WikiLeaks

A recently leaked WikiLeaks cable says that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was slapped in the face by Revolutionary Guard chief of staff Mohammed Ali Jafari. The New York Daily News reports:

As America’s premier First Amendment lawyer, Floyd Abrams is a force to be reckoned with. The force is on display at full power in today’s Wall Street Journal, where he takes up the subject of WikiLeaks and offers a very dim view of the activities of Julian Assange.

251,287. That’s the number of confidential U.S. diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks claims to have obtained. 1,897. That’s the number of confidential U.S. diplomatic cables that, according to WikiLeaks’s own count, have thus far been published on its website: not even 1 percent of the reported total. At the current rate of publication, the much vaunted “over 250,000” documents should be online and available to the public in their entirety by sometime in 2021—supposing the WikiLeaks website still exists at that time.

WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange has been released on bail from a British jail. He's currently staying put in Britain, waiting for an extradition trial to determine whether he will be sent to Sweden to face multiple charges of rape. The Daily Mail reports (my emphasis):

Germany’s Wau Holland Foundation is the principal fundraiser for WikiLeaks and indeed, on its own account, WikiLeaks’s de facto financial manager.

In the middle of a February 28, 2008 State Department cable released by WikiLeaks, we find this sentence:

Foreign leaders, rivals and allies, often find it useful to take anti-American positions, but Turkish prime minister Recep Tayip Erdoğan has taken the rarest of steps in threatening to sue the U.S. State Department in both national and international courts for defamation. At issue is the insinuation, laid out in U.S. diplomatic cables purloined by WikiLeaks, that Erdoğan is corrupt.

Gabriel Schoenfeld writes in today's Wall Street Journal:

Julian Assange has been arrested by British authorities. The WikiLeaks founder, who is responsible for the release of nearly 250,000 secret State Department cables, was arrested on two sex-related charges.

On December 1, Undersecretary of State William Burns appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee to brief members of Congress on Iran. He touted the effectiveness of the latest round of sanctions and then listed some “wider actions of the Iranian leadership” that cause concern.

Many here in the United States have been quick to dismiss the significance of the State Department cables released by WikiLeaks as little more than foreign policy gossip. Unfortunately, this is not how it’s playing in the rest of the world, particularly in the Middle East. In that conspiracy theory-rich region, nothing the Americans do is by accident.