[News:] Claims that Assange ‘endangered lives’ rubbished in U.S. extradition proceedings

(London, U.K.) A senior investigative journalist who worked on the release of thousands of military and diplomatic cables with WikiLeaks has rubbished prosecution claims that Julian Assange and his organisation put the lives of U.S. service members and informants at risk.

John Goetz, an investigations editor with the German public broadcaster NDR, had been a reporter with Der Spiegel at the time of the releases between 2010 and 2011. That included the Afghan and Iraq war diaries, in addition to the release of U.S. diplomatic cables that came to be known as Cablegate.

James Lewis QC, on behalf of the U.S. government, told the Old Bailey last week that Assange is not being prosecuted for receiving the documents, but because he risked lives with “reckless publication”.

Goetz told the court on Wednesday (September 16) that Assange and WikiLeaks in fact had a “very rigorous redaction process” — on occasion more censorious than the Pentagon when the same documents were released by Freedom of Information Act requests.

As the lead investigative journalist for Der Spiegel, Goetz was among a handful of journalists to be invited to the Guardian’s “bunker” in London where they, alongside WikiLeaks and New York Times staff, worked on removing sensitive names from documents.

Goetz said that redaction and what Assange called the “harm-minimisation process” was central from the very beginning of his involvement in June 2010 and how Eric Schmitt of The New York Times was tasked with contacting the White House prior to publication due to the newspaper’s location and existing relationship.

As a result of that early communication, WikiLeaks and the partner publications withheld 15,000 documents from the Afghan War Logs “to protect innocents being harmed,” he said.

“It was communicated to the White House that 15,000 documents would not be published because of the harm minimisation process and that is what happened.”

While media partners worked on redacting specific documents, Assange was concerned with a technological solution that could aid the process due to the high volume of documents that were being evaluated, it was added.

The same redaction process continued during the later publication of the Iraq War Diary and the U.S. State Department cables, Goetz said, but that communication with the State Department was later ceased when the department realised they were in fact helping journalists find the most damaging stories by requesting which files were to be redacted.

Goetz said: “There was a conference call with State Department officials such as PJ Crowley and others and they expressed in the phone call the numbers of the documents they were concerned about.

“We were writing the document numbers down and it was easy to look at the documents where there were sensitive names to see if there was any significant names that had to be redacted.

“We were very happy to receive these names and in many ways it was quite interesting to know which documents they were concerned about, but there was a pause in the conversation and then they — [the State Department] — stopped talking to us because it was clear that they were giving us an index of the most interesting stories.”

Giving testimony in the second half of the day, Daniel Ellsberg — famously of the Pentagon Papers — told the court during cross examination that it was “highly cynical” of the U.S. government to allege that harm had been caused as a release of the WikiLeaks documents, especially given that it was them who had been responsible for the breakdown in the redaction process.

After Lewis listed a number of incidents where journalists, translators and human rights monitors were forced to go into hiding as a result of the disclosures, the 89-year-old Ellsberg said: “Were any of the allegedly exposed individuals subject to death, violent harm or incarceration as the State Department claimed?

“Besides, the government is extremely cynical in pretending it is concerned for these people. Its contempt for Middle Easterners has been well demonstrated in the last 19 years.”

At the military trial of Chelsea Manning in 2013, the U.S. government conceded it could not point to a single death caused by the WikiLeaks disclosures. No further allegations of harm have been levelled since.

The case continues.