As Olivia Wilde's former babysitter once said,
"Calling Kissinger a War Criminal is not an epithet, it's a job description."
With those immortal words as preamble, I offer
The Kissinger Cables, compliments of our intrepid friends at Wikileaks.
The Kissinger Cables comprise more than 1.7 million US diplomatic records for the period 1973 to 1976, including 205,901 records relating to former US Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger. Dating from January 1, 1973 to December 31, 1976 they cover a variety of diplomatic traffic including cables, intelligence reports and congressional correspondence. They include more than 1.3 million full diplomatic cables and 320,000 originally classified records. These include more than 227,000 cables classified as "CONFIDENTIAL" and 61,000 cables classified as "SECRET". Perhaps more importantly, there are more than 12,000 documents with the sensitive handling restriction "NODIS" or 'no distribution', and more than 9,000 labelled "Eyes Only".
Starting at 9 AM today, Wikileaks will be holding a press conference at the National Press Club. It will be interesting to see if our lapdog corporate media gives it the same attention they lavish on the lunatics shilling for the NRA. Somehow, I doubt it.
It's not that Kissinger is such a beloved American Patriot ®. After all, this is a guy who chose to resign his position as head of the 9/11 Commission investigating the World Trade Center attack -- one of the worst terrorist attacks on American Soil in American History -- because he didn't want to disclose (unspecified) "potential conflicts of interest" with his clients.
So now that we know how low the man is willing to go, let's see what else we are going to learn from this document dump. The disclosure did not come easy.
The CIA and other agencies have attempted to reclassify or withhold sections of the US National Archives. Detailed minutes of US State Department meetings show that these attempts, which originated under the Bush II administration, have continued on through until at least 2009. A 2006 analysis by the US National Security Archives, an independent non-governmental research institute and library located at George Washington University, found that 55,000 pages had been secretly reclassified.
Last November, the US National Archives even
censored all searches for 'WikiLeaks' from its records. Remember that? Me neither. So now you know why people like Assange, Manning, and others are so valuable. And this is why he gets the last word:
Julian Assange, WikiLeaks' publisher, said: "The US administration cannot be trusted to maintain the history of its interactions with the world. Fortunately, an organisation with an unbroken record in resisting censorship attempts now has a copy."