Friday, November 26, 2010

WikiLeaks release could damage diplomatic relations, former envoy says

Wikileaks' Julian Assange shows a page from the release of Iraq war documents at an October briefing in London.Jill Dougherty - Diplomatic cables expected to be released soon by WikiLeaks could contain highly sensitive information that reveals U.S. negotiating positions, secret intelligence and other confidential matters, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia told CNN.

The expected online disclosure has to be taken seriously, said James F. Collins, who served as ambassador to Moscow from 1997 to 2001 and is currently director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

... The threat by WikiLeaks, the online whistle-blower website, to publish the information has prompted the State Department to undertake a massive review of diplomatic documents. A source tells CNN that every diplomatic mission document from 2006 to 2009 is under review.

The United States has started to alert nations around the world about the possible leaks.

In preparation for the WikiLeaks dump, the British government warning United Kingdom news organizations about the publication of any material which could endanger national security. The Ministry of Defence on Friday issued a so called "D-Notice."

In the rarely used notice, the MOD told the media that before they publish potentially sensitive stories of a national security nature, they should seek the advice of a senior military official to avoid breaking the order.

A senior Israeli government official said the American government contacted the Israeli government a few days ago to inform them about the possibility of internal U.S. communications about Israel being publicly released. ...

via WikiLeaks release could damage diplomatic relations, former envoy says - CNN.com.

Revolutionary idea: Put all the cards on the table for everyone to see, not just political leaders, but everyone. I think this is called democracy or something. Wikileaks is really picking on the U.S. They should leak from other countries too, China and Russia and Iran and Israel and so on. Perhaps they already do and it just doesn't make the news? My iPhone died today (endless reboot cycle asking me to plug it in to iTunes) and so I picked up a newspaper. The article I read in the Sacramento Bee about what is going on between North and South Korea was so one sided that I couldn't really understand what was going on. No mention of why North Korea attacked South Korea.

2 comments:

Sepp said...

Yes, let's see it all, ALL of the information. Otherwise, what kind of democracy is this?

About Korea, it seems that the South admitted that they had fired the first shots ... but that never made it into the US media of course.

Robert Myrland said...

About time this gets in the open... What else is hidden?