Wikileaks Releases More Than 250,000 Diplomatic Cables

Last week I mentioned the impending Wikileaks release and today, the NY Times reported on a huge cache of documents provided to them by Wikileaks. The documents are all diplomatic cables discussing foreign affairs and foreign policy. Some provide information on "shadowy" foreign figures, others quote foreign and U.S. officials speaking candidly about foreign leaders and delicate situations. All in all, this leak and the revelations it causes across the globe will surely strain international relations.

Here's hoping for peace.

Below is a snippet from what the Times published, I encourage everyone to read the articles. For the main coverage, click here.

• Bargaining to empty the Guantánamo Bay prison: When American diplomats pressed other countries to resettle detainees, they became reluctant players in a State Department version of “Let’s Make a Deal.” Slovenia was told to take a prisoner if it wanted to meet with President Obama, while the island nation of Kiribati was offered incentives worth millions of dollars to take in Chinese Muslim detainees, cables from diplomats recounted. The Americans, meanwhile, suggested that accepting more prisoners would be “a low-cost way for Belgium to attain prominence in Europe.”

• American diplomats in Rome reported in 2009 on what their Italian contacts described as an extraordinarily close relationship between Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian prime minister, and Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister and business magnate, including “lavish gifts,” lucrative energy contracts and a “shadowy” Russian-speaking Italian go-between. They wrote that Mr. Berlusconi “appears increasingly to be the mouthpiece of Putin” in Europe. The diplomats also noted that while Mr. Putin enjoyed supremacy over all other public figures in Russia, he was undermined by an unmanageable bureaucracy that often ignored his edicts.