Wikileaks Diplomatic Cable Dump - News and Discussion

[CRamS]

Hillary ordering surveillence on India's UNSC efforts is MUCH MORE significant than BHO stating that the US supports India at the UNSC.

JMT

MT too. Given the nature of US polity, Hilary can have an independent mind and be respected for it, and have followers cheer lead that. In BHO case, should he dare play out his natural instincts, he is toast even more than he is now. BHO's best political stance, which is following to the last dot, is follow the center right foreign/domestic policy of his party: Zbignew/Halfbright and even Clinton etc. In this view, just saying US supports India's bid for UNSC doesn't cost much and means nothing. But when India starts to take that too seriously and starts maneuvering, then US is concerned, as Hilary's comment shows.

[ramana]

So nothing much about India from the Delhi source. What about refs to India from other sources?

[pgbhat]

WikiLeaks: India 'self-appointed frontrunner' for permanent seat

New Delhi: In a diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks, Hillary Clinton refers to India as "a self-appointed frontrunner for a permanent UN security council seat."

[AdityaM]

^ was it specifically india or was she referring to the the 4 countries - germany/japan/india/brazil

[SwamyG]

CRamS:
Let us skin this cat using numbers. They say 250,000 diplomatic cables. I know ZERO about security and clearances. I am seedha saadha ebil yindoo. Using simple maths - 3 years = 1095 days. So "whoever" downloaded or stored these at an average had to do it (250,000 / 1095) = 228 cables (or data pieces) per day. Won't there be logs of what happened and who did it? Ityadi? So just looking at the numbers it points to :
a) Unkil was compromised - If there were checks and balances in the system, then more than one person ought to have been involved so that red flags are not raised.
b) Unkil orchestrated the leaks.

Some other points:
1) Assume information was downloaded from a system.
a) Red flag - One person meticulously downloaded information over the 3 years.
b) Red flag - A group was involved over 3 years.
c) Red flag - All information was downloaded by one (or a group), on a single day.
2) Assume information stored as they came:
a) Red flag - The individual or group had already planned their work well in advance.

Time pass for us......

[rgsrini]

But when India starts to take that too seriously and starts maneuvering, then US is concerned, as Hilary's comment shows.

I think you got it backwards. This comment "self appointed" by Hillary was made before US gave its endorsment for India's Sec Council seat ambition. Besides the "self appointed" is not just directed at India. It is directed at the group of 4 (Brazil,India, Germany and Japan) who were canvassing together at that time.

India self-appointed frontrunner for UNSC seat, jeer US officials

In a teasing insight into what could be in store, WikiLeaks speaks of State Department cables dealing with deliberations regarding UNSC expansion among key groups of countries: ``self-appointed frontrunners'' for permanent UNSC membership Brazil, Germany, India, and Japan (the Group of Four or G-4); the Uniting for Consensus group (especially Mexico, Italy, and Pakistan) that opposes additional permanent UNSC seats. There are also cables about ``member plans for plenary meetings of the Nuclear Suppliers Group; views of the US-India Civil Nuclear Cooperation Initiative.''

[rgsrini]

A friend of mine who used to be in US Govt tells me that this is all due to the post-9/11 "sharing is necessary" reforms. Apparently, the State Dept is blaming the Pentagon for this mess because the Pentagon did not do a proper job of figuring out what job profiles need what level of compartmental access to diplomatic material.There's going to be major bureaucratic fighting in the coming days.

William Cohen just said the same thing on MSNBC. The show host was using the terminology "Stove pipes" to refer to the silos or compartmentalization of data between various department. Like you had mentioned there was a massive effort post 9/11 to make everything known to everyone with appropriate clearance and this appears to be a fall out of that strategy.

[Brad Goodman]

WikiLeaks: No chance for IPI pipeline

NEW DELHI, Nov. 29 (UPI) -- American diplomats in the latest document dump by the Internet watchdog WikiLeaks said it was unlikely that Iran would build a gas pipeline to Pakistan.

