A drop of tittle-tattle at a time from Wikileaks

Wan A. Hulaimi
New Straits Times
01-02-2011
A drop of tittle-tattle at a time from Wikileaks
Byline: Wan A. Hulaimi
Edition: New Sunday Times
Section: Main Section
Column: Elsewhere

ACACHE contains a lot of things. So a Norwegian daily says it has received a cache of some 250,000 US diplomatic cables from around the world, which will see us reading into leaks well into the end of next year. Previously Wikileak materials were funnelled only to selected newspapers, called media partners. The British Guardian is one, The New York Times another, and then there's the German Des Spiegel. Now it seems there are more leaks to Wikileaking. So has the tittle-tattle of diplomatic observers been dished out that it fills a whole ginormous flagon, to be poured into selected funnels as time and reason admit.

There are many things that make Wikileaks such fascinating reading, not least the way Wikileaks have been drip-drip-dripping into our newspapers. We don't know what else is there nor why Wikileaks has chosen to work through the mainstream media whilst also purporting to be the alternative, exasperated by the way the mainstream has been selective in its purpose. And who has been doing the leaking is a mystery as much as who has been filtering the stuff. The leak is the information but the flow is the message.
Of the 250,00 documents said to have been released by Wikileaks, fewer than a thousand have been released by the press. So where are the rest? Could it be true what American civil rights attorney Michael Ratner has been quoted as saying, that "in the recent disclosure, Wikileaks has only posted cables that were reviewed by the news organisations and in some cases redacted. The news organisations showed them to the Pentagon and agreed to some of the government's suggested redactions"?

But free things are a boon and we are children all who want to believe in Santa Claus. From the tittle-tattle of diplomats a world view is formed but information can be stranger than truth. And diplomats are people who sometimes believe six impossible things before breakfast. But all this has not come without its own in- built entertainment value though, and irony as large as an elephant in a circus. Who, for instance, would think that US diplomats at large would rail against the absence of human rights, due process and the like when their mother country is waterboarding people and holding them without due process in a large internment camp and sending them hither and thither for "extreme rendition" abroad?

The information that has been coming out has brought some gems from their thoughts. Irony plays no small part of that, and also some big question marks. Who is this strange man Assange, for instance, and who has been paying for his meals as he was flitting from one place of refuge to another before his post-court appearance on a snowy night in England? And what a delicious thing irony can be as came from the mouth of Assange's lawyers - who were speaking on his behalf presumably - that some naughty people have been leaking details of the rape and sexual assault allegations against him in Denmark.

We don't know what that Norwegian daily will make of that new cache of information now that they have got it but it looks now that this saga of revelations will continue ad nauseam and anon.

Which brings us back to bananas that I mentioned last week in my bafflement about the strange journey of our modest petai beans. I have received emails from people who have confessed that they too were taken in by the weird and wonderful claims made for the petai and indeed have themselves passed the message on to take in more people into this smelly brotherhood.

I have no message of disdain against the petai which I am sure does have some very good attributes but what alarms me is how easily information can gather speed on the Internet and metamorphose into another thing that dances on your computer screens in a new coat. The petai in the cod message is said to build stamina, give you loads of potassium and keep your brain and mind awake. This paean to the petai that appeared in the LISTSERV of Syracuse University under the name of a Malaysian professor even appeared verbatim in Yahoo! Answers but without the professor's name. The petai praises, as I found from further tracing, were actually plagiarised from something called "The Amazing Banana", with "petai" inserted in place of the "banana" and it fooled many people and was picked up even by seemingly prestigious websites.

I traced the original banana article to a website run by a group with the delightful name of Scion of Zion and I mentioned that I could not get any reply from them. An email has landed from one Dr Ken Matto of Scion of Zion with this message: "I placed that article about the banana on my site back on Feb 24, 2004 so to be honest I have no idea which health site I got it from. This I do know that the article on my site is not the original but it may be copied from the original."

* Wan A. Hulaimi can be contacted at elsewhere@columnist.com

(Copyright 2011)