Pentagon studies risks to Afghans from leaks

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is reviewing tens of thousands of classified battlefield reports made public this week about the war in Afghanistan to determine whether Afghan informants were identified and could be at risk of reprisals, U.S. officials said Wednesday.

A Pentagon spokesman, Col. David Lapan, said a Pentagon assessment team had not drawn any conclusions, but "in general, the naming of individuals could cause potential problems, both to their physical safety or willingness to continue support to coalition forces or the Afghan government."

A search through a sample of the documents released by the organization WikiLeaks found reports that gave the names of dozens of Afghans credited with providing credible information to U.S. and NATO troops.

The New York Times and two other publications given access to the documents — the British newspaper The Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel — posted online only selected examples from documents that had been redacted to eliminate names and other information that could be used to identify people at risk. The news organizations did this to avoid jeopardizing the lives of informants.

The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, has said the organization withheld 15,000 of the approximately 92,000 documents in the archive that was released Sunday to remove the names of informants in what he called a "harm minimization" process.

But the 75,000 documents WikiLeaks put online provide information about possible informants, such as their villages and in some cases their fathers' names.

Asked on NBC's "Today" show Wednesday if the killing of an Afghan as a result of the WikiLeaks disclosure would be considered "collateral damage" in his efforts to make details of the war public, Assange said, "If we had, in fact, made that mistake, then, of course, that would be something that we would take very seriously."

National-security officials, meanwhile, are worried that the attention WikiLeaks is receiving has elevated its profile and could be used to entice disgruntled officials to send classified information to its website, which solicits "classified, censored or otherwise restricted material of political, diplomatic or ethical significance."

One U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said government lawyers were exploring whether WikiLeaks and Assange could be charged with a crime.

One question, some lawyers said, is whether WikiLeaks and Assange could be charged with inducing or serving as co-conspirators in violations of the Espionage Act, a 1917 law that prohibits the unauthorized disclosure of national-security information.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said on Fox News on Wednesday that WikiLeaks should be prosecuted for its role, saying, "As far as I know, there's no immunity for a website to be able to pass on documents" that were illegally leaked.

At a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing Wednesday, Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., pressed the FBI director, Robert Mueller, to say whether he expected that prosecutors would charge "both the individuals who provided the information and those who might have been involved in the dissemination of the information."

Mueller said, "at this juncture, I can't say as to where that particular investigation will lead."

Attorney General Eric Holder was similarly vague about prosecutorial plans, saying they would depend "on how the investigation goes."

Assange has not said where he obtained the documents. But a military intelligence analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, has been charged with leaking other classified documents and videos that have appeared on the WikiLeaks website.