The most-modern gadfly in the ointment of nefarious US governmental operations, WikiLeaks, dropped another load of classified documents into the vast media mainstream on Sunday, labeling this batch, “CableGate,” as the doco-dump is more than 250,000 US embassy cables — confidential communications between 274 embassies in countries throughout the world and the State Department in Washington DC.

And as in previous drops, WikiLeaks, offered the material to giant media outlets in advance, the usual suspects in journalism — the New York Times, Germany’s Der Spiegel, the UK’s the Guardian, Spain’s El Pais, and, not to be denied, France’s Le Monde.
Across the globe, all the ugly, arrogant and holier-than-thou bullshit from the US State Department has been apparently laid bare, and according to the various media, the result ain’t pretty.

Der Spiegel noted it best:

Never before in history has a superpower lost control of such vast amounts of such sensitive information — data that can help paint a picture of the foundation upon which US foreign policy is built.
Never before has the trust America’s partners have in the country been as badly shaken.
Now, their own personal views and policy recommendations have been made public — as have America’s true views of them.

One can peruse the various files, but right now the most-immediate view is from those media outlets and in the next few days, I’m sure, all kinds of gossip-like information will surface from this mirror of how an empire thinks about the rest of the world’s rabble.
And how US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, among others, have been conducting “damage control” the last few weeks — reportedly WikiLeaks allowed the US government a running start on what the doco-dump entailed.
From the standpoint of a campaign promise, President Obama has truly gotten his “transparency” in government, though, through a forced end-run around the closed-lipped bullshit still apparent in the way the US government conducts foreign affairs.
And oh, the gossip — again De Spiegel and Russian muck-a-mucks:

One cable from the Moscow Embassy on Russian first lady Svetlana Medvedev, for example, states that she is “generating tensions between the camps and remains the subject of avid gossip.”
It then goes on to report that President Medvedev’s wife had already drawn up a list of officials who should be made to “suffer” in their careers because they had been disloyal to Medvedev.
Another reports that the wife of Azerbaijan leader Ilham Aliyev has had so much plastic surgery that it is possible to confuse her for one of her daughters from a distance, but that she can barely still move her face.

Nasty shit.

From the Guardian, and how US diplomats were told — under Hillary’s name — to “spy” on UN officials in a “a secret intelligence campaign,” including UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, to obtain whatever information on just about everybody: Washington also wanted credit card numbers, email addresses, phone, fax and pager numbers and even frequent-flyer account numbers for UN figures and “biographic and biometric information on UN Security Council permanent representatives”. The secret “national human intelligence collection directive” was sent to US missions at the UN in New York, Vienna and Rome; 33 embassies and consulates, including those in London, Paris and Moscow.
Despite all this being illegal under UN bylaws.
All kinds of shit is being exposed, but because of death and dying in Afghanistan still ongoing, the cables view of terror in terms of popularity is noted.
Again the Guardian: IT IS OUR IMPRESSION THAT THE USG IS NOT DOING AS WELL AS IT MIGHT PROJECTING PUBLIC DIPLOMACY ON USAMA BIN LADIN (UBL). WE WOULD LIKE TO SUGGEST THAT WASHINGTON CONSIDER A REVIEW OF THIS PUBLIC DIPLOMACY EFFORT. END SUMMARY.
In other words, Osama and his boys are much-more popular than the US and pro-al-Qaeda items sell better than US “Wanted” posters — what a crock of bullshit, the war on terror.

Along with the stories on the actual cables and what they say and mean, the spotlight has again been placed on Bradley Manning, the 23-year-old soldier who was arrested seven months ago and is facing a court martial next year for leaking the troves of information into the public domain.
From the Guardian:

It was childishly easy, according to the published chatlog of a conversation Manning had with a fellow-hacker.
“I would come in with music on a CD-RW labelled with something like ‘Lady Gaga’ … erase the music … then write a compressed split file.
No one suspected a thing … [I] listened and lip-synched to Lady Gaga’s Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history.”
He said that he “had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months”.
Manning told his correspondent Adrian Lamo, who subsequently denounced him to the authorities: “Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public … Everywhere there’s a US post, there’s a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed. Worldwide anarchy in CSV format … It’s beautiful, and horrifying.”
He added: “Information should be free. It belongs in the public domain.”

Manning has repoprtedly been on suicide watch since his arrest.

All this has caused US blowhard Republicans to scream bloody murder: Rep. Peter King of New York wants Wikileaks to be classified “a foreign terrorist organization” and be eventually prosecuted.

Hey, what about Hillary and the spying and all the other “illegal” bullshit — Wiki,Wiki.

Hello, hello baby you called?
I can’t hear a thing
I have got no service
In the club, you see, see
Wha-Wha-What did you say,
Oh, you’re breaking up on me
Sorry, I cannot hear you
I’m kinda busy.
— Lady Gaga, Telephone

Huh? Too busy?