January 14, 2020 "Information Clearing House" - Of all WikiLeaks’ releases, probably the most globally significant have been the more than a quarter of a million U.S. State Department diplomatic cables leaked in 2010, the publication of which helped spark a revolt in Tunisia that spread into the so-called Arab Spring, revealed Saudi intentions towards Iran and exposed spying on the UN secretary general and other diplomats.

The releases were surrounded by a significant controversy (to be covered in a separate  installment of this series) alleging that WikiLeaks purposely endangered U.S. informants by deliberately revealing their names.  That allegation formed a major part of the U.S. indictment on May 23 of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange under the Espionage Act, though revealing informants’ names is not a crime, nor is there evidence that any of them were ever harmed.

WikiLeaks’ publication of “Cablegate,” beginning on Nov. 28, 2010, dwarfed previous WikiLeaks releases, in both size and impact. The publication amounted to 251,287 leaked American diplomatic cables that, at the time of publication, Der Spiegel described as“no less than a political meltdown for United States foreign policy.”

Cablegate revealed a previously unknown history of diplomatic relations between the United States and the rest of the world, and in doing so, exposed U.S. views of both allies and adversaries. As a result of such revelations, Cablegate’s release was widely condemned by the U.S.  political class and especially by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

WikiLeaks, writing under the Twitter handle Cable Drum, called it,

“… The largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain. The documents will give people around the world an unprecedented insight into U.S.  Government foreign activities. The cables, which date from 1966 up until the end of February 2010, contain confidential communications between 274 embassies in countries throughout the world and the State Department in Washington DC. 15,652 of the cables are classified Secret.”

Among the historic documents are 1.7 million that involve Henry Kissinger, national security adviser and secretary of state under President Richard Nixon; and 1.4 million related to the Jimmy Carter administration.

Der Spiegel reported that the majority were “composed by ambassadors, consuls or their staff. Most contain assessments of the political situation in the individual countries, interview protocols and background information about personnel decisions and events. In many cases, they also provide political and personal profiles of individual politicians and leaders.”

Cablegate rounded out WikiLeaks’ output in 2010, which had seen the explosive publication of previous leaks also from Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning including “Collateral Murder,” the “Afghan War Diaries” and “Iraq War Logs,” the subject of earlier installments in this series. As in the case of the two prior releases, WikiLeaks published Cablegate in partnerships with establishment media outlets.

The “Cablegate” archive was later integrated with the WikiLeaks Public Library of U.S.  Diplomacy, which contains over 10 million documents. 

Global U.S.  Empire Revealed

The impact of “Cablegate” is impossible to fully encapsulate, and should be the subject of historical study for decades to come. In September 2015 Verso published “The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to U.S. Empire,” with a foreword by Assange.  It is a compendium of chapters written by various regional experts and historians giving a broader and more in-depth geopolitical analysis of U.S. foreign policy as revealed by the cables.

“The internal communications of the US Department of State are the logistical by-product of its activities: their publication is the vivisection of a living empire, showing what substance flowed from which state organ and when. Only by approaching this corpus holistically – over and above the documentation of each individual abuse, each localized atrocity – does the true human cost of empire heave into view,” Assange wrote in the foreword.

‘WikiLeaks Revolt’ in Tunisia

The release of “Cablegate” provided the spark that many argue heralded the Arab Spring, earning the late-November publication the moniker of the “WikiLeaks Winter.”

 Eventually, many would also credit WikiLeaks’ publication of the diplomatic cables with initiating a chain-reaction that spread from the Middle East (specifically from Egypt) to the global Occupy Wall Street movement by late 2011.

The first of the Arab uprisings was Tunisia’s 28-day so-called Jasmine Revolution, stretching from Dec. 17, 2010, to Jan. 14, 2011, described as the “first WikiLeaks revolution.”

Cables published by WikiLeaksrevealed the extent of the Tunisian ruling family’s corruption, and were widely accessible in Tunisia thanks to the advent of social media platforms like Twitter. Then-President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali had been in power for over two decades at the time of the cables’ publication.

One State Department cable, labeled Secret, said:

“President Ben Ali’s extended family is often cited as the nexus of Tunisian corruption. Often referred to as a quasi-mafia, an oblique mention of ‘the Family’ is enough to indicate which family you mean. Seemingly half of the Tunisian business community can claim a Ben Ali connection through marriage, and many of these relations are reported to have made the most of their lineage.”

A June 2008 cable said: “Whether it’s cash, services, land, property, or yes, even your yacht, President [Zine el Abidine] Ben Ali’s family is rumored to covet it and reportedly gets what it wants.”

The cables revealed that Ben Ali’s extended family controlled nearly the entire Tunisian economy, from banking to media to property development, while 30 percent of Tunisians were unemployed. They showed that state-owned property was expropriated to be passed on to private ownership by family members.

“Lax oversight makes the banking sector an excellent target of opportunity, with multiple stories of ‘First Family’ schemes,” one cable read. “”With real estate development booming and land prices on the rise, owning property or land in the right location can either be a windfall or a one-way ticket to expropriation,” said another.

The revolt was facilitated once the U.S. abandoned Ali.  Counterpunch reported  that: “The U.S. campaign of unwavering public support for President Ali led to a widespread belief among the Tunisian people that it would be very difficult to dislodge the autocratic regime from power. This view was shattered when leaked cables exposed the U.S. government’s private assessment: that the U.S. would not support the regime in the event of a popular uprising.”

The internet and large social media platforms played a crucial role in the spread of public awareness of the cables and their content amongst the Tunisian public. “Thousands of home-made videos of police repression and popular resistance have been posted on the web. The Tunisian people have used Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites to organize and direct the mobilizations against the regime,” the World Socialist Website wrote.

Foreign Policy magazine reported: 

 “WikiLeaks acted as a catalyst: both a trigger and a tool for political outcry. Which is probably the best compliment one could give the whistle-blower site.” The magazine added: “The people of Tunisia shouldn’t have had to wait for Wikileaks to learn that the U.S. saw their country just as they did. It’s time that the gulf between what American diplomats know and what they say got smaller.”

The Guardian published an account in January 2011 by a young Tunisian, Sami Ben Hassine, who wrote: “The internet is blocked, and censored pages are referred to as pages “not found” – as if they had never existed. And then, WikiLeaks reveals what everyone was whispering. And then, a young man [Mohamed Bouazizi] immolates himself. And then, 20 Tunisians are killed in one day. And for the first time, we see the opportunity to rebel, to take revenge on the ‘royal’ family who has taken everything, to overturn the established order that has accompanied our youth.”

On the first day of Chelsea Manning’s pretrial in December 2011, Daniel Ellsberg told Democracy Now:

“The combination of the WikiLeaksand Bradley Manning exposures in Tunis and the exemplification of that by Mohamed Bouazizi led to the protests, the nonviolent protests, that drove Ben Ali out of power, our ally there who we supported up ’til that moment, and in turn sparked the uprising in Egypt, in Tahrir Square occupation, which immediately stimulated the Occupy Wall Street and the other occupations in the Middle East and elsewhere. … I hope [Manning and Assange] will have the effect in liberating us from the lawlessness that we have seen and the corruption — the corruption — that we have seen in this country in the last 10 years and more, which has been no less than that of Tunis and Egypt.”

Clinton Told US Diplomats to Spy at UN