Will WikiLeaks unravel the American 'secret government'?

[Peter Lemkin]

Lebanese Newspaper Publishes U.S. Cables Not Found on WikiLeaks 03 Dec 2010 Nearly 200 previously unreported U.S. diplomatic cables were posted on Thursday to the website of Lebanese newspaper Al Akhbar. The cables, from eight U.S. embassies across the Middle East and North Africa, have not appeared on Wikileaks' official website or in the Western media outlets working with Wikileaks... A series from Beirut in 2008 shows Lebanese Defense Minister Elias al-Murr telling U.S. diplomats, in a message he implied they should pass on to Israeli officials, that the Lebanese military would not resist an Israeli invasion so long as the Israeli forces abided by certain conditions. Murr, apparently hoping that an Israeli invasion would destroy much of the Hezbollah insurgency and the communities in Lebanon's south that support it, promised an Israeli invasion would go unchallenged as long as it did not pass certain physical boundaries and did not bomb Christian communities.

Looks like 'this thing' is 'catching on'.....many entities and countries must have copies of cables and documents as yet unreleased....may it POUR with MORE!....and may all the dikes and levies break. Smash the evil system[s]!:elefant:

[Ed Jewett]

"....

Wikileaks is like mother’s milk to people who have starved for openness and justice.

Wikileaks is mother’s milk laced with arsenic."


Those are the last two lines in a long multi-media post by Gordon Duff found here:
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/12/06/...nt-add-up/

[Ed Jewett]

Wikileaks: Brought to you by the CIA

Tags:

• COVER-UP/DECEPTIONS/PROPAGANDA
  

Everything you wanted to know
about Wikileaks but didn't know to ask
Julian Assange
He's a guy with a vague history...
Who travels the world without visible means of support...
His parents: Members of an LSD "cult" that abused kids...
Hmmm...
He's not against war...
He hates the 9/11 truth movement...
He has no info about the Bush or Obama White House...or the Federal Reserve Bank...or Goldman Sachs (but he is helping take down Bank of America)...
His "leaks" paint Pakistan as a threat and foreign politicians the CIA doesn't like as jerks...
He believes Osama is alive...and probably in Pakistan...
Everything else he "leaks" is stuff we all already knew...
The mainstream media loves him...

[Ed Jewett]

TIME’s Julian Assange Interview: Full Transcript/Audio

Catherine and News & Commentary,
December 5, 2010 at 11:12 pm



Julian Assange: Aspects of the Chinese government, Chinese Public Security Service, appear to be terrified of free speech, and while one might say that means something awful is happening in the country, I actually think that is a very optimistic sign, because it means that speech can still cause reform and that the power structure is still inherently political, as opposed to fiscal. So journalism and writing are capable of achieving change, and that is why Chinese authorities are so scared of it. Whereas in the United States to a large degree, and in other Western countries, the basic elements of society have been so heavily fiscalized through contractual obligations that political change doesn’t seem to result in economic change, which in other words means that political change doesn’t result in change.
Continue reading the article . . .
Catherine Austin Fitts’ Blog Commentaries
Swedish Defend About-face On WikiLeaks Rape Warrant
(23 Aug 10)
WikiLeaks Founder Drops ‘Mass Spying’ Hint
(23 Aug 10)
U.S. Intelligence Planned to Destroy WikiLeaks
(15 March 10)
WikiLeaks Leaks 9/11 Pager Intercepts
(30 Nov 09)
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Zero Hedge (4 Dec 10)
WikiLeaks Fighting For Survival After PayPal Cuts Off Donations Link
The Vancouver Sun (4 Dec 10)
Don’t Look, Don’t Read: Government Warns Its Workers Away From WikiLeaks Documents
The New York Times (4 Dec 10)
WikiLeaks Cables On Afghanistan Show Monumental Corruption
CNN (3 Dec 10)
Wikileaks Reopens In Sweden
Zero Hedge (1 Dec 10)

[Peter Lemkin]

