WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration has told whistleblower WikiLeaks that its expected imminent release of classified State Department cables will put “countless” lives at risk, threaten global counterterrorism operations and jeopardize U.S. relations with its allies.

In a highly unusual step reflecting the administration’s grave concerns about the ramifications of the move, the State Department late Saturday released a letter from its top lawyer to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his attorney telling them that publication of the documents would be illegal and demanding that they stop it.

It also said the U.S. government would not cooperate with WikiLeaks in trying to scrub the cables of information that might put sources and methods of intelligence gathering and diplomatic reporting at risk.

The letter from State Department legal adviser Harold Koh was released as U.S. diplomats around the world are scrambling to warn foreign governments about what might be in the secret documents that are believed to contain highly sensitive assessments about world leaders, their policies and America’s attempts to lobby them.

In the letter, Koh said the publication of some 250,000 secret diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks, which is expected on Sunday, will “place at risk the lives of countless innocent individuals,” ”place at risk on-going military operations,“ and ”place at risk on-going cooperation between countries.”

“They were provided in violation of U.S. law and without regard for the grave consequences of this action,” he said. Koh said WikiLeaks should not publish the documents, return them to the U.S. government and destroy any copies it may have in its possession or in computer databases.

The State Department said Koh’s message was a response to a letter received on Friday by the U.S. ambassador to Britain, Louis Susman, from Assange and his lawyer, Jennifer Robinson. The department said that letter asked for information “regarding individuals who may be ‘at significant risk of harm’ because of” the release of the documents.

“Despite your stated desire to protect those lives, you have done the opposite and endangered the lives of countless individuals,” Koh wrote in reply. “You have undermined your stated objective by disseminating this material widely, without redaction, and without regard to the security and sanctity of the lives your actions endanger.”

He said the U.S government would not deal with WikiLeaks at all in determining what may or may not released.

“We will not engage in a negotiation regarding the further release or dissemination of illegally obtained U.S. government classified materials,” wrote Koh, who is considered to be one of the world’s top experts in international law and was reportedly considered for a seat on the Supreme Court.

WikiLeaks is expected to post the documents online on Sunday and Koh said the U.S. government had been told that The New York Times, the British newspaper the Guardian and the German news magazine Der Spiegel had prior access to them.

The release of Koh’s letter comes as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and other top U.S. officials are reaching out to numerous countries about the expected WikiLeaks release.

Clinton spoke to leaders in China, Germany, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Britain, France and Afghanistan on Friday, according to State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley. Canada, Denmark, Norway and Poland have also been warned.

The cables are thought to include candid assessments of foreign leaders and governments and could erode trust in the U.S. as a diplomatic partner.

Crowley said the release will place “lives and interests at risk. We are all bracing for what may be coming and condemn WikiLeaks for the release of classified material. It will place lives and interests at risk. It is irresponsible.”

Diplomatic cables are internal documents that would include a range of secret communications between U.S. diplomatic outposts and State Department headquarters in Washington.

WikiLeaks has said the release will be seven times the size of its October leak of 400,000 Iraq war documents, already the biggest leak in U.S. intelligence history.

The U.S. says it has known for some time that WikiLeaks held the diplomatic cables. No one has been charged with passing them to the website, but suspicion focuses on U.S. Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, an intelligence analyst arrested in Iraq in June and charged over an earlier leak.

I don't understand why this guy is still around...

I don't understand why this guy is still around? Do you think the Israelis or Russians would allow this? Obama has made the USA the Charlie Brown of the world, even a two bit hacker gets to pull the football our from under us.

But he gets his info from somewhere..he isn't "hacking" it....

Where's that government ability to arbitrarily shut down websites when you need it? Or can that be used only for sites that the RIAA dislikes?

American intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, outraged by their inability to stop WikiLeaks and its release this week of hundreds of thousands of sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables, are convinced that the whistleblowing website is about to come up against an adversary that will stop at nothing to shut it down: the Russian government.

National-security officials say that the National Security Agency, the U.S. government’s eavesdropping agency, has already picked up tell-tale electronic evidence that WikiLeaks is under close surveillance by the Russian FSB, that country’s domestic spy network, out of fear in Moscow that WikiLeaks is prepared to release damaging personal information about Kremlin leaders.

“We may not have been able to stop WikiLeaks so far, and it’s been frustrating,” a U.S. law-enforcement official tells The Daily Beast. “The Russians play by different rules.” He said that if WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, follow through on threats to post highly embarrassing information about the Russian government
and what is assumed to be massive corruption among its leaders, “the Russians will be ruthless in stopping WikiLeaks.”

