So no WIKILEAKS will not be disclosing the Goverment's sordid Maddiegate.
WikiLeaks US embassy cables: live updates
The first batch of leaked US embassy cables reveal a desire by Saudi Arabia and other Arab states to attack Iran, and US espionage against the UN. Follow all the reaction and diplomatic fallout
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12.03pm: There's been lots of reaction all over the world so it's high time for a summary.
• Senior US politicians have launched a series of scathing attacks against WikiLeaks. US Republican senator Peter King, chair of the House homeland security committee said Wikileaks should be treated as a terrorist organisation (7.15am). Senator Joseph Lieberman, chair of the Senate homeland security committee, said the leaks had put lives at risk.• Washington's new ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter, offered a semi-apology for the cables in a newspaper article (7.15am). "Of course, even a solid relationship will have its ups and downs," he wrote.
• The UN pointedly reminded the US that the UN is supposed to be treated as inviolable, after the cables showed diplomats had been ordered to spy on the UN leadership (7.23am). Britain's former ambassador to the US, Sir Christopher Meyer, said it was wrong to interpret the cables as an order to spy, a point challenged by Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger (8.30am).
• Governments across the world have been taking action to contain the damage. Australia has launched an investigation on WikiLeaks, China has ordered local media not to report the revelations, and Downing Street says the leaks have damaged national security.
• The Iranian media has glossed over the disclosure that several Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, wanted to attack Tehran. It has focused instead on the suggestion of a US role in the post-election unrest last year. Saudi Arabia has stayed quiet.
• Silvio Berlusconi laughed when he was told about the cables (9.09am).
11.39am: Downing Street has condemned WikiLeaks in a briefing with lobby journalists. It also said it expects several more days of disclosures, according to a tweet from the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg.
Downing Street said the leaks had been damaging to national security, she told BBC News.11.34am: The Chinese media has been banned from reporting the revelations, according to Al Jazeera English's correspondent in China, Melissa Chan.
11.28am: Der Speigel, one of the five media organisations including the Guardian to have had access to the cables, has a new roundup of the reaction.
It says one of the few countries which may stand to benefit from the revelations appears to be Israel. "These (disclosures) don't hurt Israel at all -- perhaps the opposite," Giora Eiland, a former national security adviser to ex-prime ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, told Israeli radio. "If there is something on the Iranian issue that, in my opinion, happens to help Israel, it is that these leaks show that Arab countries like Saudi Arabia are far more interested in Iran than they are in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."It also quotes US senator Joseph Lieberman, chair of the Senate homeland security committee, calling for WikiLeaks to be shut down.
By disseminating these materials, WikiLeaks is putting at risk the lives and the freedom of countless Americans and non-Americans around the world. It is an outrageous, reckless and despicable action.
11.04am: Former Pakistani spy chief Hameed Gul has seized on the cables indicating a US desire to block Pakistan's nuclear programme, writes Saeed Shah.
Gul condemned as a fraud the first batch of WikiLeaks documents earlier this year, which reported that he remained active in directing the Afghan insurgency.
But speaking to the Guardian about the latest leak, he said: "This confirms that the Americans haven't given up their pursuit, to try to snatch Pakistan's nuclear capability."
Many in Pakistan sincerely believe that Washington's real plan for Pakistan is to somehow take away its nuclear weapons. The WikiLeaks cable from the then US ambassador in Islamabad, sent only last year, played directly to those fears.
"If the local media got word of the fuel removal, they certainly would portray it as the United States taking Pakistan's nuclear weapons," US ambassador Anne Patterson said in one cable, according to the New York Times.
10.46am: So far the media in Iran has glossed over Arab aggression towards Tehran and focused instead on what the cables suggest about America's role in the post-election unrest last year, writes Saeed Kamali Dehghan.
An Iran watcher in Turkmenistan sent out a cable in June 2009, at the height of the post election turmoil, in which a prominent Iranian source is quoted condemning Ahmadinejad's victory as a "coup d'etat" engineered by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
The source says opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi gained 26 million votes, 61% of the total, against "a maximum of 4 to 5 million" for Ahmadinejad.Alef.ir, a website affiliated to the Revolutionary Guards, said the cables showed "America does not trust its agents in Iran".In another article Alef.ir talks of "America's post-election co-operation with Iranian post election rioters"."The interesting parts of this documents are those which show that the rioters in the aftermath of the election are linked to the American diplomatic service and they have been consulted by them. For example an American contact in Ashghabad said: "If they are mobilised and if the protesters 'shut down the country' and don't go to work then the regime is forced to think again."
10.28am: The Saudi Gazette reports the leaks without mentioning Saudi Arabia's desire to attack Iran.
There has been no word from Saudi officials on the disclosures.
