In an unprecedented move, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called together America’s ambassadors, consuls general, and special envoys to the State Department’s “Foggy Bottom” headquarters in Washington for what was billed as a chance for Clinton to discuss personally with the diplomats America’s “foreign policy priorities” for 2011. As we are already into the second month of 2011, the “cover story” immediately called into question the true nature of the reason for the meeting.

After the last U.S. diplomats trickled into Washington from distant foreign diplomatic posts – from Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso and Koror, Palau to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan to Paramaribo, Suriname – Clinton met with the career foreign service and politically-appointed  envoys and told them some sobering news: the reason for the face-to-face meeting was primarily the result of a major compromise of secure U.S. diplomatic communications channels initiated by both outsiders and insiders who have decided to engage in a bit of “creative revolution,” mirroring to a lesser degree but with potentially as great an impact, the recent mass popular events on the streets of Tunis and Cairo.

The United States, the first nation in the world to develop and field operational cyber- and information-warfare systems, is now being hoisted on its own petard. The recent disclosures via WikiLeaks of over 250,000 classified State Department cables, with the highest classification being “Secret,” has sent shock waves through the diplomatic community. And Mrs. Clinton warned the gathered U.S. diplomats that even with secure and encrypted links from their posts to “main State,” they could no longer be assured that sensitive communications could remain secure.

Other means of communicating sensitive information from overseas posts to Washington were apparently discussed in closed-door sessions from February 7 to 9. According to U.S. government insiders, it was not the WikiLeaks revelations that prompted Clinton to sound a general alarm, but the possibility that there could be future leaks directly to the Internet of higher classification State Department cables, Top Secret and higher Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) traffic, including details of CIA operations at U.S. embassies and consulates.

There is a belief by some within the State Department and Pentagon that the previous leaks of the Secret classification and below cables from the Defense Department’s Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet) is only the beginning of a trend of unauthorized disclosures by individuals within the U.S. government to activist groups. The FBI has launched a major criminal investigation of not only WikiLeaks and U.S. Army Private First Class Bradley Manning, jailed in Quantico, Virginia without charges, but another “hacktivist” group known merely as “Anonymous.”

In fact, it is the threat of future leaks and not past leaks of U.S. classified information that has the U.S. intelligence, military, and law enforcement communities most concerned. Working with police agencies in the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, the FBI has already started to target suspected Anonymous members in California and Nevada. But there is much more to the FBI’s assault on Anonymous and others linked to WikiLeaks.  The FBI and the Justice Department clearly want to stem the future unauthorized release of classified information from America’s defense, intelligence, and foreign affairs networks. Thus, unnamed State Department officials have already been quoted in the media as stating that while the past WikiLeaks revelations constituted “bad public relations,” they have had little impact on U.S. foreign policy or American diplomacy. The future, however, is another story.

So desperate to fight back against the loose-knit network of computer hackers, the FBI engaged the services of three private firms, HB Gary Federal, Palantir and Berico, to conduct an offensive information warfare campaign against WikiLeaks and its supporters, certain journalists, and Anonymous. The official reason for the operation was to stymie and bring to justice Anonymous for its distributed denial of service attacks on financial services companies that cut-off online donation services for WikiLeaks. The firms targeted include PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, and Swiss bank Post-Finance, as well as the Bank of America, from which WikiLeaks claimed to have obtained sensitive documents. It was later revealed that the US Chamber of Commerce had a relationship with the same three companies in targeting anti-Chamber groups.

It is the penetration of the State Department's communications networks by Anonymous – the group that allegedly first made the cables available to WikiLeaks — that prompted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to call together all of America's envoys for the diplomatic "all hands" meeting.  In addition, the future potential fallout from larger and more damaging leaks of classified cables coupled with leaked and hacked off-shore banking data and e-mails was also discussed with the envoys. The fallout includes the spread of Tunisia- and Egypt-style popular revolts around the world and the need by the diplomats to be prepared for a surge in anti-American attitudes globally.

The U.S. military-intelligence-diplomatic-corporate complex realizes that continued exposure of its secret documents jeopardizes the global hegemony the United States has created. The fall of U.S. and Western client-dictators in Tunisia and Egypt and an Anonymous campaign against the dictatorship of Yemen’s president Ali Abdullah Saleh has the FBI and Justice Department scrambling to protect America’s steadily faltering status as the world’s “only superpower” by engaging in an all-out war, in some cases using illegal methods, against a stealth-like “enemy” of high-tech hackers and activists. With the Middle East’s “Pax Americana-Judaica-Egyptica” regional construct losing Egypt as one of its three main pillars, the power structures in Washington and Tel Aviv are nervous and capable of doing anything to preserve the status quo.

Secretary of State Clinton clearly sees the writing on the wall as the American empire begins to fray at the edges. The arrest of Raymond Davis, who was working in Lahore, Pakistan, ostensibly assigned to the U.S. Consulate under the non-official cover of being an employee of Hyperion Protective Consultants LLC, was arrested by Pakistani authorities in Lahore for shooting to death two Pakistani men. The State Department is claiming that Davis enjoys diplomatic immunity and must be released to U.S. custody. However, Pakistan believes it has nabbed a CIA spy and the refusal of Pakistan to release Davis has set off a major diplomatic row between Islamabad and Washington.

To the north of Pakistan, Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai is claiming that the United States wants to establish permanent military bases in the country. Egypt’s revolution is stirring up popular opposition to what is perceived by many Iraqis as a corrupt U.S. puppet government in Baghdad led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. U.S.- trained Iraqi police have responded to protests over the poor Iraqi economy and infrastructure by using non-lethal and lethal weapons against demonstrators. Most of Latin America has broken their political and economic chains to Washington and many Latin American nations have thumbed their noses at Washington and Tel Aviv by recognizing Palestine within its pre-1967 borders.

In short, America’s dominance over world affairs is drawing to a close, aided by a major leak of diplomatic and military documents from heretofore secure U.S. government communication channels. Mrs. Clinton and her senior staff let the assembled diplomats in Washington know, in no uncertain terms, that heavy seas lie ahead. In what the Secretary of State has already termed a “perfect storm” arising from events in North Africa and the Middle East.