WikiLeaks has a worldwide impact. From the UK Guardian:
"An innocuous-looking memory stick, no longer than a couple of fingernails, came into the hands of a Guardian reporter earlier this year. The device is so small it will hang easily on a keyring. But its contents will send shockwaves through the world's chancelleries and deliver what one official described as "an epic blow" to US diplomacy.
The 1.6 gigabytes of text files on the memory stick ran to millions of words: the contents of more than 250,000 leaked state department cables, sent from, or to, US embassies around the world.
What will emerge in the days and weeks ahead is an unprecedented picture of secret diplomacy as conducted by the planet's sole superpower. There are 251,287 dispatches in all, from more than 250 US embassies and consulates. They reveal how the US deals with both its allies and its enemies – negotiating, pressuring and sometimes brusquely denigrating foreign leaders, all behind the firewalls of ciphers and secrecy classifications that diplomats assume to be secure. The leaked cables range up to the "SECRET NOFORN" level, which means they are meant never to be shown to non-US citizens.
The US military believes it knows where the leak originated. A soldier, Bradley Manning, 22, has been held in solitary confinement for the last seven months and is facing a court martial in the new year. The former intelligence analyst is charged with unauthorised downloads of classified material while serving on an army base outside Baghdad. He is suspected of taking copies not only of the state department archive, but also of video of an Apache helicopter crew gunning down civilians in Baghdad, and hundreds of thousands of daily war logs from military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
It was childishly easy, according to the published chatlog of a conversation Manning had with a fellow-hacker. "I would come in with music on a CD-RW labelled with something like 'Lady Gaga' … erase the music … then write a compressed split file. No one suspected a thing ... [I] listened and lip-synched to Lady Gaga's Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history." He said that he "had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months".
Manning told his correspondent Adrian Lamo, who subsequently denounced him to the authorities: "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 ... Everywhere there's a US post, there's a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed. Worldwide anarchy in CSV format ... It's beautiful, and horrifying."
He added: "Information should be free. It belongs in the public domain."
Manning, according to the chatlogs, says he uploaded the copies to WikiLeaks, the "freedom of information activists" as he called them, led by Australian former hacker Julian Assange.
Assange and his circle apparently decided against immediately making the cables public. Instead they embarked on staged disclosure of the other material – aimed, as they put it on their website, at "maximising political impact".
This isn't the first time a member of the gay community has sold out their country. From AnnCoulter.com:
"Maybe there's a reason gays have traditionally been kept out of the intelligence services, apart from the fact that closeted gay men are easy to blackmail. Gays have always been suspicious of that rationale and perhaps they're right.
The most damaging spies in British history were the Cambridge Five, also called "the "Magnificent Five": Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, Donald Maclean and John Cairncross. They were highly placed members of British intelligence, all secretly working for the KGB.
The only one who wasn't gay was Philby. Burgess and Blunt were flamboyantly gay. Indeed, the Russians set Burgess up with a boyfriend as soon as he defected to the Soviet Union.
The Magnificent Five's American compatriot Michael Straight was -- ironically -- bisexual, as was Whittaker Chambers, at least during the period that he was a spy. And of course, there's David Brock.
So many Soviet spies were gay that, according to intelligence reporter Phillip Knightley, the Comintern was referred to as "the Homintern."
Bradley's friends told the Times they suspected "his desperation for acceptance -- or delusions of grandeur" may have prompted his document dump.
Let's check our "Gay Profile at a Glance" and ... let's see ... desperate for acceptance ... delusions of grandeur ... yep, they're both on the gay subset list!
Obviously, the vast majority of gays are loyal Americans -- and witty and stylish to boot! But a small percentage of gays are going to be narcissistic hothouse flowers like Bradley Manning.
For liberals, gays in the military is a win-win proposition. Either gays in the military works, or it wrecks the military, both of which outcomes they enthusiastically support."
This will make the argument of profiling as well as keeping gays out of intelligence areas of the military, to say the least. No telling how much damage was done.
Background Reading:
UK Guardian (Via Mark Levin): How 250,000 US embassy cables were leaked
AnnCoulter.Com: Bradley Manning: Poster Boy For 'Don't ask, Don't Tell'
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