A U.S. diplomat, whose name was redacted, was quoted by WikiLeaks as saying at a 2009 energy summit in Azerbaijan that it was "very unlikely" the gas pipeline would move forward, noting "the Pakistanis don't have the money to pay for either the pipeline, or the gas," the Press Trust of India said, quoting the watchdog.

[anupmisra]

A U.S. diplomat, whose name was redacted, was quoted by WikiLeaks as saying at a 2009 energy summit in Azerbaijan that it was "very unlikely" the gas pipeline would move forward, noting "the Pakistanis don't have the money to pay for either the pipeline, or the gas," the Press Trust of India said, quoting the watchdog.

Playing the brokerage game, eh, paKis?

[A_Gupta]

Just FYI, regarding how the New York Times obtained this third round of Wikileaks; also shows how people are offended by a free press.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/world ... anted=2&hp

WikiLeaks is not a “media partner” of The Times. We signed no agreement of any kind, with WikiLeaks or anyone else. In fact, in this case — our third round of articles based on documents obtained by WikiLeaks — we did not receive the documents from WikiLeaks. Julian Assange, the founder of the group, decided to withhold the material from us, apparently because he was offended by our reporting on his legal and organizational problems. The London newspaper, The Guardian, gave us a copy of the archive, because they considered it a continuation of our collaboration on earlier WikiLeaks disclosures. (The Guardian initially asked us not to reveal that they were our source, but the paper’s editor said on Sunday night that he was no longer concerned about anonymity.)

[Gagan]

I wonder:
1. Are the 4 newspapers - NYT, Guardian, Der Spiegel etc paying wikileaks for preferential treatment?
2. How are the media accessing and writing stories that we don't see yet on the pages of the guardian etc? How is the Indian media coming out with stories that we don't see there?

It seems that the media has access to more papers than are available to the ordinary netizens.

[rsingh]

I wonder how damage control was carried out by state department

-H Clinton to Silvio " He Silvio some badmouth republican diplomat spread some rumours about you........as you will see within next few days.........please do not mind.......carry on with your parties"
- To Indian Foreign minister " Mr Krishna............that comment I made about UNSC.......... was for local consumption only.........you know how diplomacy work......"
Krishna to Clinton "what comment?"

[ramana]

K.P. Nayar in Telegraph, Kolkata

LINK

After leaks, paint lips
- Diplomacy loses trust factor

K.P. NAYAR

Washington, Nov. 29: The next time an Indian minister or a senior civil servant accepts an invitation to dinner at the residence of an American diplomat in New Delhi, he is likely to wish that the dress code for the dinner included gloves in addition to the usual prescription of “lounge suit/national dress”.

It is equally likely that if the invitee is male, he will wear some lip balm; or an extra coat of lipstick if the guest is a woman.

The gloves will prevent his or her fingerprints from being taken and the hope will be that the lip balm or lipstick will make it difficult for American diplomats to extract DNA from a glass from which wine has been sipped once the dinner is over and the guests have all left.

This may be a vivid, but by no means, an extreme scenario. At some point in the coming months, when the latest WikiLeaks revelations of classified cables from US embassies around the world are analysed and the dust has settled down, some sort of “Top Secret” cable is bound to go out from South Block with instructions to Indian diplomats advising caution in dealings with their American counterparts. So it should be.

Simultaneously, Indian intelligence agencies will give briefings to those who hold sensitive jobs in ministries like defence and home, men and women who have to deal with foreigners in or out of their governments, on a set of new “dos” and “don’ts”.

This is nothing unusual. During the Cold War, western diplomats who were posted to Moscow and the capitals of Soviet satellite countries had very clear and precise instructions on dealing with their hosts.

In capitals like East Berlin or Sofia, it was presumed that every East German or Bulgarian who came into contact with a western diplomat was presumed to be a communist agent either on the lookout for recruits or waiting to trap westerners into some compromise.

Even western jouranlists who were posted to Moscow in those years had a code of conduct on how to deal with their Soviet contacts.

In sheer practical terms, the most serious fallout of the publication of the secret US diplomatic dispatches on American diplomacy will be that their career diplomats will have significantly forfeited the trust of their hosts.

