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Pentagon urges WikiLeaks to 'do the right thing'
The Pentagon on Thursday urged whistleblower website WikiLeaks to "do the right thing," calling on the site to hand over thousands of leaked US military documents and halt future public releases.
Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said the Defense Department "demands that WikiLeaks return immediately to the US government all versions of documents obtained directly or indirectly" from Pentagon databases or records, appearing to imply that hackers may have helped WikiLeaks obtain classified files.
Morrell said there was other information in WikiLeaks' possession that "has not been pushed into the public domain yet that we hope this message will help convince them not to publish."
Some 70,000 classified documents on Afghanistan were published by WikiLeaks in late July. The files contained a string of damaging claims, including allegations that Pakistani spies met directly with the Taliban and that deaths of innocent civilians at the hands of international forces were covered up.
The documents also included the names of some Afghan informants, prompting claims that the leaks have endangered lives.
The website's disclosure "of a large number of our documents has already threatened the safety of our troops, our allies and Afghan citizens who are working with us to help bring about peace and stability in that part of the world," Morrell said.
"The only acceptable course is for WikiLeaks to take steps immediately to return all versions of all of these documents to the US government and permanently delete them from its website, computers and records," he said.
Morrell cautioned that any additional public disclosure of classified information "can only make the damage worse," adding that the Pentagon hoped WikiLeaks would heed its warning, but did not "have a high degree of confidence" that it would.
"If doing the right thing is not good enough for them, then we will figure out what other alternatives we have to compel them to do the right thing... Let me leave it at that," Morrell told reporters, without elaborating on what pressure could be brought to bear.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, 39, an Australian former hacker and computer programmer, has said he believed the publication would help focus public debate on the war in Afghanistan and on possible atrocities by US-led forces.
US Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the US military's top officer, Admiral Mike Mullen, both said the publication had endangered locals providing information to US-led NATO forces in Afghanistan.
The Pentagon and the FBI swiftly launched an investigation into the case when it came to light July 25
Earlier this week Daniel Schmitt, a WikiLeaks spokesman in Germany, told US news website The Daily Beast that the site wanted to open a line of communication with the Pentagon to review the 15,000 further classified reports in order to "make redactions so they can be safely published."
The Pentagon however said Wednesday it had not received any such request from WikiLeaks.
The site, which styles itself "the first intelligence agency of the people," was founded in December 2006 and invited would-be whistleblowers from around the world to make anonymous contributions.
WikiLeaks has never identified the source of the Afghan files, but suspicion has fallen on Bradley Manning, a US Army intelligence analyst under arrest for allegedly leaking video of a 2007 US Apache helicopter strike in Baghdad in which civilians died.
Manning is being held in a US military jail after being transferred from a US military base in Kuwait.
