Saturday, September 11, 2010

Exclusive: WikiLeaks Collaborating With Media Outlets on Release of Iraq Documents


Newsweek

"A London-based journalism nonprofit is working with the WikiLeaks Web site and TV and print media in several countries on programs and stories based on what is described as massive cache of classified U.S. military field reports related to the Iraq War. Iain Overton, editor of The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, tells Declassified that his organization has teamed up with media organizations—including major television networks and one or more American media outlets—in an unspecified number of countries to produce a set of documentaries and stories based on the cache of Iraq War documents in the possession of WikiLeaks. As happened with a similar WikiLeaks collection of tens of thousands of U.S. military field reports on the Afghan war, the unidentified media organizations involved with the London group in the Iraq documents project will all be releasing their stories on the same day, which Overton says would be several weeks from now. He declined to identify any of the media organizations participating in the project.

Overton acknowledges that the volume of Iraq War reports that WikiLeaks has made available for the project is massive, and almost certainly more than the 92,000 Afghan field reports the organization made available for advance review to The New York Times, Britain's Guardian, and Germany's Der Spiegel. The material is the "biggest leak of military intelligence" that has ever occurred, Overton says. As we reported when stories on WikiLeaks' Afghan holdings first appeared, the site's stash of Iraq documents is believed to be about three times as large as its Afghanistan collection. After the Times, Guardian, and Der Spiegel published their stories based on the Afghan war documents, the site itself posted 76,000 of the papers......"

No comments: