reza said the colonel was virtually treat. could have you with this is his article if you live from the russian capital of history for up to date top stories now this historical rubble. has characterized relations between russia and the two leaders pledged to smooth ties from both sides . young russian woman working as an n.p.c. assistant to the united kingdom is arrested and faces deportation charges. tensions run high as the u.s. and japan hold the key drills in the yellow sea to exclude him from peace talks. and he continues in less than half an hour. in the meantime cross-talk discussing

whether revelations from whistleblowers are constructive or destructive and whether there's a hidden agenda in the outings stay with us on. welcome to cross talk i'm peter lavelle we keep backlash what is now called cable gate or red face gate has many asking who benefits from disclosure of classified government documents do such leaks serve the public interest at the expense of diplomacy and will governments become even more closed to public scrutiny as a result. you can. discuss weiqi leaks i'm joined by carne ross in boston he is the founder and

executive director of independent diplomat and in dusseldorf we go to any mashal and she's a former intelligence officer for m i five and now an author and journalist and another member of our crosstalk team on the hunger all right and if i go to first to you since you're a former spook and we have a former diplomat on the program would you say that we can leaks is doing a good job because it seems like they've created enormous amount of attention for themselves and it doesn't seem there's no end in sight at all ok we have tens of thousands of more documents that are supposed to come out and even more after that and it's really rattled the cage of governments all around the world so would you say they're doing a good job doing the right thing. absolutely i think that is concerned citizens around the world of course we need to know what's being done in our name and we've had over the last few years governments lying to take us into illegal wars to cover up their complicity in issues like torture they've covered up war crimes and but for whistleblowers we would never know what was going on and i think one it's

useful to be able to hold the governments to account to a certain degree our system but to it also enables the victim sometimes to try and claim some sort of justice for those actions so for example one of the big wiki leaks stories earlier this year was that the apache helicopter shootout in afghanistan where two reuters journalists were killed and the royal families have been pushing for years to get information us the pentagon about this the pentagon just lied about faithfully about it so of course now we have we can leaks showing the video and now they can try and push for some thought of justice so on a number of levels i think they're doing a very important job karn what do you think i mean is it gone too far i mean does it limit the ability of governments to conduct diplomacy now because a lot of these leaks and we look at them and some of them are just really embarrassing ok and in the ones that i looked at the deal with the post soviet space for example shows a lack of really i think professional bill if you look at events on the ground to the point where we have a leak where the state department under hillary clinton has ordered employees to spy the united nations spy on other diplomats so there is

a real range here how much is this impacted i don't want to qualify a positive negative about how do to do diplomacy in the world today. well i think you're right not to qualify it as positive or negative because it's probably going to be both i don't think wiki leaks can know with any certainty that it won't be negative but equally i don't think the us government can know with certainty that it definitely will be negative there's such an extraordinary amount of data so many many thousands of telegrams which are many of them extremely sensitive i don't buy the argument that some have said that with this just confirms stuff we knew before there's a lot of new material here much of which is extremely embarrassing i think there will be certainly some effect on diplomacy of this in the short term i think governments will restrict the circulation of data will tighten the circle of who see sensitive information but in order to be effective governments have got to share information so that that tension is unresolvable for governments in the

longer run what i hope will happen is that governments will realize that what we can leaks has done means that they can no longer assume that any data they keep will ultimately be kept secret and won't appear on the internet and what i hope that will do is pressure them to make sure that what they're saying in private what they're doing in private is the same as what they're saying about it in public and if that is indeed is the effect that would ultimately be a positive thing but of course we can't really know that at this stage any i mean it's interesting here that whole discussion and all of us have been watching this very closely you can't avoid it right now but it's all about go information control but i haven't seen too many people say maybe these governments should just stop doing these bad things and then they won't be any leaks because it won't be you know what i mean i mean it's like you know it's not trying to change your behavior it's just a perception of your behavior that's what everybody seems to be worried about externally western governments. you know you know some of the terrible terrible

things forced regime change lying to the media manipulating the media i mean i think this is why so many people in the public sphere is interested in we can leaks because western mainstream media has failed awfully in telling people what's actually going on in the world. no i totally agree i mean our mainstream media there stablished old fashion media has been much too controlled and much too craven over the last few years to hold our government to account so of course that means we've gone into situations where our government could lie to take into the war in iraq for example in the tourist forty five minutes we'll do headlines and yet none of those newspapers at the time were doing their job so we can make that effectively doing the job that the mainstream media should be doing i mean everyone says oh it's a whistleblower fight it will ensure that it's a site which provides a channel for with to securely information i suppose what they're doing is a sort of journalistic role and i think the fact that julian has the capability and the rest fifteen have the capability to protect the identity of those with us they

