WikiLeaks US embassy cables: live updates

7.42am:The WikiLeaks website is down again, after its domain name system, EveryDNS.net, pulled the plug on it.
But the Guardian is up and running and packed with more revelations from the leaked cables. Today the main focus is Afghanistan.
The dispatches expose a devastating contempt for the British failure to impose security and connect with ordinary Afghans, our lead story says.
The Ministry of Defence has been swift to rebut the cables. A spokesman said:

UK forces did an excellent job in Sangin, an area which has always been and continues to be uniquely challenging, delivering progress by increasing security and taking the fight to the insurgency.
That work is now being continued by the US Marines as part of a hugely increased Isaf presence across the whole of Helmand Province.
Both Afghan leaders, including the Governor of Sangin, and the US Marines have publicly recognised and paid tribute to the sacrifice and achievements of the UK forces in that area.
Criticism of UK troops in the cables has prompted a furious reaction on the Army Rumour Service, the online chatroom popular with British troops. "It's utterly ridiculous how little they appreciate the effort our troops have made," wrote Bloodloss, while Oddjob, who says he has a son currently serving in Afghanistan, tells the Afgans where to go.
Here's a round up of the other stories from the leaked cables today:
• CIA drew up UN spying wishlist for diplomats
• Afghan vice-president 'landed in Dubai with $52m in cash'
• Afghan MPs and religious scholars 'on Iran payroll'
• Germany accuses US over 'missing' Afghan funds
• Cables portray Hamid Karzai as corrupt and erratic
• Americans believed Gordon Brown was an 'abysmal' prime minister
• Gordon Brown's potential successors, as viewed by Washington
• Gordon Brown's global moves dismissed by US
• UK overruled on Lebanon spy flights from Cyprus
• U2 spy flights targetting Hizbullah fuels tensions
• Berlusconi 'profited from secret deals' with Putin
• Silvio Berlusconi's health hit by party lifestyle
• Cables vindicate Litvinenko murder claim, says widow
• Chávez and Uribe 'almost came to blows' at summit
• US has lost faith in Mexico's ability to win drugs war
You can follow all of yesterday's disclosures and reaction on Thursday's live blog. And for the full coverage go to our US embassy cables page or follow our US embassy cable Twitter feed @GdnCables.
7.56am: Connecting to WikiLeaks is presently not possible until it gets a new DNS service, writes our technology editor Charles Arthur.
WikiLeaks lawyers Mark Stephens wants answers on whether anyone leaned on EveryDNS.net to pull the domain name. He just tweeted this:
Pressure appears to have been applied to close the Wikileaks domain name. Anyone else know anything?less than a minute ago via Twitter for BlackBerry®Mark Stephens
MarksLarks

8.07am: The rest of British press wasn't interested in the corruption allegations about Russia exposed in the cables. But that was before Russia won the right to host the World Cup.
The Independent neatly links to the two stories on its front page. The front of the sun says: "Fifa Bungs Russia the World Cup.". Inside the headline is "And the 2018 World Cup is awarded to... mafia state". The story quickly gets into the details of the WikiLeak revelations.
Hours before it landed the greatest show on earth yesterday, secret US documents published by rogue website WikiLeaks had spelled out shocking corruption allegations.
The largest country in the world was depicted as run by organised criminals and headed by a government that pockets almost £200billion a year in bribes.
In one document, a Spanish prosecutor who spent ten years examining corruption levels concluded: "The government of Russia's strategy is to use organised crime groups to do whatever it cannot acceptably do as a government."
8.44am: Colonel Stuart Tootal, former commander of 3 Para, the first battle group to be sent into Helmand, has been doing the rounds of broadcast interviews today to defend the British Army's record in Afghanistan.
On BBC Breakfast he said the US held British forces "in the highest regard" and said the army had ensured "strong security" in Afghanistan for US troops. He added:
Some of the individual criticisms I think are very unfair. We have now got the resources in place. I don't think (the army) made a mess of things but we got some of our approach wrong in not having enough resources.
A lot of this comment is historic and some of it is unfair.
And speaking on the BBC Radio 4's Today programme, he described the cables as "disappointing".
But it's important to remember these are the individual views of some people."
It's been challenging - the resources, the initial approach was wrong. Now we've got 30,000 Nato troops, British and American, who are all doing a fantastic job and we mustn't lose sight of this.
And quite frankly, the leaks don't help anyone, particularly not the poor bloody infantryman on the ground slogging his guts out, whether he's a Brit or an American, to try and improve the lot of the Afghan people.
