More than 90,000 files related to the Afghanistan war were published on the site Wikileaks on Sunday, prompting angry reaction from the White House. The classified documents covering six years of the Afghanistan war were made available first to The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel. Under the conditions of the agreement with Wikileaks, the papers withheld their reports on the documents until Sunday.
National Security Adviser Gen. James Jones lashed out Sunday evening at Wikileaks, a website boasting a database of more than 1.2 million leaked, sensitive documents. The site, founded in July 2007 with a shadowy leadership, describes itself as "a multi-jurisdictional public service designed to protect whistleblowers, journalists and activists who have sensitive materials to communicate to the public"; the Chinese government attempts to block the site.
"The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security," Jones said in a statement released by the White House. "Wikileaks made no effort to contact us about these documents - the United States government learned from news organizations that these documents would be posted."
The documents cover coalition forces' attacks on civilians and friendly fire incidents, reveal American suspicions that Pakistan's intelligence service is aiding the insurgency, and show a strengthened Taliban that is using weapons such as heat-seeking missiles against coalition forces.
Seeing the sensitivity of the Pakistan documents, Jones also praised the partnership with Pakistan, saying that the countries had "deepened our important bilateral partnership" since 2009.
"The Pakistani military has gone on the offensive in Swat and South Waziristan, at great cost to the Pakistani military and people," Jones said. "...Yet the Pakistani government - and Pakistan's military and intelligence services - must continue their strategic shift against insurgent groups."
NYT editor Bill Keller said in a note to readers Sunday that the paper had taken care to not publish information that would harm national security. "We have, for example, withheld any names of operatives in the field and informants cited in the reports," Kellar wrote. "We have avoided anything that might compromise American or allied intelligence-gathering methods such as communications intercepts. We have not linked to the archives of raw material. At the request of the White House, The Times also urged WikiLeaks to withhold any harmful material from its Web site."
The documents reportedly cover the period from January 2004 to December 2009.
(Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images)
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