WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange hasn't been charged with any crime in the United States yet, but he is preparing for the possibility that he will be sooner or later -- in a statement released via Twitter on Monday, WikiLeaks announced that Assange had secured the assistance of Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz.

Dershowitz has been a staunch civil liberties advocate for decades -- he represented Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel in the Supreme Court in 1972 after Gravel read the Pentagon Papers into the congressional record -- although he's as well known today for his work as a celebrity attorney (he's represented O.J. Simpson, Mike Tyson, and Leona Helmsley, among others) and his outspoken defense of Israel. "This is the Pentagon Papers case for the 21st Century," he told me today. "This is a very important test case, because it tests the reach of the First and Fourth Amendments to new electronic media. It's every lawyer's dream to help shape the law, not just react to it."

Dershowitz says he was enlisted in Assange's legal team by Geoffrey Robertson, an Australian attorney who cuts a similar profile in his own country and Britain -- he helped hide his client Salman Rushdie after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against him in 1989 -- and who signed on to Assange's case in December. "I've been involved for a while now," Dershowitz says. "I've been quietly advising them over the past weeks. I've spoken myself with Assange on several occasions."

The U.S. Justice Department's case against Assange, if it can make one, hinges on demonstrating some sort of collaboration between the WikiLeaks leader and his alleged source for his cache of U.S. government documents, Pfc. Bradley Manning, who is currently being held in a Marine Corps jail. A federal judge in Virginia agreed today to consider an order from the Justice Department compelling Twitter to hand over account information for Assange, Manning, and several other people associated with WikiLeaks -- which Twitter has so far resisted -- in an attempt to prove that the parties were communicating before Assange received the documents. Dershowitz wasn't involved in today's hearing, but says that "we will do what we can in this country to minimize the chances that [Assange] can be prosecuted here."

"In a situation like this, you're waiting to see what moves the government makes," he says. "But I never wait passively. I always wait actively."

WikiLeaks seems to have rediscovered the news cycle, releasing seven cables from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo as the Egyptian government crackdown on protesters and journalists turned ugly Thursday. There's not much in them that you didn't know if you've ever read a Human Rights Watch report on Egypt, though a 2009 scene-setter for a visit by FBI Director Robert Mueller does effectively sum up the sorry state of human rights and civil liberties in Hosni Mubarak's country:

Egypt's police and domestic security services continue to be dogged by persistent, credible allegations of abuse of detainees.  Police brutality in Egypt against common criminals is routine and pervasive, resulting from poor training and understaffing. Over the past five years, the government has stopped denying that torture exists, and since late 2007 courts have sentenced approximately 18 police officers to prison terms for torture and killings. In March, a court sentenced a police officer to 15 years in prison for shooting a motorist following a dispute. The GOE [government of Egypt] has not yet made a serious effort to transform the police from an instrument of regime power into a public service institution, but there are indications that the government is allowing the courts increased independence to adjudicate some police brutality cases.

[…]

The Interior Ministry uses SSIS [the State Security Investigative Services] to monitor and sometimes infiltrate the political opposition and civil society. SSIS suppresses political opposition through arrests, harassment and intimidation. In February following the Gaza war, SSIS arrested a small number of pro-Palestinian activists and bloggers, and detained them for periods of a few days to several weeks.

Read on

Cables from the U.S. Embassy in the Zimbabwean capital of Harare account for just 13 of the nearly 2,000 State Department documents that WikiLeaks has posted so far, but President Robert Mugabe's government has gotten a lot of mileage out of them -- in fact, he's probably made more enterprising use of the slow-rolling scandal than any other world leader. When an independent Zimbabwean newspaper reported on a cable alleging that members of Mugabe's circle -- including his wife, Grace Mugabe -- had profited extensively from the country's black -market diamond trade, the first lady sued the paper for $15 million (a move that has prompted reprisals from hackers). When WikiLeaks published a year-old cable detailing a meeting between Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai and U.S. officials, Mugabe -- who had grudgingly acceded to a power-sharing arrangement with his old nemesis -- jumped at the opportunity.

