In case you missed it, Libyan strongman Muammar al-Qaddafi gave a bizarre speech this weekend lamenting the downfall of his eastern neighbor, Tunisia's Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. The best part was when he started talking about WikiLeaks, which he calls "Kleenex":

Even you, my Tunisian brothers. You may be reading this Kleenex and empty talk on the Internet. This Internet, which any demented person, any drunk can get drunk and write in, do you believe it? The Internet is like a vacuum cleaner, it can suck anything. Any useless person; any liar; any drunkard; anyone under the influence; anyone high on drugs; can talk on the Internet, and you read what he writes and you believe it. This is talk which is for free. Shall we become the victims of “Facebook” and “Kleenex”* and “YouTube”! Shall we become victims to tools they created so that they can laugh at our moods? 

Thanks to Amira Al Husseini for the translation. You can watch part of the speech here, though unfortunately it's not the same section. Toward the end here, he cites a World Economic Forum ("Day-vos," he says) report ranking Tunisia's economy among the most competitive in Africa:

The Internets are buzzing about an interview Julian Assange gave to Al Jazeera's Arabic channel Wednesday, in which the WikiLeaks frontman reportedly threatened to release cables showing that various Arab officials were working with the CIA.

He vowed to do so "if I am killed or detained for a long time."

“These officials are spies for the U.S. in their countries,” Assange said, according to Qatar's Peninsula newspaper. More:

The interviewer, Ahmed Mansour, said at the start of the interview which was a continuation of last week’s interface, that Assange had even shown him the files that contained the names of some top Arab officials with alleged links with the CIA. [...]

Some Arab countries even have torture houses where Washington regularly sends ‘suspects’ for ‘interrogation and torture’, he said.

He then complained, "Washington is also projecting me as a terrorist and wants to convince the world that I am another Osama bin Laden."

Observers have long speculated about the massive "insurance" file that WikiLeaks posted on the Pirate Bay, which has by now been downloaded by thousand of people all over the world. Opening the file requires an encryption key that presumably would be released upon Assange's incarceration or untimely death. I guess it's the motherlode.

I have my doubts about these new claims, though. The CIA vigorously protects the identities of its sources, and would have no reason to let any old schmo at a U.S. embassy know their names. It is also highly doubtful that the cables would talk about "torture houses" -- the United States has always denied that it (knowingly) outsources rough treatment to foreign governments. Not everyone believes this, mind you, but I'd be surprised if any embassy cables said otherwise.

Maybe Assange and Mansour are confusing ordinary visits of Arab officials to U.S. diplomats with "spying," but it's hard to say for sure without seeing the cables themselves.

I love a good blog fight as much as anyone, but after reading several thousand words of accusations and counter accusations being slung between Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald and Wired's Evan Hansen and Kevin Poulsen, I'm left scratching my head trying to figure out what, exactly, this particular dispute is all about.

For those of you who haven't been paying attention, first of all: congratulations. Second, here's a quick synopsis: On June 6, Poulsen and his colleague Kim Zetter broke the sensational story that a young Army intelligence officer, Bradley Manning, had been arrested for disclosing classified information to WikiLeaks, including a video showing a U.S. helicopter gunship killing three civilians in Iraq and more than 250,000 State Department cables. Wired's main source was Adrian Lamo, a former hacker who says he turned Manning in to U.S. authorities after the latter confessed to the deed in a Web chat. As Lamo explained his motivation: "I wouldn't have done this if lives weren't in danger."

Four days later, Poulsen and Zetter published a new article on Manning, as well as an incomplete transcript of Lamo and Manning's chats, which had begun on May 21 and continued for a few days. "The excerpts represent about 25 percent of the logs," they wrote. "Portions of the chats that discuss deeply personal information about Manning or that reveal apparently sensitive military information are not included."

That same day, the Washington Post published its own article on Manning's arrest, quoting from the logs, which the paper said it had received from Lamo. Some of the quotes do not appear in Wired's excerpts. Wired also continued to follow the story.