2010-12-06: News from the infowar front, continued
Submitted by admin on Mon, 12/06/2010 - 19:15


Today, PostFinance, the banking arm of SwissPost, announced that it closed the account created for the Julian Assange Defence Fund, on the grounds that he provided a Geneva address while not being a Swiss resident. WikiLeaks has clarified that the address provided belonged to his lawyer. PostFinance Alex Josty told AP that "That's his money, he will get his money back. We just close the account and that's it." However, Marc Andrey, another PostFinance spokesman, told The New York Times that "efforts to contact Mr. Assange to arrange for the funds in the account to be transferred had been unsuccessful." The status of the funds appears unclear.

Australia Post has announced on Friday that it would be closing the University of Melbourne Post Office on December 17, and, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, insisted that the closure "has nothing to do with the fact that Box 4080 is the Australian postal address for submissions to the whistleblower website." The post pox has long been used by WikiLeaks for submissions and donations via postal mail. "Coincidence? Or has the ever-closing security net around WikiLeaks been tightened a notch further?", asks the Herald's Daniel Flitton. "The architecture and planning building, where the post office is located, is to be demolished soon. But plans are not yet fixed and insiders expressed 'surprise' Australia Post had decided to close so early."

Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, the BBC reports that a new European Arrest Warrant from Sweden has reached SOCA on Monday afternoon and will be sent to the Metropolitan Police. This may be a good point at which to remind the reader that the charges for which Julian Assange faces an EAW and has been placed on the Interpol's wanted list carry a normal fine of 5,000 kronor, or 715 US dollars.

In the United States, Attorney General Eric J. Holder said that "there are other statutes, other tools at our disposal," besides the Espionage Act, that could be used to prosecute WikiLeaks, reports Reuters. "'I authorized just last week a number of things to be done so that we can get to the bottom of this and hold people accountable,' Holder said. He repeatedly refused to elaborate whether that would include search warrants. 'I personally authorized a number of things last week and that's an indication of the seriousness with which we take this matter and the highest level of involvement at the Department of Justice,' he said."

Meanwhile, in Sweden, the Pirate Party servers used to mirror WikiLeaks came under a DDoS attack, announced vice president Anna Troberg.

Coming on the heels of the Amazon, PayPal, Tableau, EveryDNS actions and political pressure from the US, French and Australian governments previously covered, are these supposedly unrelated actions just coincidences? This is a war. Where will you stand?

[Peter Lemkin]

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is expected to appear in a UK court tomorrow after his lawyers said he would meet police to discuss a European extradition warrant from Sweden relating to alleged sexual assaults.

As the legal net continued to close around the whistleblowers' website and US attorney general, Eric Holder, said he had authorised "a number of things to be done" to combat the group, Assange appeared to be reconciling himself to a lengthy personal court battle to avoid extradition.

Jennifer Robinson, a solicitor with Finers Stephens Innocent which represents the Australian freedom of information campaigner, told the Guardian: "We have a received an arrest warrant [related to claims in Sweden]. We are negotiating a meeting with police."

Another lawyer representing Assange, Mark Stephens, added: "He has not been charged with anything. We are in the process of making arrangements to meet the police by consent in order to facilitate the taking of that question and answer that is needed."

Stephens explained that the interview would happen in the "foreseeable future" but he could not give a precise time. According to other sources, it is thought that Assange would appear before a court to negotiate bail .

Assange is seeking supporters to put up surety and bail for him. He said he expected to have to post bail of between £100,000 and £200,000 and would require up to six people offering surety, or risked being held on remand.

In recent days Assange has told friends that he is increasingly convinced the US is behind Swedish prosecutors' attempts to extradite him for questioning on the assault allegations. He has said the original allegations against him were motivated by "personal issues" but that Sweden had subsequently behaved as "a cipher" for the US. He has also said he declined to return to Sweden to face prosecutors because he feared he would not receive a fair trial and prosecutors had requested that he be held in solitary confinement and incommunicado.

