Search on at Pentagon for source of Afghan leaks

THE PENTAGON has launched “a very robust investigation” into the leaking of tens of thousands of classified documents on the Afghan war to the WikiLeaks.org website, Geoff Morrell, a Pentagon spokesman, told CBS television yesterday.

Mr Morrell said a team is working “round the clock” to determine the source of the leak. He nonetheless minimised the importance of some 92,000 reports from 2004 to 2009, saying they were “not particularly new or illuminating” and “at least six months old”. Nor did they reflect the US-Pakistan “partnership that is so vital to our success in Afghanistan”.

Although the documents revealed collusion between Pakistani intelligence services and the Taliban as recently as last October, Mr Morrell said the US relationship with Pakistan “has been trending in the right direction for months, if not a couple of years”.

Suspicion has focused on Pte Bradley Manning, a 22-year-old US army intelligence analyst. The Pentagon has charged Pte Manning with providing footage of a July 2007 US helicopter attack in Iraq that killed 12 people, including a Reuters reporter and photographer, to WikiLeaks. When the video was posted on the group’s website in April, it created a scandal.

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, yesterday told MSNBC that Bradley Manning, who is being held by the US military in Kuwait, was a “political prisoner” whom he compared to prisoners at Guantánamo. Though it has not admitted to receiving material from him, WikiLeaks has offered to contribute to Pte Manning’s defence. The military is now checking Pte Manning’s computer to determine whether he would have had access to the Afghan reports when he was in Iraq.

Col Dave Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman, acknowledged that the private was a person of interest in the investigation. “He is someone we are looking at closely,” he said.

A poll conducted by Bloomberg this month showed that 58 per cent of Americans believe Afghanistan is a lost cause, and the WikiLeaks documents reinforce that belief.

President Barack Obama commented on the leaks yesterday, saying there was nothing new in them, and that things have improved since the last reports in December.

“While I’m concerned about the disclosure of sensitive information from the battlefield that could potentially jeopardise individuals or operations,” Mr Obama said, “the fact is these documents don’t reveal any issues that haven’t already informed our public debate.”

The uproar over the Afghan documents is not likely to subside. WikiLeaks said it will release another 15,000 reports, which it is editing to ensure that potentially harmful information, such as the names of informers, is deleted.