NOW FOR THE BEGINNING OF THE BLOODY TRUTH: ARTICLES ABOUT WIKILEAKS
CLICK ON http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/
http://twitter.com/wikileaks
http://www.spiegel.de/international/topic/wikileaks_diplomatic_cables/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/28/us-embassy-cable-leak-diplomacy-crisis
\http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11858637\
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/11/cablegate/
http://twitter.com/wikileaks
http://www.spiegel.de/international/topic/wikileaks_diplomatic_cables/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/28/us-embassy-cable-leak-diplomacy-crisis
\http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11858637\
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/11/cablegate/
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Newest First | Oldest First
By WILLIAM J. BROAD, JAMES GLANZ and DAVID E. SANGER
American intelligence assessments say that Iran has obtained advanced missiles from North Korea based on a Russian design that are much more powerful than its other missiles.
November 28, 2010
MORE ON WIKILEAKS AND: NUCLEAR WEAPONS, NORTH KOREA, IRAN, STATE DEPARTMENT
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.
November 28, 2010
MORE ON WIKILEAKS AND: UNITED STATES INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS,NEW YORK TIMES, STATE DEPARTMENT
By MARK MAZZETTI
State Department personnel were told to gather the credit card and frequent-flier numbers, schedules and other personal data of foreign officials.
November 28, 2010
MORE ON WIKILEAKS AND: UNITED STATES INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS,ESPIONAGE, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, STATE DEPARTMENT
By DAVID E. SANGER, JAMES GLANZ and JO BECKER
Cables show how two presidents have dealt with Iran and how President Obama built support for harsher sanctions.
November 28, 2010
MORE ON WIKILEAKS AND: UNITED STATES INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS,IRAN, STATE DEPARTMENT
By SCOTT SHANE and ANDREW W. LEHREN
A huge trove of State Department communiqués offers an extraordinary look at the inner workings, and sharp elbows, of diplomacy.
November 28, 2010
MORE ON WIKILEAKS AND: UNITED STATES INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS,STATE DEPARTMENT
By JOHN F. BURNS and RAVI SOMAIYA; RAVI SOMAIYA CONTRIBUTED REPORTING.
The Swedish prosecutor’s office said that Julian Assange is being sought for questioning on months-old charges of rape and other offenses.
November 19, 2010
MORE ON WIKILEAKS AND: SEX CRIMES, SWEDEN, ASSANGE, JULIAN
By NEIL MACFARQUHAR
Sarah E. Shourd, a teacher freed in September after nearly 14 months in Tehran’s Evin prison says the group inadvertently crossed into Iran.
November 1, 2010
MORE ON WIKILEAKS AND: HIKING, IRAQ, IRAN, SHOURD, SARAH EMILY,FATTAL, JOSHUA FELIX, BAUER, SHANE
By ARTHUR S. BRISBANE
Among The Times’s challenges in handling the “War Logs”: keeping distance between itself and WikiLeaks.
October 31, 2010
MORE ON WIKILEAKS AND: UNITED STATES DEFENSE AND MILITARY FORCES, CLASSIFIED INFORMATION AND STATE SECRETS, IRAQ WAR (2003- ), NEW YORK TIMES, ASSANGE, JULIAN, SCHMITT, ERIC, KELLER, BILL
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Allegations of abuse surfaced last week in a cache of secret United States military documents released by the Web site WikiLeaks.
October 29, 2010
MORE ON WIKILEAKS AND: IRAQ WAR (2003- ), TORTURE, IRAQ, IRAQIYA,MALIKI, NURI KAMAL AL-
Responses to “The War Logs” articles about the trove of secret field reports from Iraq obtained by the group WikiLeaks.
October 26, 2010
MORE ON WIKILEAKS AND: UNITED STATES DEFENSE AND MILITARY FORCES, CIVILIAN CASUALTIES, ARCHIVES AND RECORDS, IRAQ WAR (2003- ),IRAQ, ASSANGE, JULIAN
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Responding to the release of documents by WikiLeaks, the deputy prime minister said that any abuses committed by British troops “need to be looked at.”