This weekend he said he was exhausted by the effort of running his defence against the allegations in Sweden rape charges and the release of the US embassy cables at the same time, as well as running WikiLeaks, which has split since some supporters became disaffected over Assange's handling of the Afghanistan war logs.

Once he turns himself into the police he will have to appear before a magistrates court within 24 hours, where he will seek release on bail. A full hearing of his extradition case would have to be heard within 28 days.

In the past Assange has dismissed the allegations, stating on Twitter: "The charges are without basis and their issue at this moment is deeply disturbing."

Last week Stephens added: "This appears to be a persecution and a prosecution. It is highly irregular and unusual for the Swedish authorities to issue [an Interpol] red notice in the teeth of the undisputed fact that Mr Assange has agreed to meet voluntarily to answer the prosecutor's questions."

While the latest US diplomatic cables released on WikiLeaks have been stirring international political alarm and recriminations, Assange is understood to have been staying out of public sight in south-east England.

Prosecutors in Sweden issued a warrant for his arrest last month but it could not be enforced because of a technical blunder. The Australian's details were also added to Interpol's most wanted website after a red notice was issued, alerting police worldwide to his status.

Detectives in Sweden want to question Assange after two women claimed they were sexually assaulted by him when he visited the country in August. The country's supreme court upheld an order to detain Assange for questioning after he appealed against two lower court rulings. The sex assault claims may be Assange's most pressing legal issue, but it may not be the only legal complications he faces as several countries consider the impact of his diplomatic cable disclosures.

He has come under growing pressure after WikiLeaks started publishing excerpts from a cache of 250,000 secret messages. In the US, the level of political vituperation has become more vengeful. The former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has described Assange as "an anti-American operative with blood on his hands". The senior Republican Mike Huckabee said that "anything less than execution is too kind a penalty".

Meanwhile WikiLeaks has been forced to move to a Swiss host after being dumped by US internet companies as it comes under siege from cyber attacks.

PostFinance, the financial arm of the Swiss post office, said it had closed Assange's account after he provided "false information". "PostFinance has ended its business relationship with WikiLeaks founder Julian Paul Assange," the bank said in a statement. "The Australian citizen provided false information regarding his place of residence during the account opening process."

[Peter Lemkin]

Personally, I'm getting pissed off at the Assange baiters. Time will tell.....

Defend WikiLeaks or lose free speech
Journalists should wake up and realize that the attacks on the whistle-blower are attacks on them, too
By Dan Gillmor - Salon

Journalists cover wars by not taking sides. But when the war is on free speech itself, neutrality is no longer an option.

The WikiLeaks releases are a pivotal moment in the future of journalism. They raise any number of ethical and legal issues for journalists, but one is becoming paramount.

As I said last week, and feel obliged to say again today, our government -- and its allies, willing or coerced, in foreign governments and corporations -- are waging a powerful war against freedom of speech.

WikiLeaks may well make us uncomfortable in some of what it does, though in general I believe it's done far more good than harm so far. We need to recognize, however, as Mathew Ingram wrote over the weekend, that "Like It or Not, WikiLeaks is a Media Entity." What our government is trying to do to WikiLeaks now is lawless in stunning ways, as Salon's Glenn Greenwald forcefully argued today.

These are also acts of outright censorship. No, Amazon is not bound by the First Amendment. But if it's bowing to government pressure, it's helping a panicked government tear up one of our most basic freedoms.

And, no, the government's campaign is not fully working. Internet "mirror" sites are springing up to host WikiLeaks' material faster than governments can take them down. But WikiLeaks is the beneficiary, in this respect, of a wide swath of support from people who will make it part of their life's mission to help prevent this particular instance of censorship from succeeding. How ready or able will they be to defend free speech every time it's threatened in the future?

The political class' frothing against WikiLeaks is to be expected, even if it's stirring up the kind of passion that almost always leads to bad outcomes. But what to make of the equally violent suggestions from people who call themselves journalists?

