Bernd Debusmann

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

After the high-profile failure of a Congressional “supercommittee” to trim America‘s budget deficit, one could be forgiven to conclude that there’s nothing the divided House of Representatives can agree on. But that would be wrong.

Among the few topics on which Democrats and Republicans in the Republican-dominated House see eye-to-eye: the official motto of the United States is “In God We Trust”. That has been the case since 1956 but as the supercommittee wrangled with the thorny deficit problem, lawmakers found time to vote on a resolution reaffirming the motto. Why that reaffirmation was deemed necessary speaks volumes about congressional priorities and Washington‘s peculiar political climate.

According to two polls taken before the supercommittee failed to find a compromise, the American public’s faith in Congress stands at historic lows – a 9-percent approval rating according to a CBS/New York Times poll and 13 percent according to Gallup. In October, Gallup forecast that disenchantment with the people’s representatives would further deepen in the absence of agreement.

Not to harp on the negative, let’s revisit the resolution on America‘s motto, passed 396 to 9 on November 1, with two legislators voting “present” and 26 not voting. Randy Forbes, the Republican who sponsored the measure explained it had been necessary because “a number of public officials … forget what the national motto is.” He named President Barack Obama as one of the forgetful officials, referring to a speech in which he cited E Pluribus Unum as America‘s motto. (Latin for “out of many, one”, those words are emblazoned on the official seal of the United States and engraved, along with “In God We Trust”, on 25-cent coins. E pluribus unum served as the country’s de facto motto until 1956, when Congress passed a law making In God We Trust the official motto).

In the floor debate on the matter, one legislator, Arizona Republican Trent Franks, portrayed failure to reaffirm the motto in apocalyptic terms. “If … man is God, then an atheist state is as brutal as the thesis it rests upon and there is no reason for us to gather here in this place,” he told his fellow members. “We should just let anarchy prevail because after all we are just worm food.”

There are no polls showing how many Americans live in fear of atheist anarchy, or of the perils arising from people confusing one motto with the other. But such remarks leave no doubt about the extraordinary tone-deafness of some legislators at a time when unemployment and inequality dominate the national conversation.

If the oddly-timed resolution was meant by Republicans to cast doubt over Obama’s belief in God, it appears to have had little or no effect. Why Democratic lawmakers (all but eight of whom voted for the resolution) thought it was an urgent necessity and a good use of Congressional time remains a puzzle.

MORE SUPPORT FOR COMMUNISM THAN CONGRESS?

There are, it should be noted, some legislators who are worried about the apparent disconnect between ordinary Americans and their representatives and leaders inside the beltway that surrounds Washington. One of those worried is Michael Bennet, a Democratic Senator who voiced his concerns on the floor of the Senate in mid-November, carrying a number of astonishing charts illustrating the precipitous decline of Congress in the eyes of Americans.

According to one of the charts based on polls taken in different years, more people support the United States going Communist (11 percent) than approve the job Congress is doing. Congress‘s approval rating among Americans ties with that of Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president and anti-American firebrand.

Compared with Congress, the Internal Revenue Service (40 percent approval) is a darling of the people.

Bennet ascribed the “catastrophic” decline in support over the past decade to “our inability to address problems the way people in their local community are doing it. There is not a mayor in Colorado (his home state) who would threaten the credit-rating of their community for politics. Not one.”

The United States lost its top-tier credit rating last August, for the first time in its history, when the ratings agency Standard & Poor’s downgraded it from AAA to AA. One of the reasons for the agency’s downgrade: the inability of the Democratic and Republican parties to govern effectively and to compromise on diametrically opposed positions on how to deal with the country’s deficit.

As the supercommittee’s failure to come to a compromise has shown, those positions are unchanged from August, when a fierce political battle over the national debt pushed the country to the brink of default. Agreement between the 12 committee members – six Democrats, six Republicans, from both houses of Congress – proved as elusive as agreement among all 535 members.

