WIKILEAKS IS PREPARING to publish 500,000 Iraq war documents this week, in what’s being touted as the largest security leak in US military history.

The Pentagon has put a 120-member team on standby to review the documents, as it braces itself for the fallout from the leak.

The US government is preparing for the publication of the documents today or tomorrow, although people familiar with the upcoming leak told Reuters they do not expect it to go ahead for at least another week.

The US Department of Defense has said it is concerned the leak compiles “significant activities” from the war – known as SIGACTS – which include incidents such as attacks against coalition troops, Iraqi security forces, civilians and infrastructure. The document dump is also likely to revive memories of some of the most difficult times in the war, including the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal.

The WikiLeaks site was ‘undergoing scheduled maintenance’ on Monday.

However, on its Twitter page, Wikileaks claimed that the Pentagon was trying to pre-empt the leak with a release under freedom of information of four long lists of SIGACTS data, relating to the years 2004-2007.

At the time of the Afghan war leak, which saw some 77,000 classified documents exposed, the top U.S. military officer, Admiral Mike Mullen, warned that WikiLeaks may have the blood of U.S. soldiers and Afghan civilians on its hands.