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

AMERICAS

Members of Haiti's elite complained to the U.S. Embassy in 2005 about eroding security in the country.

ASIA

A Taliban representative told U.S. officials in 1996 that the Taliban had shut down "Arab" training camps in Afghanistan, and had no idea where Osama bin Laden was. A U.S. embassy official met with a Taliban representative the following year to discuss the Afghan drug trade and the group's sheltering of bin Laden.

A 1999 State Department meeting with future Afghan President Hamid Karzai, identified here as the "son of an important Afghan tribal leader."

The U.S. Embassy in Islamabad sizing up the Taliban's Mullah Omar, circa 1997.

Beijing was unhappy about North Korean nuclear tests in 2006, but powerless to stop them.

The Japanese island of Okinawa, host to a longstanding U.S. military presence, is tilting toward China and away from the United States.

MIDDLE EAST

Bahrain's recent crackdown on its Shiite minority came out of Saudi Arabia's playbook.

THE NEWS

Julian Assange is reportedly backing off of plans to publish his memoirs.

WikiLeaks briefly manages to accept donations via Visa and MasterCard before the companies shut them down again. (WikiLeaks is threatening to sue them in response.)

A medic in Britain's Royal Navy has been sentenced to seven months' detention for refusing to train on account of WikiLeaks-inspired moral objections.

An excellent telling of the sad saga of Pfc. Bradley Manning from New York. (The online friend whose chats with Manning provide much of the new information in the piece has also made their correspondence available for download.)

THE CABLES

AFRICA

U.S. diplomats condemned the "appalling greed" of Moroccan King Mohammed VI's inner circle.

AMERICAS

The George W. Bush administration supported Catholic clergy in Venezuela who protested against Hugo Chávez (and defied the pope in so doing).

A 2008 survey found that half of Cubans couldn't identify any of the major dissidents on the island that receive U.S. backing.

ASIA

Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman was an influential player in Obama's China policy during his tenure as ambassador.

Andrew MacGregor Marshall, who quit Reuters over a WikiLeaks-related disagreement, is self-publishing his reporting based on his own trove of Thailand-related cables.

Gaming out the internal power dynamics of China's Politburo Standing Committee.

THE NEWS

Julian Assange revamps his legal team.

GOP presidential hopeful and former Arizona Gov. Gary Johnson is pretty much the only Republican willing to defend WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks thinks Bitcoin is too dodgy for donations.

Remember those cameras that Assange supporters claimed were being used to spy on him? They're actually there to monitor traffic.

THE BIG PICTURE

Has WikiLeaks ushered in an era of no government secrets?

THE CABLES

AMERICAS

The U.S. government, Chevron, and Exxon Mobil joined forces to kill a Venezuelan oil deal in Haiti.

ASIA

The frightening state of the developing world's nuclear energy programs.

China told U.S. officials it wasn't selling nuclear reactors to Pakistan, then did it anyway.

EUROPE

The British government worried that Russian gas behemoth Gazprom was being run by spies.

THE NEWS

Julian Assange says WikiLeaks "played a significant role" in the Arab Spring, but that "there are no official allegations in the public domain" of anyone being hurt by the site's document dumps.

HBO has a WikiLeaks film in the works. CNN has a documentary airing this weekend.

President Barack Obama nominates a replacement for the WikiLeaks-deposed U.S. ambassador to Mexico.

The American Civil Liberties Union is suing the U.S. government to officially release WikiLeaked cables about the war on terror.

Al Jazeera's WikiLeaks-inspired document-sharing site isn't much safer than the Wall Street Journal's.

The Swedish Bar Association chastises Assange's lawyer.

Of course you want to know what Jesse Ventura thinks about WikiLeaks.

THE CABLES

AMERICAS

The United States' quasi-embassy in Havana was in the dark about the U.S. Agency for International Development's activities in Cuba.

MIDDLE EAST

U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice tried to block a U.N. investigation into possible Israeli war crimes during the 2008-2009 Gaza invasion.

The United States secretly backed Syrian opposition groups.

THE NEWS

Bradley Manning is moved from the Marine Corps' Quantico jail to a cell at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. He hasn't been convicted of anything yet, but Barack Obama has already declared him guilty.

Singing pro-Manning protesters interrupt Obama at a fundraiser in San Francisco.

Julian Assange, meanwhile, is one of the 2011 Time 100 and one of Le Figaro Madame's 20 best-dressed men in the world.

WikiLeaks may have scared diplomats, but it hasn't stopped them from talking smack about each other.

THE BIG PICTURE

The backstory of P.J. Crowley's dissent over Manning, well-told by Politico.

Has the Obama administration actually started listening to its critics on Manning's treatment?

WikiLeaks-based reporting didn't take home any Pulitzers this week, but newspapers didn't even bother to submit it.

WikiLeaks has claimed another WikiLoser: U.S. Ambassador Heather Hodges, who was kicked out of Ecuador today over a cable detailing alleged corruption in President Rafael Correa's government. "It is unfortunate that the published documents on WikiLeaks have made it impossible to continue collaborating with the current ambassador to Quito, but we hope to work with a new ambassador," Ecuador's Washington embassy said in a statement today, according to the Associated Press.