Two Washington Post columnists, among many others, have been racing to see who can be the more warmongering. The reliably bellicose Charles Krauthammer invited the U.S. government to kill Julian Assange, while his colleague Marc A. Thiessen was only slightly less bloodthirsty when he urged cyber attacks on WikiLeaks and any other sites that might be showing the leaked cables.

Of course, the New York Times, Washington Post and many other news organizations in the U.S. and other nations have published classified information themselves in the past -- many, many times -- without any help from WikiLeaks. Bob Woodward has practically made a career of publishing leaked information. By the same logic that the censors and their media acolytes are using against WikiLeaks, those organizations and lots of others could and should be subject to censorship as well. By Krauthammer's sick standards, the death squads should be converging soon on his own offices, as well as those of the Times and London's Guardian and more.

Media organizations with even half a clue need to recognize what is at stake at this point. It's more than immediate self-interest, namely their own ability to do their jobs. It's about the much more important result if they can't. If journalism can routinely be shut down the way the government wants to do this time, we'll have thrown out free speech in this lawless frenzy.

Like Clay Shirky, I'm deeply ambivalent about some of what WikiLeaks does, and what this affair portends. Governments need to keep some secrets, and laws matter. So does the First Amendment, and right now it's under an attack that could shred it.
A longtime participant in the tech and media worlds, Dan Gillmor is director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication. Follow Dan on Twitter: @dangillmor.

[Peter Lemkin]

Live with the WikiLeakable world or shut down the net. It's your choice

Western political elites obfuscate, lie and bluster – and when the veil of secrecy is lifted, they try to kill the messenger
Comments (237)
John Naughton
guardian.co.uk, Monday 6 December 2010 20.59 GMT

'Never waste a good crisis" used to be the catchphrase of the Obama team in the runup to the presidential election. In that spirit, let us see what we can learn from official reactions to the WikiLeaks revelations.

The most obvious lesson is that it represents the first really sustained confrontation between the established order and the culture of the internet. There have been skirmishes before, but this is the real thing.

And as the backlash unfolds – first with deniable attacks on internet service providers hosting WikiLeaks, later with companies like Amazon and eBay and PayPal suddenly "discovering" that their terms and conditions preclude them from offering services to WikiLeaks, and then with the US government attempting to intimidate Columbia students posting updates about WikiLeaks on Facebook – the intolerance of the old order is emerging from the rosy mist in which it has hitherto been obscured. The response has been vicious, co-ordinated and potentially comprehensive, and it contains hard lessons for everyone who cares about democracy and about the future of the net.

There is a delicious irony in the fact that it is now the so-called liberal democracies that are clamouring to shut WikiLeaks down.

Consider, for instance, how the views of the US administration have changed in just a year. On 21 January, secretary of state Hillary Clinton made a landmark speech about internet freedom, in Washington DC, which many people welcomed and most interpreted as a rebuke to China for its alleged cyberattack on Google. "Information has never been so free," declared Clinton. "Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable."

She went on to relate how, during his visit to China in November 2009, Barack Obama had "defended the right of people to freely access information, and said that the more freely information flows the stronger societies become. He spoke about how access to information helps citizens to hold their governments accountable, generates new ideas, and encourages creativity." Given what we now know, that Clinton speech reads like a satirical masterpiece.

One thing that might explain the official hysteria about the revelations is the way they expose how political elites in western democracies have been deceiving their electorates.

The leaks make it abundantly clear not just that the US-Anglo-European adventure in Afghanistan is doomed but, more important, that the American, British and other Nato governments privately admit that too.

The problem is that they cannot face their electorates – who also happen to be the taxpayers funding this folly – and tell them this. The leaked dispatches from the US ambassador to Afghanistan provide vivid confirmation that the Karzai regime is as corrupt and incompetent as the South Vietnamese regime in Saigon was when the US was propping it up in the 1970s. And they also make it clear that the US is as much a captive of that regime as it was in Vietnam.

The WikiLeaks revelations expose the extent to which the US and its allies see no real prospect of turning Afghanistan into a viable state, let alone a functioning democracy. They show that there is no light at the end of this tunnel. But the political establishments in Washington, London and Brussels cannot bring themselves to admit this.

