US worked ‘round the clock’ to contain WikiLeaks

United States officials worked around the clock to contain the fallout from the WikiLeaks scandal, a State Department official has said.

The comment from Rena Bitter, director of the State Department's operations center, came on the second day of a preliminary hearing for Army Private Bradley Manning, 24, who is facing a court-martial for allegedly handing over a trove of classified documents to the whistle blowing website.

Bitter told the court at the Fort Meade military base how working groups, consisting of 25 people each, toiled day and night to ‘stay ahead of public disclosure’ between November 2010, when the scandal broke, and July 2011.

While one was called the ‘potential risks on individuals group’ another was dubbed the ‘WikiLeaks group,’ she said.

“At some point, we worked 18 or 20 hours a day. Our office coordinated, we did what we typically do in a crisis,” the Sydney Morning Herald quoted Bitter as saying.

“When there's a crisis, everybody has to speak with one voice,” she added.