October 25, 2010
MORE ON WIKILEAKS AND: DEFENSE AND MILITARY FORCES, IRAQ WAR (2003- ), LIBERAL DEMOCRATS, CONSERVATIVE PARTY, CLEGG, NICK,CAMERON, DAVID
By JOHN F. BURNS and RAVI SOMAIYA; ERIC SCHMITT CONTRIBUTED REPORTING FROM WASHINGTON, and DEXTER FILKINS FROM KABUL, AFGHANISTAN.
Julian Assange is used to being denounced, but now some of his own comrades are abandoning him for what they see as erratic and imperious behavior.
October 24, 2010
MORE ON WIKILEAKS AND: UNITED STATES DEFENSE AND MILITARY FORCES, AFGHANISTAN WAR (2001- ), CLASSIFIED INFORMATION AND STATE SECRETS, IRAQ WAR (2003- ), ASSANGE, JULIAN
Julian Assange and Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, lashed out at the Obama administration’s aggressive pursuit of whistle-blowers.
October 24, 2010
MORE ON WIKILEAKS AND: WHISTLE-BLOWERS, CLASSIFIED INFORMATION AND STATE SECRETS, DEFENSE DEPARTMENT, ELLSBERG, DANIEL,ASSANGE, JULIAN
By JAMES GLANZ and ANDREW W. LEHREN
A trove of documents describes episodes in which private contractors killed civilians and were themselves killed.
October 24, 2010
MORE ON WIKILEAKS AND: UNITED STATES DEFENSE AND MILITARY FORCES, CIVILIAN CASUALTIES, PRIVATE MILITARY CONTRACTORS, IRAQ WAR (2003- ), IRAQ, DYNCORP INTERNATIONAL, XE SERVICES, UNITY RESOURCES GROUP, ARMORGROUP, KBR INC
By SABRINA TAVERNISE; JACOB M. HARRIS CONTRIBUTED REPORTING FROM NEW YORK.
The documents on the Iraq and Afghan wars suggest that while each conflict is different, Afghans have lost faith in the Americans’ ability to protect them.
October 24, 2010
MORE ON WIKILEAKS AND: UNITED STATES DEFENSE AND MILITARY FORCES, AFGHANISTAN WAR (2001- ), IRAQ WAR (2003- ), IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN
New York Times editors said Sunday that although the paper's reporters had been digging through WikiLeaks trove of 250,000 State Department cables for "several weeks," the online whistleblower wasn't the source of the documents.
But if WikiLeaks—which allegedly obtained the cables from a 22-year-old army private—wasn't the Times source, than who was? Apparently, The Guardian—one of the five newspapers that had an advanced look at the cables—supplied a copy of the cables to The Times.
David Leigh, The Guardian's investigations executive editor, told The Cutline in an email that "we got the cables from WL"—meaning WikiLeaks—and "we gave a copy to the NYT."
The Times, in an editor's note, said that the cables "were made available to The Times by a source who insisted on anonymity." A Times article on the cables said they were provided to the paper by an "intermediary." So presumably, the Guardian acted as intermediary and the Times agreed to the same embargo as the other publications involved.
On Sunday, Leigh wrote on The Guardian's site that his paper's staff spent months going through the cables. In an email, Leigh specified that The Guardian received the cables in August.
Leigh said that all the publications involved Sunday—including Spain's El Pais, France's Le Monde and Germany's Der Spiegel—"talked to each other in order to coordinate timing, and the papers talked to each other in an effort [not completely successful!] to avoid scooping each other."
It's unclear exactly why The Guardian passed along a copy of the cables to The Times, and whether it was at the suggestion of WikiLeaks or not. (Leigh did not respond to a follow-up email, perhaps because it's the middle of the night in England).
Both The Times and the Guardian were among the newspapers that WikiLeaks provided the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs to prior to publishing online. But the WikiLeaks-Times relationship has been a bit rocky of late.