Last week, Johannes Tomana, Zimbabwe's attorney general, announced that he would consider charging Tsvangirai with high treason over the contents of the cable, in which Tsvangirai suggests the possibility of working with U.S. and other foreign officials on the international sanctions regime imposed on Mugabe's government -- penalties that Tsvangirai publicly opposed but privately insisted "be kept in place," according to the cable. High treason carries the death penalty in Zimbabwe, and a number of writers -- Christopher Albon in the Atlantic, James Kirchick in the Wall Street Journal, and James Richardson in today's Guardian, among others -- have pre-emptively placed Tsvangirai's blood on Julian Assange's hands. Richardson's piece is a particularly good summary of the events thus far and builds to a withering conclusion:

And so, where Mugabe's strong-arming, torture and assassination attempts have failed to eliminate the leading figure of Zimbabwe's democratic opposition, WikiLeaks may yet succeed. Twenty years of sacrifice and suffering by Tsvangirai all for naught, as WikiLeaks risks "collateral murder" in the name of transparency.

Before more political carnage is wrought and more blood spilled -- in Africa and elsewhere, with special concern for those US-sympathising Afghans fingered in its last war document dump -- WikiLeaks ought to leave international relations to those who understand it -- at least to those who understand the value of a life.

It's certainly true that Assange has been maddeningly unwilling to examine the implications of his actions -- or, alternately, convinced that he can have it both ways, remaking the business of geopolitics while claiming no casualties. But I'm somewhat more persuaded by Albon's measured take from last week. After noting that a Tsvangirai conviction based on the cable alone is unlikely, he writes:

It's difficult to see this as anything but a major setback for democracy in Zimbabwe. Even if Tsvangirai is not charged with treason, the opponents to democratic reforms have won a significant victory. First, popular support for Tsvangirai and the MDC will suffer due to Mugabe's inevitable smear campaign, including the attorney general's "investigation." Second, the Prime Minister might be forced to take positions in opposition to the international community to avoid accusation of being a foreign collaborator. Third, Zimbabwe's fragile coalition government could collapse completely. Whatever happens, democratic reforms in Zimbabwe are far less likely now than before the leak. 

As Robert Rotberg wrote here last week, WikiLeaks may have provided Mugabe with a useful pretext for dispatching Tsvangirai from his government, but it's an open question whether he needed one. In reward for his decade-plus of political efforts, Tsvangirai has been variously arrested, beaten, tortured, thrown from a 10th-floor window, and involved in a suspicious collision with a truck that claimed his wife's life. WikiLeaks is useful to Mugabe, but it's hardly necessary.

An April 2009 cable from the State Department's U.S. interests section in Havana, acquired by WikiLeaks and published yesterday by El Pais, offers an unsparing assessment of the state of the dissident community in Raúl Castro's Cuba, concluding that the U.S. government "will need to look elsewhere, including within the government itself, to spot the most likely successors to the Castro regime."

The portrait that the cable, signed by top mission official Jonathan Farrar, paints of the old guard of Cuban dissidents would likely seem familiar to a student of failed opposition movements anywhere in the world: organizations fragmented by the competing egos of their leaders, absorbed in campaigns of decreasing relevance to a population mostly resigned to the status quo. Farrar is not unsympathetic to the dissidents, who are up against formidable odds. "[B]eing an anti-[government] activist in Cuba is enormously difficult, and ... any effort to move beyond small meetings in private homes would almost certainly be quickly and firmly repressed by the security services," he writes.

Still, the activists do themselves no favors. Farrar notes that the leaders of groups such as Agenda para la Transición, which was formed by prominent dissidents in 2008 in the hopes of influencing the immediately post-Fidel era, are in their 50s and 60s: "They have little contact with younger Cubans and, to the extent they have a message that is getting out, it does not appeal to that segment of society." Faced with a limited pool of funding, the various groups have also dedicated much of their efforts to undercutting each other rather than the Castro government:

When we question opposition leaders about their programs, we do not see platforms designed to appeal to a broad cross section of Cuban society. Rather, the greatest effort is directed at obtaining enough resources to keep the principal organizers and their key supporters living from day to day. One political party organization told the [chief of mission] quite openly and frankly that it needed resources to pay salaries and presented him with a budget in the hope that [the U.S. interests section] would be able to cover it. With seeking resources as a primary concern, the next most important pursuit seems to be to limit or marginalize the activities of erstwhile allies, thus preserving power and access to scarce resources. 

