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The Cable
Rand Paul: You’re Arming al Qaeda’s Allies
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War of Ideas
No, 3-D Printing Won’t End Hunger
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Passport
Why Does the U.S. Get All the Tornadoes?
Posted By Charles Homans
Friday, August 19, 2011 - 4:55 PM
THE CABLES
AMERICAS
Iran shipped UAVs to Venezuela (via Turkey) in 2009.
The collapse of the Venezuelan opposition.
Cuban doctors working in Venezuela complained to embassy officials of being "politically manipulated" and underpaid.
ASIA
Did WikiLeaks out a Malaysian politician as gay?
THE NEWS
Another day, another WikiLeaks e-book, this one by a British journalist who seems to have been a bit too into Julian Assange.
COMMENTS (0)
Posted By Charles Homans
Friday, July 22, 2011 - 6:58 PM
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.
BEN STANSALL/AFP/Getty Images
Posted By Charles Homans
Friday, July 15, 2011 - 6:09 PM
THE CABLES
AFRICA
U.S. Embassy officials cautioned the Kenyan government to restrain itself in the violence following the country's 2007 election.
AMERICAS
The U.S. State Department's energy envoy urged Canada in 2009 to improve its "messaging" on a proposed oil-sands pipeline to the United States, including promoting "more positive news stories."
U.S. officials accused the leader of a pro-Cuban government peace group of threatening to pull U.S. medical students' scholarships if they met with the U.S. mission on the island in 2007.
ASIA
The Malaysian government's crackdown on bloggers in 2007.
THE NEWS
Julian Assange's extradition appeal decision is deferred. After his hearing -- complete with another round of more-than-you-wanted-to-know details about Assange's sex life -- Swedish prosecutors blast the Assange legal team's "19th Century" view of sexual consent.
Assange also found time to throw a big 40th birthday bash, inviting Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, and Oprah. (They didn't go.)
Wired releases the long-sought-after Adrian Lamo-Bradley Manning chat logs. Commentary from Salon's Glenn Greenwald, who had crusaded for their release, here.
U.N. torture investigator Juan Mendez says the U.S. government is violating U.N. rules in refusing him access to Manning.
Anonymous hacks military contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. (And here's a helpful family tree of the hackers who've risen to prominence since the WikiLeaks saga began.)
Blocking WikiLeaks donations prompts a competition complaint against MasterCard and Visa in Europe.
Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
Posted By Charles Homans
Friday, July 1, 2011 - 5:44 PM
THE CABLES
ASIA
Andrew MacGregor Marshall's in-depth account in Foreign Policy of Thailand's slide into authoritarianism, based on exclusive WikiLeaks cables.
Was the former Chinese finance minister caught in a Taiwanese honey trap?
AMERICAS
A Cuban cardinal pushed to close a Cuban magazine critical of the Castro regime.
THE NEWS
The journalists who could make a fortune off of WikiLeaks.
LulzSec calls it quits. The Associated Press recounts its rapid rise and fall.
FP rounds up WikiLeaks' recent greatest hits.
A theatrical adaptation of the WikiLeaks saga (above) debuts in Australia.
WikiLeaks parodies MasterCard's "Priceless" ads:
TORSTEN BLACKWOOD/AFP/Getty Images
Posted By Charles Homans
Friday, December 17, 2010 - 7:18 PM
THE CABLES
AFRICA
Zimbabwe's first lady is suing a local newspaper over its reporting on a WikiLeaks cable detailing her involvement in the black-market diamond trade. (And apparently doesn't read FP.)
When FP wrote about Africa's failed states this summer, we didn't know the half of it.
Pretty much everyone involved in last week's cable about bribery in the Ugandan oil business denies bribing anyone in the Ugandan oil business.
Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir allegedly has $9 billion in oil money stashed in Britain.
AMERICAS
American diplomats at the United Nations don't like to talk much about human rights anymore.
The Cuban government misjudges the WikiLeaks cables, which show the U.S. government misjudging the Cuban government.
Joking about Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, or even above Venezuela, is ill-advised.
How Brazil got pharmaceutical companies to hand over cheap HIV/AIDS drugs.
Diverticulitis may have nearly done in the Castro regime, but Cuba's political dissidents probably can't.
ANTARCTICA
WikiLeaks is banned there.
ASIA
The Red Cross reported extensive torture of Kashmiris at Indian detention centers in Kashmir to the U.S. embassy in New Delhi in 2005.
Singapore's government owes an apology to basically every major country in Asia.
The Dalai Lama says fighting climate change is more important for Tibet than political independence.
The heir to the Gandhi family political dynasty thinks Hindu extremists are a bigger threat to India than Muslim ones.
Turkmen strongman Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov doesn't like people who are smarter than him.
A former Thai prime minister says Thailand's queen had a hand in the country's 2006 coup. The country's leaders also have their doubts about the crown prince.
Eric Clapton's weirdly persistent influence on North Korean politics.
EUROPE/CAUCASUS
Sweden told the State Department in 2008 that the country didn't have to worry about terrorism. They're probably not saying that now.
Silvio Berlusconi for the win?
The German government is still not digging L. Ron Hubbard.
The Stockholm embassy discusses Sweden's WikiLeaks-enabling Pirate Party in a particularly meta cable.
The Azeri first lady's plastic surgery creates confusion among U.S. diplomats in Baku.
Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko is "bizarre" and "disturbed."
MIDDLE EAST
Do Arab leaders actually care about the Palestinians?
Hosni Mubarak thinks his son is a perfectionist.
Is the Egyptian military in "intellectual and social decline"?
