Free Republic

The drive for transparency and openness has revolutionized communication, but can we reach a point where it becomes too much of a good thing? It’s another “What is this world coming to?” moment — something we should be getting used to with Barack Obama and the Democrats in charge of the government. Alas, the human imagination has its limits and contemplating the possibility that all our dirty diplomatic laundry would be hung out to dry so that friend and foe alike could take note of the holes in our bloomers just never occurred to us.The unscrubbed, untreated thoughts and daydreams...

How were these documents leaked? I just had a thought( yea I know its rare ) I worked for a government contractor 15 years. Even back then you could not download or copy files with out alerting security. So are we to believe you can just wander in to a secure area and copy thousands of pages of classified documents? I am not normally a conspiracy nut but this one I have to play the B.S. card on. There is no way in my experience this was achievable the way its been reported. I smell a rat. We might want...

Is Wikileaks an operation to get rid of Hillary Clinton prior to 2012? There are a few writers who think so. Don Surber wrote about the Time interview of Julian Assange where he says Hillary should resign and concludes: The Wikileaks scandal is not that it was leaked but it is a blatant attempt to eliminate Hillary Clinton as a threat to Barack Obama’s re-election. ~~~ This is a political assassination that deserves inquiry by the Republican House come January. Forget getting Julian Assange on publishing the leaks. Find out who leaked. We know why. And some in the...

Instead of leading with how Army Private First Class Bradley Manning may have jeopardized national security with his document dump to WikiLeaks, NBC's chief Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski, in his profile of Manning on Tuesday's Today show, told viewers he was the "most unlikely suspect, with a youthful smile" and portrayed him as an abused victim of the military. Miklaszewski used the New York Times' Ginger Thompson in his report to tell the tale of young man who apparently decided to avenge the abuse he had taken over the years, dating back to high school, by selling out his country.

Israel could have engineered the release of hundreds of thousands of confidential documents on WikiLeaks as a plot to corner Turkey on both domestic and foreign policy, according to a senior ruling party official. “One has to look at which countries are pleased with these. Israel is very pleased. Israel has been making statements for days, even before the release of these documents,” Hüseyin Çelik, deputy leader of the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, and the party’s spokesperson, told reporters at a press conference Wednesday. Following initial reaction to the leaked U.S. Embassy cables, which have revealed diplomatic secrets...

Anyone else see Geoff Morrell on Megyn Kelly show (FOX) today admit that the US under the Cyber Command could have stopped the Wikileaks but decded not to for political reasons?

In a review of Washington's strategy on Pakistan and Afghanistan, its ambassador to Islamabad, Anne Patterson, said Pakistan was supporting four militant groups, including the Taliban's Haqqani network and the Lashkar e Taiba (LeT) terror group, and could not be persuaded to abandon them. The Haqqani network is based in North Waziristan, from where it launches attacks on NATO forces over the border in Afghanistan. The LeT has been nurtured by Pakistan's ISI intelligence service to carry out proxy attacks on India to put pressure on New Delhi to negotiate the future of Kashmir. Pakistan has denied Indian claims that...

The Obama administration has created a position to investigate the gaps in security that led to the WikiLeaks release of diplomats’ private conversations, the White House announced. Russell Travers, the deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center, will be the national security staff’s senior advisor for information access and security policy. He will “lead a comprehensive effort to identify and develop the structural reforms needed in light of the Wikileaks breach,” the White House said in a statement.

It strikes me a bit odd that some of the original Wikileaks memos/cables at the WikiLeaks site have some names replaced with "XXXXXXXXXXXX", while the same memo when printed in the msm have the real names in them. How could this be? Why would Assange try to hide certain names on the originals, while providing them to the media? Or, did the media make up the missing names somehow? For example, this is in the news: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/204917 The Wikileaks version is here: http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/cable/2009/04/09BEIJING1176.html The Wikileaks version has as the subject: XXXXXXXXXXXXDISCUSSES G-20, DPRK, IRAN, AF/PAK, UNSC REFORM, TAIWAN, TIBET WITH...

The Obama Administration Benefits From WikiLeaks 2010 November 29 by JOSEPH KLEIN The Huffington Post is running an interesting article today entitled “The WikiLeaks Release: Blame the State Department, Not the World’s Media,” by a writer for the Guardian and the London Sunday Times, Simon Jenkins. He pointed out that the material leaked by WikiLeaks, and published by the New York Times and other newspapers, not only lacked top-secret classification. The State Department itself had made them available to some 2-3 million authorized users of the State Department’s own worldwide intranet.Jenkins observed that the material went out uncensored, with names...

