By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, December 1 -- As the new Wikileaks of US State Department cables were the buzz at the UN on Wednesday, from Sri Lanka war crimes to Russia's “Mafia state,” the UN Secretariat did all it could to dodge questions about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's directive that the UN and its officials be spied on.
But at a Turkish Mission reception on Wednesday evening, a European Ambassador told Inner City Press that the leaks were going to cause trouble within countries all over the world. “Why did the US distribute these cables so widely?” he asked. “When I have information, I write only to my minister and his chief of staff, no one else.”
Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has threatened to sue the American diplomats who cabled home that Erdogan has secret bank accounts in Switzerland. But well placed sources tell Inner City Press that the origin of the Swiss bank detail is the “Turkish minister who covers the European Union process.”
So maybe the lawsuit, if there is one, should be filed in Turkey itself.
After Secretary General Ban Ki-moon met with Clinton in Astana, the UN said only that “they discussed... the complications caused by the recent massive leak of US diplomatic cables.”
Inner City Press asked the UN's Counter-Terrorism Executive Director Mike Smith about calls to designate Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange as part of a “Foreign Terrorist Organization.” Video here, from Minute 17:40.
Smith said he would “leave it up to the countries that are talking about that to work it out through these systems, I'm not going to comment on that.” Of course, it is within Smith's and the UN's stated job to speak on the misuse of terrorism laws and designations.
Footnote: beyond Ban Ki-moon's meeting with Hillary Clinton, the UN on Wednesday afternoon confirmed to Inner City Press what it had asked about Ban's meeting with South Korea's foreign minister. Yes they met, including about two conferences in Seoul. But there was apparently no meeting with Ukraine's president, despite Ukrainian press reports that there would be.
