A special task force has been established by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to monitor Taiwan-related documents expected to be released soon by the whistle-blowing Web site WikiLeaks, Minister of Foreign Affairs Timothy Yang (楊進添) said yesterday.
“We have been in close contact with the United States and we believe that the leaked classified documents will not jeopardize bilateral relations,” Yang said.
Wikileaks announced on its Web site that over the next few months, it will release in stages 251,287 cables originating from 274 US embassies between Dec. 28, 1966 and Feb. 28 this year of the total 3,456 that were sent between the US State Department and the American Institute in Taiwan — the de facto US representative office in Taiwan.
The ministry has set up a task force under its Department of North American Affairs which has held meetings since last week to gauge and manage the possible impact of WikiLeaks’ release, Yang said.
Yang declined to comment on the authenticity of the documents, although Minister of National Defense Kao Hua-chu (高華柱) said in the legislature on Thursday that information unveiled by the Web site “was not necessarily true.”
It would be more appropriate to let the US comment on the case, given that those documents were US government property, Yang said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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