Afghanistan is, in that sense, a quagmire in the same way that Vietnam was. The only differences are that the war is now being fought by non-conscripted troops and we are not carpet-bombing civilians.

The attack of WikiLeaks also ought to be a wake-up call for anyone who has rosy fantasies about whose side cloud computing providers are on. These are firms like Google, Flickr, Facebook, Myspace and Amazon which host your blog or store your data on their servers somewhere on the internet, or which enable you to rent "virtual" computers – again located somewhere on the net. The terms and conditions under which they provide both "free" and paid-for services will always give them grounds for dropping your content if they deem it in their interests to do so. The moral is that you should not put your faith in cloud computing – one day it will rain on your parade.

Look at the case of Amazon, which dropped WikiLeaks from its Elastic Compute Cloud the moment the going got rough. It seems that Joe Lieberman, a US senator who suffers from a terminal case of hubris, harassed the company over the matter. Later Lieberman declared grandly that he would be "asking Amazon about the extent of its relationship with WikiLeaks and what it and other web service providers will do in the future to ensure that their services are not used to distribute stolen, classified information". This led the New Yorker's Amy Davidson to ask whether "Lieberman feels that he, or any senator, can call in the company running the New Yorker's printing presses when we are preparing a story that includes leaked classified material, and tell it to stop us".

What WikiLeaks is really exposing is the extent to which the western democratic system has been hollowed out. In the last decade its political elites have been shown to be incompetent (Ireland, the US and UK in not regulating banks); corrupt (all governments in relation to the arms trade); or recklessly militaristic (the US and UK in Iraq). And yet nowhere have they been called to account in any effective way. Instead they have obfuscated, lied or blustered their way through. And when, finally, the veil of secrecy is lifted, their reflex reaction is to kill the messenger.

As Simon Jenkins put it recently in the Guardian, "Disclosure is messy and tests moral and legal boundaries. It is often irresponsible and usually embarrassing. But it is all that is left when regulation does nothing, politicians are cowed, lawyers fall silent and audit is polluted. Accountability can only default to disclosure." What we are hearing from the enraged officialdom of our democracies is mostly the petulant screaming of emperors whose clothes have been shredded by the net.

Which brings us back to the larger significance of this controversy. The political elites of western democracies have discovered that the internet can be a thorn not just in the side of authoritarian regimes, but in their sides too. It has been comical watching them and their agencies stomp about the net like maddened, half-blind giants trying to whack a mole. It has been deeply worrying to watch terrified internet companies – with the exception of Twitter, so far – bending to their will.

But politicians now face an agonising dilemma. The old, mole-whacking approach won't work. WikiLeaks does not depend only on web technology. Thousands of copies of those secret cables – and probably of much else besides – are out there, distributed by peer-to-peer technologies like BitTorrent. Our rulers have a choice to make: either they learn to live in a WikiLeakable world, with all that implies in terms of their future behaviour; or they shut down the internet. Over to them.

[Peter Lemkin]

WikiLeaks cables reveal secret Nato plans to defend Baltics from Russia

• Leaked diplomatic cables reveal Russia strategy
• British troops identified for combat operations
• Washington offers to beef up Polish security

Comments (162)
Ian Traynor
guardian.co.uk, Monday 6 December 2010 21.30 GMT

US soldiers in the Polish town of Morag. The state department fears that Nato's policy shift could trigger unnecessary tensions between the west and Russia. Photograph: Wojtek Radwanski/AFP/Getty Images

Washington and its western allies have for the first time since the end of the cold war drawn up classified military plans to defend the most vulnerable parts of eastern Europe against Russian threats, according to confidential US diplomatic cables.

The US state department ordered an information blackout when the decision was taken earlier this year. Since January the blueprint has been refined.

Nine Nato divisions – US, British, German, and Polish – have been identified for combat operations in the event of armed aggression against Poland or the three Baltic states. North Polish and German ports have been listed for the receipt of naval assault forces and British and US warships. The first Nato exercises under the plan are to take place in the Baltic next year, according to informed sources.

