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On November 28, 2010, Julian Assange became America’s number one public enemy. The revelations of WikilLeaks, his organization, caused a political earthquake that raised many questions from US diplomacy and laid bare its espionage attempts. A decade later, the controversy over this scandal continues.
They say the line between diplomacy and espionage is thin. And it was only until the so-called “cablegate” scandal that the world was able to see and prove how true that sentence was.
On November 28, 2010, Wikileaks, an organization founded by programmer and activist Julian Assange, dropped a bomb on the world: nearly 250,000 State Department cables were leaked onto the Internet and delivered to mainstream media for analysis. It has been dubbed the “cablegate”, the largest document leak in history, which revealed how the United States exercised its superpower power through its diplomatic missions in every corner of the planet.
Never in history have journalists had the opportunity to access so many secrets. The documents indicated that Washington had instructed its diplomats to spy on governments and even organizations such as the United Nations. That Saudi Arabia had asked the US government to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities and that Beijing was impatient with Kim Jong-Il, the late former North Korean dictator and father of that country’s current dictator Kim Jong-Un.
He also denounced the corruption and hypocrisy of governments in the Arab world just before the outbreak of the Arab Spring, the series of protests that led to regime change in several countries. Marcel Rosenbach, a journalist from Der Spiegel in Germany, believes these cables were one of the factors in the social explosion. In Latin America, too, they caused a sensation: the deep infiltration of Cuban spies in Venezuela and the particular interest of Washington in the health of leaders of the region such as Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, currently president of Argentina, became known.
Washington businessmen, judges, politicians, and other complacent figures were similarly exposed. There were also threats and pressures on different governments to achieve the country’s goals. The tentacles of US power around the world have been revealed and as a result the country’s diplomacy has been compromised and criticized around the world. Thus, Assange, only one of those responsible for this political earthquake, ended up becoming Washington’s number one enemy.
Months before the cablegate, Assange and WikiLeaks had already dealt a blow to Washington by releasing the “Collateral Murder” video, which shows two US helicopter attacks on civilians in Baghdad, Iraq, as part of the war. Among those attacked were two children who were seriously injured but survived and were evacuated when they were discovered by a soldier who was seen approaching a van several minutes after the attack. The chronicle of the daily events of American troops in both that conflict and in Afghanistan showed the reality of the war, and sparked a barrage of criticism of the Americans.
This revelation, added to the cablegate, was enough for Washington to launch a campaign against Assange and his collaborators, most notably Chelsea Manning, ahead of Bradley Manning, the former US Army soldier and data analyst who leaked the activist and head of WikiLeaks. diplomatic documents. Manning was sentenced by a military court to 35 years in prison, although this sentence was subsequently reduced to seven years. In 2017, former President Barack Obama commuted his sentence, but Manning returned to prison for refusing to assist in the investigation of Assange. In March 2020 it was released again.
Assange, who is being held in a UK maximum security prison, has been asked by the US for extradition. In the event of extradition, the Australian activist faces 175 years in prison for 17 counts of espionage, including one for conspiring to reveal a large amount of confidential information. The trial will continue in January when Judge Vanessa Baraitser delivers the final verdict. Assange’s partner, Stella Moris, in recent days presented a petition to President Donald Trump to grant the programmer the presidential pardon.
The cablegate caused an earthquake and also a change in journalism, as it changed the concept of information in general. It was a scandal compared to the Pentagon Papers of 1971, when the New York Times and Washington Post, thanks to rumors of State Department analyst Daniel Ellsberg, revealed that every administration from Dwight Eisenhower to Richard Nixon had lied to the public about the management of war in Vietnam, that the United States was not winning and there was no progress despite the large number of dead American soldiers. This has exacerbated the unpopularity of the Nixon White House. But there are those who do not believe that there is a parallel between these two stories.
“The difference is that Ellsberg, while breaking the law, acted with what he saw as a sense of patriotism and responsibility. The Wikileaks man is an arrogant protagonist who believes he is the messiah of information (…) He did not bring a real debate as we see with the one who came out of Iraq and Afghanistan, after the fury of the press, everything died there, ”Colonel Eric Rojo, a military intelligence specialist, told the BBC.
However, there’s no denying that Cablegate has been trying to earn a place in history. And that today, ten years after the outbreak of the scandal, we continue to talk about that event, it indicates that in a certain way it has achieved its goal.
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