WikiLeaks Begins Releasing Leaked Saudi Arabia Cables

http://time.com/3928584/wikileaks-saudi-arabia-cables/

by adamnemecek • 11 years ago

109 62 11 years ago

https://wikileaks.org/saudi-cables/press is a better link? Actual cables in Arabic at https://wikileaks.org/saudi-cables/search

coldcode• 11 years ago

Sadly I can't read Arabic, hopefully there will be some translations. This can only be interesting reads.

skeuomorf3• 11 years ago

Well, I read all the documents in the first page here https://wikileaks.org/saudi-cables/search and sadly didn't find anything interesting but there are thousands of documents so, hopefully someone will parse them and report on the interesting ones.

Aside - might be interesting to some: The OCR on these documents is completely botched, I found a couple of words that were right but that's it.

anigbrowl2• 11 years ago

Thanks for noticing that. I cut and pasted the Arabic text in google translate and the results were just complete nonsense. I suppose much less effort has been spent on optimizing OCR for non-Latin chracter sets.

caminante• 11 years ago

I found it notable that this leak didn't directly flow from Bradley or Snowden:

  "The group did not attribute the documents to a source directly. The press 
  release did note that the Saudi Foreign Ministry acknowledged a computer 
  network breach in May, and a group called the Yemeni Cyber Army afterward 
  began releasing “sample” classified material to various websites."

ZanyProgrammer• 11 years ago

You mean Chelsea.

navait• 11 years ago

Yeah, somehow I suspect Manning and Snowden didn't have access to the Saudi Foreign Ministry.

bizkeep25• 11 years ago

Have Wikileaks ever dox'd an ally to Russia?

hack_edu• 11 years ago

They have an itemized list of all countries relating to leaks on their wiki, which includes (the remaining few) Russian allies.

https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Category:Countries

Wikileaks has released a number of Syrian leaks in particular, both before and during the current situation.

https://wikileaks.org/syria-files/

discardorama3• 11 years ago

I assume the implication is that Wikileaks is somehow in cahoots with Russia?

mpyne3• 11 years ago

This is a joke, right? Assange himself admitted to telling Snowden to flee to Russia in particular, not just as a waypoint to Havana...

But yes, since 2010 or so Wikileaks has been co-opted by Russia. In October 2010 Assange had crowed that "The Kremlin had better brace itself for a coming wave of WikiLeaks disclosures about Russia" and within a month [1] was meekly "revising" his comment to state instead that "we have material on many businesses and governments, including in Russia. It's not right to say there's going to be a particular focus on Russia". And indeed, the world still has yet to figure out what Assange was talking about in October 2010.

In fact Assange has been quite close with states intertwined with Russia since then, e.g. http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2012/03/belar... (what really boggles the mind about this article, which pre-dates Snowden, is the idea of Assange railing against "his enemies at the Guardian").

[1] http://www.russiaprofile.org/international/a1288285095.html <-- Want to know what changed Assange's mind?

pen2l• 11 years ago

Yes, they've released a lot of leaks from India. Russia and India are fairly close friends.

mpyne3• 11 years ago

And yet not as close as they used to be. It's not coincidental that the U.S. DoD has just recently signed agreements with India on exporting carrier technology and know-how, among other defense cooperation projects.

Russia has supplied many of India's defense needs for some time, but that's less from any special Indian affinity for Russia than because the U.S. had kind of forced their hand decades ago by aligning with Pakistan, which wasn't helped when the U.S. later sanctioned India in 1998 due to its nuclear weapons testing.

bizkeep25• 11 years ago

Mostly benign leaks. Wikileaks party has shilled for the Iranian gov. It also visited the Assad leadership.

istvan__8• 11 years ago

Do they have anything? Russia was relatively ok in the last 20 years (except the wars against Georgia, Chechen wars). They never really hide their actions, like annexing Crimea was communicated way in advance to the NATO, like in years. The western media barely mentions it. There was an earlier agreement between the NATO and Russia that we are not expanding to the east direction in the EU and we do not interfere with Russian interests in ex-soviet countries. Anyways it would be good to see more information from WL on these, I am really curious what went down exactly.

afarrell• 11 years ago

annexing Crimea was communicated way in advance to the NATO

Wait it was? I am genuinely interested. Can you please link to something more about this in either English or Russian?

madars• 11 years ago

One has to note that NATO is not "expanding to the east". None of the new members were lured into NATO. To the contrary, those are all sovereign countries who wanted to join NATO and escape Russia's bullying. No formerly occupied country wants the Russians back.

(-3 points from RT, how lovely!)

mpyne3• 11 years ago

Do they have anything?

Wikileaks claimed they had leaks that would offend the Kremlin itself, back in October 2010. Then the FSB made very public threats, and all of sudden Wikileaks was in no particular rush to leak anything regarding to Russia.

Assange later aligned himself with the Belarussian state (Belarus being, of course, still very close to Russia), the process for which apparently led to a great deal of relative upheaval in Wikileaks after 2010, until the new political alliances within Wikileaks settled out.

knowaveragejoe• 11 years ago

Do you have some sources for these claims?

cyorir• 11 years ago

There was not "an earlier agreement between the NATO and Russia that we are not expanding to the east direction in the EU and we do not interfere with Russian interests in ex-soviet countries."

