Le Monde and Wikileaks

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The Wikileaks hits just keep on coming. Disclosures from US diplomatic messages posted on the website reveal the behind-the-scenes conduct of international diplomacy. The latest disclosures suggest tension between China and North Korea. Other newly released cables concern the Obama administration’s effort to persuade countries to accept terrorism suspects from Guantanamo Bay. The documents were leaked to several major newspapers, including Le Monde. Marco Werman talks with Sylvie Kauffman, the Editor-in-Chief of the French paper. Download MP3

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Marco Werman: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World.  The Wikileaks hits keep on coming.  Disclosures from U.S. diplomatic messages posted on the website reveal the behind the scenes conduct of international diplomacy.  The latest disclosure suggests tension between China and North Korea.  Other newly released cables concern the Obama administration’s effort to persuade countries to accept terrorism suspects from Guantanamo Bay. The documents were leaked to several major newspapers, including Le Monde.  Sylvie Kauffman is editor-in-chief on the French newspaper.  She’s in Paris.  How did Le Monde get involved with Wikileaks, Miss Kauffman, and why did your newspaper decide to become one of Wikileaks’ media partners?

Sylvie Kauffman: Uh, we got involved with Wikileaks simply by covering the story of Wikileaks.  We sent a reporter to work on a profile of Julian Assange.  That’s how we got in touch with him.  We were not involved in the first batch of military reports about Afghanistan in July, but we were offered the second batch of the war logs in October.  And we did publish several of them in October. And so you know, it sounded logical that we would be again involved in the publication of these whole mass of diplomatic documents, which were of great interest to newspapers like Le Monde, because the oldest material is of course of a lot of interest to our readers. So what we have done, of course, is to filter all these documents in cooperation with the other newspapers involved.  We are not putting out all this material online unfiltered or unchecked, but yes, we decided this was of interest to us as a newspaper and to our readers.

Werman: Now, those other publications are The New York Times, Der Spiegel (the German news magazine), the Guardian in London, and El Pais.  You’ve all agreed on what stories you will cover.  What are the particular angles though that Le Monde is following up and what about these stories is especially getting people’s attention in France?

Kauffman: I should say first that the story which got the most attention on the first day was the Wikileaks leak itself, you know, that’s the biggest story in France because how this whole mass of confidential documents could be leaked out was in itself a big story.  And there’s also a lot of debate of whether it is ethical for newspapers to use such material. But apart from that, of course we started yesterday as the other newspapers with the stories about Iran and the nuclear issue, and how the Arab world was concerned, and was putting pressure on the U.S. to de-firm vis-à-vis Iran. There was also a story about France and Iran in those cables.  And today we published the story about North Korea and China.  And also those cables about Guantanamo that you mentioned earlier. Of course, Guantanamo was always a very, very big story in France because we had some French citizens detained in Guantanamo at some stage.  And I thought the cables about Guantanamo were of a lot of interest also.

Werman: Given that a lot of this may not be a surprise to a lot of people, do you consider what Wikileaks is doing whistle blowing is it about something else?

Kauffman: It’s not you know, you may not have spectacular scoops so far in those cables, but you have an analysis that you can draw from the way the Americans look at the world, which from our view is very interesting.  The way Iran came out as a big power after the war in Iraq, you know, how the war in Iraq in the end changes the whole equilibrium in the region.  This comes out quite clearly through what the diplomats write in their cables, and this is very interesting. Now, is it whistle blowing?  I don’t know, yes, I think, I suppose you can call this whistle blowing.  To me it’s making public a lot of information which is very interesting and which helps us to understand the attitude of the American government, and the American policy toward the rest of the world.

Werman: Sylvie Kauffman is editor-in-chief of the French newspaper, Le Monde.  She joined us from Paris.  Thank you very much.

Kauffman: Thank you!

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