The United States diplomatic cables leak (also known as Cablegate) began on 28 November 2010 when WikiLeaks – an international new media non-profit organisation that publishes submissions of private, secret and classified media from anonymous news sources and news leaks – started to publish classified documents of detailed correspondence between the U.S. State Department and its diplomatic missions around the world, releasing further documents every day.
Five major newspapers around the world have been publishing articles based on the leaks, by agreement with Wikileaks. The publication of the U.S. embassy cables is the third in a series of U.S. classified document “mega-leaks” distributed by WikiLeaks in 2010, following the Afghan War documents leak in July, and the Iraq War documents leak in October. The contents of the cables describe international affairs from 300 embassies dated from 1966-2010, containing diplomatic analysis of world leaders, an assessment of host countries, and a discussion about international and domestic issues.
The first 220 of the 251,287 documents were published on 28 November, with simultaneous press coverage from El País (Spain), Le Monde (France), Der Spiegel (Germany), The Guardian (United Kingdom), and The New York Times (United States). Over 130,000 of the documents are unclassified, some 100,000 are labeled “confidential”, about 15,000 documents have the higher classification “secret”, and none are classified as “top secret” on the classification scale. As of 16 December 2010, 1,532 individual cables had been released. WikiLeaks plans to release all the cables in phases over several months at a pace of about 80 cables per day. (wikipedia – For the contents of released cables, see Contents of the United States diplomatic cables leak.)
Now, the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten appears in a short article December 21 to be saying that it has obtained access, absent any agreement with WikiLeaks, to all of the 251,287 “CableGate” documents, and will begin publishing all of them over the coming weeks and months.
Aftenposten publishes only in Norwegian, however a Google English translation of the article reads as follows:
Website Wikileaks has published thousands of secret stamped documents. The latest leak is comprised of documents from the U.S. Foreign Service. Aftenposten has no clauses have access to all the 250,000 documents from the last leak.
[…]
The next days, weeks and months we will go through the massive material, and continuously publish news stories both online and paper.
To make our review more efficient, we would like tips from our readers.
Is there anything you wonder where you think the answer may lie in the messages that have been leaked to Wikileaks?
Tip us on [email protected]
Hat Tip to LodinLepp at DailyKos.
I can almost hear the sounds of desk drawers being hurriedly emptied and running footsteps in the halls of the U.S. State Department, from here…
Australia’s Herald Sun confirms the story today, stating: