In this article at The Australian, Julian Assange makes a strong case in defending the decision to publish hundreds of thousands of top-secret US documents.
In it, he rounds up some of the threats made to him:
I have been accused of treason, even though I am an Australian, not a US, citizen. There have been dozens of serious calls in the US for me to be “taken out” by US special forces. Sarah Palin says I should be “hunted down like Osama bin Laden”, a Republican bill sits before the US Senate seeking to have me declared a “transnational threat” and disposed of accordingly. An adviser to the Canadian Prime Minister’s office has called on national television for me to be assassinated. An American blogger has called for my 20-year-old son, here in Australia, to be kidnapped and harmed for no other reason than to get at me.
About the accusations that WikiLeaks (which has been pulled, but have several mirror sites) is endangering lives by releasing the documents, he says: