The classified documents reportedly cover correspondence between US diplomatic missions abroad and the state department in Washington and could reveal "unflattering" views that American officials held about close EU allies and countries like Russia, China and Saudi Arabia.
Governments around the world on Saturday braced for the publication of potentially embarrassing diplomatic cables, as Washington raced to contain the fallout.
US diplomats skipped their Thanksgiving holiday weekend and headed to foreign ministries hoping to stave off anger over the cables, which are internal messages that often lack the niceties diplomats voice in public.
Wikileaks said the newest release will be seven times the size of the October publication of 400,000 Iraq war documents, the biggest leak to date in US intelligence history.
The site also published 77,000 classified US files on the Afghan conflict in July.
'Diplomatic catastrophe'
According to Der Spiegel, which was granted early access to the files, the release will contain more than 250,000 cables and 8,000 diplomatic directives - mostly from the last five years.
The German news magazine took down its article summarising the data dump after publishing it briefly online.
In addition to Der Spiegel, The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde and El País are said to have been allowed to review the files beforehand.
According to White House sources cited by a correspondent of the US website Politico, none of the documents are classified as 'Top Secret'. But reportedly six per cent are listed as 'Secret' and 40 per cent as "confidential".
Al Jazeera's Mike Hanna, reporting from Washington, said the leaks are from correspondence "between US diplomats and between US embassies ... not what is said about enemies, but about [US] friends".
He said the files could include particularly sensitive information previously "well out of the public view" about US diplomats' perceptions of crises in Israel and Palestine.
Hanna said that US officials have emphasised how national security - not just public embarrassment - is at stake in the WikiLeaks release.
Less than five per cent of the files are about EU nations, according to OWNI, a French news site with a live blog covering the "StateLogs".
Speculation has swirled on the inclusion of cables about US ties to separatist groups in Turkey, perceptions of the UK coalition government, and allegedly corrupt politicians in several countries.
US containment
The Obama administration said earlier this week that it had alerted Congress and begun notifying foreign governments that the website was preparing to release a huge cache of diplomatic cables whose publication could give a behind-the-scenes look at American diplomacy around the world.
The US says it has known for some time that WikiLeaks was in possession of the diplomatic cables.
Some 2.5 million US government employees have access to SIPRNet - the US government's secure version of the civilian internet - where the files reportedly originated.
Thus far, no one has been charged with passing them to the website, but suspicion focuses on Bradley Manning, a US army intelligence analyst arrested in Iraq in June and charged over an earlier leak.
"WikiLeaks are an absolutely awful impediment to my business, which is to be able to have discussions in confidence with people," James Jeffrey, US ambassador to Iraq, said. "They will not help, they will simply hurt our ability to do our work here."
He said that anyone whose "confidential discussions find their way into the press is going to be very unhappy and very upset".
Admiral Mike Mullen, the most-senior US military commander, has urged WikiLeaks to stop its release of documents, according to a transcript of a CNN interview set to air on Sunday.
"I would hope that those who are responsible for this would, at some point in time, think about the responsibility that they have for lives that they're exposing and the potential that's there and stop leaking this information."
Source: Aljazeera
No comments:
Post a Comment