An announcement by the Taliban that they were going through classified military dispatches from Afghanistan posted by the Web site WikiLeaks “basically proves the point” that the disclosures put at risk the lives of Afghans who had aided American forces, said US Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates last Sunday.

Gates, a former director of the CIA, said, “Growing up in the intelligence business, protecting your sources is sacrosanct.” While it was up to the Justice Department to investigate who supplied the documents to the Web site run by Julian Assange—an Australian activist who is an outspoken opponent of American and NATO involvement in Afghanistan—he had been “mortified, appalled” at Assange’s willingness to make public documents that listed the names of individual Afghans, Gates added.

He told Christiane Amanpour in her debut as the host of ABC’s “This Week,” “There’s also a moral culpability. And that’s where I think the verdict is guilty on WikiLeaks. They have put this out without any regard whatsoever for the consequences.”

(Thanks to The New York Times and WikiLeaks)