A former WikiLeaks spokesman under fire for recently destroying thousands of unpublished documents submitted to the secret-spilling site last year says WikiLeaks is publicly exaggerating the contents of the deleted files, in an increasingly ugly dispute playing out over Twitter and in the press.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange "was aware of the submissions and had taken out all the stuff he deemed worthy enough," wrote former spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg in an e-mail to Wired.com. "It is not like we did not talk to one another, so he was aware of the submissions. He just claims all kinds of stuff now that is not true."

Domscheit-Berg shocked WikiLeaks supporters this week when he told the German newsweekly Der Spiegel that he'd deleted more than 3,500 unpublished documents that he and an associate took with them when they left the organization last year. He said he destroyed the documents because Julian Assange could not guarantee safe handling of the files or their sources.

Since then, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed has spewed out a steadily-growing list of important documents and files it claims are lost to history because of Domscheit-Berg's actions. On Tuesday, WikiLeaks tweeted that the documents included "videos of a major US atrocity in Afghanistan." WikiLeaks previously claimed that 5 gigabytes of data from Bank of America, and a copy of the U.S. No-Fly List were also casualties of the purge. The latter is a list of names of terrorist suspects who are not allowed to fly on planes taking off from the U.S. or flying to or over the country.

"I can confirm that there was a No-Fly list in the batch, but it had not been published back then because it already was public," Domscheit-Berg said in e-mail. "It was one of those lists floating around on the internet."

WikiLeaks' other claims about what the destroyed documents contain are "false and misleading," Domscheit-Berg said, such as in the case of the Bank of America documents. Domscheit-Berg cast doubt on the latter claim, based on the fact that Assange had already announced plans to publish the bank documents back in 2009, a time period that is outside the scope of when the documents that Domscheit-Berg destroyed supposedly arrived to WikiLeaks.

Last year, Domscheit-Berg told Threat Level that he only possessed documents that had been submitted to WikiLeaks between July 2010, when its newly re-architected submission system went back online, and the end of that summer, when Domscheit-Berg left WikiLeaks with another colleague. WikiLeaks says the documents span a much longer submission period, between January and July 2010, when the organization's submission system was offline for a chunk of time.

Domscheit-Berg did not speak to the discrepancy in his e-mail to Wired.com, but seemed to accept the longer time frame.

"The objects we are talking about are submissions from January 2010 to September 2010," he wrote.

But Domscheit-Berg noted that the Bank of America materials could not have been among the destroyed documents because the "BoA material was already announced in October 2009 for example, much earlier. "

Assange, he said, had claimed "repeatedly in the past that he was going to publish [the bank data], and then he claimed BoA was blackmailing him over it. Now he claims I destroyed it. So which of it is it?," Domscheit-Berg wrote.

The latest assertion about the video also does not jibe with the timing of WikiLeaks' past statements about when it received the video and was working on decrypting it.

The video in question is likely one that WikiLeaks previously claimed it possessed, which showed a May 2009 U.S. air strike near Garani village in Afghanistan. The local government insisted the air strike killed nearly 100 civilians, most of them children. The Pentagon released a report about the incident in 2009, but backed down from a plan to show video of the attack to reporters.

The Garani video was among the first files that former Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning allegedly leaked to WikiLeaks. According to the government's charging documents, Manning leaked the video to WikiLeaks some time between November 1, 2009 and January 8, 2010, when WikiLeaks announced on its Twitter feed that it had obtained "encrypted videos of US bomb strikes on civilians." The tweet included a link to a Wired.com article about the Garani air strike.

WikiLeaks later hinted that year that it planned to release the video, but instead released another video in April 2010 under the title "Collateral Murder." This video showed a U.S. Apache air strike on civilians in Iraq.

Assange told reporters after the "Collateral Murder" release that his organization still planned to release the Garani video. But the video was apparently contained in an encrypted AES-256 ZIP file, according to statements Manning made to a former hacker, and the organization appeared to be having trouble cracking the military-grade encryption.

Now WikiLeaks is claiming the video was destroyed by Domscheit-Berg.