THE GUARDIAN: The United States was catapulted into a worldwide diplomatic crisis today, with the leaking to the Guardian and other international media of more than 250,000 classified cables from its embassies, many sent as recently as February this year. At the start of a series of daily extracts from the US embassy cables – many designated “secret” – the Guardian can disclose that Arab leaders are privately urging an air strike on Iran and that US officials have been instructed to spy on the UN leadership. These two revelations alone would be likely to reverberate around the world. But the secret dispatches, which were obtained by WikiLeaks, the whistleblowers’ website, also reveal Washington’s evaluation of many other highly sensitive international issues. These include a shift in relations between China and North Korea, high-level concerns over Pakistan’s growing instability, and details of clandestine US efforts to combat al-Qaida in Yemen. MORE
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS: According to a computer chat log published in June by Wired News, soldier 
Bradley Manning bragged to Adrian Lamo, the hacker who turned him in, that he was going to unleash “worldwide anarchy in CSV [comma separated value] format.” “Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public,” Manning said. “Everywhere there’s a US post, there’s a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed.” MORE
CBS NEWS: The U.K. Guardian reports Washington is running a secret intelligence campaign targeted at the leadership of the United Nations, including the secretary general, Ban Ki-moon and the permanent security council representatives from China, Russia, France and the UK. A classified directive which appears to blur the line between diplomacy and spying was issued to U.S. diplomats under Hillary Clinton’s name in July 2009, the Guardian reports, demanding forensic technical details about the communications systems used by top UN officials, including passwords and personal encryption keys used in private and commercial networks for official communications. MORE
CNN: The information Clinton directed the diplomats she oversees to ascertain ranged from basic biographical data such as diplomats’ names and addresses to their frequent flyer and credit card numbers, to even “biometric information on ranking North Korean diplomats.” Typical biometric information includes fingerprints, signatures, and iris recognition. The cable, simply signed ‘CLINTON’, is classified S/NF – or ‘Secret/No Foreign’ – and was sent to 33 embassies and the U.N. mission offices in New York, Vienna, and Rome. MORE
DAILY TELEGRAPH: King Abdullah proposed implanting detainees with a chip that contained their personal information before authorities tracked their movements using Bluetooth technology.[…] “‘I’ve just thought of something,” the King added, and proposed implanting detainees with an electronic chip containing information about them and allowing their movements to be tracked with Bluetooth,” the cables said.” “This was done with horses and falcons, the King said.” […] The King of Saudi Arabia also privately urged the United States to attack Iran to destroy its nuclear weapons programme, according to diplomatic cables leaked by the whistle-blowing website. MORE
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS: Saudi Arabia has repeatedly urged the United States to launch air strikes on Iran to destroy its nuclear program. “Cut off the head of the snake,” the Saudi ambassador to Washington urged Gen. David Petraeus, who commands U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Officials in Jordan, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt have all also secretly pushed for military strikes against Tehran‘s nuke plans, according to the secret cables. “The danger of letting it go on is greater than the danger of stopping it,” said Bahrain’s King Hamad. MORE
ABC NEWS: What the cables also reveal is the often frank assessments that diplomats make of foreign leaders for consumption back home. Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi comes in for a harsh review. He’s reportedly described in one cable as “feckless, vain, and ineffective as a modern European leader”. In another cable he is described as a “physically and politically weak” prime minister whose taste for partying means he doesn’t get enough rest. MORE
SLASH GEAR: Documents released as part of the ongoing WikiLeaks controversy have again fingered China as directly responsible for hacking attempts on Google in January 2010, with a Chinese source apparently informing the American Embassy in Beijing that the incidents were “part of a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government.” The attacks were supposedly prompted by a senior Politburo official finding critical sites when performing a vanity search using Google. According to the papers, the Chinese government’s hacking team has also broken into American government computers and those of Western allies, as well as those of the Dalai Lama and American businesses. Rather than being a one-off, the cyber attacks have been ongoing since 2002, the cables claim. MORE
DAILY BEAST: U.S. authorities were so anxious to resettle Guantanamo prisoners abroad that they were ready to strike any deal with a foreign country willing to take them. Officials offered Kiribati, a tiny island nation in the Pacific—population 98,000—millions of dollars in incentives to shelter Chinese Muslim detainees. They also bribed Slovenian officials to take an inmate in exchange for the chance to meet President Obama. MORE
WALL STREET JOURNAL: In a strategy aimed at raising its profile, WikiLeaks has been teaming up with news organizations on its leaks. Last week it offered The Wall Street Journal access to a portion of the documents it possesses if the Journal signed a confidentiality agreement. The Journal declined. “We didn’t want to agree to a set of pre-conditions related to the disclosure of the Wikileaks documents without even being given a broad understanding of what these documents contained,” a spokeswoman for the paper said. CNN also declined to make an agreement with WikiLeaks. It declined to comment further. MORE
PREVIOUSLY: Just hours ahead of an expected release of three million classified U.S. documents, the website WikiLeaks said it has been the target of a computer attack. “We are currently under a mass distributed denial of service attack,” WikiLeaks tweeted midday Sunday. MORE