ESPRESSO (Italy); BBC, THE GUARDIAN, THE INDEPENDENT (UK)
LONDON - Whistleblowing website WikiLeaks is back making worldwide waves, publishing 1.7 million United States government records, covering diplomatic and intelligence reports on virtually every country in the world on Monday morning.
The vast collection spans from the beginning of 1973 to the end of 1976, when Henry Kissinger served as U.S. Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, and many of the reports were sent to him or from him, reports the Independent.
In one of the documents Kissinger is quoted as saying, “Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, ‘The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer,"”during a 1975 conversation that included Turkish and Cypriot officials.
Italian weekly magazine Espresso reports that they had advanced access to the information, and culled out communications with the Vatican that included its brushing off allegations of human rights abuses by the Pinochet regime in Chile. “Massacres? Not at all, it’s just propaganda,” a top Vatican official told American diplomats.
According to The Guardian, WikiLeaks has called the collection the Public Library of U.S. Diplomacy (PlusD), describing it as the world’s largest searchable collection of U.S. confidential, or formerly confidential, diplomatic communications.
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This information shows the “vast range and scope” of U.S. diplomatic and intelligence activity around the world, founder Julian Assange told the British Press Association. The collection, published today, is not of leaked documents, but from the U.S. National Archives.
Assange, who is confined to the Ecuadorian embassy in London, said that WikiLeaks undertook a detailed analysis of the communications, developing sophisticated technical systems to deal with the complex and voluminous data, writes the BBC. He added that he was being kept at the embassy “with nothing to do but work on WikiLeaks material.”
