Germany's make-believe Foreign Minister Westernwave claimed he would pay no attention to the leaks about him being arrogant, aggressive, and incompetent, but ended up so pissed that he fired his office manager for talking to the US ambassador in Berlin, which was the man's job at that time as "party liaison with foreign representatives". Angela Merkel is so very teflon that she brought a cartoon about her being labled the teflon chancellor by wicker leaks and laughed about it with her arrogant vice-chancellor and foreign minister during a meeting of parliament, which she considers disturbing and unimportant, because they debate what she had already decided to have her ministers do.
I've actually not heard anything about any of the German politicians portrayed in those cables between the Berlin embassy and Washington that is not, I believe, entirely true and which I did not already think myself, as well as do most of the people I know.
And about Berlusconi and Sarkozy, well that was also all old news. That Qadaffi let nuclear material lie around in the desert without any supervision also doesn't really suprise me either, and I think it's good that we got to know about it.
Actually I don't really see what everybody (especially Hillary) got all upset about, although the wicker chair should concentrate on the dictators and commando countries around the world some, such as China, Iran, N.Korea, even Russia, because they should really use a lot more exposure. I'd like to know what those jerks say among themselves about officials in the rest of the world, where free speech is an essential right!
Consider this tidbit The New York Times reports from the wicker chair leaks about China:
Cables Discuss Vast Hacking by a China That Fears the Web
As China ratcheted up the pressure on Google to censor its Internet searches last year, the American Embassy sent a secret cable to Washington detailing why top Chinese leaders had become so obsessed with the Internet search company: they were Googling themselves.
The May 18, 2009, cable, titled “Google China Paying Price for Resisting Censorship,” quoted a well-placed source as saying that Li Changchun, a member of China’s top ruling body, the Politburo Standing Committee, and the country’s senior propaganda official, was taken aback to discover that he could conduct Chinese-language searches on Google’s main international Web site. When Mr. Li typed his name into the search engine at google.com, he found “results critical of him.”
That cable from American diplomats was one of many made public by WikiLeaks that portray China’s leadership as nearly obsessed with the threat posed by the Internet to their grip on power — and, the reverse, by the opportunities it offered them, through hacking, to obtain secrets stored in computers of its rivals, especially the United States.
Extensive Chinese hacking operations, including one leveled at Google, are a central theme in the cables. The hacking operations began earlier and were aimed at a wider array of American government and military data than generally known, including attacks on computers of American diplomats preparing positions on a climate change treaty.
One cable, dated early this year, quoted a Chinese person with family connections to the elite as saying that Mr. Li himself directed an attack on Google’s servers in the United States, though that claim has been called into question. In an interview with The New York Times, the person cited in the cable said that Mr. Li personally led a campaign against Google’s operations in China but that to his knowledge had no role in the hacking attack.
The cables catalog the heavy pressure that was placed on Google to comply with local censorship laws, as well as Google’s willingness to comply — up to a point. That coercion began building years before the company finally decided to pull out of China last spring in the wake of the successful hacking attack on its home servers, which yielded Chinese dissidents’ e-mail accounts as well as Google’s proprietary source code.
[...]
The cables also reveal that a surveillance system dubbed Ghostnet that stole information from the computers used by the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, and South Asian governments and was uncovered in 2009 was linked to a second broad series of break-ins into American government computers code-named Byzantine Hades. Government investigators were able to make a “tenuous connection” between those break-ins and the People’s Liberation Army.
The documents also reveal that in 2008 German intelligence briefed American officials on similar attacks beginning in 2006 against the German government, including military, economic, science and technology, commercial, diplomatic, and research and development targets. The Germans described the attacks as preceding events like the German government’s meetings with the Chinese government.
Quite honestly, I'm glad to know, and to know that the whole world (with the exception of those living in China) knows about the disgusting trampling on free information and opinion that China perpetrates!
Let's here the shenanigans of Putin's new Russian secret police as well.
Keep that wicker chair rocking, and just remember that people have always some day found out when you say something "bad" even if true about someone else!
And then enjoy this great
song and dance number cartoon by Mark Fiore about the loss of diplomatic secrecy.
Have fun, and don't forget to watch those gaps in your wicker chair.
