Pentagon demands return of leaked war documents

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

The Pentagon demanded Thursday that a website that solicits leaked government secrets cancel any plan to publish more classified military documents and pull back tens of thousands of secret Afghan war logs already posted on the Internet.

The demand, which the Pentagon has no independent power to enforce, is aimed primarily at preventing release of approximately 15,000 secret documents that the website WikiLeaks has said it is holding. The Pentagon also hopes to stop WikiLeaks from making public the contents of a mammoth encrypted file recently added to the site. Contents of that file remain a mystery.

“We are asking them to do the right thing,” said Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell. “I don’t know that we’re very confident they’ll have a change of heart.”

WikiLeaks posted more than 76,900 classified military and other documents, mostly raw intelligence reports from Afghanistan, on its website July 25. The 15,000 additional documents apparently are related to that material.

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