With the campaign for the 2012 elections in full swing, prospects of action that would break the gridlock and regain some of the lost public trust look remote. Resolutions on the model of “In God we Trust” won’t do it. But perhaps the lawmakers can take comfort in the fact that they do not rank last on Bennet’s chart.

Congress is still more popular, by four points, than Fidel Castro.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com)

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

In the long-running Western debate over what to do about Iran’s nuclear program, fresh language has been as rare as fresh ideas. But here’s a novel phrase worth noting: “Striking Iranian nuclear sites is like mowing the grass.” How so?

The man who coined the simile, Middle East scholar Aaron David Miller, argues that no strike, or series of strikes, could permanently cripple the Iranian capacity to produce and weaponize fissile material. Absent complete success in wiping out Iran’s hardened and widely dispersed nuclear sites, “the grass would only grow back again.” The Iranians would “reseed” the grass “with the kind of legitimacy that can only come from having been attacked by an outside power.”

The presidential hopefuls of America‘s Republican Party could do worse than take note of that assessment. In the first foreign policy debate of the Republican primary race on November 12, all but one of the nine would-be presidents supported an attack — by the United States or Israel — on Iran to stop it from getting the bomb, if sanctions failed, as they have done so far.

Unlike the presidential candidates, Miller is familiar with the subject. Now a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, a Washington think tank, he worked for 25 years in senior roles at the State Department as a Middle East negotiator and adviser. He is not alone in arguing that an attack on Iran would only delay, but not end, Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

In the United States, a long list of prominent experts on Iran and nuclear proliferation share that view and in Israel, Meir Dagan, the former head of the Mossad, the foreign intelligence service, has called bombing Iraq “a stupid idea” and repeatedly warned that an attack would have disastrous consequences for Israel.

The latest round of the “to bomb or not to bomb” debate, a recurring theme for the better part of a decade, was triggered by a November 8 report from the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which said Tehran appeared to have worked on designing a bomb and may still be conducting secret research to that end.

The qualifying word “may” quickly disappeared from most media reports and from discussions of the issue. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared a few days after the IAEA report’s publication that it did not reflect the full extent of Iran’s nuclear program and warned that “Iran is closer to getting a bomb than we thought.”

That is music to the ears of Republican critics of President Barack Obama, whom they accuse of lacking firmness in dealing with the Iranian government and failing to rally international support for sanctions tough enough to convince Tehran that it is time to give up its nuclear ambitions.

Foreign policy is not likely to play much of a role in the 2012 presidential election and Obama has an impressive record of foreign policy successes, from the killing of Osama bin Laden to the U.S. role in ending the dictatorship of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. But in a country whose citizens regularly name Iran as the greatest threat to the United States, according to Gallup polls, any perception of weakness towards Tehran could become an issue.

VOTE FOR OBAMA, VOTE FOR THE IRANIAN BOMB?

“If … we re-elect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon,” Romney said at the Republican foreign policy debate. “And if … you elect me as the next president, they will not have a nuclear weapon.”

How would he prevent this? If he were president, he explained in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, he would impose tougher sanctions, regularly send aircraft carriers into the Mediterranean and the Gulf, speak up on behalf of Iranian dissidents and increase military assistance to Israel.

“These actions will send an unequivocal signal to Iran that the United States, in concert with allies, will never permit Iran to obtain nuclear weapons. Only when the ayatollahs no longer have doubts about America‘s resolve will they abandon their nuclear ambitions.”

For sanctions to work, they need to be global and there is no good reason to think that a Republican president would have more success than Obama in convincing China and Russia to agree to additional economic pressure against Iran. Obama’s latest attempt came in meetings with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Chinese President Hu Jintao at a summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation this week.

The outlook for the future of this confrontation looks as bleak now as it probably will after the 2012 U.S. elections — learn to live with an Iranian bomb or start yet another war with consequences nobody can predict.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com)

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

The United States is the greatest country on earth, different from others and better than the rest in all respects. Or so the great majority of its citizens believe, in good times and bad. Two new reports might dent that self-image.

