Please help, I am only a humble housewife, and I can't figure out how to search the WikiLeaks database. I can't find a thing about Australia among all the diplomatic cable documents. I have no trouble finding stuff about Azerbaijan, but I'm not interested in Azerbaijan, (no offence, Azerbaijan). What am I doing wrong? I tried asking a teenager who is obsessed with politics, and even that didn't help. Help!
Um, look for "Embassy Canberra"?
ReplyDeleteOr "Consulate something"? (where something is a city).
Hi Lili, there's an interactive map of the released cables on the Guardian website here:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2010/nov/28/us-embassy-cables-wikileaks
It looks like only a couple of the published cables reference Australia at this point. if you go to wikileaks itself, you can "browse by origin" on the left sidebar. that will show you a list of embassies that sent the cables; doesn't look like there are any from Australia yet.
Weirdly, the story you linked to on your new blog, about Gillard and her speechwriter comes from cable 08CANBERRA609, which does not show up on wikileaks right now.
ReplyDeleteBut if you google a cable's code, you can find out if people are writing about it, like here I found the full text of 08CANBERRA609 and others:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/australian-wikileaks-cables/story-fn59niix-1225971723172
I think wikileaks has officially requested that people talking about cables include the codes for reference, so a search should bring up some interesting reading.
hope this is helpful!
Thank you very much for your useful links and advice, Anon! And thank you to Adelaide too.
ReplyDeleteCable 08CANBERRA609 looks interesting, but I think the story might have come from cable
09CANBERRA545.
But why is this stuff apparently not available directly from WikiLeaks, but is published by the Australian, a newspaper that is apparently anti-ALP? And I can't find any evidence that the ABC covered the story about Gillard campaigning for the job as PM a full year before the coup. Seems odd to me.
Anon wrote:
ReplyDelete"Weirdly, the story you linked to on your new blog, about Gillard and her speechwriter comes from cable 08CANBERRA609, which does not show up on wikileaks right now."
Actually, I think it was cable number 09CANBERRA545 that the story that I linked to was based upon, but thanks for making me aware of cable number 08CANBERRA609, as it was a most entertaining read. Gillard was once a young leftie, but it looks as though she nowadays has just about as much Socialist street cred as, um as, um.... me! In that cable I also read that Bill Shorten "has Prime Ministerial ambitions". Really? I can't see the Australian people electing a leader who has a wide-eyed psycho stare in the style of Kyle Sandilands.