TV News LIES

Federica Ferrari Bravo's story of meeting American diplomats in Rome seven years ago hardly reads like a James Bond spy novel or a Cold War tale of a brave informant sharing secrets to help the United States.

So it came as a something of a surprise to her to hear that in one of the 250,000-odd State Department cables released by the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks, she was deemed a source so sensitive U.S. officials were advised not to repeat her name.

"I don't think I said anything that would put me at risk," the Italian diplomat said.

There are similar stories involving other foreign lawmakers, diplomats and activists cited in the U.S. cables as sources to "strictly protect."

An Associated Press review of those sources raises doubts about the scope of the danger posed by WikiLeaks' disclosures and the Obama administration's angry claims, going back more than a year, that the revelations are life-threatening. U.S. examples have been strictly theoretical.

The question of whether the dire warnings are warranted or overblown became more acute with the recent release all of the 251,287 diplomatic memos WikiLeaks held.

Tens of thousands of confidential exchanges were dumped, emptying a trove of documents. They were released piecemeal since last year, initially with the cooperation of a select group of newspapers and magazines that blacked out some names and information before publishing the documents.

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