Wikileaks Document: The Russian Campaign Against Georgia

Russia's goal is not Abkhazia or South Ossetia, but all of Georgia. While the Russians typically make some efforts to reduce their fingerprints on actions -- making it hard to say with 100% certainty that they are responsible for many of them -- the cumulative weight of the evidence of the last few years suggests that the Russians are aggressively playing a high-stakes, covert game, and they consider few if any holds barred.

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Wikileaks Commentary: "Fiasco Doesn't Embarrass Israel One Bit" (Benn)

WikiLeaks did not succeed in penetrating the most sensitive channels of U.S.-Israel relations.

Even after yesterday's revelations, we still do not know what was really said in the meetings between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Barack Obama, or between former prime ministers Ehud Olmert and Ariel Sharon during their talks with former U.S. President George W. Bush, or between Dagan and his counterparts at U.S. intelligence agencies.

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Wikileaks-Iran Analysis: The Scepticism over Obama's Sincerity (Peterson)

WikiLeaks revelations that American officials were planning to raise pressure on Iran with more sanctions and a missile defense shield – even while President Obama was making high-profile public overtures to Iran – are being seen in Tehran as validation of deep skepticism from the start about Obama’s effort.

Iranians and analysts alike say the leaked diplomatic cables show a half-hearted attempt at engagement in which the US administration’s “dual track” policy of simultaneously applying pressure and negotiating was undermined by a singular focus on the pressure track and a growing assumption that engaging Iran was pointless.

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Wikileaks-Iran Analysis: Assessing Engagement and War (Sick)

According to the record, the Obama administration was briefing allies almost from the start — and before Iran had even had a chance to respond to offers of engagement — that we expected this initiative to fail and that we were actively preparing the pressure track that would immediately follow.

Iran could hardly have been unaware of all this, so the chance that they would respond favorably — even before the contested election in June 2009 and the brutal crackdown that followed — was essentially zero. The only conclusion I can draw from this is that Obama was never sincere about his engagement strategy. It has yet to be tried.

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Wikileaks Video & Transcript: Hillary Clinton "Not Just an Attack on America, But Also on The International Community"

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks to the press on Monday afternoon:

CLINTON: I want to take a moment to discuss the recent news reports of classified documents that were illegally provided from United States Government computers.

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Wikileaks Special: The Consequences for Turkey and the US

I have written often of Ankara's pro-Western tendencies, underlining that Erdogan's government is nothing short of a liberal and pragmatic organisation, seeking relative autonomy in the region without raising an eyebrow in the Oval Office. So have a look at this ridiculous quotation, taken from an adviser to the ruling AKP party and added into a US report: "Turkey wants to take back Andalusia and avenge the defeat at the siege of Vienna in 1683."

There are only two options for an analyst: either some of the American diplomats are seriously ignorant about the politics and strategies pursued in the country where they are authorized to work or they are being asked to report any shred of "information" without filtering it.

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WikiLeaks' Early Christmas Present: Secrets of Israeli-American Relations?

This weekend, the website WikiLeaks is expected to release hundreds of thousands of classified American diplomatic cables sent to Washington from US embassies throughout the world.

On Friday, the US Embassy in Tel Aviv approaches the Israeli Foreign Ministry because, according to sources, some of the diplomatic cables might deal with Israeli-American relations.

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Israel: On the Verge of Discussing "US War Crimes"

On Wednesday, the secretariat of Israel's parliament, the Knesset, changed the title of a motion considering US military documents soon to be released by the website WikiLeaks. The initial proposal, n "U.S. War Crimes", was put forward by a right-wing MK Michael Ben-Ari.

Any guess about who stood up against this proposal? Full marks if you said Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon:

I don't know if you did this to be defiant or teasing or maybe even just out of black humor. I just have no other way of looking at this.

In Jerusalem, in the Israeli house of legislation, this is how we present something like this?. This is terrible, and not just from a utilitarian perspective. The fact that the U.S. is our best and strongest friend cannot be appealed.

MK Ben-Ari, I completely appreciate your parliamentary abilities, but you are almost wasting a motion for the agenda.

Had you said "Al-Qaida war criminals", I would have understood. Had you said "the report that emerged, that was leaked", I would understand. But "U.S. war crimes"?

Iran Snap Analysis: Wikileaks (and the New York Times) v. the Supreme Leader

No question about the big development in Iran yesterday. The Supreme Leader, after four days of effort, finally got a significant political and religious triumph --- as opposed to his PR victory on Tuesday with his reception by Qom's crowds --- when Grand Ayatollah Safi Golpayegani agreed to meet him. Ayatollah Khamenei's website put out a spread of photographs of the encounter, and state media --- even Press TV, which had been silent on the Supreme Leader's meetings with clerics --- posted short reports of the meeting, which also included Ayatollahs Hossein Nouri Hamedani, Naser Makarem Shirazi, Mousa Shobeiri Zanjani, Jafar Sobhani, and Abdollah Javadi Amoli. 

Still, the press coverage has been fairly muted, and the Supreme Leader faces a list of clerics who are holding out against public photographs and private talks: maraje such as Ayatollahs Mousavi Ardebili, Vahid Khorasani, Bayat Zanjani (who raised a smile with his excuse that he was attending his niece's wedding and visiting his mom in Zanjan), and Sane'i are still refusing to show allegiance.

Meanwhile, the non-Iranian press is likely to pay little or no attention today. That is because Tehran has been swept up in the high-profile release by Wikileaks on documents on the US war in Iraq since 2003.

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Afghanistan: Wikileaks and the Pentagon's Deceptive Response

Remember the fuss this summer, after Wikileaks released almost 92,000 documents on the US military intervention in Afghanistan, when the Pentagon and US military said that the primary effect of the published material would be the exposure of troops and those helping the Americans, putting their lives at risk at the hands of the Taliban?

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen, spared no words accusing Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, "Mr. Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family." 

At the time --- while not ignoring the possibility --- it felt primarily like a campaign by the Obama Administration and the Department of Defense, not only to limit the damage of the documents but to turn the story into one of Wikileaks' responsibility rather than the complications of American military action. At the start of 2010, the US Government had been slow to respond to Wikileaks' presentation of the "Collateral Murder" video, showing the apparent gunning down of Iraqi civilians by American planes. This time would be different.

This weekend, however, there was a twist in the Obama Administration's tale. A 16 August letter from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to Senator Carl Levin, the head of the Armed Services Committee, emerged: "The review [by the Department of Defense] to date has not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources and methods compromised by the disclosure."

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