Flashback 25 November 2010, before the WikiLeaks cables came out: ‘US diplomatic cables set for imminent release by WikiLeaks will reportedly show that NATO ally Turkey aided Al Qaeda in Iraq, while the US supported the PKK, a Kurdish separatist group fighting Turkey’ – so said the Raw Story, noting that ‘The claim was made in the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat’ and the story was also taken up by Reuters.
I waited for cables to come out that verified this (or not) but none came. I wrote to The Guardian, who possess the cables, and they replied: ‘We’ve not seen any evidence of this. I know there were reports to this effect, but none of the organisations who ran them (such as al-Hayat) had access to the cables.’
In any event, some US ‘allies’ are support bases for Al Qaeda according to the cables – namely Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE. ‘WikiLeaks cables portray Saudi Arabia as a cash machine for terrorists’, Guardian 5 December 2010.
