WASHINGTON, July 30, (Agencies): The White House on Friday implored the website WikiLeaks to stop posting secret Afghanistan war documents as the Pentagon pressed its investigation of the leaks, bringing a soldier charged with handing over classified video back to the US for trial.
Obama administration officials said the investigation of the release of tens of thousands of classified documents could extend beyond members of the military. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said posting the war logs on the Web jeopardized national security and put the lives of Afghan informants and US military personnel at risk.

Asked what the Obama administration could do to stop the posting of more war secrets, Gibbs said, “We can do nothing but implore the person that has those classified top secret documents not to post any more.”

“I think it’s important that no more damage be done to our national security,” Gibbs told NBC television’s “Today” show Friday.

The Pentagon inquiry has been looking most closely at Bradley Manning, an Army intelligence specialist who was already charged with leaking video to the WikiLeaks website.

Manning, 22, has been moved from Kuwait to a military base south of Washington where he will be held while awaiting trial on charges stemming from posting of the video on WikiLeaks, the Army said in a statement Friday.

The classified helicopter cockpit video showed a 2007 firefight in Baghdad that left a Reuters photographer and his driver dead.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. in an interview aired Thursday that WikiLeaks had contacted the White House — via The New York Times acting as intermediary — and offered to let government officials go through the documents to make sure no innocent people were identified. The White House did not respond to the approach, he said.

Assange dismissed allegations that innocent people or informants had been put in danger by the publication of the documents.

“We are yet to see clear evidence of that,” he said in the Australian Broadcasting interview. WikiLeaks describes itself as a public service organization for whistleblowers, journalists and activists.
Meanwhile, five Taleban members, including a former Afghan ambassador to the United Nations, have been taken off a UN sanctions terrorism list, Austria’s UN mission said Friday.
The five were Abdul Satar Paktin; Abdul Hakim Mujahid Muhammad Awrang, a former Afghan envoy to the UN; Abdul Salam Zaeef, author of “My life with the Taleban;” and two officials who are now deceased.
Austria chairs the UN Security Council panel that maintains a blacklist of individuals and entities linked to al-Qaeda and the Taleban.

Individuals on the UN sanctions list, which until now included 137 Afghan nationals, are subject to asset freezes, a travel ban and an arms embargo under UN Security Council Resolution 1267 adopted in 1999.

As part of his efforts to promote national reconciliation, Afghan President Hamid Karzai had asked the UN Security Council to remove the names of some Taleban members who were not linked to al-Qaeda from the terror blacklist.

The Karzai government has set conditions for peace talks with Taleban insurgents, demanding militants renounce violence, accept the Afghan constitution and rescind ties with al-Qaeda.
Removal from the list requires unanimous approval from all 15 members of the Security Council’s sanctions panel.