State Department Disaster as Internal Cables May Become Public

The tool who released this information to show how important he is should have the book thrown at him:

The State Department and American embassies around the world are bracing for what officials fear could be the massive, unauthorized release of secret diplomatic cables in which U.S. diplomats harshly evaluate foreign leaders and reveal the inner-workings of American foreign policy.Diplomatic and law-enforcement officials tell the Daily Beast their alarm stems from the arrest of a 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst based in Iraq who has reportedly admitted that he downloaded 260,000 diplomatic cables from government computer networks and was prepared to make them public.


Specialist Bradley Manning of Potomac, Md., who is now under arrest in Kuwait, is also accused of having leaked—to Wikileaks, a secretive internet site based in Sweden—an explosive video of an American helicopter attack in Baghdad in 2007 that left 12 people dead, including two employees of the news agency Reuters. The website released the video in April.
"If he really had access to these cables, we've got a terrible situation on our hands," said an American diplomat. "We're still trying to figure out what he had access to. A lot of my colleagues overseas are sweating this out, given what those cables may contain."

I know the wikileaks video was something of a sensation on the left, but I would like to see how releasing diplomatic cables benefits is releasing "truth to power". So how could it end up being:

“These are classified documents,” he said. “We take their release seriously.” He said the public release of diplomatic cables could do damage to national security since they could reveal the "source and methods" used by the United States to gather intelligence overseas.Even more alarming, diplomats say, is the idea that foreign leaders will now read what American diplomats have written about them in secret cables sent to Washington—evaluations of the leaders’ personalities, intelligence and honesty, among other things.

Alan K. Henrikson, a professor of diplomatic history at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, said the State Department should be “very nervous” at the prospect of the release of such a huge library of internal cables.He said he would urge the department to try to comment as little as possible about the situation in hopes that, if the cables do become public, the aftermath can be dealt with foreign governments behind closed doors. “That’s diplomacy,” he said.

The State Department has suggested that, even if Wikileaks does not have the cables at the moment, the government still believes Manning had downloaded a huge library of the department’s cables and stored them somewhere.

A disaster waiting to happen.