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Pakistani Media Helps Expedite Release Of WikiLeaks India Cables

Last Updated on Friday, 24 December 2010 16:17 Tuesday, 21 December 2010 22:54

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Complaints in Pakistani media about selective and politically-motivated manipulation of WikiLeaks cables by New York Times, Guardian and Der Spiegel prompt the whistle blowing website to expedite the release of cables on India.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—Thanks to the debate in the Pakistani media following Daily Mail’s report on India-related WikiLeaks cables, the WikiLeaks website announced over the weekend it had in its possession 1,300 secret cables from US embassy in New Delhi which it will begin releasing this week, with the first released cables confirming much of what the Pakistani report claimed. Indian media has also started publishing some of the embarrassing details.

The report by the Daily Mail, a feisty broadsheet published from Islamabad and staffed by young journalists trained in Pakistan’s large media houses, strongly defended its report, which UK’s Guardian newspaper claimed was a ‘hoax’. It also accused a couple of Pakistani newspaper of prematurely endorsing Guardian’s viewpoint, which is one of three western newspapers, in addition to New York Times and Der Spiegel, that WikiLeaks entrusted with releasing its cache of more than 250,000 secret US diplomatic correspondence. 

Pakistani commentators complained that three western journals selectively released some of the cables and used them to write biased stories about countries such as Russia, Pakistan, China and Saudi Arabia.

One of the yet-to-be released cables refer to a meeting in New Delhi in July 2009 between US Undersecretary for Political Affairs and a senior Indian official where the US diplomat discussed the role of Indian consulates in Afghanistan and the possibility of reducing their activities due to Pakistani complaints the Indian outposts were engaged in anti-Pakistan activities. 

The release of the large dump of cables from US embassy in India coincides with another decision by WikiLeaks to expand the list of newspapers around the world releasing the stolen US cables instead of exclusively relying on NYT, Guardian and Der Spiegel.