Hillary Clinton, other subjects of leak condemn WikiLeaks release
J. DAVID GOODMAN, NYT News Service, Nov 30, 2010, 01.40am IST
The United States, along with allies and adversaries around the world, reacted with disapproval on Monday to the first batch of disclosures from over 250,000 American cables, alternately discrediting the cables, brushing off revelations of problematic, embarrassing and impolitic comments and lashing out at Wikileaks, the Web site responsible for the release.
In Washington, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said at a news conference that the United States "deeply regrets" the "alleged leaks" of State Department cables, calling the release of any government information meant to be confidential an attack on both the United States and the entire international community.
At the same time, Mrs. Clinton stressed that diplomatic communications would not represent the perspective of the United States government. "Our official foreign policy is not set through these messages, but here in Washington," she said, just before beginning a trip to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Bahrain.
Mrs. Clinton questioned the motives of those behind the revelations, though without naming Wikileaks. Such disclosures "tear at the fabric" of the proper function of government, she said, "sabotaging peaceful relations between nations."
The Justice Department was conducting a criminal investigation into the leak, Attorney General Eric H. Holder said.
Iran provided the most strident response, accusing the United States of purposefully allowing the confidential diplomatic correspondence to become public. A number of cables discussed many nations' discomfort with Iran's nuclear program and revealed unvarnished opinions from world leaders on how to contain it, including by threat or force.
"Some part of the American government produced these documents," President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said at a news conference in Tehran on Monday. "We don't think this information was leaked. We think it was organized to be released on a regular basis and they are pursuing political goals."
Israel found some measure of vindication in the revelations of the breadth of the dismay with Iran. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the documents supported Israel's assessments of Iran. "There is not a huge gap between what we say behind closed doors and what we say openly," Mr. Netanyahu said, adding that such was not the case in other countries in the region.
Mr. Netanyahu refused to discuss a cable from the spring of 2009 that quoted Israel's defense minister, Ehud Barak, as telling visiting American officials that a strike on Iran's nuclear facilities was viable until the end of 2010, but after that "any military solution would result in unacceptable collateral damage." Mr. Netanyahu said only that there was no doubt that the Iranian program was "progressing all the time."
Iraq also responded to the release of the cables, some of which quoted King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia speaking scathingly about the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari called the leaks "unhelpful and untimely."
Mr. Zebari said the revelations could damage Mr. Maliki's efforts to bring together a government in Iraq, which has been stumbling along without one since divisive parliamentary elections in March. "We are going through a critical time, trying to form the long-awaited government," he said. "We hope it will not poison the overall atmosphere among Iraqi politicians and Iraqi leaders."
The cables also quoted King Abdullah criticizing the Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari, saying, "When the head is rotten, it affects the whole body." A center-right Pakistani newspaper critical of the Zardari government ran its story on the cables under the headline. "Zardari greatest obstacle to Pak progress: King Abdullah."
The government responded to the leaks with a tempered statement calling into question the veracity of the quoted cables. "We consider the extremely negative reports carried on Pakistan-Saudi relations attributed to Wikileaks as misleading and contrary to facts," the statement read. "Saudi Arabia, His Majesty King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, the Royal family and the people of Saudi Arabia have always stood by Pakistan."
A spokesman for President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan said the leaked cables, some of which expressed suspicions of Afghan government corruption, did not contain "anything substantive" and would not strain relations with the United States. Karl W. Eikenberry, the American ambassador, concurred. "Our shared goals do not change based on the release of purported diplomatic reporting from the past," he said in a statement. Generally, governments appeared at pains to condemn Wikileaks, deny certain reports, and avoid criticizing the American diplomatic corps, even when the cables show pressure or appear disrespectful.
The German foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, said relations between United States and Germany would continue to be close and friendly. In one of the cables, American officials sharply warned Germany in 2007 not to enforce arrest warrants for Central Intelligence Agency officers involved in a bungled operation in which an innocent German citizen with the same name as a suspected militant was mistakenly kidnapped and held for months in Afghanistan.
France said it would not react to cables in which President Nicolas Sarkozy was portrayed by an American diplomat as "thin-skinned and authoritarian," but an Élysée spokesman, François Baroin, said that he was "worried" by the disclosures and that France would stand with the United States in combating any more.
"We are very supportive of the American administration in its efforts to avoid what not only damages countries' authority and the quality of their services, but also endangers men and women who worked at the service of a country," said Mr. Baroin, who is also budget minister, on Europe 1 Radio today. "I always thought that a transparent society was a totalitarian society," he added, in a defense of secretive government communications.
In Russia, attention focused on the dozen or so cables that referred to the Kremlin, and Russian media repeatedly quoted them, for instance a description of President Dmitri A. Medvedev as "playing Robin" to Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin's "Batman."
The Kremlin's response was cool, even nonchalant. Early on Monday, Mr. Putin's spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, told the Interfax news service that he would respond to the cables only after seeing the original text, analyzing "the translation of certain words and expressions," and determining whether they actually referred to Mr. Putin.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey called entries in the leaked documents that related to Turkey "suspicious" and refused to comment on their content, according to the semi-official Anatolian News Agency.
"First, let's wait until Wikileaks spill all the beans, and then we would check how serious or unserious they are," Mr. Erdogan said. "Because the seriousness of Wikileaks is doubtful."
The United Nations declined to comment on the revelation of State Department directives that seemed to call on diplomats to gather personal information from foreign dignitaries, blurring the line between diplomacy and espionage.
At least one leader appeared to find the disclosures of unflattering diplomatic chatter about himself to be riotously funny. According to the Italian news agency ANSA, confidants of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said he "had a good laugh" as he read cables depicting him as a vain party animal.
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