WikiLeaks Admission: US Officials Say Damage from Cables is Limited

Since the emergence of the WikiLeaks in late November, I have argued that their damage would be overstated. American diplomats have had to deal for many decades with "leaks", sometimes from officials in the Administration. While WikiLeaks was potentially on a bigger scale --- less than 1% of the 250,000 documents have been released --- redactions in the cables (although there have been a few notable errors in letting names through) have limited any repercussions.

This, of course, would not stop the US Government from proclaiming loudly that there have been grave consequences. "Embarrassment" is not the same as "damage", and there is plenty of that in the released cables, which show --- unsurprisingly --- that the private pursuit of US foreign policy differs from its public presentation. The priority for the Government would be to ensure that a document release on this scale does not happen again.

Now I have gotten support from an unexpected source. Mark Hosenball reports for Reuters:

Internal U.S. government reviews have determined that a mass leak of diplomatic cables caused only limited damage to U.S. interests abroad, despite the Obama administration's public statements to the contrary.

"We were told (the impact of WikiLeaks revelations) was embarrassing but not damaging," said the official, who attended a briefing given in late 2010 by State Department officials.

A congressional official briefed on the reviews said the administration felt compelled to say publicly that the revelations had seriously damaged American interests in order to bolster legal efforts to shut down the WikiLeaks website and bring charges against the leakers.

"I think they just want to present the toughest front they can muster," the official said.

But State Department officials have privately told Congress they expect overall damage to U.S. foreign policy to be containable, said the official, one of two congressional aides familiar with the briefings who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity....

National security officials familiar with the damage assessments being conducted by defense and intelligence agencies told Reuters the reviews so far have shown "pockets" of short-term damage, some of it potentially harmful. Long-term damage to U.S. intelligence and defense operations, however, is unlikely to be serious, they said.

Even the cited cases of "damage" do not point to security threats but to the "embarrassment" dimension: "A cable released by WikiLeaks quoted Yemen's president saying he would allow U.S. personnel to engage in counter-terrorism operations on Yemeni territory even as he said publicly that the operations were being handled by domestic security forces."

(US officials try to save their public case with  "continued media attention on such revelations has made it difficult for Washington to repair relations with governments critical to its counter-terrorism operations, such as Pakistan and Yemen". That is no more than a distraction. Relations with the leadership of those countries turns on a convergence of interests --- political, financial, and "security" --- rather than the release of the cables.)

The substantive outcome of WikiLeaks so far is that the US Ambassador to Tripoli has been recalled because of remarks he made about Muammar Gaddafi, including the Libyan leader's fondness for large-breasted Ukrainian women, and the claimed exposure of Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai to retribution, although this has yet to manifest itself.

Beyond that, we only have "two U.S. intelligence officials said they were aware of specific cases where damage caused by WikiLeaks' revelations have been assessed as serious to grave, though they said they could not discuss the subject matter because it remained highly classified".

Perhaps WikiLeaks can eventually let us know the extent of that "serious to grave" damage. Until then, those who want to endorse the case will have to settle for the public, not the private, utterances of US officials.