Since my post on WikiLeaks last week in which I half-seriously called for a declaration of war against the group I’ve had some rather interesting conversations with my politically-aware friends. I have liberal and conservative friends (as a moderate, I can do that) and had fully expected them all to share my views on WikiLeaks. […]
A very interesting juxtaposition in the news caught my eye this last week, thanks to WikiLeaks. I’m not praising WikiLeaks, mind you, merely pointing out that leaked cables revealed that the president of Mexico had been urging the U.S. to take a more active role in the region to counter belligerent actors in South America […]
A serious trust has been breached on two levels. First, by WikiLeaks so that nary a foreign contact will wish ever to speak, or at least speak with candor, to even the lowliest Foreign Service personnel. But second, also by the notion, and the threat to life and limb, that we use our Foreign Service personnel as low-cost spies.
I’ve already said my peace on the shameful acts of the Wikileaks’ group and their enablers in the mainstream media and this latest State Department secret document dump only solidifies my feelings. While the leaders and leakers of Wikileaks are rightly being near universally condemned, major newspapers like the New York Times, The Guardian, etc. […]
U.S. foreign policy is in the news today with the release by Wikileaks of secret diplomatic cables. As a blogger for the Foreign Policy Association, foreign policy is naturally something that I take seriously and I’m really amazed and stunned at this malicious attack on American foreign policy. You know, when I first heard about […]
The current bits of news, volatile, mercurial coming out of the latest Wikileaks cache is surprisingly easy to bear. Nothing untoward has happened. All the players have played their parts. International politics between the U.S and Pakistan continues in recognizably similar ways as it did yesterday, and the day before. Of course, strategic politics has […]
Sunday’s Wikileaks release containing some 250,000 diplomatic cables included headline-creating news regarding Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. One of the cables, marked as “confidential” (not a terribly high level of secrecy) was “classified” and perhaps written by Donald Lu, who at the time was the US Chargé d’Affaires in Baku. The cable summarizes in great detail […]
It’s only the media–not a special, dedicated tunnel team–who might believe the identification of Guzman as the tunnel mastermind qualifies as breaking news.Any agent who’s worked the southwest border for a while already knows that if a tunnel or any other kind of operation is high-end, it’s almost certainly the work of “El Chapo”…
After Faheem poignantly detailed President Karzai’s disapproval of the Wikileaks document leak, we now have Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ strong reaction from the incident: “I’m not sure anger is the right word. I just — I think mortified, appalled,” Gates said. “And if I’m angry, it is because I believe that this information puts those in Afghanistan […]
Much has been made over WikiLeaks’s recent document leak on Afghanistan. Some of the most interesting commentary can be found from journalists. The Columbia Journalism Review says in an article called “The Story Behind the Publication of WikiLeaks’s Afghanistan Log” that the most interesting part of the story is what happened behind the scenes before […]
The bank, now a unit of Wells Fargo, leads a list of firms that have moved dirty money for Mexico’s narcotics cartels–helping a $39 billion trade that has killed more than 22,000 people since 2006. –Michael Smith, Bloomberg Markets Magazine, July7, 2010
Apparently, the word ‘secret’ has lost all meaning nowadays. The New York Times, Guardian, and Der Speigel have all published reports using thousands of pages of classified American intelligence reports on the war in Afghanistan from 2004-2009 given to them by Wikileaks. The United States government condemned the disclosure of these secret documents and so […]
In October 2008 I attended the International Anti-Corruption Conference. On a bus from the hotel to a reception, I sat next to someone named Julian Assange. At the time, I did not know who he was. He told me he worked for a group called Wikileaks, which was not a wiki but rather a website […]