8 April 2013

WikiLeaks Project K - Release of Kissinger Cables

A sends:

From: "Sunshine Press" <sunshinepress@this.is>
Date: Apr 7, 2013 7:37 PM
Subject: WIKILEAKS PRESS RELEASE | THE KISSINGER CABLES OVER 1.3 MILLION DOCUMENTS
To: "Sunshine Press The" <sunshinepress@this.is>

WIKILEAKS SPECIAL PROJECT K: THE KISSINGER CABLES

'Investigative journalism has never been this effective!' Publico

The Kissinger Cables are part of today's launch of the WikiLeaks Public Library of US Diplomacy (PlusD), which holds the world's largest searchable collection of United States confidential, or formerly confidential, diplomatic communications. As of its launch on April 8, 2013 it holds 2 million records comprising approximately 1 billion words.

WikiLeaks' publisher Julian Assange stated: "The collection covers US involvements in, and diplomatic or intelligence reporting on, every country on Earth. It is the single most significant body of geopolitical material ever published."


THE KISSINGER CABLES

"The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer." -- Henry A. Kissinger, US Secretary of State, March 10, 1975: http://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/P860114-1573_MC_b.html#efmCS3CUB

The Kissinger Cables comprise more than 1.7 million US diplomatic records for the period 1973 to 1976, including 205,901 records relating to former US Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger. Dating from January 1, 1973 to December 31, 1976 they cover a variety of diplomatic traffic including cables, intelligence reports and congressional correspondence. They include more than 1.3 million full diplomatic cables and 320,000 originally classified records. These include more than 227,000 cables classified as "CONFIDENTIAL" and 61,000 cables classified as "SECRET". Perhaps more importantly, there are more than 12,000 documents with the sensitive handling restriction "NODIS" or 'no distribution', and more than 9,000 labelled "Eyes Only".

At around 700 million words, the Kissinger Cables collection is approximately five times the size of WikiLeaks' Cablegate. The raw PDF data is more than 380 Gigabytes in size and is the largest WikiLeaks publication to date.

WikiLeaks' media partners will be reporting throughout the week on their findings. These include significant revelations about US involvements with fascist dictatorships, particularly in Latin America, under Franco's Spain (including about the Spanish royal family) and in Greece under the regime of the Colonels.

The documents also contain hourly diplomatic reporting on the 1973 war between Israel, Egypt and Syria (the "Yom Kippur war"). While several of these documents have been used by US academic researchers in the past, the Kissinger Cables provides unparalleled access to journalists and the general public.

Most of the records were reviewed by the United States Department of State's systematic 25-year declassification process. At review, the records were assessed and either declassified or kept classified with some or all of the metadata records declassified. Both sets of records were then subject to an additional review by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Once believed to be releasable, they were placed as individual PDFs at the National Archives as part of their Central Foreign Policy Files collection. Despite the review process supposedly assessing documents after 25 years there are no diplomatic records later than 1976. The formal declassification and review process of these extremely valuable historical documents is therefore currently running 12 years late.

The form in which these documents were held at NARA was as 1.7 million individual PDFs. To prepare these documents for integration into the PlusD collection, WikiLeaks obtained and reverse-engineered all 1.7 million PDFs and performed a detailed analysis of individual fields, developed sophisticated technical systems to deal with the complex and voluminous data and corrected a great many errors introduced by NARA, the State Department or its diplomats, for example harmonizing the many different ways in which departments, capitals and people's names were spelt. All our corrective work is referenced and available from the links in the individual field descriptions on the PlusD text search interface: https://search.wikileaks.org/plusd


RECLASSIFICATION ATTEMPTS THWARTED

The CIA and other agencies have attempted to reclassify or withhold sections of the US National Archives. Detailed minutes of US State Department meetings show that these attempts, which originated under the Bush II administration, have continued on through until at least 2009. A 2006 analysis by the US National Security Archives, an independent non-governmental research institute and library located at George Washington University, found that 55,000 pages had been secretly reclassified.

The censorship of the US National Archives was thrown into stark relief in November last year when the Archive censored all searches for 'WikiLeaks' from its records. See http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2012/11/03/us-national-archives-has-blocked-searches-for-wikileaks/

Julian Assange, WikiLeaks' publisher, said: "The US administration cannot be trusted to maintain the history of its interactions with the world. Fortunately, an organisation with an unbroken record in resisting censorship attempts now has a copy."


MEDIA ORGANIZATIONS REPORTING THIS WEEK

Australia - Fairfax (Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the Canberra Times and the Australian Fianancial Review)
Argentina - Pagina 12
Brazil - Publica
Bulgaria - Bivol
Egypt - Al Masry Al Youm
Greece - Ta Nea
Guatemala - Plaza Publica
Haiti - Haiti Liberte
India - The Hindu
Italy - L'Espresso
Italy - La Repubblica
Lebanon - Al Akhbar
Mexico - La Jornada
Spain - Publico
Sweden - Aftonbladet
UK - Press Association
US - Associated Press
US - The Nation


PRESS CONFERENCE

WikiLeaks Special Project K: concerning the United States, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Central and South East Asia, Europe and the Pacific, with special focus on Israel, Russia, India, Japan, South Africa, France and Francophone Africa.