Since the last quarter of the 15th century, when Spain and England exchanged the first recorded instance of resident ambassadors in each other’s capitals, trust has been the sheet anchor of modern diplomacy. All else was qualified by the level of that basic trust or by its absence, as in the case of India and Pakistan.

The Bush administration tried to undermine everything from freedom of information to the Geneva Conventions during its eight years in power: it would appear from the leaks yesterday that fitting into that pattern was then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice’s instructions to US diplomats to wade into the murky world of intelligence gathering as part of their conventional work at embassies abroad.

But clearly, her successor, Hillary Clinton, improved on those methods. Or so it would seem from the leaks.

In a cable she sent out on July 31 last year, for example, Clinton asked career foreign service officers, as part of a “National Humint Collection Directive”, to spy on diplomats of other countries at the UN to the extent of getting their personal credit card details, frequent flyer numbers, email addresses and passwords, telephone details, “biometric information”, and “personal encryption keys”.

“Humint” is short for human intelligence, the product of personal espionage, while “biometric information” commonly refers to fingerprints, digital photographs and iris scans. “Encryption keys” refer to codes which are needed to unlock secret telegrams sent by other governments in altered text that is readable only by those who have the codes to decipher them.

It will be argued that there have always been CIA stations at major US embassies like New Delhi. But more often than not, host countries knew who manned those stations. For those engaged in diplomacy, it is not a difficult task to find out.

But there have been firewalls between diplomats and spies, both within the embassies and in dealings between host governments and embassies.

Which is why when there have been expulsions from the US embassy in New Delhi — there have been some in the last two decades which were mutually managed by the two governments without incident — those who were asked to leave were invariably CIA personnel and not career diplomats.

The long term-damage done to US diplomacy may not really from the leaks of cables this week but from actions by Rice and Clinton in largely eliminating the line that separated professional spies from career diplomats.

Which maybe why state department spokesperson P.J. Crowley tweeted with alacrity as soon as WikiLeaks material began surfacing on the Internet on Sunday. “Our diplomats are diplomats. They are not intelligence assets,” he wrote in one Twitter message.

In another tweet, he wrote: “Diplomats collect information that shapes our policies and actions. Diplomats for all nations do the same.” Which was eerily reminiscent of Indira Gandhi’s declaration in Parliament with a straight face many years ago that there was not a single RAW (Research and Analysis Wing) agent in any Indian embassy.

[Cosmo_R]

So nothing much about India from the Delhi source. What about refs to India from other sources?

There are 5,087 cables (not 3,000 as earlier reported) sent out of the US embassy in Delhi among the leaked documents, according to WikiLeaks, but they haven't been published yet.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/rssfeed/a ... 32373.aspx

[ramana]

One needs to look at other origins(slumabad, Dhaka, Colombo, Kabul) also to see what the picture is like from there.

[Cosmo_R]

Now this young joker copied various diplomatic cables (obviously from multiple servers) and also war logs. it got to be a Tom Cruise movie and not US government.

Bradley Manning was an Intelligence Analyst. Therefore, he would have the right (plus the Top Secret Clearance) to wade through reams of data to glean patterns and establish linkages. If he was a IT consultant, he would have caught right away. Everything he collected was well within his purview. The entire data set (in text format) was 1.6 gig. How long does that take to put on a thumb drive/CD ?

Some other links to young Brad:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Manning
http://politics.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/ ... ey-manning

[SSridhar]

I have disabled all cdrom/rw and usb access in my office since long as a matter of policy.

People need special permission to access these devices.

Unbelievable as to what the US govt has allowed it's sensitive organisations to do.

And we don't even deal with software or coding!!

When a 22-year old kid, fresh out of college, gets a high-level clearance, anything is possible.

[amdavadi]

There is more to then meets the eye..Anyone working with top level security stuff cant take anything digital at work..

There is no cellphone,flashdrive,no watches or any other portable devices...

[Muppalla]

^^^ amdavadi is right. Even in civilian government areas the data protection rules are extremely stringent.

