The Red Line Towards a Legitimate Target in Wartime?

I read this and thought to myself - why not open the discussion with the very hard question...

Attorney General Robert McClelland said Australia cooperated on security matters with international bodies, but refused to say whether authorities had shared information about the Australian-born Assange.

"It's not the sort of thing that I would comment on, but again, we do cooperate with respect to a number of matters internationally," he said in comments reported by the Sydney Morning Herald.

WikiLeaks in June released close to 77,000 files from the US military about the Afghan war, some of which alleged that Pakistani spies met the Taliban and that deaths of innocent civilians by foreign forces were covered up.

The documents also included names of some Afghan informants, prompting claims that the leaks have endangered lives.

Does it matter if an organization is a public intelligence source, instead of say a private intelligence source? At what point does it become legal for a government to take out an organization or people within an organization like Wikileaks for supporting the intelligence operations of the enemy in wartime? Sorry, we have moved well beyond responsible disclosure for purposes of transparency with Wikileaks - they has thrown out that high ground argument when they intentionally redact nothing and reveal information regardless of the consequences to the lives of people involved in a war.

Note the "wartime" element is a distinction that is the critical element of the discussion. It is almost certainly politically incorrect to say, but having read through many Wikileaks documents I'd say they have probably already crossed the red line a few times. Does running a public website preclude one from being a legal target in warfare? Not according to any international law - hell in most countries running a website makes you a legal target.

Which raises the question whether Wikileaks is essentially an organization working for the enemy in wartime to undermine the state while at war, and if that makes such an organization a legitimate enemy target in the global war on terror. I'm starting to think it could - and we might be acting very naive to ignore that possibility.