THE CABLES

AMERICAS

The hand of U.S. officials in Haitian politics from 2004 to 2006.

ASIA

The United States is anxious about China's growing influence in Cambodia.

EUROPE

U.S. officials worried that Norway was unprepared for a terrorist attack.

Lithuania's wayward press.

THE NEWS

Is Prince Andrew the latest WikiLeaks casualty?

Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, under investigation by President Robert Mugabe's government for his statements in WikiLeaks cables, is cleared.

Fourteen people are arrested for a cyberattack on PayPal in solidarity with WikiLeaks.

How two LulzSec hackers got caught.

Julian Assange lawyer Mark Stephens may have been a target of News of the World's phone hacking.

Slavoj Zizek: Julian Assange "is like the boy who tells us the emperor is naked."

The U.S. Library of Congress no longer classifies WikiLeaks as an "extremist" website.

THE CABLES

AFRICA

U.S. diplomats' relationship with Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi's government wasn't always so cold.

Is Chinese demand for ivory killing Kenyan elephants?

MIDDLE EAST

An Israeli settlement leader tells U.S. officials he's willing to move, for a price.

Bahrain's king is proud of intelligence ties to Israel, wants his government to drop references to the "Zionist enemy."

Israel and Egypt locked horns over smuggling on the Gaza strip.

Israel suspects that Turkey is helping Iran skirt international sanctions.

What the WikiLeaks cables tell us about the United States' relationship with embattled Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

THE NEWS

Ecuador kicks out U.S. Ambassador Heather Hodges (above) over a WikiLeaks cable.

The Pentagon won't let anyone -- including U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich and investigators from the United Nations and Amnesty International -- meet with Pfc. Bradley Manning in private. The British government is also raising concerns over Manning's treatment.

Julian Assange has another court date.

The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee proposes new penalties for leakers.

The feds won't leave friend of WikiLeaks Jacob Applebaum alone.

Karl Rove is copping WikiLeaks' style.

Qaddafi's Ukrainian nurse tells all.

Pentagon contractor (and Anonymous nemesis) HBGary's ambitious scheme to catch the next WikiLeaker.

THE CABLES

AFRICA

Sierra Leonean military officials blew $1.9 million in British aid money on big-screen TVs and hunting rifles.

U.S. officials helped in a corruption case against Tanzanian banking executives.

Kenyan officials told U.S. diplomats that an investigation into the country's 2007-2008 election violence would risk provoking civil war.

Nigerian politician Joseph Ibori wanted to create a "trust fund" with his stolen wealth.

ASIA

The owner of Japan's currently imperiled Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant falsified inspection records for the facility.

U.S. diplomats allege that Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's party paid parliament members $2.2 million apiece for a 2008 vote. (Singh denies it.)

MIDDLE EAST

U.S. diplomats say British defense contractor BAE bribed a Saudi prince to secure a fighter jet deal.

THE NEWS

U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley is fired quits after calling the Defense Department's treatment of alleged WikiLeaks source Pfc. Bradley Manning "ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid."

The Pentagon says its own security weaknesses enabled the leaking of the WikiLeaks documents.

Mexican President Filipe Calderón is "barely on speaking terms" with the U.S. ambassador to Mexico over WikiLeaks disclosures.

A federal judge rules that Twitter must hand over its records in WikiLeaks case.

Gawker goes inside Anonymous's war room.

Jihadist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki praises WikiLeaks.

A Turkish newspaper says it has another trove of WikiLeaks cables on U.S.-Turkey relations. The Hindu in India also has a bunch.

The top lawmaker on the U.S. House of Representatives' intelligence committee says WikiLeaks have been "devastating" to diplomacy.

THE BIG PICTURE

Julian Assange: WikiLeaks sparked the Arab revolt.

How the WikiLeaks documents helped reporters covering Japan's nuclear woes.

WikiLeaks suffers the most damaging leak of them all: pictures of Julian Assange dancing.

THE CABLES

AFRICA

Muammar al-Qaddafi's kids are a real piece of work.

Qaddafi worried about a U.S. military presence in Africa.

Bernie Madoff once discussed investment opportunities with Qaddafi.

