Photo Gallery Ripples from WikiLeaks
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been "working night and day" in discussions with leaders from around the world in the wake of the leaks of secret diplomatic cables, according to a top State Department official. US President Barack Obama has come under fire from the right for not acting more decisively on the matter.
On December 1, many of the world's leaders met in Kazakhstan at a summit of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). It was the first major international meeting since the latest WikiLeaks revelations, and all eyes were on US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Diplomats at the UN Security Council in New York: The WikiLeaks cables included State Department instructions for its diplomats on how to spy on UN officials. The directive on which those instructions were based came from the CIA.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke at the beginning of the OSCE summit in Kazakhstan on Dec. 1. Merkel was described by US diplomats in the leaked documents as being "rarely creative." The chancellor said that the WikiLeaks affair only played a "secondary role" at the summit meeting.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi talked to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the OSCE summit last week. Berlusconi was described in the leaked cables as "feckless, vain and ineffective." Clinton told reporters at the OSCE meeting: "We have no better friend, we have no one who supports the American policies as consistently as Prime Minister Berlusconi has."
Bradley Manning, a private in the US Army, allegedly downloaded the diplomatic cables onto CDs and leaked them to WikiLeaks. The 23-year-old former IT expert in Iraq has been in military jail at the Marine Corps Base Quantico for more than four months.