Following years of transatlantic dispute over the new policy, Nato leaders are understood to have quietly endorsed the strategy at a summit in Lisbon last month.

Despite President Barack Obama's policy of "resetting" relations with Russia, which was boosted at the Nato summit attended by Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, the state department fears that the major policy shift could trigger "unnecessary tensions" with Moscow.

The decision to draft contingency plans for Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania was taken secretly earlier this year at the urging of the US and Germany at Nato headquarters in Belgium, ending years of division at the heart of the western alliance over how to view Vladimir Putin's Russia.

The decision, according to a secret cable signed by Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, marks the start of a major revamp of Nato defence planning in Europe.

The strategy has not been made public, in line with Nato's customary refusal to divulge details of its "contingency planning" – blueprints for the defence of a Nato member state by the alliance as a whole.

These are believed to be held in safes at Nato's planning headquarters in Mons, Belgium.

According to a secret cable from the US mission to Nato in Brussels, US admiral James Stavridis, the alliance's top commander in Europe, proposed drawing up defence plans for the former Soviet Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.

The policy was put to top military officials from Nato's 28 states. "On January 22 Nato's military committee agreed … under a silence procedure", the cable notes, referring to a decision carried by consensus unless someone speaks up to object.

Attempts by Stavridis's predecessor, General John Craddock, to push through defence planning for the Baltic were stymied by German-led opposition in western Europe, anxious to avoid upsetting the Kremlin.The policy shift was decided by senior military officials rather than Nato's top decision-taking body, the North Atlantic Council, in order to avoid repeating the splits and disputes on the issue over the past five years. The plan entails grouping the Baltic states with Poland in a new regional defence scheme that has been worked on in recent months and is codenamed Eagle Guardian.

In parallel negotiations with Warsaw the US has also offered to beef up Polish security against Russia by deploying special naval forces to the Baltic ports of Gdansk and Gdynia, putting squadrons of F-16 fighter aircraft in Poland and rotating C-130 Hercules transport planes into Poland from US bases in Germany, according to the diplomatic cables, almost always classified secret.

Earlier this year the US started rotating US army Patriot missiles into Poland in a move that Warsaw celebrates publicly as boosting Polish air defences and demonstrating American commitment to Poland's security.

But the secret cables expose the Patriots' value as purely symbolic. The Patriot battery, deployed on a rotating basis at Morag in north-eastern Poland, 40 miles from the border with Russia's Kaliningrad exclave, is purely for training purposes, and is neither operational nor armed with missiles.

At one point Poland's then deputy defence minister privately complained bitterly that the Americans may as well supply "potted plants'.

Since joining Nato in 2004, the three Baltic states have complained they are treated as second-class members because their pleas for detailed defence planning under Nato's "all for one and one for all" article 5 have been being ignored. Article 5 is the heart of Nato's founding treaty, stipulating that the alliance will come to the rescue of any member state attacked. The only time it has been invoked was following 9/11 when the European allies and Canada rallied to support America.

The Poles and the Baltic states have long argued that rhetorical declarations of commitment to article 5 are meaningless without concrete defence planning to back them up.

The Baltic demands for hard security guarantees became much more desperate in the past three years.

A cyber-attack on Estonia in 2007 was believed to have originated in Russia, and the Kremlin invaded Georgia a year later.

Nerves were further set on edge last year when the Russians staged exercises simulating an invasion of the Baltic states and a nuclear attack on Poland.

The eastern European calls for hard security guarantees, however, were stymied by western Europe, led by Germany, which did not want to antagonise Russia.

"We've found the way forward with Russia. The Baltic states have received strategic reassurance," said a well-placed source. "That's backed up with contingency planning that did not exist before. It's done now. We told them we'll give you your reassurance if you agree to the reset with Russia. That made it easier for the Germans."During intense – if discreet – diplomacy last year, the resistance was overcome by the Americans, and the new policy was tabled as a joint US-German move.