AMERICAS

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe OK'd "clandestine operations" against FARC rebels across the border in Venezuela.

U.S. Ambassador to Colombia (and later Afghanistan) William Wood was not aware of the top Colombian military leader's dodgy résumé.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce tried to take down Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega.

ASIA

China used U.S. debt obligations to pressure the United States on arms sales to Taiwan.

For the first time since World War II, Japan is building a full-blown foreign intelligence agency.

EUROPE/CAUCASUS

U.S. diplomats pushed Norway to buy American-made fighter jets.

Britain blocked an arms sale to Swaziland over fears the weapons could end up in Iran.

MIDDLE EAST

Bahrain's crown prince is not a big fan of the whole democracy thing.

THE NEWS

A British judge rules in favor of Julian Assange's extradition to Sweden.

George W. Bush doesn't like the idea of sharing a stage with Assange.

Gaddafi's "voluptuous nurse" has had enough of Libya.

WikiLeaks cable revelations are factoring in Peru's 2011 elections.

PayPal freezes the account of a group raising defense funds for Pfc. Bradley Manning.

More on HBGary, the cybersecurity firm that tried to take down WikiLeaks' supporters.

WikiLeaks now has a gift shop.

Anonymous makes "The Colbert Report" (slightly NSFW)

THE BIG PICTURE

FP looks at WikiLeaks in our new March/April issue, including contributions from Fouad Ajami, Peter W. Galbraith, Margaret MacMillan, Maya Jasanoff, and Marjorie Garber.

THE CABLES

AFRICA

U.S. diplomats in 2008 called the Libyan city where protests erupted this week "a locus of extremist activity" not really under the control of Muammar Qaddafi's government.

ASIA

What U.S. diplomats have to say about Xi Jinping, China's next leader.

EUROPE

NATO on Russia's military: Meh.

MIDDLE EAST

Inside the United States' cozy relationship with Bahrain.

Bahrain's king told U.S. officials that his country's opposition was trained by Hezbollah.

THE NEWS

The U.S. government's WikiLeaks probe makes its courtroom debut in the United States.

WikiLeaks defector Daniel Domscheit-Berg's (above) book, Inside WikiLeaks, is out in English. WikiLeaks is threatening to sue him.

The preposterously complex hacking and counter-hacking saga engulfing WikiLeaks' online allies.

Australia wants to make sure Julian Assange is treated justly in Sweden.

Anonymous is now going after Iran.

THE BIG PICTURE

Free speech advocate and celebrity attorney Alan Dershowitz, now Julian Assange's lawyer, tells FP why WikiLeaks is "the Pentagon Papers case for the 21st Century."

Hillary Clinton's tricky balancing act on WikiLeaks and Internet freedom.

WikiLeaks' Asia cables could be a whole lot worse.

Over the weekend, WikiLeaks decided to drop what (if memory serves) is its largest single release to date from its cache of U.S. State Department emails, almost all of them from the U.S. Embassy in London over the past few years. We'll be picking through the good bits here over the next few days, although at first glance they seem short on blockbusters, which may explain why they haven't commanded much attention in the media. (That, and the whole dumping-hundreds-of-cables-on-a-Friday-night thing.)

The London cables mostly concern foreign policy issues where Britain's interests are closely aligned with the United States', the war in Afghanistan among them; the effort to thread the needle between the British government's commitment to the war and waning support for it among the British public is a common theme. One cable offers a lengthy account of then British Foreign Secretary David Miliband's November 2008 meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Kabul, in which Karzai tells Miliband (in the cable's paraphrase) that "it would be difficult or impossible to hold a credible Presidential election" the following year in Afghanistan, ticking off five particularly problematic provinces. (On that much, he was right.)

Karzai also expresses optimism about the United States' new president-elect, Barack Obama, but in his conversation with Miliband you can see the seeds of the estrangement between the Afghan and American presidents that would characterize the years that followed. There's the issue of American-employed private contractors, who Karzai would order out of his country in August 2010:

Afghanistan wanted to end the way in which the Americans sub-contracted major parts of their aid program to "doubtful contractors." He was also concerned that many of the private security companies were little more than "criminal organizations." The same applied to some of the transport companies used by the U.S.; it had become apparent to Karzai that the transport companies were responsible for much of the insecurity on the highways, in order to extract higher fees and insurance payments from the Americans.

