Cartoon Time.

U.S. Officials Privately Say WikiLeaks Damage Limited Despite Obama administration's public statements to the contrary



by Mark Hosenball for Reuters


Tuesday, January 18, 2011


WASHINGTON - Internal U.S. government reviews have determined that a mass leak of diplomatic cables caused only limited damage to U.S. interests abroad, despite the Obama administration's public statements to the contrary. A congressional official briefed on the reviews said the administration felt compelled to say publicly that the revelations had seriously damaged American interests in order to bolster legal efforts to shut down the WikiLeaks website and bring charges against the leakers. "I think they just want to present the toughest front they can muster," the official said. But State Department officials have privately told Congress they expect overall damage to U.S. foreign policy to be containable, said the official, one of two congressional aides familiar with the briefings who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity. "We were told (the impact of WikiLeaks revelations) was embarrassing but not damaging," said the official, who attended a briefing given in late 2010 by State Department officials. WikiLeaks caused a media and diplomatic uproar late last year when it began to dribble out its cache of more than 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables. Major headlines were generated by some of the cables, which revealed that Saudi leaders had urged U.S. military action against Iran and detailed contacts between U.S. diplomats and political dissidents and opposition leaders in some countries. "From our standpoint, there has been substantial damage," State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told Reuters. "We believe that hundreds of people have been put at potential risk because their names have been compromised in the release of these cables," he said. National security officials familiar with the damage assessments being conducted by defense and intelligence agencies told Reuters the reviews so far have shown "pockets" of short-term damage, some of it potentially harmful. Long-term damage to U.S. intelligence and defense operations, however, is unlikely to be serious, they said.


Some of the cases of more serious damage have occurred in countries where WikiLeaks' revelations have publicized closer ties with Washington than local officials publicly admit. For example, a cable released by WikiLeaks quoted Yemen's president saying he would allow U.S. personnel to engage in counter-terrorism operations on Yemeni territory even as he said publicly that the operations were being handled by domestic security forces. U.S. officials say the continued media attention on such revelations has made it difficult for Washington to repair relations with governments critical to its counter-terrorism operations, such as Pakistan and Yemen. Two U.S. intelligence officials said they were aware of specific cases where damage caused by WikiLeaks' revelations have been assessed as serious to grave, though they said they could not discuss the subject matter because it remained highly classified. Mr. Crowley said the State Department had helped move a small number of people compromised by the leaks to safer locations. Damage assessments by the State Department, Pentagon and U.S. intelligence community are still continuing, so the current view of many officials that damage has been limited could change if and when WikiLeaks and its media partners publish more documents. The assessments also cover the leaking of tens of thousands of military field reports from Iraq and Afghanistan.


Special investigative teams are also combing through unpublished material which U.S. investigators believe is in the hands of WikiLeaks. U.S. officials and sources close to WikiLeaks have said the website is sitting on a cache of documents related to the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which includes intelligence-based risk assessments of detainees. A spokeswoman for the office of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, which oversees all U.S. intelligence agencies, said, "The irresponsible and reckless behavior of WikiLeaks has of course caused damage and will continue to be damaging in the months and years to come." But current and former intelligence officials note that while WikiLeaks has released a handful of inconsequential CIA analytical reports, the website has made public few if any real intelligence secrets, including reports from undercover agents or ultra-sensitive technical intelligence reports, such as spy satellite pictures or communications intercepts. Shortly before WikiLeaks began its gradual release of State Department cables last year, department officials sent emails to contacts on Capitol Hill predicting dire consequences, said one of the two congressional aides briefed on the internal government reviews. However, shortly after stories about the cables first began to appear in the media, State Department officials were already privately playing down the damage, the two congressional officials said. The U.S. government is examining whether criminal charges can be brought against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Mr. Assange is in London fighting extradition to Sweden for questioning in a sexual misconduct investigation.


[It would appear that we’re being lied to… again….]

