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London, England (CNN) -- Leaked United States military reports from Afghanistan appear to contain "evidence of war crimes," the man who published them said Monday.
WikiLeaks.org -- a whistleblower website -- published what it says are about 76,000 United States military and diplomatic reports about Afghanistan filed between 2004 and January of this year.
It has another 15,000 documents which it plans to publish after editing out names to protect people, according to Julian Assange, the founder of the website.
The first-hand accounts are the military's own raw data on the war, including numbers of those killed, casualties, threat reports and the like, he said.
"This material does not leave anyone smelling like roses, especially the Taliban," he said, also implying that some U.S. troops had behaved improperly.
The leaked documents comprise "the total history of the Afghan war from 2004 to 2010, with some important exceptions -- U.S. Special Forces, CIA activity, and most of the activity of other non-U.S. groups," Assange said.
He claims the documents reveal the "squalor" of war, uncovering how many relatively small incidents have added up to huge numbers of dead civilians.
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The significance lies in "all of these people being killed in the small events that we haven't heard about that numerically eclipse the big casualty events. It's the boy killed by a shell that missed a target," he told CNN before the reports were published.
"What we haven't seen previously is all those individual deaths," he said. "We've seen just the number and, like Stalin said, 'One man's death is a tragedy, a million dead is a statistic.' So, we've seen the statistic."
CNN has not independently confirmed the authenticity of the documents.
The United States "strongly condemned" their release, Pakistani officials dismissed the contents as lies, and the Afghan government expressed amazement.
"The Afghan government is shocked with the report that has opened the reality of the Afghan war," said Siamak Herawi, a government spokesman.
The New York Times reported Sunday that military field documents on WikiLeaks suggest that Pakistan, an ally of the United States in the war against terror, has been running something of a "double game."
Pakistan has been allowing "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," said the newspaper, which had access to the documents in advance.
Herawi focused on the allegation that Pakistan was secretly supporting al Qaeda, and charged that Washington needed to deal with Pakistani intelligence, known as the ISI.
"There should be serious action taken against the ISI, who has a direct connection with the terrorists," he said. "These reports show that the U.S. was already aware of the ISI connection with the al Qaeda terrorist network. The United States is overdue on the ISI issue and now the United States should answer."
But Gen. Hamid Gul, the former head of Pakistan's intelligence service who is mentioned numerous times in the WikiLeaks reports, called the accusations lies.
"These reports are absolutely and utterly false," Gul said Monday. "I think they [United States] are failing and they're looking for scapegoats."
Qamar Zaman Kaira, Pakistan's federal information minister, said allegations against the ISI are "baseless.
"If someone has any evidence, it should be brought to us and we will take action," he said. "The Pakistani military, especially the ISI, has sacrificed more than any other forces in the war on terrorism."
A spokesman for Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, Farahnaz Ispahani, said the "unsubstantiated leaks" based on uncorroborated "one-sided reports ... will not deter the Pakistani government's commitment to the eradication of terrorism, peace with our neighbors and stability in the region."
Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, issued a statement Sunday saying the reports "do not reflect the current onground realities."
Rather, they "reflect nothing more than single source comments and rumors, which abound on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and are often proved wrong after deeper examination," Haqqani's statement said.
"Pakistan's government under the democratically elected leadership of President [Asif Ali] Zardari and Prime Minister [Yousuf Raza] Gilani is following a clearly laid out strategy of fighting and marginalizing terrorists, and our military and intelligence services are effectively executing that policy," the statement said.
National Security Adviser Gen. James Jones issued a statement Sunday calling the documents' release "irresponsible."
"The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk and threaten our national security," the statement said.
"These irresponsible leaks will not impact our ongoing commitment to deepen our partnerships with Afghanistan and Pakistan; to defeat our common enemies; and to support the aspirations of the Afghan and Pakistani people," the statement said.
But Assange dismissed the American criticism, saying Washington was attacking the messenger in an attempt to distract from the message.
He said the documents were "legitimate," but said it was important not to take their contents at face value.
"We publish CIA reports all the time that are legitimate CIA reports. That doesn't mean the CIA is telling the truth," he said.
"Similarly, with this material, there is reporting from miltary units of various kinds, in Afghanistan, U.S. embassies across the world, about matters relevant to Afghanistan.... Those are legitimate reports," he said. "It doesn't mean the contents are true."
Assange declined to tell CNN where he got the documents. Jones' statement said the website made "no effort" to contact the Obama administration about them.
"The United States government learned from news organizations that these documents would be posted," Jones' statement said.
The Department of Defense will not comment on them until the Pentagon has had a chance to look at them, a department official told CNN.
The team at WikiLeaks has itself read only 1,000 to 2,000 of the documents, Assange said Monday.
Along with The New York Times, WikiLeaks gave the British daily The Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel access to the documents before posting them.
WikiLeaks publishes anonymously submitted documents, video and other sensitive materials after vetting them, it says. It claims never to have fallen for a forgery.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, said in a statement Sunday that the documents -- regardless of how they came to light -- "raise serious questions about the reality of America's policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan."
Wikileaks has previously made headlines for posting controversial videos of combat in Iraq.
The site gained international attention in April when it posted a 2007 video said to show a U.S. helicopter attack in Iraq killing a dozen civilians, including two unarmed Reuters journalists.
At the time, Maj. Shawn Turner, a U.S. military spokesman, said that "all evidence available supported the conclusion by those forces that they were engaging armed insurgents and not civilians."
Pfc. Bradley Manning, 22, suspected of leaking a classified 2007 video, has been charged by the U.S. military with eight violations of the U.S. Criminal Code for transferring classified data, according to a charge sheet released by the military earlier this month.
Attempts to reach Manning's military defense attorney, Capt. Paul Bouchard, were unsuccessful Sunday. However, U.S. Army spokesman Col. Tom Collins has said Bouchard would not speak to the media about the charges.
Assange says WikiLeaks has attempted to put together a legal team to defend Manning, something it will do for any "alleged" whistleblower that runs into legal trouble because of WikiLeaks.
Assange -- a former teen hacker who launched the site in 2007 -- denies that WikiLeaks has put troops in danger.
"There certainly have been people who have lost elections as a result of material being on WikiLeaks," he said.
"There have been prosecutions because of material being on WikiLeaks. There have been legislative reforms because of material being on WikiLeaks," he said. "What has not happened is anyone being physically harmed as a result."
But he said he hoped his website would be "very dangerous" to "people who want to conduct wars in an abusive way."
"This material doesn't just reveal occasional abuse by the U.S. military," he said. "Of course it has U.S. military reporting on all sort of abuses by the Taliban. ... So it does describe the abuses by both sides in this war and that's how people can understand what's really going on and if they choose to support it or not."
Assange said the organization gets material from whistleblowers in a variety of ways -- including via postal mail -- vets it, releases it to the public and then defends itself against "the regular political or legal attack."
He said the organization rarely knows the identity of the source of the leak. "If we find out at some stage, we destroy that information as soon as possible," he said.
http://www.wikileaks.org/
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