Karzai also tells Miliband that he's leery about the United States dispatching more soldiers to his country:

Karzai emphasized that more U.S. troops were not the answer. He hoped the Americans would consult the Afghan Government before sending more troops. Karzai said that the U.S. had failed to send the troops for which Karzai had asked in 2002, but now it might be too late.

Miliband brings up the inevitable question of how all of this ends, and according to the cable suggests that "reconciliation" -- presumably with the Taliban -- "subject to strict conditions, would obviously be part of that."

Karzai agreed, saying that he had consulted "the whole Afghan people," and they were all in favor of reconciliation. They wanted to "bring over the good guys, while excluding the bad guys." Karzai realizes that the U.S., Russia and Iran had doubts about reconciliation, but this was something that the Afghan people wanted, and which he was bound to press ahead.

As WikiLeaks' media partners (official and otherwise) have multiplied, it's gotten harder to follow what are and aren't new revelations in the U.S. State Department cables; even some of the media outlets seem confused. Take Britain's Daily Telegraph, which has a big headline today detailing a scoop from an ostensibly new batch of cables detailing the British government's behind-the-scenes discussions of the release of Pan Am Flight 103 bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. The Telegraph flags an October 2008 cable in which a British Foreign Office minister advises the Libyan government on how to request the compassionate release of Megrahi, who had recently been diagnosed with inoperable cancer.

Interesting stuff -- enough so that the Guardian published the cable and wrote about it early last month.

THE CABLES

AMERICAS

U.S. officials worried about the return to Haiti of Jean-Claude "Baby-Doc" Duvalier back in 2006. (Duvalier returned to the country this week.)

Guatemalan President Álvaro Colom doesn't think Rigoberta Menchú exists.

EUROPE/CAUCASUS

BP's top Russia executive has his doubts about the survival of the company's partnership with Russian oil firm Rosneft.

MIDDLE EAST

Turkey allowed the United States to use one of its airbases for rendition flights.

Condoleezza Rice wanted U.S. diplomats in the Middle East to gather intelligence on Israeli communications technology and Palestinian leaders.

American diplomats were ambivalent about deposed Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and alarmed by the growing opposition to him.

U.S. diplomats in Turkey fretted about a military backlash after the arrest of several officers in an alleged coup plot last year.

THE NEWS

Julian Assange is planning to release details on 2,000 offshore bank accounts, which he says contain evidence of serious tax evasion and money laundering. Swiss authorities are now mulling filing related charges against his source, former Swiss Banker Rudolf Elmer, who was already found guilty on Wednesday of breaking other banking secrecy laws.

Alleged Assange source Pfc. Bradley Manning is placed on suicide watch; his lawyer says he's being mistreated at the Marine Corps jail.

The State Department has made a big deal about the havoc caused by WikiLeaks, but privately officials tell congressional staffers the leaks were "embarrassing but not damaging."

Assange still has a lot of supporters in his home country of Australia.

Assange is slated to get the Hollywood treatment. (The FP newsroom votes for this guy.)

The Pentagon wants U.S. military personnel to get rid of any WikiLeaks files they might have on their computers.

Russian WikiLeaks knockoff RuLeaks posts pictures of Vladimir Putin's Black Sea estate.

French lawyers are using WikiLeaks cables to argue for the acquittal of five Guantánamo detainees.

Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt says that Assange's extradition is a judicial matter, and that his government won't be involved in the decision.

An investigative firm alleges WikiLeaks skims documents off of file-sharing networks.

Zimbabwe's attorney general is considering pursuing treason charges against more government officials based on WikiLeaks cables.

WikiLeaks volunteer Jacob Applebaum is detained at an airport again.

A German CEO is out of a job after calling Europe's multi-billion-dollar Galileo satellite system (on which his company was working) a "stupid idea" in a WikiLeaked cable. (If you're keeping track, this is officially the first time WikiLeaks has caused trouble in space.)

Libya's Muammar al-Qaddafi is not a WikiLeaks fan, and blames the site for the fall of Tunisian strongman Ben Ali. (The State Department disagrees.)