WikiLeaks founder and editor-in-chief Julian Assange harshly criticized The Times in October for a front-page profile of him that ran alongside the Iraq logs coverage.
Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, declined to comment on Leigh's statement about providing a copy to the Times.
“This Is What Diplomats ... Have Done For Hundreds Of Years.”' State Department Says (CNN) -- WikiLeaks, the whistle-blower website sitting on a giant trove of U.S. diplomatic cables, didn't expect the papers to reveal as much espionage as they apparently do, a spokesman said Monday. "I was surprised at (the) extent of the spying," Kristinn Hrafnsson told CNN. The leaked papers include what seems to be an order from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to American diplomats to engage in intelligence-gathering. Clinton directed her envoys at embassies around the world to collect information ranging from basic biographical data on diplomats to their frequent flyer and credit card numbers, and even "biometric information on ranking North Korean diplomats." Typical biometric information includes fingerprints, signatures, and iris recognition data. The cable, simply signed 'CLINTON', is classified S/NF - or 'Secret/No Foreign' - and was sent to 33 embassies and the U.N. mission offices in New York, Vienna, and Rome. "Is it a natural part of diplomatic activity to have diplomats collecting biometric data?" WikiLeaks spokesman Hrafnsson asked Monday, calling it "a contravention of how diplomats are supposed to conduct business." The State Department denied its diplomats were spies. · "Contrary to some Wikileaks' reporting, our diplomats are diplomats. They are not intelligence assets," State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said on Twitter. He further downplayed the cable's significance by writing in a separate tweet: "Diplomats collect information that shapes our policies and actions. Diplomats for all nations do the same thing." WikiLeaks spokesman Hrafnsson denied that Sunday's release of papers harmed United States security. "I don't believe anything in these cables are national security concerns," he said. "If we are talking about strained relations or embarrassment, that does not fall into national security concerns," he said with a shrug. WikiLeaks claims it has 251,288 cables sent by American diplomats between the end of 1966 and February 2010, which it will release piecemeal over the course of weeks or months, Hrafnsson said. Of those, 8,017 originated from the office of the secretary of state, and more than 15,600 are classified as secret, WikiLeaks said as began releasing the papers Sunday. "Secret" is not the highest level of classification, Hrafnsson pointed out. WikiLeaks does not have any top secret documents, he added. More than half are unclassified, he said. Top U.S. officials were quick to denounce the publication of the leaked documents Sunday. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said publishing the documents would jeopardize "our diplomats, intelligence professionals and people around the world who come to the United States for assistance in promoting democracy and open government." And the British Foreign Office followed suit Monday, saying it condemned any release of classified documents. "They can damage national security, are not in the national interest and, as the U.S. (has) said, may put lives at risk," the office said in a statement. A spokesman for Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari weighed in with a statement about documents mentioning Zardari and Saudi King Abdullah, saying the "so-called leaks are no more than an attempt to create misperceptions between two important and brotherly Muslim countries." The office of Afghan President Hamid Karzai downplayed the significance of the revelations. "The things that have been said about President Karzai are not new. They've been alleged in the media in the past and we are not surprised," a spokesman for Karzai told reporters. The New York Times and four European newspapers that had received the documents in advance began publishing excerpts earlier Sunday. Many of them detail conversations on sensitive issues between American officials and leaders in the Middle East, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Major topics in the documents include pressure from U.S. allies in the Middle East for decisive action to neutralize Iran's nuclear program, conversations about military action against al Qaeda militants in Yemen and Washington's efforts to have highly enriched uranium removed from a Pakistani research reactor. "The cables show the U.S. spying on its allies and the U.N.; turning a blind eye to corruption and human rights abuse in 'client states'; backroom deals with supposedly neutral countries; and lobbying for U.S. corporations," the site's editor-in-chief and spokesman, Julian Assange, said in a statement released Sunday evening. (CBS) A leading Republican Congressman called WikiLeaks' release of secret U.S. State Department