(CNN) — American officials from the president down tried Tuesday to downplay the leak of tens of thousands of documents about the war in Afghanistan, a disclosure experts are calling the biggest leak since the Pentagon Papers about Vietnam.
Pentagon officials have not found anything top-secret among the documents, a Defense Department spokesman said Tuesday.
“From what we have seen so far, the documents are at the ‘secret’ level,” Col. David Lapan said. That’s not a very high level of classification.
Lapan emphasized that the Pentagon has not looked at all of the more than 75,000 documents published on WikiLeaks.org on Sunday.
President Barack Obama said Tuesday that he is “concerned about the disclosure of sensitive information” about the U.S. mission in Afghanistan but asserted that the documents don’t shed much new light on the issue.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, said Tuesday that the importance of the leak should not be overstated.
“I think it’s important not to overhype or get excessively excited about the meaning of those documents,” Kerry told the committee.
But, he said, the leak “breaks the law, and equally importantly, it compromises the efforts of our troops, potentially, in the field and has the potential of putting people in harm’s way,” he said.
The top-ranking U.S. military officer, Adm. Michael Mullen, said he was “appalled” by the leak but questioned the current significance of the documents, which date from 2004 to 2009.
Video: Congressmen talk WikiLeaks and the war
Video: Pentagon responds to WikiLeaks
“Much has changed since 2009, particularly with respect to our focus, our new strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” said Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in Baghdad, Iraq. “A lot of it is focused on the past, and I am very focused on the future.”
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has ordered the Foreign Ministry and National Security Council to study the vast cache of documents, Karzai’s office said Tuesday.
The documents are divided into more than 100 categories. Tens of thousands of pages of reports document attacks on U.S. troops and their responses, relations between Americans in the field and their Afghan allies, intramural squabbles among Afghan civilians and security forces, and concerns about neighboring Pakistan’s ties to the Taliban.
The “direct fire” category accounts for the largest number — at 16,293 reports — while “graffiti,” “mugging,” “narcotics” and “threat” each account for one. And WikiLeaks has another 15,000 documents that it plans to publish after editing out names to protect people, according to the website’s founder and editor in chief, Julian Assange.
He said on CNN’s “Larry King Live” that the firsthand accounts represent “the cut and thrust of the entire war over the past six years,” through the military’s own raw data: numbers of casualties, threat reports and notes from meetings between Afghan leaders and U.S. commanders.
“We see the who, the where, the what, the when and the how of each one of these attacks,” Assange said. That includes, he said, possible evidence of war crimes by both U.S. troops and the Taliban, the Islamic militia that has been battling U.S. troops since 2001.
Assange said some events listed in the reports are “very suspicious,” such as reports of skirmishes in which “a lot of people are killed, but no people taken prisoner and no people left wounded.”
“In the end, it will take a court to really look at the full range of evidence to decide if a crime has occurred,” he said. But earlier, he noted, “This material does not leave anyone smelling like roses, especially the Taliban.”
CNN has not independently confirmed the authenticity of the documents, but neither the White House nor the Pentagon has denied that they are what WikiLeaks claims they are.
On Monday, the White House condemned the release of the documents as “a breach of federal law” but simultaneously dismissed them as old news.
“I don’t think that what is being reported hasn’t in many ways been publicly discussed — whether by you or by representatives of the U.S. government — for quite some time,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters. But he said an investigation into the source of the leak had begun by last week.
“There is no doubt that this is a concerning development in operational security,” he said.
The reports tend to be filled with jargon, like this one that describes a border incident from September 4, 2005:
“The Pakistan LNO [liaison officer] reports that ANA [Afghan National Army] troops are massing and threatening the PAKMIL [Pakistani military] 12km NE of FB Lwara [Firebase Lwara, a U.S. military base] …”
And that’s not even the entire first sentence.
Assange said WikiLeaks withheld some documents that dealt with activity by U.S. Special Forces and the CIA, “and most of the activity of other non-U.S. groups.”
But he said the documents reveal the “squalor” of war, uncovering how a number of small incidents have added up to huge numbers of civilian deaths.
“What we haven’t seen previously is all those individual deaths,” he said. “We’ve seen just the number. And like Stalin said, ‘One man’s death is a tragedy; a million dead is a statistic.’ So, we’ve seen the statistic.”
The release of the documents is being called the biggest intelligence leak in history, drawing comparisons to the disclosure of the Vietnam-era Pentagon Papers.
