WikiLeak’s latest scoop, the announced publication of nearly 2.5 Mio emails from Syrian political figures, comes unfortunately too late, I am afraid. The platform again chose to closely collaborate with a number of news outlets, Al Akhbar in Lebanon, Al Masry Al Youm in Egypt, NDR/ARD in Germany, Associated Press in the US, L’Espresso in Italy, Owni in France and Publico.es in Spain. As is mentioned on the WikiLeaks page, the number of emails is more than eight times larger than CableGate, the trove of US diplomatic cables published in late 2010. The amount of information is an unbelievable 100 times larger. “To solve these complexities, WikiLeaks built a general-purpose, multi-language political data-mining system which can handle massive data sets like those represented by the Syria Files,” as the platform promises. It is hoped that this will better facilitate tracing of relevant information in these emails.

While the numerous revealing and/or embarrassing US American diplomatic cables may have sparked the initial uprisings of the Arab Spring in late 2010 and early 2011 , the expected information in the Syria Files may disclose what most of us believe to know already about the Assad regime. But that won’t help the Syrians any more. Anyway Assange seems to be more optimistic:

“The material is embarrassing to Syria, but it is also embarrassing to Syria’s opponents. It helps us not merely to criticise one group or another, but to understand their interests, actions and thoughts. It is only through understanding this conflict that we can hope to resolve it.”

It might be interesting to learn more about Iran’s influence and that of western powers in the violent crushing of the Syrian Spring which has resulted in the killing 10’000 people or more so far .

July 5, 2012 @ 15:49

Last modified July 5, 2012.