WikiLeaks to Drop Nearly 2 Million New Documents

WikiLeaks to Drop Nearly 2 Million New Documents.

by Naama Ben-Yaakov

WikiLeaks website founder Julian Assange has revealed that his site is set to publish more than 1.7 million United States diplomatic and intelligence documents from the 1970s.

WikiLeaks has collected a variety of records including cables, intelligence reports and congressional correspondence and is releasing them in a searchable form, according to the AFP news agency.

Assange has carried out much of the work from his refuge in Ecuador’s embassy in London and told the domestic Press Association that the records highlighted the “vast range and scope” of American influence around the world.

Assange has been holed up in the tiny diplomatic mission for nine months as he seeks to avoid extradition to Sweden over allegations of sexual assault, which he denies.

WikiLeaks sparked uproar in the diplomatic world in 2010 when it released a set of more than 250,000 leaked US cables.

Among the many American documents made public by WikiLeaks was a secret state department cable in which Condoleezza Rice established an espionage network against Israel just before leaving her position as secretary of state, ostensibly to assist her successors in continuing to advance Washington’s Middle East agenda.

A cable signed by Rice and dated October 31 2008, one week before President Barack Obama’s election, instructed US diplomats in Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, as well as the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, to conduct a massive espionage operation against the Jewish state. According to the leak, the sought-for information covered all aspects of Israel’s political system, society, communications infrastructures and military, as well as Israeli attitudes towards the United States and potential ways to divide resistance activists.

The new records, dating from the beginning of 1973 to the end of 1976, reportedly include many communications that were either sent or received by then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

Many of the documents, which WikiLeaks has called the Public Library of US Diplomacy (PlusD), are marked NODIS (no distribution) or Eyes Only, while others were originally marked as secret, according to AFP.

Assange fled to the Ecuadorian embassy in June after losing his battle in the British courts against extradition to Sweden.

Ecuador granted him asylum in August but Britain has refused to allow him safe passage out of the country, sparking a diplomatic stalemate.

Assange founded the WikiLeaks website that enraged Washington by releasing cables and war logs relating to the American-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan in what has become one of the biggest security breaches in US history.

http://www.indynewsisrael.com/wikileaks-to-drop-nearly-2-million-new-documents