The Obama administration has told whistle-blower WikiLeaks that its expected imminent release of classified State Department cables will put “countless” lives at risk, threaten global counterterrorism operations and jeopardize U.S. relations with its allies.
Some of the diplomatic papers stolen from the State Department and leaked by WikiLeaks show more than just potentially embarrassing revelations about U.S. views of allies, including disturbing developments among alleged friends and foes globally.
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The details from the cables being released — among 250,000 illegally taken from secret State Department records — include discussions on the U.S. being unable to stop Syrian arms to Hezbollah, its disappointment in Qatar to stop funding terrorism and hacking by the Chinese government of U.S. computers. Samples of some of the thousands of documents that were to be released by Wikileaks Sunday night began leaking out midday after the German newspaper Der Spiegel and The New York Times released excerpts earlier than planned.
The Wikileaks website tweeted out a copy of an article that appeared on the Gawker website taken out of Der Spiegel, which posted copies of its newspaper ahead of time. Moments later The New York Times released some of the details of documents it had acquired. The Guardian followed suit. The massive dump began after Wikileaks announced that it had been the victim of a “denial of service” attack but that it was still releasing documents via its international newspaper partners.
Wikileaks announced Sunday morning via Twitter that it was “currently under a mass distributed denial of service attack,” which shuts down access to the site, but “El Pais, Le Monde, Speigel, Guardian & NYT will publish many US embassy cables tonight, even if WikiLeaks goes down.
The Obama administration has told whistle-blower WikiLeaks that its expected imminent release of classified State Department cables will put “countless” lives at risk, threaten global counterterrorism operations and jeopardize U.S. relations with its allies.
