PHOENIX — The sheriff of Arizona's most populous county is making room in a vast outdoor jail and determined to round up illegal immigrants to fill it. Police from the U.S.-Mexico border to the Grand Canyon are getting last-minute training. And protests and marches are planned throughout Phoenix.

Arizona's new immigration law takes effect Thursday, creating a potentially volatile mix of police, illegal immigrants and thousands of activists, many planning to show up without identification as a show of solidarity.

At least one group plans to block access to federal offices, daring officers to ask them their immigration status.

"Our message for that day is: 'Don't comply, don't buy,'" said activist Liz Hourican, whose group, CodePink, plans to block the driveway for immigration offices in downtown Phoenix.

As both sides prepare, a federal judge is deciding whether to step in and block the law. It requires officers enforcing other laws to check a person's immigration status if they suspect the person is in the country illegally. It also bans illegal immigrants from soliciting work in a public place.

Police across the state scrambled on Tuesday to train officers, including on how to avoid racial profiling, and plan for a potential influx of detainees.

The hardest-line approach is expected in the Phoenix area, where Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio plans his 17th crime and immigration sweep. He plans to hold the sweep, regardless of any ruling by U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton.

Arpaio, known for his tough stance against illegal immigration, plans to send about 200 deputies and volunteers out, looking for traffic violators, people wanted on criminal warrants and others. He's used that tactic before to arrest dozens of people, many of them illegal immigrants.

"We don't wait. We just do it," he said. "If there's a new law out, we're going to enforce it."

He said that the space he made in the complex of military surplus tents can handle 100 people, and that he will find room for more if necessary.

Elsewhere in the state, police officials said they didn't expect any dramatic events. They were busy wrapping up training sessions this week, with some agencies saying that untrained officers will not be allowed on the streets.

Many of the state's 15,000 police officers have been watching a DVD released this month that signs that might indicate a person is an illegal immigrant are speaking poor English, looking nervous or traveling in an overcrowded vehicle. It warned that race and ethnicity do not.

Some agencies added extra materials, including a test, a role-playing exercise or a question-and-answer session with prosecutors.

Critics of the law among police chiefs remain, saying that the law is so vague that no amount of training could eliminate potential confusion.

"Am I going to sit here and say I think every officer has a clear understanding of the law when they leave the training?" Tucson Police Chief Roberto Villasenor said. "No, because I think the law is poorly constructed."

Arizona's law gives police two options to confirm whether a detainee is an illegal immigrant.

Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, declined to comment on preparations or the role federal authorities would play in enforcing the law, except to say ICE "focuses first on criminal aliens who pose a threat to our communities."

Arpaio vowed to arrest all illegal immigrants and make them spend time in his jail. Other police officials said they'd try to get the Border Patrol involved as often as possible to avoid the time and cost of booking the detainees into jail.

Prosecutors are also preparing for a potential influx of cases. They are reminding officers that they are required to explain the circumstances of the original stop, why they suspected the person was an illegal immigrant and any comments made by the suspect.

A march from the state Capitol is planned at 4:30 a.m., followed by a prayer service, a rally outside Arpaio's office and later that afternoon a concert outside a Maricopa County jail, according to the Los Angeles-based National Day Laborer Organizing Network.

The protesters both from Arizona and elsewhere plan to show up without identification and hold peaceful rallies.

"It's defiance, to see if they want to come and arrest those people," said Pablo Alvarado, the executive director of the NDLON. "We dare them to come and ask."

Associated Press writer Jacques Billeaud contributed to this report.

KILLEEN, TX - The owners and organizers behind an anti-war coffeehouse near Fort Hood have been fighting against mounting financial pressure.

"Under the Hood" is a cafe for soldiers and their families to "gather, relax and speak freely about the wars and the military" says its website.

But that draw hasn't been earning them the donations in recent months to keep their doors open.

"Two months ago when we were looking at the books, it was clear that Under the Hood would not be around for too much longer if we did not start engaging a larger group of small donors, the big checks, the grant funding has just not been there," said Matthis Chiroux, coffeehouse organizer.

That same dip in checks received coincided with the current economic recession that has hit many non-profits especially tough.

Veterans in Killeen however voiced opinions that it has less to do with the recession, and more to do with the "hard sell" they face in a military town.

"Good. Good,  I couldn't support that, if they're against the war, I'm against them," said Billy Reiken, a Vietnam veteran in response to their financial problems.

 "We're not pro-war, we're pro-support," said Bob Brown, commander of the American Legion post in Killeen.

The possibility of closing became all too real two months ago when coffeehouse organizers realized they may not make it three more months.

With the help of a recent anti-war convention in Austin and also a protest held outside Fort Hood earlier this month, organizers saw more donations come in.

"We are good until the first of the year, December or so, and we have fundraising and people have offered fundraising for us, so we are hoping for the best," said Cindy Tomas, Under the Hood owner.

As far as its presence in Killeen and in proximity to Fort Hood, "It should be a hard sell for them to do anything around here," Rieken said.

Six House members crossed the Capitol to stage a "sit-in" in the Senate chamber  to protest what they believe to be GOP obstruction of jobs legislation.

These House Democrats sat quietly in the back of the chamber and were approached by both Majority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois and Republican Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah, who shook the hands of the upper chamber visitors.

Democratic Reps. Donna Edwards of Maryland, Carolyn Kilpatrick of Michigan, Danny Davis of Illinois, Ed Perlmutter of Colorado, Gwen Moore of Wisconsin and Jackie Speier of California seated themselves in the area from which Senate staffers ordinarily watch their bosses on the floor.

Nothing really came of the silent protest.

But it was the second planned trip from the House side of the Capitol to the Senate — with the first being last week — and this brief sojourn to the upper chamber drew the attention of reporters when Senate Press gallery staffers announced their presence on the floor.

The orchestrated "sit-in" was a modest illustration of House frustration over the dozens of major pieces of legislation that have cleared the lower chamber only to be stuck in legislative limbo in the Senate. In addition to a pending small-business jobs bill, the House has passed climate change legislation, campaign finance reform and a tax extenders package — all of which await Senate approval.

This has been a tough week for the Defense Department. WikiLeaks released thousands of government documents on the Afghanistan war, and an even bigger treasure trove on Iraq may be next, while a government audit just reported that the Pentagon cannot account for more than 95 percent of $9.1 billion in Iraq reconstruction money.

But at least the cash will keep coming. With the August recess looming, the House just approved a $59 billion bill to continue war funding and to increase spending on operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, by a comfortable 308–114 vote. That's the good news for the Pentagon.

The bad news? The antiwar caucus is growing by leaps and bounds: 102 Democrats, including Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey (D-Wis.), voted against the bill (although Obey shepherded the bill to the floor, so his was a protest vote). That's a substantial increase when only 32 Democrats declined to support a larger war-spending bill a year ago.

