Aussie to release secret Pentagon video
Australian-born Julian Assange is the face of a web group, has been in hiding since last week amid claims US authorities were hunting him. While Assange’s whereabouts are unknown there are whispers he may still be in Australia. He has continued to send email and Twitter messages to supporters.
Suggestions he would soon release a secret Pentagon video of a US airstrike on Granai, a small town in western Afghanistan, in May last year appeared in an email sent on Tuesday.
US media reported that Pentagon investigators were trying to find him and discourage him from publishing confidential diplomatic cables allegedly leaked to him by a disillusioned intelligence analyst. A secret Pentagon video streaming a bloody airstrike in Afghanistan which killed dozens of children is set to be released by the fugitive founder of online iconoclast WikiLeaks. In the email, Assange confirmed the website was ‘’still working on” the ”Garani [sic] massacre”.
President Obama and the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have apologised for the bombing, which took the lives of 100 people mostly children and teenagers.
This year WikiLeaks, which has posted on its website more than 2100 confidential documents and videos in its three-year existence, published footage of a US army helicopter gunning down civilians in Iraq in 2007.
In late May the US Army arrested one of its soldiers based in Iraq after he boasted online about leaking the so-called ”Collateral Murder” video. In a series of online conversations with a former hacker, Private Bradley Manning said he had also sent the Granai video and hundreds of thousands of confidential State Department cables to Assange.
”i cant believe what im confessing to you,” Private Bradley wrote. ”ive been so isolated so long […] smart enough to know whats going on, but helpless to do anything … no-one took any notice of me.”
An article last week in The New York Times reported the jailing of Private Manning, which suggested the Obama administration was proving to be the most aggressive in US history in seeking out and punishing whistle blowers.
WikiLeaks has published a 2008 US Army report which described the site as a ”potential … threat to the US Army”.