(UPDATE: Today's Times includes a story about the WikiLeaks Iraq cable, under the somewhat strange headline "Cable Implicates Americans in Deaths of Iraqi Civilians." Still very little in the rest of the press-- nothing on television, according to a search of the Nexis database).

One of the main media tropes regarding WikiLeaks' release of State Department cables last year was that there was either nothing new to be learned, or that private conversations they revealed were remarkably consistent with what U.S. officials were saying publicly. That was totally misleading, but for many pundits the story seemed to end there.

Now comes the release of thousands more documents. If you've been reading the New York Times, you know these cables exist. But you don't know much more than that. On August 29, the Times focused on a dispute over whether some names in the cable weren't properly redacted to protect these individuals--"a shift of tactics that has alarmed American officials." WikiLeaks disagrees.

In today's edition of the Times (9/1/11), reporter Scott Shane gives a few examples of what's actually in the cables: criticism of former Philippines President Corazon Aquino, something about the Australian air safety system, human trafficking in Botswana.  The rest of the article discusses the controversies over redactions, and whether or not someone has gained access to the entire trove of cables.

Shane adds: "News organizations in dozens of countries are panning for nuggets in the latest and largest dump of diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks."

One "nugget" the Times seems to have trouble finding: A cable that details how U.S. forces executed 11 civilians in a night raid in Iraq in 2006. The victims appear to have been handcuffed. U.S. forces apparently destroyed the evidence--the house--in an airstrike.

McClatchy has a piece by Matthew Schofield (8/31/11) summarizing the matter ( "WikiLeaks: Iraqi Children in U.S. Raid Shot in Head, UN Says"). He reports:

A U.S. diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks provides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a five-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi.

The unclassified cable, which was posted on WikiLeaks' website last week, contained questions from a United Nations investigator about the incident, which had angered local Iraqi officials, who demanded some kind of action from their government. U.S. officials denied at the time that anything inappropriate had occurred.

But Philip Alston, the UN's special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said in a communication to American officials dated 12 days after the March 15, 2006, incident that autopsies performed in the Iraqi city of Tikrit showed that all the dead had been handcuffed and shot in the head. Among the dead were four women and five children. The children were all 5 years old or younger.

Schofield adds:

At the time, American military officials in Iraq said the accounts of townspeople who witnessed the events were highly unlikely to be true, and they later said the incident didn't warrant further investigation. Military officials also refused to reveal which units might have been involved in the incident.

The Daily Mirror (9/1/11) also has a piece today on this incident ("WikiLeaks Reveals Atrocities by U.S. forces"). John Glaser at Antiwar.com wrote a piece on August 29 detailing the contents of the cable--the first account that I can find, so he deserves credit for that.

But at this point, major U.S. papers like the New York Times are still searching for this nugget.

The long 60 Minutes segment on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange from last night (1/30/11) is definitely worth a look. But this set-up from correspondent Steve Kroft was certainly odd:

Julian Assange is not your average journalist or publisher, and some have argued that he is not really a journalist at all. He is an anti-establishment ideologue with conspiratorial views. He believes large government institutions use secrecy to suppress the truth and he distrusts the mainstream media for playing along.

Assange believes the government keeps important secrets? And that mainstream media play along? That is kooky.

According to NPR ombud Alicia Shepard (12/30/10), one very persistent letter writer named Henry Norr managed to get NPR to correct an error made several times by different programs-- that WikiLeaks 'published' the many thousands of State Department cables in its posession. The site has actually published few of them-- less than 2,000.

Shepard wrote:

On Dec. 21, I sent Norr’s 9 examples to NPR top editors and asked that a staff memo be sent out reminding everyone to be more careful in talking about the November document release. The memo went out on Christmas Eve.

Still Norr was (rightly) not satisfied. “Aren’t you going to run a correction as well?” he asked. He prodded me. I prodded Stu Seidel, NPR’s deputy managing editor who handles corrections. (corrections@npr.org)

And, so thanks to Norr’s doggedness the correction is on the Web and hopefully, NPR won’t make the same mistake again.

It's a reminder that media activism works.

Another reminder-- Henry Norr was a journalist suspended by the San Francisco Chronicle over his opposition to the Iraq War, as FAIR noted here:

Henry Norr, a technology writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, was suspended without pay by his paper for using a sick day to get arrested at an anti-war protest. According to Norr (Berkeley Daily Planet, 4/1/03), his supervisors knew in advance he would be doing civil disobedience that day. Defending the punishment, Chronicle readers' representative Dick Rogers (4/3/03) noted that subsequent to Norr's suspension, the paper had "strengthened its policy to prohibit public political activity related to the war." Rogers argued that the Chronicle ought to have a sign at its entrance reading, "Check your activism at the door."