On June 18, Greenwald wrote a long blog post raising questions about Poulsen's scoop and about Lamo. He said he found the story "quite strange," called Lamo an "extremely untrustworthy source," and accused Poulsen of being "only marginally transparent about what actually happened here."

What was curious about Greenwald's post was that he didn't challenge any specific facts in Wired's reporting; he just pointed to what he saw as inconsistencies in the story, as well as Lamo's account, and condemned the ex-hacker's actions as "despicable." He didn't suggest outright that Manning had not actually confessed to Lamo. He didn't try to argue that Manning hadn't broken the law. He didn't say the log excerpts were fabricated. He did, however, complain that Lamo had told him about conversations with Manning that were not in the chat-log excerpts published by Wired, and called on the magazine to release them. Poulsen said he wouldn't be doing so, telling Greenwald: "The remainder is either Manning discussing personal matters that aren't clearly related to his arrest, or apparently sensitive government information that I'm not throwing up without vetting first."

Still with me?

Then, on Monday, several weeks after the cables had begun trickling out, Greenwald again returned to the issue. In a torqued-up post titled "The worsening journalistic disgrace at Wired," he excoriated the magazine and Poulsen for refusing to release the full logs, calling Poulsen's behavior "odious" and "concealment" of "key evidence." Greenwald appears to have been motivated to weigh in anew by Firedoglake -- a left-leaning website whose members had been obsessively trolling the Web for stories about Lamo and Manning, and even pulled together a handy, color-coded expanded transcript from the logs -- as well as by a flawed New York Times article reporting that the Justice Department was trying to build a conspiracy case against WikiLeaks frontman Julian Assange. Presumably, the logs would be an important part of the prosecution's argument.

Wired responded to Greenwald Tuesday night with twin posts by Evan Hansen, the magazine's editor in chief, and Poulsen. Greenwald fired back with two angry posts of his own today (1, 2). Long story short: Wired reiterated its refusal to release the logs (Poulsen: "[T]hose first stories in June either excerpted, quoted or reported on everything of consequence Manning had to say about his leaking"), Greenwald rejected that explanation, and both sides traded some nasty barbs about each other and made competing claims about the nature of Poulsen's relationship with Lamo.

What still remains a mystery to me is what, exactly, Greenwald thinks is being covered up here. What is he accusing Wired of doing, and why? Does he think that the full transcript of the logs would somehow exonerate Manning, or prove Lamo a liar? And if he catches Lamo telling a journalist something that wasn't in the logs, what then?

Ironically, Wired seems most worried about protecting Manning, whom Greenwald is ostensibly trying to defend. The magazine has hinted all along that what's not been made public is mainly stuff that Manning would not want to see on the front page of the Daily Mail. Hansen writes:

To be sure, there's a legitimate argument to be made for publishing Manning's chats. The key question (to us): At what point does everything Manning disclosed in confidence become fair game for reporting, no matter how unconnected to his leaking or the court-martial proceeding against him, and regardless of the harm he will suffer?

In other words: Be careful what you wish for, Glenn.

UPDATE: Over Twitter, Greenwald responds. Here are three tweets put together:

To answer your question, I want the logs because it'll show if Lamo's claims are *true* - isn't that what journalism is? You seem confused because I don't know whose cause will be helped by disclosure - it'll help the cause of truth. Lamo made lots of fantastical claims about what Manning said - Wired can say if those claims are true. Why shouldn't they???

I know Glenn is looking for a normative answer, but I'm going to answer this in a roundabout way. Reporters generally don't consider it their business to fact-check claims made by sources in other publications. They look for ways to advance a story, or move on to other topics if there doesn't seem to be any "news" to be had. They also generally do weigh the harm that will come of too much disclosure against the value of the information to be disclosed. And they judiciously husband their scarcest resource: time.

