Pentagon studies possible risks to Afghans from leaked documents

A Pentagon spokesman, Colonel David Lapan, said that a Pentagon assessment team had not yet drawn any conclusions, but that “in general, the naming of individuals could cause potential problems, both to their physical safety or willingness to continue support to coalition forces or the Afghan government.’’

A search by The New York Times through a sampling of the documents released by the organization WikiLeaks found reports that gave the names of dozens of Afghans credited with providing credible information to US and NATO troops.

The Times and two other publications given access to the documents — the British newspaper the Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel — had posted online only selected examples from documents that had been redacted to eliminate names and other information that could be used to identify people at risk. The news organizations did this to avoid jeopardizing the lives of informants.

The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, has said the organization withheld 15,000 of the approximately 92,000 documents in the archive that was released Sunday to remove the names of informants in what he called a “harm minimization’’ process. But the 75,000 documents WikiLeaks put online provide information about possible informants, such as their villages and in some cases their fathers’ names.

Asked on NBC’s “Today’’ show yesterday whether he would consider the killing of an Afghan as a result of the WikiLeaks disclosure “collateral damage’’ in his efforts to make details of the war public, Assange said, “If we had, in fact, made that mistake, then, of course, that would be something that we would take very seriously.’’

Assange has also said his organization does not know who sent it the documents, saying the website was set up to hide the sources of its data.

National security officials, meanwhile, are worried that the attention WikiLeaks has received in the past week has elevated its profile and could be used to entice disgruntled officials to send classified information to its website, which solicits “classified, censored, or otherwise restricted material of political, diplomatic, or ethical significance’’ and asserts that “submitting confidential material to WikiLeaks is safe, easy, and protected by law.’’

One US official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the investigation, said government lawyers were exploring whether WikiLeaks and Assange could be charged with a crime. One question, some lawyers said, is whether WikiLeaks and Assange could be charged with inducing or serving as coconspirators in violations of the Espionage Act, which prohibits the unauthorized disclosure of national security information.

At a press club in London on Tuesday, Assange said that before the most recent disclosure of documents, WikiLeaks had been warned by officials in the US government that there had been “thoughts of whether I could be charged as a coconspirator to espionage, which is serious.’’

“That doesn’t seem to be the thinking within the United States anymore, however,’’ he added.

He did not elaborate.

But yesterday, Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, said on Fox News that WikiLeaks should be prosecuted for its role, saying, “As far as I know, there’s no immunity for a website to be able to pass on documents’’ that were illegally leaked.

At a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing yesterday, Senator Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican, pressed FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III to say whether he expected prosecutors to charge “both the individuals who provided the information and those who might have been involved in the dissemination of the information.’’

Mueller demurred, saying that “at this juncture, I can’t say as to where that particular investigation will lead.’’

Several legal specialists in matters related to leaks of classified information say that prosecuting Assange or WikiLeaks on charges that they had violated the Espionage Act would face many hurdles, from the diplomatic difficulty in persuading a country to arrest and extradite Assange to an array of legal defenses he could mount if the United States managed to detain him. Assange is an Australian activist who has operated in various European cities.

Susan Buckley, a partner at the law firm Cahill Gordon & Reindel who specializes in communications law, said the Espionage Act had rarely been used, so there were few guides for how such a novel case would play out. For example, it is not clear whether the law applies to foreigners for actions overseas, although she noted that in a 1985 case, a judge ruled that the law did apply abroad.