The Guardian called the material "one of the biggest leaks in U.S. military history ... a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and NATO commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency".
[19][20][21] In June 2010, The Guardian journalist Nick Davies and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange established that the U.S. Army had built a huge database with six years of sensitive military intelligence material.
[32] Journalist Will Heaven of The Daily Telegraph has said that WikiLeaks was not politically neutral when it fed its information to the left-leaning newspapers The Guardian, The New York Times, and Der Spiegel instead of releasing the data openly.
[32] The initial web article in The New York Times on the subject, appearing 25 July was written by Mark Mazzetti, Jane Perlez, Eric Schmitt, and Andrew Lehren, and titled "Pakistan Spy Service Aids Insurgents, Reports Assert".
Its Sunday, 25 July 2010 article by Declan Walsh states: But for all their eye-popping details, the intelligence files, which are mostly collated by junior officers relying on informants and Afghan officials, fail to provide a convincing smoking gun for ISI complicity.
Coming from sources such as Afghan spies and paid informants, Iranian involvement in Afghanistan steadily widened from 2004 to today and constituted armaments, money, and physical deployment of anti-NATO militants.
[15] The documents, wrote journalist Jeff Stein of The Washington Post'', stated that Hezb-e-Islami party leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Amin al-Haq, a financial advisor to Osama bin Laden, both flew to North Korea on 19 November 2005, and purchased remote-controlled rockets to be used against American and coalition aircraft.
[44] David Leigh of The Guardian wrote: They range from the shootings of individual innocents to the often massive loss of life from air strikes, which eventually led President Hamid Karzai to protest publicly that the US was treating Afghan lives as "cheap".
The Guardian reported their actions: The marines made a frenzied escape [from the scene of the bombing], opening fire with automatic weapons as they tore down a six-mile stretch of highway, hitting almost anyone in their way – teenage girls in the fields, motorists in their cars, old men as they walked along the road.
[44][47] In 2007, documents detail how U.S. special forces dropped six 2,000 lb bombs on a compound where they believed a "high-value individual" was hiding, after "ensuring there were no innocent Afghans in the surrounding area".
[48] On 16 August 2007, Polish troops mortared the village of Nangar Khel, killing five people – including a woman and her baby – in what The Guardian described as an apparent revenge attack shortly after experiencing an IED explosion.
The war logs made clear that suicide bombing, generally carried out by non-Afghan foreign fighters, was increasing and claim that they were nurtured by al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, whose influence was pervasive and possibly growing.
A report generated in September 2004 stated that terrorists had been assigned by Bin Laden to conduct a suicidal attack against the Afghan president Hamid Karzai, during a press conference or a meeting held.
The British paper cited as an example a press statement that concealed the fact that the real reason for a coalition presence in a particular area was because a group known as Task Force 373 was on a mission to kill or capture Abu Laith al-Libi.
[62][63] Partially in response to this criticism, Julian Assange claimed that WikiLeaks had sought the help of the White House, via The New York Times, in redacting the names of 'innocent' people but that this request had been denied.
Now, of course, that is — you know, that image is disturbing, but that is what happens in war, that spies or traitors are investigated.Former WikiLeaks volunteer, Smári McCarthy, told The Independent, 'there were serious disagreements over the decision not to redact the names of Afghan civilians'.
"[83] An editorial in The Washington Post stated "they hardly provide a secret history of the war or disclose previously unknown malfeasance" and that "tends to fill out and confirm the narrative of Afghanistan between 2004 and 2009 that most Americans are already familiar with".
The Times and the other news organizations agreed at the outset that we would not disclose – either in our articles or any of our online supplementary material – anything that was likely to put lives at risk or jeopardize military or antiterrorist operations.
[2]The Guardian called the material "one of the biggest leaks in U.S. military history...a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and NATO commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency".
[4] New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton said that the documents "undermines the confidence" Canadian citizens have in their government and called on politicians to "get to the bottom of" the situation regarding the friendly fire report.
Omid Nouripour, the security spokesman for the party, said, "On our reading of the U.S. documents, it is disturbing how little the federal government has informed the parliament about the activities of American special forces in German areas.
"[97] India – The Ministry of External Affairs said:[99] We have seen media reports about classified information, supposedly from US government sources, put out in public domain, on support to terrorism by ISI – Pakistan's military intelligence agency.
"[100] Pakistan's ambassador to the United States Husain Haqqani on Sunday denounced the leak of secret files calling them as "irresponsible", saying it consisted of "unprocessed" reports from the field.
Former ISI Chief Hamid Gul, who headed the agency in the late 1980s when Pakistan and the United States were supporting militants in their fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan, denied the allegations that he was working with the Taliban, saying "these leaked documents against me are fiction and nothing else".
[103] "The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security", he said in his statement, "These irresponsible leaks will not impact our ongoing commitment to deepen our partnerships with Afghanistan and Pakistan; to defeat our common enemies; and to support the aspirations of the Afghan and Pakistani people.
"[110] U.S. Army officials condemned the public dissemination of military secrets and the White House urged the website WikiLeaks to not publish any more classified documents related to the Afghan war.
[111][112] U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that it is up to the Justice Department to determine if there would be criminal charges in the release of classified military documents by WikiLeaks, but the website was "morally guilty for putting lives at risk".
[113] On 6 August 2010, U.S. military authorities urged Wikileaks to return the already published 70,000 documents, and the other 15,000 records the website was expected to post soon as well, which contained sensitive details of Afghans who had assisted ISAF forces.
[119] Daniel Markey, a senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations and former South Asia analyst for the Bush administration, said, Whether WikiLeaks uncovered anything new isn't actually important – it's on the front page of every newspaper in the country; the media is now focused on Afghanistan, and that makes it a big deal.
[136] In August 2013, Manning was convicted of espionage and other charges for disclosing the Baghdad airstrike video of 2007 (known as "Collateral Murder"), the diplomatic cables leak of 2010 (known as "Cablegate"), and other classified information.