July 29, 2010

Wikileaks publishes military secrets: the story so farâ€¦

Whistle-blowing website Wikileaks was thrust to the top of the news agenda this week as it published more than 91,000 secret US Military documents.

Publication was part of a release of information coordinated with The Guardian, The New York Times and German weekly Der Spiegel, each of which ran stories based on details contained in the documents.

The military logs revealed new details about the extent of Afghan civilian casualties, a covert special forces unit targeting insurgent leaders, and concerns that Pakistani intelligence could be supporting the Taliban.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said he hoped the information in the files would be investigated and exposed as a deterrent to future human rights abuses.

However, several newspapers then ran stories claiming Afghan lives had been put at risk by the leak as the documents on the Wikileaks site contained names of Afghans credited with providing intelligence to US forces which had been withheld from newspaper coverage.

Here is the coverage Press Gazette has so far given to the story and earlier coverage of Wikileaks’ founderâ€¦