9.03am: The WikiLeaks cables can still be seen at this proxy address, tweets Andrew Spooner.
A tweet from WikiLeaks suggests the new address is being hosted in Switzerland. Or is it just speaking metaphorically?
WikiLeaks moves to Switzerland http://wikileaks.ch/less than a minute ago via webWikiLeaks
wikileaks

9.15am: Pravada goes into Cold War mode. In an opinion piece David Hoffman, its legal editor launches a scathing attack on the United States, contrasting the US double standards over WikiLeaks and the outing of the CIA operative Valerie Plame.
The article doesn't mention the corruption allegations against Russia.
It is the American people who should be outraged that its government has transformed a nation with a reputation for freedom, justice, tolerance and respect for human rights into a backwater that revels in its criminality, cover-ups, injustices and hypocrisies.
9.29am: The New York Times WikiLeaks coverage today focuses on corruption in Afghanistan.
From hundreds of diplomatic cables, Afghanistan emerges as a looking-glass land where bribery, extortion and embezzlement are the norm and the honest man is a distinct outlier.
Describing the likely lineup of Afghanistan's new cabinet last January, the American Embassy noted that the agriculture minister, Asif Rahimi, "appears to be the only minister that was confirmed about whom no allegations of bribery exist."
But the paper's veteran foreign affairs commentator Roger Cohen has serious qualms.
The cables are intriguing, offering plenty of voyeuristic titillation but no gasp of discovery. They provide texture but break little new ground. Yet their publication has done significant damage to the courageous work of America's diplomats and may endanger lives. That's a tradeoff that I find troubling and unpersuasive.
10.14am:Here's the latest on what's happening with the WikiLeaks website, from Josh Halliday on our Media and Technology desk.
The site this morning said it had "move[d] to Switzerland", announcing a new domain name with the Swiss suffix, .ch. However, the new address still only points to a DNS address, suggesting WikiLeaks has been unable to quickly find a new hosting provider.
A new Germany-based WikiLeaks domain also appeared this morning, with its data apparently hosted in California. People have also taken to setting up alternative domain names that point to the WikiLeaks address. Robin Fenwick, a UK-based web services director, this morning launched Wikileeks.org.uk – a "joke domain" that points to the WikiLeaks DNS address.
10.26am: There was a fascinating exchange yesterday between journalists and the US State department spokesman PJ Crowley. The State department has published a full transcript. Here's a key extract, in which Crowley reveals that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange wrote to the US ambassador in London last weekend offering to talk:
QUESTION: P.J., on that subject of WikiLeaks, Amazon, as we know, did have them on their server for a time and then stopped doing that. And there's a human rights group that says that Amazon was directed by the U.S. Government to stop that relationship. Do you know anything –
MR. CROWLEY: All I can say is I'm not aware of any contacts between the Department of State and Amazon.
QUESTION: Or the U.S. Government or just State?
MR. CROWLEY: I'm not in a position on this particular issue to talk about the entire government. I'm just not aware of any contacts directly.
QUESTION: From your perspective, what is WikiLeaks? How do you define them, if it is not a media organization, then?
MR. CROWLEY: Well, as the Secretary said earlier this week, it is – one might infer it has many characteristics of some internet sites. Not every internet site you would call a media organization or a news organization. We're focused on WikiLeaks's behavior, and I have had personally conversations with media outlets that are reporting on this, and we have had the opportunity to express our specific concerns about intelligence sources and methods and other interests that could put real lives at risk.
Mr. Assange, in a letter to our Ambassador in the United Kingdom over the weekend, after documents had been released to news organizations, made what we thought was a halfhearted gesture to have some sort of conversation, but that was after he released the documents and after he knew that they were going to emerge publicly. So I think there's been a very different approach. And Mr. Assange obviously has a particular political objective behind his activities, and I think that, among other things, disqualifies him as being considered a journalist.
10.46am: Pentagon papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg has called for a boycott of Amazon, over its withdrawal of support for WikiLeaks.
In an open letter to Amazon, he writes:
I'm disgusted by Amazon's cowardice and servility in abruptly terminating today its hosting of the Wikileaks website, in the face of threats from Senator Joe Lieberman and other Congressional right-wingers. I want no further association with any company that encourages legislative and executive officials to aspire to China's control of information and deterrence of whistle-blowing.
For the last several years, I've been spending over $100 a month on new and used books from Amazon. That's over. I ask Amazon to terminate immediately my membership in Amazon Prime and my Amazon credit card and account, to delete my contact and credit information from their files and to send me no more notices.
