On 25 July 2010, WikiLeaks published 75,000 of more than 91,000 internal U.S. military logs covering Afghanistan from January 2004 through December 2009. The Guardian, The New York Times, and Der Spiegel reviewed the material against independent reporting and found it authentic. The archive documented previously unreported civilian deaths, escalating Taliban attacks, alleged assistance from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence and Iran, friendly-fire incidents, and the activity of Task Force 373, whose 144 recorded operations involved 195 reported civilian deaths. The records also challenged official accounts, including the reported deaths of four Canadian soldiers during Operation Medusa in 2006, though Canadian officials and some families disputed the documents’ account.
The disclosure exposed both wartime secrecy and weaknesses in WikiLeaks’ handling of sensitive data. WikiLeaks acknowledged that it had reviewed only about 2,000 documents in detail and had not completed redactions before publication; media partners withheld roughly 14,000 files containing many names. President Barack Obama and Afghan President Hamid Karzai warned that exposed Afghan informants could be endangered. The Pentagon said WikiLeaks was unlawfully holding U.S. government property and classified national-security information, while the Justice Department considered using the Espionage Act of 1917 to block publication of the remaining files. The source was never identified in the supplied record, and several intelligence claims remained uncorroborated or disputed.
