Anti-secrecy
Web site WikiLeaks on Friday dumped its full unredacted archive of more than
250,000 US diplomatic cables online, drawing a furious response from its media
partners. The
Web site confirmed in a message on Twitter that all 251,287 of the US embassy cables had been posted on the Internet
and posted a link to a site containing the documents that can be accessed
without a password. Five
media groups that worked with WikiLeaks on the first release last year — The
Guardian, the New York Times, German news magazine Der Spiegel, Spanish daily
El Pais and France’s Le Monde — condemned the decision to publish the cables
without first deleting the names of sources who spoke to US diplomats. “We
deplore the decision of WikiLeaks to publish the unredacted [US ] State Department cables, which may put sources
at risk,” they said in a joint statement published in The Guardian. “Our
previous dealings with WikiLeaks were on the clear basis that we would only
publish cables which had been subjected to a thorough editing and clearance
process,” the statement said. WikiLeaks
had been slowly releasing the leaked documents since November and had largely
worked with the media organizations, which trawled through the information to
erase the names of potentially vulnerable sources. The
decision to dump the remaining documents will also anger the US , which has warned the move could endanger the
lives of its sources and was irate last week when some of the cables were
published with names unprotected. “Shining
a light on 45 years of US ‘diplomacy,’ it is time to open the archives
forever,” WikiLeaks said in a tweet announcing the release on Friday. Previous
releases revealed the often candid views of US diplomats about foreign
governments around the world and caused huge embarrassment to the US . The
Guardian said the newly published archives contained more than 1,000 cables
identifying individual activists, as well as some labeled with a tag used by
the US to mark sources it believed could be in danger
if identified. Meanwhile,
Iraq said it would open an investigation into the
alleged summary execution of 10 Iraqis, including four women and five children,
by US forces in 2006, disclosed in an April 2006 US diplomatic cable released
last week. The
document release came amid a row between WikiLeaks and The Guardian over who
was behind last week’s release of thousands of unredacted cables. WikiLeaks
accused The Guardian of leaking the password to the archive, but the newspaper
denied the allegation. The
joint statement by the five media partners on Friday said the decision to
publish the full archive was the decision of WikiLeaks’ Australian frontman
Julian Assange, “and his alone.” Assange
is currently living under stringent bail conditions in Britain , fighting extradition to Sweden where he is wanted for questioning over alleged
rape and sexual assault. The
US Department of State said on Thursday that WikiLeaks had informed it in
advance of the document releases, but ignored US appeals that making them
public could endanger lives and put US national security at risk. WikiLeaks
has defended the release of the diplomatic cables as the journalistic exposure
of official deception. US soldier Bradley Manning is suspected of leaking
the cables and other military documents to WikiLeaks. He was arrested in June
last year while deployed in Iraq and is being held in a US military prison.
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