14 DAY TRIAL // Wikileaks has done it again releasing close to 400,000 documents from the US Military on the Iraq war. The documents show systematic abuse, disregard for international laws, significantly more civilian deaths that previously revealed, according to those that had early access, and will probably reveal more as they are analyzed.
As with the previous Afghan war documents, a number of news and media organizations were granted early access to the documents to prepare coverage in time for the wider release.
The New York Times, UK's The Guardian and the German weekly Der Spiegel were chosen again, but Wikileaks also collaborated with Al Jazeera, CNN, BBC, Le Monde and others.
While the publications have extended coverage of the document leak and provide thoughtful analysis as well as several points of view, it may still take months for the documents to be fully investigated.
It is by far the largest military information leak surpassing Wikileaks previous massive leak, the Afghan war documents. The whistleblower site revealed over 90,000 documents in July.
Now, 391,832 documents have been made available. While it had been rumored that Wikileaks also had documents on the Iraq war, the organization never officially confirmed it until very recently.
The Pentagon, as expected, is not thrilled about the move and is asking Wikileaks again to return the documents and remove them from the website. Since, by now, the documents have been grabbed by countless individuals and organizations, that is unlikely to solve anything.
It does look like there are at least some attempts to silence the organization, its private communications server was reportedly hacked this week.
However, apart from public statements, the US doesn't appear to have been doing much to stop Wikileaks. The "insurance" file Wikileaks posted a couple of months back may have something to do with this, but it may also just be that's it's not worth the trouble and the Pentagon hopes to simply ride out the storm knowing that the average American doesn't really care about some documents on the internet as long as terrorists are being stopped.