Wikileaks’s decision to post on its website more than 92,000 classified documents related to the Afghan war is a breach of federal law and an investigation is on the leak of secretive Pentagon documents, the White House said on Monday.
“They constitute a potentially national security concern,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said on Monday as he informed reporters that he and others in the Obama administration were informed about the upcoming release of such a document by the news outlets that were given pre-release access to these documents by Wikileaks.
“I remember talking to the US President sometime last week after discussions with news organisations that these stories were coming,” he said in response to a question.
“I think our reaction to this type of material, a breach of federal law, is always the same, and that is, whenever you have the potential for names and for operations and for programs to be out there in the public domain, that it, besides being against the law, has the potential to be very harmful to those that are in our military, those that are cooperating with our military, and those that are working to keep us safe,” Gibbs said.
There is an ongoing investigation into the leak of classified documents, he said, but refrained from going into details. “I think there is no doubt that this is a concerning development in operational security. It poses a very real and potential threat to those that are working hard every day to keep us safe,” Gibbs said.