cablegate.wikileaks.org<\/a>.<\/p>\nUS 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
US diplomats described Karzai in the documents as “driven by paranoia” and “conspiracy theories”.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“There is nothing new or deserving a comment in these publication,” Kremlin spokeswoman Yulia Timakov was quoted as saying by Russian news agencies.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
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.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Governments worldwide scrambled Monday to head off damage from a flood of leaked US diplomatic cables revealing secret details and indiscreet asides on some of the world's most tense international crises.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16921"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16921"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16921\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}