Zimbabwe Diamond Scandal Overlooked

The Root
December 9, 2012

Perhaps understandably, a court ruling that a Zimbabwean mining executive must pay U.S. $10 million in defamation damages because of comments published by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks did not get much Western news coverage.

Andrew Cranswick, CEO of African Consolidated Resources, allegedly told U.S. diplomats that the country’s spy chief,Happyton Bonyongwe, and other officials were looting diamonds from the country’s diamond fields, according to U.S. diplomatic cables leaked by WikiLeaks in 2009.

Cranswick says he never spoke to U.S. embassy officials. Still, Radio France International, which reported the judicial ruling last month, said the judgment was likely to encourage piling on by other officials linked to President Robert Mugabe‘s party. They, too, have launched lawsuits over WikiLeaks.

Closer to home, a military trial at Fort Meade, Md., has begun for Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of secret diplomatic cables and classified reports while working as an intelligence analyst in Baghdad in 2009 and 2010. The cables involved the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as U.S. relations with Third World countries.

Left-wing groups have accused much of the mainstream media, particularly the New York Times, of downplaying the start of Manning’s trial.

On Wednesday, the New York Times public editor agreed. “In failing to send its own reporter to cover the fascinating and important pretrial testimony of Bradley Manning, The New York Times missed the boat,” Margaret Sullivan wrote. “. . . The testimony is dramatic and the overarching issues are important. The Times should be there.”

The media watch group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting said Tuesday, “These dramatic developments, in particular the testimony from Manning (11/29/12), were mostly unreported in corporate media. The New York Times ran a brief Associated Press wire story (11/30/12). Manning’s story was mentioned by just one of the three big network newscasts (CBS Evening News, 11/29/12). There was a brief mention on the PBS NewsHour (11/30/12), mostly about suicide risk.”

What were these reporters missing? Eliza Gray wrote Wednesday for the New Republic, “Last week, in a Grisham-like courtroom scene, Bradley Manning — the Army private charged with leaking hundreds of thousands of classified war logs and State Department cables to WikiLeaks — testified publicly for the first time since his arrest in May of 2010. For more than five hours, Manning described the two months he spent in a ‘cage’ inside a dark tent in Kuwait and the nine months that followed in 23-hours-a-day solitary confinement on a Marine Corps Brig in Quantico, Virginia. In one theatrical moment, Manning got up from the stand and paced inside a 6 by 8 tape outline on the courtroom floor to demonstrate the size of his prison cell. In another, he donned the suicide smock he had to wear.”

The case is far more important than the fate of one man, however.

It places some members of the news media in collusion with what could be ruled an illegal act. It makes some journalists uncomfortable.

“The Times has always had a rocky relationship with WikiLeaks, Manning, and other leakers of state secrets,” Gray wrote. “After publishing the cables, Bill Keller, the Times executive editor at the time, wrote an 8,000-word New York Times Magazine story in which he compared Julian Assange,” editor-in-chief and founder of WikiLeaks, “to a ‘bag lady.’ ‘We regarded Assange throughout as a source, not as a partner or collaborator,’ he wrote.” In Britain, “The Guardian, on the other hand, sought ‘partnership between a mainstream newspaper and WikiLeaks: a new model of cooperation aimed at publishing the world’s biggest leak,’ as Yochai Benkler described it in the Harvard Civil-Rights Civil-Liberties Law Review.”

Andy Greenberg, author of “This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim To Free The World’s Information,” speaking in September on “The Diane Rehm Show,” an NPR program originating at Washington’s WAMU-FM, compared the WikiLeakers with the now-celebrated Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg released “The Pentagon Papers” on the Vietnam War in 1971, first to the New York Times, then to the Washington Post. That case went to the Supreme Court, whichruled that the government could not restrain publication even if there was some danger to national security.The State Department would not detail the damage done by the released cables. A spokesman told Journal-isms by email, “The Department of State does not comment on materials, including classified documents, which may have been leaked. Any unauthorized disclosure of classified information by Wikileaks has harmful implications for the lives of identified individuals that are jeopardized, but also for global engagement among and between nations. Given its potential impact, we condemn such unauthorized disclosures and are taking every step to prevent future security breaches.”

The difference? “. . . Assange was just more interested in these record-breaking leaks, the act of leaking, than even the content of the information,” Greenberg said. “. . . I do believe that Manning erred in releasing this kind of unfiltered, just massive mega leak of information. I believe he should have done more what Ellsberg did, which is to read it all himself, to filter himself and not put these innocent sources in danger.”

In a piece Thursday in the Huffington Post, Assange asserted, “. . .The material that Bradley Manning is alleged to have leaked has highlighted astonishing examples of U.S. subversion of the democratic process around the world, systematic evasion of accountability for atrocities and killings, and many other abuses.” Included was a revelation that two journalists, one a Spaniard, were killed during the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq when a U.S. tank fired on a Baghdad hotel, and that the United States sought to have Spain drop plans to prosecute three U.S. solders who were involved.

“. . . It is the case that WikiLeaks’ publications can and have changed the world, but that change has clearly been for the better,” Assange wrote. Perhaps unaware of the case of the Zimbabwe mining executive, he added, “Two years on, no claim of individual harm has been presented . . .”