I understand that many other regular customers feel as I do and are responding the same way. Good: the broader and more immediate the boycott, the better.
Amazon denies that it was put under pressure by the US government.
10.57am: The Guardian's latest WikiLeaks story exposes more duplicity from the Foreign Office, this time over the plight of thousands of islanders expelled from Deigo Garcia to make way for a US military base.
Rob Evans and Richard Norton-Taylor report:

More than 2,000 islanders – described privately by the Foreign Office as "Man Fridays" – were evicted from the British colony of Diego Garcia in the 1960s and 1970s. The Foreign Office, backed by the US, has fought a long legal battle to prevent them returning home.
The islanders' quest to go back will be decided by a ruling, expected shortly, from the European court of human rights.
New leaked documents show the Foreign Office has privately admitted its latest plan to declare the islands the world's largest marine protection zone will end any chance of them being repatriated.
The admission is at odds with public claims by Foreign Office ministers that the proposed park would have no effect on the islanders' right of return.
Here's relevant cable.
11.12am: Julian Assange will be live on the Guardian's site from 1pm today to answer readers' questions. That's if he can get access to the internet. A big if at the moment.
11.22am: The WikiLeaks affair has claimed its first victim, according to the EU Observer. It reports that Germany's vice-chancellor Guido Westerwelle today sacked his chief of staff for spying for the Americans.
Westerwelle's chief of staff, Helmut Metzner, admitted that he gave regular information to the US embassy in Berlin, and has been "relieved from his duties," a spokesman for the Liberal Free Democrats (FDP) said in a statement.
11.31am: Another technical update on the WikiLeaks site, from Josh Halliday.
The Wikileaks.ch domain name, which only surfaced on Friday morning, is being served by the Swiss Pirate Party. And the routing to it is still being done by everydns.
11.40am: Der Spiegel has more on the German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle's chief of staff who admitted to passing secrets information to the Americans.
A worker at the party's headquarters who was chief of staff to the FDP chairman, German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, came forward and admitted to being the source, an FDP party spokesperson said.
Frankfturter Allgemeine names him as Helmut Metzner and says he has been relieved of his duties rather sacked. Does that mean he's been suspended?
Der Spiegel adds:
Helmut M. became chief of staff to the chairman of the party in Berlin after Westerwelle became Germany's foreign minister in a coalition government with Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats in 2009. During the coalition talks, Helmut M. had participated as a notetaker, FDP officials stated.
In a cable sent back to Washington that has been published online by WikiLeaks and cited by Spiegel, US Ambassador Philip Murphy described the worker as a "young, up-and-coming party loyalist." The cable states that during his meetings at the US Embassy in Berlin, he brought along internal papers from the coalition talks, including participant lists from working groups, schedules and handwritten notes. According to Spiegel information, they include, for example, information about an internal dispute over disarmament that took shape during the coalition negotiations.
11.57am: This is useful: a full summary of today's WikiLeaks disclosures by my colleague Haroon Siddique. Down the right hand side of the article are links to previous day's disclosures.
12.04pm: The Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, the man described as Robin to Vladimir Putin's Batman in one cable, has spoken out against US diplomats.
Speaking at a briefing with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in the southern Russian resort of Krasnaya Polyana, he said the cables showed the "cynicism" of US diplomacy.
According to RIA Novosti he said:
We are not paranoid and we do not link Russian-American relations with any leaks, although the leaks are revealing. They show a full measure of cynicism of those evaluations and judgments that often prevail in the foreign policy of various states, in this case I am referring to the United States.
12.31pm: There's been some more interesting reaction on the Army Rumour Service, the site popular with squaddies, to the criticism of the British campaign in Afghanistan.
annoy_mous writes:

The comments about the British were justified. We didn't send enough troops out there because the British government, and British taxpayer, wouldn't pay for them. There weren't enough troops in Sangin to dominate the ground, so regular patrols weren't possible. The army hierarchy wouldn't / didn't acknowledge this and for several years carried on with the same tactics despite there obvious flaws.
Karzai and the Americans were right, US marines were needed to provide the extra manpower. I've read nothing to suggest that the lads themselves were anything other than professional. And hopefully now we are consolidating a position in central Helmand, we will be more effective.
