In an interview with NBC News, Julian Assange, the controversial WikiLeaks chief, said in just the last few days the website has received a “wide variety” of fresh material, including documents on the oil giant BP and “internal abuses,” including sexual abuse, within the U.S. military. The enormous international publicity given the Afghan documents has “emboldened” more whistleblowers to step forward and contact the organization, he said…

At a news conference at the Pentagon on Thursday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates charged that the WikiLeaks material had endangered the safety of U.S. troops and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that Assange and WikiLeaks may “already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.”

But Assange shot back Friday that if the names of any Afghan informants were identified in the WikiLeaks documents, the U.S. military has only itself to blame for what he said would be a “disgraceful” lapse in security by allowing easy accessibility to such material. While declining to identify any of the organizations sources, he said the documents were available through SIPRNET (Secret Internet Protocol Router Network) — the Defense Department’s standard classified Internet network that is widely accessible to “hundreds of thousands” of soldiers and defense contractors around the world.