Read this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classified ... ted_States
(one will get only a little bit of info from this link). There are extremely lot more stringent procedures than what is written there. It will be a really really hard for one individual to just get and give them to wiki leaks without the knowledge of anyone.

I am not saying that fraud cannot be done.

But it is a joke that one person can do this much. No one keeps all these ready available just to copy on a thumb drive and go out and expose. It got to be a network of folks some knowingly and some unknowingly while certain roving eyes just allowed them. They may have validated that these leaks may be useful and can be "used" for benefit and they do not have anything that damages US geopolitical plans.

[pgbhat]

There is more to then meets the eye..Anyone working with top level security stuff cant take anything digital at work..

There is no cellphone,flashdrive,no watches or any other portable devices...

In any decent finance co./bank the USB drives wont work on the computer... there are no CD/DVD writers put in....outgoing e-mail ftp traffic is monitored...ityadi..... I cant believe unkil would not take these basic precautions.

[Muppalla]

I only see one thing that is consistent where ever the origin is from. Everyone is begging US and even Isreal to attack Iran. The important point I see is that it is like a message to common muslims in the muslim world that even if Israel or US attacks Iran it is not anti-muslim. Most of the muslims around the world want to hit Iran.

As a long stretch, these leaks are because US may want to look like they are not anti-muslim to keep their association with countries like Pakistan for geopolitical necessities even if they attack Iran. That way these are helpful leaks.

[amdavadi]

There is no way 22 year old PFC has access to this much information. wiki has to have other sources or this is done with uncles blessing.

[Mauli]

I only see one thing that is consistent where ever the origin is from. Everyone is begging US and even Isreal to attack Iran. The important point I see is that it is like a message to common muslims in the muslim world that even if Israel or US attacks Iran it is not anti-muslim. Most of the muslims around the world want to hit Iran.

As a long stretch, these leaks are because US may want to look like they are not anti-muslim to keep their association with countries like Pakistan for geopolitical necessities even if they attack Iran. That way these are helpful leaks.

WikiLeaks shake the ‘ummah’

http://dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?pa ... 2010_pg3_1

[saip]

There is no way 22 year old PFC has access to this much information. wiki has to have other sources or this is done with uncles blessing.

What is still hard to believe is that this guy was in Bagdad and did all the copying there. This much information from all over the world is accessable of all the places in Bagdad?

[arun]

WikiLeaks: No chance for IPI pipeline ....................Snipped

Excerpt dealing with the IPI pipeline from the cable released by Wikileaks:

Friday, 12 June 2009, 12:11
S E C R E T SECTION 01 OF 03 BAKU 000478 ...............................

Projected Problems in Iranian Gas Links
---------------------------------------

¶9. (C) The annual Baku Oil and Gas Show, held June 2-5, brought a variety of energy company executives and pundits to Baku, though no senior officials from Iran. An American interlocutor told Baku Iran Watcher on the side of the show that a [Source removed] had confided to him in a private conversation on June 4 that he viewed near-term implementation of the Iranian-Pakistani gas link project as “very unlikely.” The downbeat comment by the [Source removed] was made despite the recent signing in Istanbul by President Ahmadinejad and President Zardari of an Iranian-Pakistani MOU committing to the gas project. According to this source, [Source removed] indicated that he had several reasons for this opinion, but the only one he elaborated was that “the Pakistanis don’t have the money to pay for either the pipeline, or the gas.”

¶10. (C) Meanwhile, during a panel discussion at the conference on the future prospects of Caspian gas, several commentators noted the difficulty of doing business in “unpredictable, overly bureaucratic” Iran, and the alleged historical “unreliability” of Iranian gas supply contracts previously reached with Turkey and Turkmenistan. For example, panelists recounted that, after long negotiations, Iran has four times failed to sign separate Liquid national Gas contracts at the last minute. Two panelists claimed that Iran has repeatedly diverted gas supplies to meet domestic needs, thereby interrupting its contractual gas exports - and has not paid contractual penalties for these violations.

