wikileaks

Daily highlights of the content of the cables: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/29/wikileaks-embassy-cables-key-points

 

Daily highlights of the release and responses to it: http://waxy.org/2010/11/wikileaks_cablegate_roundup/

 

Would like to have a list of things that it is good for us to have learned from the leaked cables:

 

U.S. direct attacks in Yemen: “We’ll continue to say the bombs are ours, not yours.” --Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, as quoted in U.S. role in Yemen covered up by its president, WikiLeaks file reveals

 

From this Gleen Greenwald article:

(1) the U.S. military formally adopted a policy of turning a blind eye to systematic, pervasive torture and other abuses by Iraqi forces;

(2) the State Department threatened Germany not to criminally investigate the CIA's kidnapping of one of its citizens who turned out to be completely innocent;

(3) the State Department under Bush and Obama applied continuous pressure on the Spanish Government to suppress investigations of the CIA's torture of its citizens and the 2003 killing of a Spanish photojournalist when the U.S. military fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad (see The Philadelphia Inquirer's Will Bunch today about this: "The day Barack Obama Lied to me"); 

(4) the British Government privately promised to shield Bush officials from embarrassment as part of its Iraq War "investigation"; 

(5) there were at least 15,000 people killed in Iraq that were previously uncounted;

(6) "American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world" about the Iraq war as it was prosecuted, a conclusion the Post's own former Baghdad Bureau Chief wrote was proven by the WikiLeaks documents;

(7) the U.S.'s own Ambassador concluded that the July, 2009 removal of the Honduran President was illegal -- a coup -- but the State Department did not want to conclude that and thus ignored it until it was too late to matter;

(8) U.S. and British officials colluded to allow the U.S. to keep cluster bombs on British soil even though Britain had signed the treaty banning such weapons, and,

(9) Hillary Clinton's State Department ordered diplomats to collect passwords, emails, and biometric data on U.N. and other foreign officials, almost certainly in violation of the Vienna Treaty of 1961.