes Sydney grandmother Hutchinson, as well as two of her sons, Abdullah and Illias Ayub, and her daughter Rahmah Wisudo as well as Hutchinson’s friend, Sydney mother Shyloh Giddins and controversial Muslim preacher Sheik Zoud.

The problem for McClelland and the Gillard government when banging the national security drum is that the government has cried wolf on this before.

When WikiLeaks began dumping the US cables in November last year, the government warned of grave threats to national security and to the country’s national interests, describing WikiLeaks as “reckless, irresponsible and potentially dangerous”.

But 10 months on, and with many hundreds of cables already released on Australia, it is difficult to identify any damage wrought on the nation’s diplomatic, strategic and economic interests.

White, who wrote a defence white paper for the Howard government in 2000, says he has been carefully monitoring the WikiLeaks documents released on Australia.

“As a general proposition, the argument that the national interest has been harmed by the publication of the sort of material we have seen so far is very hard to sustain,” he says.

“I have read carefully the stuff that relates to Australia and there is a big difference between embarrassing a minister and damaging a country.

“Kevin Rudd and others may well have been embarrassed by some of the things they were reported to have said, but that is not a matter of national security.”

Indeed, the most memorable disclosures in the Australian WikiLeaks cables have not been high-minded policy disputes over international issues but the colourful, unvarnished assessments of our politicians made by US diplomats.

Arguably the most brutal of these was the February 2009 assessment of Rudd, which characterised him as a walking diplomatic disaster who made “foreign policy on the run” and had presided over a series of international gaffes, which the Americans gleefully listed for their masters in Washington.

At regular intervals, the Americans fired off missives about what they considered to be his mistakes in office.

And Rudd’s colleagues on both sides of politics have winced at the WikiLeaks disclosures. Stephen Smith was described by the Americans as being “very tentative” in his early days as foreign minister, while former defence minister Joel Fitzgibbon was characterised as a lightweight who was not up to the task of the portfolio.

The WikiLeaks files on Australia have also disclosed issues of substance. On defence, they revealed that China was furious about the 2009 defence white paper, which Beijing saw as being directed largely at its own military expansion. On economics, they revealed a split between the Labor government and the Reserve Bank of Australia over the economy’s ability to recover from the global financial crisis on the back of the Chinese boom.

But the majority of the US cables on Australia are a mundane recounting of events that were played out in the government and the media at the time. That many of these cables were classified has at times led to them receiving more prominent media coverage than has been justified by their contents.

The cables also have revealed that US diplomats do not always get it right. The Wikileaks files include predictions by the US embassy that Australia was likely to go into recession despite the stimulus measures; that Labor would not toughen up its asylum-seeker policy and that Rudd was unassailable as leader.

When launching his counter-attack on McClelland yesterday, Assange should have argued that the WikiLeaks disclosures in Australia have failed to inflict any lasting damage on Australia’s interests or on the Gillard government.

Instead, he made the bizarre claim that the cables showed how the government had been “caught out” for “ratting out” the 23 Australians to the US embassy “without due process”.

As White says, “I certainly have no problem with the idea of the Australian government providing information on watch lists or vice versa. You would hope the US would do the same for us.”

But White says the government has little choice but to rail strongly against their release.

“All governments are made uncomfortable by the publication of classified material, especially of a close ally, and so it needs to object to it on principle.

“Its anxiety has been amplified by the fact that technology now allows for such large leaks of material, much greater volumes than ever before.”

The government hopes the worst is over. WikiLeaks tweeted it has now released all cables relating to Australia. If so, Australia has escaped lightly from the world’s biggest leak.