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A British officer speaks
with an Afghan youth during a patrol near Nahr e Saraj village, in
Helmand
(Photo: AFP) |
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 Leaks show hidden Afghanistan war
details:
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 ......
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Dubai:
The next 15,000 military documents to be published on whistleblower
website wikileaks.org are "predominantly intelligence reports", its
founder Julian Assange told Gulf News by telephone from London on
Monday.
On Sunday, more than 91,000 secret — and previously unreported — US
military reports of conflicts in Afghanistan were published on the
site, as well as by the New York Times, The Guardian and Der
Spiegel.
It is the biggest military security leak since the Vietnam war.
Assange said at a news conference in London on Monday that the
documents may include evidence of war crimes.
War crimes evidence
However, when asked why the documents were not presented to
international war crime investigators, Assange said: "Publishing
them on the site and drawing attention to them through the media
tends to be more effective than drawing in the efforts of
investigators to follow-up the abuses that have been exposed."
According to the site, most of the entries in the "Afghan War Diary"
have been written by soldiers and intelligence officers listening to
reports radioed in from frontline deployments. Reports also contain
related information from Marine intelligence, US embassies, apart
from corruption cases and development activity across Afghanistan.
In 310 "significant" reports highlighted in a downloadable
spreadsheet by The Guardian, "Enemy KIA" (killed in action) numbered
138, while "Civilian KIA" numbered 197.
The Pentagon on Monday said its review of the documents could take
weeks.
Colonel Dave Lapan, Pentagon spokesman, said: "We will be looking at
them to try to determine the potential damage to lives of our
service members and our coalition partners, whether they reveal
sources and methods and any potential damage to national security.
"It will take a matter of days if not weeks, again depending on how
these documents are actually made available so that they can be
reviewed."
Kabul shocked
The Afghanistan government said it is "shocked" about the leak,
particularly regarding civilian casualties and the role of
Pakistan's intelligence service in destabilising activities inside
Afghanistan. Pakistan has said that the US intelligence leaks are
"skewed".
On the sidelines of the EU Foreign Ministers meeting in Brussels on
Monday, UK Foreign Secretary William Hague said: "I hope any such
leaks will not poison the atmosphere and I don't think they will."
Assange said WikiLeaks is a "public service" and it is not for it to
determine if sources are "well-motivated".
"We're not concerned if a source has a vendetta or not; our concern
is whether the material is significant and whether it's likely to
have a public impact and whether it's true," he said.
(Courtesy: Gulf News)
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