, the online organization that was posting tens of thousands of classified military field reports about the Afghanistan war Sunday, says its goal in disclosing secret documents is to reveal “unethical behavior” by governments and corporations.
Since it was founded in December 2006, WikiLeaks has exposed internal memos about the dumping of toxic material off the African coast, the membership rolls of a racist British party, and the American military’s manual for operating its prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
“We believe that transparency in government activities leads to reduced corruption, better government and stronger democracies,” according to the organization’s website. “All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community, as well as their own people. We believe this scrutiny requires information.”
The trove of war reports posted Sunday dwarfs the scope and volume of documents that the organization has made public in the past.
In a telephone interview from London, the organization’s founder, Julian Assange, said the documents would reveal broader and more pervasive levels of violence in Afghanistan than the military or the media have previously reported.
“It shows not only the severe incidents but the general squalor of war, from the death of individual children to major operations that kill hundreds,” he said.
Assange said in the interview and a subsequent e-mail that about 15,000 documents would be withheld from release for a few days until WikiLeaks could redact names of individuals in the reports whose safety could be jeopardized.
WikiLeaks’ critics range from the military, which says it jeopardizes operations, to some open-government advocates who say the organization is endangering the privacy rights of others in favor of self promotion. The New York Times