can go public with their concerns without risking their careers and imprisonment and liberty and the fed is very important and it's a shame that the rest of the mainstream media is not doing that job to this day you know carnival going to one of the criticism of leaks is that it it its purpose is to be show transparency of government behavior around the world in the case right now that of these diplomatic cables from the u.s. state department but a lot of people that its critics would say it is itself is not a transparent organization so i mean how do you know with the what is being leaked is are they selecting it there are people that will say they don't leaks is obsessed with the united states and its behavior in the world and which you know i'm not going to say is a bad thing but nonetheless i mean it is not an agenda less organization it has its own agenda it has the ability to give us information that it wants to see design is that a concern of yours well i think these are fair criticisms that wiki leaks have got

to answer and i think they would say that actually they're not particularly focused on the u.s. they've released data about other countries it just happens that the leaks have mostly been about the u.s. but i think they need to be careful that they're not seen as being an anti american organization but i think there is a category error in claiming that. the standards that apply to government should also apply to wiki leaks i mean governments are bodies of extraordinary power they can wage war imprison people do good things and sometimes very bad things and i think the standards of accountability and transparency are really very different need to be applied to government than applied to an organization like wiki leaks which after all is not killing people not waging war it is basically a much more minor phenomenon equally though as i've said i think there are ethical standards that we can leagues needs to be careful to maintain but if you think about that any i mean the they put themselves in a position where they are an authority now in the public sphere and so they have the ability to put out what they want and what they don't want to do someone

pointed out to me said where is the weekly leaks on israel for example i mean isn't there any issues there it seems like every other country in the world is as been affected by this and maybe it will come out in the future but again they can control a lot i mean so we can give them information but it's up to weeks to decide if they're going to give it to the public sphere. well i think if you look back over their record over the last few years and have been going since two thousand and seven so even before the big info dump that happened this year they have been pretty even handed and quite catholic really about the sort of information they've been releasing about governments intelligence agencies and mega corporations around the world so now of course the focus very much on them because of the american aspect but you know that they will release whatever is credible in their view and put it out in public from whatever source they get i mean there they seem to be on a mission to say well we don't like cover ups we don't like criminality we want to shine a light in the dark corners of government and big corporations and we feel we're

doing a duty in doing that so what else can you do i think in terms of holding them to the same standard that's come with saying is government is of course unnecessary and i've heard recently that the pentagon now has one hundred twenty strong team investigating wiki leaks and julian the sloan so i think in terms of. you've got a team like that off to you then you're not going to be that open and that out there in that transparent you're going to take some protective measures protective measures i think that's very interesting life to ask both of you given the magnitude of documents that are coming out how in the world did the u.s. state department miss somebody downloading so much material i mean with the volume of it the amount of time it would take and i'm not looking for a conspiracy here or maybe just really bad management card what do you think about that i mean just of birth of the whole thing i mean it takes a long time even to read it all go ahead i mean i i just can't understand it so one person or a small group of people could be downloading so much information without

a red light going off. i rather agree and i think there's much more to come out on this story i find it basically implausible this account that one army private downloaded this enormous stock of telegrams some of them dating back to nine hundred sixty six and there seems to be a kind of witch hunt about this man in america right now that this this man should some of called for his execution rather to lie on the principle of innocence until proven guilty. at the same time coming from the british foreign service i was amazed that so many documents were available online on a computer in the u.k. system sensitive telegrams of that kind go to a much much smaller circle of people. not to say the u.s. is the u.k. is impenetrable and perhaps one day it will suffer its own we can leaks of its own but i was rather amazed like you about the scale of this and how on earth did this happen any what do you think about that i mean is it again we're not going into the

realm of conspiracy thinking all the big i mean one person you think more people are involved in this or they don't want to say more people are involved because they don't want to show how we lax do security is i mean they want to point they want to put look for a fall guy maybe this guy was involved in it just wrap him around in it and then you know we say we found the guy. i think probably that is very much the case that there is a fall guy in that seat and it's very much to spare there blushes as well but i have to say having worked on the inside the security around a lot of the databases that governments use in the west tend to be pretty lax and pretty sort of retro they don't tend or certainly weren't focusing until very recently on good tech backup so i think it's really their chickens coming home to roost because they didn't take these sort of threats seriously enough and it's interesting as well that sort of hacktivists circles now seem to be able to run rings around the n.s.a. the pentagon and you know always military types and it's almost a sort of david and goliath sort of approach where an organization like wiki leaks

can level the playing field for whistleblowers where they can you know take a hit at the big organizations the big government and their allies and i think it's a resonates with a lot of people richer image sort of women who don't feel real quick you're after a short break we'll continue our discussion and we could still. keep you. warm. as you watch this tape i can only imagine the fear and the despair that you face for this is being recorded for viewing only after the disappearance of god's people from the earth. oh it's a pleasure cultures it's a close of civilization still we want to go back to the eighth century islamic law

or do we want to enjoy the blessings of british liberty. really christianity is one of the only religion i think the only one that actually respects the rights of people who don't break. the spirit in fact it is taking place. around the station. ready up and. wait for your moment one of the time and exclaimed. god bless you. download the official t. application to you on the phone only pulled touch from the store. life on the go. video on demand on t.v.'s mine comes and says feeds now in the palm of your.

