Update

Not really related to the heart of this post, but important to the bigger scheme: As of the legal implications of the Cablegate leaks for WikiLeaks and Assange there is little the U.S. can do and likely little it will, in the end, do. A friend of MoA has obtained the Congressional Research Service report on the legal questions regarding WikiLeaks and reading it there seems to be only a very small chance that any legal strategy of punishing WikiLeaks or Assange would succeed: CRS Report: Criminal Prohibitions on the Publication of Classified Defense Information (Dec. 6, pdf).

Original (slightly corrected) post on the alleged Pro Israel bias of Cablegate:

In an interview with Spiegel former National Security Adviser Brzezinski wonders about Wikileaks:

Brzezinski: There are slightly mystifying aspects to this whole operation. I do see some strange degree of emphasis on some issues.

SPIEGEL: For example?

Brzezinski: Just look at the degree of emphasi

s that has been put in the initial wave of revelations on discrediting several pro-American Arab governments by highlighting their demands for military action against Iran. That could be very troublesome within some Arab countries. It's also interesting that so much emphasis is put on leaks that could be calculated deliberately to damage American-Turkish relations.

Brzezinski also raised the question of some secret service being behind this during a TV discussion.

Looking at what has been released in the first days of C

ablegate one can certainly see some pro-Israel or anti-Israeli-enemies bias.

But that alone does not mean that the total cache of documents that was leaked has this bias or that the leak comes from a tainted source.

It is much more likely that this bias was introduced because of WikiLeaks' self-defensive decision to let the documents get published through traditional media-outlets before putting them up on its website.

It were those outlets, Guardian, Spiegel, El Pais and Le Monde, with the NYT sneaked in of the Guardian's behest, that decided what to publish and when to publish it:

"They are releasing the documents we selected," Le Monde's managing editor, Sylvie Kauffmann, said in an interview at the newspaper's Paris headquarters.

WikiLeaks turned over all of the classified U.S. State Department cables it obtained to Le Monde, El Pais in Spain, The Guardian in Britain and Der Spiegel in Germany. The Guardian shared the material with The New York Times, and the five news organizations have been working together to plan the timing of their reports.

They also have been advising WikiLeaks on which documents to release publicly and what redactions to make to those documents, Kauffmann and others involved in the arrangement said.

Especially with the NYT, which coordinated its publishing with the Obama administration, and with other U.S. media playing the echo-chamber it was certain that the first batches of stories and cables were selected and played with a pro-Israel taste. That's because this is even more widely true today than it was when it was written 28 years ago:

The more or less serious [U.S.] commentators take their information about Israel, and much of their opinions about it, from two sources. The first is from articles in the "liberal" American press, written almost totally by Jewish admirers of Israel who, even if they are critical of some aspects of the Israeli state, practice loyally what Stalin used to call "the constructive criticism." (In fact those among them who claim also to be "Anti-Stalinist" are in reality more Stalinist than Stalin, with Israel being their god which has not yet failed). In the framework of such critical worship it must be assumed that Israel has always "good intentions" and only "makes mistakes," and therefore such a plan would not be a matter for discussion–exactly as the Biblical genocides committed by Jews are not mentioned. The other source of information, The Jerusalem Post, has similar policies.

Besides the Stalinist pro-Israel bias of the English language media involved in the first round of publishing there are three other biases in the Cablegate releases.

1. These cables were written by U.S. Foreign Service members that want to be liked by their political bosses. Many cables may have a anti-Russian, anti-Turkish, anti-Iran slant because being that is what gets one promoted in the State Department. In total the cables with naturally reflect the political biases and Stalinist pro-Israel beliefs of the U.S. establishment.

2. A lot of people tell the U.S. what they assume it wants to hear. So when this or that Arab dictator tells the U.S. to bomb Iran it may well be he does that because he thinks that is what the U.S. ambassador wants to hear.

3. Brezinski and many English-only readers have ignored that other media have published from various  additional cables. A batch of Middle East cables was published in Arabic by the leftist Lebanese daily Al Akhbar with the copies of some of the cables excerpted at the Friday Lunch Club. Brezinski ignores these. And who has so far read the leaked cables on Bolivia which are now hosted on the website of the Vice President of Bolivia?

To sum it up: As of now there are only 1,500 cables public with only 1,060 of those at WikiLeaks. This out of a total of over 250,000 cables. There was certainly a bias in the first few stories and batches that were published but this was likely a 'natural' result of the general bias of those "western" media that selected and published them.

Only when all the leaked cable will finally be published will one be able to judge if there is a selection bias in the whole batch which could then point to some cabal being behind the leak.