MOSCOW, April 8 (RIA Novosti) – Whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has published online a huge new batch of 1.7 million classified US records, including diplomatic and intelligence reports from the years 1973 to 1976, the website reported on Monday.
The records, dubbed the Kissinger Cables by WikiLeaks after then US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, comprise thousands of documents labeled as "Eyes Only" and “No Distribution” as well as some originally marked as “Secret” or “Confidential.”
The records cover a variety of diplomatic traffic including “cables, intelligence reports and congressional correspondence,” WikiLeaks says, from the period when the United States was in the process of withdrawing from Southeast Asia following the war in Vietnam.
According to WikiLeaks, the files should have been reviewed in accordance with the 25-year declassification process, but some sets of records were then subject to an additional review and later placed as individual PDF files at the National Archives, making searching for them complicated. In addition, no diplomatic records from later than 1976 are yet available, which means the issue of declassified diplomatic documents is running 12 years late, the website claimed.
The newly-revealed records will be integrated into WikiLeaks' PlusD collection (Public Library of US Diplomacy), said to be world's largest searchable collection of US confidential and formerly confidential diplomatic communications. The library is set to be launched later on Monday, WikiLeaks said in a statement.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has remained in refuge at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since last summer after Britain’s Supreme Court ordered his extradition to Sweden where he is wanted on sex assault charges.
Assange has denied the accusations, maintaining the case is politically motivated as a consequence of WikiLeaks, which has published hundreds of thousands of US diplomatic cables.
