U.S. asks WikiLeaks site to stop war-report posts

— The Obama administration on Friday implored the website WikiLeaks to stop posting secret Afghanistan war documents, as the Pentagon pressed its investigation of the security breach by bringing a soldier under scrutiny back to the U.S. for trial.

Administration officials said the investigation into the release of the documents, more than 76,900 so far, could extend beyond members of the military.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said WikiLeaks’ online posting of mostly raw military intelligence reports jeopardized national security and put the lives of Afghan informants and U.S. troops at risk.

Asked what the Obama administration could do to stop WikiLeaks from disclosing thousands of similar documents it claims to have, Gibbs said, “We can do nothing but implore the person that has those classified top secret documents not to post any more.”

“I think it’s important that no more damage be done to our national security,” Gibbs said Friday on NBC’s Today show.

According to Britain’s Channel 4 News, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in a telephone interview that theAfghans named in the leaked documents were under scrutiny.

The Pentagon’s inquiry has been looking most closely at Pfc. Bradley Manning, an Army intelligence analyst charged with leaking a helicopter video from Iraq to the WikiLeaks website. The classified cockpit video showed a 2007 firefight in Baghdad that left a Reuters photographer and his driver dead.

Manning has also been charged with illegally obtaining more than 150,000 classified State Department cables and leaking more than 50 of them. It’s not clear from the charges, though, whether the purportedly diverted documents were those published on the WikiLeaks site.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. in an interview that aired Thursday that WikiLeaks had contacted the White House, via The New York Times, which acted as intermediary.

Assange said WikiLeaks had offered to let U.S. government officials go through the documents to make sure no innocent people were identified. The White House did not respond to the proposal, he said.

A Pentagon spokesman, Marine Col. David Lapan, said Friday that it was “absolutely false” that WikiLeaks contacted the U.S. government to offer a prerelease review.

Asked about Assange’s statement, White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said: “It’s absolutely, unequivocally not true. He’s as careless with the facts as he has been with these documents.”

On Thursday, Assange dismissed allegations that innocent people or informants had been put in danger by his organization’s postings.

“We are yet to see clear evidence of that,” he said in the Australian Broadcasting interview.

WikiLeaks describes itself as a public service organization for whistle-blowers, journalists and activists.

Information for this article was contributed by Matthew Lee of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 7 on 07/31/2010

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