I think some combination of all that is what is going on here, in addition to the bad blood that has been generated by Greenwald's unfortunate impugnment of Poulsen's integrity and his motives. Would it be relatively easy for Wired to take a look at the specific claims Lamo has made and check them against the logs? Probably. Would it be worth someone's time there? Maybe. Do I wish Poulsen would just directly address the seeming contradictions in Lamo's statements, in a way that protects what shred of privacy Manning has left? Yes. (In fact I emailed him this morning hoping to talk with him about it myself.) But at this point, I doubt it will happen.

Mikhail Khordokovsky, the ex-tycoon who was convicted in a Moscow courtroom Monday on embezzlement charges -- a development that surprised approximately zero observers -- faces a grim short-term future, judging from a cable released this week that describes the Russian prison system in painful detail.

The cable, dated Feb. 27, 2008, and signed by then-ambassador William J. Burns, tells of a broken, inhumane system that "combines the country's emblematic features -- vast distances, harsh climate, and an uncaring bureaucracy -- and fuses them into a massive instrument of punishment." A Dostoevsky novel come to life.

Khordokovsky has yet to be sentenced, but observers expect he could be on the hook for as many as 15 more years in jail. Since he was first arrested in 2003, he has spent much of his time in Krasnokamensk, a Siberian prison camp more than 3,000 miles from Moscow. There, he was exposed to freezing temperatures, awful food, and solitary confinement -- conditions he called "Gulag Lite." Later, during his two-year trial, he was crammed into "a 35-square-foot cell with several other men and no fresh air or sun save for a few shafts of light through a tiny ventilation window," according to an account earlier this year in FP.

Judging by Burns's cable, Khordokovsky's experience sounds rather typical. But Russian prisons aren't simply brutal, inhospitable places. They also contain some unique features. For instance, enforcers:

According to Lev Ponomarev, who recently established the NGO "For Prisoners' Rights," the authorities use a two-tier system of administration. The prison officials and the guards protect the perimeter of the facilities and provide the upper layer of security, but then they elevate select prisoners to act as internal enforcers among the other prisoners. These elite prisoners receive privileges and protections in return for enforcing a brutal form of order within the prisons. Ponomarev called this a "low-risk ghetto system" for the guards. "If one of their enforcers gets killed by another, they can just promote a new one. Maybe even the one that killed the last boss." [...]

This system of using prisoners to enforce discipline and order was formally established by the Ministry of Justice in 2005. According to William Smirnov, a member of the President's Council on Human Rights, the MOJ formalized a system that had long existed. Smirnov defended the system, telling us that "It was not a bad idea, but it was poorly implemented."

Another unique feature? Toddlers:

At the women's prison in Mozhaisk (Moscow Oblast) the Embassy and a visiting DOJ delegation were given a tour of the prison housing facilities and clothing factory, and then treated to a bizarre fashion and talent show by the inmates. Eleven of the 43 women's prisons in the Russian Federation allow inmates to have children under age three to live on the prison grounds, and women in the other prisons who become pregnant are transferred to prisons that allow children. Only two, Mozhaisk and Mordovia, allow mothers to live and sleep in the same rooms with their young children. At age three, the children are moved to family members on the outside or to orphanages. The facilities at Mozhaisk were clean, well kept, and the factory where prisoners produced uniforms for the military, police, and other government workers appeared to be safe, well lit, and well run.

Burns, or whoever wrote the cable, holds out no hope for change:

A system as vast and entrenched as the Russian prison system will be difficult if not impossible to reform. The nature of the system, which has not substantively varied as it has evolved from tsarist prisons to the gulag to today's system, nurtures the spread of disease, abuse, and corruption. Observers agree that the combination of distance, isolation, corruption, and general indifference to the plight of convicts combine to create a system that is brutal and will resist attempts to reveal its inner workings, or to change it.

For Egypt watchers, thrilled as they no doubt were to read Hosni Mubarak's private ruminations on Iran or his advisors' insistence that Egyptian diplomacy is still a force for peace in the Middle East, we're just now getting to the good stuff.

WikiLeaks has released a fresh batch of cables from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, and these make for much more interesting reading.

