New whistleblowers said to provide 'significant' documents on BP spill, military abuses
The WikiLeaks website has received additional “very significant” material about U.S. military abuses from anonymous whistleblowers since the publication of its leaked Afghan war logs and plans to post the new documents within weeks, the group’s founder said Friday.
In an interview with NBC News, Julian Assange, the controversial WikiLeaks chief, said in just the last few days the website has received a "wide variety" of fresh material, including documents on the oil giant BP and "internal abuses," including sexual abuse, within the U.S. military. The enormous international publicity given the Afghan documents has “emboldened” more whistleblowers to step forward and contact the organization, he said.
Assange’s vow to publicize more internal government documents comes in the wake of furious criticism of WikiLeaks from the Obama administration and members of Congress over its publication of 91,000 classified U.S. documents on the war in Afghanistan — at least some of which appear to identify the names of U.S. and Afghan government informants and cooperative parties in the war against the Taliban.
The U.S. military, working with the FBI, also has stepped up its investigation into the disclosure, announcing Friday that it had transferred Army intelligence analyst Pfc. Bradley Manning — described by Pentagon officials as a “person of interest” in the probe — from Kuwait to Quantico, Va. Manning already stands accused of providing WikiLeaks with a video of a U.S. air strike that killed civilians in Iraq.
At a news conference at the Pentagon on Thursday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates charged that the WikiLeaks material had endangered the safety of U.S. troops and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that Assange and WikiLeaks may “already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.”
Story: Pentagon: Leak probe may go beyond military
But Assange shot back Friday that if the names of any Afghan informants were identified in the WikiLeaks documents, the U.S. military has only itself to blame for what he said would be a “disgraceful” lapse in security by allowing easy accessibility to such material. While declining to identify any of the organizations sources, he said the documents were available through SIPRNET (Secret Internet Protocol Router Network) — the Defense Department’s standard classified Internet network that is widely accessible to “hundreds of thousands” of soldiers and defense contractors around the world.
Even WikiLeaks internally uses “code names” and code words to shield the identities of its sources, he said.
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