The King Is Naked
Published in Maariv
(Israel) on 29 November 2010
by Ben Caspit (link to original)
U.S. statesmen are emerging as a ridiculous bunch of worthless personalities incapable of keeping a secret, prattling and gossiping beyond all reason — and, in the end, finding out that the stinky eggs they’ve been throwing in all directions are spread all over their faces.
There are several things one would not want to be this morning. The first one is an American diplomat. Or just an American. Up until fifteen minutes ago, if you were invited to a meeting with an American ambassador somewhere, you wore your best suit, memorized your opening lines and were as giddy as a schoolgirl before your first date. For isn’t an American ambassador a representative of might? The greatest leak in history on the WikiLeaks site has turned all of that, almost overnight, into a farce.
At the hour this stuff is being written down, it’s still difficult to know whether the materials are really that dramatic, exclusive or novel, but one thing is clear: This is an embarrassment on a monster scale. The statesmen of the strongest superpower in the universe, from Obama to Clinton and to the south till the last of the ambassadors, are presented naked, and her shame is on display in the window of all the websites and newspapers of the world, in dreadful disgrace; her genitalia are visible to all and her sparse nudity (and so ours) is bared. They are portrayed as a ridiculous bunch of worthless personalities, incapable of keeping a secret, prattling and gossiping beyond all reason — and, in the end, finding out that the stinky eggs they’ve been throwing in all directions are spread all over their faces. The most important thing is that Jonathan Pollard is still in jail.
The second person not worth being this morning is a censor. With all of this work, conflicts with the press, the Supreme Court rulings, disputes and hesitations about what to approve and what to erase — how is it possible, in the age of an unrestrained media that we have dropped into, to still guard the secrets of the kingdom? With his body, the censor is defending the door of the stable — while in the meantime, as it turns out, the stable doesn’t have walls. The horses have run away.
Here comes the Minister of Defense Ehud Barak, and in the conversation with American congressmen, he discloses a dramatic operational detail that never in life — never ever — would pass censoring: The window of opportunities for bombing the Iranian nuclear program is closing. Barak stipulated six to 18 months (spoken as of June 2009), which means that even in his lenient estimation, the opportunity for attack on Iran’s nuclear sites is going to close in the middle of 2011, which is half a year more. Any timing later than that, according to Barak, will result in a huge peripheral damage.
Not Nice Being a Journalist This Morning
And all this, as mentioned, is in the document from the American embassy in Tel Aviv as obtained by WikiLeaks. And we still haven’t talked about this issue of supplying bunker-cracking bombs, which the American administration seeks to supply to Israel in a quiet way, so as to not expose American cooperation with the Israel’s preparation for the attack. Okay, here we go: It’s been exposed.
The third thing one would not want to be this morning is a journalist. For days, weeks and years, we sweat for any slice of information, a comma or a quarter of a telegram that someone is reading for us aloud from a pay phone in the middle of the night and then vanishes right away into the darkness. We’re trying to verify sources and facts, to crosscheck, to add up details and to create insights out of hints, bits of threads and obscured sayings. And here comes this prankster, Julian something, from some website we never heard of in our whole life, who fudges hundreds of thousands, or even millions of thousands, of classified documents without printing a sheet of paper, without wasting ink, without flipping through a notebook.
Yeah, this is frustrating. ... Is this accelerating the end of the epoch of an investigative journalist, a diligent field agent, one with a notebook, wandering between the sources, leaping over hills, going from door to door and fighting for the public’s right to know? I hope not, but it looks so. From now on, the world is going to prefer electronic leaks. If the kids do not play football in the neighborhood any more, but in “V,”* why wouldn’t journalism disappear from the field and converge into WikiLeaks?
And after all, what have we got there? Lots of stories exposing a few things we didn’t know. The most ludicrous one has been Mossad’s plan for bringing down the Iranian regime. First of all, sit down. And now, you may find out that the Mossad recommended exploiting the protest of students and ethnic minorities in Iran in order to stage a coup and to knock over the regime. Voila! I’m serious. We should hope that Mossad has a real plan somewhere that doesn’t look like the scribble of an amateur blogger. On the other hand, if we do have such a plan, why is the Iranian regime still there?
A Series of Secondhand Insights
The hardest embarrassment falls on the part of the gang of Arab leaders, from the king of Saudi Arabia southward. Everything we knew about them until now is unveiled, and this time in official documents with the seal of the United States of America. How the Saudi king demands to bomb Iran, how everybody denigrates and curses the Ayatollahs like there is no tomorrow, how Arab hatred toward Persians and the nuke they’re plotting to build humbles what’s attributed to us, how the Yemenites agreed with the Americans that drones will carry on bombing al-Qaida’s strongholds in Yemen and the Yemenite government would pretend it is the one that’s actually bombing.
It’s truly like a Marx Brothers movie. And there is still a long series of secondhand insights. Instability in Pakistan (surprise), or the suspicion of a connection between the Russian government and organized crime groups (Really, how did they get to this point?), reports on improper behavior of the royal family (indeed, an historical scoop) and Benjamin Netanyahu is a charmer who never keeps his promises. We’re in shock.
Gentlemen — respected American diplomats and most esteemed chiefs of CIA stations — is this what they have established your organizations for? Is this what the American taxpayer spends trillions of dollars for (and I’m not exaggerating), so that you would report back that Silvio Berlusconi is a party animal? So that you’d identify that Putin as an Alpha male?
Yes, before WikiLeaks we knew that every American embassy around the globe was also a state-of-the-art relay station and a sophisticated tapping center. We knew that but took it seriously. Now it has become clear that the United States is in fact the supervisor of the world. Most regretfully, we’re talking the Inspector Clouseau here.