With only 12 Republicans joining them, the antiwar Democrats in the House do not, by themselves, have the power to reverse the escalation in the AfPak theater. But what their displeasure signals—amid rising casualties, rumblings from Senate Foreign Relations chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.), an anti-Afghanistan war gaffe from Republican Party chairman Michael Steele, and the recent controversy over comments by ousted Afghanistan Gen. Stanley McChrystal—is that the once near-unanimous support for the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is becoming controversial, particularly on the left.

That, in turn, could mean that there will be pressure on President Obama to move more quickly toward an Afghanistan withdrawal from within his party's grassroots in the run-up to his reelection bid in 2012. Just this week, liberal commentator Arianna Huffington told NEWSWEEK's Daniel Lyons that the editors of her popular Web site, the Huffington Post, uniformly oppose the Afghanistan war as unnecessary. That may be a bellwether of rising sentiment on the left.

BOISE - U.S. military commanders ordered all operations stopped in the moments after Spc. Bowe Bergdahl was reported missing in Afghanistan June 30, 2009, new secret military documents reveal.

Within hours, soldiers started looking for the Hailey, Idaho, native using various tactics including drones, a paratrooper, a tracking dog team and several fighter jets. They went active the same morning Bergdahl went missing.

Soliders also breached two enemy locations in the search but had nothing serious to report, according to the leaked documents.

Posted to the website WikiLeaks, 90,000 pages of secret military documents reveal new information on U.S. armed forces operations throughout Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Several pages of the leaked documents highlight how Spc. Bergdahl was captured. The events surrounding his disappearance have been under much speculation and rumors.

The Pentagon has previously said Bergdahl was captured after lagging behind on a patrol. One radio traffic transmission included in the report, apparently from the Taliban, says Bergdahl was captured while he was unarmed and stopping to go to the bathroom.

The radio traffic also reveals the Taliban lined "lots of I.E.D.s on the road" to prevent rescue teams from finding Spc. Bergdahl.

The documents also uncover new information regarding talks with Taliban "elders" about a possible release.

It reads: "The elders were asked by the Taliban to a trade between the U.S. and Taliban. The Taliban Terms are 15 of their Taliban brothers in U.S. jail and some money in exchange for Pvt. Bergdahl. The elders assured me that Pvt. Bergdahl is alive and that he in not being harmed."

"The elders are going to to have another meeting with themselves to discuss helping us this afternoon. They requested to have another meeting with me the same time tomorrow."

Read the full report.

The last time the world saw Bergdahl was April 7, 2010 by the Taliban. In the video Bergdahl pleads for an end to the war and a release of the prisoners being held by the U.S.

KABUL, Afghanistan — One of two US sailors missing in Afghanistan since last week — a 30-year-old father of two — has been confirmed dead and his body recovered, a NATO spokesman said yesterday.

The search continues for the other missing sailor, said Lieutenant Colonel Todd Breasseale, a spokesman for NATO and US forces in Afghanistan.

The two Navy personnel went missing Friday in the eastern province of Logar after their armored sport utility vehicle was seen driving into a Taliban-held area. The Taliban have said it killed one of the two men in a firefight, captured the other, and are holding him in a “safe place.’’

In a statement, the NATO-led command said that the body was recovered Sunday after an extensive search and that the coalition “holds the captors accountable for the safety and proper treatment of our missing service member.’’

NATO officials were unable to say what the two service members were doing in such a dangerous part of eastern Afghanistan.

The sailors were instructors at a counterinsurgency school for Afghan security forces, according to senior military officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case. The school was based in Kabul and had classrooms outside the capital, but they were never assigned anywhere near where the body of the sailor was recovered, the officials said.

The Pentagon identified the dead sailor as Petty Officer Second Class Justin McNeley, 30, of Wheat Ridge, Colo., and the missing sailor as Petty Officer Third Class Jarod Newlove, 25, of Renton, Wash. The Pentagon listed Newlove’s whereabouts as unknown and is not confirming he was captured.

Jim Kerr, a Colorado legislator from the Denver suburb of Littleton, said McNeley was his wife’s nephew. McNeley was from Colorado but moved to Kingman, Ariz., in 2004, three years after he joined the Navy. His mother lives in Kingman and his father is a fire official in Encinitas, Calif.

Kerr told The Denver Post that McNeley, a noncommissioned officer and father of two sons, was due to return home next month.

The only confirmed American service member in Taliban captivity is Specialist Bowe Bergdahl of Hailey, Idaho, who disappeared June 30, 2009, in Paktika Province. Bergdahl has since been shown in Taliban videos online.

LOS ANGELES — Energy giant BP and victims of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill go to court for the first time Thursday during a session in Idaho that sets the stage for a potential trial of the century.

The proceedings in Boise, Idaho before the Multidistrict Litigation Panel (MDL Panel) will examine whether complaints submitted by around 200 plaintiffs can be consolidated, and determine where the hearings should take place and under which judge.

A decision is expected around two weeks after the hearing, but the session will give trial lawyers a test run for the arguments they will make during what could be years-long legal proceedings.

The hearing will bring together a wide cast of characters linked to the disaster that was prompted by an April 20 explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig, which killed 11 and caused the platform to sink two days later.

Joining BP are Transocean, which leased the rig to the British firm, and Cameron International, which manufactured the blow-out preventer, which should have shut down the well, but failed to work properly.

Plaintiffs range from the families of the workers killed in the April explosion aboard the rig to Gulf fishermen whose catch has been contaminated by the spill, threatening them with financial ruin.

The judges on the panel are expected to consolidate the plaintiffs' complaints for practical reasons, but observers will pay close attention to where the panel orders the case be heard, and under which judge.

"As a legal matter, the MDL Panel has authority to send them to any federal court in the US, though, as a practical matter, the panel may very well be inclined to choose a judge located around the Gulf Coast area," said Richard Nagareda, a law professor at Vanderbilt University.

Richard Arsenault, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said he expected pre-trial hearings to be held in Louisiana, the Gulf state closest to site of the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig, which sank on April 22, two days after an explosion that killed 11 workers and unleashed the worst US oil spill ever.

Ordinarily, he said, the panel will consider the area's caseload and accessibility to witnesses among other factors when deciding where to send a case.

"In this case, however, I suspect that the experience of the jurist will be the critical consideration and the other factors will be a distant second," he told AFP.

Nagareda agreed and noted the panel would also likely seek out a judge with no potential conflict of interests.

"I believe the panel will take great care to select a judge with no financial or other professional connection to the oil industry. That way, his or her impartiality would be beyond question," he said.

Wherever the case ends up, it promises to be a high-profile process attracting plenty of public interest and scrutiny. Nagareda compared it to California court hearings involving Japanese automaker Toyota over faulty vehicles.

Thursday's court hearing comes during a rough week for BP, which announced Tuesday it would replace British chief executive Tony Hayward with Bob Dudley, an American, in a bid to repair its tattered US reputation.

The firm also reported a quarterly loss of 16.9 billion dollars after it set aside 32.2 billion dollars to cover costs associated with the oil spill.