documents "catastrophic" which would make other governments question whether America can be trusted. Rep. Peter Hoesktra, R-Mich., Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee, said the more than a quarter-million diplomatic messages released by the whistleblower organization and published by news media organization in the U.S. and Europe contain "a whole number of time bombs." Appearing on CBS' "The Early Show" this morning, Hoekstra said the embassy cable messages and directives to diplomatic staff represents "a range of information getting into the public domain that was never intended to be there. Some of it is gossip, some of it is about the political sausage [-making] of getting to a deal." And in the case of cables referencing Pakistan, some is "very, very sensitive negotiations between the U.S. and one of our allies, dealing with nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation." Hoekstra said that from what he has seen so far, there has been no single piece of information that is potentially catastrophic in terms of damage. But what he believes what is catastrophic about the leak is a breakdown in trust. "There's just a lot of countries that are going to be out there, they are going to see stuff that they never thought was going to be public. It's now in the public domain, it's on the front page of the newspapers, it's all over TV, it's all over the Internet. They are just going to wonder: Can the U.S. be trusted? Can the United States keep a secret?" Hoekstra told anchor Harry Smith. Also awkward: Revelations that State Department employees were asked to spy on U.N. delegations and certain foreign officials and collect not just biographical information but also biometric information (including fingerprints and DNA), credit card numbers, even frequent flyer numbers. "A very, very awkward position, I would think, for diplomats to be put in," said Hoekstra. He said that during his work on the Intelligence Committee, "the CIA has never really asked us to, you know, to spy on the people that we've been meeting with or those kinds of things, because they recognize that it may compromise our position as being a congressman. I think it does the same thing for diplomats - it compromises or potentially compromises their position and their relationship with the people that they work with." Hoekstra said the fact that so much information was collected in a database to which "hundreds of thousands of people across the government" has access represents "a massive failure within the intelligence community. "I think the real surprising thing here is that it never happened before," he added. More on WikiLeaks: Links to Leaked Cables: The US Embassy Cable (Guardian) A Superpower's View of the World (Spiegel, in English) Los papeles del Departamento de Estado (El Pais) Videos Wikileaks report stokes anti-US hardliners in PakistanRelated stories US Embassy Cables: Even Disapproving Newspapers Publish The RevelationsHow Hillary Clinton ordered U.S. diplomats to spy on UN leaders Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1333920/WikiLeaks-Hillary-Clinton-ordered-U-S-diplomats-spy-UN-leaders.html#ixzz16gS1PAfT |
US embassy cables offer frank insights; State Dept. scurries to ease tensions
Google China offices in Beijing. A leaked cable said China’s Politburo directed an intrusion into Google computer systems. (Gemunu Amarasinghe/ Associated Press)
New York Times / November 29, 2010
WASHINGTON — A cache of a quarter-million confidential US diplomatic cables, most of them from the past three years, provides an unprecedented look at back room bargaining by embassies around the world, brutally candid views of foreign leaders, and frank assessments of nuclear and terrorist threats.
Some of the cables, made available to The New York Times and several other news organizations, were written as recently as late February, revealing the Obama administration’s exchanges over crises and conflicts. The material was originally obtained by WikiLeaks, an organization devoted to revealing secret documents. WikiLeaks posted the first installment of the archive on its website yesterday.
The disclosure of the cables is sending shudders through the diplomatic establishment and could strain relations with some countries, influencing international affairs in ways that are impossible to predict.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and US ambassadors around the world have been contacting foreign officials in recent days to alert them to the expected disclosures. A statement from the White House yesterday said: “We condemn in the strongest terms the unauthorized disclosure of classified documents and sensitive national security information.
“President Obama supports responsible, accountable, and open government at home and around the world, but this reckless and dangerous action runs counter to that goal. By releasing stolen and classified documents, WikiLeaks has put at risk not only the cause of human rights but also the lives and work of these individuals.’’