“There hasn’t been an unauthorized disclosure of this magnitude in 39 years,” said Daniel Ellsberg, the onetime Pentagon official who leaked that multiple-volume secret history of the conflict.
Others disagreed with the comparison. Bruce Riedel, an analyst at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, noted that the Pentagon Papers were part of a document prepared for U.S. leaders that analyzed how the United States got into Vietnam, “which assessed successes and failures in a comprehensive way.”
“This is really the raw material of the war — unassessed, raw, fragmentary data that I think in each case, you have to be very careful how much of a larger picture you can conclude from these fragments and snippets,” Riedel said.
And CNN Terrorism Analyst Peter Bergen said the Pentagon Papers revealed “a huge disconnect between what the American government was saying officially and internally.”
“Here, all sorts of American government officials are saying the war is not going very well. No one is disagreeing with that,” Bergen said.
But Ellsberg said the documents, “low-level as they are,” raise the question of whether the United States has a winning strategy in Afghanistan and whether it should continue to pursue the war.
“They do give us the sense of the pattern of failure, of stalemate, and why we’re stalemated — civilian casualties that recruit for the Taliban … and raise the question of what we’re doing there,” he said.
The United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan in 2001 after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. The attacks were carried out by the Islamic terrorist network al Qaeda, which operated from bases in Afghanistan with the approval of the Taliban, the fundamentalist movement that ruled most of the country at the time.
The invasion swiftly toppled the Taliban, but al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar escaped and remain at large. Meanwhile, the Taliban regrouped along the rugged border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which is now battling its own Taliban insurgency as well.
Gary Berntsen, who led a CIA commando team in Afghanistan in the hunt for al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, said on CNN’s “Rick’s List” that the documents “probably are accurate.” But Berntsen, now a Republican candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in New York, said the reports are likely to be a propaganda coup for the Taliban and “sap morale in the United States.”
“It does paint a bleak picture on this,” he said. “But it doesn’t mean this fight is less worth fighting and trying to make progress on.”
And Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said the information should be put “in context” and that journalists should avoid publishing anything that could harm U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Assange, he said, “is an anti-war activist who has repeatedly cast a very unfair light on the American military and on the American population in general.”
“There are American troops in harm’s way getting shot and killed,” Rieckhoff said. “If WikiLeaks is endangering them, we need to push back, and the American public needs to push back.”
Once the jargon of the report is pierced, the stories can be eye-opening.
In a February 5, 2008, incident, Task Force Helmand reported that an Afghan National Police officer — referred to as ANP — was in a public shower smoking hashish when two members of the Afghan National Army walked in.
“ANP felt threatened and a fire fight occurred,” the report says. “The ANP fled the scene and was later shot. ANP and ANA commanders held meetings to contain the incident.”
An October 15, 2007, incident describes an Afghan National Police highway officer’s shooting of another Afghan National Police officer in the shoulder and leg, not seriously. “The shooting was not accidental the policeman had been arguing with each other for a few days,” the report said.
In a March 19, 2005, incident, “FOB [Forward Operating Base] Cobra received a local national boy who had received a gunshot wound to his stomach,” another report said.
–Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America
“He had been shot during a green-on-green [Afghans attacking Afghans] firefight in Jangalak Village. The boy and his older brother had heard shooting outside of their compound and went outside to check it out, at which point the boy was shot in the stomach. Another brother had also been shot and died at the compound. No adult males had accompanied the brothers, and only the older brother of the injured boy could provide information on the incident. The older brother explained that men in the village were having personal disputes with each other and had then began shooting at each ones’ compounds.”
Assange said the documents were “legitimate” but said it was important not to take their contents at face value.
“We publish CIA reports all the time that are legitimate CIA reports. That doesn’t mean the CIA is telling the truth,” he said.
He said his website is not campaigning against the war.
“WikiLeaks does not have an opinion whether the war in Afghanistan should continue or not continue. … It should continue in a just way if its to continue at all,” he said.
He declined to tell CNN where he got the documents and said the identities of his sources are less important than the authenticity of the documents they provide. And he denied that WikiLeaks has put troops in danger and said the documents’ publication will help people make informed decisions about whether to support the war.
Assange, an Australian, said the site is coming under “significant pressure” from authorities, including several recent “surveillance events.” But he said that due to the response the latest release has received, “It is not politically feasible to interfere with us at a high level.”
CNN Pentagon Correspondent Barbara Starr and CNN’s Atika Shubert, Richard Allen Greene, David DeSola, Adam S. Levine and Atia Abawi contributed to this report.
