Manning leaks chilled US relationships

FORT MEADE, Maryland - The more than 250,000 U. S. diplomatic cables Army Pfc. Bradley Manning disclosed through WikiLeaks have had a chilling effect on American foreign relations, a highranking State Department official testified yesterday.

Undersecretary for Management Patrick Kennedy said at the soldier's sentencing hearing some foreign government officials, business leaders, educators and journalists remain reluctant to speak freely in private with U.S. diplomats more than two years after the cables were published.

" In several cases, people have said, 'We're not going to share with you like we used to.' Others feel they are not getting the same kinds of exchanges they had before," said Kennedy, who testified as a prosecution witness.

Kennedy said the State Department never completed a damage assessment but he insisted the harm was real.

"It's impossible to know what someone is not sharing with you - and this is, in itself, I believe, a risk to the national security," he said.

Kennedy's testimony came during the second week of a hearing to determine Manning's sentence for leaking the cables, 470,000 Iraq and Afghanistan battlefield reports and some warzone video to the anti- secrecy group while working as an intelligence analyst in Iraq in 2010. WikiLeaks began publishing the cables in November 2010 and eventually posted almost all of them on its website.