Wikileaks website on Sunday evening released over 250.000 US diplomatic documents of various level of secrecy, which imply scandalous information.
Who or What is Wikileaks?
Wikileaks is an international social network project. Wikileaks is an international non-profit media organization that publishes submissions of otherwise unavailable documents from anonymous sources and leaks. Its website, launched in 2006, is run by The Sunshine Press. Within a year of its launch, the site claimed a database that had grown to more than 1.2 million documents. The organization has described itself as having been founded by Chinese dissidents, as well as journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the United States, Taiwan, Europe, Australia, and South Africa. Newspaper articles and The New Yorker magazine (7 June 2010) describe Julian Assange, an Australian Internet activist, as its director. Wikileaks has won a number of awards, including the 2008 Economist magazine New Media Award. In June 2009, Wikileaks and Julian Assange won Amnesty International’s UK Media Award (in the category "New Media") for the 2008 publication of "Kenya: The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances", a report by the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights about police killings in Kenya. In May 2010, the New York Daily News listed Wikileaks first in a ranking of "websites that could totally change the news". In April 2010, Wikileaks posted video from a 2007 incident in which Iraqi civilians were killed by U.S. forces, on a website called Collateral Murder. In July of the same year, Wikileaks released Afghan War Diary, a compilation of more than 76,900 documents about the War in Afghanistan not previously available for public review. In October, the group released a package of almost 400,000 documents called the Iraq War Logs in coordination with major commercial media organizations. Angry Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was blaming a conspiracy smear campaign for the rape charge that was filed against him on August 20, then quickly dropped, by Swedish authorities. Assange himself said that this cannot be true and that this is being set up as a response to his publications on Wikileaks. On the next day the accusations were dropped. But 10 days later the Swedish authorities launched a case against him. Assange continues insisting that all this is organized by the US intelligence and secret services as well as Pentagon. Nevertheless, a week ago there was information that Wikileaks is leaving Sweden. According to rumors, the founders of the website didn’t even bid farewell to the managers of the server. The owner of the server Mikail Viborg submitted the final bill but it’s not paid yet. According to certain media sources the traffic of the website is currently being implemented in other countries, specifically in Holland and France. One of the providers of the Swedish internet stated that Wikileaks didn’t abandon Sweden. Only traffic was redistributed. Australia, the citizen of which is Assange, also undertook certain steps against Sweden. The media committee of Australia imposes the internet providers of the country block the access to Wikileaks webpages. It is assumed that the publicized documents are so important that the US State Department has directly requested them not to spread those by warning that the release or outflow of this information may seriously damage various lives, spoil relations of many countries with the US and its allies and become a reason of callback of ambassadors and diplomatic scandals. Despite these warnings publications appeared on Monday in major American, British, German, Spanish and French newspapers. Yesterday the leaders of almost all the countries made statements and expressed opinions about the publications of Wikileaks. Yesterday in the afternoon the US Embassy in Armenia released a statement regarding Wikileaks, which reads, “Regarding recent news reports concerning documents purportedly downloaded from U.S. Defense Department computers, the Department of State does not comment on materials, including classified documents, which may have been leaked. Any unauthorized disclosure of classified information by Wikileaks has harmful implications for the lives of identified individuals that are jeopardized, but also for global engagement among and between nations. Given its potential impact, we condemn such unauthorized disclosures and are taking every step to prevent future security breaches. While we cannot speak to the authenticity of any documents provided to the press, we can speak to the diplomatic community’s practice of cable writing. Cables reflect the internal day to day analysis and candid assessments that feed the governments’ foreign relations deliberations. These cables are often preliminary and incomplete expressions of foreign policy, and they should not be seen as having standing on their own or as representing U.S. policy. The leader of Iran Mahmud Ahmadenijad has lashed out against the whistle blower website’s release of thousands of diplomatic cables and classified documents, calling it all a secret ploy by the United States. “The U.S. administration released the documents and based on them they pass judgment," Ahmadinejad told the state-run Press TV. “The files "have no legal value" and "no one would waste their time reviewing them,” he said. Ahmadinejad also said Iran considers all regional countries its friend and brother and such mischievous acts will never affect Iran’s ties with them. Some 250 Iranian and foreign journalists are covering Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s press conference. "The material was not leaked but rather released in an organized way," Mr. Ahmadinejad said, adding that the Wikileaks "game" is "not worth commenting upon and that no one would waste their time reviewing them." The documents publicized by Wikileaks have surprised Azerbaijan as well. Chief of the International Affairs Department of the Presidential Administration of Azerbaijan, made a statements attempting to refute the reports of the Wikileaks about what the Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev said about the presidents of the neighboring