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.

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

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.

Newly instated Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman has been a longtime favorite of Israel, according to new WikiLeaks cables released Monday.  The cables reveal snippets from a strategic partnership that is often fraught with differences, but mostly sharing of similar concerns, among them Gaza, Iran, and terrorism. The revelations seem particularly notable in the context of ongoing turmoil in Egypt, where protestors are calling for Mubarak to step down. The United States is now backing Suleiman as a leader of a transition government -- something that, according to the recently released cables, should  help quell Isreali anxiety.

In a cable dated August 29, 2008, David Hacham, a senior adviser to Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, told U.S. diplomats about Barak's visit to Egypt earlier that month, calling it a success. While Hacham said the Israelis were "shocked" by President Hosni Mubarak's "aged appearance and slurred speech," they had only nice things to say about Suleiman, then head of Egypt's foreign intelligence service. Israel and Suleiman were apparently quite close, a relationship built through the daily use of a hot line set up between the Israeli Ministry of Defense and Suleiman's office. And even as most of the world expected Mubarak's son, Gamal, to be his successor, the Israelis had different thoughts, according to the cable:

Hacham noted that the Israelis believe Soliman is likely to serve as at least an interim President if Mubarak dies or is incapacitated. (Note:  We defer to Embassy Cairo for analysis of Egyptian succession scenarios, but there is no question that Israel is most comfortable with the prospect of Omar Soliman.)

With Egypt eager to position itself as a leader in the Middle East, Suleiman also apparently took a keen interest in the Israel-Palestinian negotiations, according to a different 2008 cable. He told a U.S. Congressional delegation that he was optimistic about the situation between Egypt's neighbors, but stressed his concern over "continuing Israeli criticism of Egyptian anti-smuggling efforts."

According to the cable, the timing for Israeli-Palestinian progress was right, in 2008, for four reasons:

First, the PA leadership is moderate and willing to negotiate. Second, Hamas is isolated and politically cut off in Gaza. Third, the Israelis are ready for peace; Soliman assessed that the GOI coalition is broad and strong, and larger than Rabin's coalition of the mid-nineties. Fourth, Arab states are ready to see an end to "the struggle."

Suleiman said that Egypt wanted to help the United States continue the peace process, recommending steps to continue progress:

First , both the Israelis and Palestinians must be pressed hard to sign an agreement, which the U.S. and international community could endorse, to be implemented at the proper time. Second, the U.S. should insist that "phase one" of the Roadmap should be completed before the end of 2008.

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.

The U.S. government has justifiably taken a lot of heat for its relative silence regarding -- and occasional complicity in -- the human rights abuses committed by Hosni Mubarak's regime in Egypt. But it's worth highlighting an exception in a recently WikiLeaked November 2008 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, signed by Amb. Margaret Scobey, in which American diplomats did the right thing -- while Silicon Valley played it safe.

The cable concerns an Egyptian blogger whose name is redacted in the document, but who CNET thinks is most likely Wael Abbas, a celebrated dissident journalist whose efforts to distribute videos of human rights abuses by Egyptian authorities have in one case led to convictions of the perpetrators (and who, incidentally, was arrested on Friday in Cairo, though according to his Twitter feed he's since been released):

Prominent Egyptian blogger XXXXXXXXXXXXX, contacted us November 17 to report that YouTube removed from his website two videos exposing police abuses -- one of Sinai bedouin allegedly shot by police and thrown in a garbage dump during the past week's violence (ref A), and the other of a woman being tortured in a police station.  XXXXXXXXXXXXX told us that YouTube is also preventing XXXXXXXXXXXX from posting new videos, and asked us for assistance in urging YouTube to re-post his removed videos and reinstate his access to uploading new material.  XXXXXXXXXXXXX said XXXXXXXXXXXXXX has tried to contact Google, but has not received a response.

The cable notes that the same thing happened to the blogger the previous year -- which again suggests that the blogger in question is Abbas, who had his YouTube access restored in December 2007 after getting kicked off for posting videos of Egyptian police brutality. At the time, YouTube explained in a statement that the company's general policy banned videos depicting graphic violence, but that "Having reviewed the case, we have restored the account of Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas -- and if he chooses to upload the video again with sufficient context so that users can understand his important message we will of course leave it on the site."

