The White House on Monday condemned Wikileaks for publishing and distributing 90,000 classified documents relating to the war in Afghanistan.

"The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security," national security advisor James Jones said in a statement.

Wikileaks did not contact that White House about plans to publish the documents, which hit the Web on Sunday night, Jones said. Instead, the administration learned about them from publications that received them under embargo from Wikileaks – The New York Times, The Guardian in London, and Germany's Der Spiegel.

Jones said the documents in question covered a time period between January 2004 and December 2009. Since then, President Obama "announced a new strategy with a substantial increase in resources for Afghanistan, and increased focus on al Qaeda and Taliban safe-havens in Pakistan, precisely because of the grave situation that had developed over several years," Jones said.

One of the things revealed in the documents, according to the Times, is suspicion that Pakistan's military might be helping the Afghan insurgency. Pakistani government officials reportedly allowed members of its spy service to attend strategy sessions with the Taliban.

Jones insisted Monday that since 2009, the "United States and Pakistan have deepened our important bilateral partnership, [and] counter-terrorism cooperation has led to significant blows against al Qaeda's leadership."

"These irresponsible leaks will 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," Jones said.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange held a press conference Monday morning in London, during which he defended his decision to publish, according to The Guardian.

"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," Assange said, according to the paper. "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."

Not surprisingly, the Wikileaks Web site has been inundated with traffic since the release. "Wikileaks is tremendously overloaded," the site tweeted on Monday, pointing users to a direct link to the Afghanistan war material.