questions on the dot com. from plans to. screen stunts on t.v. don't come. well i'm about to remind you we're talking about we keep expecting to see. it.

but before we see what russians think about public databases documents revealed wiki leaks cold one of the largest leaks of classified information in history continues to publish more and more classified documents we can leaks might be called unprecedented leaking and then credible number of documents in russia the ministry of the defense launch an electronic database presenting documents from military archives according to the polls the launch of the project was supported by ninety percent of the citizens while only ten percent oppose the idea that information related to the wars operations heroic feats and rewards of soviet soldiers now is open to the public. ok i'd like to go to you back to you any one of the interesting things that we've been hearing a lot here about how to deal with we could weeks and i'd like to go to a sound bite from joe lieberman the u.s.

senator from connecticut and what he thinks the u.s. government should do with this give me here. in my opinion we can do what we can be it says done amounts to espionage in a most serious form it's probably the single greatest. and most terrible activist pre-knowledge against united states in our history because wiki leaks used the massive power and openness of the internet. to disseminate stolen classified information around the world and in doing so compromise not only america's national security but the security of a lot of other countries and the lives of a lot of people who are mentioned in those documents. ok and it's quite interesting here with joe lieberman has to say he doesn't want to and did deal with any of the lead the information that are in those cables ok it all and i mean it's complete you know i see that is complete denial ok almost to the point of

saying ok it's all true but ok because that's what it looks like to me is that what it looks like to you because there seems to be very little coming out of the state department of the u.s. about the authenticity of it they actually even don't really doubt the authenticity that they i mean because he said well on that i won't talk about that issue and won't talk about that issue so i mean it this is kind of a state of denial we just have to make sure we can't we can't have whistleblowers that's the most important thing protect national security irrespective of content. well it whether it's national security or national embarrassment for the matter but yes this is a classic response that you shoot the messenger and you don't address the message i mean i certainly it threw that in a whistle blowing is back in the one thousand nine hundred k. and i've seen that time and time again as well with subsequent whistleblowers that if you can discredit and destroy the organizations or the people involved then you don't have to address the very serious message that they're putting out and the pushback from some of these american politicians that they should assassinate someone or that they should put. on

a foreign terrorist list as well as try and perhaps prosecute them for espionage and things i mean this is ludicrous you know who is the criminal here is it the person is it we're going to is ation is it the government that is committing the crime or is it the person who is reporting this crime clearly it's really interesting with and lieberman piece because it seems to me when i looked at it i was just a gas saying you can't interrogate us you can't ask any questions you have no right to know because we will protect you it's our job to protect you and i think that's quite insulting to to a public looking at these documents as i think the news huge interest in them is just that government doesn't isn't accountable to people and that's what this organization is all about the respect of you what you think of its founder or its behavior or maybe its charter the documents the don't refute it is being authentic speak for themselves and government is not accountable. no i entirely agree that's why we can leagues exist because people feel that the government has not been

telling them the truth over the last few years particularly in iraq afghanistan the war on terror and they're absolutely right but the reaction reaction here both politically and publicly here in the in the u.s. has been pretty pretty extraordinary basically a mass condemnation of of we kill leaks and politicians taking it in turns to condemn them in ever more colorful terms and that that's a very interesting thing it seems to me to speak of the mood here since nine eleven where there are constant stories feeding national paranoia about terrorism some with foundation but it doesn't lead to questioning of the relationship between government and the people and i hope on sober reflection people will question that relationship more more fundamentally i've been amazed to hear in the us that even liberal commentators have assumed and argued that government needs to secrecy in order to operate but they don't even know what government is keeping secret from us

how do we get around that and you know we do accept the fact that there has we have a diplomatic corps we do have a security forces there it is a dangerous world but you know you're not paranoid by saying it's a dangerous world i mean but how do we use the line where do we draw where we need to be prince parent while having secrets the religion are meant to have and convince people that we we know the difference between the two because i think there's you know if you look at the politics going on in the u.s. it's basically mass hysteria because nobody knows what really to believe anymore it all and you know obviously you have this organization like wiki leaks a gives you an enormous amount of information it's not filtered or at least doesn't appear to be filtered if you want to make the effort you can actually learn a lot about how your government works. well i agree with carney i think there's a breakdown of trust between people in government they don't feel they've been told the truth and i think in terms of sites like wiki leaks and the role of whistle blowers they need a certain degree of protection because at the moment in our countries whistleblowers tend to be prosecuted and persecuted and there is no official

