Wikileaks Drops the Big One (continued)

The Wikileaks U.S. diplomatic documents dropped today.  The world’s major newspapers have the details as does the Wikileaks site itself.  It is becoming more apparent that this is a huge amount of data.

From Der Spiegel:

The US State Department gave its diplomats instructions to spy on other countries’ representatives at the United Nations, according to a directive signed by Hillary Clinton. Diplomats were told to collect information about e-mail accounts, credit cards and passwords, among other things.

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.

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.

The US State Department also wanted to obtain information on the plans and intentions of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and his secretariat relating to issues like Iran, according to the detailed wish list in the directive. The instructions were sent to 30 US embassies around the world, including Berlin.

The detailed document also reveals which UN issues most interested the US government. These included: “Darfur/Sudan,” “Afghanistan/Pakistan,” Somalia, Iran and North Korea. Other top issues included Paraguay and the Palestinian Territories, eight West African states including Burkina Faso, Mauritania and Senegal, as well as various states in Eastern Europe.

As justification for the espionage orders, Clinton emphasized that a large share of the information that the US intelligence agencies works with, comes from the reports put together by State Department staff around the world.

From The Guardian:

“SPARE US YOUR EVIL”: The King expressed hope the U.S. would review its Iran policy and “come to the right conclusion.” Brennan responded that President Obama was personally reviewing U.S. Iran policy and wanted to hear the King’s thoughts. Abdullah asserted that Iran is trying to set up Hizballah-like organizations in African countries, observing that the Iranians don’t think they are doing anything wrong and don’t recognize their mistakes. “I said (to Mottaki) that’s your problem,” recounted the King. Abdullah said he would favor Rafsanjani in an Iranian election, were he to run. He described Iran not as “a neighbor one wants to see,” but as “a neighbor one wants to avoid.” He said the Iranians “launch missiles with the hope of putting fear in people and the world.” A solution to the Arab/Israeli conflict would be a great achievement, the King said, but Iran would find other ways to cause trouble. “Iran’s goal is to cause problems,” he continued, “There is no doubt something unstable about them.” He described Iran as “adventurous in the negative sense,” and declared “May God prevent us from falling victim to their evil.” Mottaki had tendered an invitation to visit Iran, but Abdullah said he replied “All I want is for you to spare us your evil.” Summarizing his history with Iran, Abdullah concluded: “We have had correct relations over the years, but the bottom line is that they cannot be trusted.”

The Hill reports the Wikileaks claim that there was a cyber attack on the site prior to release of the data.

Just hours ahead of an expected release of three million classified U.S. documents, the website WikiLeaks said it has been the target of a computer attack.

“We are currently under a mass distributed denial of service attack,” WikiLeaks tweeted midday Sunday.

Fifteen minutes later, WikiLeaks vowed that it would go ahead with the document dump, which is expected to include State Department cables that Washington fears will wound foreign relations, through its media partners, who received advance access to the documents, if they couldn’t get the site back up in time.

“El Pais, Le Monde, Speigel, Guardian & NYT will publish many US embassy cables tonight, even if WikiLeaks goes down,” WikiLeaks tweeted.

The Guardian site was also briefly down Sunday morning with a 404 error.

Notable Tweets from Notable Tweeters:

benpolitico Ben Smith

RT @tomgara: @arabist nails it: this Wikileaks dump is more significant for the Arab world than it is for the US http://bit.ly/e2tVLM

Wikileaks Drops the Big One

Newspapers around the world are dropping the latest Wikileaks documents.  The site itself is inaccessible but its tweets say that it is not under attack of any kind.

We’ll be adding to this post as links become available.

This overview was just put up by Huffpo.

The New York Times and The Guardian have published classified State Department documents provided to them by the online website WikiLeaks. The WikiLeaks website appeared to be inaccessible, and WikiLeaks said in its Twitter feed that it was experiencing a denial of service attack. WikiLeaks also provided the documents to Spain’s El Pais, France’s Le Monde, and Germany’s Der Spiegel.

According to The New York Times, the cables reveal how foreign leaders, including Israel’s defense minister Ehud Barak and Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, urged the U.S. to confront Iran over its nuclear program.

“The cables also contain a fresh American intelligence assessment of Iran’s missile program,” The Times reports. “They reveal for the first time that the United States believes that Iran has obtained advanced missiles from North Korea that could let it strike at Western European capitals and Moscow and help it develop more formidable long-range ballistic missiles.”

The White House has made a statement and you can read that on the HuffPo piece too.

From Der Spiegel on line:  A Super Power’s View of the World

The tone of trans-Atlantic relations may have improved, former US Ambassador to Germany William Timken wrote in a cable to the State Department at the end of 2006, but the chancellor “has not taken bold steps yet to improve the substantive content of the relationship.” That is not exactly high praise.

And the verdict on German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle? His thoughts “were short on substance,” wrote the current US ambassador in Berlin, Philip Murphy, in a cable. The reason, Murphy suggested, was that “Westerwelle’s command of complex foreign and security policy issues still requires deepening.”

Such comments are hardly friendly. But in the eyes of the American diplomatic corps, every actor is quickly categorized as a friend or foe. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia? A friend: Abdullah can’t stand his neighbors in Iran and, expressing his disdain for the mullah regime, said, “there is no doubt something unstable about them.” And his ally, Sheikh bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi? Also a friend. He believes “a near term conventional war with Iran is clearly preferable to the long term consequences of a nuclear armed Iran.”

[MABlue here]
I can’t wait to find out more in the hard copy of Der Spiegel tomorrow. As a subscriber, I normally get the new edition Saturdays in my mail. This week however, that did dot happen. So far, nobody has seen tomorrow’s edition where there’s more.

There are additional interesting links on the website of Der Spiegel:

Orders from Clinton: US Diplomats Told to Spy on Other Countries at United Nations

Foreign Policy Meltdown: Leaked Cables Reveal True US Worldview

Diplomatic Cables Reveal US Doubts about Turkey’s Government

The Germany Dispatches: Internal Source Kept US Informed of Merkel Coalition Negotiations

WikiLeaks FAQ: What Do the Diplomatic Cables Really Tell Us?

BBC News has a fine overview of some of the major issues addressed in the cables.

Wikileaks cables: key issues

The NYT: Cables Shine Light Into Secret Diplomatic Channels

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 intends to make the archive public on its Web site in batches, beginning Sunday.

The anticipated disclosure of the cables is already sending shudders through the diplomatic establishment, and could conceivably strain relations with some countries, influencing international affairs in ways that are impossible to predict.

The Guardian:   US embassy cables leak sparks global diplomacy crisis