Chelsea Manning's 2010 leak of thousands of Iraq War-related intelligence documents did minimal damage to U.S. national security, a secret report prepared by a Department of Defense task force, and recently obtained by BuzzFeed News, claims. Despite having apparent evidence to the contrary, the federal government publicly alleged that Manning's decision to share the intelligence with WikiLeaks threatened national security.
The newly public 2011 Department of Defense assessment had concluded "with high confidence that disclosure of the Iraq data set will have no direct personal impact on current and former U.S. leadership in Iraq." A separate set of documents leaked by Manning, related to the Afghanistan War, were also found to not have a "significant impact" on American operations, although they were ruled to potentially have significant consequences for the lives of "cooperative Afghans, Iraqis, and other foreign interlocutors" and could mean "serious damage" to "intelligence sources, informants, and the Afghan population."
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