Devil Soul
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Clinton worried about Argentine leader: WikiLeaks (Reuters)
30 November 2010, 11:44 AM LONDON - US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton questioned the mental health of Argentinas President Cristina Fernandez, asking US diplomats to investigate whether she was under medication, leaked cables showed on Tuesday.
Britains Guardian newspaper one of several publications to have had early access to US diplomatic cables made public by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks quoted secret memos sent by Clinton to the US Embassy in Buenos Aires last December. Clinton asked diplomats a series of questions about the interpersonal dynamics between Fernandez and her late husband, Nestor Kirchner, and enquired how the 57-year-old leader was managing her nerves and anxiety.
Under what circumstances is she best able to handle stresses? How do Cristina Fernandez de Kirchers emotions affect her decision-making and how does she calm down when distressed? The Guardian quoted a cable as saying.
How does stress affect her behaviour toward advisers and/or her decision-making? What steps does Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner or her advisers/handlers take in helping her deal with stress? Is she taking any medication?
Having succeeded her husband in 2007 for a four-year term, Fernandez became known for being a sharp-tongued and forthright politician, who often peppers her fiery speeches with criticism of rivals, private companies and the media.
The secret cable appeared to have been prompted by diplomatic spats which showed Kirchners government to be extremely thin-skinned and intolerant of perceived criticism, the Guardian said.
Clinton said on Monday that the US government deeply regretted the release of any classified information and would tighten security to prevent leaks such as WikiLeaks disclosure of a trove of State Department cables.
---------- Post added at 01:45 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:45 PM ----------
Putin rules Russia’s chaos: WikiLeaks (Reuters)
30 November 2010, 9:30 AM MOSCOW - Russia’s Vladimir Putin emerges from the biggest ever leak of US diplomatic documents as the “alpha-dog” ruler of a deeply corrupt state dominated by its security forces.
The 58-year-old prime minister is presented by US diplomats as Russia’s most powerful politician, holding the keys to everything from energy deals to Moscow’s Iran policy.
By contrast, President Dmitry Medvedev “plays Robin to Putin’s Batman”, is pale and hesitant and has to get his decisions approved by Putin, according to the cables.
But correspondence from the elite of the US diplomatic corps also casts Putin as a leader plagued by an unmanageable bureaucracy and grappling with ruling a “virtual mafia state” dominated by corrupt businessmen and the security forces.
A cable from the US Embassy in Paris said US Defense Secretary Robert Gates observed on Feb. 8, 2010, that “Russian democracy has disappeared and the government is an oligarchy run by the security services”.
Gates told his French counterpart that “President Medvedev has a more pragmatic vision for Russia than PM Putin, but there has been little real change”, according to the document.
Putin is the dominant member of what Russian officials call a ruling tandem with Medvedev, who Putin tapped as his successor when a constitutional limit of two consecutive terms kept him out of the 2008 presidential race.
But the publication of such frank statements by US diplomats about Russian leaders ahead of the 2012 presidential election are embarrassing for President Barack Obama, who has worked closely with Medvedev to improve US-Russian ties.
Russia “regrets” the release by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks on Sunday of a trove of cables between Washington and US embassies around the world, a diplomatic source said on Monday.
“Digging into diplomatic underwear is not a nice business,” the source said on condition of anonymity. “We hope there is nothing (in the documents) which could really surprise us.”
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov suggested Moscow does not want the revelations to damage ties with Washington.
“It’s entertaining reading, of course,” Lavrov said in India, according to Itar-Tass. “But in practice we prefer to be guided by the concrete matters of partners. We will continue to adhere to precisely that approach in the future.”
Medvedev’s spokeswoman, Natalya Timakova, said “the Kremlin has found nothing interesting or worth comment” in the cables, and, referring to the Batman and Robin allusion, she said that “fictional Hollywood heroes hardly deserve official comment.”
Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment.
“You can’t boil two heads”
The documents give a rare glimpse of an arcane world where US diplomats pore over news reports and garner titbits of information on everything from shady businessmen breaking UN sanctions on Iran to Kremlin politics.
According to a cable from Feb. 25, 2010, one of Washington’s top diplomats, Under Secretary for Political Affairs William Burns, was told by Azeri President Ilham Aliyev that Medvedev is surrounded by people he does not control.
“Many high-ranking officials don’t recognize (Medvedev) as a leader,” Aliyev was quoted as saying in a cable published by Britain’s Guardian newspaper. Aliyev said he had seen Medvedev taking decisions that needed further approval and that some were stymied by others, presumably in the prime ministerial office.
