7.21am: It's Russia day on the WikiLeaks front. Our Moscow correspondent Luke Harding single-handedly wrote five of the Guardian's pages today.

Here's how he kicks off the coverage:

Russia is a corrupt, autocratic kleptocracy centred on the leadership of Vladimir Putin, in which officials, oligarchs and organised crime are bound together to create a "virtual mafia state", according to leaked secret diplomatic cables that provide a damning American assessment of its erstwhile rival superpower.

Putin dismissed the claims with a chuckle in an interview on CNN.

The latest batch of leaked cables also reveals:

• Alexander Litvinenko murder 'probably had Putin's OK.' Senior US diplomat doubted former KGB agent could have been poisoned without Russian president's approval.

• Russian government 'using mafia for its dirty work.' The Kremlin relies on criminals and rewards them with political patronage, while top officials collect bribes 'like a personal taxation system'.

• US cables claim Russia armed Georgian separatists. Grad missiles were given to rebels in South Ossetia and Abkhazia in a Russian campaign to undermine Georgia, the dispatches claim.

• Britain and America colluded to allow US bases to sidestep a ban on cluster bombs.

Officials concealed from parliament how the US is allowed to bring weapons on to British soil.

• The former foreign secretary David Miliband focused on the civil war in Sri Lankan war 'to win votes'. A leaked May 2009 cable from the US embassy in London explained his intense focus on the plight of the country's Tamils in terms of UK electoral geography.

The fallout from the leaks continues to reverberate.

• Amazon has cut adrift the WikiLeaks website after US political pressure.

• The British police are continuing to look for the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, over sexual assault allegations made against him in Sweden.

• There have been calls for Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, to give evidence to a parliamentary inquiry after the Conservatives claimed he sided with them during the talks leading to the formation of the coalition government.

• You can follow all of yesterday's disclosures and reaction on Wednesday's live blog. And for the full coverage go to our US embassy cables page.

7.31am: In his CNN interview Putin used the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defence against WikiLeaks. Like the Iranian president, Putin suggested that the contents of the cables are part of deliberate ploy to undermine his country.

The Russian news site RIA Novosti has a full transcript of the exchange between Larry King and Putin. Here's the extract on WikiLeaks:

Larry King: What do you think of the leak of military and diplomatic correspondence by the WikiLeaks group? Vladimir Putin: Some experts believe that somebody is deliberately "inflating" WikiLeaks. Building up the site's authority in order to use it to further their political ends. That is one possible theory, and this is the opinion of experts, which has some currency in our country too. I think that if this is not the case, it shows that the diplomatic service should be more careful with its documents. Such leaks have happened before, in the previous era. I don't see it as any kind of catastrophe. Larry King: What about the statement by the US Defence Secretary Robert Gates that Russian democracy has disappeared and that the government is being run by the security services? What is your response to the American secretary of defence's statement? Vladimir Putin: I am personally acquainted with Mr Gates, I have met him on several occasions. I think he is a very nice man and not a bad specialist. But Mr Gates, of course, was one of the leaders of the US Central Intelligence Agency and today he is defence secretary. If he also happens to be America's leading expert on democracy, I congratulate you. Larry King: So he is wrong in saying that your country is being run by secret security services? Vladimir Putin: He is profoundly wrong. Our country is run by the people of the Russian Federation through legitimately elected bodies of power and administration: through representative bodies (the parliament) and executive bodies (the president and the government of the Russian Federation).

As for democracy, this is a long-running argument we have been having with our American colleagues. I would like to recall that twice in the history of the United States the presidential candidate who ultimately became president of the United States won more votes in the electoral college but lost the popular vote. What's democratic about that?

And when we tell our American colleagues that there are systemic problems in this sphere we hear, "Don't poke your noses into our affairs. This is how things work here and this is the way it is going to be." We are not butting in, but I would also like to advise our colleagues not to poke their noses into our affairs. This is the sovereign choice of the Russian people. The Russian people unequivocally backed democracy in the early 90s. They will not be swayed from this path. No one should have any doubts on that score. This is in Russia's own interests. And we will definitely continue along this path.

The issue Mr Gates raised in the course of this diplomatic correspondence is clearly related to his desire to bring some pressure to bear on the allies over concrete issues. There are many such issues. Russia is seen as deserving this pressure because it is undemocratic: these measures have to be taken because there is no democracy there. We have heard this a thousand times. We have stopped paying attention to it. But it is still being used as an instrument of US foreign policy. I think this is an erroneous approach to take in the building of relations with the Russian Federation. Larry King: How would you describe your relationship with President Medvedev? As you know, there are some who say that he is Robin and you are Batman, to refer to those all-American heroes. Or in fact, to get it straight, that you are Batman and he is Robin. Vladimir Putin: Well, you know when Mr Medvedev and I were considering how to structure our relations and how to run the election campaign, the 2008 presidential election campaign, we were very well aware that many would try to create a split in our common approach to the building of the Russian state and the development of our economy. Because our interaction is a considerable factor in the country's domestic policy. But it did not occur to us that it would be done in such an impudent, brazen and aggressive fashion.