THE BIG PICTURE

WikiLeaks was supposed to have extensive safeguards for its whistleblowers -- so why are so many of them ending up in jail?

What the WikiLeaks cables tell us about Iran's nuclear ambitions.

The Tunisian uprising wasn't a WikiLeaks revolution, but it does help us understand how technology can and can't help spread democracy.

At last, someone thought to ask Miss America what she thinks about WikiLeaks.

Two weeks after a leaked cable cost a U.S. ambassador his job, another diplomat has found his life suddenly complicated by WikiLeaks -- this time in the Netherlands. Yesterday WikiLeaks published a September 2009 cable from the U.S. embassy in the Hague detailing U.S. Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder's efforts to keep the Dutch from bailing on the war in Afghanistan after 2010. Among Daalder's interlocutors is a Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs official named Pieter de Gooijer, who at one point in the conversation suggests a means by which Daalder could secure the further support of the Netherlands in the war effort:

De Gooijer encouraged Daalder to ask [U.S. Treasury] Secretary [Timothy] Geithner to tell [Dutch] Finance Minister [Wouter] Bos that the Netherlands would not have a seat in G20 discussions but for its contributions in Afghanistan. Bos is head of the Labor party and key to the Dutch cabinet's decision on Afghanistan.

Whatever efforts were ultimately made to persuade Bos failed; the Dutch cabinet collapsed last February over the issue of Afghanistan deployment, when the contingent of Labor ministers -- who remained staunchly opposed to keeping troops in the country -- resigned. Dutch troops pulled out of Afghanistan in August.

The new revelation doesn't look all that great for de Gooijer, who last week was named the Netherlands' ambassador to the European Union. Since the cable was published, his appointment has been blocked by Frans Timmermans, a Labor member of Parliament, on the grounds that de Gooijer can't be trusted. The Dutch government has recently proposed sending Dutch troops back to Afghanistan for an Afghan police training mission, but 70 percent of the respondents in a poll taken this month were opposed to the idea, as is Timmermans's party.

WikiLeaks also claimed its first private-sector casualty today, in the form of Berry Smutny, the CEO of the German space technology company OHB System AG. Smutny was fired after appearing in a WikiLeaks cable calling Galileo, a 4.5 billion-euros-and-counting European satellite navigation system on which OHB System is a contractor, a "stupid idea."

Your required WikiLeaks reading today is Sarah Ellison's Vanity Fair piece, published last night, detailing the behind-the-scenes finagling by which Julian Assange and five publications arranged their operating agreement for WikiLeaks' State Department cables. The news in it is that that agreement was far more ad-hoc than any of its adherents originally let on: That Assange changed the terms of the deal and added new partners on the fly, aggravating his original partner, the Guardian, and eventually precipitating his falling out with the paper (though Reuters's Felix Salmon suggests, plausibly, that this isn't the whole story).

The protagonists of Ellison's story are Guardian Editor in Chief Alan Rusbridger and reporter Nick Davies, who won Assange's confidence last summer and brokered privileged access to WikiLeaks' mountain of soon-to-be-released U.S. military and diplomatic documents -- and then spent the rest of the year trying to keep the deal from blowing apart as Assange brought in new media partners without warning them, threatened lawsuits, and generally proved to be a colossal headache. The piece is really worth reading in its entirety, but it's also worth reading Slate's Jack Shafer, who distills the juicy particulars and pins down just why it is that Assange drives the media crazy:

Assange bedevils the journalists who work with him because he refuses to conform to any of the roles they expect him to play. He acts like a leaking source when it suits him. He masquerades as publisher or newspaper syndicate when that's advantageous. Like a PR agent, he manipulates news organizations to maximize publicity for his "clients," or when moved to, he threatens to throw info-bombs like an agent provocateur. He's a wily shape-shifter who won't sit still, an unpredictable negotiator who is forever changing the terms of the deal.

Although Ellison casts Julian Assange as a genuinely new quantity on the journalistic landscape -- which he is -- the thing that actually struck me most, reading the story, is how much he reminds me of an older one: the sort of news-chasing story-broker that was common in the era before checkbook journalism became frowned-upon, and still exists by other names in the television and new media businesses.