channel for it for example intelligence whistle blows to go to in the u.k. and the u.s. so i mean it's well acknowledged within the intelligence agencies that the only information you need meaningfully to keep secret is sensitive operational techniques ongoing operations and agent identities and anything else really should be out there so increased accountability increased transparent will increase trust between the government and the government and if there is a proper official channel that will as can go to where they feel they will be not only heard but there's a whistle blowing will be acted upon meaningfully i think then probably we wouldn't need such that we could leak but until that day unfortunately we do harm your former diplomat what you think about that all those good parameters. yes i think there are good parameters but i think these parameters should be a lab rated basically by parliament by the democratic mechanisms of scrutiny and accountability and i think that one of the reasons wiki leaks has come about is because parliament both in britain and congress in the us has basically failed to

act as an adequate mechanism of accountability and scrutiny over the last few years i know this i work very sensitive issues iraq afghanistan terrorism i was never properly questioned by parliament either before or since all during rather during that period of policymaking or even subsequently and i think there's a general sense that that mechanism is inadequate a sensible conclusion from all of this therefore would be the parliament's. politicians need to ask themselves how can they promote better mechanisms of transparency and accountability rooted in democratic institutions rather than allowing wiki leaks to do its in this this very crude and dramatic fashion you know and i'd like to address one more issue with both of you that i think is very important i mean i don't know anybody who's read all of the cables but i've read a lot of them but the cable that got my attention of the most not the embarrassing ones or the funny ones and there are plenty of them here but it was the cable headed reporting on collection needs the united nations red state zero four eight

four eight nine now that is a document a cable that is quite significant because that is a cable that went from the state department out everything else from what i can see when from outside to the state department now i think it's quite interesting is it's quite galling that the u.s. state department is demanding its own employees to break u.s. and international law and in both of you i am very dissatisfied that mainstream media has not focused enough on this cable everyone who goes after the funny ones the embarrassing ones and there's plenty of them what politicians by definition can be embarrassing i think ok but what about this again this is more smoke and mirrors and it's trying to change the topic and what do you think about that because it's very clear which state department officials are supposed to do their marching orders. absolutely and again it just shows that the mainstream media is not doing its job adequately and that's why we need organizations like wiki but it's

interesting as well it's the idea that the state department to be ordering diplomats to spy on u.n. counterparts and things now is being released by wiki leaks this story of course broke as well in the u.k. and us way back in two thousand and three in the run up to the iraq war where we had a very famous u.k. intelligence whistleblower catherine gun who worked for g c h q which is the u.k. listening post who got hold of a telegram that actually said that the us wanted certain swing states to be tried upon in the run up to the crucial vote about the legality of the iraq war this woman and this really highlights the value of what we can leaks is doing now this woman was victimized for months they charged her with a breach of the official secrets act she lost her job she lost her income she was everything and it was only at the very last very last hour before the trial started that they dropped her prosecution because of potential political embarrassment so she put an individual through that for reporting crime illegality on the part of the state within the un is just ludicrous so if we can leaks can report that sort

of information without someone having to give the chop you know lose their job or get prosecuted for leaking that's an information i say all power to them you know carl if i go back to you are you concerned by this this cable about the do the order for us state department visuals to spy on their counterparts at the un that's not given enough time it's not being talked enough about because i know the deceit department spokesperson was asked about it in just a convoluted answer i read it over and over again i couldn't figure out what the hell you're saying ok i really don't i mean it came from sign that says convoluted nonsense ok he didn't want to answer the question in like you said as part of a lot of cables that is one that is very that's a huge indictment of what's going on in american foreign policy. well yes and now i have to say i mean firstly that a lot of the media i've been aware of has picked up on that cable i've been asked a lot about it in interviews secondly i'm rather less surprised kind of educated

about it because the fact that states spy on each other and on the u.n. is i'm afraid no secret i spent many years working at the u.n. for the u.k. and it's widely understood there that there are many countries spying on each other and all right gary barlow of the year we're going to run out of time here and this is going story i hope you'll come back and discuss more. evidence of what leaks can actually do for the world many thanks to my guest today in boston and in dusseldorf and thanks to our viewers for watching us here r.t. see you next time and remember.

in india multis available in the move go hard enough to join the photos of the let's take a photo of the grand imperial trying to talk west coast coromandel you can a letter tell the close mission hotel.