Just Finished Reading: Jane’s Fame – How Jane Austen Conquered the World by Claire Harman



Ah, another impulse buy in the 3 for 2 section of Waterstone’s…… Or at least semi-impulse. After all I am a big fan of Ms Austen’s work. Or at least of the one book I’ve actually read – pre-Blog so there’s no review to check out…..


Anyway….. I think I first fell in love with Jane’s work – and not incidentally Lizzie Bennet – through the BBC’s adaptation of Pride and Prejudice starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. Much later, after loving the BBC version of Persuasion (though not as much as P&P) I renewed my love of Austen’s work with the recent Kiera Knightly movie version of Pride and Prejudice (reviewed her on 9th August 2010). After that I had to read the book – which I did with relish, much chuckling and a growing realisation of why her books are such timeless classics.


This book is unusual for me in several ways. For one thing I don’t normally read books about books. Also, in general, I have little or no interest in the lives of the artists I enjoy. This crosses all boundaries from authors, musicians, actors or indeed actual artists. I have no desire to know anything about their personal lives or personal histories. So although the first part of this book didn’t bore me at all, I didn’t take any great delight in the uncovering of the details of Jane’s early life (interestingly told though it was). About the only thing that came as any great surprise was at how young she was when she died – probably of cancer – in her 40’s. The rest of her family lasted so much longer. I did wonder what would’ve happened if Ms Austen had lived long enough to produce more than 6 books. Or maybe the fact that she produced so few highly polished works is part of her everlasting appeal. What did interest me much more was the growth of the love of her books which rose from relative absurdity not long after her death to the towering place they occupy today. The number of books about Jane and her work, the websites, societies and much else besides – to say nothing of the increasingly odd-ball spin-offs – continues to grow at an amazing pace and shows no signs of subsiding.


I found this book honestly delightful and passed a very pleasant few days in its company over the Christmas break. It has prompted me, if such prompting was required, to read the rest of her books over the coming year or so as well as other classics from around that time – presently gathering dust on my bookshelves. I hope that her other works, after falling in love with P&P and Elizabeth all over again, live up to my first introduction to her work. I have every expectation that they will. I highly recommend this to all Austen fans and anyone else interested in a true publishing phenomena.

Cartoon Time.

Just Finished Reading: Human Evolution – A Very Short Introduction by Bernard Wood



I think that the thing that most surprised me about this book is the fact that, prior to the burying of our dead some 100,000 years ago, there have actually been very few discoveries of human fossils. At one point the author described how the total human fossil collection pre-dating 100KYA would easily fit into a shopping trolley. No wonder then that the full detail of our origins is largely missing and that arguments rage unresolved about which particular ancestor gave rise to recognisable Homo Sapiens.


Ideas of our origins are as old as human culture but it is only in the past 400 years or so, since the emergence of science, that we have actually been able to slowly piece together where we came from. With the framework provided by Darwin’s Evolutionary theories we are able to place humans on their correct taxonomic branch of the tree of life. With it we are able – as best we can – to place our evolutionary ancestors going back to the point where we spilt from the other apes and Great ape and arrive at the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees some 5-8 Million years ago. Again I was surprised to discover that we know almost nothing about the evolution of chimpanzees – the only fossil evidence we have (at the time of the books publication) are 700,000 year old teeth from a site in Kenya. The evidence to the parting of the ways comes primarily from genetics rather than from the fossil record. This is something that I will definitely need to read more about. Of course the lack of fossils – for both early humans and chimpanzees is easy to account for. Before we buried our dead they would have been discovered by carrion eaters and scattered to the four winds. The very earliest bones were often discovered in caves – not because our ancestors lived there – but because scavengers took bones there to eat later. It is lucky that we have any fossils of early humans at all.


With so few fossils to examine it is hardly surprising that there is much debate as to whether these remains constitute different sub-species of humanity or if they simply represent natural variation within a species. It appears that at this stage we cannot know this with any certainty. Of course this leaves the actually evolutionary path of humans rather undefined. There is most definitely more work to be done here. What does seem certain though is the ‘Out of Africa’ hypothesis. It appears, from the evidence that we have so far, that humans first evolved in Africa and spread to the rest of the world from there in successive waves probably caused by climate change.


