Did Wikileaks Take Down Al Jazeera's Wadah Khanfar?

Al Jazeera Director General Wadah Khanfar announced yesterday that he was retiring after eight years at the head of the news agency. He said he'd been discussing this with the Chairman of the Board for some time, and that he'd decided to move on to new opportunities, etc. (here's his farewell message to his staff), but given the fact that Khanfar has turned up in the latest Wikileaks cable dump, it's not surprising that a lot of people and commentators, up to and including The New York Times, think this is Wikileaks related. One has to admit the timing doesn't suggest he just wanted to spend more time with his family.

If there is a smoking gun, it appears to be this cable from Embassy Doha, released by Wikileaks.  The Embassy PAO, the Public Affairs Officer, met with Khanfar to discuss a Defense Intelligence Agency report about Al Jazeera. Despite some of the reporting there and abroad, he did not meet with the DIA directly, at least not according to this cable. (The DIA representative is usually the Defense Attache.) Nothing in what I read suggests he agreed to "soften" Al Jazeera coverage, just enforce a greater control over what appears on their website.

Admittedly, in the conspiracy-prone Middle East, any whiff of the CIA or the DIA can be fatal, but it suggests a rather naive view of how reporting works. The other day somebody posted a link on Facebook to some publication trying to paint Juan Cole (Juan Cole!) as a "CIA consultant" because a CIA officer had said they had had meetings with him and other academics to give them alternative views. Believe me, in Washington, both academics and journalists interact with the intelligence community because we share the same space. Sometimes we know who they are; sometimes we don't. (I remember an Indian Embassy official taking me out for a lovely Indian lunch in my defense journalism days and quizzing me about the real range of Pakistani ship-to-ship missiles. I assured him that all I knew was what I read in Jane's, and asked him what his job was. "I'm just a visa officer," he assured me. "This is a hobby with me." As an aside, India's intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing, has the greatest acronym of the English-speaking intel world, RAW.)

If you touch policy in DC, you'll touch the intel community. My old college roommate spent a career in the intel community. I've considered myself a personal friend of Miles Copeland, knew William Colby, and met Richard Helms a few times; I've known at least two former heads of Mossad and one former head of Israeli military intelligence and have met ‘Omar Suleiman of Egypt. I've spoken to the DIA and most of the war colleges but have never worked for our or any other government. Kermit Roosevelt once served as President of the Middle East Institute and a former US Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East serves on my Board of Advisory Editors today. The number of ex-CIA analysts ensconced in Middle East think tanks in DC is considerable, and they are not all on one side of the ideological fence. I won't even start to name them.

If this is what really forced the resignation of Khanfar, it's too damned bad.

Oh: Khanfar's replacement? Sheikh Ahmad bin Jasem Al Thani, head of Qatargas, a member of he Al Jazeera Board, and, as his name should make obvious, a member of Qatar's royal family. He certainly has no questionable political links.

This is Probably Not Going to Help King Hamad

As Yossi Melman notes in today's Haaretz, according to the latest Wikileaks cable leaks, King Hamad of Bahrain reportedly boasted to the US Ambassador in 2005 of Bahrain's relations with Israel in the intelligence field.

I can't find the cable in question on Wikileaks yet, and Haaretz says it's an exclusive. But King Hamad probably won't welcome this right now.

Wikileaks Cables on Tunisia: Background to the Current Troubles

I have only occasionally cited the ongoing Wikileaks revelations for reasons I've previously expressed (and to make things worse, in Zimbabwe the opposition leader Prime Minister is being threatened with trial because of a Wikileaks cable). On the other hand, much as I may dislike the indiscriminate nature of the leaks, the documents are out there in public now, and can shed light on current events. Take three cables released earlier this month from the US Embassy in Tunis, which shed light on the roots of the current protests. I commend them as essential background reading

First is a 2008 report on corruption in Tunisia. Readers of opposition blogs or the French media may have heard much of it before, but it is interesting to see it in an Ambassador's cable. It spells out the extent of alleged corruption, especially among the First Lady's family, the Trabelsis. One example among many:

The numerous stories of familial corruption are certainly galling to many Tunisians, but beyond the rumors of money-grabbing is a frustration that the well-connected can live outside the law. One Tunisian lamented that Tunisia was no longer a police state, it had become a state run by the mafia. "Even the police report to the Family!" he exclaimed. With those at the top believed to be the worst offenders, and likely to remain in power, there are no checks in the system. The daughter of a former governor recounted that Belhassen Trabelsi flew into her father's office in a rage -- even throwing an elderly office clerk to the ground -- after being asked to abide by laws requiring insurance coverage for his amusement park. Her father wrote a letter to President Ben Ali defending his decision and denouncing Trabelsi's tactics. The letter was never answered, and he was removed from his post shortly thereafter.

Second, a 2009 report on the state of US-Tunisia relations generally, with a different take than that expressed in official statements. Read the whole thing, but the "Summary" runs:

By many measures, Tunisia should be a close US ally. But it is not. While we share some key values and the country has a strong record on development, Tunisia has big problems. President Ben Ali is aging, his regime is sclerotic and there is no clear successor. Many Tunisians are frustrated by the lack of political freedom and angered by First Family corruption, high unemployment and regional inequities. Extremism poses a continuing threat. Compounding the problems, the GOT brooks no advice or criticism, whether domestic or international. Instead, it seeks to impose ever greater control, often using the police. The result: Tunisia is troubled and our relations are too.

The third is a report on a July 2009 dinner between the US Ambassador and his wife and Mohammed Sakher El Materi and his wife, son-in-law and daughter of Ben Ali. Materi is often mentioned as a possible successor to Ben Ali if the First Lady has any say in the matter, as she plans to. While Materi is described as cooperative and friendly, we also hear this:

¶13. (S) El Materi has a large tiger (“Pasha”) on his compound, living in a cage. He acquired it when it was a few weeks old. The tiger consumes four chickens a day. (Comment: The situation reminded the Ambassador of Uday Hussein’s lion cage in Baghdad.) El Materi had staff everywhere. There were at least a dozen people, including a butler from Bangladesh and a nanny from South Africa. (NB. This is extraordinarily rare in Tunisia, and very expensive.)

It's a revealing report on a man still largely unknown to non-Tunisians.