Military Bans Disks, Threatens Courts-Martial to Stop New Leaks | Danger Room
It’s too late to stop WikiLeaks from publishing thousands more classified documents, nabbed from the Pentagon’s secret network. But the U.S. military is telling its troops to stop using CDs, DVDs, thumb drives and every other form of removable media — or risk a court martial. Maj. “Unauthorized data transfers routinely occur on classified networks using removable media and are a method the insider threat uses to exploit classified information. It’s one of a number of moves the Defense Department is making to prevent further disclosures of secret information in the wake of the WikiLeaks document dumps. To stop that from happening again, an August internal review suggested that the Pentagon disable all classified computers’ ability to write to removable media. One military source who works on these networks says it will make the job harder; classified computers are often disconnected from the network, or are in low-bandwidth areas. Photo: USAF See Also:
Obama and GOPers Worked Together to Kill Bush Torture Probe
In its first months in office, the Obama administration sought to protect Bush administration officials facing criminal investigation overseas for their involvement in establishing policies the that governed interrogations of detained terrorist suspects. A "confidential" April 17, 2009, cable sent from the US embassy in Madrid to the State Department—one of the 251,287 cables obtained by WikiLeaks—details how the Obama administration, working with Republicans, leaned on Spain to derail this potential prosecution. The previous month, a Spanish human rights group called the Association for the Dignity of Spanish Prisoners had requested that Spain's National Court indict six former Bush officials for, as the cable describes it, "creating a legal framework that allegedly permitted torture." Soon after the request was made, the US embassy in Madrid began tracking the matter. Two weeks later, Sen. On April 15, Sen. Still, this did not end the matter.
WikiLeaks just made the world more repressive
I am an aid worker, the kind who rants about transparency, open governments and reforming the United Nations. But, I used to be a diplomat and I used to write secret cables, like the ones being released by WikiLeaks. And I said some very frank and nasty things in those cables. Why? Allow me to illustrate with an example. When we sent the reporting cables back to the Department of Foreign Affairs, they were secret for a reason. The third most common topic in the WikiLeaks cables is human rights, with American diplomats doing the same thing we were trying to do in Indonesia: Make the world a little better. That's hard to swallow for the cyber mob that is celebrating the embarrassment being inflicted on the U.S. government this week. It's not just the militant activist in Guelph, Ont., reading the cables. Ironically, WikiLeaks is inflicting the same collateral damage it so loudly abhors.
Gates on Leaks, Wiki and Otherwise
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has regularly denounced Wikileaks in recent months for its extensive disclosures, and as a former director of central intelligence he places high value on secrets. But at a Pentagon briefing on Tuesday, Mr. Gates, who plans to retire next year, responded to a question about Wikileaks’ disclosure of 250,000 diplomatic cables by meandering down a different path. Here is some of what he said: “Let me just offer some perspective as somebody who’s been at this a long time. “Now, I’ve heard the impact of these releases on our foreign policy described as a meltdown, as a game-changer, and so on. “So other nations will continue to deal with us. “Is this embarrassing?
The cables and the damage done
For people who value freedom and truth, what's not to applaud about WikiLeaks? Certainly in Australia, the cablegate saga – and its local offshoot – has unlocked a tide of libertarian righteousness. Throughout the media and much of civil society, there's a thrill of surprise at the unsaintly ways and words of diplomacy, a frisson of satisfaction at seeing the powerful humbled and exposed, and a current of outrage on behalf of Julian Assange. All this is muddled with some less noble impulses, including the voyeuristic buzz of reading a lot of other people's mail. And if your business is to sell newspapers, there is also the rare joy of finding a new lease on relevance and profit. But beyond the melodrama and moralising, what matters are the consequences. Bad for diplomacy and international cooperation: More than ever, most of the world's problems demand cooperative responses. Restrictions on providing sensitive information to the media and the public could well be tightened.
U.S. has warm words for ex-Guantanamo detainee
WASHINGTON — A U.S. consular official in Luxembourg gave a former Guantanamo detainee warm praise earlier this year in a cable to Washington made public Monday by the website WikiLeaks. The cable, written Jan. 15, recounted the visit to Luxembourg of Moazzam Begg, a British citizen who was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and was held until 2005 by the Americans in Afghanistan and Guantanamo as a suspected member of al Qaida. His story, including allegations that U.S. soldiers beat him in Afghanistan, was recounted in the 2007 Academy Award winning documentary "Taxi to the Dark Side." After his release, Begg began pushing for European countries to accept Guantanamo detainees, and was in Luxembourg to press his case, including a meeting Jan. 14 with the country's foreign minister. His visit was monitored with interest by a U.S. consular officer, who attended an Amnesty International-sponsored screening of the film, where Begg also spoke. "Mr. Read the cable
U.S. Diplomats Aren't Stupid After All - By Joshua Kucera
As a journalist covering international affairs, I have long wondered: Are U.S. diplomats ignorant or lying? I have talked to countless numbers of them in dozens of countries in "on background" interviews, that staple of foreign reportage. Readers recognize a background interview by its citation of "a Western diplomat," and theoretically that anonymity frees the diplomat to talk frankly. But in practice, I've found that when that diplomat is American, the result is still often nothing more than warmed-over talking points, displaying a level of knowledge that suggests a cramming of the Wikipedia entry on the country in question. "Of course things could be better, but overall the situation is improving," they'll say blandly, while I scribble "BLAH BLAH BLAH" in my notebook, hoping they can't see it, to maintain the fiction that I'm interested in what they're saying. This is not the case with other countries' diplomats. These don't necessarily contradict what Hoagland told me.
WikiLeaks cables are dispatches from a beleaguered America in imperial retreat | Neal Ascherson | Comment is free | The Observer
There's more to the WikiLeaks dispatches than leaks. Look behind them, at the writers, and you see the loyal rearguard of America: an imperial power in retreat. There was a tradition in our Foreign Office that a retiring ambassador could blow off steam. In a final, exuberant telegram to Whitehall, he could say exactly what he thought of the country he was leaving, and of the folly of the Foreign Office in ignoring his advice.The best telegrams were treasured by young diplomats. But they began to leak into the press. And a few years ago this privilege was suppressed. Now the WikiLeaks eruption has smothered the world with the secret thoughts of the state department's ambassadors. These diplomats who didn't want us to know their thoughts are not mere cogs in an imperial machine. The test of an ambassador is telling truth to those who wield the power – having the guts to tell the department that its plan is a delusion. Not all the dispatch-writers are that sound. Perhaps not.