The Arab League doesn't like Steven Spielberg.
THE NEWS
Julian Assange is released on bail after a media-circus-attracting hearing, but not before Michael Moore manages to get involved. Now that he's out of jail, Assange is pretty chatty -- as is Vaughan Smith, the journalist and WikiLeaks supporter who's hosting him until his next court date.
Things are not going nearly so well for alleged Assange document source Bradley Manning.
Australian police determine WikiLeaks hasn't broken any laws in the country, but Assange's lawyer says a grand jury in the United States is considering indicting him.
WikiLeaks is already inspiring imitators around the world, and counterfeit cables are turning up in Russia -- because, you know, that worked so well in Pakistan.
FP's WikiLeaked is too hot for the U.S. Air Force.
Someone posts a manifesto on behalf of Anonymous, the ad-hoc group of hackers that has cyber-attacked an array of targets in solidarity with WikiLeaks over the past two weeks. The manifesto quotes KISS bassist Gene Simmons. A Greek web designer is arrested for it.
Governments may be scared of WikiLeaks, but the Pakistani feminine hygiene industry isn't.
A lot of people think Assange should have been Time's 2010 person of the year. Richard Stengel, the magazine's managing editor, isn't one of them.
Portrait of the hacker as a young man: Julian Assange during his couch-surfing and email-stalking days.
Would Henry David Thoreau join Anonymous?
Congress considers WikiLeaks.
Mark Prendergast, ombudsman for the U.S. military's official Stars and Stripes newspaper, argues that military personnel should be allowed to read the cables.
If WikiLeaks doesn't get things rolling a little faster, we'll be writing this blog for another 7.6 years.
ADRIAN DENNIS/AFP/Getty Images
Posted By Charles Homans
Tuesday, December 14, 2010 - 8:59 AM
In May, Thailand's capital city of Bangkok temporarily became a war zone, with rural populist "red shirts" opposed to Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva fighting pitched battles in the streets with government forces. The fighting was the other shoe dropping after the 2006 military coup that deposed Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, a politician who was venal and not especially democratic but was nevertheless immensely popular with Thailand's rural poor. Thaksin's ousting was seen as the work of the urban Bangkok elite, and Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej was widely suspected to have had a hand in it, or at least given his tacit consent, despite the Thai royal family's traditional neutrality in the country's politics.
That's the backstory to a series of U.S. State Department cables the Guardian is reporting on (but hasn't released) this morning, which allege that Queen Sirikit, Bhumibol's wife, had a hand in the 2006 coup. Samak Sundaravej, who briefly served as prime minister during the chaotic post-coup years, tells U.S. diplomats that Sirikit
was indirectly "responsible for the 2006 coup d'état." ... Samak also claimed, the cable writers add, that Sirikit had a hand in the "ongoing turmoil generated by PAD protests", a reference to the mass protests by the royalist People's Alliance for Democracy which have contributed to the downfall of several Thaksin-associated governments since 2006.
...
Samak alleged the queen "operated through privy council president Prem Tinsulanonda who, along with others presenting themselves as royalists, worked with the PAD and other agitators", according to a report by US ambassador Eric John, within a cable from October 2008.
The Guardian adds that "there is no mention in the cables of any coup involvement by King Bhumibol himself," but that they do report that shortly after the coup, "Bhumibol called the leaders of the coup to his palace for a meeting the evening after Thaksin was ousted and was 'happy, smiling throughout.'"
Posted By Josh Rogin
Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - 6:37 PM
The State Department denied a report today that it contacted the online money transfer service PayPal and asked them to cut ties with WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, who remains behind bars in the United Kingdom.
"It is not true," State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told The Cable. "We have not been in touch with PayPal."
Osama Bedier, vice president at PayPal, told an audience Wednesday at Paris' tech conference Le Web'10 that PayPal had shut down its business with WikiLeaks, which used the electronic money transfer service to collect donations, at the request of the State Department.
"The State Department told us these were illegal activities. It was straightforward. We first comply with regulations around the world making sure that we protect our brand," Bedier reportedly said..
Crowley said that PayPal made the decision based on a publicly available letter sent last week to Assange and his lawyer from State Department counselor Harold Koh, which called the disclosure of 250,000 diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks an "illegal dissemination" of classified documents and said the leaks "place at risk the lives of countless innocent individuals -- from journalists to human rights activists and bloggers to soldiers to individuals providing information to further peace and security."
A reporter from the TechCrunch blog confirmed with Bedier after his speech that he was in fact working from the Koh letter that State had sent to WikiLeaks.
Crowley also responded to the remarks of Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd, who seemed to alter his country's position on Assange, who is an Australian citizen, "Mr. Assange is not himself responsible for the unauthorized release of 250,000 documents from the US diplomatic communications network," said Rudd Tuesday. "The Americans are responsible for that."
"He's correct in that the primary responsibility for the leak existed within the United States government," Crowley said, being careful not to criticize Rudd and create yet one more diplomatic problem.
As for whether the United States will seek to prosecute Assange under the Espionage Act of 1917 or some other U.S. laws, Crowley said that decision would be made by the Justice Department and the Defense Department. But he was clear about the State Department's position on the matter.
"Certainly, we believe that what Mr. Assange has done in the aftermath of that leak has put the interests of our country and others at risk, and put the lives of people who are reflected in these documents at risk," Crowley said. We haven't changed our view."
AFP / Getty Images
WikiLeaked is FP’s blog dedicated to sorting through and making sense of the more than 250,000 State Department cables acquired by WikiLeaks.
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