The non-profit whistle blower has released 243 of its total 251,287 cables to a few newspapers around the world, with the rest promised in the coming months.
“It puts people’s lives in danger, threatens our national security and undermines our efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems,” Clinton said.
“We are taking aggressive steps to hold responsible those who stole this information.”
Clinton, speaking to reporters in Washington, said other governments she has spoken with have agreed to “continue to focus on the tasks at hand.”
“Every country, including the U.S., must be able to have candid conversations about the people and nations with whom they deal,” she said. “In almost every profession …. people rely on confidential communications to do their jobs. We count on the space of trust that confidentiality provides. When someone breaches that trust we are all worse off for it.”
The first tranche of cables released by Wikileaks on Sunday was explosive.
They reveal how Iran’s middle eastern neighbours fear the country’s influence, aggressive growth and search for nuclear weapons; how Yemen has taken responsibility for U.S. drone attacks on Al Qaeda actors operating in the country; and how difficult it is for coalition countries in Afghanistan to cooperate with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his brother, the Kandahar power broker Ahmed Wali Karzai.
Yet Clinton stood by the revelations about Iran, saying that the fears expressed by countries like Saudi Arabia, which urged the Americans to “cut off the head of the snake” with a military strike, bolster official U.S. policy in the Middle East.
And there was even room for a joke in the tense American capital Monday.
Clinton joked about the response of one counterpart when informed of the coming release of documents.
“Don’t worry about it,” the unidentified counterpart said, according to Clinton. “You should see what we say about you.”
Israel jumped on some of the Wikileaks revelations, saying they proved Iran is “the greatest threat to world peace.”
Among the most politically potent of the first batch of Wikileaks disclosures is the coincidentally unified opposition that Israel and Arab leaders, from Saudi Arabia to Bahrain, hold toward Iran and particularly its nuclear program.
Gulf leaders have long kept private their views on their Middle Eastern neighbour.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged Arab countries to seize the moment and band together to stand against Iran.
This could produce a “breakthrough” in peace efforts in the region, he told a news conference.
Netanyahu was referring to a meeting between U.S. officials and the Saudi ambassador to the United States. Adel al-Jubeir “recalled the king’s frequent exhortations to the U.S. to attack Iran and so put an end to its nuclear weapons program,” the cable said.
Also stunning is how much more Washington knew about the threat Iran posed than was ever disclosed.
Iran now has Western Europe in target range after buying 19 powerful Russian-designed missiles from North Korea, The New York Times reported from diplomatic cables.
The missiles are “much more powerful than anything Washington has publicly conceded that Tehran has,” the newspaper said.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday brushed off the cables.
“We don’t give any value to these documents. Iran and regional states are friends. Such acts of mischief have no impact on relations between nations,” he said.
A fresh revelation from the diplomatic cables also showed Iranian Red Crescent ambulances were used to smuggle weapons to Hezbollah during its 2006 war with Israel in Lebanon.
“IRC shipments of medical supplies served also to facilitate weapons shipments,” the memos said.
Hezbollah and Israel fought a 34-day war that killed 1,200 Lebanese and 160 Israelis.
The British newspaper The Guardian reported a French diplomat branded Iran a “fascist” state. France on Monday refused to comment.
The U.S. government has ordered a review of how classified information is kept safe, The Associated Press reported.
The leak of U.S. State Department documents has caused “significant damage” to U.S. national security, Jacob Lew, director of the Office of Management and Budget said.
Lew’s OMB has ordered agencies to create “security assessment teams” to figure out who has access to what and that no one has a higher security clearance than necessary.
Wikileaks is using its Twitter feed to communicate after claiming its main website was hit with a “massive denial of service attack.”
Another analysis of the data contended that Iraq was the most discussed country and the embassy in Ankara, Turkey, the most prolific in the vast network of information.
Among the other revelations trickling out of the Wikileaks release:
• Libyan President Mumammar al-Qadhafi travels everywhere with a “voluptuous blonde” Ukrainian nurse named Galyna Kolotnytska. And he uses Botox.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi exchange “lavish gifts.”
• Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, displays a “deep ignorance on economic issues.”
• North Korean leader Kim Jong-il was described as a “flabby old chap.”
• U.S. diplomats at the United Nations were encouraged to spy on Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and diplomats of other countries.
• Afghanistan Vice President Amned Zia Massoud was carrying $52 million in cash in the United Arab Emirates last year.
• Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh was “dismissive, bored and impatient” while meeting U.S. national security adviser John Brennan.
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