WikiLeaks seeks transparency in data disclosure

Whistleblower: Site posts thousands of secret reports on Afghan war

Since it was founded in December 2006, WikiLeaks has exposed internal memos about the dumping of toxic material off the African coast, the membership rolls of a racist British party, and the American military’s manual for operating its prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“We believe that transparency in government activities leads to reduced corruption, better government and stronger democracies,” the organisation’s website says.

“All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community, as well as their own people. We believe this scrutiny requires information.” The trove of war reports posted on Sunday dwarfs the scope and volume of documents that the organisation has made public in the past.

In a telephone interview from London, the organisation’s founder, Julian Assange, said the documents would reveal broader and more pervasive levels of violence in Afghanistan than the military or the news media had previously reported. “It shows not only the severe incidents but the general squalor of war, from the death of individual children to major operations that kill hundreds,” he said.

WikiLeaks withheld some 15,000 documents from release until its technicians could redact names of individuals in the reports whose safety could be jeopardised.

Action slammed

WikiLeaks’ critics range from the military, which says it jeopardises operations, to some open government advocates who say the organisation is endangering the privacy rights of others in favour of self promotion. Steven Aftergood, head of the project on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, in his blog posting on June 28 accused WikiLeaks of “information vandalism” with no regard for privacy or social usefulness.

“WikiLeaks must be counted among the enemies of open society because it does not respect the rule of law nor does it honor the rights of individuals,” he wrote.

The release of the data comes nearly three weeks after new charges were filed against an American soldier in Iraq who had been arrested on charges of leaking a video of a deadly American helicopter attack in Baghdad in 2007 that killed 12 people, including a reporter and photographer from the news agency Reuters.

He was also charged with downloading more than 150,000 highly classified diplomatic cables.

WikiLeaks made public a 38-minute video of the helicopter attack as well as a 17-minute edited version that it called “Collateral Murder.” The abridged version drew criticism for failing to make clear that the attacks happened during clashes in a Baghdad neighbourhood and that one of the men fired on by the helicopter was carrying a rocket-propelled grenade.

WikiLeaks has also made public a cable entitled “Reykjavik13,” about the banking crisis in Iceland, which was cited in the criminal charges against the soldier, Pfc Bradley E Manning, 22, an Army intelligence analyst. In keeping with its policy to protect the anonymity of its sources, WikiLeaks has not acknowledged receiving the cables or video from Private Manning. In the telephone interview, Assange, an Australian activist, refused to say whether the war reports came from Private Manning. But Assange said WikiLeaks had offered to help pay for Private Manning’s legal counsel or provide lawyers to defend him.

WikiLeaks has a core group of about half a dozen full-time volunteers, and there are 800 to 1,000 people whom the group can call on for expertise in areas like encryption, programming and writing news releases.

Assange, 39, said the site operated from servers in several countries, including Sweden and Belgium, where laws provided more protection for its disclosures.