The Pentagon on Wednesday rebutted statements by the WikiLeaks organization that it had expressed a willingness to discuss reviewing a trove of classified documents before public release.
“The Department of Defense will not negotiate some ‘minimized’ or ‘sanitized’ version of a release by WikiLeaks of additional US government classified documents,” Jeh Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, wrote in a letter to a lawyer representing WikiLeaks, the online whistle-blowing organization.
The letter was dated on Monday but was provided by Defense Department officials on Wednesday.
Earlier in the day, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.org, was quoted by The Associated Press as having said the Pentagon had agreed to negotiations over how to redact the files to remove names and information that might harm individuals, in a process leading to the eventual release of more documents by his organization.
Adding to the dispute, the Pentagon letter — addressed to Timothy Matusheski, a lawyer who works pro bono for WikiLeaks — said that Johnson and Matusheski had agreed to speak by telephone at 10am on Sunday about the department’s official position. Despite his consent to the conversation, the WikiLeaks lawyer did not answer the telephone, Johnson wrote.
Matusheski disputed the Pentagon’s version of events, beyond confirming that he had discussed a review of the documents with an Army criminal investigator.
“You could tell us what stuff is critical — tell us what to redact,” he said in a phone interview, describing his end of that conversation.
Matusheski said, however, that he had not asked for an appointment and had never agreed to a specific time to discuss the issue with senior government officials.
Assange told The Associated Press that he had received information through his lawyer that Pentagon lawyers “want to discuss the issue.”
Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, said WikiLeaks “misrepresented both the level of engagement we have had as well as our position on this matter.” The policy has not changed, he said.
“We are willing to discuss with them how they can return the stolen documents and expunge them from their records,” he said.
The New York Times, the Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel, after being given early access by WikiLeaks, published excerpts from an archive of 77,000 classified documents but excluded those that identified individuals or compromised operations.
At the US government’s request, the Times also forwarded a request to WikiLeaks not to post online any documents that would put informants in jeopardy.
WikiLeaks has said it plans to release 15,000 more documents soon.
An Army intelligence analyst, Private First Class Bradley Manning, has been charged with downloading volumes of classified information from a computer at his base east of Baghdad and sending it to WikiLeaks.
Meanwhile, Assange has been in Sweden this week in part to prepare an application for a publishing certificate that would make sure the site is fully protected by Swedish laws.
WikiLeaks moved its servers from the US to Sweden in 2007 to take advantage of laws protecting whistleblowers and a culture supportive of online mavericks.
Swedish laws allow prosecutors to intervene against publication of material deemed harmful to national security. It’s unclear whether that could also include the security of a friendly nation.
Another question is whether there is political will in Sweden to go after WikiLeaks. Assange is confident there isn’t.
“The will of the Swedish people is with us,” Assange told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt said the US has not contacted Stockholm about WikiLeaks. Any complaint against the site would be a matter for Swedish judicial authorities — not the government, Bildt said, but added he doesn’t primarily see WikiLeaks as a legal problem.
“Is it responsible to publish information that leads to people being killed? I think that is more of an ethical question than a legal one,” he said.
The Pirate Party, a small Swedish political group that holds a seat in the European Parliament, on Tuesday offered Wikileaks the use of its servers. Their reasoning was that it would be even more difficult for authorities to seize servers owned by a political group.
Assange has said WikiLeaks routes its material through Sweden and Belgium because of the whistleblower protection offered by laws in those countries.
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