Mandela, Karzai, Gaddafi among WikiLeaks’ new releases
By IANSSunday, November 28, 2010
LONDON - Whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks will release a whole cache of secret diplomatic messages to the US related to former South African president Nelson Mandela, Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai and Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi, a media report said here Sunday.
Around three million secret US diplomatic messages obtained by WikiLeaks would expose the “no-holds-barred” private cables to the White House from scores of US embassies, the Daily Mail reported.
Mandela, who stepped down as president in 1999, condemned George Bush over the Iraq war, saying the US president had ignored the UN’s calls for restraint because the then secretary-general Kofi Annan was black.
He also called Tony Blair the “foreign minister of the US” for supporting Bush over the Iraq war.
Around 800 messages are from the US embassy in London and some reportedly feature “negative and hostile comments” about Gordon Brown and the then Labour government.
These are reportedly related to the British-US dispute after Britain freed Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi from a Scottish jail to a hero’s welcome in Libya last year.
The messages also reportedly include US assessments of Brown’s personality and prospects of staying in power.
The secret messages, due to be published online Sunday, are believed to be from January 2006 to December 2009.
WikiLeaks earlier this year released secret details - 70,000 files - of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The revelations of American brutality in Iraq and Afghanistan led to its founder Julian Assange - an Australian-born computer hacker - being targeted by governments around the world. He is now wanted for alleged rape in Sweden.