One is the World Bank’s annual ranking of how easy (or not) it is to do business in 183 countries. The other is from the Bertelsmann Foundation, a German think tank, and examines social justice in the 31 of the 34 countries of the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Economic Development (OECD), often dubbed the rich-country club.

On the World Bank list, the United States came fourth behind Singapore, Hong Kong and New Zealand. In the Bertelsmann study the United States ranked a dismal 27th.

It shows the United States as the country with the biggest rich-poor gap of those examined, except for Mexico and Chile. On providing health care, it ranks 23rd; on access to education 20th. Five Scandinavian countries – Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland – topped the list, prompting the conclusion that social justice and economic performance are not mutually exclusive.

(This is not a concept embraced by most of the Republican presidential hopefuls. Herman Cain, a front-runner, made headlines with a punchy comment on the growing anti-inequality Occupy Wall Street movement: “Don’t blame Wall Street. Don’t blame the big banks. If you don’t have a job and you are not rich, blame yourself.”)

The World Bank’s ranking shows that the United States is better at Doing Business (the report’s title) than it is at social justice but even on the business front, it is no longer the best overall. It doesn’t fare well in a number of categories, from “ease of starting a business” (13th) and “trading across borders” (20th) to “ease of registering property” (16th).

The five top scorers in the social justice study also rank among the top 15 rated by the World Bank, evidence that American-style inequality is not a prerequisite for flourishing capitalist enterprise.

How do such statistics mesh with the perception of most Americans that their country is the best? They don’t.

According to a Fox News poll in April, 84 percent of American adults think the United States is the greatest country in the world. Almost 70 percent said they would not leave the United States to live anywhere else. Just 19 percent they would, for financial security or greater physical safety. While two thirds considered the United States weaker than it was five years ago, they still thought it the best.

TOP MILITARY

That firm belief in America’s standing as the world’s number one became a political issue early in the presidency of Barack Obama who said, in reply to a news conference question in France four months after taking office: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

Ever since, Republican critics of the president have accused him of lacking patriotism and the conviction that American values and the American way of life are superior. That criticism is likely to bubble up again in the 2012 presidential election campaign and the offending sentence will be recycled without the rest of the quote.

That included references to the American constitution, democratic practices, free speech, equality, an exceptional set of core values “and if you think of our current situation, the United States remains the largest economy in the world. We have unmatched military capability.”

True enough. The United States spends almost as much on military power than the rest of the world combined and even if that expenditure were cut in half, it would still be more than its current and potential adversaries. The current defense budget is higher than at any time since World War II and could be cut substantially without risking the country’s security, according to Lawrence Korb, assistant secretary of defense under President Ronald Reagan. Defense spending now takes up more than a fifth of the total budget.

Is there a link between that kind of military spending and America’s poor showing in the social justice study? It’s a question that merits debate.

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

So much for charges from conservative contenders for the 2012 U.S. presidential elections that Barack Obama is not pro-Israel enough — the president just won seals of approval from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his far-right foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, and the U.S. lobby that usually reflects their views.

If the elections, as some predict, will include a contest on who loves Israel most, Obama can use their praise to good effect. How much it will contribute to his legacy is another matter.

The plaudits came in response to Obama’s address to the United Nations on Sept. 21, when he rejected the Palestinians’ bid for U.N. membership in what one Israeli journalist, Chemi Shalev of the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper, described as “probably the warmest pro-Israel speech ever given at an annual U.N. General Assembly meeting by any U.S. president, bar none.”

Its tone differed sharply from his moving description of the plight of the Palestinians in a speech in Cairo in 2009, five months after taking office. For 60 years, he said, they had endured the pain of dislocation and “the daily humiliations – large and small – that come with occupation. Let there be no doubt,” he said, “the situation of the Palestinians is intolerable.”