First, you are confusing NATO policy with EU policy. Agreements between NATO and Russia are binding on NATO, not the EU. Likewise, agreements between the EU and Russia are binding on the EU but not NATO, and agreements between Russia and individual states are binding on those states, not NATO or EU.

NATO-Russian relations are broadly defined by the Founding Act(1995)[0]. This calls for cooperation to achieve peace and security, and calls for respect for the territorial integrity and sovereignty of "all states." Both sides are alleged to have violated this over the years, NATO in the Balkans(Serbia-Kosovo), and Russia in the Caucasus.

EU relations are based on the PCAs[1], but these are generally based on deals with individual countries and do not deal with Russia on the basis of a presumed sphere of influence.

However, the relations between Russia and the West specifically regarding Ukraine are strained by the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances[2]. Western countries claim Russia violated this agreement by not respecting existing borders (annexation of Crimea) and by the threat/use of force. The agreement also specifies that that economic influence should not be used to influence Ukrainian politics. Western countries believe Russian economic influence affected the decision by Yanukovych to pull away from the EU in November 2013. You could counter that EU influence has affected Ukrainian politics, but the memorandum was an agreement between US, UK, Ukraine, and Russia, so there was no guarantee against EU influence.

[0] http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_25468.htm [1] http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/external_relations/re... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Budapest_Memorandum_on_Secur...

botulm• 11 years ago

and we do not interfere with Russian interests in ex-soviet countries

("interests" decided by Russia)

discardorama3• 11 years ago

Saudi Arabia is at the center of a lot of stuff going on in the middle east right now (their support for ISIS, their involvement in Yemen, the chess game with Iran, etc. etc.). It would be interesting to see what these cables turn up, once translated.

skeuomorf3• 11 years ago

erm "their support for ISIS" citation?

fweespeech• 11 years ago

http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/saud...

Although Saudi donors and other private contributors were believed to be the most significant funding source for the original forerunner to ISIS, the importance of such donations has been marginalized by the group's independent sources of income. This income, which is now estimated to overwhelmingly exceed private donations, is generated by activities such as smuggling (of oil, weapons, antiquities), extortion (e.g., the group levies around $8 million per month in "taxes" on local businesses), and other crimes (e.g., robberies, counterfeiting). The group's June 11 seizure of Mosul's central bank alone netted tens of millions of dollars (though U.S. officials note that the $400 million figure often cited in connection with the heist is not accurate).

NN88• 11 years ago

You mean...everything?

themeekforgotpw4• 11 years ago

ISIL is used as a proxy force by all powers that can effectively manipulate them, but they are also a force of their own.

The US heavily invests in using video games for propaganda and ISIL and Sunni-insurgent forces have been exposed to a number of anti-Assad video games. Hamas is unlikely to be the progenitor of anti-Assad video themed video games. It's speculative, but it makes a lot of sense that the US would do what it can to direct ire at Assad.

What's not speculative is that Turkey and the US were running guns to groups that became ISIL factions in Syria.

There's lots of influence to be had all over. The larger powers are trying to manage the situation to achieve their ends. That means funding insurgent groups where it benefits them and bombing the same groups from the air where they are challenged.

boreas• 11 years ago

Can you provide a source for US "gun running" to ISIL factions in Syria? It is well known that Turkey's intelligence agency is doing this, but I've never heard the same accusation leveled at the US.

Also I would love to see these anti-Assad video games, even though it seems like American involvement is your own analysis.

anigbrowl2• 11 years ago

Aside of the content, interesting things to do with both these and the state department cables would be to study patterns in the metadata like transmission date/time vs geographic location. Wikileaks has them sorted by various criteria, is anyone aware of a good platform for wrangling this to visualize it different ways? Most of the offerings at http://infosthetics.com/archives/2010/11/wikileaks_us_embass... are deprecated or dead.

bizkeep25• 11 years ago

This is laundering FSB intelligence.

foxhedgehog• 11 years ago

It certainly is never Russia or its allies that is leaked by WikiLeaks

acd• 11 years ago

Is there some machine learning program that can make sense from a lot of text?

What could read several thousand research articles about food intake and make common sense out of it? What could read Wikileaks and make sense of all that text?

Raed667• 11 years ago

This is one of a very few times, where I feel privileged that I know Arabic.

albenali• 11 years ago

this is laughable. WikiLeaks claims that "A document listing the subscriptions that needed renewal by 1 January 2010 details a series of contributory sums meant for two dozen publications in Damascus, Abu Dhabi, Beirut, Kuwait, Amman and Nouakchott. The sums range from $500 to 9,750 Kuwaiti Dinars ($33,000)". The actual document shows that a Saudi ministry is buying subscriptions to newspapers. The "9,750" is actually 9 dinars and 750 fils - an amount equivalent to $35!

dogma11382• 11 years ago

Not really laughable commas and periods have a different meaning in math, and well accounting in many countries.

For example if you have a 2340 dollars and 87 cents then in the US it will be written like 2,345.87 in mainland Europe it will be 2.345,87.

If you remove the cents than to an American person 2,340 is 2000 and 345 dollars, to a say French person it will be 2 dollars and 34 cents.

On top of that the Kuwaiti Dinar is the only currency in the world (that i know off) that its main unit is divided into thousands and not hundreds which complicates this even further since for most people this makes it even look less like a "decimal" sign used in currency but a simple comma which is used to separate thousands.

WikiLeaks Begins Releasing Leaked Saudi Arabia Cables

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