WHERE

The National Press Club
The Holeman Lounge
529 14th St. NW
13th Floor
Washington, DC
20045

+1 202-662-7500


WHEN

Monday April 8th at 9am (Washington time)


INTERVIEWS

WikiLeaks Spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson is available for interviews after the press conference please make arrangements with Melanie Lerardi ( Mlerardi@press.org ) or +1 (202) 662 7502 alternatively you can call Kristinn directly on +354 821 7121 or email sunshinepress@this.is


STATUS UPDATES

WIKILEAKS AND JULIAN ASSANGE

After WikiLeaks' publication of Pentagon and State Department documents in 2010, the White House launched a multi-agency investigation into WikiLeaks and its publisher Julian Assange. The investigation includes the Department of Justice (DOJ), the FBI, the State Department, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) among others. The DoJ / FBI investigation is ongoing, as is its associated Grand Jury in Alexandria, Virginia, which is headed up by District Attorney Neil McBride, a current candidate for the FBI directorship.

A number of senior political figures in the United States have called for the assassination, extraordinary rendition or kidnapping of Julian Assange and other WikiLeaks staff and for the execution of WikiLeaks US sources: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuQW0US2sJw

The Grand Jury has coercively forced numerous people to give testimony in secret and to do so without the presence of a judge or defence lawyer. The actions of the Grand Jury, including issuing PATRIOT Act 'subpoenas' against Twitter, Google and other companies, is the subject of ongoing legal proceedings.

On 1 February this year, the Associated Press reported that the FBI was conducting an illegal investigation into WikiLeaks' activities in Iceland. This investigation was discovered by the Icelandic Minister of the Interior, Ögmundur Jónasson, who ordered the FBI to leave and issued a formal diplomatic protest to the United States.

Julian Assange, an Australian, was granted political asylum on 19 August 2012 by the government of Ecuador. He remains under their protection in the Embassy of Ecuador in London. British police have surrounded the embassy and the British government admits to spending more than $4.5 million on this policing presence so far. Contrary to international law, the United Kingdom refuses to grant Julian Assange safe passage to Ecuador, saying that he must be extradited to Sweden to answer questions. He has not been charged with an offence in either country and the chief of the Swedish Supreme Court says there is no legal reason why Swedish police cannot go to London should they wish to speak to him.

By 8 April 2013 Julian Assange will have been imprisoned, detained under house arrest in the United Kingdom, and unable to leave the protective custody of the Ecuadorian Embassy for a total of 854 days.

On 11 April 2013 a feature film about Julian Assange in his formative years will open the Washington DC International Film Festival: http://www.filmfestdc.org

Julian Assange is a popular figure in his native Australia, where he is running for the Australian Senate. The latest poll, by Labour party polling outfit UMR, showed he had 27 per cent of the voting intention: http://wikileaksparty.org.au/

For further information see: http://justice4assange.com/extraditing-assange.html and https//usvwikileaks.org/ and http://justice4assange.com/


BRADLEY MANNING

An alleged WikiLeaks source, intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, now aged 25, was arrested on 26 May 2010 by US Army investigators. Manning was detained under extreme conditions in Kuwait and Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia. The United Nations Rapporteur on Torture Juan E. Mendez formally found these conditions to amount to "cruel and abusive treatment" akin to torture. Judge Denise Lind of the US military court found that his conditions were illegal. After the resignation of Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs P. J. Crowley over the issue, Manning was transferred to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and the Quantico barracks were decommissioned. Mr. Manning's defence team said that the abusive treatment may have been in order to break Mr. Manning into turning State's witness against WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.

By 8 April 2013 Bradley Manning will have been detained without trial for 1049 days, the longest detention without trial of a US soldier in modern history. His trial is said by Guantanamo beat reporters to be more secret than the military commissions held against al Qaeda suspects. It is scheduled for 2 June 2013 at Fort Meade, Maryland. WikiLeaks, the Center for Constitutional Rights and more than 30 other media organizations have filed suit against the US military for the abuse of secrecy used in prosecuting the case.


ECONOMIC CENSORSHIP: BANKING BLOCKADE

After documented political pressure, including from Senator Joseph Lieberman and Congressman Peter T. King, VISA, MasterCard, Bank of America, PayPal, Western Union, AMEX, Diners Club, Discover and JCB erected an extra-legal banking blockade against the WikiLeaks organization and its donors. The blockade is the subject of ongoing litigation and a resolution by the European Parliament. It has been condemned by the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression, Frank La Rue, the New York Times, Reporters Without Borders, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Amnesty International, the Council of Europe, and numerous other organizations.

The fiscal blockade against WikiLeaks is similar to that conducted against the central banks of Cuba and Iran, however, unlike these two countries, the WikiLeaks blockade is being conducted with no known legal or administrative basis. In fact, the US Secretary of the Treasury found in early 2011 that there was no legal reason to place WikiLeaks under a US embargo. Due to the market dominance of VISA, MasterCard and PayPal, the extra-legal action has cut off 95 per cent of WikiLeaks' income stream, costing the organization more than $50 million dollars.

All litigation to date has been won by WikiLeaks and its partners, but the blockade continues. An appeal, lodged by Valitor (Visa Iceland) is to be heard by the Icelandic Supreme Court on April 15, 2013.

BREAKING THE BLOCKADE: THE US FREEDOM OF THE PRESS FOUNDATION

In December 2012 Daniel Ellsberg, John Cusack, John Perry Barlow, Glenn Greenwald and others launched the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which allows US citizens to bypass the blockade to make tax-deductable and anonymous donations to WikiLeaks. For more information go to: See https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/ and http://wikileaks.org/WikiLeaks-declares-war-on-banking.html
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