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As the charges against Julian Assange heat up, the anonymous folks of Wikileaks continue undaunted and promise another bombshell:

Who: WikiLeaks.

What: A Twitter message posted by the whistle-blowing website announced plans to release classified U.S. diplomatic cables reporting corruption allegations against foreign governments and leaders. WikiLeaks said the latest release will be seven times larger than the previous leak of classified Pentagon documents of roughly 400,000. U.S. State Department officials say the upcoming dump features corruption allegations and is set to cause serious embarrassment for American and foreign governments and politicians named in them.

Where: It is not yet known where the classified documents would be released, however, the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, gave America’s New York Times, Britain’s Guardian newspaper and the German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel – access to the documents some time ago.

When: WikiLeaks has not specified when the tranche of documents would be released but Pentagon spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan said U.S. officials were expecting a possible release of documents ‘late this week or early next week’.

As would be expected, the State Department has claimed that the leaks could cause irreparable harm and could put lives at risk.

The latest leak is expected to include documents covering US dealings and diplomats' confidential views of countries including Australia, Britain, Canada, Israel, Russia and Turkey.

The letter from the US state department's legal advisor Harold Koh was a response to correspondence from Mr Assange, who had written to the US ambassador to Britain, Louis Susman.

Mr Assange had asked which individuals would be put at risk due to the leak, the State Department said.

A senior American official told the BBC that Mr Assange was offering to negotiate over limited redactions.

Of course, expect the government to go into overdrive in demonizing Assange even further in the hopes of deflecting the information.

I meant to get to this earlier in the week. It's so illustrative of the problems with our corporate media that the guy who wins a Pulitzer prize for investigative reporting is ignored - because he was investigating the corporate media for stacking the deck with paid sources to support the Iraq war:

On the April 20 edition of NBC's Nightly News, reporting on the awarding of the 2009 Pulitzer Prizes earlier that day, anchor Brian Williams stated that "The New York Times led the way with five, including awards for breaking news and international reporting." But Williams did not note that the Times' David Barstow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting that day "for his tenacious reporting that revealed how some retired generals, working as radio and television analysts, had been co-opted by the Pentagon to make its case for the war in Iraq, and how many of them also had undisclosed ties to companies that benefited from policies they defended." Media Matters for America has repeatedly documented the unwillingness of the major broadcast networks, including NBC, to report on Barstow's April 20, 2008, Times article. Moreover, NBC joined ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC in reportedly declining to participate in a segment based on Barstow's article that aired on the April 24, 2008, edition of PBS' NewsHour.

In an April 29 post on his MSNBC.com blog, Williams responded to Barstow's April 20 article, describing NBC News analyst military analyst Barry R. McCaffrey and Wayne Downing, who died in July 2007, as "honest brokers" and writing that McCaffrey and Downing were "warriors-turned-analysts, not lobbyists or politicians":

All I can say is this: these two guys never gave what I considered to be the party line. They were tough, honest critics of the U.S. military effort in Iraq. If you've had any exposure to retired officers of that rank (and we've not had any five-star Generals in the modern era) then you know: these men are passionate patriots. In my dealings with them, they were also honest brokers. I knew full well whenever either man went on a fact-finding mission or went for high-level briefings. They never came back spun, and never attempted a conversion. They are warriors-turned-analysts, not lobbyists or politicians.

Glenn Greenwald has more:

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