*Editor's Note: "V" refers to Israel's largest electronic games portal http://www.vgames.co.il/.
There are several things one would not want to be this morning. The first one is an American diplomat. Or just an American. Up until fifteen minutes ago, if you were invited to a meeting with an American ambassador somewhere, you wore your best suit, memorized your opening lines and were as giddy as a schoolgirl before your first date. For isn’t an American ambassador a representative of might? The greatest leak in history on the WikiLeaks site has turned all of that, almost overnight, into a farce.
At the hour this stuff is being written down, it’s still difficult to know whether the materials are really that dramatic, exclusive or novel, but one thing is clear: This is an embarrassment on a monster scale. The statesmen of the strongest superpower in the universe, from Obama to Clinton and to the south till the last of the ambassadors, are presented naked, and her shame is on display in the window of all the websites and newspapers of the world, in dreadful disgrace; her genitalia are visible to all and her sparse nudity (and so ours) is bared. They are portrayed as a ridiculous bunch of worthless personalities, incapable of keeping a secret, prattling and gossiping beyond all reason — and, in the end, finding out that the stinky eggs they’ve been throwing in all directions are spread all over their faces. The most important thing is that Jonathan Pollard is still in jail.
The second person not worth being this morning is a censor. With all of this work, conflicts with the press, the Supreme Court rulings, disputes and hesitations about what to approve and what to erase — how is it possible, in the age of an unrestrained media that we have dropped into, to still guard the secrets of the kingdom? With his body, the censor is defending the door of the stable — while in the meantime, as it turns out, the stable doesn’t have walls. The horses have run away.
Here comes the Minister of Defense Ehud Barak, and in the conversation with American congressmen, he discloses a dramatic operational detail that never in life — never ever — would pass censoring: The window of opportunities for bombing the Iranian nuclear program is closing. Barak stipulated six to 18 months (spoken as of June 2009), which means that even in his lenient estimation, the opportunity for attack on Iran’s nuclear sites is going to close in the middle of 2011, which is half a year more. Any timing later than that, according to Barak, will result in a huge peripheral damage.
Not Nice Being a Journalist This Morning
And all this, as mentioned, is in the document from the American embassy in Tel Aviv as obtained by WikiLeaks. And we still haven’t talked about this issue of supplying bunker-cracking bombs, which the American administration seeks to supply to Israel in a quiet way, so as to not expose American cooperation with the Israel’s preparation for the attack. Okay, here we go: It’s been exposed.
The third thing one would not want to be this morning is a journalist. For days, weeks and years, we sweat for any slice of information, a comma or a quarter of a telegram that someone is reading for us aloud from a pay phone in the middle of the night and then vanishes right away into the darkness. We’re trying to verify sources and facts, to crosscheck, to add up details and to create insights out of hints, bits of threads and obscured sayings. And here comes this prankster, Julian something, from some website we never heard of in our whole life, who fudges hundreds of thousands, or even millions of thousands, of classified documents without printing a sheet of paper, without wasting ink, without flipping through a notebook.
Yeah, this is frustrating. ... Is this accelerating the end of the epoch of an investigative journalist, a diligent field agent, one with a notebook, wandering between the sources, leaping over hills, going from door to door and fighting for the public’s right to know? I hope not, but it looks so. From now on, the world is going to prefer electronic leaks. If the kids do not play football in the neighborhood any more, but in “V,”* why wouldn’t journalism disappear from the field and converge into WikiLeaks?
And after all, what have we got there? Lots of stories exposing a few things we didn’t know. The most ludicrous one has been Mossad’s plan for bringing down the Iranian regime. First of all, sit down. And now, you may find out that the Mossad recommended exploiting the protest of students and ethnic minorities in Iran in order to stage a coup and to knock over the regime. Voila! I’m serious. We should hope that Mossad has a real plan somewhere that doesn’t look like the scribble of an amateur blogger. On the other hand, if we do have such a plan, why is the Iranian regime still there?
A Series of Secondhand Insights
The hardest embarrassment falls on the part of the gang of Arab leaders, from the king of Saudi Arabia southward. Everything we knew about them until now is unveiled, and this time in official documents with the seal of the United States of America. How the Saudi king demands to bomb Iran, how everybody denigrates and curses the Ayatollahs like there is no tomorrow, how Arab hatred toward Persians and the nuke they’re plotting to build humbles what’s attributed to us, how the Yemenites agreed with the Americans that drones will carry on bombing al-Qaida’s strongholds in Yemen and the Yemenite government would pretend it is the one that’s actually bombing.
It’s truly like a Marx Brothers movie. And there is still a long series of secondhand insights. Instability in Pakistan (surprise), or the suspicion of a connection between the Russian government and organized crime groups (Really, how did they get to this point?), reports on improper behavior of the royal family (indeed, an historical scoop) and Benjamin Netanyahu is a charmer who never keeps his promises. We’re in shock.
Gentlemen — respected American diplomats and most esteemed chiefs of CIA stations — is this what they have established your organizations for? Is this what the American taxpayer spends trillions of dollars for (and I’m not exaggerating), so that you would report back that Silvio Berlusconi is a party animal? So that you’d identify that Putin as an Alpha male?
Yes, before WikiLeaks we knew that every American embassy around the globe was also a state-of-the-art relay station and a sophisticated tapping center. We knew that but took it seriously. Now it has become clear that the United States is in fact the supervisor of the world. Most regretfully, we’re talking the Inspector Clouseau here.
*Editor's Note: "V" refers to Israel's largest electronic games portal http://www.vgames.co.il/.