The Cairo speech raised expectations in the Arab world that here was a president who sympathized with the Palestinians and had the power, global prestige and commitment to succeed where a long line of his predecessors had tried and failed – help create a Palestinian state side-by-side with Israel. It didn’t work that way.

Fast forward to Sept. 21, 2011. No word about daily humiliations, dislocation, occupation, intolerable conditions. Instead, the emphasis was on centuries of persecution of Jews, anti-Semitic Arab school books, Israelis killed by Palestinian rockets and suicide bombs. As Rashid Khalidi, director of Columbia University’s Middle East Institute put it, “He recited a litany of suffering of Israelis with nothing about Palestinian hardships in a conflict whose most recent flare-up in 2008-09 left over 1,300 Palestinian victims and 13 Israelis.”

Netanyahu saw it differently. Obama had won a “badge of honor” with his address. Lieberman, a driving force behind the relentless construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, praised Obama for not mentioning that negotiations on a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be based on the 1967 borders.

The American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) issued a statement expressing its appreciation for Obama’s rejection of the Palestinian U.N. bid and his insistence on the return to negotiations. Off and on, they have dragged on for two decades, during which Israel has tripled the number of Jewish settlements on land that is supposed to become a Palestinian state.

POLITICS TRUMP POLICY

What explains Obama’s transition from Cairo 2009 to New York 2011? In Washington, politics trump policy and Israel has been more of a domestic than a foreign policy issue even before the foundation of the Jewish state in 1948. When President Harry Truman and his top advisers discussed plans for the partition of Palestine in 1945, the experts warned against it. Truman is said to have responded: “I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I don’t have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”

Sixty-six years later, that kind of calculation still plays a role but in the case of Obama, there has been an additional element – a battle of will with the Israeli prime minister in which the leader of the world’s remaining superpower backed down repeatedly, on issues from a demand for a settlement freeze to the territorial lines on which negotiations should be based. The score so far: Netanyahu 3, Obama 0.

Which makes it rather bizarre that the two front-runners for the Republican presidential nomination, Texas Governor Rick Perry and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, are portraying Obama as favoring the Palestinians at the expense of Israel. In language that highlighted both ignorance and the toxic nature of American politics, Perry said Obama had pursued a policy of “appeasement” of the Palestinians.

The term dates back to the 1930s when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made concessions to Adolf Hitler to avoid going to war against Nazi Germany. In slightly less over-the-top terms, Romney talked of Obama’s efforts to “throw Israel under the bus.”

Whether Perry, Romney and other prominent Republicans manage to turn support for Israel into a wedge issue in 2012 is open to doubt in a race almost certainly dominated by jobs and the economy. But if it does emerge as a campaign topic, Obama can always wave the “badge of honor” awarded him by Netanyahu, to show that he is no different from a long line of American presidents much closer to Israel than to the Palestinians.

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

WASHINGTON — In tandem with the $447 billion jobs plan President Barack Obama announced on September 8, his administration is breathing new life into an old program to draw job-creating foreigners to the United States. It’s known as the EB-5 investor program, has a clouded history, and can’t bring much relief to America’s unemployment misery.

But with 27 million people unemployed or underemployed and Obama’s own job depending on whether or not he can bring down the unemployment rate in time for next year’s presidential election, every job-creating opportunity is worth pursuing.

Which is why Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano and Alejandro Mayorkas, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), announced “streamlining measures” to America’s complicated immigration laws a few weeks before the president laid out his ideas on how to spur growth, a mix of tax cuts and infrastructure spending.

Unlike the Obama plan, tweaks to existing immigration rules need no approval from Congress so the administration has no-one to blame if the streamlining fails to yield results, such as a rush of foreigners investing $500,000 in a U.S. project that generates at least 10 jobs in areas of economic hardship and high unemployment. The incentive, apart from possible profits: a fast track to a “green card” (permanent residence) and U.S. citizenship for the entrepreneur and his family.

