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By Mark Hosenball
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Almost as quickly as it scheduled a press conference in London for Monday to address Pentagon demands that it hand over any secret U.S. government documents in its possession, the whistle-blower Web site WikiLeaks postponed the event indefinitely.
The initial announcement, circulated Sunday morning by London's Frontline Club, identified the topic of the press conference, to be broadcast live on the club's Web site, as "WikiLeaks Responding to the Pentagon." The next announcement, issued about 12 hours later, said only that the event would be "postponed until further notice ... because of logistical difficulties." An official of the club, a popular retreat for journalists near London's Paddington Station, said via e-mail that the problem was related to "travel arrangements for their spokesmen which have altered at the last minute." But another person who has been in recent contact with WikiLeaks participants suggests that the postponement was related to the Web site's fears that it might somehow come under attack from the Pentagon.
Warning that WikiLeaks' release of some 76,000 classified U.S. military field reports from Afghanistan in late July "has already threatened the safety of our troops, our allies, and Afghan citizens who are working with us to help bring about peace and stability in that part of the world," U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates's press secretary, Geoff Morrell, told a Pentagon press conference last week that U.S. authorities were demanding "that WikiLeaks return immediately to the U.S. government all versions of documents obtained directly or indirectly from the Department of Defense databases or records." Morrell was vague about what would happen if—as seems likely—the Web site fails to comply with the demand. "If doing the right thing is not good enough for them, then we will figure out what other alternatives we have to compel them to do the right thing," Morrell said.
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Morrell and other Pentagon officials have not responded to Declassified's request for elaboration on what those "other alternatives" might be. Current and former intelligence and defense officials say they see few, if any, legal ways to stop the site's Australian founder and principal frontman, Julian Assange, as long as he stays away from U.S. territory. And former officials say they can imagine equally few, if any, ways to disable the site without the risk of creating more problems for U.S. interests.
Assange did not respond to Declassified's requests on Sunday and Monday for an explanation of why the London event was postponed. During the media feeding frenzy that followed publication of the Afghan War archive, he used the Frontline Club as a venue for his public appearances. (Full disclosure: the author of this item is a member of the club.) After that uproar died down, people close to WikiLeaks said Assange had left London for parts unknown. People who have recently been in contact with him say he's difficult to deal with because of his mercurial manner and unpredictable behavior.
Nevertheless, Declassified did receive a few cryptic e-mails over the weekend from Assange. He seemed unhappy with our recent stories suggesting that WikiLeaks has been sitting on a cache of Iraq War documents similar to, but three times larger than, its Afghan field-reports archive. Despite our inquiries, Assange has not made clear his complaints about those stories. But a person familiar with the site's holdings of unreleased documents, requesting anonymity when discussing sensitive information, says WikiLeaks has not abandoned its plans to release additional U.S. government secrets, perhaps in the near future.
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