London: The WikiLeaks website appears close to releasing what the Pentagon fears is the largest cache of secret US documents in history - hundreds of thousands of intelligence reports compiled after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
In a message posted to its Twitter page on Thursday, the organisation said there was a "major WikiLeaks press conference in Europe coming up." WikiLeaks has not commented publicly on the imminent announcement.
Their disclosure would be the most massive leak of secret documents in US history, and defense officials are racing to contain the damage.
A team of more than a hundred analysts from across the US military, lead by the Defense Intelligence Agency, has been combing through the Iraq documents they think will be released.
Called the Information Review Task Force, its analysts have pored over the documents and used word searches to try to pull out names and other issues that would be particularly sensitive, officials have said.
The task force has informed the US Central Command of some of the names of Iraqis and allies and of other information they believe might be released that could present a danger, officials have said, noting that - unlike the WikiLeaks previous disclosure of some 77,000 documents from Afghanistan - in this case they had advance notice that names may be exposed.
That previous leak, back in July, outraged the US military, which accused WikiLeaks of irresponsibility.
But The Associated Press has obtained a Pentagon letter reporting that no U.S. intelligence sources or practices were compromised by the posting of secret Afghan war logs.
Although U.S. officials still think the leaks could cause significant damage to U.S. security interests, the assessment suggests that some of the administration's worst fears about the July disclosure have so far failed to materialize.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates reported the conclusions in an Aug. 16 letter to Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who had requested a Pentagon assessment.
Wikileaks release could endanger lives: Nato
Nato chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen on Friday warned that the lives of soldiers and civilians could be endangered if the whistleblowing Wikileaks website releases more secret military documents, reports AFP.
"Such leaks are very unfortunate and may have very negative security implications for people concerned," Rasmussen said during a joint press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin.
"Leaks may put soldiers as well as civilians at risk," he added.
WikiLeaks announced Monday it would be releasing more documents "very soon", but did not specify exactly what was coming.
A message posted on its Twitter page also said, "Major WikiLeaks press conference in Europe coming up."
"We don't comment on what we are working on and don't give any exact dates," Kristinn Hrafnsson, a close collaborator of founder Julian Assange, told AFP.
The US Pentagon said last week a 120-strong taskforce was scouring an Iraq war database to prepare for potential fallout from an expected release by WikiLeaks of some 400,000 secret military reports.
It appealed to the media to avoid facilitating the leak of documents regarding Iraq.
"News organisations should be cautioned not to facilitate the leaking of classified documents with this disreputable organisation known as WikiLeaks," Pentagon spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan told reporters.
Helping the website publish the classified records could "provide a veneer of legitimacy to WikiLeaks," he said.
But Lapan did not threaten legal action and said so far no news outlet had indicated it intended to cooperate with WikiLeaks.
"We have not been approached specifically by news organizations about the release," Lapan said.
US newspapers have argued that media outlets are under no legal obligation to obey secrecy rules designed to apply to government employees, and that in the past the publication of classified documents has served the public interest.
But in a tweet on the micro-blogging networking site Twitter, Wikileaks said: "We did not say we were publishing something on Iraq."
The whistleblower website published 77,000 classified US military documents on the war in Afghanistan in July and is expected to publish another 15,000.
The documents, revealing details of civilian victims and supposed links between Pakistan and the Taliban insurgents infuriated the Pentagon.
Human rights groups were also worried that the names of Afghans aiding the US forces had not been erased, laying them open to reprisals.
WikiLeaks first released those files to three publications, the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel, but it was unclear if the website would take a similar approach with the Iraq documents.
WikiLeaks has not identified the source of the documents it obtained but suspicion has fallen on Bradley Manning, a US Army intelligence analyst who is currently in military custody.
Manning was arrested in May following the release by WikiLeaks of video footage of a US Apache helicopter strike in Iraq in which civilians died and has been charged with delivering defence information to an unauthorized source.
