Great round-up of the reaction from the Arab press to WikiLeaks’ latest leak involving more than 250,000 cables sent by US embassies across the world, many relating to meetings between high-ranking American diplomats and Arab leaders.
The region’s press has been cautious in its coverage of the documents. Although many newspapers have reported the leak, most were hesitant in revealing details of claims made in the cables, preferring to discuss the themes of the leak in more general terms.
The leak of the US embassy cables by WikiLeaks is prompting new legislation in the US that would give employees in sensitive government jobs a way to report corruption or mismanagement.
The “whistleblower bill” will discourage leaks of classified information say its supporters. The bill is likely to pass through the approval process quickly, Yahoo News reports
Following WikiLeaks’ pulibcation of the Afghanistan war logs in July US senators Charles Schumer and Dianne Feinstein began hastily drafting an amendment to a current piece of legislation designed to protect journalists’ sources to ensure that WikiLeaks could not be included. The amendement declared that the bill would “only extend only to traditional news-gathering activities and not to websites that serve as a conduit for the mass dissemination of secret documents”.
According to WikiLeaks, there are more than 7,500 embassy cables due to be released as part of its latest classified documents leak that have the tag OPRC or “Public Relations and Correspondence”.
Only two with these tag have been published so far – one is a round-up of Turkish media reaction and the other a summary of media reaction to news issues in China, the US and Iran, both sent in 2009.
But it’ll be worth keeping an eye on future cables tagged OPRC for information about diplomats and country leaders’ media relations and communications.
Until the text of these cables is made public, we don’t know just what they contain and how relevant it might be to media outlets. But using the Guardian’s data store of the cables, it’s easy to find out how many cables have been sent by which embassies during the time period covered by the leak –
The US embassy in Ankara, Turkey is responsible for the largest number of cables tagged OPRC, 1,551, while the American Institute Taiwan in Taipei is behind 1,026 of them. Seventy-five embassies have sent 10 or fewer OPRC-tagged cables.
As WikiLeaks begins publication of more than 250,000 diplomatic cables sent by US embassies around the world, the Guardian, which is one of a group of media organisations publishing a selection (a few hundred) of the cables in partnership with the whistleblowing site, has produced the video below, explaining the significance of the leak:
Video: US embassy leaks: ‘The data deluge is coming …’ | World news | guardian.co.uk.