Gates says Pentagon, FBI to launch aggressive probe

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has asked the FBI to help the Pentagon in an ‘aggressive’ investigation.

WASHINGTON: US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to help the Pentagon in an ‘aggressive’ investigation into the leaked Afghan war documents.

The leak of 92,000 classified documents by the website WikiLeaks contained no surprises and did not call into question the US strategy in the Afghan war, Gates and the US military’s top officer, Admiral Mike Mullen, told a press conference on Thursday.

Gates, however, said that “the battlefield consequences of the release of these documents are potentially severe and dangerous for our troops, our allies and Afghan partners, and may well damage our relationships and reputation in that key part of the world.” The Pentagon, he said, will prosecute those behind the leak.

Clearly angry over the episode, Gates said that the leak exposed sources and methods for US intelligence agencies and allowed US adversaries to learn about military tactics and procedures.

Founder of the Wikileaks website Julian Assange has defended the release of the files, saying that his site had checked for named informants before distributing the papers and he hoped it would spark a debate about the war.

Admiral Mullen, however, was not impressed by Assange’s reasoning and said that there were better ways to question the war. “Mr Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family,” he said.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai also condemned the release of the documents on Thursday, saying it could endanger the lives of Afghans cooperating with the US-led force.

Gates promised a thorough probe to find out how the ‘massive breach’ had occurred, to identify who was responsible, and to assess what information was compromised. “The military will take additional steps to protect classified information and to safeguard the lives of US service members as well as Afghans possibly endangered by the leaks,” Gates said.

Gates, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), said that the unprecedented leak jeopardised the trust that was vital to gathering intelligence in the field. “We have considerable repair work to do, to fix relations damaged by the leak. That is one of the worst aspects of this, as far as I’m concerned. Will people trust us? Will people whose lives are on the line trust us to keep their identities secret? Will other governments trust us to keep their documents and their intelligence secret?”

But key ally Pakistan has said that the documents would have no adverse effect on relations with the US. “We believe that it is highly unintelligent to give any credibility to these reports because only about 180 of the 92,000 documents focus on Pakistan,” Foreign Office spokesperson Abdul Basit told PTV on Thursday.

He said that the reports were based on unverifiable sources. “There are forces who would like to justify the collective failure of the international community in Afghanistan and that can be one reason. Secondly, there are some elements around the world who continue to engage in malicious propaganda against Pakistan and particularly our intelligence agency the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI),” he said.

Reiterating that the reports were absolutely inconsistent with realities on the ground, he said that Pakistan had suffered the most from this war and had paid high human and economic costs.

US Army involvement

Gates declined to comment on a Wall Street Journal report that authorities had evidence linking an army soldier, already accused of leaking a classified video from Iraq, to the leaked Afghan war documents. Private First Class Bradley Manning was charged earlier this month with illegally releasing a video of a helicopter attack as well as US State Department documents.

Gates did, however, agree that the leak will force the military to review how it shares intelligence with soldiers on the battlefield as, in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military had worked to ensure that soldiers deployed on the front line had the latest intelligence. Troops were entrusted with sensitive information.

“We want those soldiers in a forward operating base to have all the information they possibly can have that impacts on their own security, but also being able to accomplish their mission,” Gates said.

He said that he would be discussing with commanders in Afghanistan and Iraq whether to “change the way we approach that, or do we continue to take the risk.” AFP (WITH ADDITIONAL INPUT FROM APP)

Published in The Express Tribune, July 31^st, 2010.