Such claims of course are aimed at insulting one of us, at damaging our sense of pride and at provoking us into taking steps that would destroy our effective interaction in running the country. I have to tell you that we have already grown used to this. I urge all those who are engaged in such attempts to calm down.

7.53am: The Chinese government seems to be upping the anti-WikiLeaks rhetoric. Ananth Krishnan, the Beijing correspondent of the Hindu, just tweeted this:

8.06am: Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University, thinks aloud about WikiLeaks. He speaks very slowly for a New Yorker but he has some interesting things to say about WikiLeaks as a stateless news organisation.

8.16am: Here's an interesting antidote to all those American calls to treat WikiLeaks as a terrorist organisation. Writing in the LA Times two frustrated US federal investigators write that if WikiLeaks had been around in 2001 it could have helped prevent 9/11. They argue that information their superiors wanted bottled up could have been leaked to the site alerting the world to the possibility of a terrorist attack. (Hat tip to my live-blogging colleague Richard Adams).

The 9/11 Commission ultimately concluded that [would-be terrorist Zacarias] Moussaoui was most likely being primed as a September 11 replacement pilot and that the hijackers probably would have postponed their strike if information about his arrest had been announced. WikiLeaks might have provided a pressure valve for those agents who were terribly worried about what might happen and frustrated by their superiors' seeming indifference. They were indeed stuck in a perplexing, no-win ethical dilemma as time ticked away. Their bosses issued continual warnings against "talking to the media" and frowned on whistle-blowing, yet the agents felt a strong need to protect the public.

8.29am: The cables aren't all bad for Putin. One of them from US ambassador William Burns relays praise for the former Russian president by the Noble prize-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, four months before his death.

Burns wrote: "Solzhenitsyn positively contrasted the eight-year reign of Putin with those of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, which he said had 'added to the damage done to the Russian state by 70 years of communist rule'. Under Putin, the nation was rediscovering what it was to be Russian, Solzhenitsyn thought."

But as Luke Harding writes Solzhenistyn praise for Putin wasn't unqualified.

8.43am: David Horsey, a cartoonist for Seattle Pi, manages to get at least eight WikiLeaks story lines into one cartoon. Can you count anymore?

The Guardian's Steve Bell gives us a double dose of WikiLeaks cartoons with his If... strip and the main comment page cartoon. Both feature Prince Andrew, a trough of gold, and pig's ear.

8.57am: More signs of US twitchiness about WikiLeaks. New York's Daily News is tweeting that Julian Assange may be on a bar crawl in Manhattan. Gawker can't take it seriously.

Meanwhile the right wing talk show host Todd Schnitt is offering a $50,000 reward for the capture of Assange.

9.17am: The New York Times leads with a 2,300 word article on the revelations about Putin's Russia. Here's the nub:



The cables portray Mr Putin as enjoying supremacy over all other Russian public figures, yet undermined by the very nature of the post-Soviet country he helped build. Even a man with his formidable will and intellect is shown beholden to intractable larger forces, including an inefficient economy and an unmanageable bureaucracy that often ignores his edicts. In language candid and bald, the cables reveal an assessment of Mr Putin's Russia as highly centralized, occasionally brutal and all but irretrievably cynical and corrupt. The Kremlin, by this description, lies at the center of a constellation of official and quasi-official rackets.

10.02am: Two interesting lines emerged overnight in Australia

• The prime minister Julia Gillard strongly criticised WikiLeaks. "I absolutely condemn the placement of this information on the WikiLeaks website," she told Fairfax Radio. "It's a grossly irresponsible thing to do and an illegal thing to do."

• Daniel Assange, Julian's 20 year old son, told the website crikey.com that he was surprised his father hadn't been killed. He said he was proud of his father but confirmed he can be difficult to work with. "He gets easily frustrated with people who aren't capable of working up to his level and seeing ideas that he grasps very intuitively," he said.

10.11am: Salon's Glenn Greenwald blogs about the hypocrisy of the bloodthirsty reaction to the leaks in America.

The ringleaders of this hate ritual are advocates of - and in some cases directly responsible for - the world's deadliest and most lawless actions of the last decade. And they're demanding Assange's imprisonment, or his blood, in service of a Government that has perpetrated all of these abuses and, more so, to preserve a Wall of Secrecy which has enabled them. To accomplish that, they're actually advocating - somehow with a straight face - the theory that if a single innocent person is harmed by these disclosures, then it proves that Assange and WikiLeaks are evil monsters who deserve the worst fates one can conjure, all while they devote themselves to protecting and defending a secrecy regime that spawns at least as much human suffering and disaster as any single other force in the world. That is what the secrecy regime of the permanent National Security State has spawned.