I found this book both fascinating and rather surprising. I had thought that we had a reasonable handle on our early evolution but this appears not to be the case. There is still much to discover and many debates to be settled. I definitely need to read up more about this and will attempt to do so in the coming year – so, as always, watch this space.

Cartoon Time.

Exoplanet hunt turns up 54 potentially habitable worlds



By Jason Palmer for BBC News



Astronomers have identified some 54 new planets where conditions may be suitable for life. The announcement from the Kepler space telescope team brings the total number of exoplanet candidates they have identified to more than 1,200. The data release also confirmed a unique sextet of planets around a single star and 170 further solar systems that include more than one planet circling far-flung stars. The Kepler telescope was conceived to hunt for exoplanets, staring into a small, fixed patch of the sky in the direction of the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. It looks for the minuscule dimming of light that occurs when an exoplanet passes in front of its host star. Kepler spots "candidate" planets, which typically are confirmed by ground-based observations to confirm their existence. In just its first few months of operation, as a paper posted to the Arxiv server reports, Kepler has spotted 68 Earth-sized candidates, 288 so-called "super-Earths" that are up to twice Earth's size, 662 that are Neptune-sized, and 184 that are even larger.


On Wednesday, members of the team announced it had confirmed the Kepler-11 solar system, comprising six large exoplanets tightly circling an eight billion-year-old star that lies about 2,000 light-years away. "The fact that we've found so many planet candidates in such a tiny fraction of the sky suggests there are countless planets orbiting sun-like stars in our galaxy," said William Borucki, who heads Kepler's science programme at Nasa's Ames Research Center. "We went from zero to 68 Earth-sized planet candidates and zero to 54 candidates in the habitable zone, some of which could have moons with liquid water." The bountiful nature of the data from just a few months of observing time from Kepler makes profound suggestions about the preponderance of exoplanets in general, and about the existence of multiple planets around single stars in particular. In a separate paper, team members outlined how the Kepler candidates include 115 stars that host a pair of planets, 45 with three, eight stars with four, one with five planets, and Kepler-11, which hosts six. "Even in first four months of Kepler data, a rich population of multiples appeared, and we recognised this was going to be a very important discovery," David Latham, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told BBC News.


[It seems that everywhere we look we keep finding new planets – some of which seem, at least on the face of it, capable of supporting life as we know it. As the head of the programme said, the fact that they’ve found so many planets in such a small arc of sky points to the fact that planets – even Earth-like planets - are very common in our Galaxy. If that is the case, it would seem prudent to suspect that life is common too. I suspect that it’s only a matter of time until we confirm that too.]

Just Finished Reading: The Unfettered Mind – Writings of the Zen Master to the Sword Master by Takuan Soho (translated by William Scott Wilson)



It should be easy to imagine how I feel about a philosophy that puts forward the idea of not thinking. Of course it isn’t quite that simple. Zen proposes that we should stop thought getting ‘in the way’ of what we would be doing (or could be doing) without its presence. In the context of a sword fight this makes a kind of sense. If a sword is inbound on a killing stroke you really don’t want to spend a few micro-seconds thinking about how to respond. You just want to respond and then kill the guy before he has any change to counter strike. Without thought getting in the way the swordsman should be able – after years of swordsmanship training of course – to act and react without thinking. Weirdly, on reading the explanation of the process I knew exactly what the author meant because I had experienced Zen-like moments during my years of gaming. There have been times when, usually during RTS games that I have been ‘fighting for my life’ to such an extent that there is no time to think. For seconds at a time (and sometimes whole minutes at a time) I was acting and reacting without a single thought going through my head. To think in these circumstances is to die.


Despite that I can’t really imagine the idea of “not thinking” as much of a foundation for a philosophy that I can buy into. I can understand how useful it would be in certain circumstances but not as an end in itself. I will, however, be reading more in the area of Zen and especially how it applies to the Samurai warrior. The Samurai are a fascinating group that have interested me since my early youth and really deserve more of my attention. They will get this sooner rather than later I think.

Cartoon Time.