Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Thursday condemned as "irresponsible and shocking" the release of informants' names by whistleblower site WikiLeaks, saying it had put their lives in danger. "It is extremely irresponsible and shocking," Karzai told a news conference in the Afghan capital. "There are lives and these lives are in danger."
  
The website released more than 90,000 classified US military files from the Afghan war between 2004 to 2009, a period when tens of thousands of US and NATO troops ran into increasing resistance from a Taliban resistance.
  
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has said the documents were checked for named informants and that 15,000 such documents had been held back. But the British newspaper The Times reported that after just two hours of combing through the documents it was able to find the names of dozens of Afghans said to have provided detailed intelligence to US occupation forces.
 
The Pentagon has also said that informants whose names appear in the documents have reason to fear for their lives.
 
A former head of the CIA warned that government secrets pouring through WikiLeaks could sabotage the post 9-11 campaign to break down walls between rival US intelligence agencies. "This is destructive on so many levels," retired Air Force general and former CIA chief Michael Hayden said of the WikiLeaks saga, after an onstage chat on Wednesday at a Black Hat computer security conference in Las Vegas.
  
"It reinforces the darker angels. Leaders in the intelligence community have to come to grips with this problem and work hard to find an answer." Black Hat and an overlapping DefCon gathering of hackers have become venues for national security officials to court software wizards as allies to fight cyber wars, online crime syndicates and other mounting Internet threats.
  
"In the years after 9/11, whenever anything went wrong I got slammed by both parties about failure to share," Hayden said. "We told senators 'Yes, we'll share.' But, in the back of your mind your conscious was saying there are real dangers in sharing. And that just got displayed."
 
WikiLeaks has not identified the source of the documents it obtained but suspicion has fallen on Bradley Manning, a US Army intelligence analyst who is currently being held in a military jail in Kuwait. Manning was arrested in May following the release by WikiLeaks of video footage of a US Apache helicopter strike in Iraq in which civilians died and has been charged with delivering defense information to an unauthorized source.
  
Manning was relatively low in military rank, and if he did release the information it highlights the risks posed by sharing intelligence too widely, according to Hayden.
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