Cuba has a younger cohort of dissidents -- such as the well-known blogger Yoani Sánchez -- who, Farrar writes, "are much better at taking ‘rebellious' stands with popular appeal." But these individuals are less likely to cohere into organized groups, and have little to do with the old-line dissidents, who Farrar says are jealous of them in any case. Dissident groups also suffer from the influence of Cuban exiles in the United States; exile groups fund the dissidents still on the island, but "opposition members of all stripes complain that the intention of the exiles is to undercut local opposition groups so that they can move into power when the Castros leave."

The saddest character in Farrar's cable is Oswaldo Paya, the veteran democracy activist and frequent Nobel Peace Prize nominee who ran the Varela Project in the 1990s and is still, in Farrar's estimation, "a very sober and serious force." But he remains traumatized by the Black Spring of 2003, the sweeping crackdown in which the Cuban government arrested, tried, and imprisoned 75 dissidents. The Black Spring trials revealed the extent to which the Cuban government had infiltrated the country's political opposition and civil society -- a surveillance that stunned even the few American journalists in Havana in its scope -- and left a cloud of mutual suspicion over the dissident community that has never quite dispersed.

"The fact that 41 of the 54 prisoners of conscience arrested in the Black Spring of 2003 and still being held," Farrar writes, "are Varela Project volunteers clearly weighs heavily on Paya. Therefore, much of his focus has been on defense of human rights and demands for the release of political prisoners. While these are laudable goals that must be pressed forward...they have little resonance within Cuban society and do not offer a political alternative to the government of Cuba."

Farrar concludes that Cuba's future likely lies in younger dissidents like Sánchez, and "within the middle ranks of the government itself" -- the regime insiders poised to succeed Castro. Beyond that, he writes, "[w]e also must continue to open up Cuba to the information age...to facilitate and encourage the younger generations of Cubans seeking greater freedoms and opportunity."

When two bloggers in Azerbaijan were thrown in jail last year for a satirical video making fun of the government of Azeri President Ilham Aliyev, a (unnamed) source told the U.S. embassy in Baku that if you wanted to understand the mercurial ruler, you had to think of The Godfather: "He's not Michael Corleone," the source said of Aliyev; "he's Sonny."

The reference to Vito Corleone's sons in the famous Francis Ford Coppola film -- the first, Michael, pragmatic and calculating in his efforts to hang onto his family's organized crime empire after an attack on Vito; the second, Sonny, hot-tempered and preoccupied with vengeance -- sets a Baku embassy official off on an extended, and inspired, riff on the subject of which Corleone, exactly, the Caucasian strongman resembles most. The cable, filed by Charge d'Affaires Donald Lu, works off of the premise of John Hulsman's and A. Wess Mitchell's notion of the "Godfather Doctrine," but the author suggests that the comparison may be particularly apt in the Azeri case:

Because of family connections, dynastic succession, the strong arming of the opposition and the creation of an elaborate patronage/protection network, the Aliyev Administration has developed an "organized crime" image in some quarters, leading some analysts to see Ilham Aliyev at times in a mafia-like role.

The diplomat-essayist concludes that, in fact, Aliyev is a Michael abroad and a Sonny at home, crediting the president with maintaining the "clever, realistic foreign policy" of his father, President Heydar Aliyev, while savagely punishing his domestic enemies:

As Aliyev perceives a challenge to his authority or affronts to his family dignity, even minor ones, he and his inner circle are apt to react (or overreact), much to the detriment of the country's democratic development and movement toward Western alliances.

But the cable suggests that Aliyev's repressive domestic tendencies may be in part the work of his longtime presidential administrator, Ramiz Mehdiyev, and wonders,

Is [Mehdiyev] the puppet or the puppet-master? At age 71 and often seen in frail health, this is an increasingly important question. While the rule of 47-year-old Ilham Aliyev could continue for decades, it would be most likely without the benefit of his consigliere. Without Mehdiyev, it is not clear whom Aliyev will turn to for help in maintaining the same firm grip on the instruments of power.

(Thanks to FP contributor Haley Edwards for the tip.)