It’s probably not the feds who are responsible, simply because knocking the servers offline at this point achieves nothing. Wikileaks gave the documents to newspapers weeks ago; the first stories about the contents are set to drop this afternoon at around 4:30 p.m. Unless they’re being DOS’d purely out of spite, why bother?
I’m not sure what the point of this is either:
In a highly unusual step reflecting the administration’s grave concerns about the ramifications of the move, the State Department late Saturday released a letter from its top lawyer to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his attorney telling them that publication of the documents would be illegal and demanding that they stop it…Again, the Times has had these documents for ages. No doubt they’ve got a giant front-page feature about them set to publish tonight. Assange probably couldn’t stop them at this point even if he wanted to, in which case releasing the letter is really just the feds doing PR. I’m intrigued, though, that it’s Koh who signed it and not some lower-level functionary. Partly that’s to signal how seriously State is taking this, but possibly it’s also an attempt by the Obama administration to trade on Koh’s leftist credibility in rallying U.S. public opinion against Wikileaks. He’s been a liberal shortlister for Supreme Court vacancies since The One took office, notwithstanding his legal defense of drone strikes in Pakistan. Having him publicly warn Wikileaks about the damage they’re doing to U.S. interests might temper progressive enthusiasm for Assange from three cheers to, say, one.
The letter from State Department legal adviser Harold Koh was released as U.S. diplomats around the world are scrambling to warn foreign governments about what might be in the secret documents that are believed to contain highly sensitive assessments about world leaders, their policies and America’s attempts to lobby them…
The State Department said Koh’s message was a response to a letter received on Friday by the U.S. ambassador to Britain, Louis Susman, from Assange and his lawyer, Jennifer Robinson. The department said that letter asked for information “regarding individuals who may be ‘at significant risk of harm’ because of” the release of the documents.
“Despite your stated desire to protect those lives, you have done the opposite and endangered the lives of countless individuals,” Koh wrote in reply. “You have undermined your stated objective by disseminating this material widely, without redaction, and without regard to the security and sanctity of the lives your actions endanger.”
Needless to say, Assange has already rejected Koh’s demands. And just to make sure that he wrings every drop of media attention he can get out of this, he’s arranged for the documents to be released in waves, ensuring a week’s worth of buzz for him and his group instead of a mere 48 hours. What sort of bombshell revelations can we expect? Well, apparently, there’s nothing “top secret” in the files; six percent qualify as “secret,” 40.5 percent are “classified,” and the rest aren’t confidential at all. Which doesn’t mean that they won’t be embarrassing:
A journalist with Britain’s Guardian newspaper said the files include an unflattering US assessment of UK PM David Cameron.More here, including a reference to Ahmadinejad as “Hitler,” and here, teasing the possibility that Turkey might have facilitated weapons smuggling to Al Qaeda in Iraq(!). Until today, one could argue (unpersuasively) that Wikileaks isn’t so much anti-American as it is anti-war; releasing secret docs about Iraq and Afghanistan supposedly would speed an end to the conflicts, forcing a U.S. withdrawal and leaving Iraqis and Afghans to enjoy a thousand years of kite-flying, occupation-free peace, etc. That’s moronic, but it’s more or less in line with traditional leftist policy priorities. What’s the “anti-war” motive, though, in releasing a few hundred thousand diplomatic cables? Progressives are forever telling us that we need to rely less on Defense and more on State, and yet it sounds like today’s leak will do much greater damage to the latter than the previous leaks did to the former. Not only will it strain U.S. diplomatic relationships, but the paranoia it’ll engender among U.S. diplomats about future communiques being exposed will cripple their ability to be candid. In fact, depending upon how sensitive the revelations are and which countries they involve, Wikileaks is potentially increasing the risk of war in the Middle East, on the Korean peninsula, or who knows where else. As Glenn Reynolds likes to say: They’re not anti-war, they’re just on the other side.