Long an object of desire for millions of would-be immigrants, a green card normally takes years to get. Approval for a conditional EB-5 green card can come through in a matter of weeks and the USCIS has established a Premium Processing Service that “guarantees processing within 15 calendar days for “projects that are fully developed and ready to be implemented.”

The impact of the enhancements announced by Napolitano and Mayorkas remains to be seen. According to projections by the Congressional Budget Office, the agency that provides economic data to Congress, lowering the unemployment rate by 1 percent (it now stands at 9.2 percent) would require 316,000 new jobs per month. That dwarfs the jobs created by the EB-5 program.

Since its inception in 1990, according to USCIS estimates, the program resulted in more than $1.5 billion in capital investments and created at least 34,000 jobs – an average of 1,700 a year. There has not been a single year when the annual quota of 10,000 EB-5 green cards was taken up. A Government Accountability Office report in 2005 blamed, among other things, “an onerous application process and lengthy adjudication periods.”

Those kinks have been ironed out, to hear the government tell it, and the United States is ready “to attract the best and brightest from around the world.”

But foreigners thinking of putting down $500,000 (for projects in depressed regions) or $1 million for other projects would be well-advised to read a Reuters report, the result of two months of investigations, on misleading promotions of the system by some of the specially-designated American businesses (known as regional centers) that are allowed to offer EB-5 visas to foreign investors.

NOTHING EASY, NOTHING CERTAIN

The report comes to the conclusion that the EB-5 program is anything but an easy and certain path for wealthy foreigners to get into the U.S. and stay there. In fact, only 54 percent of the immigrants who start the process of gaining permanent residence through the program actually attain it, according to the report, published in December.

Since the beginning of the year, USCIS has been working on enhancements of the process and its backers see it as a win-win proposition. One of its most vocal champions, Stephen Yale-Loehr, a professor at Cornell University Law School, says it’s a win for U.S. businesses finding it difficult to get bank loans, it’s a win for the foreigner who gets a green card (if the project flourishes) and it’s a win for American workers because jobs are being created.

Hard-core opponents of immigration see a different picture. David North of the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, greeted the announcement that the EB-5 process was being streamlined with a blast of criticism headlined Administration Caves to Open-Borders Advocates on Investor Visas.

This is a reflection of a general anti-immigration mood thanks to which new legislation to attract foreigner entrepreneurs to the United States is stuck in Congress. Called the Startup Visa Bill, it was first introduced last year by Senator John Kerry, a Democrat, and Richard Lugar, a Republican, and re-introduced with modifications in the spring. The aim is the same as the EB-5 program but the barriers to entry are lower and the procedure differs.

Under the legislation, a foreign entrepreneur would qualify for a conditional green card if he can raise $100,000 from a U.S. venture capitalist. The green card would become permanent if the new venture created five new American jobs and raised at least $100,000 in annual revenues.

The bill has won fulsome praise from the technology industry, where foreign entrepreneurs have played leading roles, but the prospect of its passage in an election year look as remote as the comprehensive immigration reform Obama promised when he campaigned for the presidency in 2008.

Even less likely to persuade immigration opponents is an unorthodox suggestion from one of the most prominent advocates for an overall reform of an immigration system he has described as completely broken – New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. His idea: offer visas to foreigners who agree to live in blighted cities, such as Detroit, for seven years without claiming any welfare benefits.

In his words: “Overnight you would fill it with new people who would fill it with new jobs.”

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

Confidence in the U.S. Congress is at a historic low, more than half of Americans think that the Republican and Democratic parties are doing such a bad job that a third party is needed, and the word “dysfunction” has been common currency in the drawn-out debate over the national debt.

Does this mean the bells are tolling for the Republican-Democratic duopoly which has dominated American political life for more than 150 years?

The answer is yes for a budding political force that aims to get the millions of voters who are disaffected by the present system to bypass the traditional selection of presidential candidates through primary elections.

Instead, the new organization, Americans Elect, says it wants voters “to decide the issues that matter, find candidates to match your views and nominate the President and Vice President directly.”