While the incident was widely reported at the time, there was no mention of any involvement of the State Department in YouTube's decision. But the 2008 cable notes:

In December 2007, DRL [State's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor] and Embassy Cairo worked to convince Google [which owns YouTube] to restore XXXXXXXXXXXXX' YouTube access after a similar incident. We believe that a similar Department intervention with Google representatives could help in restoring XXXXXXXXXXXXX' access again. XXXXXXXXXXXXis an influential blogger and human rights activist, and we want to do everything we can to assist him in exposing police abuse.

A YouTube spokeswoman wouldn't confirm or deny the cable's account of the two incidents, saying in an emailed statement that "In order to protect the privacy of our users, we do not comment on actions taken on individual videos or accounts."

It's been a while since WikiLeaked checked in on Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen's newly embattled president and a reliably interesting character in the WikiLeaks oeuvre. Most of what we've seen from Saleh in the leaked U.S. State Department cables has followed a pattern in which U.S. diplomats try to coax more counterterrorism cooperation out of the veteran strongman, while Saleh -- whose government received $155 million in military aid from the United States in 2010, twice the previous year's amount -- tries to finagle more cash and materiel out of the Americans. A newly released December 2004 State Department cable recounting a meeting between Saleh and U.S. Ambassador Thomas C. Krajeski (pictured above with Saleh in a 2007 photo) is no exception.

The meeting takes place a little more than a month after U.S. President George W. Bush's reelection; Saleh badly wants to meet with Bush in Washington to congratulate him personally, he tells Krajeski, and also talk about "important new developments in the region 'that can only be discussed face to face,'" according to the cable. Krajeski hems and haws a bit about this, at which point, the cable notes, "True to form, Saleh launched into a list of what he believes the U.S. owes him. 'Where is the money for the Army, and what about my spare (F-5) parts?' Saleh demanded." (The cable notes, a little acidly, that there have been reported problems with getting the Yemeni Ministry of Defense "to follow through with the necessary paperwork on parts and equipment in order to spend the 17 million USD in Yemen's [foreign military financing] account.")

There's also the matter of smaller weapons, specifically the massive number of small arms being bought and sold in Yemen:

Pointing out that any meetings with senior U.S. officials would quickly turn to the subject of Yemen's huge grey market in SA/LW [small arms/light weapons], Ambassador told Saleh that Yemen needs to gain control over the huge flow of these weapons in and through the country. Washington is very concerned about this issue and ready to help the ROYG tackle it, added Ambassador. "I will do it!" Saleh exclaimed, insisting that he was insisting that he was already "cracking down" on the SA/LWs market.

The conversation soon turns, inevitably, to counterterrorism, in which Saleh has been a longstanding if not unproblematic partner to the United States. Pressed on the subject of Hadi Dulqum, an arms dealer with alleged links to Al Qaeda, the cable reports that "Saleh stuck to his line that Hadi Dulqum is just a 'simple arms dealer:'"

The Saudis want Dulqum, said the President, "they are crazy for him. What do you expect?" he asked, "if we arrest every arms dealer in the country, we will have hundreds of them in prison." The USG [U.S. government] agrees with the Saudis, said Ambassador, adding that Dulqum's connections with AQ are too extensive for him to be simply another Yemeni arms dealer.

Months later, Saleh does manage to swing a White House invite, prompting a June 2005 cable from the Sanaa embassy titled PRIORITIES FOR WASHINGTON VISIT: SALEH NEEDS TO BE PART OF THE SOLUTION. The cable characterizes relations with Saleh's government as "frustrating and difficult," noting that "Saleh has indicated to top advisors in the past that he believes he can pull the wool over the eyes of the [U.S. government.]" On the political front, "Saleh touts Yemen as a leader in regional reform and has committed to democratization," the cable says. "Domestically, however, he has run-out of reforms he can implement at no political cost to himself."

The cable proposes "a public show of support via a greater role in public fora such as the G-8" as a possible inducement to greater democratization, but it seems that half a decade later, the upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt may have done the job more effectively.

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.

On July 25, 1990, Saddam Hussein summoned April Glaspie, the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, to discuss Iraq's brewing dispute with Kuwait. Their discussion would eventually cost Glaspie her promising career as a diplomat.

One week after the meeting, Saddam's troops would storm into Kuwait, beginning the chain of events that eventually led to the Gulf War. Now, with WikiLeaks' release of Glaspie's cable describing her meeting with Saddam, we have her firsthand perspective on one of the seminal events that preceded the conflict.

