On Sunday morning more than 91,000 pages of classified military documents were leaked to the whistle-blowing website www.wikileaks.org. Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has come under fire for posting the information online as it has been sighted as a possible security concern for the men and women on the ground in Afghanistan. A former hacker, Assange has no permanent address and lives what some might call a nomadic lifestyle. One report mentioned he refuses to travel to the United States as he believes he is wanted by the FBI.

So what exactly is in the documents that have taken over military media coverage? It has been suggested that they contain evidence of war crimes. Details include descriptions of raids carried out by U.S. Secret Service members, including the mysterious Troop 373 targeting insurgents and Taliban members. According to the documents, during the targeting of Abu Laith al-Libi, a Libyan fighter and senior al-Qaida member, six enemy fighters were killed as well as seven “non-combatants” all of which were children.

Given that the documents are a compilation of first-hand accounts, the information is being interpreted differently depending on the reviewer’s political or personal purview. For example, The New York Times reports that the documents suggest Pakistan “allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders.” While The Guardian’s take on the same information is that the documents “fail to provide a convincing smoking gun.”

With these vastly opposing views, it is unclear how the information contained within the documents will be received by the American people once mainstream media outlets have had enough time to process and regurgitate the information.  Only time will tell what effect the leak will have on our troops and American civilians’ opinions of the nine year war.

The WikiLeaks “document dump” is one of the largest leaks of classified military information in American history. Earlier this year WikiLeaks released the now infamous video of the shooting of reporters in Iraq that led to changes in legislation to help prevent further incidences of the same magnitude. The department of defense has declined comment until the Pentagon has had a chance to review the material. The White House condemns the leak as a threat to national security. One official said Monday, “We don’t know how to react… This obviously puts Congress and the public in a bad mood.”  

The WikiLeaks founder has come out saying that while he strongly advocates transparency, safety is his number one concern. To that end, fifteen thousand documents were withheld from publication as he believed they required further review to be sure they would not put any troops in danger. With regard to the allegations that the documents contain evidence of war crimes, Assange has said that it will ultimately be up to the courts to decide the significance of the information released through his website.