The founder of the whistleblowing Web site WikiLeaks on Monday defended his decision to publish thousands of secret US military files about the war in Afghanistan, faced with criticism from the White House for placing troops in danger.
Julian Assange said his organization was currently working through a “backlog” of further secret material and was expecting a “substantial increase in submissions” from whistleblowers after one of the biggest leaks in US military history.
Assange rejected accusations that the leak had compromised US national security.
PHOTO: EPA
“We are familiar with groups whose abuse we expose attempting to criticize the messenger to distract from the power of the message,” he said.
“We don’t see any difference in the White House’s response to this case to the other groups that we have exposed. We have tried hard to make sure that this material does not put innocents at harm. All the material is over seven months old so is of no current operational consequence, even though it may be of very significant investigative consequence,” Assange said.
Speaking at a press conference at the Frontline Club in central London, Assange said that the 90,000 leaked US military documents about the war in Afghanistan would help shape understanding of the past six years of fighting.
Earlier, the White House said the leaks “could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security.”
It said that WikiLeaks had made no effort to contact US security services, but insisted that what it called the “irresponsible leaks” would not “impact our ongoing commitment to deepen our partnerships with Afghanistan and Pakistan; to defeat our common enemies; and to support the aspirations of the Afghan and Pakistani people.”
British Minister of State for Security, Pauline Neville-Jones, former chair of the UK’s joint intelligence committee, described the leak as “really serious stuff” and questioned how the documents had been obtained.
“We don’t know how they got that material — it may be a combination of leaking of documents, but also one strongly suspects they have hacked into systems as well,” she said.
“This is a very, very big story. But if you stop to think about it for a moment, military systems have to be secure because people’s lives are at stake,” Neville-Jones said.
The Guardian, along with the New York Times and German weekly Der Spiegel, were given access to the archive and have spent several weeks investigating the logs. In order not to compromise intelligence sources or to put forces at risk, the Guardian has only published a selection of the logs, relating to significant events.
The UK’s former foreign secretary David Miliband, said the “war logs” showed that the war could not be won by military means alone.
“We cannot kill our way out of an insurgency. Instead, the battle for power is fought in the minds of the local population, insurgents and Western publics. The purpose of military effort and civilian improvement is to create the conditions for political settlement,” he said.
“There is now a race against time to persuade the Afghan people that the correct strategy is in place and show our own people it can succeed. Better Afghan security forces, better police, better schooling and economic opportunities are all vital but not enough. None of them are durable or possible without a political settlement,” Miliband said.
He said any peace settlement “must include the vanquished as well as the victors” and urged the government in Kabul to involve Afghans in “defining a political endgame.”
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