Wow. Excellent point!
From a 01/25/2010 cable from our Kazakhstan embassy:
http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/cable/2010/01/10ASTANA72.html#par7
Wait, what? :dubious: 
Oh, you are plenty serious my friend - it is the art of disinformation taken to a whole new level - just like your non-denial denial. This makes the multiple layers of Inception look like a Denny’s placemat maze.
edit - now we know what happened to the Usual Suspects sequel - Kaiser Soze was transmogrified into Assange.
I don’t think people fully understand the dangers of 1) charging Assange with espionage and/or 2) designating wikileaks a terrorist org.
Man oh man, that would be the biggest step toward a police state since…Alien/Sedition? And this one would be unlikely to be undone.
Everyone who thinks this is some sort of CIA trick: How exactly does that work? Is Bradley Manning a willing dupe who’s willing to spend decades if not his entire life in a federal penitentiary in order to pull off this trick?
What about the cable indicating that the U.S. has been bombing Yemen and then pressuring the Yemen government to take responsibility for it? How does that bit of information help the U.S.? Won’t that generate more resentment and possibly more terrorism aimed at us?
What about that helicopter video? How did that help the U.S.?
Some of you seem to think that outfits like the CIA have near absolute control over everything we see and hear. I just don’t buy it. It makes no sense to me.
Obviously we need to be discriminating about what we hear, but that’s also true for conspiracy theories.
Let’s see what happens when he releases the bank info he has. I doubt that the CIA wants to harm a major U.S. bank.
Interestingly, wikileaks is currently based on servers within the US. Which either means an all powerful CIA plot is supporting wikileaks against an attack by America’s enemies who saw through the deception or the US is respecting Constitutional guarantees of free speech even for information it desperately wishes wasn’t being released.
Which explanation you choose is up to you. I just found it interesting that despite how often Assange has made claims the US is out to destroy him, currently the government is leaving his shit alone even though it is based in US jurisdiction at the moment.
Or there’s little point in taking down a U.S. based server since there are mirrors all over the world.
Or the U.S. is actually afraid of him because of what’s in that encrypted insurance file that no doubt currently resides on private hard drives all over the planet waiting for the release of a key phrase.
Iran Calls Leaked Documents a U.S. Plot
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/world/middleeast/30iran.html?_r=1&ref=world
Sure Mahmoud, whatever you say. :rolleyes:
“We Have Not Seen Anything Yet,” Guardian Editor Says Most Startling WikiLeaks Cables To Be Released
Very good video report: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOxZiDALQlg
In all fairness in Ahmadenijad’s eye’s everything is a US plot. He’s not really singling out wikileaks here. 
Here’s what Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has to say about this.
I’m aware that the supposed ‘damage’ done by these disclosures isn’t as big an issue in this thread, and I’ve already posted this link and quote in The Pit, but it might spark some interesting comment here as well:
Really, though, it’s worthwhile to follow the link and read the whole thing. He has a fairly long spiel on this subject.
Well, that’s Gates’ spin. I personally think there’s likely already been some damage done. For example, there were reasons for having Yemen take responsibility for those bombings. Whether or not they were good reasons is another argument.
North Korea learning that China apparently won’t go out of their way to prevent a collapse and reunification may make them a little less bold, so that could actually be a good result from this.
Hillary Clinton apparently being behind orders to gather personal info - credit card numbers, etc. - on UN representatives is embarrassing at the least.
Keep in mind that only a small fraction have been released so far. Who knows what we’ll learn. Who knows what’s in the current batch that hasn’t been noticed yet?
I’m very interested in the bank release. Now that could be big.
Four former Danish foreign ministers (all red as Lenin mind you) and a number of former diplomats went out together to condemn the releases of confidential diplomatic messages, saying that it is essential for peaceful international relations that diplomats must be able to talk together and negotiate without fearing that their work or informal chats be made public. I don’t give a damn about all that shit. The political establishment and in particular the foreign office departments are anyway under little control of the citizens. It’s like a global self-referential behemoth.
The best bits so far are the bits about the Egyptians and Saudis prodding the USA to bomb the fuck out of the Iranians. The Persians say it matters naught, but I bet they are secretly fuming, and scheming to teach them a lesson. This in turn will make the Saudis even more scared. Which will lead to more delicious weapon purchases of very expensive US and European/Russian weapon systems. Saudi money used on bombs is Saudi money not used on fascist wahhabist propaganda in the West and other places. All for the good. A humanitarian project. The Saudis are the last good Western weapons customer. Filthy rich so they can shop till they drop in US and Euro toys – yet too stupid to reverse engineer them or demand buy back clauses or local license productions. Probably also too stupid to used them or maintain them effectively – so all the expensive weapons just sits there and rust. The Iranian nuke project is God sent. If it didn’t exist we’d have to invent it. Same with Wikileaks.
Wikileaks is just one of many similar organisations. If you take Wikileaks out, there’s already a few set up to take its place almost instantly. In this respect, it’s like the early days of filesharing; taking Napster out achieved nothing.
Besides, the web presence of Wikileaks is just one aspect of the organisation. You can get all of the information that they release through Bit Torrent and other decentralised file sharing programs, IIRC.
There’s also the possibility that shutting them down just makes them martyrs and makes their cause even more popular.
Story here on the AP.
I wondered how it had a U.S. domain.
First: Domain names usually don’t indicate anything about where the site is hosted; for example, the .tv top-level domain was assigned to Tuvalu, but very few .tv sites are actually hosted on machines in the Pacific. (There are exceptions. It’s all down to who has the rights to sell domain names with that top-level domain.)
Second: Having your DNS record revoked is the equivalent of someone ripping your name out of the phone book. Anyone who knows your number already, or can ask someone who does, can still call you, but it might be more difficult for the average person to find your number. It doesn’t really imply anything about whether the machine serving the content is up or down.
Third: WikiLeaks is now being hosted in Sweden and France. The US government can’t touch them, especially where they’re being hosted in Sweden.
The server was never down. As Derleth says, you could still get to it if you knew how.
They’ve addressed the issue and are now available at wikileaks.ch.
Also, they are now directly reachable at 213.251.145.96 independent of name servers. That address should work even if the domain wikileaks.ch is taken down.
BBC has been saying one of the disclosures is that the Russian Mafia is active in Thailand. Whoa, Stop the Presses! Only everyone and his brother knows that over here already. They’re especially heavy in Pattaya, where they’ve even brought in their own Russian bargirls and built a Russian Orthodox church.