Post date: Oct 23, 2010 12:43:31 PM
Wikileaks founder defends release of classified files on the Iraq war at a news conference in London.
LONDON, ENGLAND, UK (OCTOBER 23, 2010) UK POOL - Whistleblowing website Wikileaks presented on Saturday (October 23) its latest release, alongside organisations which helped prepare the material. The website released nearly 400,000 classified U.S. files on the Iraq war on Friday (October 22), some detailing gruesome cases of prisoner abuse by Iraqi forces that the U.S. military knew about but did not seem to investigate.
The Pentagon decried the website's publication of the secret reports -- the largest security breach of its kind in U.S. military history, far surpassing the group's dump of more than 70,000 Afghan war files in July. U.S. officials said the leak endangered U.S. troops and threatened to put some 300 Iraqi collaborators at risk by exposing their identities.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said the documents showed evidence of war crimes and defended their publication.
"In our release of these 400,000 documents about the Iraq war, in intimate detail of that war from the U.S. perspective, we hope to correct some of that attack on the truth that occurred before the war, during the war and which has continued on since the war officially ended," he told reporters at a news conference in London where he was joined by some of the organisations given advance access to the database.
"The victims of this war, their families and the publics whose taxes funded this war deserve better than this. There is a public right to know," said John Sloboda, co-founder of human rights group Iraq Body Count (IBC).
The Iraq war files touched on other themes, including well-known U.S. concerns about Iranian training and support for Iraqi militias. The documents, which spanned 2003 to 2009, also detailed 66,081 civilian deaths in the Iraqi conflict, WikiLeaks said.
Although the Iraq conflict has faded from U.S. public debate in recent years, the document dump threatens to revive memories of some of the most trying times in the war, including the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse