Pentagon hunts WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in bid to gag website
June 12, 2010 03:26 pm
American officials are searching for Julian Assange, the
founder of WikiLeaks in an attempt to pressure him not to publish thousands of
confidential and potentially hugely embarrassing diplomatic cables that offer
unfiltered assessments of
The Daily Beast, a US news reporting and opinion website, reported that Pentagon investigators are trying to track down Julian Assange – an Australian citizen who moves frequently between countries – after the arrest of a US soldier last week who is alleged to have given the whistleblower website a classified video of American troops killing civilians in Baghdad.
The soldier, Bradley Manning, also claimed to have given WikiLeaks 260,000 pages of confidential diplomatic cables and intelligence assessments.
The US authorities fear their release could “do serious damage to national security”, said the Daily Beast, which is published by Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and New Yorker magazines.
Manning, 22, was arrested in
As an intelligence specialist in the
In one of his messages to Lamo, obtained by Wired magazine, Manning said: “Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available.”
Although it is likely that WikiLeaks has broken US laws in
de-encrypting the video from
It is, in any case, not clear what legal measures US
officials could use to stop publication of the cables. Assange has created an
elaborate web of protection – with servers in several countries, notably
WikiLeaks’ response to the news that the Americans are trying to track down Assange came on Twitter. “Any signs of unacceptable behaviour by the Pentagon or its agents towards this press will be viewed dimly,” it said.
After Manning was arrested, WikiLeaks said in a Twitter
message that allegations “we have been sent 260,000 classified
Before his arrest, Manning told Lamo he was in part motivated to leak the video and documents by being ordered to look the other way in the face of injustice.
Messages from Manning, obtained by Wired, say he found that 15 Iraqis arrested by Iraqi police for printing “anti-Iraq” literature had merely put together an assessment of government corruption.
“I immediately took that information and ran to the [
“Everything started slipping after that. I saw things differently. I had always questioned the [way] things worked, and investigated to find the truth.
“But that was a point where I was … actively involved in something I was completely against.”
The Pentagon has declined to comment on the grounds that
what is in the documents is classified. – (The Guardian,