countries. "Over the last couple of days “Wikileaks” has been publishing some information. I don’t want to say anything about their content, yet. However some of the publicized information surprised me. It surprised me because there were some statements in these documents concerning the president of Azerbaijan during his meetings,” said Novruz Mammadov in an interview. Novruz Mammadov said he participated in all the meetings of the president Aliyev with foreign dignitaries. “I also took part in the meetings with William Burns. I want to note that this meeting was dedicated to two topics: Armenian-Azerbaijani relations and the Karabakh conflict, and secondly, the US-Azerbaijani relations. I want to say that during these kinds of talks the president does not speak of any third parties, or countries. This was also the case in the meeting with William Burns. No other topics or countries were spoken of, apart from those two.” “It seems as though the correspondent only finds out about what he is speaking of later. It is clear that some powers want to see some government ties severed. This is a dangerous tendency. Our relations with our neighbors are well-known to all, and the steps we have undertaken to build cooperation with those countries are also obvious to everybody. There is no need to prove any of this. Our brothers in Turkey have been our close allies especially in this last decade, and our president Ilham Aliyev has played a big role in this. It is possible that the names of the authors of some documents have been changed in order to give them more importance – for example to promote the dialogue from the level of Foreign Affairs office to a higher ranking one. However it is also important to consider the fact that the Wikileaks reports came up on the eve of the OSCE summit in Astana.” Many Armenian political party leaders also commented on the documents released by Wikileaks. For example, in the opinion of the Heritage faction head Stepan Safaryan on the threshold of the OSCE summit the information publicized by Wikileaks may have a serious influence on the resolution of the NKR conflict and in terms of practicing pressure on the parties of negotiation. “After this outflow of information the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan cannot oppose and will perhaps agree to whatever is imposed to them,” thinks Safaryan. As of the assumption that Armenia has sold weapon to Iran Safaryan said that this may be a warning from the US addressed to Armenia. “It is evident that they are showing a yellow card to the government. The same relates to the government of Azerbaijan. So there are clear messages connected with all the countries and there are also calculations how the leaders of these countries will behave after the outflow if this information.” In the meantime, he has the opinion that the US-Armenia relations will even become closer instead of deteriorating because after that the Armenian government won’t be able to resist to anything and will agree to whatever is offered. By the way, according to Safaryan all the countries that were mentioned by the Wikileaks secret documents are the ones that at some point have caused certain obstacles for the US foreign policy – Azerbaijan, Russia, Iran, Germany, Italy, etc. “These are the countries that at certain point have hindered the implementation of the US projects – from the energy sector till conflict resolution.” Thus, according to him the outflow of these documents is no accident for sure and will change the quality of relations among the states and in certain cases the Russia-Azerbaijan relations will be deteriorated. Secret documents concerning Armenia published by Wikileaks should be studied thoroughly to understand what is true and what is not”, Aram Safaryan, Secretary of the Prosperous Armenia parliamentary faction, said. “I do not believe in certification of facts. I think that content of the documents on the whole contradicts public foreign policy,” Safaryan said. He ruled out possibility of Armenia’s selling weapons to Iran. “Our policy speaks for itself, it is impossible,” he added by excluding the possibility of illegal weapon sale to Iran on part of Armenia. “The politics of our country prompts that this cannot be possible.” The RPA spokesman Edward Sharmazanov is rest assured that the confidential documents released on "Wikileaks" will put Ilham Aliyev in a more difficult situation in terms of the negotiations. "The official Baku has already denied that Aliyev said such things during his meeting with US officials, while the official Washington has not denied the existence of those documents and has simply regretted that they have turned into a topic for public discourse." Do you exclude the release of conversations between Armenian authorities and those of other countries that may come as a surprise to Armenians? In response, Sharmazanov said: "I never make predictions." “Our relations with Iran in front of the eyes of the international community and we are interested in the good relations between the US and Iran because it reflects the interests of our country,” he said. Director of the ARF Bureau for the Armenian Cause and Political Affairs Kiro Manoyan says the release of the documents on Wikileaks will complicate Azerbaijan’s relations with Iran and Turkey. In general, Mr. Manoyan doesn’t understand Wikileaks’s claims that it supports open politics. "This is not an open, but a stripped policy." Mr. Manoyan is waiting for the release of new documents. "I don’t exclude the release of documents in which Armenia’s authorities have made pledges, but I think the pressures against the authorities will be released." “Those documents were merely stolen from the State Department. It means this is not the initiative of the State Department. As of the letter then I should say no weapon was sold to Iran by Armenia but the US side has tried to prevent the possibility of this via its threats. If this had really had happened than the US would have already had applied its sanctions against Armenia. It means that through the threat they have tried to prevent what be undesirable. The American side has received the permission to periodically conduct inspections on the Armenian-Iranian border checkpoint.”