It’s a novel and extremely ambitious idea, backed by a 50-strong board of advisors that includes business executives, seasoned political operatives and senior former government officials, including ex-FBI director William Webster and former U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills. Also on the board: Doug Schoen, a pollster who worked for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

The chairman of the group is Peter Ackerman, who heads the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and made a fortune in the 1980s working for Drexel Burnham Lambert, the junk-bond dealers. His son Elliot is chief operations officer. Both are confident that the Internet and social media are the right tools to change the way the system functions.

The debt debate has strengthened the case of those who think the two-party system is failing. According to a CNN poll this week, 77 percent of Americans say that elected officials in Washington have behaved “like spoiled children” in the tug-of-war over raising the debt ceiling.

Schoen described the disenchantment of many Americans with the bickering in Washington as an “extraordinary opportunity” to win support for the Americans Elect project and said some 40,000 voters had added their signatures in the past few days to the 1.7 million the campaign had already collected. “We are winning greater public acceptance than anyone might have expected,” he said.

Traffic to the website also jumped, according to Americans Elect. “We had more than 600,000 page views on AmericansElect.org in the past 10 days,” said Ainsley Perrien, the project’s press secretary. “And, in the same period, more than 3,000 ideas and comments.”

These are substantial numbers for a new website and for an organization barely known nationally until an influential New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, wrote about it in enthusiastic terms in July: “What Amazon.com did to books, what the iPod did to music, what drugstore.com did to pharmacies, Americans Elect plans to do to the two-party duopoly that has dominated American political life – remove the barriers to real competition, flatten the incumbents and let the people in.”

FORMIDABLE OBSTACLES

Perhaps. There are formidable obstacles on the road to the goals of Americans Elect: win access to all 50 state ballots as an essential step to holding an online convention in June, 2012, open to registered voters who have signed up to select a candidate for president and vice president. The running mate must be from a different party (or independent).

Joshua Levine, the group’s chief technology officer who joined Americans Elect from the same position at E-Trade, has predicted that the way the group is planning its online convention will be a model for the way the voting process will be shaped in the future. Again, perhaps.

Old traditions die hard. But it is worth noting that according to polls, 41 percent of Americans are describing themselves as independents, beholden to neither of the two parties –  which are more polarized than the electorate as a whole.

Will the disenchanted middle go to the trouble of registering with Americans Elect, participating in debates, selecting candidates?

It’s difficult to predict whether the depth of disgust shown by the polls will translate into action, and the will to try something novel and untested. What Americans Elect is hoping to do is more than a twist on an old story of third party candidates taking on the establishment, as did Ross Perot in 1992 (he won almost 20 percent of the vote), John Anderson in 1980 (6.6 percent), or Ralph Nader in 2000 (2.7 percent).

Officials of the group say it’s more about opening a second, 21st century process than about a third party.

To paraphrase a Wall Street phrase – past polls are no guarantee of future results but it’s useful to keep in mind the surveys mentioned at the beginning of this column. Gallup began asking about Americans’ confidence in various institutions in 1973. Then, 42 percent of respondents said they had confidence in Congress. By June 2011, it had dropped to 12 percent, dead last on a list of 16 institutions.

Gallup began asking about support for a third party in 2003, when 40 percent of respondents said there was no need for it. By May 2011, 52 percent thought there was a need for a third party. Among independents, 68 percent of independents thought so.

And by June 2012, when Americans Elect plans to hold its online convention? Let the betting begin.

You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

Does a secret stop being a secret when millions of people know it? Yes, says common sense. No, says the U.S. government, whose reaction to the WikiLeaks dump of classified diplomatic cables portrays a bureaucracy inhabiting a logic-free world all of its own.

Writers thinking of producing 21st century novels emulating the works of Franz Kafka are well advised to closely follow Washington’s problems in coming to grips with what kind of information should be open to whom and when.