BATTLE CREEK, Mich.—An oil spill from an underground pipeline connecting the U.S. to Canada has spread across roughly 20 miles of the Kalamazoo River in south-central Michigan, prompting the pipe's Canadian owner and U.S. officials on Wednesday to double their resources to contain and clean up more than 800,000 gallons of seeped-out crude.

The spill with an estimated volume of 19,500 barrels of oil is believed to be one of the largest in the history of the Midwest, but unlike the BP PLC oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico, this spill was capped relatively quickly after its owners were able to shut down the line almost immediately after its discovery. The pipe rupture has already forced the evacuation of several dozen residents who live near the Kalamazoo River, forced the river's closure to the public and raised questions about whether the pipeline's owner reported the spill in a timely way.

The line owned by Enbridge Energy Partners LP is a 30-inch pipe that moves light synthetic, heavy and medium crude oil northeast about 1,900 miles from Griffith, Ind. through Michigan and just over the border to Sarnia, Ontario. After the leak was discovered on Monday morning near the company's pump station in Marshall, Mich., the pipeline was shut down and its isolation valves closed off, according to officials at the parent company, Enbridge Inc. of Calgary, Alberta. But some media reports said local residents first reported strong odors near the spill site in emergency calls as early as Sunday. Federal officials said Wednesday that the timeline involved in the spill remains under investigation by several agencies.

Officials said it would be weeks before an official cause of the pipe break is determined. Feedback from the initial portions of the investigation in the next few days are expected to provide telling clues about the origins of the leak, company officials said.

Patrick Daniel, Enbridge's chief executive, told reporters in a news conference Wednesday morning that his company is doubling its 150-person work force in Michigan and will increase the size of oil-corraling booms to about 31,000 feet from its current 14,000 Wednesday. The company has as much as 45,000 feet worth of boom on-hand.

"Our intention is to return your communities" to its state before the pill," Mr. Daniel said Wednesday, who has previously apologized for the spill. "We still have a lot of work to do."

The company now plans to unearth the pipeline at the breakpoint near Marshall, Mich., in an effort to determine the cause of the rupture, repair the line and restore the oil flow in coming days, according to Enbridge officials. In previously scheduled quarterly earnings, Enbridge reported net income of 138 million Canadian dollars, down 65% from a year-earlier period on market-to-market losses on current exchange compared to the year-earlier quarterly gain.

State and federal officials said they are attempting to stop the penetration of the oil down the river before it reaches a nearby lake, worried as well about the threat of predicted thunderstorm on the river's already swollen levels.

Mr. Daniel said he met Tuesday with Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who took an aerial tour of the affected site and called Enbridge's initial clean-up response "anemic." He told reporters Wednesday that he and the governor had a frank conversation and that Enbridge remains committed to do everything it can to contain the spill and clean-up the recovered oil.

Ralph Dollhopf, the on-scene coordinator for the Environmental Protection Agency which is leading the government's efforts, said that the spill does not yet appear to have fouled air quality or groundwater to levels considered dangerous. Local health officials said they will continue to monitor air and water quality, reminding local residents that large swaths of the river remained closed to all public activity.

Concerned residents as well as volunteers willing to help with the spill response can call 1-800-306-6837 or visit response.enbridgeus.com for more information.

Dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was bombarded by US Marines in 2004, exceed those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, according to a new study.

Iraqi doctors in Fallujah have complained since 2005 of being overwhelmed by the number of babies with serious birth defects, ranging from a girl born with two heads to paralysis of the lower limbs. They said they were also seeing far more cancers than they did before the battle for Fallujah between US troops and insurgents.

Their claims have been supported by a survey showing a four-fold increase in all cancers and a 12-fold increase in childhood cancer in under-14s. Infant mortality in the city is more than four times higher than in neighbouring Jordan and eight times higher than in

Dr Chris Busby, a visiting professor at the University of Ulster and one of the authors of the survey of 4,800 individuals in Fallujah, said it is difficult to pin down the exact cause of the cancers and birth defects. He added that "to produce an effect like this, some very major mutagenic exposure must have occurred in 2004 when the attacks happened".

US Marines first besieged and bombarded Fallujah, 30 miles west of Baghdad, in April 2004 after four employees of the American security company Blackwater were killed and their bodies burned. After an eight-month stand-off, the Marines stormed the city in November using artillery and aerial bombing against rebel positions. US forces later admitted that they had employed white phosphorus as well as other munitions.

In the assault US commanders largely treated Fallujah as a free-fire zone to try to reduce casualties among their own troops. British officers were appalled by the lack of concern for civilian casualties. "During preparatory operations in the November 2004 Fallujah clearance operation, on one night over 40 155mm artillery rounds were fired into a small sector of the city," recalled Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, a British commander serving with the American forces in Baghdad.

He added that the US commander who ordered this devastating use of firepower did not consider it significant enough to mention it in his daily report to the US general in command. Dr Busby says that while he cannot identify the type of armaments used by the Marines, the extent of genetic damage suffered by inhabitants suggests the use of uranium in some form. He said: "My guess is that they used a new weapon against buildings to break through walls and kill those inside."

The survey was carried out by a team of 11 researchers in January and February this year who visited 711 houses in Fallujah. A questionnaire was filled in by householders giving details of cancers, birth outcomes and infant mortality. Hitherto the Iraqi government has been loath to respond to complaints from civilians about damage to their health during military operations.

Researchers were initially regarded with some suspicion by locals, particularly after a Baghdad television station broadcast a report saying a survey was being carried out by terrorists and anybody conducting it or answering questions would be arrested. Those organising the survey subsequently arranged to be accompanied by a person of standing in the community to allay suspicions.

The study, entitled "Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005-2009", is by Dr Busby, Malak Hamdan and Entesar Ariabi, and concludes that anecdotal evidence of a sharp rise in cancer and congenital birth defects is correct. Infant mortality was found to be 80 per 1,000 births compared to 19 in Egypt, 17 in Jordan and 9.7 in Kuwait. The report says that the types of cancer are "similar to that in the Hiroshima survivors who were exposed to ionising radiation from the bomb and uranium in the fallout".

Researchers found a 38-fold increase in leukaemia, a ten-fold increase in female breast cancer and significant increases in lymphoma and brain tumours in adults. At Hiroshima survivors showed a 17-fold increase in leukaemia, but in Fallujah Dr Busby says what is striking is not only the greater prevalence of cancer but the speed with which it was affecting people.

Of particular significance was the finding that the sex ratio between newborn boys and girls had changed. In a normal population this is 1,050 boys born to 1,000 girls, but for those born from 2005 there was an 18 per cent drop in male births, so the ratio was 850 males to 1,000 females. The sex-ratio is an indicator of genetic damage that affects boys more than girls. A similar change in the sex-ratio was discovered after Hiroshima.

The US cut back on its use of firepower in Iraq from 2007 because of the anger it provoked among civilians. But at the same time there has been a decline in healthcare and sanitary conditions in Iraq since 2003. The impact of war on civilians was more severe in Fallujah than anywhere else in Iraq because the city continued to be blockaded and cut off from the rest of the country long after 2004. War damage was only slowly repaired and people from the city were frightened to go to hospitals in Baghdad because of military checkpoints on the road into the capital.

