US fumes over WikiLeaks release of diplomat memos

Fav Tag: Wikileaks WASHINGTON: The WikiLeaks release of more than 250,000 diplomatic cables on Sunday has infuriated Washington, where officials said it could put lives in danger and threaten national security.

At least one US lawmaker called for the prosecution of the founder of the whistle-blower website, which had previously released nearly a half million classified military reports on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The White House called Sunday's release a "reckless and dangerous action" in a statement released after the first batch of cables was published by The New York Times and European newspapers.

"To be clear -- such disclosures put at risk our diplomats, intelligence professionals, and people around the world who come to the United States for assistance in promoting democracy and open government," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said.

Democratic Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, called the release a "reckless action which jeopardizes lives" and rejected Assange's claims to be acting in the public interest.

"This is not an academic exercise about freedom of information and it is not akin to the release of the Pentagon Papers, which involved an analysis aimed at saving American lives and exposing government deception," he added, referring to a secret history of the Vietnam War leaked in 1971.

US Republican congressman Peter King, the ranking member of the House of Representatives' Homeland Security Committee, urged the attorney general to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for espionage.

The latest release "manifests Mr Assange's purposeful intent to damage not only our national interests in fighting the war on terror, but also undermines the very safety of coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan."

He went on to urge the State Department to designate WikiLeaks a "Foreign Terrorist Organization," saying it "posed a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States," in a statement from his office.

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment on whether the United States was mulling criminal charges against Assange, saying only that it was assisting the Pentagon in its "ongoing investigation" into the disclosure.

The top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee said the release was "an embarrassment to the (Barack) Obama administration and represents a critical failure by the Pentagon and intelligence community."

Representative Pete Hoekstra called on the intelligence community to "move quickly to assess the failures in this case" and said Congress should also take up the matter.

The Pentagon, which also strongly condemned the release, said it had taken new steps to "prevent further compromise of sensitive data."

The steps were taken after Pentagon reviews launched in August that followed the disclosure of tens of thousands of US military intelligence files on the war in Afghanistan.

The measures included disabling all write-capability for flash drives or removable media on classified computers, restricting transfers of information from classified to unclassified systems and better monitoring of suspicious computer activity using similar tactics employed by credit card companies.

"Bottom line: It is now much more difficult for a determined actor to get access to and move information outside of authorized channels," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said.