■ A dangerous standoff with Pakistan over nuclear fuel: Since 2007, the United States has mounted a highly secret effort, so far unsuccessful, to remove from a Pakistani research reactor highly enriched uranium that US officials fear could be diverted for use in an illicit nuclear device. In May 2009, Ambassador Anne Patterson reported that Pakistan was refusing to schedule a visit by US technical experts because, as a Pakistani official said, “if the local media got word of the fuel removal, ‘they certainly would portray it as the United States taking Pakistan’s nuclear weapons,’ he argued.’’
■ Planning for an eventual collapse of North Korea: US and South Korean officials have discussed the prospects for a unified Korea, should the North’s economic troubles and political transition lead the state to implode. The South Koreans even considered commercial inducements to China, according to the US ambassador to Seoul. She told Washington in February that South Korean officials believe the right business deals would “help salve’’ China’s “concerns about living with a reunified Korea’’ that is in a “benign alliance’’ with the United States.
■ Bargaining to empty the Guantanamo Bay prison: When US diplomats pressed other countries to resettle detainees, they became reluctant players in a State Department version of “Let’s Make a Deal.’’ Slovenia was told to take a prisoner if it wanted to meet with Obama, while the island nation of Kiribati was offered incentives worth millions of dollars to take in Chinese Muslim detainees, cables from diplomats recounted.
■ Suspicions of corruption in the Afghan government: When Afghanistan’s vice president visited the United Arab Emirates last year, local authorities working with the Drug Enforcement Administration discovered he was carrying $52 million in cash. A cable from the US Embassy in Kabul called the money “a significant amount’’ that the official, Ahmed Zia Massoud, “was ultimately allowed to keep without revealing the money’s origin or destination.’’ (Massoud denies taking any money out of Afghanistan.)
■ Mixed records against terrorism: Saudi donors remain the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda, and the tiny Persian Gulf state of Qatar, a generous host to the US military for years, was the “worst in the region’’ in counterterrorism efforts, according to a State Department cable last December. Qatar’s security service was “hesitant to act against known terrorists out of concern for appearing to be aligned with the United States and provoking reprisals,’’ the cable said.
The 251,287 cables, first acquired by WikiLeaks, were provided to the Times by an intermediary on the condition of anonymity. Many are unclassified, and none are marked “top secret,’’ the government’s most secure communications status. But some 11,000 are classified “secret,’’ 9,000 are labeled “noforn,’’ shorthand for material considered too delicate to be shared with any foreign government, and 4,000 are designated both secret and noforn.
Many more cables name diplomats’ confidential sources, from foreign legislators and military officers to human rights activists and journalists, often with a warning to Washington: “Please protect’’ or “Strictly protect.’’
The Times has withheld from articles and removed from documents it is posting online the names of some people who spoke privately to diplomats and might be at risk if they were publicly identified. The Times is also withholding some passages or entire cables whose disclosure could compromise US intelligence efforts.
The cables show that nearly a decade after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the dark shadow of terrorism still dominates the United States’ relations with the world. They depict the Obama administration struggling to sort out which Pakistanis are trustworthy partners against Al Qaeda, adding Australians who have disappeared in the Middle East to terrorist watch lists, and assessing whether a lurking rickshaw driver in Lahore, Pakistan, was awaiting fares or conducting surveillance of the road to the US Consulate.
They show US officials managing relations with a China on the rise and a Russia retreating from democracy. They document years of painstaking effort to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon — and of worry about a possible Israeli strike on Iran with the same goal.
Even when they recount events that are already known, the cables offer remarkable details.
For instance, it has been previously reported that the Yemeni government has sought to cover up the US role in missile strikes against the local branch of Al Qaeda. But a cable’s fly-on-the-wall account of a January meeting between the Yemeni president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and General David Petraeus, then the US commander in the Middle East, is nonetheless breathtaking.
Speaking to another Iraqi official about Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, King Abdullah said, “You and Iraq are in my heart, but that man is not.’’ The king called President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan the greatest obstacle to that country’s progress. “When the head is rotten,’’ he said, “it affects the whole body.’
© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.
US Tries To Contain Damage From Leaked Documents
BY MATTHEW LEE : Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Bristling over the unauthorized release of more than a quarter million classified State Department documents, the Obama White House on Monday ordered a government-wide review of how agencies safeguard sensitive information.