¶11. (C) A [Source removed] asserted bluntly that Iranian political leaders are totally focused on domestic needs and personal jockeying, and are simply not interested in hearing about the value of optimizing foreign gas exports. The only exception, he claimed, is their interest in the notional prospect of annually exporting ten billion cubic meters (bcms) of gas to Europe. He attributed this interest to a conviction that such a deal will significantly increase Iran’s political leverage in Europe and substantially insulate it from future European pressure - a perception he characterized as revealing, and “typically” unrealistic.
DERSE

Wikileaks

[arjunm]

Where does India figure in Wikileaks Cablegate
According to WikiLeaks there are as many as 5,087 records amongst the leaked cables that refer to India.
Where does India figure in Wikileaks Cablegate
The 2.5 lakh documents, including 15,652 cables classified Secret, date back from December 1966 to February 2010 and contain confidential communications between 274 US embassies around the world and the US Department of State.

List of India-related documents from the first batch of 226 documents released by WikiLeaks

(India-specific portions highlighted in bold)

- To avoid hurting Pakistan, Turkey didn't invite India

- Bahrain's King Hamad on India's role in Afghanistan

- India a 'self-appointed frontrunner for permanent UNSC membership'

- Indo-Pak relations and Musharraf

- Pakistan's obsession with India

- India critical of sanctions on Iran

- Saudi Arabia expanding relations with India

- 'Little to fear about India having nuclear weapons'

- Iran could follow India's path in going nuclear

- Differing opinions of US and India

- India benefitting from international security

- Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty and India

- Nuclear facility safeguards in India

- Israel-India strategic partnership

- Non-proliferation and India

- Indo-US trade relations and foreign aid

- Sanctions and German business interests in India

- Some Indian-origin people supplying equipment to Iran

- Germany on US-EU position towards India

- Israeli relations with India

- Reliance Industries oil and gas exploration

- US-Indian economic cooperation and Indo-Pak relations

http://ibnlive.in.com/news/where-does-i ... 99-53.html

[arjunm]

WikiLeaks cables: US view of Kim Jong-il, Putin, Sarkozy and Berlusconi

US embassy cables reveal Washington's view of world's leading statesmen in colourful, distinctly undiplomatic language

President Dmitry Medvedev plays Robin to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's Batman, according to one Moscow embassy dispatch. Gosh they make them part of a Gay erotica.

Washington's view of the world's leading statesmen emerges from the cables in a carnival of colourful and distinctly undiplomatic language.

In late 2008 the Moscow embassy wired back about the relationship between Russia's president, Dmitry Medvedev and the prime minister, Vladimir Putin, remarking that Medvedev, officially the senior partner, "plays Robin to Putin's Batman".

Kim Jong-il, the ailing dictator of North Korea fared no better, with diplomats quoting sources who described him variously as a "flabby old chap" and someone who had suffered "physical and psychological trauma" as a result of his stroke.

The Paris embassy remarked on the "thin-skinned and authoritarian personal style" of French President Nicholas Sarkozy after it reported his tendency to repeatedly rebuke his team and the French prime minister.

Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was "feckless, vain, and ineffective as a modern European leader", according to Elizabeth Dibble, US charge d'affaires in Rome. Another report from Rome recorded the view that he was a "physically and politically weak" leader whose "frequent late nights and penchant for partying hard mean he does not get sufficient rest".

Key allies in the war on terror are not spared either. A dispatch from Kabul reports the view that the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, is "an extremely weak man who did not listen to facts but was instead easily swayed by anyone who came to report even the most bizarre stories or plots against him".

In Yemen, the power base of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, President Ali Abdullah Saleh was "dismissive, bored and impatient", during a meeting with John Brennan, Barack Obama's deputy national security adviser.

Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe, is simply branded "the crazy old man" by Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, South Africa's international relations and cooperation minister, according to a cable from Pretoria, while Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, is "just strange" according to an adviser to Sultan Qaboos of Oman.

Israel's prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu is "elegant and charming" but never keeps his promises, according to a cable from Cairo recounting a meeting with President Hosni Mubarak, who added: "I have told him so personally".

