Wikirecap: Cables!

Let's see what cablelicious goodness we've got, courtesy of Wikileaks:

In a substantial dick move, the government of Botswana evicted Bushmen from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, after years of being relocated into "economically absolutely unviable situations without forethought and follow-up support". The kicker? They kicked them off the ancestral land to hand it over to diamond mining companies. Come on, Botswana--who do you think you are, Canada?




The prominent Yemeni journalist that wrote about the US's happy-missile-scapegoating-scam that resulted in US drones levelling a village they weren't technically allowed to bomb was locked up, tortured and sentenced to 5 years in prison for "recruiting young people, including foreigners, to an illegal armed organization by communicating with them via the Internet". The journalist, named Abdul Elah Hayder Shae, had been two important things: 1) an expert on Al-Qaeda, and 2) a thorn in the side of the Yemeni government for years, doing that pesky press-supported-public-accountability thing good journalists do. Quote from him that sounds too familiar in this day and age:

"I do not stand now in front of a judiciary but in front of a gang belonging to the national security apparatus." 

So many parallels, I don't even know where to start.

Haitian Elections in 2010--haggard with cholera, still votin'.

From the Department of Shit Everyone Already Knew,  we've got more proof of America's fairly dirty imperial hands all over Haiti. It appears the US is obsessed with keeping Aristide out of the country, and is still insistent on maintaining their occupier status. Rumours that American, Canadian and French officials "overseeing" the most recent voting process skewed the results to bar Jude Celestin (successor to Rene Preval) for being too "independent". We can't have that, can we. Add that to the occupation and raiding of the Cité Soleil slums by the UN and the mysterious "suicide" of one of the seasoned UN veterans opposed to meddling in Cité Soleil, and the situation in Haiti gets more and more fluid and weird.
So why the pants is the world's biggest superpower worrying about little old unnecessarily-cholera-stricken Haiti? Gwynne Dyer speculates with the sort of sense he's known for:

"Aristide, currently living in South Africa, could play a role in the Caribbean similar to that of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela if he regained power, but that is not currently on the cards."

Aside from the cables, there's been buzz about the possibility of persecuting Wikileaks under the CFAA for "systematically crawling P2P networks for secret files that might be accidentally shared". There's question as to whether or it's illegal to do that. Which might be irrelevant, because there's even bigger questions about whether or not Wikileaks actually DID any of that. Which hasn't stopped people trying to sink Wikileaks in the past, but whatevs.