Simon Hoggart told the BBC: “There is going to be some embarrassment certainly for Gordon Brown but even more so for David Cameron who was not very highly regarded by the Obama administration or by the US ambassador here.”
Just as I’m writing this, the Times has gone live with its news package about the documents. I’m off to go read. Back later with more.
Update: Spiegel and the Guardian have also released their document packages.
Update: Here’s a fun one from Spiegel. Let the outrageously outrageous progressive outrage begin!
US diplomats are alleged to have been requested by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to spy on the diplomats of other countries at the United Nations. That was the purpose of the “National Humint Collection Directive,” which has been seen by SPIEGEL. The document was signed by Clinton and came into force on July 31, 2009.Hasn’t every country at the UN attempted to spy on every other country there since the day the building opened? C’mon.
The information to be collected included personal credit card information, frequent flyer customer numbers, as well as e-mail and telephone accounts. In many cases the State Department also required “biometric information,” “passwords” and “personal encryption keys.” In the US, the term biometric information generally refers to fingerprints, passport photos and iris scans, among other things.
Update: Someone on Twitter points out that the Times’s stories on the leaks contain the subhead “State Secrets — Day 1 of 9.”
Update: The Times claims it’s taken precautions to protect sources, including agreeing to some — but not all — redactions proposed by the White House: “The Times has taken care to exclude, in its articles and in supplementary material, in print and online, information that would endanger confidential informants or compromise national security. The Times’s redactions were shared with other news organizations and communicated to WikiLeaks, in the hope that they would similarly edit the documents they planned to post online.”
Update: One of the questions before the leak was whether there’d be any real news here or whether, like the war leaks, it’d fall into the “confirmation of stuff most people suspected anyway” category. Here’s an example of real news and an illustration of my point about how the leak will make war more, not less, likely. Given the fragility of the situation in North Korea, is now the moment to make bombshell public accusations against them?
Secret American intelligence assessments have concluded that Iran has obtained a cache of advanced missiles, based on a Russian design, that are much more powerful than anything Washington has publicly conceded that Tehran has in its arsenal, diplomatic cables show.Other cables reveal King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia repeatedly urging the U.S. to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, which does fall into the “stuff everyone suspected” category but isn’t going to help Sunni/Shiite relations, especially if things come to a head in Lebanon over the findings of the Hariri tribunal. Among others urging action: Jordan, Bahrain, and Abu Dhabi.
Iran obtained 19 of the missiles from North Korea, according to a cable dated Feb. 24 of this year. The cable is a detailed, highly classified account of a meeting between top Russian officials and an American delegation led by Vann H. Van Diepen, an official with the State Department’s nonproliferation division who, as a national intelligence officer several years ago, played a crucial role in the 2007 assessment of Iran’s nuclear capacity…
The missile intelligence also suggests far deeper military — and perhaps nuclear — cooperation between North Korea and Iran than was previously known. At the request of the Obama administration, The New York Times has agreed not to publish the text of the cable.
Update: More rocking of the North Korean boat: The Times’s overview article mentions that the U.S. and South Korea have discussed how to bring about reunification on the peninsula. That’s firmly in the “stuff everyone suspected” category too, but if North Korea’s looking for a new pretext to justify a further provocation, an alleged foreign “plot” to dissolve the DPRK could be useful.
Also in that overview piece, here’s a way to further destabilize an already unstable country:
For instance, it has been previously reported that the Yemeni government has sought to cover up the American 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 Gen. David H. Petraeus, then the American commander in the Middle East, is nonetheless breathtaking.Yemenis surely already suspect that the U.S. is working against jihadis inside the country, but it’s one thing to suspect it and another to have hard evidence of Saleh merrily lying to the public to protect American interests. AQ will get a lot of propaganda mileage out of that.
“We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Mr. Saleh said, according to the cable sent by the American ambassador, prompting Yemen’s deputy prime minister to “joke that he had just ‘lied’ by telling Parliament” that Yemeni forces had carried out the strikes.
