Pentagon calls own lawyers incompetent

Left hand, meet right hand

US Department of Defense chiefs have accidentally branded their own legal team incompetent, it was revealed today by documents mischievously leaked by whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks.

Acting on the mantra of "deny first and then, well... keep on denying until everyone loses interest or you begin to look faintly ridiculous", Pentagon bosses have insisted that they want no truck with Julian Assange's pesky bunch of freedom-obsessed journarchists.

So much so, in fact, that in a press release they derided the site's claims that it had tried to get in touch with military authorities to discuss the reviewing of the remaining 15,000 military documents in the site's possession. According to the story, WikiLeaks had not contacted a "competent" authority.

Only it had: the Pentagon's own legal department, as revealed in this document - also helpfully ushered into the public domain by WikiLeaks - which acknowledges contact from the site, and is dated, you'll note, two days before yesterday's press release.

You can follow the ongoing spat between @wikileaks and @DeptofDefense on Twitter.