The new Snowden documents illustrate a crucial fact: "Israeli aggression would be impossible without the constant, lavish support and protection of the US government, which is anything but a neutral, peace-brokering party in these attacks. And the relationship between the NSA and its partners on the one hand, and the Israeli spying agency on the other, is at the center of that enabling," Greenwald writes.

COMMENTS by President Barack Obama about the soldier accused of the biggest intelligence leak in US history were prejudicial and sought to harm the suspect's defence, a court has heard. Other top figures, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and retired admiral Mike Mullen, the former head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, also made ill-advised remarks about Private Bradley Manning, it was alleged in court on Tuesday by civilian lawyer David Coombs.

According to a controversial leak provided by WikiLeaks - and picked up in stories by news outlets from AP to NPR - Barack Obama s administration was politely advised by the Japanese in September 2009 that there would be no need for the presidential entourage to go to Hiroshima, apparently to apologize for the dropping of the atomic bomb 64 years earlier.

Groups representing atomic bomb survivors and opponents of nuclear weapons have criticized the government following the release of a secret U.S. cable indicating that Japan's Foreign Ministry discouraged U.S. President Barack Obama from visiting Hiroshima.

It is only one sentence from a lengthy conversation, but it says volumes about how the Obama Administration escalated US intervention in Afghanistan. And it says just as much about the man behind that escalation: not President Barack Obama but General David Petraeus.

Recently published Wikileaks documents expose the failure of President Obama's counter-terrorism policy. While reaffirming a 1,400 years old Muslim track record, the documents refute Obama's fundamental assumptions, which have shaped his counter-terrorism policy: that the Palestinian issue is a root cause of Middle East turbulence and anti-Western terrorism; that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are allies of the US; that there is no Islamic terrorism since Islam promotes peace and not terrorism; that there is no Jihadist terrorism since Jihad is a process which purifies the soul; that there is no global terrorism; that Islamic terrorists represent a Muslim minority which rejects modernity and that Islam has always been part of the American story.