Blokeonabike writes:
The military "top brass" have, on several occasions and occasionally very publicly, noted that we do not have enough manpower/helicopters/light armoured vehicles etc. However, they, like the soldiers below them, are obliged to follow legal orders. The fact that they are given those orders by politicians with no military understanding does not make them any less legally binding. Given insufficient funding/equipment and political back-up, the British Forces at all levels have done the best they could be expected to do with the hand they have been dealt.
12.43pm: Lebanon's al-Akhbar newspaper has an Arab world exclusive by getting its hands on a sizeable selection of Wikileaked state department cables from across the region, writes Ian Black, our Middle East editor.
How it got the material — much of it not yet released by anyone else — is a closely-guarded secret.
Al-Masry al-Youm, a respected Egyptian daily, also intended to run the cables - triggering nervousness in Cairo - but apparently came under pressure not to do so.
Interestingly, there is very little new in the Beirut documents about the 2005 murder of the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafiq al-Hariri, as expectations mount that a UN tribunal will shortly indict members of Hizbullah for the assassination.
Other key events are conspicuously absent.
Elias al-Murr, the defence minister, has come under attack for comments he reportedly made to US diplomats, and was forced to issue a statement that a Wikileaks cable was "incomplete and inaccurate."
It quoted him as telling the US ambassador that Hizbullah was "terrified of Israel."
Al-Akhbar accused him and other pro-western Lebanese politicians of acting like "informers." The paper also said the leaked documents proved the extent of the "politicization" of the UN's investigation into the Hariri assassination.
The Guardian's revelations about US spy flights over Lebanon are also big news in Beirut, not least because of the assumption that any intelligence about Hizbullah would automatically be passed to Israel.
12.58pm: The online chat with Julian Assange is about to start. He has signed in. There have been hundreds of questions and comments so it's going to be tricky to spot his answers.
My boss, Janine Gibson, posted this in the comments section:
Sorry to have to run this in the not-very-practical, scroll through the comments way. Obviously Julian Assange is only able to log on to the site as a commenter at present, and this is the most reliable way to host this Q&A. It is, I know, far from ideal. As far as we know he will still be able to join us at 1pm. But we will pull out his responses afterwards and publish in a more user-friendly form.
2.19pm: Sorry about the lack of activity for the last hour or so. The site fell over under the weight of interest in the Julian Assange Q&A. His answers so far (about Bradley Manning, death threats, UFOs) are here.
2.32pm: Assange is about to be arrested, according to the BBC.
Assange's lawyer said this afternoon that neither the British nor the Swedish authorities had sought to speak to his client, according to PA.
Mark Stephens said: "The police have given us an undertaking that they will contact us if they want to get in touch with Julian. At this point in time nobody has."
2.38pm: Over on the online chat, Assange says that Tom Flanagan, the former adviser to the Canadian premier Stephen Harper, should be charged with incitement to murder.
Flanagan told Canadian TV that Assange should be assassinated, a comment he later said he regretted (11.39am).
"Flanagan and the others seriously making these statements should be charged with incitement to commit murder," Assange told the Guardian.
2.47pm: More interesting online answers from Assange: "I have become the lightening rod. I get undue attacks on every aspect of my life, but then I also get undue credit as some kind of balancing force."
2.50pm: The French government has called for Wikileaks to be banned from French servers, writes Angelique Chrisafis.
Ministers complained that the site has been partly hosted since Thursday by OVH, a server based near Lille in northern France.
The industry minister Eric Besson wrote to the French body governing internet use saying it was "unacceptable" for Wikileaks to be hosted by French servers and there would be consequences for any French operators involved with keeping Wikileaks online.
Besson wrote: "France cannot host internet sites that violate the confidentiality of diplomatic relations and put in danger people who are protected by diplomatic secrecy." He added France could not host sites which had been deemed "criminal" and rejected by other states because they broke the law.
Contacted by the French press, OVH, based in Roubaix, declined to comment.
3.09pm: Assange ended his online chat with the defiant answer.
The Cable Gate archive has been spread, along with significant material from the US and other countries to over 100,000 people in encrypted form. If something happens to us, the key parts will be released automatically. Further, the Cable Gate archives is in the hands of multiple news organisations. History will win. The world will be elevated to a better place. Will we survive? That depends on you.
Meanwhile, AFP reports that Sweden has issued a new warrant for the rest of Assange, according to Sky News.
3.19pm: My partner in WikiLeaks live blogging, Richard Adams, has drawn up a list of seven key things we have learned among all the disclosures.
3.34pm: One of the staunchest defenders of WikiLeaks over the last week has been Salon's Glenn Greewald. Here he is on Bloggingheads TV, attacking the media's scorn for Assange and its subservience to power.

