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An Afghan child watches
from a car as US soldiers patrol in the Dand district of Kandahar
Province.
(Photo: AFP) |
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Washington:
Two newspapers are reporting that 90,000 leaked US military records
amount to a blow-by-blow account of six years of the Afghanistan
war, including unreported killings of Afghan civilians as well as
covert operations by special operations forces against Taliban
figures.
The New York Times and The Guardian of London say the documents were
made available to them, as well as the German weekly Der Spiegel, by
the online whistle-blower organisation Wikileaks.
A US official it may take days to comb through all the documents.
The source of the leak is believed to be a US Army analyst who was
arrested in Iraq and has been charged with leaking classified
information.
The White House reacted strongly
within hours of the release. National Security Advisor General James
Jones said in a statement that the U.S. "strongly condemns the
disclosure of classified information by individuals and
organisations which could put the lives of Americans and our
partners at risk, and threaten our national security".
'Wikileaks founder defends'
The founder of Wikileaks says that angry reactions to his release of
tens of thousands of US military documents on the Afghan war show
the whistleblower website is succeeding in its mission.
Julian Assange, 39, an Australian former hacker and computer
programmer, told the Guardian newspaper: "If journalism is good it
is controversial by its nature.
"It is the role of good journalism to take on powerful abuses, and
when powerful abuses are taken on, there is always a back reaction.
"So we see that controversy and we believe that is a good thing to
engage in."
The site, which styles itself "the first intelligence agency of the
people", was founded in December 2006 and invited would-be
whistleblowers from around the world to make anonymous
contributions.
It attained international fame in 2009 when it published internal
documents from multinational shipping company Trafigura implicating
the firm in toxic waste dumping in the Ivory Coast.
Until the Afghan dossier, Wikileaks' most prominent scoop was a
video posted in April this year showing a US Apache helicopter
strike in Baghdad in 2007. Around a dozen civilians were gunned
down, including two Reuters employees.
A US soldier, Private First Class Bradley E. Manning, was charged
earlier this month with misconduct over the leak.
The site has also hosted a copy of the US Army's operating
procedures for the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, and emails
from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia
implying scientists had hidden flaws in their data.
Assange says the site operates from servers in countries including
Sweden and Belgium, whose laws help to protect its information.
It has about half a dozen full-time volunteers and can call on 800
to 1,000 people for expertise in areas such as encryption,
programming and writing news releases, the New York Times said.
In May this year Assange's passport was briefly confiscated by
Australian authorities and he said in June that lawyers had advised
him not to travel to the United States.
The US government has repeatedly criticised the site, saying its
disclosures threaten national security and endanger lives, and may
present a biased picture.
The White House denounced the leak of the Afghan papers and a US
official said the site was "not an objective news outlet but rather
an organisation that opposes US policy in Afghanistan".
But Assange said he believed publication was in the public interest,
and told the New York Times that Wikileaks had withheld the
documents from release until it could redact the names of
individuals whose safety might be at risk.
"It shows not only the severe incidents but the general squalor of
war, from the death of individual children to major operations that
kill hundreds," he told The New York Times from London.
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