“He said that there are signs of a strong confrontation between the teams of the two men, although not yet between Putin and Medvedev personally,” the cable added.
“We have a saying in Azeri, ‘Two heads cannot be boiled in one pot’” (street slang suggesting that two leaders are spoiling for a fight),” Aliyev was quoted as saying.
In other cables quoted by the New York Times, diplomats express concern over the relationship between Putin and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who they said “appears increasingly to be the mouthpiece of Putin” in Europe.
One particularly tart cable from Moscow relates a wedding party in the North Caucasus republic of Dagestan where Kremlin-backed Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov dances clumsily with a gold-plated automatic gun stuck down his jeans.
Kadyrov gave the happy couple five kilograms of gold before roaring off into the night with his bodyguard. “Ramzan never spends the night anywhere,” the US diplomat is told.
---------- Post added at 01:46 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:45 PM ----------
WikiLeaks may set back US intelligence sharing (Reuters)
30 November 2010, 8:41 AM WASHINGTON - The damaging disclosure by whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks of sensitive US diplomatic cables could put a chill on the sharing of intelligence considered vital to waging war and averting Al Qaeda attacks.
Nine years after the Sept. 11 attacks ushered in a new age of US intelligence sharing, the website’s release of some 250,000 sensitive diplomatic cables is raising accusations that too much US intelligence is being shared with too many people — in an age when digital data is too easy to steal.
The full extent of the diplomatic fallout is still unclear but the leaks threaten to erode trust of crucial US allies, who justifiably may now fear speaking candidly with Washington if those private revelations might be made public.
From a global perspective, the system now in place to guard US secrets has lost credibility and Washington may need to take major steps to show its secrets are safe, observers say.
“This is a colossal failure by our intel community, by our Department of Defence, to keep classified information secret,” said Peter Hoekstra, the top Republican on the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee.
“This database should never have been created. Hundreds of thousands of people should not have been provided access to it,” he told CBS’s Morning Show.
US officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, believe that WikiLeaks data from the latest leak and previous dumps of hundreds of thousands of Afghan and Iraq war logs were gleaned from the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, known as SIPRNet.
The network gives access to documents at a lower level of secrecy to US national security officials, including the Defence Department and State Department.
“You get on the SIPRNet and you have access to tons of (more) stuff than just a few years earlier, when you were dealing more with paper,” said Paul Pillar, a former CIA official now with Georgetown University.
A Pentagon spokesman acknowledged that efforts in the post-9/11 era to give diplomatic, military, law enforcement and intelligence specialists quicker and easier access to data “have had unintended consequences — making our sensitive data more vulnerable to compromise.”
The White House appeared to take a small step toward more secrecy, ordering government agencies to tighten procedures on handling classified information. The Office of Management and Budget said it aimed to ensure “users do not have broader access than is necessary to do their jobs effectively.”
The Pentagon and State Department also said they are tightening up procedures to prevent more disclosures.
“This will be a force in swinging (the pendulum) in favour of less sharing and more control,” said Pillar, adding in the short term he saw pressure for “more restrictions.”
After the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, US intelligence officials were chastised for failing to “connect the dots” before the attacks on New York and Washington. Less sharing could complicate efforts to prevent another attack, and Pillar noted that the pendulum could swing back again toward greater sharing if al Qaeda successfully struck US targets.
What went wrong?
The US investigation into the disclosures so far has focused on Bradley Manning, a former low-level US Army intelligence analyst in Iraq charged with leaking a classified video showing a 2007 helicopter attack that killed a dozen people in Iraq, including two journalists. He was also accused of downloading state department cables.
In the wake of Manning’s arrest, US officials have been struggling to explain how a low-level analyst in Iraq could have had access to so much sensitive information.
“The administration must identify how someone was able to leak such a large amount of classified information and build safeguards to ensure this does not happen again,” said Howard McKeon, the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee.
Defence Secretary Robert Gates, speaking to reporters in July after the WikiLeaks document dump on the Afghan war, said if the security breach had occurred at a rear headquarters or in the United States, it would have been detected.
The Pentagon has said it is now looking at controls like those credit card companies have to detect anomalous behaviour. It is also disabling the ability to download computer data onto removable storage devices and increasing training to raise awareness of a potential “insider threat.”
“It is now much more difficult for a determined actor to get access to and move information outside of authorized channels,” Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said.
Whether it is enough remains an open question.
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence who is tasked with promoting greater cooperation within the US intelligence community, hinted last month that leaks in Washington were already threatening sharing.
“In this day and age, with the haemorrhage of leaks in this town, I think compartmentation, appropriate reasonable compartmentation, is the right thing to do,” Clapper said.