The cable is more interesting for what is not discussed than what is. Glaspie doesn't show any awareness that war is just around the corner; she mainly offers diplomatic pablum that the United States is interested in "friendship" with Iraq. Due to her failure to warn Saddam that the United States would forcefully retaliate in the event of an invasion of Kuwait, the Washington Post described her as "the face of American incompetence in Iraq." Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer piled on in a 2003 article for Foreign Policy, arguing that Glaspie's remarks unwittingly gave Iraq a green light to invade Kuwait.

That's an unfair judgment. Glaspie was unable to employ harsher language because George H.W. Bush's administration hadn't yet reached a decision on how the United States would respond to an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. "Practically nobody in the U.S. government believed that Saddam was going to opt for military action," Wayne White, who served in the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) at the time of the Gulf War, told me.

Saddam, after all, had sent two of his highest-ranking deputies to Saudi Arabia to hold negotiations with the Kuwaitis to resolve the crisis. And during the meeting with Glaspie, he received a telephone call from Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak where he pledged that "nothing will happen" until after the discussions. Surely the Iraqi dictator wasn't preparing to invade a U.S. ally, seize a significant share of world oil supplies, and sabotage the diplomatic efforts of the Arab world's two most powerful countries?

In fact, he was. But the United States had yet to appreciate that fact, leaving Glaspie with instructions only to issue a tepid plea to find a negotiated solution to the dispute.  "There was no way that April could have done anything more than she did without authority going all the way up to the president of the United States," said White. "Because we don't make idle threats. If you're going to threaten, you have to really mean it."

Glaspie, who became the first female U.S. ambassador posted to a Middle Eastern country when she was sent to Iraq, became something of a pariah within the State Department after this episode. She served at the U.S. mission to the United Nations after leaving Iraq, and then headed the U.S. consulate in Cape Town, South Africa, before retiring in 2002. For someone who had previously spent her entire career focused on U.S. policy in the Middle East, these were something less than dream assignments.

The WikiLeaks cables do show that Glaspie was not the sharpest observer of Saddam's regime, and at points made the mistake of trying to handle the Iraqi president with kid gloves. In one cringe-inducing line, she commiserates with Saddam over his unhappiness with how the Diane Sawyer show edited an interview with him, saying that it was "cheap and unfair." Der Spiegel, which apparently has unreleased cables from the period written by Glaspie, reported that the U.S. diplomat also described to the State Department an "important" initiative by Saddam to draft a new Iraqi constitution.

Perhaps that credulousness is the reason why Glaspie's rise in the State Department stalled. But on the charge that she could have deterred Saddam from invading Kuwait by using sterner language during that much-debated meeting, she is certainly innocent.

Cables from the U.S. Embassy in the Zimbabwean capital of Harare account for just 13 of the nearly 2,000 State Department documents that WikiLeaks has posted so far, but President Robert Mugabe's government has gotten a lot of mileage out of them -- in fact, he's probably made more enterprising use of the slow-rolling scandal than any other world leader. When an independent Zimbabwean newspaper reported on a cable alleging that members of Mugabe's circle -- including his wife, Grace Mugabe -- had profited extensively from the country's black -market diamond trade, the first lady sued the paper for $15 million (a move that has prompted reprisals from hackers). When WikiLeaks published a year-old cable detailing a meeting between Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai and U.S. officials, Mugabe -- who had grudgingly acceded to a power-sharing arrangement with his old nemesis -- jumped at the opportunity.

Last week, Johannes Tomana, Zimbabwe's attorney general, announced that he would consider charging Tsvangirai with high treason over the contents of the cable, in which Tsvangirai suggests the possibility of working with U.S. and other foreign officials on the international sanctions regime imposed on Mugabe's government -- penalties that Tsvangirai publicly opposed but privately insisted "be kept in place," according to the cable. High treason carries the death penalty in Zimbabwe, and a number of writers -- Christopher Albon in the Atlantic, James Kirchick in the Wall Street Journal, and James Richardson in today's Guardian, among others -- have pre-emptively placed Tsvangirai's blood on Julian Assange's hands. Richardson's piece is a particularly good summary of the events thus far and builds to a withering conclusion:

And so, where Mugabe's strong-arming, torture and assassination attempts have failed to eliminate the leading figure of Zimbabwe's democratic opposition, WikiLeaks may yet succeed. Twenty years of sacrifice and suffering by Tsvangirai all for naught, as WikiLeaks risks "collateral murder" in the name of transparency.