It's being called the largest wind power project in the country, with plans for thousands of acres of towering turbines in the Mojave Desert foothills generating electricity for 600,000 homes in Southern California.

And now it's finally kicking into gear.

The multibillion-dollar Alta Wind Energy Center has had a tortured history, stretching across nearly a decade of ownership changes, opposition from local residents and transmission infrastructure delays.

But on Tuesday, the project is officially breaking ground in the Tehachapi Pass, a burgeoning hot spot for wind energy about 75 miles north of Los Angeles. When completed, Alta could produce three times as much energy as the country's largest existing wind farm, analysts said. It's slated to be done in the next decade.

The project will probably be a wind power bellwether, affecting the way renewable energy deals are financed, the development of new electricity storage systems and how governments regulate the industry, said Billy Gamboa, a renewable energy analyst with the California Center for Sustainable Energy.

"It's a super-mega-project — it'll definitely set a precedent for the rest of the state and have a pretty large impact on the wind industry in general," he said.

The project's developer, New York-based Terra-Gen Power, plans to coax three gigawatts of power from the wind farm over the next eight years. It has led some industry experts to predict that California might have a shot at reclaiming the wind energy crown from competitors such as Texas and Iowa.

"Alta's an absolutely enormous project in probably the most promising wind resource area that remains in the state," said Ryan Wiser, a renewable energy analyst at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "It's the single biggest investment in California wind project assets in decades and is likely the largest the state is ever going to see."

Southern California Edison agreed in 2006 to buy 1,550 megawatts of electricity from Alta over 25 years, one of the heftiest power purchase agreements ever signed. That would be enough energy to serve 275,000 homes and is twice the capacity of the country's largest existing wind farm, a 735-megawatt project in Texas.

Terra-Gen is building Alta as a collection of wind farms; it has finished funding and started building the first group of five. The cluster's 290 turbines will be scattered across 9,000 acres, most of which are leased from private landowners. As early as next year, executives said, the turbines could start producing enough power to boost California's wind energy output more than 25% while creating thousands of local jobs.

By 2015, another batch of farms, with roughly 300 turbines — some with blades spanning nearly the length of a football field — is expected to be producing an additional 830 megawatts. Beyond that, details are scarce.

"The first Alta phases are very real, but future phases might be a little less tangible," said Matt Kaplan, a senior analyst with IHS Emerging Energy Research. "We've seen California utilities sign a lot of power purchase agreements for not necessarily the most realistic projects."

For years, Alta seemed to some like just another ambitious pipe dream tied up in red tape and stymied by a lack of transmission lines to carry the energy to customers.

The project was originally conceived as the Alta-Oak Creek Mojave initiative in the early 2000s by Australian infrastructure fund Allco Finance Group. But when the firm went bankrupt in 2008, Terra-Gen bought control of Alta for $325 million.

The permitting process took about three years, said Steve Doyon, vice president and head of development for Terra-Gen.

Along the way, Terra-Gen had to abandon several proposed sites because of landowners' concerns about noise and frosty turbine blades slinging chunks of ice. Some worried that the skyscraping structures could malfunction and collapse or impede firefighting efforts.

Last year, a petition opposing part of the project collected more than 1,000 signatures. The Federal Aviation Administration also jumped in, saying that some of the proposed turbines would interfere with flights at the nearby Mountain Valley Airport.

"We're not against green energy in any way, but there just comes a time when you say that this is my community and I don't want turbines encroaching in full view," said Merle Carnes, president of the Old West Ranch Property Owners Assn. "There's room somewhere else."

The Alta project had other big hurdles. California has been falling behind in the wind power race, increasing its capacity just 7% in 2008 while Texas and Iowa each doubled theirs. Pockets where high wind is common — such as the Altamont Pass in Northern California and the San Gorgonio Pass near Palm Springs — ran out of space early on, crammed with small turbines using inefficient old technology, analyst Wiser said. That has led to just "dribs and drabs" of installation over the last two decades. The Tehachapi area is one of the few windy regions left with room to grow, he said.

Edison has been making headway on its Tehachapi Renewable Transmission Project, connecting alternative-energy projects such as Alta to electricity-hungry city centers. The utility is trying to meet a statewide goal for investor-owned utilities to use renewable energy for 33% of all power supplied to customers by 2020.

Previously tight-fisted investors also are more confident about financing renewable energy projects. Terra-Gen recently secured $1.2 billion in funding for the Alta project.

Vestas-American Wind Technology said last week that it would deliver 190 turbines to Alta, the largest order ever for the turbine-making company. It was unable to land any contracts last year because of the credit crunch.

The industry is not out of the woods yet: In the first half of 2010, newly added wind capacity in the U.S. tumbled 70% compared with the same period last year to just 1,200 megawatts, the American Wind Energy Assn. said Monday.

But for now, experts said, the Alta project seems to be on track.

"I'm not seeing any great big red flags there," Wiser said.

WikiLeaks' editor-in-chief claims his organization doesn't know who sent it some 91,000 secret U.S. military documents, telling journalists that the website was set up to hide the source of its data from those who receive it.

Julian Assange didn't say whether he meant that he had no idea who leaked the documents, or whether his organization simply could not be sure. But he did say the added layer of secrecy helped protect the site's sources from spy agencies and hostile corporations.

"We never the know the source of the leak," he told journalists gathered at London's Frontline Club late Tuesday. "Our whole system is designed such that we don't have to keep that secret."

While Assange acknowledged that the site's anonymous submissions raised concerns about authenticity, he said WikiLeaks had yet to be fooled by a bogus document.

"We do see wholly fabricated submissions, usually around election time," he said, but added that they were "quite rare."

Operatives inside Afghanistan and Pakistan who have worked for the U.S. against the Taliban or al-Qaida may be at risk following the disclosure of thousands of classified U.S. military documents, former and current U.S. officials said.

Speaking in Washington on Tuesday, President Barack Obama said he was concerned about the massive leak of sensitive documents about the Afghanistan war, but that the papers did not reveal any concerns that were not already part of the debate.

In his first public comments on the matter, Obama said the disclosure of classified information from the battlefield "could potentially jeopardize individuals or operations."

As the Obama administration scrambles to repair any political damage to the war effort in Congress and among the American public by the WikiLeaks revelations, there are also growing concerns that some U.S. allies abroad may ask whether they can trust America to keep secrets.

In Baghdad, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters he was "appalled" by the leak. He said "there is a real potential threat there to put American lives at risk."

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said he "deplores" the leak of Afghan war secrets and an investigation by the Pentagon and Justice Department will determine whether criminal charges will be filed.

Holder, speaking to reporters during a visit to Egypt on Wednesday, says the investigation aimed to determine the source of the leak. He says "whether there will be criminal charges brought will depend on how the investigation goes."

The Army is leading the Pentagon's inquiry into the source of the leak.

In London, Assange said WikiLeaks had ex-military and former intelligence workers "in our network," people he said could help evaluate whether documents leaked from the armed forces or spy agencies were genuine.

