STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- NEW: Documents reveal "the cut and thrust of the entire war," Assange says
- More than 100 categories lay out Afghan war
- CNN has not independently confirmed the authenticity of the documents
- The release will have a potential chilling effect on spy recruitment, analyst says
CNN.COM
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. "Direct fire" accounts for the largest number -- at 16,293 reports -- while "graffiti," "mugging," "narcotics" and "threat" each account for one.
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 with Afghan leaders, among others.
"We see the who, the where, the what, the when and the how of each one of these attacks," Assange said.
Earlier, he said the reports appear to contain "evidence of war crimes" by both U.S. and Taliban forces, he said.
"This material does not leave anyone smelling like roses, especially the Taliban," he said.
