By Owei Lakemfa
THE Americans are still wondering what hit them. In one of the most devastating blows ever dealt their  diplomacy, Wikileaks began this Sunday, offloading some quarter of a million cables between the State Department and 270 American embassies and consulates around the world.

A furious Secretary of State, Hilary Rodham Clinton in the typical American hyperbole said the leak is an attack on the world.

The Americans have the delusion  that whatever they think, feel  and do is actually the entire world   that is  affected; they are the world! And the American bureaucracy actually  expressed its deep regrets  to the world for the embarrassment the revelations might cause.

The  United States(US) assumed the leak to have come from its State Department, it cut off the Department’s data base from that of the Defence Department and vowed to plug future  leaks. This is a delusion; the uses information technology can be put are so vast and limitless that virtually nothing can remain secret again.

Wading through the tonnes of American anger, I find many of the leaks released as quite frank, and sometimes hilarious.

For instance, I have always found it difficult  to characterise French President Nicolas Sarkozy,  the smallish European leader who likes appearing big, taking on the electorate on pension and social issues, banning Islamic  scarfs  and deporting his fellow citizens and Europeans as Romas who have no right to live in France.

Now an American diplomatic cable described His Imperial Majesty as  an emperor without clothes.
It also exposed the fascists  and war mongers in Saudi Arabia who proposed to the US that  chips be installed in Guantanamo detainees (people who have not had their day in court after many years of inhuman detention) so that they can be monitored like wild animals in the jungle.

The same Saudi monarch described Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a snake whose head the Americans should cut off.

Although the American government  prides itself as fighting corruption, leaked  documents revealed that it does condone it where it affects  its allies. For instance, a cable from its embassy in Kabul reported that when in 2009, Afghan  Vice President Ahmed Zia Massoud visited  the United Arab Emirates, he was discovered to be carrying $52 million cash. After consultations, he was allowed to keep the money without disclosing its source or destination.

Some cables revealed how the US which had carried out series of kidnappings across the globe  in the name of fighting terrorism is trying to dispose off some of its victims. For example, Slovenia was told that if it wants to have an audience with President Obama, it should make a goodwill gesture  by taking a Guantanamo detainee. In another case,  the Central Pacific Ocean  island nation of Kiribati was offered millions of dollars as aid on condition that  it takes in Chinese Muslim detainees.

In a May,2009 cable, Ambassador Anne.W. Patterson   reported that  the Pakistanis continue to block an attempt by America to remove  a highly enriched uranium research reactor that the US  fears might fall into the wrong hands in politically volatile Pakistan. The Pakistani government, she says, fears that if  the move leaks, it might be misinterpreted  that it is surrendering  the country’s nuclear weapons to the Americans.

The American ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, Tatiana Gfoeller reported in a 2008 cable that Prince Andrew, the Duke of York  and special United Kingdom  representative on international trade had during a visit to that country railed at a private gathering at “British anti- corruption investigators (the Serious Fraud Office) who had the ‘idiocy’ of almost scuttling” a lucrative defence deal with  Saudi Arabia over alleged kickbacks to a Saudi royal.

He was also reported to have said that the only way business can be done in Kyrgyzstan is to be corrupt, and that this was like doing business in France.

She also reported Prince Andrew as insulting the US, saying “Americans don’t understand geography” and that his remarks were ”verging  on the rude” and with “almost neuralgic patriotism”.

The cables are generally, what Fela Anikulapo-Kuti would call ”Yabis” They are proof that in the  runaway  Information  Age, traditional things like the famed diplomatic pouch have become archaic and that information that would have cost billions of dollars to obtain with many years of painstaking intelligence work and loss of human lives, can be obtained free at the click of a button.

The leaks pitched the world’s strongest power against  the power of information; it would have been easier if the US faced a nuclear  or terrorist threat than a war that is more interpretative, contentious and borderless. For instance, does the revelation on the Afghan Vice President hurt American interest or promote anti-corruption?

The American Government says it “supports responsible, accountable and open  government at home and around the  world, but this reckless and dangerous action runs counter to that goal”. But who determines what is “responsible” and what is not? Who determines what is “open government”?

In a large sense, what the American  Government is engaged in is press censorship and raising walls to impede the free flow of information. It might be the business of government to keep its doors shut,   but it is the business of the media  and other information sources to open the doors.

The leaks are a journalistic scoop which no serious international media can ignore. The CNN in making excuses for its second hand reports on the leaks claimed self-righteousness in not entering an alleged confidentiality agreement with Wikileaks.

Some American media that published had to undertake  balancing acts between a furious government that wants the leaks blocked, and their professional duty to the public. In any case, it appeared a hopeless situation; the documents are in the public domain and the world media is falling over itself to publish these juicy cables.

What seems certain to me is that the US government would hunt officials of Wikileaks and fall on them with a vengeance; but the deed is done, and the group has beaten a path, others will follow.