Many of them deal with the very sensitive question of whether Gamal Mubarak, the president's son, will succeed his father (one particularly frank cable calls this issue "the elephant in the room of Egyptian politics"), and there are some revealing nuggets on that score.

In one cable, Hosni regales Frank Ricciardone, then the U.S. ambassador, and a visiting congressman with some rare fatherly insights on Gamal -- whom he describes as a perfectionist:

"As a schoolboy, if I gave him a notebook with one line that was not straight, he would throw a fit and demand a new one," Mubarak laughed. Furthermore, Gamal is "idealistic" and "punctual." Mubarak added, "If he (Gamal) says, 'meet me for lunch at 2:00,' he means 2:00. Set your watch by it."

Presidential material! In the same cable, Hosni says he exercises each afternoon when he's in Cairo, but when he retreats to his beach house in Sharm el-Sheikh, on the Sinai coast, "I just relax -- no exercise." He also misremembers Gamal's age at one point. Here's the best bit, tagged as sensitive/no foreign:

Throughout the meeting, Mubarak was expansive and in fine humor. He rose easily from his seat several times to point out activity on the golf course and to be photographed with his visitors. He engaged the visitors extensively on the topic of food, stressing that his favorite fare is Egyptian popular breakfast dishes, such as tamiya (felafel) and foul (beans). He ordered up a huge tray of freshly made tamiya sandwiches for lunch, and lustily consumed several.

(I had always heard that Hosni was big on shrimp while he was in Sharm, but I guess he's got to keep it real.)

Other Cairo cables are more analytical, delving into various succession scenarios, comparing Mubarak to his predecessor Anwar Sadat, and evaluating the Egyptian military, which unnamed Egyptian interlocutors portray as "in intellectual and social decline," albeit still deeply enmeshed in the economy.

But the question of what happens when "pharaoh" dies hangs over all.

Read on

Oh, goody. Perhaps upset that his last film, Capitalism, was a dud and he hasn't been in the news for a while, filmmaker Michael Moore is now offering to post bail for WikiLeaks frontman Julian Assange, who is currently languishing in a British prison while the Brits work out his extradition to Sweden, where he's wanted for questioning.

In a statement posted on his website, Moore writes:

I support Julian, whom I see as a pioneer of free speech, transparent government and the digital revolution in journalism. His commitment to exposing the follies of government and business offers the greater society a chance to protect itself from these follies. Some aren't just follies. Some are crimes. What do we do with someone who informs the authorities -- and in this case it is the free people in a democracy who are the "authorities" -- that a crime has been committed? Do we arrest HIM? Do we try to shut his mouth? Do we hound him, threaten him, track him down and hunt him as if HE is the criminal? He bravely informed the citizenry of what was being done in their name and with their tax monies. That is no crime. That is an act of patriotism. He should be thanked and honored, not abused and jailed. It dishonours this court to be used in this way, holding this man without bail. Julian has made the world, and my country in particular, a safer place. His actions with WikiLeaks have put on notice those who would take us to war based on lies that any future attempts to do so will be met by the fierce bright light provided by WikiLeaks and intended to expose those who commit their war crimes. His actions will make them think twice next time -- and for that we all owe him a debt of gratitude.

For the record, Swedish authorities insist that their beef with Assange has nothing to do with WikiLeaks and that no foreign government has pressured them to arrest him.

In other Assange-related news, Internet sleuths have found what looks to be a dating-website profile in which he says he is looking for an "erotic non-confomist," preferably from a country in "sustained political turmoil."

"Do not write to me if you are timid," the profile reads. "I am too busy. Write to me if you are brave."

He also appears to have absconded with a copy of a book called Introduction to Non-Classical Logic from the Melbourne University library. Notes on the library's website read: "Not returned by Julian Assange, March 2004. Despite many attempts by staff he was unable to be contacted. Still missing 2006."

Officials in Singapore are sweating the release Sunday of a fresh batch of cables that show top leaders of the tiny island nation being a little too candid about the neighbors.

The cables themselves don't seem to be out yet, but Australia's The Age newspaper reports that they make for pretty good reading.