30 November 2010, 11:44 AM LONDON - US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton questioned the mental health of Argentinas President Cristina Fernandez, asking US diplomats to investigate whether she was under medication, leaked cables showed on Tuesday.
Britains Guardian newspaper one of several publications to have had early access to US diplomatic cables made public by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks quoted secret memos sent by Clinton to the US Embassy in Buenos Aires last December. Clinton asked diplomats a series of questions about the interpersonal dynamics between Fernandez and her late husband, Nestor Kirchner, and enquired how the 57-year-old leader was managing her nerves and anxiety.
Under what circumstances is she best able to handle stresses? How do Cristina Fernandez de Kirchers emotions affect her decision-making and how does she calm down when distressed? The Guardian quoted a cable as saying.
How does stress affect her behaviour toward advisers and/or her decision-making? What steps does Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner or her advisers/handlers take in helping her deal with stress? Is she taking any medication?
Having succeeded her husband in 2007 for a four-year term, Fernandez became known for being a sharp-tongued and forthright politician, who often peppers her fiery speeches with criticism of rivals, private companies and the media.
The secret cable appeared to have been prompted by diplomatic spats which showed Kirchners government to be extremely thin-skinned and intolerant of perceived criticism, the Guardian said.
Clinton said on Monday that the US government deeply regretted the release of any classified information and would tighten security to prevent leaks such as WikiLeaks disclosure of a trove of State Department cables.
---------- Post added at 01:45 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:45 PM ----------
Putin rules Russia’s chaos: WikiLeaks (Reuters)
30 November 2010, 9:30 AM MOSCOW - Russia’s Vladimir Putin emerges from the biggest ever leak of US diplomatic documents as the “alpha-dog” ruler of a deeply corrupt state dominated by its security forces.
The 58-year-old prime minister is presented by US diplomats as Russia’s most powerful politician, holding the keys to everything from energy deals to Moscow’s Iran policy.
By contrast, President Dmitry Medvedev “plays Robin to Putin’s Batman”, is pale and hesitant and has to get his decisions approved by Putin, according to the cables.
But correspondence from the elite of the US diplomatic corps also casts Putin as a leader plagued by an unmanageable bureaucracy and grappling with ruling a “virtual mafia state” dominated by corrupt businessmen and the security forces.
A cable from the US Embassy in Paris said US Defense Secretary Robert Gates observed on Feb. 8, 2010, that “Russian democracy has disappeared and the government is an oligarchy run by the security services”.
Gates told his French counterpart that “President Medvedev has a more pragmatic vision for Russia than PM Putin, but there has been little real change”, according to the document.
Putin is the dominant member of what Russian officials call a ruling tandem with Medvedev, who Putin tapped as his successor when a constitutional limit of two consecutive terms kept him out of the 2008 presidential race.
But the publication of such frank statements by US diplomats about Russian leaders ahead of the 2012 presidential election are embarrassing for President Barack Obama, who has worked closely with Medvedev to improve US-Russian ties.
Russia “regrets” the release by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks on Sunday of a trove of cables between Washington and US embassies around the world, a diplomatic source said on Monday.
“Digging into diplomatic underwear is not a nice business,” the source said on condition of anonymity. “We hope there is nothing (in the documents) which could really surprise us.”
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov suggested Moscow does not want the revelations to damage ties with Washington.
“It’s entertaining reading, of course,” Lavrov said in India, according to Itar-Tass. “But in practice we prefer to be guided by the concrete matters of partners. We will continue to adhere to precisely that approach in the future.”
Medvedev’s spokeswoman, Natalya Timakova, said “the Kremlin has found nothing interesting or worth comment” in the cables, and, referring to the Batman and Robin allusion, she said that “fictional Hollywood heroes hardly deserve official comment.”
Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment.
“You can’t boil two heads”
The documents give a rare glimpse of an arcane world where US diplomats pore over news reports and garner titbits of information on everything from shady businessmen breaking UN sanctions on Iran to Kremlin politics.
According to a cable from Feb. 25, 2010, one of Washington’s top diplomats, Under Secretary for Political Affairs William Burns, was told by Azeri President Ilham Aliyev that Medvedev is surrounded by people he does not control.
“Many high-ranking officials don’t recognize (Medvedev) as a leader,” Aliyev was quoted as saying in a cable published by Britain’s Guardian newspaper. Aliyev said he had seen Medvedev taking decisions that needed further approval and that some were stymied by others, presumably in the prime ministerial office.
“He said that there are signs of a strong confrontation between the teams of the two men, although not yet between Putin and Medvedev personally,” the cable added.
