“The publication of the documents reveals the contradictions between the public image of the United States and what is really said behind closed doors – and shows that if citizens in a democracy want their government to reflect their wishes, then they should have the opportunity to ask to be shown what really goes on behind the scenes”
“In the United States every child is taught at school that George Washington – the first President of that country – was someone incapable of lying. If the successors of every administration that preceded him had done their work in keeping with that principle, then the flood of documents published today would be no more than an awkward situation” said Assange. “On the contrary, the Government of the United States has alerted every government – even the most corrupt ones- around the world, trying to mitigate the damage ahead of the imminent impact of the documents to be revealed today”.
Unlike previous Wikileaks publications, in which numerous documents were published all at once, on this occasion the organisation will publish the documents gradually. “The Embassy cables will be published in stages over the coming months. The subject matter of the cables is of such importance, and covers such a wide geographic area, that doing it any other way would not do justice to the content it reveals”
“We owe it to the people who entrusted us with the disclosure of the documents that they be disclosed in the proper way. That is why we must make sure there is time to write about them, to comment on and discuss their content broadly and in public, something that is impossible to achieve if all the documents are published at once. That is why the publication will be carried out gradually over the following weeks and even months.”
“While the documents show atrocious diplomatic cynicism and abuse, the fact that these materials were leaked shows that there are good and brave people working inside government, who believe in transparency and in a more ethical foreign policy. These people seek to reform the organisations they work for, a goal that, according to what the cables show, matters to every citizen in every country. Today’s publication is a sample of the power of the actions of one brave person, but it will be the world’s reaction to those cables that defines whether change is possible”.
“In the coming weeks we will be able to judge the political climate of dozens of countries by their reactions. Will they join the campaign of distraction and disinformation, or will they take this situation as the opportunity to reform the system?”
Key facts:
The complete set comprises 251,288 documents, which in turn add up to 261,276,536 words (seven times the size of «The Iraq War Logs», which was the largest publication of classified information until today).
If the reading pace of a person who wanted to read all the cables were equivalent to that of someone who reads one doctoral thesis per week, it would take them approximately 70 years to finish the task.
The cables cover the period from 28 December 1966 to 28 February 2010, and originated from 274 different embassies, consulates and diplomatic missions.
According to the tagging system used by the State Department, the most discussed topics in the communications are:
Political International Relations– 145,451
Internal Government Affairs – 122,896
Human Rights – 55,211
Economic Conditions – 49,044
Terrorists and terrorism – 28,801
United Nations Security Council – 6,532
Iraq is the most discussed country in the communications – 15,365 (Cables sent from Iraq– 6,677)
Ankara, Turkey was the Embassy that sent the largest number of cables, 7,918
8,017 instructions were sent from the offices of the Secretary of the State Department.
15, 652 cables are classified as secret, 101,748 as confidential and 133,887 are unclassified documents.
Source: http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/articles/2010/Wikileaks-empieza-a-publicar.html