On the Wikileaks trail in Oslo: The planet is a flat screen

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By Heikki Aittokoski
     
      Greetings from Oslo.
      I am writing this while sitting on the 8th floor of the editorial offices of Aftenposten in the Norwegian capital.
      In front of me is a 22" LCD display unit, and this is the reason I have reached the eccentric conclusion that the planet is not round, but flat.
      Scrolling on the display before my eyes is an entire world: Planet Earth as seen through the lens of the United States Department of State. More than 250,000 leaked documents.
      How should I proceed?
     
Well, I suppose one has to try to be rational about it.
      What sorts of search criteria, what keywords should be strung together in order to get down to the nitty-gritty?
      How should the results be collated in order to somehow keep the whole throbbing contraption under control?
     
This is hands-on work. There are few short cuts on offer.
      To begin with we have focused our resources on matters concerning Finland, because other media outlets and the wire services have already pored over the big international stories, bringing them to readers before Christmas.
      For all that, we shall be going back to world affairs in due course.
     
But the question remains: how do we do the searching?
      Aftenposten's IT expertise is right out of the top drawer, and in the spirit of Nordic cooperation they have put it at our disposal - in addition to the entire massive body of material.
      The articles on these pages have come into being from countless cross-referenced searches.
      A piece on Foreign Minister Alexander Stubb's views on Russia, complete with a reference to the "good cop/bad cop" duality of President Dmitri Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, comes for instance from trawling through confidential cables sent from Washington to the US Embassy in Helsinki.
      Many others are based on traffic in the opposite direction, reports sent from Kaivopuisto by successive US Ambassadors to Finland.
     
Since this is also a question of competition between news outlets, and time is of the essence, I and my Wikileaks partner, HS foreign correspondent Anssi Miettinen, have not counted the hours but worked day and night.
      The words on the screen start to blur and dance after a while.
      Every so often it is necessary to pull back and relax.
      But how does one relax in front of a flat-screen world?
     
One way is to throw in some total curve-ball searches every so often. Right now, as fatigue kicks in, the idea of a hot sauna sounds very attractive.
      S-a-u-n-a. Click.
      The keyword search on "sauna" throws up no fewer than 74 cables.
      Mind you, these first ones don't sound like a very relaxing experience.
      Depressing reports of human trafficking in Kazakhstan, where "saunas" are anything but like the ones at home in Finland.
      Or a report from Kyrgyzstan, where the country's "Scorpion" special ops forces have an impressive base (complete with saunas), which by all accounts was paid for with American taxpayers' dollars.
     
Ah, and yes, there seems to be a report on the visit to Finland in August 2005 of the then Russian Preisdent Vladimir Putin.
      Jarmo Viinanen, then the Secretary General and Chief of Staff of the Office of the President of the Republic, had gone to report on the visit to the US Ambassador, at that time Earle I. Mack.
      Putin had apparently gone to sauna with President Tarja Halonen's husband Dr. Pentti Arajärvi.
      It appears from the cable transcript that Putin's English language skills were not up to much, but he quite clearly made a commendable effort in this direction, and they were able to communicate adequately enough in the steam-room, Mack writes Viinanen's having recounted Arajärvi's saying.
      And there we have it: writes - having recounted - saying. All of this should be taken with a pinch of salt and healthy scepticism, but it's all interesting as hell anyway.
     
And, when it is taken as a whole, the material is actually of very great significance.
      If one can make the right selections and relate them to the things we know to have happened, then one can learn just a little bit more about the world, flat or round.
      And now back to the words on the screen.
     
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 12.2.2011
     
     
The writer Heikki Aittokoski is the head of Helsingin Sanomat's foreign desk. His colleague in Oslo Anssi Miettinen is a foreign correpsondent for the newspaper, stationed in London. The Wikileaks material pertaining to Finland has been covered in the newspaper since Friday 11th. A selection of the articles has been translated into English in our dailies, and they are collected here in the links below. Please note that many of the articles contain others published on that day nested in the internal links below them.
     


Previously in HS International Edition:
  WIKILEAKS: Finland reported copiously to the Americans on dealings with Russian leaders (11.2.2011)
  WIKILEAKS: Release of Afghan convicts responsible for death of Finnish peacekeeper pointed to corruption (15.2.2011)
  WIKILEAKS: US diplomatic cables portray Ahtisaari as straight-talking and formidable peace mediator (14.2.2011)
  WIKILEAKS, SATURDAY: Halonen tried repeatedly - and in vain - to get an invite to the Bush White House (12.2.2011)

HEIKKI AITTOKOSKI / Helsingin Sanomat
heikki.aittokoski@hs.fi