• Listen to this segment

• Listen to the entire program

The New York Times, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel simultaneously published on Sunday, an analysis of over 90,000 leaked, previously classified documents about the Afghanistan war. The documents, which span the period of January 2004 to December 2009, were provided to all three news outlets by WikiLeaks. Wikileaks is an online web organization that protects whistleblowers and in recent months has embarrassed the US government several times over its conduct in both Iraq and Afghanistan from secretly leaked documents. Buried in the latest batch of raw data are descriptions of never-reported incidents involving US and NATO civilian killings, extra-judicial killings of Taliban targets, the role of Pakistan’s intelligence agency in supporting the Taliban and other insurgencies, and the corruption of the Afghan government. The sheer number of documents makes this leak the biggest in US history, far eclipsing the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg during the Vietnam war. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been widely profiled in the wake of the leak, and was heavily criticized by the US government for endangering the lives of troops and jeopardizing national security. However Assange, and the news outlets he shared the information with, claim they have withheld from publishing any such material.

GUEST: Anand Gopal, Afghanistan-based journalist. He has reported for the Christian Science Monitor and Wall Street Journal. He is currently working on a book about the Afghan war.

The entire war diary can be found at wardiary.wikileaks.org.

You can also download the html version of the diary (75 Mb) here: http://leakmirror.wikileaks.org/file/straw-glass-and-bottle/afg-war-diary.html.7z

Read Anand Gopal’s work online at www.AnandGopal.com.