[Sudip]

^^ Too many posts repeating the same news again and again that were posted few pages back

[Mort Walker]

Info came from SIPRNET http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIPRNET

There are more than 2 million people with clearances worldwide who have access to the SIPRNET network. There are bound to be leaks no matter what protocol.

[ramana]

Don't be silly. US military doesn't leak. These will eventually be found o be authorized disclosures. One fallout will be a number of transfers in SD due to persona non grata in the leaked countries. The transfers will be willing ie by US or unwilling by the countries themselves for H&D.

Say whatever, but Ms Clinton destroyed US Diplomacy by her edicts to remove the line between spies and diplomats drawn since 16th century. Bu she is too dense to resign.

AL Q acolytes will have field day.

[Muppalla]

Don't be silly. US military doesn't leak. These will eventually be found o be authorized disclosures. One fallout will be a number of transfers in SD due to persona non grata in the leaked countries. The transfers will be willing ie by US or unwilling by the countries themselves for H&D.

Say whatever, but Ms Clinton destroyed US Diplomacy by her edicts to remove the line between spies and diplomats drawn since 16th century. Bu she is too dense to resign.

AL Q acolytes will have field day.

ramana garu, this could be a master stroke like PVNR's hawala disclosures.

[Mort Walker]

SIPRNET is not confined to the US military. Civilian agencies use it as well and the number of users are high. Certainly the individuals who accessed the info can be tracked, but the probability of crackpots or careless persons increases if the overall number of authorized users increase. There are parts of the Wikileaks that have been redacted, so it appears someone has reviewed the info before it was put out.

HC actions on monitoring personal details in nothing new. The SD does in fact spy and has been doing so frequently since the Cold War. There are no lines between diplomats and spies - that's all hogwash. As an example, Valerie Plame's husband, Joe Wilson, worked for the SD and collected info about Iraq and fell out with the Bush admin.

[ramana]

So no one single set of India related cables yet.

No wonder Raja ram said unveiling the seven veils saga!

Any one downloaded the csv file to get the cable titles?

[arjunm]

Bradley Manning 22 years old did all these copying within 7 months of his solitary confinement while facing a court martial with music CD like lady Gaga etc. erased the Music and copied these millions of pages of documents, amazing this guy copied all these sensitive unauthorised down loads and no body ever suspected any thing.

How it happened-

The US military believes it knows where the leak originated. A soldier, Bradley Manning, 22, has been held in solitary confinement for the last seven months and is facing a court martial in the new year. The former intelligence analyst is charged with unauthorised downloads of classified material while serving on an army base outside Baghdad. He is suspected of taking copies not only of the state department archive, but also of video of an Apache helicopter crew gunning down civilians in Baghdad, and hundreds of thousands of daily war logs from military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It was childishly easy, according to the published chatlog of a conversation Manning had with a fellow-hacker. "I would come in with music on a CD-RW labelled with something like 'Lady Gaga' … erase the music … then write a compressed split file. No one suspected a thing ... listened and lip-synched to Lady Gaga's Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history." He said that he "had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months".

Manning told his correspondent Adrian Lamo, who subsequently denounced him to the authorities: "Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public ... Everywhere there's a US post, there's a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed. Worldwide anarchy in CSV format ... It's beautiful, and horrifying."

He added: "Information should be free. It belongs in the public domain."
Manning, according to the chatlogs, says he uploaded the copies to WikiLeaks, the "freedom of information activists" as he called them, led by Australian former hacker Julian Assange.

[CRamS]

The NYT bosses concur with me

The claim by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that the leaks threaten national security seems exaggerated.

On WikiLeak's "revelation" that US is obsessed with Iran, which we all know sans the juicy tit-bits from the leaks, I was laughing my butt off listening to an NPR report where they had an ex-pat Iran expert. Here is why.

This is what US pompously lectures India and tells the world about India's legitimate, justified, and existential threat it faces from the TSP abomination

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/indi ... z16h8vjQUe

WASHINGTON/NEW DELHI: The first lot of WikiLeaks documents paints a flattering picture of India as a reliable, trusted and respected power in a world that worries itself sick about neighbouring Pakistan.