The weekend release of documents reflecting, in some cases, unflattering assessments of world leaders has caused embarrassment to the administration. The director of the White House's Office of Management and Budget, Jacob Lew, said in ordering the agency-wide assessment Monday that the disclosures are unacceptable and will not be tolerated.
The U.S. cables contained raw comments normally muffled by diplomatic politesse: Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah pressing the U.S. to "cut off the head of the snake" by taking action against Iran's nuclear program. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi described as "feckless" and "vain." German Chancellor Angela Merkel dismissed as "risk averse and rarely creative."
Publication of the secret memos and documents made public by the online whistle-blower Wikileaks Sunday amplified widespread global alarm about Iran's nuclear ambitions. It also unveiled occasional U.S. pressure tactics aimed at hot spots in Afghanistan, Pakistan and North Korea. The leaks disclosed bluntly candid impressions from both diplomats and other world leaders about America's allies and foes.
It was, said Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, the "Sept. 11 of world diplomacy."
In the wake of the massive document dump by online whistleblower WikiLeaks and numerous media reports detailing their contents, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was expected to address the diplomatic repercussions later Monday. Clinton may have to confront the fallout first hand after she leaves Washington on a four-nation tour of Central Asia and the Middle East - a region that figures prominently in the leaked documents.
Most of the disclosures focused on familiar diplomatic issues that have long stymied U.S. officials and their foreign counterparts - the nuclear ambitions of Iran, North Korea and Pakistan, China's growth as a superpower, the frustrations of combating terrorism.
But their publication could become problems for the officials concerned and for any secret initiatives they had preferred to keep quiet. The massive release of material intended for diplomatic eyes was quickly ruffling feathers in foreign capitals despite efforts by U.S. diplomats in recent days to shore up relations with key allies in advance of the leaks.
At Clinton's first stop in Astana, Kazakhstan, she will be attending a summit of officials from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a diplomatic grouping that includes many officials from countries cited in the leaked cables.
In London, Steve Field, a spokesman for British Prime Minister David Cameron, said "it's important that governments are able to operate on the basis of confidentiality of information." French Foreign Ministry spokesman Bernard Valero said "we strongly deplore the deliberate and irresponsible release of American diplomatic correspondence by the site Wikileaks.:"
Pakistan's foreign ministry said it was an "irresponsible disclosure of sensitive official documents" while Iraq's foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, called the document release "unhelpful and untimely." In Australia, Assange's home country, Attorney General Robert McClelland said law enforcement officials were investigating whether WikiLeaks broke any laws.
In Washington, Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, called the release very damaging.
"The catastrophic issue here is just a breakdown in trust," he said Monday, adding that many other countries - allies and foes alike - are likely to ask, 'Can the United States be trusted? Can the United States keep a secret?' "
The encrypted e-mails and other documents unearthed new revelations about long-simmering nuclear trouble spots, detailing U.S., Israeli and Arab world fears of Iran's growing nuclear program, American concerns about Pakistan's atomic arsenal and U.S. discussions about a united Korean peninsula as a long-term solution to North Korean aggression.
The documents published by The New York Times, France's Le Monde, Britain's Guardian newspaper, German magazine Der Spiegel and others laid out the behind-the-scenes conduct of Washington's international relations, shrouded in public by platitudes, smiles and handshakes at photo sessions among senior officials.
The White House immediately condemned the release of the WikiLeaks documents, saying "such disclosures put at risk our diplomats, intelligence professionals and people around the world who come to the United States for assistance in promoting democracy and open government."
U.S. officials may also have to mend fences after revelations that they gathered personal information on other diplomats. The leaks cited American memos encouraging U.S. diplomats at the United Nations to collect detailed data about the U.N. secretary general, his team and foreign diplomats - going beyond what is considered the normal run of information-gathering expected in diplomatic circles.
State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley played down the diplomatic spying allegations. "Our diplomats are just that, diplomats," he said. "They collect information that shapes our policies and actions. This is what diplomats, from our country and other countries, have done for hundreds of years."
