Image courtesy wikileaks.ch
Wikileaks, the whistleblower site that the US gov’t loves to hate, has just released the first in it’s latest batch of classified US documents – the Gitmo Files.
Wikileaks released 143 of the nearly 800 files on prisoners at the infamous Guantanamo Bay prison. They will be releasing additional documents each day over the coming month.
The release comes several days after stories from major news outlets around the world, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, McClatchey, The Guardian, The Telegraph, Le Monde, El Pais & Der Spiegel, all of which had received advanced copies of the files.
Interestingly, bad blood between Assange and both the NYT and the Guardian meant neither organization received the files from Wikileaks. The NYT reportedly received files from another source “on condition on anonymity” and then passed the files with the Guardian.
Not surprisingly, coverage of the files varies considerably between organizations. NYT & NPR teamed up for a great interactive – The Guantanamo Docket – which combines the Wikileaks files with others from the Pentagon and the U.S. Deparment of Defense. The Guardian developed created a very thorough series of articles, interactives & visualizations using just the Wikileaks files themselves, called The Guantanamo Files.
Foreign Policy online has an excellent Media Roundup, covering the various angles from several of the papers.