Greenwald also went up against Steven Aftergood on Democracy Now today.
3.41pm: Here's an update from Paris on that attempt by the French government to ban WikiLeaks being hosted by French servers. Angelique Chrisafis writes:
The server OVH, which the government claimed was partly hosting Wikileaks site from northern France, has hit back.
It will consult a judge on whether it is legal to host the whistleblowing site in France. The server said "it's not up to politicians or OVH to demand or decide the site's closure".
3.53pm: My colleague, Sam Jones, picks out Assange's comments about Bradley Manning as the top line in his story about the online chat.
Here's how it starts:

The WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, today hailed the young US soldier accused of leaking the diplomatic cables as "an unparalleled hero" and suggested that his organisation deliberately placed its servers in certain jurisdictions, such as Amazon in the US, to test their commitment to freedom of speech.
In a live Q&A on guardian.co.uk, the Australian journalist highlighted the role alleged to have been played in the leaks by Bradley Manning.
"For the past four years one of our goals has been to lionise the source who take the real risks in nearly every journalistic disclosure and without whose efforts, journalists would be nothing," said Assange. "If indeed it is the case, as alleged by the Pentagon, that the young soldier — Bradley Manning — is behind some of our recent disclosures, then he is without doubt an unparalleled hero."
That's it from me. Richard Adams is poised for the night shift. Thanks for all your comments, sorry about the technical problems at lunchtime.
4.09pm: Good morning from Washington, where the knives appear to be out for WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. Here's this entirely sane and rational demand that Assange be assassinated by the US government, by someone named Jeffrey T Kuhner in today's Washington Times, a ferociously right-wing newspaper owned by the Moonies.
"It is too late for tough talk," says Kuhner, described as "president of the Edmund Burke Institute," who proceeds to do just that:
At this point, we are beyond indictments and courts. The damage has been done; people have died - and will die because of the actions of this puerile, self-absorbed narcissist. News reports say the WikiLeaks founder is hiding out in England. If that's true, we should treat Mr. Assange the same way as other high-value terrorist targets: Kill him.
Earlier in the piece, Kuhner says:
Mr Assange is ... an active, willful enabler of Islamic terrorism. He is as much a threat as Osama bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahri. In short, Mr Assange is not a journalist or publisher; rather, he is an enemy combatant - and should be treated as such.
4.34pm: A staunch defence of Assange and WikiLeaks – perhaps the best to appear in the US media – is this piece in the Atlantic by David Samuels, well worth reading in full. In particular Samuels points out the shameful attacks on Assagne from American journalists:
But the truly scandalous and shocking response to the Wikileaks documents has been that of other journalists, who make the Obama Administration sound like the ACLU. In a recent article in The New Yorker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Steve Coll sniffed that "the archives that WikiLeaks has published are much less significant than the Pentagon Papers were in their day" while depicting Assange as a "self-aggrandizing control-freak" whose website "lacks an ethical culture that is consonant with the ideals of free media." Channeling Richard Nixon, Coll labeled Wikileaks' activities – formerly known as journalism – by his newly preferred terms of "vandalism" and "First Amendment-inspired subversion."
Coll's invective is hardly unique, In fact, it was only a pale echo of the language used earlier this year by a columnist at his former employer, The Washington Post. In a column titled "WikiLeaks Must Be Stopped," Mark Thiessen wrote that "WikiLeaks is not a news organization; it is a criminal enterprise," and urged that the site should be shut down "and its leadership brought to justice." The dean of American foreign correspondents, John Burns of The New York Times, with two Pulitzer Prizes to his credit, contributed a profile of Assange which used terms like "nearly delusional grandeur" to describe Wikileaks' founder. The Times' normally mild-mannered David Brooks asserted in his column this week that "Assange seems to be an old-fashioned anarchist" and worried that Wikileaks will "damage the global conversation."
Samuels concludes powerfully:
American reporters, Pulitzer Prizes and all, should be ashamed for joining in the outraged chorus that defends a burgeoning secret world whose existence is a threat to democracy.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images 5.02pm: Human Rights First has sent a strongly worded letter to Amazon's Jeff Bezos, asking his company to "make clear the decision-making process that led Amazon to drop Wikileaks from its servers and to share with the public which parts of the United States government contacted Amazon to request that it do so."
