As Wikileaks spokesman Julian Assange has announced that the outfit is gearing up to release the rest of the secret Afghan war documents it has on file, the Pentagon has got into a bit of a panic.

The last release of documents showed that the US Army was a bunch of baby killers who were conducting assassination strikes on behalf of local warlords and that the US's best ally in the region was giving insurgents safe havens.

If you believe the Pentagon, this coming batch of documents is "even worse" and would be "more damaging to security and risk more lives" than the first leak.

However, the Pentagon says it believes it has identified the additional 15,000 classified documents, that their exposure would be even more damaging to the military than what has already been published.To be fair, there is no evidence that Wikileaks exposing military operations in Afghanistan resulted in a single death. However, the documents show that Afghanistan citizens are more likely to be killed by the US military on botched raids than they are from a Wikileaks leak.

Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell described the prospective publication as the "height of irresponsibility."

However, Assange told AP that his his organisation had gone through about half of the papers to make sure that .no Afghans would be hurt by their disclosure.

He said he would "absolutely" publish them. They show unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings by NATO forces and covert operations against Taliban figures.

Wikileaks said that it has contacted the Pentagon's to help it purge the name of Afghan informants from the files, but the government has refused.

At the State Department, spokesman Mark Toner said he was not aware of any effort by department officials to contact Wikileaks.

Defense Department spokesman Colonel David Lapan said that Wikileaks did not have the expertise to determine what might be too sensitive to publish.

Apparently the US government has been asking its allies to look into Assange and his international network of activists. We guess it is only a matter of time before Wikileaks is branded an official terrorist organisation.

Of course it is following in the great US tradition of the free speech of Paul Revere who used to organise propaganda against the British. The only thing different about Wikileaks is that the information it publishes is true, whereas Revere used to just make it up.