when he threatened to sue The Guardian if they published them before he wanted them to, according to the latest issue of Vanity Fair. He also wasn't particularly concerned about protecting anyone's identity.
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/02/the-guardian-201102In Rusbridger’s office, Assange’s position was rife with ironies. An unwavering advocate of full, unfettered disclosure of primary-source material, Assange was now seeking to keep highly sensitive information from reaching a broader audience. He had become the victim of his own methods: someone at WikiLeaks, where there was no shortage of disgruntled volunteers, had leaked the last big segment of the documents, and they ended up at The Guardian in such a way that the paper was released from its previous agreement with Assange—that The Guardian would publish its stories only when Assange gave his permission. Enraged that he had lost control, Assange unleashed his threat, arguing that he owned the information and had a financial interest in how and when it was released.
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The biggest gulf between WikiLeaks and the traditional news outlets lay in their approaches to editing. Put simply, WikiLeaks didn’t have one, or believe in one. “Neither us nor Der Spiegel nor The New York Times was ever going to print names of people who were going to get reprisals, anymore than we would do on any other occasion,” says David Leigh. “We were starting from: ‘Here’s a document. How much of it shall we print?’ Whereas Julian’s ideology was: ‘I shall dump everything out and then you have to try and persuade me to cross a few things out.’ We were coming at it from opposite poles.” The redaction of the Afghanistan files was a point of contention within WikiLeaks as well. Associates say that Assange dismissed the need for editorial care, even as they urged him to take the task more seriously. Smári McCarthy, a former WikiLeaks volunteer, told The Independent in October that there were “serious disagreements over the decision not to redact the names of Afghan civilians.”
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The Afghanistan War Logs appeared in the three print publications and on Channel 4. Among other things, the documents detailed hundreds of civilian deaths at the hands of Western troops and the existence of a secret “black” unit of Special Forces to hunt down Taliban leaders. It also became clear that American officials were persuaded that Pakistan’s spy service had been helping the Taliban. WikiLeaks made a clumsy effort to redact the raw material, and in fact held back some 15,000 of the 90,000 files. Still, the redaction was not comprehensive, and the documents it posted on its site revealed some individual identities. Assange’s minimal attention to redaction—potentially putting informers or people on the American payroll in danger—drew criticism from some unlikely quarters, including Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders.
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