From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

Bob Garfield is away again this week. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

WikiLeaks.org, a whistleblower website, has published what it says are nearly 92,000 official U.S. documents.

...about the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2009.

Raw data from the front line.

It poses a very real and potential threat to those that are working hard every day to keep us safe.

Some 91,000 documents related to the U.S. war in Afghanistan were released last Sunday,

minus 15,000 they delayed for, quote, harm minimization reasons.

The political and military impact won't be known for some time, but the single largest

leak of classified documents in U.S. history is a tremendous display of power by the self-described

whistleblower site, WikiLeaks, which paired with three news outlets,

the New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel,

for as wider reach as possible.

According to two of those internal military memos

leaked by WikiLeaks,

on August 25, 2009,

the 2nd Battalion Eighth Marines Echo Company in Afghanistan exchanged small arms fire,

or SAF, with the enemy, or EN. The documents itemize each instance of SAF from each specific location

and conclude their account with the bomb that was finally used. In U.S. military terms, primal 3-1

Harrier dropped one G.BU.12 on the compound effectively suppressing the EN threat. But according

to Noah Shackman of Wired Magazine, who was with Echo Company during the firefights, this step-by-step

military account only tells a fraction of the story.

...