Wikileaks: The Finger-Pointing Begins

The National Journal is reporting:

“The latest WikiLeaks document dump, publishing the details of more than 250,000 confidential U.S. diplomatic cables, has member of Congress blaming both the whistle-blowing website and the U.S. government for somehow allowing it to happen.

Already this morning, the Obama administration has ordered government agencies to review safeguards on classified information, the Associated Press reports.

Sen. Joe Lieberman, ID-Conn., described the leak in a statement as “an attack on our national security” and “an offense against our democracy and the principle of transparency.” He called for President Obama to shut down the site.

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called the release “a reckless action which jeopardizes lives.” Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., said on NBC’s Today show that beyond the “obvious titillating facts” of the release, “foreign intelligence agencies — our enemies — are going to be going through [the documents] line by line.” King, the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, called for WikiLeaks to be classified as a foreign terrorist organization.

“The benefit of [classifying WikiLeaks as an FTO] is we would be able to seize their assets and we would be able to stop anyone from helping them in any way — whether it’s making contributions [or] giving free legal advice,” King said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

Yet others, like Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, criticized the U.S. intelligence community for its failure to prevent such a release. It should be clear that WikiLeaks is “determined to undermine U.S. national security and damage our foreign relations,” Hoekstra said in a statement Sunday, and he added on CBS’s Early Show today that the release represents “a massive failure within the intelligence community, to create this kind of database with this much information in it and then provide access to it to hundreds of thousands of people across the government.”