The offending cable, which was signed by Hodges (above, with Correa in happier times) in July 2009 and published on Monday by the Spanish newspaper El Pais, concerns Jaime Hurtado, the former commanding general of Ecuador's National Police. "The Embassy has multiple reports that indicate [Hurtado] used his positions to extort bribes, facilitate human trafficking, misappropriate public funds, obstruct investigations and prosecutions of corrupt colleagues, and engage in other corrupt acts for personal enrichment," Hodges wrote.

Hodges is the third U.S. ambassador to be forced out of an embassy post by an inconvenient cable; Carlos Pascual resigned from the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City last month, and Gene Cretz was called back from Tripoli in January (though he's back in action now that the U.S. government is somewhat less concerned about Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi's feelings). Of course, it's also worth noting that Correa -- like his regional allies -- drops U.S. diplomats like they're going out of style.

As you've probably heard, U.S. Ambassador Carlos Pascual stepped down from his post in Mexico City over the weekend following his WikiLeaks-based falling out with Mexican President Felipe Calderón. In noting his departure, we thought it would be worth looking back over the arc of the U.S. State Department's slow-rolling PR catastrophe -- now rounding out its fourth month -- and tallying the casualties. The results are here.

The WikiLeaks unfortunates are a pretty varied group -- the expected array of diplomatic officials and WikiLeaks associates, plus a few politicians, a CEO, a university administrator, and a dictator -- and it's hard to draw much of a trend line through the circumstances of their respective scandals. The first and last of them were both genuine scandals: A German party official passing documents to American embassy officials, the prime minister of India's party allegedly buying votes with chests full of rupees.

But what strikes me as most noteworthy is how un-noteworthy most of the cables that got a lot of these people in trouble really were. U.S. ambassadors were pulled from their posts for noting that Mexico's drug war was going badly and that Muammar al-Qaddafi was rather eccentric. The fact that Tunisia's Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was a fantastically corrupt ruler was not exactly news to anyone in Tunisia. Europe's still-incomplete satellite system really is a boondoggle. There have been a few bombshells in the WikiLeaks cables -- some of them literal -- but these weren't them. They were significant only because they confirmed that the U.S. government knew what everyone else knew.

Things just got even worse for Pfc. Bradley Manning, the alleged source for WikiLeaks' cache of U.S. military and State Department documents. The Army announced today that it has filed 22 new charges against Manning, in addition to the 12 counts he was initially charged with after his arrest in May.

Wired's Threat Level blog reports that the charges, which were filed Tuesday, "include aiding the enemy, theft of public property or records, computer fraud, transmitting defense information and wrongly causing intelligence to be published on the internet knowing it would be accessible to the enemy." Although the first charge is a capital offense, the Army has said it will not seek the death penalty. Even so, Manning is still looking at the possibility of life in prison. (Politico has the charge sheet here.)

Manning's lawyer, David E. Coombs, said in a blog post today that he and Manning had been expecting the additional charges for several weeks:

The decision to prefer charges is an individual one by PFC Manning's commander.  The nature of the charges and the number of specifications under each reflects his determination, in consultation with his Staff Judge Advocate's office, of the possible offenses in this case.  Ultimately, the Article 32 Investigating Officer will determine which, if any, of these additional charges and specifications should be referred to a court-martial.

As Threat Level notes, the capital offense charge could play into the deliberation over WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges, which Assange's lawyers are in the process of appealing. A British judge ruled in favor of the extradition last week, and his ruling made virtually no mention of the political context of the case, effectively dismissing as implausible Assange's lawyers' arguments that an extradition -- even on unrelated charges -- would pave the way for their client's extradition to the United States on capital charges. Now that Manning has been charged with a capital offense, such arguments will be harder to dismiss.

Proceedings against Manning, meanwhile, are still on hold pending a psychiatric review sought by his lawyers. Politico reports that that review is expected to be completed in the next two to six weeks.

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.

THE CABLES

AMERICAS

Diplomats say corruption is "a way of life" in Cuba, and name names.

MIDDLE EAST

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak thought George W. Bush was "naive, controlled by subordinates, and completely unprepared for dealing with post-Saddam Iraq."

Inside the U.S. military's $1.3 billion-a-year relationship with Egypt.

When Hillary met Hosni.

The Egyptian military's Plan B in the event of a regime change.

THE NEWS

WikiLeaks rival OpenLeaks is launched. And leaked.

New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller details the Times' complicated relationship with Julian Assange. (Juicy bits here.)

The U.S. military hasn't turned up any evidence of collaboration between Assange and Pfc. Bradley Manning.

Manning's supervisors warned the U.S. Army not to deploy him to Iraq.

Police in Britain bust alleged Anonymous hackers. The FBI is going after them, too.