Elisa Massimino, the chief executive of Human Rights First, went on to say in the letter:
With the holiday gift giving season approaching, undoubtedly the last thing Amazon wants to see is customers concerned by talk of boycotts, possible legal issues, and political uproar. However, like information technology companies the world over facing government requests to censor or restrict online activity, your company's actions affect the rights of millions of individuals today and will help determine whether the Internet of tomorrow lives up to its promise to provide people with greater freedom to express themselves and organize or, instead, becomes simply another forum where governments exercise unjust control over the rights of their citizens.
5.15pm: Unfunny Economist cartoon.
5.23pm: One of the spiciest news items that first emerged from the US embassy cables was this New York Times article that Iran had obtained 19 long-range missiles from North Korea. Some doubts soon emerged about the veracity of the information in the cables – well reported by Justin Elliott at Salon – and today the New York Times has had a second go at the subject:
[A] review of a dozen other State Department cables made available by WikiLeaks and interviews with American government officials offer a murkier picture of Iran's missile capabilities. Despite the tone of the February cable, it shows there are disagreements among officials about the missiles, and scant evidence that they are close to being deployed.
This highlights an interesting point: the cables are only as good as the information that US diplomats themselves have at the time they were written, and can offer an incomplete picture.
5.33pm: Cif America's Sadhbh Walshe listens to America's right-wing shock jocks so you don't have to. Here's Laura Ingraham – who likes what's she hearing from the WikiLeaks cables:
We now know Hillary Clinton is my kind of gal, because she wants to spy on people at the United Nations. That's the best thing I've heard about Hillary all day, all year, all decade. Good for her: we should be spying on these people, that's what I say. But it's not good that it's come out.
4.49pm: The Columbia Journalism Review has the transcript of an interview with Ethan Zuckerman of Harvard's Berkman Centre, and he has this insight into Amazon's craven decision to boot WikiLeaks off its servers:
The interesting thing about it is, the actual cables, the actual data in question, wasn't being distributed on Amazon servers. That's being hosted on a peer-to-peer network, so what Amazon was distributing was basically the index page: 'here's what we have, here's the link to the torrent files.' So the truth is, you'd have a hard time getting an injunction saying that Amazon was contributing to espionage or to the dissemination of stolen goods, because in fact, all they were really doing was hosting the HTML page that said, here's how to go get this on bit torrent.
So why did Amazon do it? Zuckerman speculates:
I think Amazon probably did a mental calculation and said, 'if we don't do this, we're going to end up the subject of a boycott on Fox News, and that's coming right before the Christmas season, we can't afford that.' I have no way of justifying that statement; that's a speculation. But I understand why they might be concerned about this.
6.10pm: An must-read piece from Hal Roberts – also at Harvard's Burkman Centre – arguing that Amazon's stated reasons for dropping WikiLeaks was even worse than if it had bowed to political pressure – and he's got a very good point:
The core of [Amazon's] argument is that WikiLeaks was hosting content that it did not own and that it was putting human rights workers at risk.... If this is really how they made their decision, this is a worse process than merely succumbing to the political pressure of the US government. At least Lieberman is an elected official and therefore to some degree beholden to his constituents. Amazon is instead arguing dismissively that it made the decision based on its own interpretation of its terms of service. Without getting into the merits of either side, the questions of whether Wikileaks has the rights to the content and especially of what level of risk of harm merits censorship are very, very difficult and should clearly be decided by some sort of deliberative jurisprudence rather than arbitrarily and dismissively decided by a private actor.
This need for careful, structured, and public deliberation on these questions is obviously balanced by Amazon's right to decide what to do with its own property. But as a society, we have reached a place where the only way to protect some sorts of speech on the Internet is through one of only a couple dozen core Internet organizations. Totally ceding decisions about control of politically sensitive speech to that handful of actors, without any legal process or oversight, is a bad idea (worse even than ceding decision to grandstanding politicians). The problem is that an even worse option is to cede these decisions about what content gets to stay up to the owners of the botnets capable of executing large DDOS attacks.
6.32pm: If you've only just joined us, earlier today Julian Assange held a live Q&A with Guardian readers via the internet. In it he answers a question that I've heard many times from readers and journalists:
Can you explain the censorship of identities as XXXXX's in the revealed cables? Some critical identities are left as is, whereas some are XXXXX'd. Some cables are partially revealed. Who can make such critical decisons, but the US gov't? As far as we know your request for such help was rejected by the State department. Also is there an order in the release of cable or are they randomly selected?
