WikiLeaks sparks fury with release of unredacted cables

Anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks on Friday dumped its full unredacted archive of more than 250,000 US diplomatic cables online, drawing a furious response from its media partners.

The website confirmed in a message on Twitter that all 251,287 of the US embassy cables had been posted on the Internet and posted a link to a site containing the documents that can be accessed without a password.

Five media groups which worked with WikiLeaks on the first release last year the Guardian, the New York Times, German news magazine Der Spiegel, Spanish daily El Pais and France's Le Monde condemned the decision to publish the cables without first deleting the names of sources who spoke to US diplomats.

"We deplore the decision of Wikileaks to publish the unredacted State Department cables, which may put sources at risk," they said in a joint statement published in the Guardian.

"Our previous dealings with WikiLeaks were on the clear basis that we would only publish cables which had been subjected to a thorough editing and clearance process."

WikiLeaks had been slowly releasing the leaked documents since November and had largely worked with the media organisations which trawled through the information to erase the names of potentially vulnerable sources.

The decision to dump the remaining documents will also anger the United States, which has warned the move could endanger the lives of its sources and was irate last week when some of the cables were published with names unprotected.

"Shining a light on 45 years of US 'diplomacy', it is time to open the archives forever," said WikiLeaks in a tweet announcing the release on Friday.

Previous releases revealed the often candid views of American diplomats about foreign governments around the world and caused huge embarrassment to the United States.

Among the newly released documents were tens of thousands from countries with which Washington has difficult relationships, including nearly 20,000 about Afghanistan, 13,000 on Pakistan and 30,000 about Iran.

The Guardian said the newly published archives contained more than 1,000 cables identifying individual activists, as well as some labelled with a tag used by the US to mark sources it believed could be in danger if identified.

One cable from December 2004 contains telephone numbers of figures at the Vatican including the then Pope John Paul II, the BBC reported.

Other recent revelations included concern from the US consulate in the Chinese city of Guangzhou over contamination in the Pearl River.

Iraq meanwhile said it would open an investigation into the alleged summary execution of 10 Iraqis, including four women and five children, by US forces in 2006, disclosed in a April 2006 US diplomatic cable released last week.

The document release came amid a row between WikiLeaks and the Guardian over who was behind last week's release of thousands of unredacted cables.

WikiLeaks accused the Guardian of leaking the password to the archive, but the newspaper denied the allegation.

In the joint statement by the five media partners on Friday, they said the decision to publish the full archive was the decision of WikiLeaks' Australian founder Julian Assange, "and his alone".

Assange is currently living under stringent bail conditions in Britain, fighting extradition to Sweden where he is wanted for questioning over alleged rape and sexual assault.

The State Department said Thursday WikiLeaks had informed it in advance of the document releases, but ignored US appeals that making them public could endanger lives and put US national security at risk.

"We have made clear our views and concerns about illegally disclosed classified information and the continuing risk to individuals and national security that such releases cause," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said.

WikiLeaks has defended the release of the diplomatic cables -- as well as the previous release of leaked Iraq and Afghanistan war reports as the journalistic exposure of official deception.

US soldier Bradley Manning is suspected of leaking the cables and other military documents to WikiLeaks. He was arrested in June last year while deployed in Iraq and is being held in a US military prison.

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