Alternative Main Street News |WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says the Pentagon is determined to destroy the website after it released tens of thousands of classified US military documents. Assange who was talking in a debate at a London university on Thursday expressed the seriousness of the attack against the whistleblower website.

"The Pentagon has demanded... that we destroy, totally destroy, our previous publications, including that Afghan publication," AFP quoted Assange as saying.

"The Pentagon is trying to get up an espionage case and destroy our organization," he added.

Assange rejected claims that the organization was obsessed with attacking the American military, but he stated, "We have to deal with that country, if we are to deal - even partially - with the problem of secrecy in the world."

In the debate, he repeated his previous claims that his organization has accessed a mass of classified information from different countries without announcing any publication schedule.

On July 23, the website published around 77,000 classified US military documents.

Although WikiLeaks had previously announced that it was going to release a further 15,000 US intelligence reports, it fell behind on this promise.

The website is currently down over what is cited as "scheduled maintenance" on its homepage.