Wikileaks question

There is a legitimate role for secrecy, and there is a legitimate role for openness.

Washington/Berlin, Nov 28 (DPA) The first details of the illicit publication of US classified diplomatic cables and documents were leaking Saturday on the internet.

The US State Department was bracing for the publication by WikiLeaks of millions of confidential messages and reports sometime in the coming days. Germany's Der Spiegel, London's Guardian and the US's New York Times were expected to simultaneously release their stories and links to the documents in the coming day or so.


The documents are expected to contain classified and embarrassing details or communications about other countries. They will represent the third batch of secret US documents posted by the upstart WikiLeaks organisation.


The German website netzpolitik.org reported Saturday on a brief posting on Der Spiegel online that hinted at some details of the WikiLeaks documents. Der Spiegel took the posting down after only a brief appearance online.


According to the link to the now-disappeared article, the documents will include 250,000 diplomatic cables sent by US representatives all over the world to the State Department in Washington.


Most of the documents were transmitted since 2004, only one document dates back to 1966, netzpolitik.org reported.


More than 9,000 documents stem from the first two months this year. Spiegel Online did not comment to DPA on the veracity of netzpolitik's report or on whether the summary was posted in error.


US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has reached out to Germany and a handful of other countries to contain the diplomatic fallout ahead of the WikiLeaks publication, the State Department said Saturday.


Only a small portion of the documents are classified as secret, that is, with the second highest secrecy level. An estimated 4,330 documents were so confidential that they were not to have been made accessible to foreigners.


None of the documents that WikiLeaks obtained were classified as 'top secret', according to the alleged Spiegel report.

2010-11-28: ARIJ Conference [Update 1]
Submitted by admin on Sun, 11/28/2010 - 08:31
Julian Assange joined the Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism third annual conference today via video link. ARIJ is the region's first media network supporting in-depth reporting. The conference is taking place in Amman, November 26-28, 2010.

"The material that we are about to release covers essentially every major issue in every country in the world," Assange said, adding that "Over this last month much of my energy and activities have been spent preparing for the upcoming release of a diplomatic history of the United States," as quoted by AFP.

""This is an organisation with a four-year publication history. As far as we are aware, and as far as anyone has ever alleged in any credible manner whatsoever, no single individual has even come to harm as a result of anything that we have ever published," he said.

According to the event website, over 200 Arab journalists, editors and university academics from 16 Arab countries, including those benefitting from the network in the eight ARIJ countries of operation — Lebanon, Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, Yemen, Bahrain, Jordan and Syria, are attending:

"The conference, sponsored by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), is an ARIJ initiative to improve both the standards of hard-core investigations that promote accountability and transparency for the benefit of the public and to foster cross-border networking."

Classified Papers Prove German Warnings to Bush
By Klaus Wiegrefe[br />11/24/2010

Gerhard Schröder and Joschka Fischer made every effort they could. The German chancellor and foreign minister spared no effort with their appeals, whether in public or private, in small groups or with the eyes of the entire world upon them. In the end, though, it was all for naught. Then-United States President George W. Bush wouldn't allow anyone to change his mind. He was dead set on launching a war against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and thereby bringing "freedom," as he put it, to the Middle East. It was a freedom that Bush described as " God's gift to mankind."

Over time, however, this would-be gift from God has grown to become the biggest foreign-policy disaster in US history since the Vietnam War. The war in Iraq and its subsequent occupation has cost more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians and over 4,000 American soldiers their lives. Washington's credibility has been severely damaged, and Iraq will remain a trouble spot for the foreseeable future.

It is facts like these that have helped stoke the outrage since Bush recently published his memoirs, "Decision Points," in which he claims that Schröder -- the very man who won re-election in 2002 in large part based on his opposition to the war -- assured him in January 2002 that Germany would support the United States if it decided to go to war against Iraq. For his part, Schröder was quick to deny Bush's comments, claiming instead that "(t)he former American president is not telling the truth."

SPIEGEL has now obtained a previously secret copy of notes taken from a conversation in February 2003 marked "Classified Information -- For Internal Use Only." At that time, in was just a matter of weeks before US soldiers invaded Iraq. Klaus Scharioth, a Berlin-based state secretary in the German Foreign Ministry, had flown to Washington in the hope of still having a chance of changing the minds of Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser at the time, and other high-ranking members on the National Security Council.

According to the notes -- all in German -- the meeting amounted to 90 minutes of verbal blows, which primarily stemmed from Rice's "relatively rigorous and uncompromising" defense of the US position. The same notes indicate that Scharioth didn't budge an inch toward Washington, either. In retrospect, though, they document a high point in German diplomatic history, because the objections and predictions put forward by Berlin on that Tuesday have turned out to be legitimate and correct.

By Daniel Tencer
Sunday, November 28th, 2010 -- 2:08 pm

A classified directive signed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered US diplomats to spy on the highest-ranking officials in the United Nations, according to documents obtained from the latest WikiLeaks document dump.

The targets of the spying reportedly included UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, as well as the ambassadors of the permanent members of the UN Security Council -- China, Russia, France and the UK.

Even as its servers were under a denial-of-service attack Sunday, making it virtually impossible to reach its Web site, the whistleblower group WikiLeaks began releasing the first batch of US government documents -- many of them State Department cables -- expected to cause embarrassment or even a straining of relations among the US's diplomatic partners.

The Guardian, which along with the New York Times, Germany's Der Spiegel, France's Le Monde and Spain's El Pais received the WikiLeaks materials in advance, dug up a cable signed by Clinton in June of 2009, "demanding forensic technical details about the communications systems used by top UN officials, including passwords and personal encryption keys used in private and commercial networks for official communications."

The articles published today and in coming days are based on thousands of United States embassy cables, the daily reports from the field intended for the eyes of senior policy makers in Washington. The New York Times and a number of publications in Europe were given access to the material several weeks ago and agreed to begin publication of articles based on the cables Sunday online. The Times believes that the documents serve an important public interest, illuminating the goals, successes, compromises and frustrations of American diplomacy in a way that other accounts cannot match.

US embassy cables: browse the databaseUse our interactive guide to discover what has been revealed in the leak of 250,000 US diplomatic cables.

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