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank (12/19/10) derides WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for being "insufferable"--apparently because he emerged from prison talking about prison conditions. Milbank sarcastically noted, "As if nine days in an English jail fighting extradition to Sweden on sex charges made him a regular Nelson Mandela."

You can decide for yourself whether that's insufferable. (Assange said, "I had time to reflect on the conditions of those people around the world also in solitary confinement, also on remand, in conditions that are more difficult than those faced by me. Those people also need your attention and support." Milbank ended this quote after the word "confinement.")

But one thing is indisputable--Milbank's column is inaccurate.   Specifically when he writes: "Assange's indiscriminate dump of American government secrets over the last several months--with hardly a care for who might be hurt or what public good was served."

One more time: The release of the WikiLeaks cables has been extremely discriminate, actually. The documents are mostly released on schedule with various news outlets, with certain information redacted.

Today's New York Times (12/20/10) brings the latest from the WikiLeaks cables, an interesting piece about how Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) went to Honduras after the coup to praise the new government and hopefully arrange business deals for his friends.

Unfortunately the Times bungles the story of the coup itself:

Honduras had grabbed international headlines starting in June 2009, when its president at the time, Manuel Zelaya, was detained and then sent into exile, based on a fear by other elected officials there that he was scheming to remain in office despite a one-term limit in Honduras’ Constitution.

Mr. Rohrabacher, challenging the stand taken by some Obama administration officials, ridiculed suggestions that Mr. Zelaya's removal was a coup d'état, and used his visit to Honduras to praise government leaders there who played roles in removing Mr. Zelaya, including members of the Supreme Court and the president of the Honduran Congress, Juan Orlando Hernández.

This is pretty typical--presenting the coup from the point of view of coup defenders and promoters, who had "a fear" that Zelaya was "scheming" to extend his term.

If the Times was really interested in what WikiLeaks tells us about Honduras, they could report--as Robert Naiman did here--that U.S. officials in the country had determined soon after the coup that the arguments being made to defend its legitimacy were without merit.

Back to the Times article, which allowed Rohrabacher to portray himself as a guy standing up for freedom and democracy, as he is wont to do:

Mr. Rohrabacher, who was a speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s as the United States financed "freedom fighters" in Central America to challenge a perceived communist threat, has long cast himself as a defender of democratic causes in the region. The turn of events in Honduras offered him a chance to return to that role.

"He warned at the danger of allowing 'caudillos' or strongmen, like Cuban President Fidel Castro and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, to assume control," the State Department summary of his visit said, recalling his remarks to the new leaders in Honduras.

So a guy who worked for Reagan is positioning himself as a defender of democratic freedom in Latin America--by supporting a coup against an elected president.  Are readers supposed to be laughing at Rohrabacher's hypocrisy, or at the Times for presenting this drivel without challenging it?

One recently released WikiLeaks cable stated that Cuban officials had banned Michael Moore's healthcare documentary Sicko. Critics of Moore's work pounced, delighted that a film that spent time pointing out that Cuba's national system has some merits would be banned in that country.

The problem is that... well, it wasn't. Which is something that anyone could have known if they'd done a moment of factchecking. Like Michael Moore did (though, to be fair, he probably knew this stuff without having to check):

Sounds convincing, eh?! There's only one problem--Sicko had just been playing in Cuban theaters. Then the entire nation of Cuba was shown the film on national television on April 25, 2008! The Cubans embraced the film so much so it became one of those rare American movies that received a theatrical distribution in Cuba. I personally ensured that a 35mm print got to the Film Institute in Havana. Screenings of Sicko were set up in towns all across the country.

Moore slammed the Guardian's story (headlined, "WikiLeaks: Cuba Banned Sicko for Depicting 'Mythical' Healthcare System"). Other outlets were also guilty of taking the cable at face value. It shows--once again--that a lot of journalists have a strange relationship with these WikiLeaks cables. They don't like what WikiLeaks does, and they're pretty sure there's nothing explosive or newsworthy hidden in the cables. Unless, of course, there's something they find politically useful. Then it should be treated as a Top Secret Fact--no checking necessary.

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman attempts to offer up some measure of support for WikiLeaks today (12/15/10)

I read many WikiLeaks and learned some useful things. But their release also raises some troubling questions. I don't want to live in a country where they throw whistleblowers in jail. That's China. But I also don't want to live in a country where any individual feels entitled to just dump out all the internal communications of a government or a bank in a way that undermines the ability to have private, confidential communications that are vital to the functioning of any society. That's anarchy.