Before more political carnage is wrought and more blood spilled -- in Africa and elsewhere, with special concern for those US-sympathising Afghans fingered in its last war document dump -- WikiLeaks ought to leave international relations to those who understand it -- at least to those who understand the value of a life.

It's certainly true that Assange has been maddeningly unwilling to examine the implications of his actions -- or, alternately, convinced that he can have it both ways, remaking the business of geopolitics while claiming no casualties. But I'm somewhat more persuaded by Albon's measured take from last week. After noting that a Tsvangirai conviction based on the cable alone is unlikely, he writes:

It's difficult to see this as anything but a major setback for democracy in Zimbabwe. Even if Tsvangirai is not charged with treason, the opponents to democratic reforms have won a significant victory. First, popular support for Tsvangirai and the MDC will suffer due to Mugabe's inevitable smear campaign, including the attorney general's "investigation." Second, the Prime Minister might be forced to take positions in opposition to the international community to avoid accusation of being a foreign collaborator. Third, Zimbabwe's fragile coalition government could collapse completely. Whatever happens, democratic reforms in Zimbabwe are far less likely now than before the leak. 

As Robert Rotberg wrote here last week, WikiLeaks may have provided Mugabe with a useful pretext for dispatching Tsvangirai from his government, but it's an open question whether he needed one. In reward for his decade-plus of political efforts, Tsvangirai has been variously arrested, beaten, tortured, thrown from a 10th-floor window, and involved in a suspicious collision with a truck that claimed his wife's life. WikiLeaks is useful to Mugabe, but it's hardly necessary.

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.

In March 2010, then-CENTCOM chief Gen. David Petraeus set off a storm of protest among neoconservatives when, in his statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee, he named "insufficient progress toward a comprehensive Middle East peace" as an obstacle to U.S. goals in the region.

"The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the AOR [area of responsibility]," read the statement. "Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world." At the same time, Petraeus concluded, "Al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas."

While this represented only one of a number of "cross cutting challenges to security and stability" detailed in his statement, Petraeus' analysis was too much for the Anti-Defamation League's Abe Foxman, who quickly issued a scolding: "Gen. Petraeus has simply erred in linking the challenges faced by the U.S. and coalition forces in the region to a solution of the Israeli-Arab conflict," said Foxman. "This linkage is dangerous and counterproductive."

That such a carefully calibrated statement of the obvious should draw condemnation from the ADL -- as if the very suggestion that Israel's conflicts could create difficulties for its American patron were itself a form of defamation -- indicates how uncomfortable the notion of "linkage" makes many Israel hawks.

Read on

While the demonization of Julian Assange continues apace, the following thought occurred to me (it probably occurred to you already). Suppose a reporter like David Sanger or Helene Cooper of the New York Times had been given a confidential diplomatic cable by a disgruntled government employee (or "unnamed senior official"). Suppose it was one of the juicier cables recently released by Wikileaks. Suppose further that Sanger or Cooper had written a story based on that leaked information, and then put the text of the cable up on the Times website so that readers could see for themselves that the story was based on accurate information. Would anyone be condemning them? I doubt it. Whoever actually leaked the cable might be prosecuted or condemned, but the journalists who published the material would probably be praised, and their colleagues would just be jealous that somebody else got a juicy scoop.

So if one leaked cable is just normal media fodder, how about two or three? What about a dozen? What's the magic number of leaks that turns someone from an enterprising journalist into the Greatest Threat to our foreign policy since Daniel Ellsberg? In fact, hardly anyone seems to be criticizing the Times or Guardian for having a field day with the materials that Wikileaks provided to them (which is still just a small fraction of the total it says it has), and nobody seems to hounding the editors of these publications or scouring the penal code to find some way to prosecute them. 

I don't know if the sex crime charges against Assange in Sweden have any merit, and I have no idea what sort of person he really is (see Robert Wright here for a thoughtful reflection on the latter issue). I also find it interesting that the overwrought U.S. reaction to the whole business seems to be reinforcing various anti-American stereotypes. But the more I think about it, the less obvious it is to me why the man is being pilloried for doing wholesale what establishment journalists do on a retail basis all the time.