Thursday, December 2, 2010

Hillary Clinton:India as a "self-appointed front-runner UNSC seat"

US Embassy in Colombo alerted the Sri Lankan:
US Embassy in Colombo alerted the Sri Lankan government over the dossiers expected to be released by the whistle blowing website ‘Wikileaks’, Sri Lanka said that it “does not wish to comment publicly on privileged communications of a foreign government. However, Colombo said, if the contents reveal any material relevant to Sri Lanka’s interests, these will be taken up through diplomatic channels.

A press statement today by the External Affairs Ministry of Sri Lankan said that they are in the process of obtaining the contents of the documents allegedly pertaining to Sri Lanka put in the public domain by Wikileaks.

Reports say that the new documents released by Wikileaks suggests that United States wanted its diplomats at the UN headquarters to find what the global agency was thinking about the human rights situation in Sri Lanka.

The Guardian newspaper published the secret cables sent to the US diplomats in which enquires were made about Sri Lanka.

One such cable was dispatched in July, 2009; two months after Lankan government troops defeated the LTTE amid allegations of human rights violations by both sides.

US talks Julia Gillard Governent:
US ambassador to Australia Jeffrey Bleich said he has been talking to the Julia Gillard government over the issue.Bleich described the release of leaked diplomatic cables on the website founded by Australian Julian Assange as "reprehensible action," according to a report in the AAP.His comments came as global police agency Interpol issued an arrest warrants for Assange on a rape charge originating from Sweden.Bleich said the US was "aware of documents that are purported to have come from Canberra that are purported to relate to Australia but we are not going to validate those"."We are talking together about ways to ensure that our partners and our sources throughout the world are not put in jeopardy or not harm as a product of them working to promote a safer world," he said.
Bleich said the US embassy had now briefed Attorney-General Robert McClelland, Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd, Defence Minister Stephen Smith and the secretary of the Defence Department. "Based on those conversation we have effectively calibrated what the risks are and tried to take people out of harm's way," he said.

"We have done the best we can to mitigate those risks and we hope that it will not result in harm to any people".
The ambassador said he had not discussed the possible action that could be taken against Assange. "With respect of people who engaged in illegal action that is for the law enforcement authorities to evaluate and for them to look at what are prosecutable offences," he said."I love Australia and I don't think there is anything I have put in a cable to cause me heartburn", the ambassador said.

Hillary Clinton:India as a "self-appointed front-runner"

Treading cautiously on the Wikileaks issue, government on Wednesday said it will react only after complete facts come out."Let the facts come out, then we will react," External Affairs Minister S M Krishna told reporters outside Parliament House.He was asked to comment on the cable communication between the US Embassy in New Delhi and Washington leaked by whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks.Krishna's deputy in the Ministry Preneet Kaur had recently said, "This (wikileaks issue) is a very sensitive issue. We have good bilateral relations (with the US) and they had already warned us. So, I think it is not the right time to comment on it...."

As part of its massive leak of a quarter million classified documents of the US government, the website released a "secret" cable issued by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in which she has described India as a "self-appointed front-runner" for a permanent UNSC seat.Clinton had also directed US envoys to seek minute details about Indian diplomats stationed at the United Nations headquarters, according to classified documents released by WikiLeaks.

NATO condemns Wikileaks over tactical nukes:

NATO is condemning the release by Wikileaks of diplomatic cables detailing the deployment of US tactical nuclear weapons in Europe.NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu Tuesday described the leaks as ``illegal and dangerous.''

Leaked US diplomatic cables show that most of about 200 US tactical nuclear bombs still left in Europe are based in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Turkey. The four nations have been long suspected of hosting the warheads, but NATO and the governments involved have always refused to confirm this.The B-61 bombs, America's oldest nuclear weapons, date back to the 1950s.They were part of Washington's effort to demonstrate a commitment to NATO's defense during the Cold War by embedding such weapons near potential battlefields.

Japan joins criticism of WikiLeaks:

Japan, a key ally of the United States, tuesday joined criticism of the WikiLeaks website over its release of secret US diplomatic cables."It's just outrageous. It's a criminal act," Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara told a news conference when asked about his stance on the controversial website."It is a government that makes decisions on documents, no matter whether they are unscreened or classified," Maehara said.

"(WikiLeaks) steals them without asking and then makes them public. I cannot see any value in the act at all."

Top US diplomat Hillary Clinton on Monday accused WikiLeaks of an "attack" on the world as key American allies were left red-faced by the embarrassing revelations in the vast trove of leaked memos.According to confidential cables released by WikiLeaks, an unnamed Chinese official criticised Japan, which has been pressing North Korea on the fate of its citizens kidnapped in the 1970s and 1980s to train the regime's spies.

"Japan's obsession with the abductee issue reminded him of a Chinese expression for an individual who was too weak to make something work, yet strong enough to destroy it," the cable said.

Another cable was on a visit to China in April 2009 by then Japanese prime minister Taro Aso and his meeting with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao.Kunio Umeda, who at the time was a minister at the Japanese embassy in Beijing, reported that Wen was "tired and seemed under a lot of pressure" from dealing with the economic crisis.

WikiLeaks site came under renewed cyber attack Tuesday as a fresh batch of secret documents revealed the depth of American and British fears over Pakistan’s nuclear material falling into the wrong hands.

The latest disclosures show that even as President Barack Obama was offering assurances on Pakistan last year, senior U.S. diplomats and their U.K. counterparts fretted about a downward spiral that left the safety of a stockpile of bomb-grade uranium in doubt.

The Pakistan files were detailed in near-simultaneous reports released Tuesday afternoon by The New York Times, The Guardian and Germany’s Der Spiegel, which said the secret U.S. diplomatic dispatches “provide deep insights into the true extent of Pakistan’s volatility.”
Pakistan has confirmed to the BBC claims by Wikileaks that the US had wanted nuclear fuel taken away from a reactor, citing security fears.

Foreign ministry spokesman Abdul Basit said they rejected US attempts to have the highly enriched uranium removed.Pakistan's Army and ISI are covertly sponsoring four militant groups, including LeT, and will not abandon them for any amount of US money. As per the diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks,the American envoy to Islamabad Anne Patterson wrote this in a secret review of Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy in September 2009.

Patterson also underpinned the need for the US to reassess India's role in Afghanistan and the US policies towards India including the growing military relationship through sizeable conventional arms sales. She said all of this feeds Pakistani establishment paranoia and pushes them closer to both Afghan and Kashmir-focused terrorist groups while reinforcing doubts about US intentions.

The latest cache of WikiLeaks documents also lay bare the deep concern of the US over the safety of Pakistan's nuclear weapons and the fact that Islamabad is producing them at a faster rate than any other country in the world.

The US diplomatic cables also revealed that hundreds of millions of dollars in American military aid to Pakistan earmarked for fighting Islamist militants was not used for the desired purpose, but diverted to the government's coffers.

WikiLeaks has disclosed the conversation between US Senator John McCain and former president Pervez Musharraf in which latter talked about the possibility of the presence of Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri in Bajaur Agency.

The US embassy cables disclosed Musharraf as saying that although he had no direct evidence, he thought al Qaeda leaders Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri were hiding in Bajaur Agency, bordering Afghanistan's Konar province where US forces were not deployed.Musharraf, however, added that Mullah Omar was not present in Balochistan.

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