Who is really culpable for the release of these names?

Here's an excerpt from an interview with Assange...

http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2010/s2968342.htm

TONY JONES: Well, not according to the Pentagon. They're accusing you of revealing the identities of Afghan informants and putting their lives at risk. Afghan's president, Karzai, agrees with that he says 'the breach is extremely irresponsible and shocking.' Your response to those comments.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Well we have yet to see clear evidence of that. I mean the London Times is also making this allegation today and in a quite disingenuous way, for example they mention some informers' names they say they had found and with a headline Afghan informer already dead, but when you actually read the story what you see is in fact that individual that they're mentioning died two years ago.

So there's a little bit of media manipulation occurring here. In terms of the Afghan government, it's in their interests to sort of play up the irresponsible, irresponsibility of the United States that they say has been involved in sort of collecting and permitting this data to release, be released.

Now we contacted the White House as a group before we released this material and asked them to help assist in going through it to make sure that no innocent names came out, and the White House did not accept that request.

TONY JONES: So you're saying that you offered the White House a chance to go through the documents, or officials from the White House a chance to go through the documents and single out names of people at risk. Is that correct?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah that's right. Now, of course we did not offer them a chance to veto any material, but rather we told them that we were going through a harm minimisation process and offered them the chance to point out names of informers or other innocents who might be harmed and they did not respond to that request which was mediated through the New York Times who was our, acting as the contact for the four media groups involved in this.