Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar’s website was hacked on Thursday by unknown perpetrators in the latest cyber-battle over classified US diplomatic cables leaked by online whistleblower WikiLeaks, according to one of the paper’s editors.
“Our website has been down all day, and we think it has something to do with our coverage of the WikiLeaks documents," Al-Akhbar Managing Editor Khalid Saghieh told Al-Masry Al-Youm in a phone interview on Thursday.
Saghieh added that the website had been down intermittently ever since the leaked documents were published.
Last week, the pro-Hezbollah newspaper began publishing secret US diplomatic cables related to Lebanon. It reportedly received the cables from WikiLeaks days after WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said his outfit planned to collaborate with certain Arab media organizations.
Besides Al-Masry Al-Youm, the Lebanese daily is the only Arabic-language newspaper to have obtained exclusive documents from WikiLeaks.
The Lebanon-related documents detail backstage negotiations regarding the UN investigation into the 2005 murder of Lebanese premier Rafiq Hariri. The documents reveal UN frustrations with both Syria and France over their respective levels of cooperation with the international tribunal.
On Monday, the daily published a leaked document quoting Lebanese PM Saad Hariri–son of the slain premier–predicting that Hezbollah would not be easily destroyed.
It also published a document revealing that Daniel Bellemare, prosecutor for the UN tribunal, had told then US ambassador to Lebanon Michele Sison last year that Syria was treating his investigators like "school kids in short pants."
Most explosively, one cable revealed that Lebanese Defense Minister Elias Murr had offered advice on how Israel could defeat Hezbollah if a new war erupted on Israel's northern border.
"Israel cannot bomb bridges and infrastructure in the Christian areas," Murr was quoted as saying in the cable, allegedly sent by an American diplomat to the US State Department. "The Christians were supporting Israel in 2006 until they started bombing their bridges."
The Lebanon cables, part of a trove of 4,000 secret documents, also proved embarrassing for Saudi Arabia. One document stated that the western-backed oil-rich gulf country had proposed Arab military intervention in Lebanon in 2008 to destroy the Shia resistance movement.
According to that document, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal presented a senior US diplomat with plans for a force backed up by US and NATO air and sea power.
Current US ambassador to Lebanon Maura Connelly on Monday condemned the latest batch of WikiLeaks releases, describing the revelations as "illegal and irresponsible."
After releasing thousands of classified messages from US envoys around the world, both WikiLeaks and its founder have come under heavy fire from several national governments.
A number of organizations that had been associated with WikiLeaks have since distanced themselves from it.Web services provider Amazon has stopped hosting its servers, while domain provider EveryDNS has cancelled its service.
E-payment platform PayPal, meanwhile, has permanently restricted WikiLeaks’ account "due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy.”Shortly afterward, PayPal itself was hit with a denial-of-service (DOS) attack by “Operation Payback,”a group of Internet activists that targetinstitutions opposed to WikiLeaks.
DoS attacks are illegal in several countries, including the UK.
