CAIRO: Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said on Saturday that US diplomatic cables published by whistle-blower WikiLeaks were just the "tip of the iceberg" and showed Egypt had nothing to hide.
"These leaks are the tip of the iceberg," Aboul Gheit said at a joint news conference with visiting Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd.
"It is still too early to comment. We wait, follow up and read but not everything we read is necessarily true. It could be distorted or planted for a reason," Aboul Gheit said when asked to comment on the US diplomatic cables.
As far as Egypt is concerned, he said, the cables "confirm the strength of our position."
"The documents have shown that what we say in private behind closed doors reflects our public opinion," he said.
One cable released by WikiLeaks on Egypt said that President Hosni Mubarak advised the United States in 2008 to "forget" about democracy in Iraq and allow a dictator to take over.
Mubarak made the comments during talks with visiting US congressmen to whom he also admitted that he was "terrified" by the possibility of a nuclear Iran.
Rudd, a former prime minister of Australia, said Washington should in future protect its secrets.
On Wednesday he said that the United States was to blame for the leak of secret cables, not the Australian-born founder of the WikiLeaks website, Julian Assange.
Rudd, himself the focus of embarrassing memos released by WikiLeaks, said in statements broadcast on Australian commercial radio, "the unauthorized release of these things by the US system" was the core problem, not Assange.