A U.S. military official said the U.S. assumed that WikiLeaks had access to sources who could supply the site with detailed, damaging information about Russian leaders; those sources would likely include wealthy Russian expatriates who have had the resources over the years to conduct far-ranging private investigations of graft among Kremlin leaders, including their movement of assets outside Russia.

“We may not have been able to stop WikiLeaks so far, and it’s been frustrating,” says a U.S. law-enforcement official. “The Russians play by different rules.”

The London-based Russian billionaire and newspaper magnate Alexander Lebedev suggested that a government raid on the Moscow headquarters of his National Reserve Bank this month may have been a response to recent contacts between his Moscow newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, and WikiLeaks.

Lebedev, who is outspoken in his criticism of government corruption in his homeland—which he has described as comparable to the “evils of apartheid” in South Africa—has acknowledged that one of his reporters recently traveled to Sweden to meet with Assange.

Assange has courted attacks from the Russian government, telling a reporter from the pro-government daily newspaper Izvestia last month that WikiLeaks had obtained damaging information “about Russia, about your government and businessmen” and “we will publish these materials soon.” Another WikiLeaks spokesman was quoted as describing the Russian government as “despotic.”

Instead of leading with how Army Private First Class Bradley Manning may have jeopardized national security with his document dump to WikiLeaks, NBC's chief Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski, in his profile of Manning on Tuesday's Today show, told viewers he was the "most unlikely suspect, with a youthful smile" and portrayed him as an abused victim of the military. Miklaszewski used the New York Times' Ginger Thompson in his report to tell the tale of young man who apparently decided to avenge the abuse he had taken over the years, dating back to high school, by selling out his country.

Before throwing to soundbites from Thompson, Miklaszewski teased that the New York Times reporter "profiled Manning and found that as a young man he was an outcast who tried desperately to fit in." Thompson then went on to reveal that Manning "was teased all the time in elementary school for being a geek" and was beaten up in high school for "because kids figured out that he was gay." After Miklaszewski added that the abuse continued when he joined the Army, noting "once in the military, he quickly became a target," he aired another clip of Thompson claiming "As a gay man in the military, he was, you know, he was outcast and he was, you know, teased and harassed."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Manning#Enlistment_in_the_U.S._Army

When he was 13 he began to question his sexual orientation, and around this time his parents divorced....

Manning went through basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, but six weeks after enlisting was sent to the discharge unit. He was allegedly being bullied, and in the opinion of another soldier was having a breakdown. The soldier told The Guardian: "The kid was barely five foot ... He was a runt, so pick on him. He's crazy, pick on him. He's a faggot, pick on him. The guy took it from every side. He couldn't please anyone." Denver Nicks writes that Manning, who was used to being bullied, fought back – if the drill sergeants screamed at him, he would scream at them – to the point where they started calling him "General Manning."[18]

The decision to discharge him was revoked, and he started basic training again in January 2008. After graduating in April, he moved to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, where he trained as an intelligence analyst, receiving a TS/SCI security clearance (Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information). According to Nicks, this security clearance, combined with the digitization of classified information and the government's policy of sharing it widely, gave Manning access to an unprecedented amount of material. Nicks writes that he was reprimanded while at Fort Huachuca for posting three video messages to friends on YouTube, in which he described the inside of the "Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility" (SCIF) where he worked.[19]...


A month later, in November 2009, he was promoted from Private First Class to Specialist. That same month, according to his chats with Lamo, he made his first contact with WikiLeaks, shortly after it posted 570,000 pager messages from the 9/11 attacks, which it released on November 25.[24] Also in November, Manning wrote to a gender counselor in the United States, said he felt female, and discussed having sex reassignment surgery. The counselor told Steve Fishman of New York Magazine that it was clear Manning was in crisis, partly because of his gender concerns, but also because he was opposed to the kind of war in which he found himself involved.[25]


He was by all accounts unhappy and isolated. Because of the army's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy (known as DADT, which was repealed in September 2011), he was not allowed to be openly gay, though he apparently made no secret of it; his friends said he kept a fairy wand on his desk. When he told his roommate he was gay, the roommate responded by suggesting they not speak to each other. His working conditions – 14–15 hour night shifts in a dimly lit secure room – did not help his emotional well being.[26] On December 20, 2009, after being told he would lose his one day off a week for being persistently late, he overturned a table in a conference room and damaging a computer that was sitting on it before his arms were pinned behind his back. Several witnesses to the incident believed his access to sensitive material ought to have been withdrawn at that point. The following month, he began posting on Facebook that he felt alone and hopeless.[27]

We will not engage in a negotiation regarding the further release or dissemination of illegally obtained U.S. government classified materials,” wrote Koh, who is considered to be one of the world’s top experts in international law and was reportedly considered for a seat on the Supreme Court.