The website's worse fear, he said, was not a complete forgery but a real document that had been subtly tampered with. Still, he said he had yet to see that happen.

Assange spoke for nearly two-and-a-half hours, outlining his site's mission and methods, and defending it from criticisms that it had put lives at risk by putting mountains of classified information in the public domain.

He seemed irritated when one member of the audience asked him whether he believed there were ever any legitimate national security concerns that would prevent him from publishing a leaked document.

"You often hear ... that something may be a threat to U.S. national security. This must be shot down, whenever this statement is made. A threat to U.S. national security? Is anyone serious? The security of the entire nation of the United States? It is ridiculous!" he declared.

But he admitted that individual cases were different.

"If we are talking a threat to individual soldiers ... or citizens of the United States, then that is potentially a genuine concern," he said.

WASHINGTON – The House on Tuesday sent President Barack Obama a major war-funding increase of $33 billion to pay for his troop surge in Afghanistan, unmoved by the leaking of classified documents that portray a military effort struggling between 2004 and 2009 against a strengthening insurgency.

The House voted, 308-114, to approve the spending boost for the additional 30,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Other non-war provisions brought the total bill to nearly $59 billion.

From Obama on down, the disclosure of the documents was condemned by administration officials and military leaders on Tuesday, but the material failed to stir new anti-war sentiment. The bad news for the White House: A pervasive weariness with the war was still there — and possibly growing.

Republicans in Congress still were strongly behind the boost in war spending, but there was unusually strong opposition from members of Obama's own Democratic Party. All but 12 of the "no" votes in the House came from Democrats.

In debate before the vote, Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., said the leaked documents revealed corruption and incompetence in the Afghanistan government.

"We're told we can't extend unemployment or pay to keep cops on the beat or teachers in the classroom but we're asked to borrow another $33 billion for nation-building in Afghanistan," McGovern said.

At a Senate hearing on prospects for a political settlement of the Afghan conflict, there was scant mention of the leaked material, posted on the website of the whistleblower group WikiLeaks, but there were repeated expressions of frustration over the direction of the fighting.

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who has questioned the realism of U.S. goals in Afghanistan though he supports the war, pointedly asked why the Taliban, with fewer resources and smaller numbers, can field fighters who are more committed to winning than are Afghan soldiers.

"What's going on here?" Kerry asked with exasperation.

But Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a vocal supporter of the war, took issue at a separate hearing with anyone who would argue that the leaked documents buttress arguments for withdrawing now from Afghanistan.

"In actuality, the emerging picture from these documents appears to be little more than what we knew already: that the war in Afghanistan was deteriorating over the past several years," McCain said.

Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis told senators at a hearing on his nomination to lead the military's Central Command that, whatever other lessons are drawn from the WikiLeaks documents, no one should doubt that the U.S. is committed to staying in Afghanistan until it wins.

"We are on the right track now," Mattis said, while predicting that the U.S. casualty rate would increase in coming months as still more U.S. troops join the fight against the Taliban.

In his first public comments on the weekend leak of tens of thousands of documents, Obama said it could "potentially jeopardize individuals or operations" in Afghanistan. But he also said the papers did not reveal any concerns that were not already part of the war debate.

Obama said the shortcomings in Afghanistan as reflected in the leaked documents explain why, last year, he undertook an in-depth review of the war and developed a new strategy.

"We've substantially increased our commitment there, insisted upon greater accountability from our partners in Afghanistan and Pakistan, developed a new strategy that can work and put in place a team, including one of our finest generals, to execute that plan," Obama said. "Now we have to see that strategy through."

In the House, Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., said he was torn between his obligation to bring the bill to the floor and his "profound skepticism" that the money would lead to a successful conclusion of the war.

Even if there were greater confidence, he said, "it would likely take so long it will obliterate our ability to make the kinds of long-term investments in our own country that are so desperately needed."

The leaked documents are battlefield reports compiled by various military units in Afghanistan that provide an unflinching view of combat operations between 2004 and 2009, including U.S. displeasure over reports that Pakistan secretly aided insurgents fighting American and Afghan forces.

Even as the administration dismissed the leaked documents as outdated, U.S. military and intelligence analysts were caught up in a struggle to limit the damage contained in the once-secret files now scattered across the Internet.

In Baghdad, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters he was "appalled" by the leak, which he said had the potential of putting troops' lives at added risk.

Officials also are concerned about the impact the disclosures could have on the military's human intelligence network built up over the past eight years inside Afghanistan and Pakistan. The people in that network range from Afghan village elders who have worked behind the scenes with U.S. troops to militants working as double agents.

Beyond expressions of disgust at the document dump, the political fallout in Washington appeared limited.

Advocates of pulling U.S. troops out of Afghanistan said the leaks reinforced their argument for disengaging. War supporters said they illustrated why Obama was right to decide last December to send an additional 30,000 troops and step up pressure on the Afghan government to reform, while pressing Pakistan to go after insurgents on its side of the border.

At the State Department, spokesman P.J. Crowley said efforts to explain to Afghanistan and other allies that the U.S. government played no role in leaking the documents seemed to have paid off.

"We're very gratified that the response thus far internationally has been moderate, sober," Crowley said.

In his only reference to the leak, Kerry called the new material "over-hyped," said that it was released in violation of the law and that it largely involved raw intelligence reports from the field.

Buried among the 92,000 classified documents released Sunday by WikiLeaks is some intriguing evidence that the U.S. military in Afghanistan has adopted a PR strategy that got it into trouble in Iraq: paying local media outlets to run friendly stories.

Several reports from Army psychological operations units and provincial reconstruction teams (also known as PRTs, civilian-military hybrids tasked with rebuilding Afghanistan) show that local Afghan radio stations were under contract to air content produced by the United States. Other reports show U.S. military personnel apparently referring to Afghan reporters as "our journalists" and directing them in how to do their jobs.

Such close collaboration between local media and U.S. forces has been a headache for the Pentagon in the past: In 2005, Pentagon contractor the Lincoln Group was caught paying Iraqi newspapers to run stories written by American soldiers, causing the United States considerable embarrassment.

In one of the WikiLeaks documents, a PRT member reports delivering "12 hours of PSYOP Radio Content Programming" to two radio stations in the province of Ghazni in 2008, and paying one of them "$3,900 for Radio Content Programming air time for the month of October":

The PRT provided 12 hours of PSYOP Radio Content Programming to Radio Ghaznwyan FM Station and Radio Ghazni AM/FM Station for week of 6-12 Nov.   Topics included Afghanistan History, Law, and Human Rights in both Dari and Pashto, and a spreadsheet with the specific radio content programming for the week of 6-12 Nov will be forward sepcor to SPARTAN.   Additionally, PRT paid Radio Ghaznwyan $3,900 for Radio Content Programming air time for the month of October."

Radio Ghaznawiyaan was established and funded by the Agency for International Development, but USAID has described it in the past as a success story for local independent journalism launched with American help. So its listeners may be surprised to learn that it is an outlet for paid U.S. "PSYOP radio content."

