WikiLeaks spokesman Julian Assange said his organisation is preparing to release the rest of the secret Afghan war documents it has on file.

Assange made the announcement while speaking via video link to a conference at London’s Frontline Club on Thursday.

The Pentagon warned that a second release could be more damaging to security and risk more lives than the organisation’s initial release of some 76-thousand war documents.

That extraordinary disclosure, which laid bare classified military documents covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010, has angered US officials, energised critics of the NATO-led campaign, and drawn the attention of the Taliban, which has promised to use the material to track down people it considers traitors.

The Pentagon says it believes it has identified the additional 15-thousand classified documents, and said ON Thursday that their exposure would be even more damaging to the military than what has already been published.

Assange though brushed aside the Pentagon’s demands that he stop publishing their intelligence.

He gave no specific time-frame for the release of the remaining files, but said his organisation had gone through about half of them.

“We’re about 7-thousand reports in,” he said, describing the process of combing through the files to ensure that no Afghans would be hurt by their disclosure as “very expensive and very painstaking.”

Still, he told the audience that he would “absolutely” publish them.

He gave no indication whether he would give the documents to media outlets The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel, as he has before, or simply dump them on the Wikileaks website.

The leaks exposed unreported incidents of alleged Afghan civilian killings by NATO forces and covert operations against Taliban figures.

Assange has said that hundreds of those reports should be investigated by the media for evidence of war crimes.

WikiLeaks’ supporters say the blow-by-blow account of the conflict reveals the horror of the campaign’s daily grind.

Detractors say the site has recklessly endangered the war effort and Afghan informants working to stop the Taliban.

The Pentagon has a task force of about 100 people reading the leaked documents to assess the damage done and working, for instance, to alert Afghans who might be identified by name and now could be in danger.

“They convey a huge amount of information about our tactics, techniques and procedures; how we fight, where we’re vulnerable,” Robert Gates, US??Defence Secretary, said Friday.????

Taliban spokesmen have said they would use the material to try to hunt down people who’ve been cooperating with what the Taliban considers a foreign invader.

That has aroused the concern of several human rights group operating in Afghanistan, as well as Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, which on Thursday accused Wikileaks of recklessness.

While Assange acknowledged that some of the critiques levelled at his group were legitimate, he said the Pentagon, as well as human rights groups, had so far refused to help WikiLeaks purge the name of Afghan informants from the files.

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

Defence Department spokesman Colonel David Lapan dismissed WikiLeaks’ claims that they were reviewing the documents and removing information that could harm civilians.

A team of more than a hundred analysts from across the US military, lead by the Defence Intelligence Agency, is poring over the WikiLeaks documents, according to defence officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss matters of intelligence.

Called the Information Review Task Force, the team is working out of the Crystal-City, Virginia-based Counterintelligence Collaboration Centre.

The analysts are combing the documents, trying to determine the implications of the WikiLeaks release, everything from whether military or intelligence-gathering tactics and procedures have been revealed and compromised, to whether specific intelligence sources have been endangered.

In the meanwhile, the US has also reportedly urged its allies to look into Assange and his international network of activists, although it’s not clear how aggressive Washington has been in prodding its foreign friends.

Assange did say on Thursday that at least one of his volunteers had been “detained going through customs in the United States.”