Saturday, December 18, 2010

Arab governments and Wikileaks

"Lebanon's Al-Akhbar , a leftist and pro-Hizbullah paper, pulled off quite a trick: it somehow obtained unauthorised leaks from the WikiLeaks cache, posting 250 US cables from eight Arab countries on its website – only to find that it was cyber-attacked (and replaced by a shimmering pink Saudi girl chat room) when it published one of two devastatingly frank documents about President Ben Ali of Tunisia, who reinforced his country's reputation as the most internet-unfriendly in the region. "This is a professional job," said publisher Hassan Khalil, "not the work of some geek sitting in his bedroom.""