Here Are The US Government Damage Reports Made In The #WikiLeaks Aftermath Obtained Through Freedom Of Information Laws
▻https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/here-are-the-never-before-seen-us-government-damage-reports
The Department of Defense authorized several damage assessment reports after WikiLeaks released its massive cache of classified documents, and BuzzFeed News can reveal some of their contents for the first time.
The heavily redacted reports cover a roughly three-year time span. BuzzFeed News obtained more than 300 pages in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
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Several damage assessment reports say that the records released by WikiLeaks contained details about previously undisclosed civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, which “could be used by the press or our adversaries to negatively impact support for current operations in the region .”
Regarding the hundreds of thousands of Iraq-related military documents and State Department cables, the report assessed “with high confidence that disclosure of the Iraq data set will have no direct personal impact on current and former U.S. leadership in Iraq .”
One heavily redacted damage assessment report determined that a different set of documents published the same year, relating to the US war in Afghanistan, would not result in “significant impact” to US operations .
It did, however, have the potential to cause “serious damage” to “intelligence sources, informants and the Afghan population,” and US and NATO intelligence collection efforts. The most significant impact of the leaks, the report concluded, would likely be on the lives of “cooperative Afghans, Iraqis, and other foreign interlocutors.”