[vidarh]

> So you instead confirm that leak by blocking the website

No, you confirm that you have a standing policy of blocking any content that purports to be classified, regardless of actual content.

> - The documents are already in the public. Just saying, "they are now de-classified," doesn't give more information, other than an explicit confirmation that they were real. But this doesn't matter because:

Stating they are declassified still leaves them with the burden of cross checking any document found on their unclassified networks to figure out whether or not it is allowed to be there. It substantially eases the job of containing the genuinely classified information to keep the amount of "possibly classified, needs investigation" content down.

> There are so many things implicitly confirming that the documents are real that it doesn't make sense to deny them officially anymore.

The point is not to deny that they are real (how would the Army know?), but to prevent "contaminating" an unclassified network in a way that makes discerning real security problems harder.