Another message, from 2008, records a meeting that members of the Bagram PRT held with Rahimullah Samander, the news director of the Wakht News Agency and president of the Afghan Independent Journalists Association. Samander, the memo says, "proposed a partnership with the PRT" and "offered to include PRT news articles and photos on his news service":

"Kapisa team met with a Kabul radio representative at the Kapisa TV and Radio Station.  Met with Rahimullah Samander, news director for Wakht News Agency and president of the Afghan Independent Journalists Association.  He provided information about his organizations and proposed a partnership with the PRT.  He offered to include PRT news articles and photos on his news service.  The PRT IO recommended a conference including Afghan and US military journalists to collaborate and share ideas.  Samander hopes to increase the presence of his agency in Kapisa province."

Another 2008 memo records a similar meeting among psychological operations soldiers, Jalalabad PRT members, and representatives of Radio Television Afghanistan and the Shaiq Network. Both of these news organizations were directly contracted by psychological operations units to air friendly content:

"The TF has a new PSYOP contract with RTA and a continuing PSYOP contract with Shaiq Network; additionally, these are key IO mediums.  The purpose of the meetings were to introduce new HQ PSYOP members to the RTA and Shaiq managers, provide initial payment for the RTA contract, receive a PRT Advertising Campaign contract bid proposal from Shaiq (for the pending garbage removal initiative in Jalalabad), and tour both facilities."

The report, written by an Army information operations officer, describes the Afghan journalists as "very pro-CF [coalition forces]" and surmises that "there is a lot they are willing to do for the CF."

Two other messages seem to show U.S. soldiers referring to local Afghan media as extensions of their own units rather than independent reporters. In 2007, after insurgents attacked an Afghan National Police convoy, a member of Task Force Rock wrote that "we ... had our journalist conduct an interview with the Afghan National Police District Chief who condemned the attacks on their fellow countrymen." In another 2007 message, a Task Force Diablo soldier reported that after Taliban gunmen assassinated a local businessman, leading village elders to question the Afghan police's ability to keep the peace, "we were able to send the journalist in with our cultural advisor to speak to the elders."

An inquiry after the Lincoln Group revelations found that paying foreign news outlets to run friendly stories did not violate Department of Defense policy or U.S. law, though the practice seems to have been discontinued in Iraq.

A Defense Department spokesperson did not immediately return an e-mail seeking comment.

Washington (CNN) -- Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Sen. John Kerry said Tuesday the importance of Afghanistan war documents leaked by the whistleblower website WikiLeaks.org should not be overstated.

"I think it's important not to over-hype, or get excessively excited about the meaning of those documents," Kerry, D-Massachusetts, told the committee.

The senator called the leak of the documents "unacceptable."

"It breaks the law and equally importantly it compromises the efforts of our troops, potentially, in the field and has the potential of putting people in harm's way," he said.

WikiLeaks.org published Sunday what it says are more than 75,000 U.S. military and diplomatic reports about Afghanistan filed between 2004 and January of this year.

Kerry stressed that most, if not all, of the documents date to before December, when President Barack Obama outlined a new strategy for the war that Kerry said addressed many of the issues raised by the leaked reports.

Retiring Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.) will vote against a bill to fund military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq Tuesday afternoon, an usual step for an Appropriations Committee chairman and a sign of how disillusioned Obey has become with the Afghan war effort and with the Obama administration's priorities.

In one of the last acts of his four-decade congressional career, Obey said on the House floor Tuesday: "I have a double, and conflicting, obligation. As chairman, I have the obligation to bring this supplemental before the House to allow the institution to work its will. But I also have the obligation to my conscience to indicate - by my individual vote - my profound skepticism that this action will accomplish much more than to serve as a recruiting incentive for those who most want to do us ill."

Obey has become increasingly critical in recent years of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, arguing against throwing billions more dollars into the venture and in favor of hastening plans for a troop withdrawal, largely because he considers the Afghan government an uncertain and ineffective partner.

"Even if we could have greater confidence in that government's capacity, it would likely take so long that it will obliterate our ability to make the kinds of long term investments in our own country that are so desperately needed," Obey said.

Obey has been a strong advocate of adding $10 billion in emergency funds to the war supplemental bill, money that would be sent to states to prevent layoffs of teachers and school administrators. Obey put that money in the original House bill along with a proposed $500 million cut in Obama's signature Race to the Top education initiative, angering the White House and drawing a veto threat.

The Senate stripped that extra funding from the bill before passage, putting House Democrats in a difficult position. The House could still decide to move the education money in a separate measure this week before it leaves for August recess.

For Obey, the supplemental bill's journey has been a depressing chapter of his last year in office.

"What's happened with this bill is a good indication of the tensions and the false choices that we face," he said.

BAGHDAD — The U.S. Defense Department is unable to properly account for over 95 percent of $9.1 billion in Iraqi oil money tapped by the U.S. for rebuilding the war ravaged nation, according to an audit released Tuesday.

The report by the U.S. Special Investigator for Iraq Reconstruction offers a compelling look at continued laxness in how such funds were being spent in a country where people complain basic services like electricity and clean water are sharply lacking seven years after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

The audit found that shoddy record keeping by the Defense Department left the Pentagon unable to fully account for $8.7 billion it withdrew between 2004 and 2007 from a special fund set up by the U.N. Security Council. Of that amount, Pentagon "could not provide documentation to substantiate how it spent $2.6 billion."

The funds are separate from the $53 billion allocated by Congress for rebuilding Iraq.

The report comes at a critical time for Iraq, which four months after inconclusive elections squabbling political factions have still not agreed on a new government.

Despite security gains made since 2008, bombings remain near a daily occurrence that compound the frustrations and fears of Iraqis increasingly weary of the political crisis — one many say reflects how the country's politicians are more interested in their own interests than those of the nation.

The continuing impasse was highlighted on Tuesday when Iraqi lawmakers gathered for the second time this month only to indefinitely postpone the parliamentary session because there was still no decision on the new government.

Acting speaker Fouad Massoum told reporters that the postponement was designed to give the political blocs more time to discuss contentious issues and agree on the distribution of positions in the new government.

"With every delay, the suffering of the Iraqi people and security risks are increasing," lawmaker Salman al-Jumaili told reporters, criticizing the move.

The U.S. audit is unlikely to do anything but further stoke that frustration felt by Iraqis who continue to suffer from poor infrastructure despite the billions spent.

The audit cited a number of factors behind the inability to account for most of the money withdrawn by the Pentagon from the Development Fund for Iraq.

It said most of the Defense Department organizations that received DFI money failed to set up Treasury Department accounts, as required.

In addition, it said no Defense Department organization was designated as the main body to oversee how the funds were accounted for or spent.

"The breakdown in controls left the funds vulnerable to inappropriate uses and undetected loss," the report said.

Calls to Iraqi officials for comment went unanswered.

