BREAKING: WikiLeaks releases 2.4 million #Syria emails

[kpete]

Today, Thursday 5 July 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing the Syria Files – more than two million emails from Syrian political figures, ministries and associated companies, dating from August 2006 to March 2012.
This extraordinary data set derives from 680 Syria-related entities or domain names, including those of the Ministries of Presidential Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Finance, Information, Transport and Culture.

Over the next two months, ground-breaking stories derived from the files will appear in WikiLeaks (global), Al Akhbar (Lebanon), Al Masry Al Youm (Egypt), ARD (Germany), Associated Press (US), L’Espresso (Italy), Owni (France) and Publico.es (Spain). Other publications will announce themselves closer to their publishing date.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said: "The material is embarrassing to Syria, but it is also embarrassing to Syria’s opponents. It helps us not merely to criticise one group or another, but to understand their interests, actions and thoughts. It is only through understanding this conflict that we can hope to resolve it."


MORE:
http://wikileaks.org/syria-files/
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/07/05/1106159/-BREAKING-WikiLeaks-releases-2-4-million-Syria-emails

[Spider Jerusalem]

1. Observe who's not publishing this:

the Guardian, New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, or El Pais. Assange fucked himself in the arse with his grandstanding. The leading newspapers and newsmagazines in the countries of publication wouldn't touch anything Wikileaks-related with a bargepole after that "well screw it I'm going to publish all the cables, unredacted" little display of poor judgement and temper.

[KansDem]

2. But look who is interested in publishing them...

Over the next two months, ground-breaking stories derived from the files will appear in WikiLeaks (global), Al Akhbar (Lebanon), Al Masry Al Youm (Egypt), ARD (Germany), Associated Press (US), L’Espresso (Italy), Owni (France) and Publico.es (Spain). Other publications will announce themselves closer to their publishing date.

And the New York Times? Oh, yeah, the ones who lied us into the Iraq invasion with Judith Miller's stories, not to mention the revelation that the NYTs learned about W's illegal spying on Americans but sat on the story until after the 2004 elections. What credibility do they have?

[ananda]

3. From The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/middle-east-live/2012/jul/05/syrians-paid-to-protests-assad-live

[reorg]

5. more likely: they didn't get the offer

The Guardian didn't stick to the rules agreed upon in their contract with Wikileaks, so no surprise there if Wikileaks decided to go elsewhere.

The German ARD is the most watched TV program in Germany and they are widely respected for their news magazines and honest reporting. Much more publicity than a mere weekly print magazine.

[ananda]

6. From The Guardian again.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/middle-east-live/2012/jul/05/syrians-paid-to-protests-assad-live

[reorg]

7. So what?

Of course they report the news, but Assange/Wikileaks would be fools to cooperate with them ever again.

FYI I'm not blind and had already klicked the link.

[snot]

4. For the record,

for quite a while, Wikileaks published ONLY those cables that either they had vetted and redacted themselves or that had already been published by The New York Times, WaPo, or one of its other partners. The "dump" occurred only because

“a series of unintentional though negligent acts by multiple parties — WikiLeaks, The Guardian‘s investigative reporter David Leigh, and Open Leaks’ Daniel Domscheit-Berg” led to the release of all documents in unredacted form. Domscheit-Berg, who sought to share in the glory of the WikiLeaks operation, essentially stole a copy of the encrypted files from WikiLeaks, which led, unintentionally, to the circulation of the encrypted version of the unredacted cables. But this by itself would not have created the problem, except for the fact that David Leigh of the Guardian chose to publish the password to the file in a book, last year. {See Glenn Greenwald at http://www.salon.com/2011/09/02/wikileaks_28/ .}

" . . . . at that point, as Greenwald and others have noted, . . . “virtually every government’s intelligence agencies would have had access to these documents as a result of these events, but the rest of the world — including journalists, whistle-blowers and activists identified in the documents — did not.” So, WikiLeaks finally released everything, and I think this was the right thing to do."

More at http://www.support-julian-assange.com/author/irma-vrbnjak/ .

I think even Wikileaks would agree that the unredacted dump was regrettable; but it did not happen solely because of Wikileaks' own mistakes; and once those mistakes had been made, as this article points out, it would have been worse than counterproductive to let the situation persist in which all the bad guys to had access to the complete cache but none or few of the good guys.