Der Spiegel's tick-tock on the lead-up to Cablegate. (Assange: "We have to survive this leak.")

When American newspapers aren't bashing Julian Assange, they're imitating him.

WikiLeaks: the next generation.

Assange wants more media partners.

Is anyone not publishing an instant book about WikiLeaks?

THE BIG PICTURE

Reading WikiLeaks as literature.

Is Manning Capt. James Yee all over again?

Is Algeria next?

Why the Palestine Papers aren't the next WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks has done more for Arab democracy than decades of U.S. diplomacy.

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.

Late Friday, the U.S. Justice Department issued a court order for the Twitter account records of Birgitta Jonsdottir (above), a member of Iceland's Parliament and early friend of WikiLeaks. At first blush, this would seem to suggest that the Feds' efforts to build a case against Assange, who was in court in London yesterday and faces an extradition hearing next month, aren't going that well -- it's hard to envision an organization as tech-savvy as WikiLeaks conveying any sensitive information via Twitter direct messages -- and it drew protest from E.U. politicians yesterday. In any case, Twitter refused to comply -- or, in the words of Wired's Ryan Singel, "Twitter beta-tested a spine."

Twitter isn't talking about why it made the decision, and in the absence of a statement the speculation on tech blogs over the past few days seems to have mostly settled on the theory that the refusal was the work of Twitter general counsel Alexander Macgillivray, an early graduate of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and former Google lawyer known for championing privacy in the slippery legal environs of the Internet.

Christopher Soghoian, a graduate student and consultant who has done exhaustive research on the subject of Internet companies' data disclosures to government, explains that this is an extremely unusual response for a tech firm -- they usually fold in a hurry when the government comes knocking -- and why it matters:

Twitter has gone out of its way to fight for its users' privacy. The company went to court, and was successful in asking the judge to unseal the order (something it is not required to do), and then promptly notified its users, so that they could seek to quash the order. Twitter could have quite easily complied with the order, and would have had zero legal liability for doing so. In fact, many other Internet companies routinely hand over their users' data in response to government requests, and never take steps to either have the orders unsealed, or give their users notice and thus an opportunity to fight the order.

It's also notable in light of Twitter's past friendliness with the State Department, which famously prevailed upon the company to keep its servers up and running during Iran's Green Revolution protests (a collaboration which Evgeny Morozov argues in the current issue of FP has proven problematic).

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

On Thursday, Julian Assange told reporters that WikiLeaks would be releasing State Department cables concerning the assassination of Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai in January, and he has made good on the promise with a couple of short dispatches from the U.S. embassy in Abu Dhabi. They don't offer any more insight into the still-unsolved killing, but they do paint a picture of the diplomatic conundrum the incident posed for the United Emirates and the United States.

Mabhouh, a Hamas military commander who had orchestrated the kidnapping and killing of two Israeli soldiers and was suspected of smuggling arms into the Gaza Strip, died in his room at the Al Bustan Rotana hotel in Dubai on Jan. 19, after being injected with the muscle relaxant succinylcholine and then suffocated. Although Israel has denied it won't confirm or deny it, the list of people who don't believe that Mossad agents did the job is vanishingly short. The hit squad had deftly plotted and executed the assassination, using encrypted cell phones and passports from half a dozen countries, and quickly scattered themselves from Hong Kong to Paris once their work was done. Their one mistake, however, was a big one: failing to account for the hotel's CCTV cameras, which caught their faces on tape.

The story was first reported 10 days later by Reuters, and as it happened, U.S. Ambassador Richard Olson was at a social event with UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed when it broke, according to one of the two embassy cables, signed by Olson. An unnamed UAE media advisor, Olson reports in the Jan. 31 cable, "after making a few calls reported back that the UAE's public posture was being discussed between Dubai Ruler Mohammed bin Rashid and Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed. The two options discussed were to say nothing at all, or to reveal more or less the full extent of the UAE's investigations."

The UAE was no friend of Hamas -- the emirate's discontent with Hamas patron Iran is a recurring theme in the WikiLeaks corpus -- but its government was, of course, not exactly eager to be seen as enabling an Israeli incursion on the sovereignty of an Arab state, either. The cable describes the UAE officials' reasoning, and decision:

Saying nothing would have been perceived as protecting the Israelis and in the end, the UAE chose to tell all. The statement was carefully drafted not to point any fingers, but the reference in the document (see below) to a gang with western passports will be read locally as referring to the Mossad.

American officials had their own decision to make about where their loyalties were -- one documented in the second cable, signed by Olson deputy Doug Greene, several weeks later. Greene reports that UAE officials requested the embassy's help in acquiring account data for credit cards, issued by a bank in Iowa, that investigators had linked to suspects in the assassination. The request was apparently turned down, and as Haaretz reports, the State Department denied at the time that any requests had been made. "By not accepting the request," Haaretz's Yossi Melman writes, "the Obama administration harmed the Dubai investigation efforts and assisted Israel instead." The U.S. government did eventually assist in the investigation, however, identifying American companies that may have been used to finance the operation.