More than 92,000 documents relating to the war in Afghanistan were simultaneously published last night by WikiLeaks, the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel.
"We have built up an enormous backlog of whistleblower disclosures," said Assange. "After the Collateral Murder tape came out we received a substantial increase in the number of submissions (…) We have an enormous range of material we are trying to get through.
"There is more to come."
He refused to comment on unreleased documents, but said the website has held back around 15,000 documents from last night's batch of reports to undergo "further harm-minimisation review", a process undertaken by WikiLeaks to prevent the publication of information that might endanger lives.
"Some will be released as soon as we are able to get through them and others will be withheld until the security situation in Afghanistan means it is safe to release them," he said.
Despite working in conjunction with teams from three newspapers, Assange admitted that as a team they had "only looked through 2000 documents properly". Asked about how he could guarantee that it was a responsible release if they had only looked through a fraction of the documents in detail, he claimed that individual documents were grouped in categories, some of which could be dismissed as not posing a risk to the safety of troops or sources.
Speaking on resulting policy changes from such leaks, he said having an impact on the ground can be difficult.
"At the time [General] McChrystal took command (...) a new field appeared in these reports, 'credible allegations of coalition forces causing civilian causalities'. That appears to have been an attempt by McChrystal to get some handle on the situation. What we see is that the US army is an enormous boat which is extremely hard to turn around. The cover up of those sorts of crimes begins at the bottom and moves its way to the top. It's quite hard to enact a new policy and have it filtered down to a change in practice."
When asked to expand on his use of the word "crimes", Assange refused to comment further, despite being pressed, telling the audience their questions would need to be phrased "in a meaningful way" in order to be answered.
Asked later in the press conference how many potential war crimes might be documented in the archive, he responded "thousands".
Assange recently criticised mainstream media for not making proper use of "primary resources", and told today's press conference that it is important to not only focus on large-scale events.
"I am always asked what the most single damning revelation is," he said.
"That is not the real story of this material. The real story is that it is war, it's one damned thing after another. It's the continuous small events, the continuous deaths of children, insurgents, allied forces (...) This is the story of the war since 2004 and like most of the accidents that occur in the world, they are as a result of cars not buses, most of the deaths in this war are the event of the everyday squalor of war, not the big incidents."
"Through this material we see what war is like everyday, as well as the big event (...) This is the beginning, the end and the middle, the whole context, with some exceptions. If anything can give us some kind of intellectual understanding, this is it," he added.
"There is no perfect information, but in the end the truth is all we have."
Asked about the reliability of the information, Assange said it was important to use common sense.
"When we publish material what we say is the document as we describe is true," he told the conference. "We publish CIA reports all the time, they are legitimate CIA reports, that does not mean the CIA is telling the truth. Similarly with this material there is reporting from military units of all kinds (...) Those are legitimate reports, it doesn't mean that the contents are true. People should exercise caution."
He added that informants can give "completely outlandish claims".
"Just like dealing with any source you should exercise some common sense, that does not mean you should close your eyes," he said.
Assange revealed that members of WikiLeaks and all three of the newspapers involved in the joint publication worked together "in a collaborative basement, here in London".
Asked why he chose the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel, he said the three publications "were the best newspapers in the world for investigative research," and said that WikiLeaks hoped next time to also partner with a television network.
"We can't have a journalistic coalition which is too large (...) for logistical reasons. With three or four we could get into a room and agree on all the conditions.
"The task of good journalism is to turn this material; who, when, where, how, how many, into something which emotionally engages people."
As previously reported by Journalism.co.uk, WikiLeaks applied for a $650,000 Knight News Foundation grant earlier this year. Assange revealed today the grant money was intended to help WikiLeaks provide its online security technology "to all news organisations", but the application was rejected for "political reasons", he said.
Image courtesy of Cirt on Wikimedia Commons
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