The new cables are summaries of meetings between U.S. diplomats and three top Singaporean officials: Peter Ho, Bilahari Kausikan, and Tommy Koh (shown above in Amritsar, India).

In one cable, Koh is quoted describing Japan as "the big fat loser" in ASEAN, the Southeast Asian regional body, and attributing Japan's shrinking status in the region to "stupidity, bad leadership, and lack of vision."

"He was equally merciless towards India, describing his 'stupid Indian friends' as 'half in, half out' of ASEAN,'' the cable reportedly says.

Koh has warm words for Beijing, however: "I don't fear China. I don't fear being assimilated by China,'' the cable quotes him saying, pointing to how the Chinese go about their business in Africa ''without lecturing them about human rights and democracy as the West does."

Kausikan, meanwhile, rips neighboring Malaysia's "lack of competent leadership" and connects current Prime Minister Najib Razik to a 2006 murder scandal.

Kausikan also has some colorful things to say about Thailand, dismissing former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra as ''corrupt,'' just like ''everyone else, including the opposition." He claims that Thaksin paid off the gambling debts of the Thai crown prince, whom he describes as "very erratic, and easily subject to influence."

Another recent story, in the Sydney Morning Herald, cites a leaked State Department cable relaying that Singaporean officials told their Australian counterparts that Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim committed sodomy as he has long been accused of doing but that it was a "set up job," according to Australian intelligence. Ibrahim denies it, and his party is demanding an explanation from the Singaporeans.

One of the many fascinating angles to this unfolding State Department cables story has been the character of Julian Assange himself -- mysterious, flamboyant, and uncompromising. It often seems as if he were sent by Central Casting to play the role of WikiLeaks frontman -- with his angular Teutonic features and his obvious yen for the spotlight, he could be a villain from Die Hard or a Bond movie (one joke making the rounds before Assange turned himself in to British authorities was that if anyone really wanted to find him, all they'd have to do was pose as a photographer).

But villain is obviously a subjective word -- many view Assange as a hero speaking truth to power. So is he an activist, then? A transparency advocate? Neither term seems to quite capture the ambitions of a man who obviously has pretensions as an intellectual, as his voluminous writing makes clear. In the manner of leftist radicals of old, he seems ideologically driven not simply to expose secret communications to the light of day but to bring down "the system" as a whole. The way he writes and talks, it's as if he believes that some day he will find the Holy Grail of documents in which the Big Lie that governs the world will be found.

Is he a journalist? He claims rather grandiosely to be practicing "scientific journalism" -- which "allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on." And he calls himself the "editor in chief" of WikiLeaks. But journalists are in the business of contextualizing news stories, adding color, detail, and perspective to documents or events that in and of themselves don't tell the whole story. Assange is more like a middleman for journalists -- he has created a platform encouraging insiders to leak information exposing alleged malfeasance or corruption, and he partners with news organizations who can sift through the dross and identify what is truly interesting and important.

Is he a terrorist, as some are claiming? Obviously not -- Assange is not using violence to carry out political objectives.

So what is he? The question is not merely an academic one, for if the United States procedes with its threat to prosecute Assange, we in the media will have to think hard about whether and how to defend a man who  makes many of us deeply uncomfortable. The general precedent in U.S. law is to prosecute leakers while leaving those who publish classified information alone. But the U.S. government has never before confronted an organization that vows "regime change" and actively solicits insiders to break the law. WikiLeaks is clearly a new phenomenon.

We also need to be careful not to get too carried away here by the implications of the State Department cable dump. If it's true, as Bradley Manning seems to admit here, that all four batches of U.S. government leaks (the helicopter video, the Iraq and Afghanistan logs, and the cables) were carried out by the same person, then maybe WikiLeaks will turn out to be a flash in the pan. Indeed, what's most surprising about the State Department cables -- to which some 3 million people reportedly had access -- is that nobody else had leaked them before. Though somehow I doubt that fact helps Hillary Clinton sleep better at night.