Afgan War Papers [CNN article]
WikiLeaks - Afgan War Diary Link
(CNN) -- Journalists and other observers around the world spent Monday poring over a vast cache of documents a whistleblower website says are U.S. reports that exhaustively chronicle the twists, turns and horror of the 9-year-old war in Afghanistan.
The whistleblower website WikiLeaks.org published more than 75,000 of the reports on Sunday. The documents date from between 2004 and January 2010, and are divided into more than 100 categories.
Tens of thousands of pages of reports document attacks on U.S. troops and their responses, relations between Americans in the field and their Afghan allies, intramural squabbles among Afghan civilians and security forces, and concerns about neighboring Pakistan's ties to the Taliban.
The "direct fire" category accounts for the largest number -- at 16,293 reports -- while "graffiti," "mugging," "narcotics" and "threat" each account for one. And WikiLeaks has another 15,000 documents that it plans to publish after editing out names to protect people, according to the website's founder and editor in chief, Julian Assange.
He told CNN's "Larry King Live" that the first-hand accounts represent "the cut and thrust of the entire war over the past six years," from the military's own raw data -- numbers of casualties, threat reports and notes from meetings between Afghan leaders and U.S. commanders.