Two things:

• There is, of course, an alleged whistleblower here. His name is Bradley Manning. If you're interested in the circumstances of his imprisonment--which isn't happening in China--read Glenn Greenwald's account in Salon today.

• The idea that it is wrong to "just dump out all the internal communications of a government or a bank"  would be a lot more convincing if WikiLeaks had actually done this. They've released very few of the State Department cables, and have apparently been mindful about making redactions and the like.

One gets the impression, reading the New York Times' coverage of the WikiLeaks cables, that the paper is particularly interested in documents that portray the State Department in a good light, struggling to do good in a world that continually resists its efforts. Take today's front-page piece (12/7/10), "America Prods and Protests But Can't Halt Arms Trade."

The piece, by Michael Gordon and Andrew Lehren, details "the United States' efforts to prevent buildups of arms...in some of the world's tensest regions." The piece does include an acknowledgment that "the United States is the world's largest arms supplier, and with Russia, dominates trade in the developing world"; the U.S. is, in fact, the seller in 40 percent of global arms deals, and delivers arms to some of the most repressive and war-torn countries in the world (Extra!, 5/10).  Gordon and Lehren go on to note, "Its role as a purveyor of weapons to certain allies--including Israel, Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states--has drawn criticism that it has fueled an arms race."

But aside from these two sentences of context, the rest of the article overwhelmingly presents the contradictory case that, as the Times' Web headline has it, the "U.S. Strains to Stop Arms Flow."

New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane wrote a response (of a sort) to the criticisms that the paper's reporting on Iranian missiles was fundamentally flawed. It's hard to believe that his column was meant be taken seriously.

To review: The Times published a story, based on a WikiLeaks cable, on November 29 alleging that Iran possesses powerful missiles with "the capacity to strike at capitals in Western Europe." The Times kept the cable off its website, but it was available on the WikiLeaks site. The cable showed that these were not facts, but U.S. claims--and weak ones at that, to the point where doubts existed as to whether the kind of missiles Iran had supposedly purchased from North Korea even existed.

The Washington Post wrote a piece (12/1/10) that cast considerable doubt on the Times' account. (The Post pointed out that the U.S. position was apparently based on a German newspaper article that did not fully corroborate the U.S. claims the Times was touting.) That was followed by a Times article (12/3/10) headlined "Wider Window Into Iran's Missile Capabilities Offers a Murkier View," which hinted at some of the weaknesses in the case--the ones the Times didn't see fit to report the first time. For a useful comparison, compare the definitive headline of the  original story: "Iran Fortifies Its Missiles With the Aid of North Korea." FAIR issued an Action Alert (12/1/10) and a follow-up (12/3/10) urging activists to ask Brisbane to address the problems in the Times' coverage.

So now to Brisbane's column. Here is what he wrote about the incident:

United States officials believe that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government obtained so-called BM-25 missiles from North Korea, enabling Iran to extend its range enough to strike Western Europe or Moscow. This development largely explains the Obama administration's willingness to shift its missile defense strategy in Europe.

But wait, other news organizations have now weighed in to say the Times' coverage of the BM-25 missiles was misleading, that other authorities have cast strong doubt on whether such missiles even exist. That leads me to the further point: Publication isn't necessarily a short hop to the full truth. It is sometimes only a first step. But it is the essential first step in a process that has to start before the marketplace of news and information can establish the facts.

Read those last three sentences again. He is saying (without really saying it) that the Times' publication of an erroneous article was commendable, "the essential first step in a process that has to start before the marketplace of news and information can establish the facts."

I guess you could say the same thing about the Times' infamous pre-war "scoop" on Iraq's aluminum tubes. It was totally wrong, but other news outlets--including the Washington Post--published articles that accurately conveyed the doubts about the bogus intelligence the Times was touting. So, yes, the Times is performing a service, in the sense that other reporters get the opportunity to demonstrate how poorly the Times is covering important news stories.

Brisbane asked: "The real question should be: Are Times readers and Americans at large better informed on these issues because of the stories?" In this case, the answer is obviously no. But somehow he arrived at the opposite conclusion.

Today (12/2/10) the New York Times has another report based on the latest WikiLeaks cables. The focus is on U.S. policy toward the former Soviet republic of Georgia, and the upshot is that diplomats based there exercised little to no scrutiny of the claims made by Georgian government regarding South Ossetia and Russia. The conflict there led eventually to a brief war in 2008, which was often inaccurately portrayed in U.S. media as unprovoked Russian aggression against a U.S. ally. The Times reports:

The cables show that for several years, as Georgia entered an escalating contest with the Kremlin for the future of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two breakaway enclaves out of Georgian control that received Russian support, Washington relied heavily on the Saakashvili government's accounts of its own behavior. In neighboring countries, American diplomats often maintained their professional distance, and privately detailed their misgivings of their host governments. In Georgia, diplomats appeared to set aside skepticism and embrace Georgian versions of important and disputed events.