"Most of the information on this is not in the public domain.

But the bottom line is that there is enough political will in Nato now to do defence plans for the Baltic states. The opposition has melted away over the past 18 months," said Tomas Valasek, defence analyst at the Centre for European Reform. He worked with Madeleine Albright, the former US secretary of state, on drafting Nato's new "strategic concept" this year.In a meeting last December in Brussels with the Nato ambassadors from Poland, the three Baltic states and the Nato secretary-general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, together with the US and German ambassadors, Ivo Daalder and Ulrich Brandenburg, secured agreement on the new policy.

"Ambassador Daalder acknowledged in these meetings that Germany had initiated the proposal," says another secret cable .The east Europeans were delighted. Paul Teesalu, a senior Estonian diplomat, described the policy shift as "an early Christmas present" when told last December in Tallinn, according to a cable.

Another secret report from the US embassy in Riga says the Latvian foreign ministry's security policy chief "expressed his government's profound happiness."

The Poles, although keen supporters of concrete Nato defence plans for the Baltic, were neverthless worried that the new policy could dilute alliance commitments to their defence, since a limited Polish contingency plan was being turned into an expanded regional blueprint for the four countries.

Poland's late deputy defence minister, Stanislaw Komorowski, told US diplomats in Warsaw that he was "sceptical that a regional approach was the best way ahead. Komorowski said Warsaw would prefer a unique plan for Poland.".

Komorowski, the Polish ambassador in London until 2004, was one of 98 people killed with the country's president, Lech Kaczynski, when their plane crashed at Smolensk, Russia, in April.

The Americans argued that adding defence planning for the Baltic states would reinforce rather than dilute Polish security.

"After two years, contingency plans have been successfully prepared for Poland," Bogdan Klich, the Polish defence minister told Warsaw newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza last month.

In January, after the decision was taken, the state department in Washington instructed US missions and embassies how to proceed, making clear that the drafting of defence blueprints for the Baltic was the beginning of a more ambitious overhaul of Nato's core military planning.

"This is the first step in a multi-stage process to develop a complete set of appropriate contingency plans for the full range of possible threats – both regional and functional – as soon as possible," said the secret cable.

The diplomatic traffic seen by the Guardian is from US state department and US embassies worldwide, but not from Pentagon or CIA communications, meaning that the cables reveal the policy and political decision-making processes but contain little on the specifics of hard military planning.

Details of the nine divisions earmarked for the plan and the prominence of the port of Swinoujscie, on Poland's Baltic coast, were leaked to Gazeta Wyborcza.

It is clear that the defence plans for Poland and the Baltic are to be orchestrated from Nato's Shape planning headquarters at Mons in Belgium and from the Joint Forces Command at Brunssum in the Netherlands, the nerve centre for overseeing the crucial German theatre during the alliance's cold war heyday.

The policy shift represents a sea change in Nato defence planning and in assessments of the threat posed by what a Polish official calls "a resurgent Russia."

Officially the US and Nato term Russia a "partner" and not an adversary, with the Germans, French, and Italians in particular tending to be deferential in dealings with Moscow. But the east Europeans, with their bitter experience of Moscow domination, argue that the Russians respect strength, despise and exploit weakness and division, and that Nato will enjoy better relations only if its most exposed and vulnerable members feel secure.

"The whole point is not to paint Russia as a threat. It is about reassuring those countries that are seriously worried.

The debate is primarily about Poland and the Baltic. Geography has a lot to do with it," said Valasek.

Repeatedly calling for the Baltic military plans to be kept utterly secret, Clinton and other senior US officials acknowledge that the policy shift "would also likely lead to an unnecessary increase in Nato-Russia tensions … Washington strongly believes that the details of Nato's contingency plans should remain in confidential channels."

[Magda Hassan]

Gee, I bet Russia never would have guessed that if it wasn't for the leak. This just shows that it is the people in whose names all the wars are fought that they need to keep these things secret from. I think Russia is already up to speed on this little matter.