Anyone with a computer and an internet connection can see the 1,500-odd classified cables released so far by the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks, which holds more than 250,000 messages exchanged between the U.S. Department of State and American embassies around the world. Five news organizations, including the New York Times, have reported on the cables in great detail. But the fact that the information is in the public domain makes no difference to the government’s view of its classified nature.

So, government workers were told, in the first week of the WikiLeaks data dump, that “unauthorized disclosure of classified documents (whether in print, on a blog or on websites) do not alter the documents’ classified status or automatically result in declassification of the documents. To the contrary, classified information, whether or not already posted on public websites or disclosed to the media, remains classified, and must be treated as such by federal employees and contractors, until it is declassified by an appropriate U.S. government authority.”

There’s an authority specifically set up for the declassification of documents, under an executive order President Barack Obama signed a year ago. It’s called the National Declassification Center and it is dealing with a backlog of more than 400 million (yes, 400 million) classified documents. They date back 25 years or more and are kept in cardboard boxes holding 2,500 pages each in storage vaults the size of several football fields at the U.S. National Archives in College Park, Maryland.

The classified-stays-classified view of documents made public has produced an element of anguish among federal employees, including the more than 200,000 who work under the umbrella of the sprawling Department of Homeland Security. One of its workers expressed the vexation of many in an email to Steven Aftergood, a veteran anti-secrecy campaigner who puts out a weekly newsletter, Secrecy News, for the Federation of American Scientists.

The email, from a DHS employee whose work involves dealing with senior foreign officials, noted that “if it is discovered that we have accessed a classified WikiLeaks cable on our personal computers, that will be a security violation. So, my grandmother would be allowed to access the cables, but not me. This seems ludicrous.”

ACCESS DENIED

Not to be outdone by Homeland Security, the U.S. Air Force went a step further this week and blocked employees from using work computers to view the websites of the New York Times and other news organizations that have posted WikiLeaks cables. Those who tried saw “Access Denied: Internet usage is logged and monitored” splashed across their screens, a notice that brings to mind the Chinese government’s efforts to block its citizens from material deemed inappropriate.

Denying access to information that virtually everyone else in the world can see has been accompanied by warnings to students at several colleges to refrain from commenting on WikiLeaks and its cables on social websites such as Facebook or Twitter. Doing so might jeopardize their chances of future employment with the government, said messages from the schools’ offices of career services.

Self-censorship in the country that prides itself on its commitment to free speech and openness, or prudent advice in a climate of post-September 11 obsession with secrecy?

One of the casualties of WikiLeaks and the government’s fierce reaction to them will almost certainly be the effort Obama launched a year ago to curb America’s secrecy inflation. The executive order that created the National Declassification Center also laid out in 13,000 words and great detail guidelines on classifying information. One of the novel features of the order was that classified documents must include the name of the person who classified them. That was meant to curb such excesses as slapping “secret” labels on, for example, summaries of foreign press reports.

The opening paragraph of the order, dated December 29, 2009, says: “Our democratic principles require that the American people be informed of the activities of their Government. Also, our Nation’s progress depends on the free flow of information both within the Government and to the American people.”

How does that square with the present attempts to prevent large numbers of Americans from looking at information available to much of the rest of the world?

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com)

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

WASHINGTON — Now that WikiLeaks has begun releasing a quarter of a million classified U.S. State Department cables from embassies around the world, a new era is dawning. Political change and reform are inevitable world-wide and at long last, there’s a chance for peace and stability in the Middle East. Really.

This is how Julian Assange, the Australian founder of WikiLeaks, views the effect of the dispatches that lay bare the inner workings of U.S. diplomacy, provide frank and often titillating detail of the shortcomings and foibles of foreign leaders, report on the breath-taking scale of corruption in such places as Afghanistan and Russia, and note that — surprise, surprise — Arab leaders in particular tend to say one thing in public and quite another in private.

