Bradley Manning: WikiLeaker, Part 2
The State Department Cables
On November 28, newspapers around the world began publishing the State Department Cables in conjunction with WikiLeaks. As before, Julian Assange had handpicked The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El Pais as the interpreters of the information. The trove of documents included some 250,000 documents from diplomats around the world written to their government's heads of state.
The cables were a rich source of news and amusement. In some cases, they were entertaining: Qaddafi, prior to the uprising in Libya, was reported to be an egocentric who only employed voluptuous nurses. Other cables discussed the vanity and ridiculous behavior of world leaders like Silvio Berlusconi, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Il. Other cables discussed sites in the U.S. that were particularly vulnerable to terrorist attacks, drawing the ire of U.S. officials once again.
Manning had been right, too, about Hillary Clinton’s response. She and the rest of the Obama administration were less than pleased. Clinton blasted the leaks saying the leak "puts people's live in danger, threatens national security and undermines our efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems."