US rushes to contain new WikiLeaks damage

WASHINGTON, Nov 27, (AFP)The United States raced Friday to contain the fallout from the looming release of millions of sensitive diplomatic cables by the WikiLeaks, warning governments around the world of embarrassing disclosures.

US diplomats headed to foreign ministries in hopes of staving off anger if the whistleblower website puts out the leaked cables, which are internal messages that lack the niceties that diplomats generally voice in public.

The documents, the third tranche since WikiLeaks published 77,000 classified US files on the Afghan conflict in July, could affect some of the most sensitive US relationships including with Russia, Israel and Turkey.

“We are worried about additional documents coming out,” US ambassador to Baghdad James Jeffrey told reporters.

“WikiLeaks are an absolutely awful impediment to my business, which is to be able to have discussions in confidence with people. I do not understand the motivation for releasing these documents.

“They will not help, they will simply hurt our ability to do our work here.” Russia’s respected Kommersant newspaper said that the documents included US diplomats’ conversations with Russian politicians and “unflattering” assessments of some of them.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that his office has not been officially informed by Washington about the impending file dump, which he blamed on “little thieves running around the Internet.”

“They steal secret documents there, but we do not get the same thing here — or at least not to the same extent,” the Interfax news agency quoted Lavrov as saying.

State Department spokesman Philip Crowley told AFP on Wednesday that the United States was “gearing up for the worst-case scenario” and was informing governments around the world about the possible release of documents.

WikiLeaks has not specified what the tranche of documents pertains to or when it would be released, but Pentagon spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan said US officials were expecting a possible release of documents “late this week or early next week.”

The website has so far only said there would be “seven times” as many secret documents as the 400,000 it posted in Iraq war logs published last month.

Among the countries alerted so far about the document release are Britain, Denmark, Israel, Norway and Turkey, officials and reports said.

Washington contacted authorities in Ankara to give “us information on the issue, just as other countries have been informed,” a senior Turkish diplomat told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.

According to Turkish media reports, the planned release includes papers suggesting that Turkey helped Al-Qaeda militants in Iraq, and that the United States helped Iraq-based separatist Kurdish rebels fighting against Turkey.

Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Turkey did not know what kind of papers the files contained.

“This is speculation,” he said on CNN Turk television. “But as a principle, tolerating or ignoring any terrorist action that originates in Turkey and targets a neighboring country, particularly Iraq, is out of the question.” The Italian government said it was alarmed about “possible negative repercussions for Italy” from the release of the US diplomatic cables.

“I have been informed that the person responsible for leaking the information has been arrested,” Foreign Minister Franco Frattini told parliament.

US officials have not confirmed the source of the leaked documents, but suspicion has fallen on Bradley Manning, a former army intelligence agent. He was arrested in May after the release of a video showing air strikes that killed civilian reporters in Baghdad.

Israel has also been warned of potential embarrassment from the latest release, which could include confidential reports from the US embassy in Tel Aviv, Haaretz newspaper said on Thursday, citing a senior Israeli official.

Officials in London, Stockholm and Copenhagen were also all either briefed or contacted by US missions about the impending release, officials in each country said.

WikiLeaks argues the first two document dumps — US soldier-authored incident reports from 2004 to 2009 — has shed light on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, including allegations of torture by Iraqi forces and reports that suggested 15,000 additional civilian deaths in Iraq.

Its announcement on Monday came just days after Sweden issued an international arrest warrant for the website’s head, Julian Assange of Australia, wanted for questioning in connection with allegations of rape and sexual molestation.