10.18am: Like the Saudis, Tony Blair is also keen to use force to end Iran's nuclear ambitions. Blair's former spin doctor, Alastair Campbell, says the cables could open the way for a tougher stance against Tehran. In a new blogpost he writes:
I was left with the impression that anyone in the US system pushing for a hardening of the policy position vis a vis Iran would be able to build a lot of support for such a move.Fascinating too the view of Israeli defence minister Ehud Barak last year that if Iran's nuclear ambitions were not checked soon, they would be developed to such an extent that a military response would be impossible because of collateral damage. Part of me thought that was just the Israelis doing their usual thing of trying to push the US harder than they want to go. Another part of me thought 'holy shit!'
10.01am: The leak of the cables has divided newspaper commentators in the UK.
Writing in the Times Libby Purves says she is on the side "horrified Washington diplomats" [paywall].
The loose-lipped internet has done the world many favours, but there is a strong possibility that this latest release will do it none at all. If diplomats no longer dare to send undiplomatic, unvarnished truths to their governments on encrypted cables, the world's peace will be in more danger. Not less.
The Telegraph devotes lots of space to the revelations, but its deputy editor Benedict Brogan says they contain no surprises.
Effective diplomacy involves all the transgressions Wikileaks is exposing. Embarrassment is just the consequence of exposure. Perhaps the more sophisticated response is to stand firm, to assume a degree of worldiness from those involved in the world of diplomacy (who will for example enjoy seeing the US Secretary of State squirming about her UN spying operation, but only because theirs hasn't been exposed as well), and to accept that occasional embarrassment is an occupational hazard in a 21st century marked by vast quantities of information circulating in all too accessible digital form.
But John Kampfner, chief executive of the Index on Censorship, provides a stout defence of free speech and WikiLeaks in the Independent.
The mainstream media in the UK are serial offenders. Newspapers that have no compunction about invasions of privacy or about shrill comment devote precious little time or energy to challenging authority through rigorous investigative journalism. Most political "scoops" are merely stories planted by politicians on pliant lobby hacks. Editors and senior journalists are habitually invited into MI5 and MI6 for briefings. These are affable occasions, often over lunch. There is no harm in that. What tends to happen, however, is that journalists are tickled pink by the attention. They love being invited to the "D-notice" committee to discuss how they can all behave "responsibly". It makes them feel important. Many suspend their critical faculties as a result.
Far from being "feral beasts", to use Tony Blair's phrase, the British media are overly respectful of authority. Newspapers and broadcasters tend to be suspicious of those who do not play the game, people like Mr Assange who are awkward outsiders. Some editors are quite happy to help the authorities in their denunciations of him, partly out of revenge for not being in his inner circle.
Rather than throwing stones, newspapers should be asking themselves why they did not have the wherewithal to hold truth to power.
9.31am: Don't confuse WikiLeaks and Wikipedia. Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, strongly condemned the whistle-blowing site for releasing the cables.
In a tweet yesterday he wrote: "@wikileaks Speaking as Wikipedia's co-founder, I consider you enemies of the U.S.--not just the government, but the people."9.21am: Establishment scorn for the leaks is summed up in a post on the Economist's Diplomacy in America blog. It dismisses them as gossip.
At this point, what WikiLeaks is doing seems like tattling: telling Sally what Billy said to Jane. It's sometimes possible that Sally really ought to know what Billy said to Jane, if Billy were engaged in some morally culpable deception. But in general, we frown on gossips. If there's something particularly damning in the diplomatic cables WikiLeaks has gotten a hold of, the organisation should bring together a board of experienced people with different perspectives to review the merits of releasing that particular cable. But simply grabbing as many diplomatic cables as you can get your hands on and making them public is not a socially worthy activity.
9.09am: Silvio Berlusconi laughed when told the content of the cables, according to Italian newspaper reports this morning, doubtless based
on a briefing by senior government officials, writes our Rome correspondent John Hooper.
on a briefing by senior government officials, writes our Rome correspondent John Hooper.
The cables include a a senior US diplomat's assessment of the billionaire politician as "feckless, vain and ineffective as a modern European leader".
Even if Berlusconi did not take the leak seriously, others in Italy did. The prosecution service in Rome said it would be looking at the documents to see if their publication violated Italian official secrecy legislation.
The announcement followed a suggestion from Berlusconi's foreign minister, Franco Frattini, that the judiciary should take action.
Italy was perhaps the country in which the impending release of the cables was viewed with greatest – or, at least, most obvious – alarm by the government. Frattini described the leaks as "the 9/11 of world diplomacy". The head of his party in the lower house of parliament, Fabrizio Cicchitto, said the documents were representative of a new
form of "media terrorism".
8.59am: "It's a bombshell," says the historian Timothy Garton-Ash in a Guardian video on the released of the cables. "It's the most extraordinary window into how American diplomacy works."
If you are new to the story the video provides an excellent primer on how the cables were leaked, how the Guardian handled them, and what the first batch of leaks contain.