Julian Assange replied:
The cables we have release correspond to stories released by our main stream media partners and ourselves. They have been redacted by the journalists working on the stories, as these people must know the material well in order to write about it. The redactions are then reviewed by at least one other journalist or editor, and we review samples supplied by the other organisations to make sure the process is working.
The full Q&A transcript is here.
6.49pm: The BBC has toned down its earlier claim (see 2.32pm – all times here are GMT, five hours ahead of ET) that Julian Assange is about to be arrested. Its latest news item merely says "[A] Scotland Yard spokesman said that, as of 1600 GMT on Friday, no arrest had been made."
7pm: Ryan Gallagher at OpenDemocracy puts the WikiLeaks controversy into the context of British politics:
So far Cameron's strategy on Cablegate has been one of avoidance and denial. "We are not going to get drawn into the detail of the documents," said his spokesman. The Prime Minister was instead in Zurich yesterday alongside David Beckham and Prince William, making a failed bid to host the World Cup in 2018. But he cannot evade the encroaching reality of this exposé for much longer.
7.24pm: MSNBC currently discussing Julian Assange's Q&A with the Guardian via its Stockholm correspondent, standing outside and shivering.
Fox News also covers the online Q&A, quoting Assange's comment to Guardian readers "That depends on you."
7.47pm: The US embassy cables might be circulating around the world but the US government is telling federal employees that the cables are still classified and that they cannot be viewed on their computers.
Al Kamen of the Washington Post has an email from the Commerce department's Commerce Computer Incident Response Team, telling staff that the "information is NOT authorized for downloading, viewing, printing, processing, copying or transmitting" on your government "computers, laptops, blackberries or other communications devices":
"Accessing the WikiLeaks documents will lead to sanitization of your PC to remove any potentially classified information from the system and result in possible data loss," the e-mail warns.
Kamen also reports that the Department of Education is blocking access to the WikiLeaks website from its network.
President Obama in Afghanistan today. Photograph: Jason Reed/Reuters 8pm: The US news networks are reporting that Obama's trip to Afghanistan today and plans to talk to Karzai have been frustrated.
Earlier today the line was that Obama had planned to meet with Karzai but that the weather made it impossible for the US party to get to Kabul by helicopter and a teleconference was arranged instead. Now the word is that the planned video conference was also canceled – raising questions about why even that couldn't happen. Reuters reports from Bagram Air Base:
Obama spoke to Karzai by phone from Bagram Air Base outside the capital after a planned helicopter visit was scrapped. US officials said they had hoped to set up a secure videophone line but weather and technical difficulties prevented that.
8.17pm: Following the item at 7.47pm below – on how US government employees are barred from looking at WikiLeaks's site – comes chilling news that students are being warned not to go near the US embassy cables if they want a career working for the federal government.
This creepy discovery comes from a blogger at the Arabist.net website, Issandr El Amrani, who posts an email from the Office of Careers Service at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). "Hi students," the email begins:
We received a call today from a SIPA alumnus who is working at the State Department. He asked us to pass along the following information to anyone who will be applying for jobs in the federal government, since all would require a background investigation and in some instances a security clearance.
The documents released during the past few months through Wikileaks are still considered classified documents. He recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter. Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government.
8.30pm: Hal Roberts's excellent commentary on Amazon's dangerous decision to boot WikiLeaks off its servers is now also online at Cif America.
8.56pm: US magazine Mother Jones dives into the US embassy cables and finds that the US seriously considered taking action against Ahmed Wali Karzai, the younger brother of Hamid Karzai, to "signal a change in US policy on corruption" – but nothing came of it:
Despite widespread allegations about his involvement in Afghanistan's drug trade and other illicit activities, the US government has never taken steps to prosecute Ahmed Wali Karzai, the younger half-brother of the Afghan President – though a leaked diplomatic cable suggests American officials may have come very close.
9.13pm: Unfunny McSweeney's piece Fragments From Wikileaks! The Musical.
US secretary of state Hillary Clinton: sorry. Photograph: Mazen Mahdi/EPA 9.22pm: Here we go, the latest from the Guardian's WikiLeaks cable coverage rolls off the runway: Clinton begins effort to limit damage with apology to UK
"I personally want to convey to the government and the people of the United Kingdom both my deep respect and admiration for the extraordinary efforts and our regret if anything that was said by anyone suggested the contrary," the US secretary of state said.
She added that it was essential for any government that its ministers, officials and advisers were able to speak frankly and in confidence with one another. "I think everyone knows that if we cannot speak openly and candidly with each other, we can't understand each other and we can't make policy that will benefit each other," she said.
