Sunday, November 28, 2010
Hillary Clinton gets task to solve the matter of WikiLeaks
Twitter Scoops WikiLeaks’ Newest “Cablegate” Leak; WikiLeaks Website Down
Twitter Scoops WikiLeaks’ Newest “Cablegate” Leak; WikiLeaks Website Down
Gawker is reporting that Twitter users have obtained and spread details of WikiLeaks’ latest leak online before its scheduled release later today — and the details are at times juicy, but contain “no earth-shattering revelations.”
Twitter has out-leaked the leakers. About 12 hours before Wikileaks latest enormous leak was scheduled to be released, a Twitter user bought a copy of a German news magazine outlining the leak after it was placed on newstands too early.
According to tweets from German-speaking Twitter users who snagged an embargoed copy of this week’s Der Spiegel (cover above), the cache of over 250,000 confidential diplomatic cables may be a bit of a let-down. At least from the German point of view there are no earth-shattering revelations, just a lot of candid talk about world leaders. Angela Merkel is praised as “teflon,” though she “avoids risk and is rarely creative,” and German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle is repeatedly bashed. There is talk of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s “wild parties,” (duh) and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is likened to Hitler. French President Nicolas Sarkozy is called an “emperor with no clothes.” The cables also show Obama has “no emotional relationship with Europe,” focusing instead on Asian countries, according to Der Spiegel.
The full tranche of cables is apparently scheduled to be released by Wikileaks this afternoon at around 4:30 pm EST in concert with The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel. But this morning, a sharp-eyed Twitter user spotted a copy of Der Spiegel at a a rest area on the Germany-Switzerland border. “Der Spiegel too early in the Badische Bahnhof Basel!” wrote Freelancer_09. “We’ll see what it says…… :)” He and another user, sa7yr, have been tweeting excerpts for a few hours now.
Shortly after the leak, however, WikiLeaks tweeted that their website appears to be under attack and has crashed — just a few hours before the new leak was scheduled to go public. Although they appear to be scrambling to get the site back in order, they seem relatively unfazed, since the cables will still be published in major media outlets later this afternoon.
'WikiLeaks shows U.S. dismissed Israel's warnings about Iran bomb'
'WikiLeaks shows U.S. dismissed Israel's warnings about Iran bomb'
According to Der Spiegel, which is running excerpts of the WikiLeaks expose in its Monday edition, a State Department official states in a classified cable that Netanyahu informed the United States of Iran's nuclear advancement in November 2009, but that the prime minister's estimate was likely unfounded and intended to pressure Washington into action against the Islamic Republic
The Monday edition of the German weekly has already gone on sale in Basel, Switzerland, apparently by accident.
The classified communiques are expected to reveal the inner workings of American and international diplomacy, and are likely to cause major embarrassment to the United States. American embassies in more than a dozen nations have informed their host countries that their secret cables could be revealed.
In one cable dated June 2009 quoted Defense Minister Ehud Barak, a U.S. diplomat says Barak told visiting officials that a strike on Iran's nuclear facilities was viable until the end of 2010, saying that after :any military solution would result in unacceptable collateral damage"
"He also expressed concern that should Iran develop nuclear capabilities, other rogue states and/or terrorist groups would not be far behind," the U.S. diplomat said.
The cable also quoted Barak as describing the Iranian leadership "chess, not backgammon players," with the U.S. diplomat quoting the defense minister saying would "attempt to avoid any hook to hang accusations on, and look to Pakistan and North Korea as models to emulate in terms of acquiring nuclear weapons while defying the international community."
Another cable, from later 2009, the U.S.-Israel Joint Political Military Group, Mossad representatives said Iran was using repeated attempts to resolve the nuclear issue through diplomacy to "play for time" and evade sanctions, "while pursuing its strategic objective to obtain a military nuclear capability."
"From Mossad's perspective, there is no reason to believe Iran will do anything but use negotiations to stall for time so that by 2010-2011, Iran will have the technological capability to build a nuclear weapon -- essentially reducing the question of weaponizing to a political decision," the cable said.