Wikileaks question

There are two issues...

POLITICO 44
The Obama administration is preparing for a leak of hundreds of thousands of classified documents from the whistleblower Web site WikiLeaks that are expected to include diplomatic communiqués between U.S. officials about key allies and other information that could undercut military operations and derail fragile diplomatic relations.

Administration officials have been scrambling over the weekend to reach out to allies and give them a heads up about what the documents are likely to contain. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other top diplomatic officials have called leaders in Germany, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Great Britain, France and Afghanistan to mitigate the fallout from the release of what would be the largest batch of documents the website has released thus far.

As in the past with two other releases of documents, on U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, WikiLeaks was expected to release the documents through some of the same news outlets it has used before, including The New York Times, Germany’s Der Spiegel and Britain’s Guardian newspaper. Administration officials expected the release would come Sunday, POLITICO was told.

News reports over the weekend indicate this dump of documents – as many as 3 million and as few as 250,000 — will contain classified State Department cables that could run the gamut from embarrassing communiqués among U.S. diplomats about close allies to intelligence documents that could undermine counterterrorism operations in places like Yemen and Afghanistan.

NBC reported Friday that the leaking of diplomatic communications over the negotiation of the START nuclear treaty with Russia could be used by opponents of the treaty to undermine its ratification.

At the Pentagon, officials are finding themselves once again bracing for a release of classified documents they were unsuccessful at keeping under wraps. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told CNN for an interview set to air Sunday that the release of the documents sets a “very, very dangerous precedent." Mullen reiterated concerns about jeopardizing not only the lives of troops but individuals who have worked with the U.S. government.

“What I don’t think those who are in charge of Wikileaks understand is we live in a world where just a little bitty piece of information can be added to a network of information and really open up an understanding that just wasn’t there before,” Mullen told CNN. “I would hope that those who are responsible for this would, at some point in time, think about the responsibility that they have for lives that they’re exposing and the potential that’s there and stop leaking this information.”

Media reports from Ankara suggest that Washington aided the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, and that Turkey helped al Qaeda in Iraq. The Russian newspaper Kommersant reported that some of the U.S. documents contain “unflattering” assessments of some Russian officials.

They “touch on an enormous range of very sensitive foreign policy issues,” according to an e-mail written to the appropriate House and Senate panels by Elizabeth King, the Pentagon’s assistant secretary for legislative affairs. “We anticipate that the release could negatively impact U.S. foreign relations."

If wiki leaks is not treason than nothing ever is.

In the Pentagon Papers case - not an exact parallel but with half of the transaction the same, the Supreme Court ruled that NY Times and the Washington Post could publish the classified information under First Amendment rights.