Leaked US cables provide insight into diplomatic episodes: NYT

The confidential cache of US cables released to the paper by the whistleblower website, were described by the Times as the one that unlocks the secrets of American diplomacy.
The newspaper made public the details contained in the documents yesterday, some time after WikiLeaks said its website was under a cyber attack.

One cable reveals that since 2007, the US has mounted a highly secret effort, so far unsuccessful, to remove from a Pakistani research reactor highly enriched uranium that American officials fear could be diverted for use in an illicit nuclear device, the Times said.
In May 2009, Ambassador Anne W Patterson reported that Pakistan was refusing to schedule a visit by American technical experts because, as a Pakistani official said, "if the local media got word of the fuel removal, 'they certainly would portray it as the United States taking Pakistan’s nuclear weapons,' he argued."

The documents were made available to several news organisations by online by WikiLeaks, which will also post the documents on its own website.

In the past week, American officials had warned WikiLeaks from going public with the documents on the grounds that it could endanger lives.

Another document shows that a Chinese contact told the American Embassy in Beijing that China's Politburo directed the intrusion into Google's computer systems in that country, the daily said.

The Google hacking was part of a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government, the cables reported.

The Chinese government has broken into computers belonging to US government computers, American businesses and the Dalai Lama, the cables said.
Another cable illustrates a great deal of corruption in Afghanistan.

For instance, when Afghanistan's Vice-President visited the UAE last year, local authorities working with the Drug Enforcement Administration discovered that he was carrying USD 52 million in cash.

The cables also show that that Obama administration is struggling to offload detainees from Guantanamo Bay. For instance, Slovenia was told to take a prisoner if it wanted to meet with President Barack Obama.

The island nation of Kiribati, the cable show, was offered incentives worth millions of dollars to take in a group of detainees.

The documents indicated that Saudi donors remain the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like al-Qaeda and the tiny Persian Gulf state of Qatar, a generous host to the American military for years, was the "worst in the region" in counter-terrorism efforts, according to a State Department cable last December.

The New York Times said that out of 251,287 cables, many are unclassified, and none are marked "top secret."

But some 11,000 are classified "secret," 9,000 are labeled "noforn," shorthand for material considered too delicate to be shared with any foreign government, and 4,000 are designated both secret and noforn.

The 251,287 cables, first acquired by WikiLeaks, were provided to The Times by an intermediary on the condition of anonymity.