This morning, WikiLeaks dumped 251,287 secret US diplomatic cables on the world. They've led to a number of interesting revelations, both of the US's dirty dealings (and what it really thinks of its "allies"), and those of foreign governments. One of my favourites so far is 07BERLIN242, about the US government's efforts to avoid international arrest warrants being issued for the CIA kidnappers of Khalid El-Masri, an innocent German man who was rendered and tortured by the US. But there's a lot more; read any newspaper to find it.
But obviously, we're interested in New Zealand. No full cables from or about NZ have been published yet, but there are 1610 tagged as being from or about us, most of them from the US embassy in Wellington. If you are curious, there's a spreadsheet of the headers here. The oldest dates from 1993, and is from the US Embassy in Rome (tags: PREL, VAT, TU, NZ, US - that's political external relations, the Vatican? and Turkey). After that there's one from December 1997 from Wellington, which given the tags and timing is almost certainly about Jenny Shipley's backroom coup against Jim Bolger. Everything else is between 2004 and early 2010. In terms of subjects, I've done a frequency list, as has Danyl; most cables are about "external political relations", "internal government affairs", "foreign trade" and "economic conditions". Which is the bread and butter of any embassy - reading the newspapers and reporting back on what's going on, so their government doesn't get any nasty surprises. There may be some amusing free and frank assessments of our politicians in there (possibly even what they thought of Winston Peters), but there's unlikely to be anything serious.
More interesting are the 62 cables tagged "MARR" (Military and Defense Arrangements) and the 69 cables tagged "PTER" (Terrorists and Terrorism). The former will have some information about the US's wheedling to get us to send more kiwis to die in their stupid wars (and likely some criticism of our reluctance to do so), while the latter will be fascinating for the light it may shed on the war on terror locally, and its biggest local casualty, Ahmed Zaoui. Maybe we'll get to see the information that got SIS director Richard Woods' panties in a twist after all...
Unfortunately, we'll have to wait for it. Only a tiny fraction (less than 0.1%) of the cables have so far been released. But that's been enough to make the governments of the world tremble. And this is going to drag on for months...
