U.S. worried more info from Afghanistan may be leaked

U.S. officials are worried about what other secret documents the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks may possess and have tried to contact the group without success to avoid their release, the State Department said on Friday.

	U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates in Washington last week.
	Photo by: AP

The shadowy group publicly released more than 90,000 U.S. Afghan war records spanning a six-year period last Sunday. The group also is thought to be in possession of tens of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables passed to it by an Army intelligence analyst, media reports have said.

"Do we have concerns about what might be out there? Yes, we do," State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told a briefing, adding that U.S. authorities have not specifically determined which documents may have been leaked to the organization.

He said the State Department could not confirm the longstanding reports that WikiLeaks is in possession of a large set of U.S. diplomatic cables.

But the fact that the documents released last Sunday contained a handful of State Department cables suggests that other secret diplomatic messages may have been included in data transmitted to WikiLeaks, Crowley said.

Both Crowley and White House spokesman Robert Gibbs urged WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, not to release further classified government documents. Gibbs, noting WikiLeaks claims to have at least 15,000 more secret Afghan documents, told NBC's "Today" show there was little the government could do halt the release of the papers.