White House shifts criticism of Wikileaks to focus on "naming of individual" Afghans

The initial response to the Wikileaks Afghan document leak from the Pentagon and White House focused largely on the documents’ purported irrelevance as “old news,” and general condemnation of the leak as a violation of federal law. Now, the response has shifted more specifically to focus on the fact that within the massive cache of documents, names of Afghan informants are included in plain view, with no redaction. Those informants can now be located and punished or murdered by the enemy, the logic goes.

For its part, Wikileaks frontman Julian Assange has stated in interviews this week that the organization is holding off on releasing the next 15,000 or so documents from the Afghan leak material to scrub some personally identifying data, as “harm minimization procedure.”

Supporters of Wikileaks counter that, basically, now’s a fine time for the military to be fretting about harm to Afghans. Glenn Greenwald of Salon tweets that Wikileaks should have been more careful about redactions, but:

So the WikiLeak-ed documents might put Afghans at risk? You know what else does? 10 yrs of bombings, air raids, checkpoint shootings, drones

Report in today’s New York Times (and note a related report indicating some folks at the Times were none too happy with Wikileaks for other reasons).