The Theatre of Wikileaks

As of this writing, Wikileaks’ Cablegate has published only a small fraction of its huge stockpile of diplomatic cables numbering more than 250,000, about 118,000 of which are classified either as secret or confidential correspondences between several US embassies around the world and the US State Department in Washington. These memos are yet to inflict a felt impact on the countries involved, however, that many of the cables revealed an assortment of long unheard-of ironies and absurdities in international politics makes it inevitable for statesmen and world leaders to either exercise caution or become more defiant in the light of the Cablegate revelations.

But it seems that Wikileaks is yet to post the real bombshell of an expose comparable to its 2007 leakage of a video of an American helicopter firing at civilians in a Baghdad neighborhood thereby killing two Reuters journalists, or it has published only selected memos which it deems are able to create quite a stir but don’t yet bring a major shocker that will rock monopolizing governments (has it saved the best ones for last?) For now Cablegate seems to focus mostly on being an anthology of embarrassing politics, aimed at the US government the fall guy of which (Hilary Clinton) is trying hard to let hackers understand that Cablegate is putting national and individual security at huge risk. Wikileaks’ soft-spoken founder and Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange has told TIME’s Richard Stengel via Skype that in its four years of publishing history the whistle-blower website has never caused any individual “to come to any sort of physical harm or to be wrongly imprisoned.”

According to the website’s statistical graph, 1, 796 of the memos came from the US Embassy in Manila. This wikidump, which is the largest in Southeast Asia, dates from January 2005 to February 2010 and consists of 982 unclassified, 749 classified and 65 secret memos to Washington. While Wikileaks is yet to publish any of these memos, the Philippine media is anxiously standing by as any of its disclosures would prove instrumental in revealing the US’s perceptions and position on various issues and controversies confronting, or rather hounding, the Arroyo administration at the time. [read more]