The Pentagon said on Friday it does not expect big surprises from an imminent release of up to 500,000 Iraq war files by WikiLeaks, but warned that US troops and Iraqis could be endangered by the file dump. If confirmed, the leak would be much larger than the group's record-breaking publication of more than 70,000 Afghan war documents in July, which stoked debate about the nine-year-old conflict but did not contain major revelations.
It was the largest security breach of its kind in US military history. Colonel Dave Lapan told reporters that a Pentagon team had reviewed the Iraq war files it believes WikiLeaks has, spanning a time period between 2003 and 2010. He described them as largely "ground-level" field reports, which could expose the names of Iraqi individuals working with the United States and give insight to Iraqi insurgents about US operations, similar to the Afghan war files.
"Our concern is mostly with the threat to individuals, the threat to our people and our equipment," Lapan said. "But in terms of the types of incidents that are captured in these reports, where innocent Iraqis have been killed, where there are allegations of detainee abuse, all of these things have been very well chronicled over time." Although the Iraq conflict has faded from public debate in the United States in recent years, the document dump threatens to revive memories of some of the most trying times in the war, including the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal.