To the embarrassment of U.S. diplomats, the latest exposé by the WikiLeaks media organization digs into tens of thousands of cables from American embassies around the world—including the one in Rīga, Latvia.
Details regarding what’s in the dispatches from Rīga have yet to emerge, but they apparently are nothing compared to cables from embassies such as the one in Ankara, Turkey. Only about 700 cables from Rīga are in the database available from WikiLeaks, compared to more than 7,900 from Ankara.
WikiLeaks, whose parent company Sunshine Press is registered in Iceland, has more than 250,000 cables in the data set from 250 American embassies. About half of the cables are described as secret or confidential.
The cables from Rīga date from March 2006 to February of this year, according to data made available by London’s Guardian newspaper through Google Fusion Tables.
News organizations such as The New York Times have been digging into “Cablegate,” but are not publishing all details because of security concerns.
Based on the “tags” that help diplomats categorize the nature of information contained in the cables, the most popular topics of messages from Rīga dealt with external political relations and internal government affairs. However, without access to the text of the cables, that does not say very much.
Media in Latvia, such as the daily newspaper Diena and the weekly news magazine Ir, are not reporting much at this point except to say that the country’s name appears in some of the dispatches.
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Not any more. Here are three dispatches from the US Embassy in Riga. http://www.ir.lv/2010/11/29/wikileaks-telegrammas-ari-latvija/viedokli#viedoklis_75954