By 2008, as the region slipped toward war, sources outside the Georgian government were played down or not included in important cables. Official Georgian versions of events were passed to Washington largely unchallenged.

The last cables before the eruption of the brief Russian-Georgian war showed an embassy relaying statements that would with time be proved wrong.

The conventional storyline at the time was that Georgia was attacked by South Ossetian forces, and thus forced to retaliate, which brought a Russian onslaught. The U.S. embassy's line--that the Times says "would with time be proved wrong"--was echoed in the media, as FAIR documented at the time. There was little skepticism shown toward Georgian claims, or its shelling of civilian areas of South Ossetia (which Russia pointed to as a justification for its military intervention).

The fact that U.S. diplomats and U.S. media were mostly in step is not a coincidence. It reminds me of that Karl Kraus quote: "How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print."

In this case, the WikiLeaks cables provide the basis for a useful corrective. And anyone who thinks the WikiLeaks cables mostly show that U.S. diplomats are doing good work should note this story as an example of just the opposite.

They don't show--at least in any significant way, with the caveat that thousands of e-mails still remain to be released--the U.S. government seriously misleading its allies. They don't show unauthorized war, fraudulent procurement practices or unexpected assassination. They don't show America forming significant alliances with sworn enemies or visiting unexpected deceit on friends.
--James Rainey on the "dearth of scandalous behavior" in the WikiLeaks material (L.A. Times, 12/1/10)

How good do you have to be to qualify as good? I haven't killed anybody. See, that's good, right? I haven't committed any felonies. I didn't start any wars. I don't practice cannibalism. Wouldn't you say that's pretty good?
--Calvin (Scientific Progress Goes "Boink")

If a single foreign national is rounded up and put in jail because of a leaked cable, this entire, anarchic exercise in "freedom" stands as a human disaster. Assange is a criminal. He's the one who should be in jail.
--Joe Klein, Swampland (12/1/10)

Actually, Julian Assange didn't leak anything--he can't, because he didn't have access to classified documents. Someone (or someones) who did have such access leaked those documents to Assange's WikiLeaks, which, as a journalistic organization, made them available to the world, both directly and through other media partners.

This distinction, which is widely ignored in commentary on WikiLeaks, is actually quite important, because the ethical obligations of a government official with a security clearance are quite different from those of a media outlet. An official makes a promise to protect classified information, and should break that promise only when the duty to keep one's promises is outweighed by the public interest in disclosing wrongdoing. Journalists, on the other hand, are not in the business of protecting secrets, and should have a general presumption in favor of informing the public unless disclosure would cause specific foreseeable harms. The two ethical situations are pretty much opposite.

To treat Assange as a leaker when he is, in fact, a journalist is not only morally confusing, it's quite dangerous to journalists in general. If the government can declare Assange to be spy or a terrorist because he's published classified documents he's received, every investigative journalist who does the same thing is in deep trouble.

Last night's broadcast of the PBS NewsHour (11/29/10) offered a discussion of the WikiLeaks documents. Who were the guests? As Judy Woodruff announced: "We turn to two former national security advisers with extensive experience in making and carrying out U.S. foreign policy. " That would be Carter's Zbigniew Brzezinski and George W. Bush's Stephen Hadley. The discussion was about as illuminating as one might expect.

Hours later on the Charlie Rose show, guest host Jon Meacham featured a typical Charlie Rose discussion: two reporters from the New York Times and former Clinton State Department aide Jamie Rubin. The Times reporters more or less retold stories they are reporting in the paper, so it was left to Rubin to hurl accusations against WikiLeaks:

I think the widespread dissemination of pretty much everything that the U.S. State Department does is an attack on the U.S. ability to operate in the world.  It's not on one policy, like I'm against Iraq War or I'm against the Afghan War.  It's an attack against the American government's ability to conduct its foreign policy, meaning America's being attacked in a cyber attack by a particular group of individuals who are trying to harm American foreign policy and therefore America, and therefore, in my opinion, harm the interests of the West.

Rubin went on to add:

And ironically, the State Department are the people who are trying to do the job that the WikiLeaks founder says he's trying to do, which is world peace.  It's not going to happen if the State Department can't make secret agreements sometimes with foreign leaders.

I wasn't aware that the State Department's job is to create world peace. But Jamie Rubin worked there, so he'd know better.

