Wikileaks has proudly announced their next treasure trove of US secrets they are dumping on the world. More than 1.7 million cables and reports from the period 1973-1976 will be available to peruse to your anti-American heart’s content.
If these hackers are so all-powerful, why don’t they try hacking the diplomatic archives of the old Soviet Union? We couldn’t have that — that would show a balanced view of the historical landscape. This is something Wikileaks is desperate to avoid at all costs. The goal here is to undermine American leadership. Confusing people by showing how there were times that America was responding to moves made by the Soviet Union would ruin the narrative of America as bully, America as sinner — not sinned against.
Julian Assange said WikiLeaks had been working for the past year to analyse and assess a vast amount of data held at the US national archives before releasing it in a searchable form.
WikiLeaks has called the collection the Public Library of US Diplomacy (PlusD), describing it as the world’s largest searchable collection of US confidential, or formerly confidential, diplomatic communications.
Assange told Press Association the information showed the vast range and scope of US diplomatic and intelligence activity around the world.
Henry Kissinger was US secretary of state and national security adviser during the period covered by the collection, and many of the reports were written by him or were sent to him. Thousands of the documents are marked NODIS (no distribution) or Eyes Only, as well as cables originally classed as secret or confidential.
Assange said WikiLeaks had undertaken a detailed analysis of the communications, adding that the information eclipsed Cablegate, a set of more than 250,000 US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks from November 2010 and over the following year. He said WikiLeaks had developed sophisticated technical systems to deal with complex and voluminous data.
Top secret documents were not available, while some others were lost or irreversibly corrupted for periods including December 1975 and March and June 1976, said Assange.
For some historians, the document dump is a godsend. Most of these cables wouldn’t have been available for 30 years or more and they certainly flesh out the bare bones of knowledge we have about US actions during this period.
I just wonder how much history you can write looking at only one side of the equation.
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