Read on

A story in the Guardian on Monday, reporting on another cable from the paper's WikiLeaks master cache, opens with a bang:

The United Nations' drugs czar told NATO that Afghan insurgents were withholding thousands of tonnes of heroin and treating their drugs like "savings accounts" to manipulate street prices in the west, according to a leaked US cable.

The cable is from May 2009, and details a briefing by Antonio Maria Costa, then the United Nations' top drug official, at NATO headquarters, on the occasion of the release of his office's 2009 Afghan opium survey. My first thought reading the Guardian piece was, Wow, the U.N. drug czar has no idea what he's talking about. Then I read the cable. It turns out this is what's actually in there:

Costa said that Afghanistan has 12,400 tons of opium stocks because it produces more than the world consumes. Costa believes the insurgency is withholding these stocks from the market and treating them like "savings accounts." He said the stocks pose a serious threat as it could be used to finance the insurgency. Costa encouraged intelligence organizations to keep focus on the storage and movement of Afghanistan's opium stocks.

Costa is talking about the price of unrefined opium within Afghanistan, not the price of the finished product in London or New York -- which means the Guardian is unfairly saddling Costa with its own rather large analytical error here. If you want the long explanation for why, read this very useful paper on the Afghan opium trade and counternarcotics strategy, released by New York University's Center for International Cooperation in June, written by drug policy experts Jonathan Caulkins, Mark Kleiman, and Jonathan Kulick. If you want the short answer, read this bit of it:

[T]he price of raw opium, and even refined heroin ready for export from Afghanistan, contributes only modestly to the retail prices facing heroin users in drug-importing countries -- the effect of falling opium prices in Afghanistan would be tiny in remote markets such as western Europe, larger but still quite modest in nearer markets, and substantial only within Afghanistan itself. Effects in the United States, if any, would be even smaller than those in western Europe, since the U.S. heroin market is currently supplied primarily from Colombia and Mexico.

Rising prices are similarly insignificantly affected by price fluctuations inside Afghanistan -- which is why supply-side-only counternarcotics strategies, in Afghanistan or anywhere else, tend to work poorly.

Sweden's Pirate party has been a key supporter of WikiLeaks throughout its recent travails. In August, the party, which is dedicated to the repeal of copyright laws and electronic privacy, agreed to host WikiLeaks on its servers. This month, the party's Swiss branch registered WikiLeaks' new URL after it lost its .org address. 

But the Pirate Party is also the subject of some of the cables. One, from shortly after Sweden's 2009 EU elections, comes with the attention-grabbing subject line, "Aargh! Swedish Pirates Set Sail for Brussels":

The big winner was the Pirate Party -- which campaigned on reformation of copyright and patent law and opposition to a wiretapping law proposed by the Swedish security services. The Pirates secured a whopping 7.1% and one seat in Parliament. The party, founded in January 2006, attracted young voters angry over the guilty verdict in the Pirate Bay trial, the unpopular EU Ipred directive, and new national laws criminalizing file sharing and authorizing monitoring of emails. The party has not yet announced what EP party group it would like to belong to, and the current thinking espoused by Pirates is that the classic political right-left scale is outdated. Rather, the Pirates see themselves as an historic movement analogous to working-class and the green movements. The party is now looking to negotiate with both the liberal ALDE group and the Greens/EFA group.

4. A side effect of the Pirates' success is that it most likely reduced the chances for the far-right nationalist Sweden Democrats to gain representation in the EP. The Pirates have some of the same voter base -- young men with mistrust for politicians. Although the Sweden Democrats tripled their results to 3.3%, up from 1.1% in 2004, they remain below the threshold for representation in either the EP or Swedish Parliament. In any case, the Pirate's landslide among younger voters caught the attention of the larger parties, our contacts tell us, who are now scrambling to come up with policies to woo the youth back to the mainstream.

Not sure I quite buy that the Pirates and the Sweden Democrats share a political base. "Young men with mistrust for politicians" is a pretty broad category. In another cable, Sweden's deputy prime minister also cites the Pirate Party's success as proof that young voters "do not trust us."

