`The possibility that current employees or moles within DOD or elsewhere in the U.S. government are providing sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.org cannot be ruled out'' said a counterintelligence analysis prepared by Michael Horvath of the cyber counterintelligence assessments branch of the US Army Counterintelligence Center.

Wikileaks represented "a potential force protection, counterintelligence, operational security (OPSEC), and information security (INFOSEC) threat to the US Army," he wrote.

 The army document provides enumerates numerous embarrassing stories broken by WikiLeaks---U.S. equipment expenditure in Iraq, probable U.S. violations of the Chemical Warfare Convention Treaty in Iraq, the battle over the Iraqi town of Fallujah and human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay.

Wikileaks has posted a 32 page classified document  [PDF] by the Defence Analysis Programme, dated March 2008 (in the midst of the Presidential election campaign). It details    "the counterintelligence threat posed to the US Army by the Wikileaks.org Web site." 

When Hillary Clinton attacked internet censorshim in January her speech was dripping with Cold War imagery and she she made multiple references to the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall to describe the rise of an Information Iron Curtain.

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The Obama Administration's high-minded declarations are likely to be met with cynicism by repressive regimes in the light of the latest leaks. 

The DOD complains that the Wikileaks site published the 238-page torture manual used by the U.S. Army at Guantanamo Bay; a map of the Abu Ghraib secret prison in Iraq and revealed evidence that the US violates international treaties by using toxic weapons such as depleted uranium.

Those leaked documents caused grave embarassment to the U.S. government, but they also helped restore human rights standards across the military. And its not as if the revelations compromised any American soldiers in the field. 

If anything, by helping to force a change US policy towards detainees, in all likelyhood the leaks made it less likely that captured US soldiers will be tortured or executed in future.

Isn't that the point of an independent media in a healthy democracy?

The DOD detailed some of the documents that Wikileaks leaked:

• Secretive U.S. document exploitation centers
• Detainee operations and alleged human rights violations
• Information on the U.S. State Department, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy and U.S. Marines units, Iraqi police, and coalition forces from Poland, Denmark, Ukraine, Latvia, Slovakia, Romania, Armenia, Kazakhstan, and El Salvador serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• Nearly the entire order of battle for U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan as of April 2007.
• Revelations that the U.S. government violated the Chemical Weapons Convention in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It then went on to detail how best to find out who is leaking state secrets to Wikileaks:

The Army's counterintelligence should use "properly trained cyber technicians, the proper equipment, and the proper technical software could most likely conduct computer network exploitation (CNE) operations or use cyber tradecraft to obtain access to Wikileaks.org's Web site, information systems, or networks...." is says.

The aim is to discover, prosecute, sack and punish whoever leaked details of US human rights violations.

"Successful identification, prosecution, termination of employment, and exposure of persons leaking the information by the governments and businesses affected by information posted to Wikileaks.org would damage and potentially destroy [its] center of gravity and deter others from taking similar actions."

So how does that square with the Obama policy of encouraging internet freedom? Not very easily, which is why the rest of the world may take a slightly jaundiced view of Mrs Clinton's campaign for internet freedom.

When Hillary Clinton attacked internet censorship, China was quick to accuse her and the United States of "information imperialism,"  and The People's Daily attacked Clinton's "smart power"  accusing the Washington of double standards. One editorial called "network freedom" only "an illusion" saying the United States uses  "internet diplomacy" as a cyber "battlefield." 

The People's Daily editorial said the US had hacked the Chinese search engine Baidu while Beijing flatly denying hacking Google and other American firms. Its a bit harder to refute that now that we know the Army was itself  plotting to have a poke around inside Wikileaks source code.

More details: Did Uncle Sam try to kill Wikileaks?