Afghanistan war leak papers will take 'weeks to assess'Tuesday, July 27, 2010 11:20:07 AM
The US military has said it could take weeks to determine the impact of the leak of more than 90,000 classified military records. The documents, published online at the website Wikileaks, detail the war in Afghanistan, including previously unreported civilian deaths.
They reveal concerns within Nato that Pakistani intelligence helped the Taliban - something Islamabad denies.
The White House condemned the leak as a possible threat to national security.
The huge cache of classified papers - posted by Wikileaks as the Afghan War Diary - is one of the biggest leaks in US history.
Wikileaks describes the documents as battlefield and intelligence reports compiled by a variety of military units during the period 2004-09.
Calling their release a "criminal act", Pentagon spokesman Col Dave Lapan said US officials were reviewing the documents to determine "whether they reveal sources and methods" and might endanger US and coalition personnel.
It could take "days, if not weeks" to go through the leaked documents, he said.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said the leak did not reveal anything new about the nature of the war in Afghanistan but the details revealed could be damaging.
"Whenever you have the potential for names and for operations and for programmes to be out there in the public domain... besides being against the law, [it] has a potential to be very harmful to those that are in our military, those that are co-operating with our military and those that are working to keep us safe."
The founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, told a news conference in London he had no reason to doubt the reliability of the reports and said the release of the material was comparable to the opening of the archives of the Stasi, the East German secret police.
The documents were given in advance to the New York Times, the Guardian and the German news magazine, Der Spiegel.
War crimes?
A spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai said he was "shocked" at the scale of the leaks, but thought that "most of this is not new".
Mr Karzai's office later said the documents "clearly support and verify Afghanistan's all-time position that success over terrorism does not come with fighting in Afghan villages, but by targeting its sanctuaries and financial and ideological sources across the borders".
Mr Gibbs said the documents covered the period before President Barack Obama announced an increase in resources for Afghanistan and a new strategy for the war.
But Mr Assange was sceptical, saying: "A new policy by Obama doesn't mean new practice by the US military."
He also said Wikileaks had "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."
After being asked repeatedly by reporters whether he believed some of the incidents described in the documents constituted war crimes, Mr Assange said: "It is up to a court to decide, clearly, whether something is, in the end, a crime."
"That said, prima facie, there does appear to be evidence of war crimes in this material," he added.
He cited as an example an attack in June 2007 by a secret US special forces unit, Task Force 373, which used a Himars (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) to begin a raid on a compound where a senior al-Qaeda leader, Abu-Laith al-Libi, was thought to be hiding. Seven children died.
The Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) acknowledged the deaths of the children at the time, but stated that coalition troops had attacked because of "nefarious activity" there.
It did not mention they had targeted al-Libi nor used a Himars before any shots had been fired at them, and has not commented on the details included in the Wikileaks papers.
Pakistan's government, meanwhile, denied claims its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency backed the Taliban in the war in Afghanistan.
One of the leaked documents refers to an alleged meeting in December 2006 between insurgents and the former ISI chief, Lt Gen Hamid Gul, during which he claimed to have dispatched three men to Kabul to carry out attacks.
He dismissed the Wikileaks material, telling the BBC it was "pure fiction which is being sold as intelligence".
The Pakistani presidential spokeswoman, Farahnaz Ispahani, said the leaks might be an attempt to sabotage the new strategic dialogue between the US and Pakistan.
The reports also suggest:
* The Taliban has had access to portable heat-seeking missiles to shoot at aircraft
* A secret US special forces unit, Task Force 273, has been engaged on missions to "capture or kill" top insurgents listed on a Joint Priority Effects List (JPEL)
* Many civilian casualties - caused by Taliban roadside bombs and Nato missions that went wrong - have gone unreported
* Iran is engaged in an extensive covert campaign to arm, finance and equip the Taliban and Afghan warlords allied to al-Qaeda
National security 'breached'
In Washington, the head of the Foreign Relations Committee in the US Senate said the leak came at a "critical stage" for US policy in the region.
"However illegally these documents came to light, they raise serious questions about the reality of America's policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan," Democratic Senator John Kerry said.
Wikileaks says it delayed the release of about 15,000 reports from the archive as part of a "harm minimisation process demanded by our source".
The Guardian and the New York Times say they had no contact with the original source of the leak, but spent weeks cross-checking the information.
A senior US senator urged the military to launch a "major investigation" into the leak.
"These leaks are a serious breach of national security," said Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Earlier this year, Wikileaks posted a video on its website which it said showed the killings of civilians by a US military helicopter in Baghdad in 2007.
A US army intelligence analyst, Specialist Bradley Manning, is awaiting trial on charges including releasing classified information.
A former hacker, Adrian Lamo, said Spc Manning boasted to him about handing over military videos and 260,000 classified US embassy messages to Wikileaks.
Wikileaks has refused to identify its source for the video or the US military documents.
Meanwhile, Nato said an investigation had found "no evidence" that as many as 52 civilians died in an air strike in Helmand province on Friday.
President Karzai's office had said Afghan intelligence believed coalition forces had killed women and children in the village of Rigi. The BBC also spoke to villagers who said they had witnesses the incident. (BBC)
Link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-10770682