I'm hardly an expert on Swedish political movements, but I find it a little odd that the emphasis here seems to be on young Swedes' distrust for the political establishment, rather than support for the Pirate Party's stated goal of reforming copyright laws and legalizing filesharing. Sounds like a winning formula for getting out the youth vote to me.  

Time's Barton Gellman pens a very good profile of WikiLeaks' Julian Assange, a runner-up for the magazine's 2010 person of the year. He also buries the lede on the last page of the story: that WikiLeaks' cache of government documents may be much, much larger than the organization has claimed to date:

The worst -- or best, in the view of advocates for radical transparency -- could be yet to come. John Young, a New York City architect who left the WikiLeaks steering committee after clashing with Assange, says the group members are storing "a lot more information underground than they are publishing on the surface." Some of it comes from a hacker-on-hacker sting in 2006, when data jockeys at WikiLeaks detected what they believed to be a large-scale intelligence operation to steal data from computers around the world. The intruders were using TOR, an anonymous browsing technology invented by the U.S. Navy, to tunnel into their targets and extract information. The WikiLeaks team piggybacked on the operation, recording the data stream in real time as the intruders stole it.

In an encrypted e-mail dated Jan. 7, 2007, decrypted and made available to TIME by its recipient, one of the participants boasted, "Hackers monitor chinese and other intel as they burrow into their targets, when they pull, so do we. Inxhaustible supply of material?… We have all of pre 2005 afghanistan. Almost all of india fed. Half a dozen foreign ministries. Dozens of political parties and consulates, worldbank, apec, UN sections, trade groups."

Gellman writes that "the theft scandalized some WikiLeaks insiders," and Assange decided to hold most of the information back from publication. (Whether it's included in the "insurance" file the group distributed in July, when it released its stash of Afghan war documents, is unclear.) But if Assange has proven anything so far, it's that whether these things stay hidden or not may no longer be something any individual can control.

Update 1: Salon's Justin Elliott, whose Googling skills are better than mine, finds the whole email in question, which was in fact sent to John Young and posted on his own document-dumping website Cryptome. 

Update 2: Kim Zetter of Wired's Threat Level blog points out that this is not entirely new news.

WikiLeaks has released its first confidential cable written by diplomats from the U.S. mission to the United Nations. While the December 2009 cable -- which discusses U.S. efforts on a range of issues before the U.N. General Assembly -- provides no major news revelations, it contains some valuable insights into the way America conducts its business here.

The confidential U.S. diplomatic communication -- which was approved by U.S. ambassador Susan E. Rice -- shows how reliant the U.S. is on its allies, particularly in Europe, to take the lead on politically sensitive issues like the promotion of human rights, where the U.S. often faces criticism for its military and detention policies.  The cable credits the European Union with "collaborating pragmatically" with the Obama administration on its top priorities, including efforts to require emerging economic powers to pay a larger share of the U.N.'s administrative and peacekeeping costs, and to adopt U.N. resolutions criticizing the human rights record of Burma, Iran, and North Korea.

The EU, led by Sweden, also helped Washington fend off efforts by an influential alliance of developing countries -- known as the Group of 77 -- to adopt resolutions that would increase American financial burdens, including a draft resolution affirming a right to economic development.

The EU "responded with alacrity to new U.S. flexibility, particularly on arms control and economic/social issues," according to the cable. "The Swedish ambassador himself repeatedly engaged with G-77 colleagues to sway votes."

The cable, however, also singled out areas where key European powers refused to budge, including its annual support for a General Assembly resolution condemning the U.S. embargo against Cuba: "Spain was a particularly tenacious critic of our Cuba policy." It also expressed frustration with the failure of the EU, despite strong support from Britain, France, and the Netherlands, to significantly weaken a raft of nine pro-Palestinian resolutions that criticize Israel each year. "The EU's annual negotiation of these nine drafts... improved marginally.... The vote outcomes remained lopsided." 

On the whole, this U.N. cable was certainly more businesslike than many of the most dramatic reports flowing out of U.S. embassies  around the world.  But I anticipate that future releases may provide sharper insights into many of the U.N.'s more colorful personalities. Perhaps they will even show us what Rice really thinks about U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

Follow me on Twitter @columlynch.