Julian Assange wants the Pentagon’s help. His secretive WikiLeaks website tells The Daily Beast it is making an urgent request to the Defense Department for help in reviewing 15,000 still-secret American military reports to remove the names of Afghan civilians and others who might be endangered when the website makes the reports public.
The request follows statements of regret from Assange and others at WikiLeaks that the site may have unintentionally endangered Afghan civilians with its first massive document dump—72,000 leaked classified American military reports from Afghanistan that revealed the names and home villages of hundreds of local informants who cooperated with American forces there.
Schmitt said the site wanted to open a line of communication with the Defense Department to review an additional 15,000 classified reports in an effort to “make redactions so they can be safely published.”
The Taliban has suggested it will now hunt down the informants named in the leaked documents.
“I would certainly say that the invitation to talk to the Obama administration is open,” said Daniel Schmitt, a WikiLeaks spokesman in Germany. “It has been open before.”
In a phone interview Tuesday with The Daily Beast, Schmitt said the site wanted to open a line of communication with the Defense Department to review an additional 15,000 classified reports that have still not been posted to the site in an effort to “make redactions so they can be safely published.” Schmitt said the reports also relate to American military operations in Afghanistan.
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