“The…media scrutiny and the reaction from government are so tremendous that it actually eclipses our ability to understand it,” Assange said in an interview with Time magazine on day 3 of the data dump, which began on November 28. “I can see that there is a tremendous re-arrangement of viewings about many different countries. And so that will result in a new kind of harmonization … ”

The Frequently Asked Question section of the WikiLeaks website explains why things are looking up for Middle East peace. “These cables, by giving the players an unvarnished description of how they are seen … (provide) common ground on which to effectively negotiate peace and stability.”

The phrase “irrational exuberance” comes to mind, and the suspicion that fame and notoriety have driven the former hacker away from the reality-based community and pointed him towards Utopia. In his version of Utopia, there are no lies, double-talk, secrets, confidential conversations and wheeling-and-dealing. It’s a brave new world with perennially open microphones.

WikiLeak’s original intent, when it was established in 2007, was to leak secret documents for the sake of greater transparency. That has been redefined.

“It’s not our goal to achieve a more transparent society,” he told Time, “it’s our goal to achieve a more just society.” Who could argue with such a lofty goal? And who can explain how a society, let’s say America’s, can become “more just” by exposing that its diplomats manipulate, cajole, and don’t mince words when they report back to Washington how they see their host countries?

Despite Assange’s bombastic predictions, the leak of the embassy messages — 612 published as of December 2, and 250,675 to go — is already proving to be counter-productive. It’s almost certain that there will be less transparency in foreign affairs in future, not more. The document dump will probably cramp efforts to reduce the over-classification of documents, according to Steven Aftergood, a veteran campaigner against excessive government secrecy who has been sharply critical of WikiLeaks.

“It has an anarchist approach,” he said in an interview. “It doesn’t have any well-defined agenda other than foster chaos, suspicion and distrust.”

POLL SHOWS OPPOSITION TO WIKILEAKS

None of the leaked cables was marked Top Secret, a label which would have kept them from the shared network from which they appear to have leaked. The State Department and the Pentagon began sharing the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet) after the September 11, 2001, attacks to make it easier to connect the dots the government failed to connect before al-Qaeda struck New York and Washington.

As part of the post-leak security crackdown, the routine of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted, the White House set up a commission charged with figuring out new ways to keep classified documents secret. The State Department disconnected itself from SIPRNet, to which around three million users with “secret” clearances have access.

Contrary to Assange’s belief, stated in various interviews, that the American public favours WikiLeaks’ approach to secrecy – in essence, there should be none, ever – a poll released by Zogby Interactive on December 2 showed that 77 percent of some 2,000 surveyed saw WikiLeaks as a national security threat and 63 percent were opposed to U.S. news organizations publishing the documents.

Such views are no doubt shaped by a steady drumbeat of dire warnings from political leaders, administration officials and right-wing talk show hosts that publishing the diplomatic dispatches “could put at risk the lives of countless innocent individuals,” as the U.S. State Department’s legal advisor, Harold Koh, wrote in a letter to WikiLeaks. From the cables so far released, this is as difficult to see as Assange’s “new kind of harmonization.”

Would the lives of American diplomats in Moscow be in danger because one of the cables described Russia as a “virtual mafia state?” Or those in Berlin for portraying Chancellor Angela Merkel as risk-averse and lacking creativity? Or the Paris embassy for describing French President Nicolas Sarkozy as “the emperor with no clothes?”

All very embarrassing, to be sure, both for the subjects and for the authors who thought their dispatches would be safe from public scrutiny until unsealed at the request of  historians in 25 years. But life-threatening?

The unintended consequence of the WikiLeaks dump will be self-censorship, smaller distribution lists and higher security classification, all combining for less transparency. And the real secrets will be conveyed the old-fashioned, pre-Internet way — from mouth to ear.

You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com

Photo caption: The homepage of the WikiLeaks.org website is pictured in Beijing December 2, 2010. Amazon.com Inc has stopped hosting WikiLeaks’ website after an inquiry by the U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee amid anger about the release of classified U.S. government documents on the site. REUTERS/Petar Kujundzic