The Defense Department, in responses attached to the audit, said it agreed with the recommendations laid out in the report about establishing better guidelines for monitoring such funds, including appointing an organization to be responsible for overseeing such funds mostly likely by November.

The audit found that the U.S. continues to hold about $34.3 million of the money even though it was required to return it to the Iraqi government.

The audit did not indicate that investigators believed there were any instances of fraud involved in the spending of these funds.

The DFI includes revenues from Iraq's oil and gas exports, as well as frozen Iraqi assets and surplus funds from the now-defunct, Saddam Hussein-era oil-for-food program.

With the establishment of the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq shortly after the start of the U.S. invasion in 2003 until mid-2004, about $20 billion was placed into the account.

The Iraqi government had agreed to allow the U.S. continued access to the funds after the CPA was dissolved in 2004, but it revoked that authority in December 2007.

In other developments, seven people were killed in a series of bombings and apparent assassinations in Baghdad and Mosul, a northern city where al-Qaida is believed to still have a strong presence. Among those killed were two women shot dead in their home by gunmen and a Baghdad electricity official who died of wounds sustained after a morning roadside bombing.

KABUL, Afghanistan – Afghanistan's president says that a NATO rocket attack killed 52 civilians in the south of the country on Friday.

Hamid Karzai's statement issued Monday says the Afghan intelligence service determined that a NATO rocket hit Regi village in Helmand province's Sangin district. The dead included women and children. Karzai condemned the attack.

But NATO spokesman Col. Wayne Shanks says initial reporting from the area did not confirm any civilian casualties or NATO rockets gone astray.

He said insurgents and NATO forces fought Friday in an area about seven or eight kilometers (4.3 to 5 miles) away but there was no evidence in initial reporting that it was connected to the claims of rocket fire in Regi.

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan — President Hamid Karzai asserted Monday that up to 52 civilians had been killed by NATO rocket fire in southern Afghanistan, a controversy that erupted just as thousands of leaked military documents depicted a pervasive pattern of underreported civilian deaths and injuries in the course of the long conflict.

Karzai's claim of civilian casualties last week in Helmand province was sharply disputed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization force. Provincial authorities said the incident was still being investigated, and that neither the number of deaths nor culpability had been established.

But taken together, the leaked documents and the familiar scenario of conflicting claims emanating from a remote battle zone underscore that civilian casualties remain one of the most bitterly divisive issues between Western forces and Karzai's government.

Afghan human rights activists vowed to investigate civilian casualty cases described in documents posted Sunday on the Internet by the watchdog group WikiLeaks.

Most of the documents, from 2004 through 2009, are reports from field-level commanders. Many offer detailed descriptions of lethal encounters between Western forces and Afghan civilians.

"We will look to see how much of the information about these incidents provided by the military at the time matches up with what is in the leaked documents," said Nader Nadery of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission.

The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, told reporters in London that he believed some of the documents, particularly those involving civilian deaths, could be used as evidence in war crimes cases. The group has said it will release more of the classified reports.

According to the British newspaper the Guardian, the military reports contain 144 entries describing civilian deaths, in incidents ranging from shootings at checkpoints to airstrikes. The Guardian, the New York Times and the German magazine Der Spiegel were given advance access to 92,000 documents and spent weeks analyzing them before they were published Sunday.

Some of those incidents were big enough to make headlines and raise questions at the time; others were wrenching episodes that went all but unnoticed. One report describes the shooting in March 2007 of a villager who ran away from a Western military convoy. It turned out he was deaf and did not hear the soldiers' orders to stop.

Most Afghans have no way to view the leaked military documents, but word of their existence stirred intense curiosity, especially among those who lost loved ones in the fighting. The field reports, with harrowing tragedies rendered in impersonal and abbreviated military jargon, are likely to spur fresh outrage.

The Afghan government said the documents underscored what it described as longtime Western inattentiveness.

"Over the years, we have raised the issue of civilian casualties and how harmful these can be to achieving our joint objective of defeating terrorism," presidential spokesman Waheed Omar told reporters in Kabul, the capital, on Monday. "We have had a hard time trying to communicate this to our international partners."

But Omar also pointed to improvements during the last year and a half. The proportion of civilians accidentally killed by Western troops, as opposed to those killed by insurgents, declined significantly during that period, even as overall deaths continued to rise.

The leaked military documents suggest that some civilian fatalities were deliberately covered up, but also reflect how difficult it can be to determine exact circumstances in the heat of battle. Isolated locations and the tradition of swift burials can add to the confusion.

The latest dispute is a case in point. An undetermined number of villagers were reported killed Friday in a remote part of Sangin district in Helmand province, which has been the scene of near-constant battles between Western troops and insurgents.

Provincial spokesman Daoud Ahmadi said Monday that an investigating team had been sent to the village of Rigi, but had not yet returned. It was not yet known how many people were killed or who was responsible, he said.

Karzai's office, however, issued a statement saying that reports by the National Directorate of Security intelligence agency indicated that a house had been hit by a rocket fired by Western troops, killing up to 52 civilians, including women and children. He and the Cabinet condemned the strike "in the strongest possible terms."

Karzai has made civilian casualties one of the most high-profile issues of his presidency. He once wept publicly while decrying civilian deaths. But he also is capable of making political use of his complaints that NATO is careless in safeguarding civilian life. Often his most impassioned rhetoric on the subject coincides with Western pressure over government corruption — an issue that also received considerable attention in the leaked documents.

The NATO force said a joint investigation by Afghan officials and the Western military had thus far revealed no evidence of civilians injured or killed in last week's incident.

"Any speculation at this point of an alleged civilian casualty in Rigi village is completely unfounded," said U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, a senior spokesman.

Fierce fighting was taking place at the time, the military said, but it occurred about seven miles away. Afghan and Western forces were attacked with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, it said, and hit back with attack helicopters and precision-guided missiles. The statement said six insurgents were killed, including a Taliban commander.

The founder of the whistleblowing website Wikileaks today defended his decision to publish thousands of secret US military files about the war in Afghanistan, faced with criticism from the White House for placing troops in danger.

Julian Assange said his organisation was currently working through a backlog of further secret material and was expecting a "substantial increase in submissions" from whistleblowers after one of the biggest leaks in US military history.

He said the files showed that "thousands" of war crimes may have been committed in Afghanistan.

The documents have revealed unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings and information about secret operations against Taliban leaders, as well as highlighting US fears that Pakistan's intelligence service was aiding the Afghan uprising.

Assange rejected accusations that the leak had compromised America's national security. "We are familiar with groups whose abuse we expose attempting to criticise the messenger to distract from the power of the message."

"We don't see any difference in the White House's response to this case to the other groups that we have exposed. We have tried hard to make sure that this material does not put innocents at harm. All the material is over seven months old so is of no current operational consequence, even though it may be of very significant investigative consequence."

Speaking at a press conference at the Frontline Club in central London, Assange said that the 90,000 leaked US military documents about the war in Afghanistan would help shape understanding of the past six years of fighting.

On the question of whether crimes had been committed, he said: "It is up to a court to decide clearly whether something is in the end a crime. That said, on the face of it, there does appear to be evidence of war crimes in this material."