“We have a saying in Azeri, ‘Two heads cannot be boiled in one pot’” (street slang suggesting that two leaders are spoiling for a fight),” Aliyev was quoted as saying.
In other cables quoted by the New York Times, diplomats express concern over the relationship between Putin and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who they said “appears increasingly to be the mouthpiece of Putin” in Europe.
One particularly tart cable from Moscow relates a wedding party in the North Caucasus republic of Dagestan where Kremlin-backed Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov dances clumsily with a gold-plated automatic gun stuck down his jeans.
Kadyrov gave the happy couple five kilograms of gold before roaring off into the night with his bodyguard. “Ramzan never spends the night anywhere,” the US diplomat is told.
---------- Post added at 01:46 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:45 PM ----------
WikiLeaks may set back US intelligence sharing (Reuters)
30 November 2010, 8:41 AM WASHINGTON - The damaging disclosure by whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks of sensitive US diplomatic cables could put a chill on the sharing of intelligence considered vital to waging war and averting Al Qaeda attacks.
Nine years after the Sept. 11 attacks ushered in a new age of US intelligence sharing, the website’s release of some 250,000 sensitive diplomatic cables is raising accusations that too much US intelligence is being shared with too many people — in an age when digital data is too easy to steal.
The full extent of the diplomatic fallout is still unclear but the leaks threaten to erode trust of crucial US allies, who justifiably may now fear speaking candidly with Washington if those private revelations might be made public.
From a global perspective, the system now in place to guard US secrets has lost credibility and Washington may need to take major steps to show its secrets are safe, observers say.
“This is a colossal failure by our intel community, by our Department of Defence, to keep classified information secret,” said Peter Hoekstra, the top Republican on the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee.
“This database should never have been created. Hundreds of thousands of people should not have been provided access to it,” he told CBS’s Morning Show.
US officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, believe that WikiLeaks data from the latest leak and previous dumps of hundreds of thousands of Afghan and Iraq war logs were gleaned from the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, known as SIPRNet.
The network gives access to documents at a lower level of secrecy to US national security officials, including the Defence Department and State Department.
“You get on the SIPRNet and you have access to tons of (more) stuff than just a few years earlier, when you were dealing more with paper,” said Paul Pillar, a former CIA official now with Georgetown University.
A Pentagon spokesman acknowledged that efforts in the post-9/11 era to give diplomatic, military, law enforcement and intelligence specialists quicker and easier access to data “have had unintended consequences — making our sensitive data more vulnerable to compromise.”
The White House appeared to take a small step toward more secrecy, ordering government agencies to tighten procedures on handling classified information. The Office of Management and Budget said it aimed to ensure “users do not have broader access than is necessary to do their jobs effectively.”
The Pentagon and State Department also said they are tightening up procedures to prevent more disclosures.
“This will be a force in swinging (the pendulum) in favour of less sharing and more control,” said Pillar, adding in the short term he saw pressure for “more restrictions.”
After the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, US intelligence officials were chastised for failing to “connect the dots” before the attacks on New York and Washington. Less sharing could complicate efforts to prevent another attack, and Pillar noted that the pendulum could swing back again toward greater sharing if al Qaeda successfully struck US targets.
What went wrong?
The US investigation into the disclosures so far has focused on Bradley Manning, a former low-level US Army intelligence analyst in Iraq charged with leaking a classified video showing a 2007 helicopter attack that killed a dozen people in Iraq, including two journalists. He was also accused of downloading state department cables.
In the wake of Manning’s arrest, US officials have been struggling to explain how a low-level analyst in Iraq could have had access to so much sensitive information.
“The administration must identify how someone was able to leak such a large amount of classified information and build safeguards to ensure this does not happen again,” said Howard McKeon, the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee.
Defence Secretary Robert Gates, speaking to reporters in July after the WikiLeaks document dump on the Afghan war, said if the security breach had occurred at a rear headquarters or in the United States, it would have been detected.
The Pentagon has said it is now looking at controls like those credit card companies have to detect anomalous behaviour. It is also disabling the ability to download computer data onto removable storage devices and increasing training to raise awareness of a potential “insider threat.”
“It is now much more difficult for a determined actor to get access to and move information outside of authorized channels,” Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said.
Whether it is enough remains an open question.
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence who is tasked with promoting greater cooperation within the US intelligence community, hinted last month that leaks in Washington were already threatening sharing.
“In this day and age, with the haemorrhage of leaks in this town, I think compartmentation, appropriate reasonable compartmentation, is the right thing to do,” Clapper said.
