Bond calls for jail time for source of leaked war documents
U.S. Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., put out a statement Monday afternoon about a collection of reports on the war in Afghanistan made public by the organization WikiLeaks on Sunday. Bond called for the source of the leak to be jailed.
WikiLeaks, a website that publishes sensitive leaked documents as a form of whistleblower reporting, obtained some 92,000 previously unreleased military reports on the conflict on Afghanistan, most of them reports from officers in the field and made them public on its website and also to three newspapers on Sunday: The New York Times, the British newspaper The Guardian and the German newspaper Der Spiegel.
The documents appear to show that Pakistan intelligence officials were aiding the Taliban, in contrast with statements by American officials that Pakistan is America's ally in the fight against the Taliban. The documents were released as the Senate is set to debate a war funding bill this week. Wikileaks obtained the documents through an unnamed source within the Pentagon.
Bond, who is vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement Monday that the source should be prosecuted for potentially endangering the lives of soldiers by releasing the documents.
“It is shocking that any American, much less someone in the Pentagon, would betray his country and possibly put our soldiers at risk by leaking information on the ongoing war in Afghanistan,” Bond said in the statement. “The damage to our national security caused by leaks like this won’t stop until we see more perpetrators in orange jump suits.”
Wikileaks said it withheld releasing some reports because they would have threatened the troops.
"We have delayed the release of some 15,000 reports from total archive as part of a harm minimization process demanded by our source," the group said on its website.