<p>The latest WikiLeaks trove raises once more the following two issues — the circumstances of the release of classified documents and their contents. We won’t know the full extent of the diplomatic archives for days, but so far the particulars seem as embarrassing as they are underwhelming.</p>

Napoleon was a lunatic who thought he was Napoleon, and the joke applies to the 44th United States president with a vengeance. What doesn't the president know, and when didn't he know it? American foreign policy turned delusional when Barack Obama took office, and the latest batch of leaks suggest that the main source of the delusion is sitting in the Oval Office. From the first batch of headlines there is little in WikiLeaks' 250,000 classified diplomatic cables that a curious surfer would not have known from the Internet. We are shocked - shocked - to discover that the Arab...

The Russian leadership sees Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman as "one its own," a U.S. official indicated in a WikiLeaks document released on Sunday. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman Photo by: Emil Salman The cable was sent to the State Department from the U.S. embassy in Moscow, discussing Liveryman's visit to Russian in June of 2009, and was based on information provided by deputy FM Yuval Fuchs. In the cable, the U.S. official said that the FM "cemented Moscow's impression that the Russian-speaking Lieberman is one of their own," saying that the foreign minister "conducted his meetings in Russian, shared stories about...

RUSH: Everybody is freaking out over this WikiLeaks stuff. And, frankly, the WikiLeaks guy bugs me because he looks like a waif. He looks like he ought to be in a Peter Pan stage play rather than on the world stage affecting things. He's a little wuss, Julian Assange. Need to find this guy and string him up. Frankly, I find what's in this stuff interesting. I think it's more interesting than the news the networks come up with each and every day. Give me more of this stuff. For example, we have learned that the Saudis, our friends the...

SNIP The information Clinton directed the diplomats to ascertain ranged from basic biographical data such as diplomats' names and addresses to their frequent flier and credit card numbers, to even "biometric information on ranking North Korean diplomats." Typical biometric information includes fingerprints, signatures and iris recognition. The cable, simply signed 'CLINTON', is classified S/NF - or 'Secret/No Foreign' - and was sent to 33 US embassies and the UN mission offices in New York, Vienna and Rome. It asked officers overseas to gather information about "office and organisational titles; names, position titles and other information on business cards; numbers of...

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 ... [I] 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".

A top incoming House GOP chairman asked Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Sunday evening to review whether Wikileaks can be declared a foreign terrorist organization (FTO). Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), the incoming chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, called for U.S. officials to get aggressive against Wikileaks after the website published highly-sensitive, classified diplomatic cables that reveal frank assessments of foreign leaders and the war on terror. "I am calling on the attorney general and supporting his efforts to fully prosecute Wikileaks and its founder for violating the Espionage Act. And I'm also calling on Secretary of State...

The IDF can handle the job without any US military help...According to documents made public by the suicidally-wreckless WikiLeaks, Israel told US politicians 18 mos ago that 2010 was to be the "critical year" for attacking Iran's illicit nuclear weapons program. They've been warning us for a half decade that time is running out, and now-leaked diplomatic cables from Ehud Barak had set a deadline for military action. The files also betrayed the fact that Israel already has taken delivery of the GBU-28 bunker-busting bomb, and that efforts where made to conceal this from the public: ________________________________________________________ Ehud Barak, Israel's...

After WikiLeaks' unauthorized release of a quarter of a million State Department documents Sunday, Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford) called for the Swedish website to be designated a "foreign terrorist organization" and its founder Julian Assange to be charged as a spy. "WikiLeaks presents a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States," he wrote Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. "I strongly urge you to work within the administration to use every offensive capability of the U.S. government to prevent further damaging releases by WikiLeaks," said King in the letter he made public Sunday.

Wikileaks has released the next wave of classified material and it has made this country infinitely weaker. No country will want to confide, nor help, the US again knowing that they too could be embarrassed. Ronald Neumann, who served as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007, tells Danger Room he fears the impact of forced candor on U.S. foreign relations. “A man might say things to his wife about his mother-in-law that he would be horrified to hear her repeat to her mother and the doing of which might even put great strain on his marriage,” Neumann...