The White House noted that "by its very nature, field reporting to Washington is candid and often incomplete information. It is not an expression of policy, nor does it always shape final policy decisions."
"Nevertheless, these cables could compromise private discussions with foreign governments and opposition leaders, and when the substance of private conversations is printed on the front pages of newspapers across the world, it can deeply impact not only U.S. foreign policy interests, but those of our allies and friends around the world," the White House said.
On its website, The New York Times said "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."
Le Monde said it "considered that it was part of its mission to learn about these documents, to make a journalistic analysis and to make them available to its readers." Der Spiegel said that in publishing the documents its reporters and editors "weighed the public interest against the justified interest of countries in security and confidentiality."
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange claimed the administration was trying to cover up alleged evidence of serious "human rights abuse and other criminal behavior" by the U.S. government. WikiLeaks posted the documents just hours after it claimed its website had been hit by a cyberattack that made the site inaccessible for much of the day.
But extracts of the more than 250,000 documents posted online by news outlets that had been given advance copies of the documents showed deep U.S. concerns about Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs along with fears about regime collapse in Pyongyang.
The Guardian said some cables showed King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia repeatedly urging the United States to attack Iran to destroy its nuclear program. The newspaper also said officials in Jordan and Bahrain have openly called for Iran's nuclear program to be stopped by any means and that leaders of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt referred to Iran "as 'evil,' an 'existential threat' and a power that 'is going to take us to war,'" The Guardian said.
Those documents may prove the trickiest because even though the concerns of the Gulf Arab states are known, their leaders rarely offer such stark appraisals in public.
The Times highlighted documents that indicated the U.S. and South Korea were "gaming out an eventual collapse of North Korea" and discussing the prospects for a unified country if the isolated, communist North's economic troubles and political transition lead it to implode.
The Times also cited diplomatic messages describing unsuccessful U.S. efforts to prod Pakistani officials to remove highly enriched uranium from a reactor out of fear that the material could be used to make an illicit atomic device. And the newspaper cited exchanges showing Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, telling Gen. David Petraeus that his country would pretend that American missile strikes against a local al-Qaida group had come from Yemen's forces.
The paper also cited documents showing the U.S. used hardline tactics to win approval from countries to accept freed detainees from Guantanamo Bay. It said Slovenia was told to take a prisoner if its president wanted to meet with President Barack Obama and said the Pacific island of Kiribati was offered millions of dollars to take in a group of detainees.
It also cited a message from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing that included allegations from a Chinese contact that China's Politburo directed a cyber intrusion into Google's computer systems as part of a "coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws."
Le Monde said another memo asked U.S. diplomats to collect basic contact information about U.N. officials that included Internet passwords, credit card numbers and frequent flyer numbers. They were asked to obtain fingerprints, ID photos, DNA and iris scans of people of interest to the United States, Le Monde said.
The Times said another batch of documents raised questions about Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his relationship with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. One cable said Berlusconi "appears increasingly to be the mouthpiece of Putin" in Europe, the Times reported.
Der Spiegel reported that the documents portrayed German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle in unflattering terms. It said American diplomats saw Merkel as risk-averse and Westerwelle as largely powerless.
Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, meanwhile, was described as erratic and in the near constant company of a Ukrainian nurse who was described in one cable as "a voluptuous blonde," according to the Times.
The State Department's top lawyer warned Assange late Saturday that lives and military operations would be put at risk if the cables were released. Legal adviser Harold Koh said WikiLeaks would be breaking the law if it went ahead. He also rejected a request from Assange to cooperate in removing sensitive details from the documents.
Hoekstra was interviewed Monday on ABC's "Good Morning America" and CBS's "The Early Show."
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Associated Press writers Anne Gearan in Washington; Juergen Baetz in Berlin; Don Melvin in London; Angela Doland in Paris; Robert H. Reid in Cairo; Brian Murphy in Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Mark Lavie in Jerusalem and Nicole Winfield in Rome contributed to this report.
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Online: http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/
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