WikiLeaks causes worldwide issues
Despite diplomats’ red faces, officials were quick to criticise the release of the confidential missives, most of which date from 2007 to February this year, and to stress that the leaks would not harm relations.
Highlights include a call by Saudi King Abdullah for the US to “cut off the head” of the Iranian snake over its nuclear programme and leaked memos about a Chinese government bid to hack into Google.
The more than 200,000 cables were given to journalists from five Western publications several weeks ago and are being released on the web in stages over the coming weeks, with many governments still braced for the worst.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose policies are the subject of many of the memos, dismissed them as “worthless” and “mischief” which would not affect Tehran’s relations with its Arab neighbours.
Britain said it would continue to work closely with the US despite the upcoming release of unflattering US memos about Prime Minister David Cameron.
British newspaper The Guardian, one of those media selected to preview the documents, said that upcoming memos give “embarrassing” US views of Cameron and “weak” ex-leader Gordon Brown.
Cameron’s spokesman said leaks were “inhibiting the conduct of governments.”
WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange described the release as a “diplomatic history of the United States” covering “every major issue.”
Despite a cyber attack that took down its main website Sunday, WikiLeaks started publishing 251,287 cables — 15,652 of which are classified “secret” — from 274 US embassies around the world on cablegate.wikileaks.org.
US officials had raced to contain the diplomatic fallout by warning more than a dozen governments of the impending leaks, but Washington refused to negotiate with WikiLeaks, saying it had obtained the cables illegally.
Afghanistan insisted its relations with the US would not be affected by cables portraying President Hamid Karzai as weak and paranoid, and his brother as a corrupt drugs baron.
“We don’t see anything substantive in the document that will strain the relationship,” Karzai’s spokesman Waheed Omer told reporters, adding: “We’ll wait and see what else comes out before making further comment.”
US diplomats described Karzai in the documents as “driven by paranoia” and “conspiracy theories”.
Russia likewise tried to play down US diplomats’ reported assessment of the country as “a virtual mafia state” that is ruled by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and not the president.
“There is nothing new or deserving a comment in these publication,” Kremlin spokeswoman Yulia Timakov was quoted as saying by Russian news agencies.
“Our own diplomats are sometimes just as open in their own private messages to each other,” an unidentified Kremlin official told the Kommersant business daily.
Israel emerged as a surprising beneficiary, with senior officials saying that they vindicated the Jewish state’s position as they exposed widespread Arab concern over Iran’s nuclear programme.
“I don’t think Israel was harmed at all,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, although one document quoted him as saying while in opposition in 2007 that he would “never allow a single Palestinian refugee to return to Israel.”
And in the US itself, the government ordered a sweeping review of information security across federal agencies, saying the inflammatory and sometimes embarrassing revelations had damaged national security.
“Any failure by agencies to safeguard classified information… is unacceptable and will not be tolerated,” the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Jacob Lew, said.
The Guardian said all five papers had decided “neither to ‘dump’ the entire dataset into the public domain, nor to publish names that would endanger innocent individuals.”
US officials have not confirmed the source of the leaks, but suspicion has fallen on Bradley Manning, a former army intelligence analyst arrested after the release of a video showing air strikes that killed reporters in Iraq.
WikiLeaks argues that the first two document dumps — nearly 500,000 US military incident reports from 2004 to 2009 — shed light on abuses during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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