The U.S. Department of Defense has issued a demand to WikiLeaks: Return all the secret documents related to the war in Afghanistan, or else.In a press briefing, Pentagon spokesperson Geoff Morrell made it very clear the Pentagon isn’t playing along; it wants its documents back or it will find ways to “compel them to do the right thing,” according to reports from the press conference:
“We want whatever they have returned to us and we want whatever copies they have expunged… We demand that they do the right thing. If doing the right thing is not good enough for them, then we will figure out what alternatives we have to compel them to do the right thing.”
WikiLeaks made international headlines when it published more than 90,000 military reports, many of them secret, related to the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Information from the documents was simultaneously published in The New York Times, The Guardian in the UK and Der Spiegel in Germany. Many organizations, including the Pentagon, are still sifting through the mountains of documents.
This isn’t the U.S. government’s first clash with WikiLeaks. Just last week, Jacob Appelbaum, a security research and programmer, was briefly detained by U.S. authorities and probed on his involvement with the controversial website. Appelbaum’s three mobile phones were also confiscated.
Government insiders have also told WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange that he could be arrested if he returns to the U.S.
For all their hauteur, these ominous words from the government aren’t fazing WikiLeaks. The WikiLeaks Twitter account called the Pentagon’s threats “obnoxious.”
“What we didn’t hear from the Pentagon last week: ‘Killing all those innocent people is bad. Sorry. We will stop that,’” the WikiLeaks rep continued via Twitter.
What do you think of WikiLeaks’ role in these government PR disasters? Should the site return the documents in their possession? We welcome your opinions in the comments.
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