WikiLeaks document dumps are largely what media want to make of them. There's one conventional response, which goes something like this: "There's nothing new here, but WikiLeaks is dangerous!"  But there's another option:  "There's nothing here, except for the part that confirms a storyline we've been pushing." In  those cases, WikiLeaks is deemed very, very useful.

That was the case with the last batch of WikiLeaks documents, when the New York Times wrote a long piece about what the documents alleged about Iran's involvement in the Iraq War. Journalist Ali Gharib wrote about that issue (and talked to CounterSpin about it too). You get a similar feel from the Times' treatment of Iranian weapons in today's edition (11/29/10).

"Iran Fortifies Its Arsenal With the Aid of North Korea" is the self-confident headline, and the piece (co-authored by William Broad, James Glanz and David Sanger) seems remarkably certain about this intelligence:

Secret American intelligence assessments have concluded that Iran has obtained a cache of advanced missiles, based on a Russian design, that are much more powerful than anything Washington has publicly conceded that Tehran has in its arsenal, diplomatic cables show.

The Times' account seems to rely almost entirely on one cable in the WikiLeaks archive-- a "detailed, highly classified account of a meeting between top Russian officials and an American delegation."  The Times wastes no time in conveying the danger:

The missiles could for the first time give Iran the capacity to strike at capitals in Western Europe or easily reach Moscow, and American officials warned that their advanced propulsion could speed Iran's development of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

At issue are 19 missiles that Iran allegedly bought from North Korea. It's hard to know how definitive this evidence might be. (There are likely many secret documents pertaining to Iraq's WMDs that proved to be entirely incorrect; because something is secret or confidential does not mean it's uniquely candid or truthful.) The Times does not seem at all skeptical about the story, but there's one thing they won't do: publish the actual cable:

At the request of the Obama administration, The New York Times has agreed not to publish the text of the cable.

So the paper will publish a story that reiterates the most explosive allegations in the cable, but not the cable itself. This is curious.

Luckily WikiLeaks did publish it. And the most interesting thing one learns is that the Russians were deeply skeptical of the U.S. allegations about these missiles:

Russia said that during its presentations in Moscow and its comments thus far during the current talks, the U.S. has discussed the BM-25 as an existing system.  Russia questioned the basis for this assumption and asked for any facts the U.S. had to provide its existence such as launches, photos etc.  For Russia, the BM-25 is a mysterious missile.  North Korea has not conducted any tests of this missile, but the U.S. has said that North Korea transferred 19 of these missiles to Iran.  It is hard for Russia to follow the logic trail on this.  Since Russia has not seen any evidence of this missile being developed or tested, it is hard for Russia to imagine that Iran would buy an untested system.  Russia does not understand how a deal would be made for an untested missile.  References to the missile's existence are more in the domain of political literature than technical fact.  In short, for Russia, there is a question about the existence of this system.

In other words, not only were the Russians not convinced that Iran had purchased these missiles, they weren't sure that these missiles even existed.

The cable went on to note that the U.S. view is that the Iranians might be buying a system that doesn't work in order to adapt the technology to its existing missiles:

The U.S. repeated its earlier comment that Iran and North Korea have different standards of missile development than many other countries, including the U.S. and Russia. North Korea exported No Dong missiles after only one flight test, so it is not unimaginable that it would build and seek to export a system that has not been tested.  This is especially true for North Korea because of its need for hard currency.  In the U.S. view, the more interesting question is why would Iran buy a missile that has not been tested.  One possible answer is that Iran has recognized that the BM-25's propulsion technology exceeds the capabilities of that used in the Shahab-3, and that acquiring such technology was very attractive.  Iran wanted engines capable of using more-energetic fuels, and buying a batch of BM-25 missiles gives Iran a set it can work on for reverse engineering. This estimate would be consistent with the second stage of the Safir SLV using steering engines from the BM-25 missile.

Of course it's possible that the North Koreans actually sold Iran missiles that they can use to strike Europe. Or they didn't do any such thing. Or that they sold them missiles that don't actually work. But the Times seems to be going with the first story, based on secret documents that, when you actually read them, suggest strongly that the other two possibilities might be correct. In light of this, the decision not to publish the cable makes a lot more sense: You can make strong allegations about an official enemy without letting your readers see the less than overwhelming evidence.

From one of the Washington Post's stories about WikiLeaks:

A senior U.S. intelligence officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to be identified, said: "No one should think of American diplomats as spies. But our diplomats do, in fact, help add to our country's body of knowledge on a wide range of important issues. That's logical and entirely appropriate, and they do so in strict accord with American law."

The source is anonymous because he must remain...anonymous. Got it.