Whistleblowing website Wikileaks has begun releasing more than 250,000 classified cables from American embassies around the world - including 68 reports about Bermuda.

The huge data leak, reported to be the largest-ever release of confidential documents into the public domain, has been denounced as “reckless and dangerous” by the White House and a threat to national security by 10 Downing Street.

So far, some 220 documents have made it into the public domain - none of them apparently referencing Bermuda. But Wikileaks says on its dedicated “Cablegate” website — http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/ — that the embassy correspondence will be released in stages over the next few months.

The “data dump”?involves cables sent between 1966 and February this year;?15, 652 of them secret files, 101,748 confidential and 133,887 unclassified.

The reports on Bermuda are expected to shed fresh light on the deal struck by former Premier Ewart Brown last year to bring four Uighurs from Guantanamo Bay to the Island.

The New York Times reports today that some of the cables reveal how the American authorities used their assets to empty the notorious detention centre.

The newspaper states that they offered Slovenia talks with President Barack Obama in exchange for taking a Gitmo prisoner, while “the island nation of Kiribati was offered incentives worth millions of dollars to take in Chinese Muslim detainees”.

See much more on this story in tomorrow’s edition of The Royal Gazette.