WIKILEAKS

It’s been called a virtual treasure trove of military documents.

400-thousand classified and potentially damaging U-S military records, secretly obtained and published by the online whistleblower website – Wikileaks.

The documemts cover the last six years of the war in Afghanistan, including unreported incidents of civilian killings and covert operations against Taliban figures.

And now the website is threatening to release up to 2 million more documents.

2. SOUNDBITE: (English) Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder and editor-in-chief:
"'The first casualty of war is the truth.' But the attack on the truth by war begins long before war starts and continues long after a war ends. In our release of these 400,000 documents about the Iraq war, the intimate details of that war from the US perspective, we hope to correct some of that attack on the truth that occurred before the war, during the war and which has continued on since the war officially concluded."

WikiLeaks founder and editor-in chief Julian Assange has defended the document release.

The 39-year old computer hacker from Australia is now out of jail in London, after being released on bail, for unrelated sex crime allegations in Sweden.

7. SOUNDBITE: (English) Mark Stephens, Assange's British lawyer:
"It's certainly attempt to criminalise Julian Assange and I think that's unfortunate because he has been offering to meet with the Swedish prosecutor for some two months now, and he waited for 40 days and 40 nights in Sweden attempting to meet the prosecutor to answer these allegations that had been put around by them and course has been unable to do so."

Many of the documents released by Wiki-Leaks include assessments by U-S diplomats of foreign officials. Turkiye's foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, was among the targets.

A U-S diplomat is quoted in the pages describing Davutoglu as “exceptionally dangerous,” forcing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to apologize for the leak.

A closer look inside the home base of Wikileaks, shows the top-secret underground bunker that houses the controversial website's nerve center.

It’s located in a heavily fortified underground bunker in Sweden...filled with computers and servers and a full staff of engineers who monitor the site's activites 24 hours a day.

But the seemingly secure location has not stopped cyber attacks and financial roadblocks that have crippled the website’s activities.

8. SOUNDBITE (English) Kristinn Hrafnsson, WikiLeaks spokesman:"Yes, definitely. We have been under attack and we have had to move to different servers, but we have ways and means to bypass any closure in our services."

Earlier in December, an anonymous hacker group launched Operation Payback, against several companies that have been critical of Julian Assange and the Wikileaks website.

The group managed to temporarily take down Visa and MasterCard's main websites, and analysts have warned that Facebook and Amazon dot com could be the next targets.

Several foreign banks have also frozen the accounts of Wikileaks, and some U-S lawmakers are calling for espionage charges against Assange, saying his website has threatened national security.

6. SOUNDBITE (English) Joe Lieberman, US Senator from Connecticut:
"In my opinion what WikiLeaks has done amounts to espionage, in a most serious form. It's probably the single greatest act and the most terrible act of espionage against the United States in our history."

12. SOUNDBITE (English) Dianne Feinstein, Democrat Senator from California:
"We have just seen the tip of the iceberg so far, so I have no way of knowing what's to come next, but clearly you have the Secretary of State out in a major effort right now trying to reassure our allies, trying to move on, trying to set up a mechanism to stop this and State has done that. And it is very serious and this is far beyond free speech, this is an attack at the operating capability of the United States government."

All four U-S military services -- the Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard -- have told their staff that the Wikileaks website is off-limits for public and personal use.

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WIKILEAKS

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