So India's worries about TSP threat is a joke. Now, here is what the Iran expert said in the NPR report. If aliens were to read wikileaks and learn of USA's obsession with Iran, they would come away with the conclusion that there are 2 super powers on earth: USA & Iran . Now thats a real joke. And India, whose military power over TSP is nowhere as larger than TSP as USA's (not to mention Israel) over Iran, "worries itself sick", meaning what is a TSP-perpetrated Mumbai every now & then, and what is the big deal if millions of SDREs perish in a TSP nuke attack; they are SDREs after all, and there are a billion of them.

The other hilarious part of the leak that both amused me and sickened me was the uncouth, uncivilized, corrupt, cowardly Arab tin pot dctators from Gulf countries including Saudi Arabia begging USA to annhilate Iran. Both USA & Israel were gloating that the leaks show the "international consensus" regarding Iran. But the truth of the matter is, according to the Iran expert on NPR, the man on the street in Gulf countries do not favor an attack on Iran, matter of fact, they have some respect for Iran. Its the tin pots who fear loosing out to the will of the people shoud Iran gain in strength & popularity.

[Sri]

The whole leaks thing is a drama.

Why would Americans give credence to this by saying things like 'damaging to national interest' and yada yada.

If the leaks were made then what stops them to deny the authenticity of the documents. If they don't really want to discredit the docs then they can simply reply 'may or may not be' to any questions originating from these docs...

there are many ways to counter this without making a hue and cry about it. Believe it or not, doc leakage is quite rampant in the world... India included...

What stops Americans from saying:

a) these are individual observations not our policy.
b) We don't comment on hypothetical questions. When the docs are released we will respond.
c) Authenticity of the documents are questionable.
d) United States Government gets inputs from it's diplomatic corp from all over the world, it is highly unlikely that a 22 y o soldier in Baghdad could have access to these dispatches ...


This is a hog wash. A propaganda scheme. Making these tiny inputs more then what they are worth and make the world actually believe that this is the way USG functions, where as the 'real' stuff lies secure some 6 feet under a super firewall...

[krishnan]

Things dont work that way in US. Remember Monica Lewinsky? How hard was it for US to have her vanish from the scene, and close the case?

[shynee]

WikiLeaks: US warns India on cables from its Af-Pak staff

WikiLeaks may not have made all US secret cables public yet, but the United States is taking no chances and has forewarned India that some of the communications from its missions in Pakistan and Afghanistan could be “potentially embarrassing”.
Given the fact that no cable from US missions in Pakistan has still been put out and barely a few from Afghanistan have been made public, there could be more in store from an Indian standpoint in the days ahead as WikiLeaks puts out these documents in phases.

It’s learnt that US authorities conveyed this to the Indian Ambassador in the US Meera Shankar just before WikiLeaks went public with its documents. The same was also conveyed to the Ministry of External Affairs by the US mission here.

According to reliable sources, US authorities told their Indian counterparts that the cables from their mission in India are “unlikely to be damaging” and so they were not worried to that extent. However, they were not as confident about the nature of the communication from their missions in Pakistan.

The US has conveyed that its officials in these two countries are likely to have been more “candid” and “forthright” in their communications than Washington’s “public pronouncements” on issues sensitive to New Delhi.

South Block officials speculate that these could relate to the assessments on Kashmir or the role played by Indian consulates in Afghanistan. These are two concerns of Pakistan that have found some resonance among a section of US officials. However, sources said, India is unlikely to get overtly worried by assessments of some officials in the US system.

[A_Gupta]

I wonder how damage control was carried out by state department

-H Clinton to Silvio " He Silvio some badmouth republican diplomat spread some rumours about you........as you will see within next few days.........please do not mind.......carry on with your parties"
- To Indian Foreign minister " Mr Krishna............that comment I made about UNSC.......... was for local consumption only.........you know how diplomacy work......"
Krishna to Clinton "what comment?"

Actually, one of H Clinton's counterparts told her - we are told - "you should see what we say about you!"

[Narad]

As far as the US taking out the uranium are concerned, the US DID take out the Enriched Uranium from Pakistan in the end.

What is the source of your claim?