The article also goes into detail about the impact on US-Afghan relations following recent cables showing US ambassador Karl Eikenberry calling Hamid Karzai "a weak individual":
In Kabul, there appeared to be widespread agreement on the streets with Eikenberry's assessment of Karzai as a weak leader.
Abdul Wahid, a Kabul shopkeeper, said: "I agree that he can't make decisions and he doesn't have a good administration to help him. The people around him don't want this government to succeed. Karzai himself is a good man but the people around him are a mafia."
Ahmad Behzad, a politician, said: "Karzai is seriously weak and that has given the terrorists the opportunity to destabilise the country. He is not governing in the best interests of the country. Eikenberry is right."
9.35pm: And our WikiLeaked country of the day is – Yemen
• Yemen offered US 'open door' to attack al-Qaida on its soil
The president of Yemen secretly offered US forces unrestricted access to his territory to conduct unilateral strikes against al-Qaida terrorist targets, the leaked US embassy cables reveal.
In a move that risked outraging local and Arab opinion, Ali Abdullah Saleh told Barack Obama's deputy national security adviser, John Brennan, in September 2009: "I have given you an open door on terrorism. so I am not responsible," according to a secret dispatch back to Washington.
• Yemeni president 'bizarre and petulant'
Yemen's long-serving president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, emerges from the US embassy cables as a perplexing partner in the "war on terror" who flits from disdain for the Americans to congeniality while all the time wrestling to keep a lid on the simmering tensions in a country that he warns is on the brink of becoming "worse than Somalia".
The 64-year-old, who has ruled Yemen for half his life, is variously labelled as "petulant" and "bizarre" in his negotiations with US security officials who met him in Yemen on several occasions in 2009 as concern grew about al-Qaida's resurgence in the country.
9.48pm: The US diplomatic efforts on climate change negotiations is the subject of a new tranche of cables released this evening:
The US diplomatic cables reveal how the US seeks dirt on nations opposed to its approach to tackling global warming; how financial and other aid is used by countries to gain political backing; how distrust, broken promises and creative accounting dog negotiations; and how the US mounted a secret global diplomatic offensive to overwhelm opposition to the controversial "Copenhagen accord", the unofficial document that emerged from the ruins of the Copenhagen climate change summit in 2009.
10.12pm: WikiLeaks and FIFA's World Cup decisions – how to weld those two unrelated stories together into one seamless whole? Frank Foer of the New Republic – or "TNR" as the kids today call it – pulls it off:
They both highlight the paradoxes of American power. Yes, the world still badly needs us. In the State Department cables, foreign leaders are constantly whispering their agreement with American policy – on subjects from Iran sanctions to Pakistani nukes – and, for the most part, seem happy to have us playing an outsized role in the world. The same is true for the world of soccer, where the relatively well-heeled American consumer remains the biggest prize for the game's marketers. But neither the foreign heads of state nor the rulers of FIFA cared to publicly express their longing for American leadership. We have power without prestige, and allies who are reticent to closely identify with us.
10.37pm: El Pais has a very long, detailed and fascinating account of the US's strenuous efforts to force Spain to fight internet piracy. The 120 cables show the US pushing hard for revised intellectual property laws, using various tactics to push Spanish politicians into taking action, with help from US trade bodies such as the Motion Picture Association of America.
Although El Pais's coverage is in Spanish, the published embassy cables are in English and you can read them here.
11pm: The White House's Office of Management and Budget has told government departments to warn their employees against accessing the leaked US embassy cables from either their home or work computers, according to a memo sent out by the office tonight.
AFP obtained a copy of the memo:
"Unauthorized disclosures of classified documents (whether in print, on a blog or on websites) do not alter the documents' classified status or automatically result in declassification of the documents," the OMB said.
"To the contrary, classified information, whether or not already posted on public websites or disclosed to the media, remains classified, and must be treated as such by federal employees and contractors, until it is declassified by an appropriate US government authority."
The memo does not bar federal employees from visiting WikiLeaks, just from accessing the classified embassy cables.
11.17pm: The Library of Congress posted a statement on its blog, explaining that it was forced to block access to Wikipedia through its network:
The Library decided to block Wikileaks because applicable law obligates federal agencies to protect classified information. Unauthorized disclosures of classified documents do not alter the documents' classified status or automatically result in declassification of the documents.
11.30pm: Time to wrap it up for this evening, with this timely tweet today from Republican congressman Ron Paul, darling of American libertarians:
Re: Wikileaks - In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, we are in big trouble.