Earlier, the White House said the leaks "could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security".

It said that Wikileaks had made no effort to contact US security services, but insisted that what it called the "irresponsible leaks" would not "impact our ongoing commitment to deepen our partnerships with Afghanistan and Pakistan; to defeat our common enemies; and to support the aspirations of the Afghan and Pakistani people".

In London, the security minister Lady Neville-Jones, former chair of the UK's joint intelligence committee, described the leak as "really serious stuff" and questioned how the documents had been obtained.

"We don't know how they got that material – it may be a combination of leaking of documents, but also one strongly suspects they have hacked into systems as well.

"This is a very, very big story. But if you stop to think about it for a moment, military systems have to be secure because people's lives are at stake."

The Guardian, along with the New York Times and German weekly Der Spiegel, were given access to the archive and have spent several weeks investigating the logs. In order not to compromise intelligence sources or to put forces at risk, the Guardian has only published a selection of the logs, relating to significant events.

The White House national security adviser, General Jim Jones, stressed that the documents related to a period from January 2004 to December 2009, during the administration of President George Bush and before President Obama ordered a "surge" in Afghanistan.

"President Obama announced a new strategy with a substantial increase in resources for Afghanistan, and increased focus on al-Qaida and Taliban safe havens in Pakistan, precisely because of the grave situation that had developed over several years," he said.

Labour leadership candidate David Miliband, said the "war logs" showed that the war could not be won by military means alone.

"We cannot kill our way out of an insurgency. Instead, the battle for power is fought in the minds of the local population, insurgents and western publics. The purpose of military effort and civilian improvement is to create the conditions for political settlement.

"There is now a race against time to persuade the Afghan people that the correct strategy is in place and show our own people it can succeed. Better Afghan security forces, better police, better schooling and economic opportunities are all vital but not enough. None of them are durable or possible without a political settlement."

Miliband, the former foreign secretary, said any peace settlement "must include the vanquished as well as the victors" and urged the government in Kabul to involve Afghans in "defining a political endgame".

Elsewhere, experts analysed the damage inflicted on the war effort by the leak. British military expert professor Michael Clarke, director of the Royal United Services Institute thinktank, said the leaked files were less damaging than the Abu Ghraib Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal but would prove awkward for politicians.

"There is no doubt that the leaks are politically pretty damaging. The papers give an impression of a lack of military discrimination in how operations were conducted. They are also appearing at the worst possible time, particularly in the United States, because people are looking for an exit strategy. This is old bad news at a new bad time."

In the US, the chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee and former Democrat presidential candidate, John Kerry, responded to the leak with a direct challenge to the administration. "However illegally these documents came to light, they raise serious questions about the reality of America's policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan," he said.

"Those policies are at a critical stage and these documents may very well underscore the stakes and make the calibrations needed to get the policy right."

LONDON – The release of some 91,000 secret U.S. military documents on the Afghanistan war is just the beginning, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange promised Monday, adding that he still has thousands more Afghan files to post online.

The White House, Britain and Pakistan have all condemned the online whistle-blowing group's release Sunday of the classified documents, one of the largest unauthorized disclosures in military history. The Afghan government in Kabul said it was "shocked" at the release but insisted most of the information was not new.

The documents cover some known aspects of the troubled nine-year conflict: U.S. special operations forces have targeted militants without trial, Afghans have been killed by accident, and U.S. officials have been infuriated by alleged Pakistani intelligence cooperation with the very insurgent groups bent on killing Americans.

Still, they also included unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings and covert operations against Taliban figures.

Assange told reporters in London that what's been reported so far on the leaked documents has "only scratched the surface" and said some 15,000 files on Afghanistan are still being vetted by his organization.

He said he believed that "thousands" of U.S. attacks in Afghanistan could be investigated for evidence of war crimes, although he acknowledged that such claims would have to be tested in court.

"It is up to a court to decide really if something in the end is a crime," he said.

Assange pointed in particular to a deadly missile strike ordered by Taskforce 373, a unit allegedly charged with hunting down and killing senior Taliban targets. He said there was also evidence of cover-ups when civilians were killed, including what he called a suspiciously high number of casualties that U.S. forces attributed to ricochet wounds.

White House national security adviser Gen. Jim Jones said the release of the documents "put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk." In a statement, he took pains to point out that the documents describe a period from January 2004 to December 2009, mostly during the administration of President George W. Bush.

Jones noted that time period was before President Obama announced a new strategy.

Pakistan's Ambassador Husain Haqqani agreed, saying the documents "do not reflect the current on-ground realities," in which his country and Washington are "jointly endeavoring to defeat al-Qaida and its Taliban allies."

The U.S. and Pakistan assigned teams of analysts to read the records online to assess whether sources or locations were at risk.

Pakistan's powerful spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, said Monday that the accusations it had close connections to Taliban militants were malicious and unsubstantiated.

A senior ISI official said they were from unverified raw intelligence reports and were meant to impugn the reputation of the spy agency. He spoke on condition of anonymity in line with the agency's policy.

Hamid Gul, a former head of the ISI who is mentioned many times in the documents, also denied allegations that he'd worked with the insurgents.

The New York Times said the documents reveal that only a short time ago, there was far less harmony in U.S. and Pakistani exchanges.

The Times says the "raw intelligence assessments" by lower level military officers suggest that Pakistan "allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders."

The Guardian, however, interpreted the documents differently, saying they "fail to provide a convincing smoking gun" for complicity between the Pakistan intelligence services and the Taliban.

The leaked records include detailed descriptions of raids carried out by a secretive U.S. special operations unit called Task Force 373 against what U.S. officials considered high-value insurgent and terrorist targets. Some of the raids resulted in unintended killings of Afghan civilians, according to the documentation.

During the targeting and killing of Libyan fighter Abu Laith al-Libi, described in the documents as a senior al-Qaida military commander, the death tally was reported as six enemy fighters and seven noncombatants — all children.

Task Force 373 selected its targets from 2,000 senior Taliban and al-Qaida figures posted on a "kill or capture" list, known as JPEL, the Joint Prioritized Effects List, the Guardian said.

U.S. government agencies have been bracing for the deluge of classified documents since the leak of helicopter cockpit video of a 2007 firefight in Baghdad. That was blamed on a U.S. Army intelligence analyst, Spc. Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Md. He was charged with releasing classified information earlier this month. Manning had bragged online that he downloaded 260,000 classified U.S. cables and transmitted them to Wikileaks.org.

Assange on Monday compared the impact of the released material to the opening of the East German secret police archives. "This is the equivalent of opening the Stasi archives," he said.

He also said his group had many more documents on other subjects, including files on countries from across the globe.

"We have built up an enormous backlog of whistleblower disclosures," he said.

Assange said that he believed more material would flood amid the blaze of publicity.

"It is our experience that courage is contagious," he said. "Sources are encouraged by the opportunities that they see before them."

___

Dozier reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin and Robert Burns in Washington contributed to this report.