10.32am: Sweden's Supreme Court has upheld a court order to detain WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for questioning over an alleged sexual assault, according to AP.

Assange, who denies the charges, had appealed two lower court rulings allowing investigators to bring him into custody and issue an international arrest warrant.

Today the Swedish Supreme Court rejected his appeal of the detention order.

10.42am: Another world leader gets a very undiplomatic pasting in the latest leaked cable. Next up in the stocks is President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov of Turkmenistan, who is described as "vain, suspicious, guarded, strict, very conservative", a "micro-manager" and "a practised liar".

Luke Harding writes:

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Powerful writer ... Turkmenistan president Berdymukhamedov. Photograph: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty

The cable, released by WikiLeaks but originally sent by Sylvia Reed Curran, the US's charge d'affaires in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan's capital, fleshes out Berdymukhamedov's humble family background.

She says he is the only son in a family of eight children. She adds witheringly: "His father is a retired prison guard with the rank of colonel. The father, many in Turkmenistan think, is more intelligent than the son."

The website of the US embassy in Ashgabat says that Curran is still the Charge d'Affaires, but for how much longer?

10.57am:

Canadians "always carry a chip on their shoulder" in part because of a feeling that their country "is condemned to always play 'Robin' to the US 'Batman.' "



And

Medvedev continues to play Robin to Putin's Batman, surrounded by a team loyal to the Premier and checked by Putin's dominance over the legislature and regional elites.

11.39am: Tom Flanagan, a former senior adviser to the Canadian prime Minister Stephen Harper, now says he regrets calling for Julian Assange's assassination, (see yesterday at 8.38am).

Speaking to the Canadian broadcaster CBC, he said:

It was a thoughtless, glib remark about a serious subject," Flanagan told the Candian broadcaster CBC. I never seriously intended to advocate or propose the assassination of Mr Assange. But I do think that what he's doing is very malicious and harmful to diplomacy and endangering people's lives, and I think it should be stopped.

11.49am:

So far most listeners favour shooting.

12.00pm: There's a very wry spoof Twitter feed for Julian Assange. The premise is that he is holed-up in his mother's back bedroom.

12.17pm: It seems that diplomat Sylvia Reed Curran, author of that stinging criticism of president Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov of Turkmenistan, has moved on. She was sent to Vladivostok, according to the website of the US consulate there. The website of the US embassy in Turkmenistan has been updated since our 10.42am post.

12.31pm: A double dollop of revelations about Silvio Berlusconi have been published by the Guardian, and they don't look good for the Italian premier.

• US diplomats have reported startling suspicions that Silvio Berlusconi could be "profiting personally and handsomely" from secret deals with the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin. Exasperated by Berlusconi's pro-Russian behaviour, American embassy staff detail allegations circulating in Rome that the Italian leader has been promised a cut of huge energy contracts.

• Silvio Berlusconi's fondness for partying has also taken a physical and political toll on the Italian prime minister, according a friend in contact with the US embassy in Rome.Giampiero Cantoni, then chairman of the Italian Senate's defence committee, was quoted in a leaked embassy cable from October 2009 as saying the results of medical tests on Berlusconi had come back "a complete mess".

12.51pm:Pentagon spokesman, Geoff Morrell told Fox News that the US has the power to shutdown WikiLeaks and block the leaks, but chose not to.

"This is a capability reserved for threats of much higher consequence than this," he told Fox News. He conceded that the revelations were awkward and embarrassing but would cause long term damage to America's "power and prestige".

1.32pm: Russia's leadership and supine television channels were deafeningly silent this morning over revelations that US diplomats view Russia as a corrupt, autocratic kleptocracy, writes Tom Parfitt in Moscow.

Russia Today, the English language broadcaster, did mention the leaks but focused on Putin's robust rebuttal on the Larry King show. It didn't explore the contents of the leaks, and is leading its bulletins on Putin's remarks about European defence.

2.22pm: NPR examines the art of writing a diplomatic cable. Mark Lagon, a former US ambassador, enthuses about this wonderfully funny leaked cable by the then US ambassador in Moscow William Burns describing a drunken wedding party in Dagestan.

Lagon picks out this passage:

An Avar FSB colonel sitting next to us, dead drunk, was highly insulted that we would not allow him to add "cognac" to our wine. "It's practically the same thing," he insisted, until a Russian FSB general sitting opposite told him to drop it. We were inclined to cut the Colonel some slack, though: he is head of the unit to combat terrorism in Dagestan, and Gadzhi told us that extremists have sooner or later assassinated everyone who has joined that unit. We were more worried when an Afghan war buddy of the Colonel's, Rector of the Dagestan University Law School and too drunk to sit, let alone stand, pulled out his automatic and asked if we needed any protection.

3.02pm: Former EU commissioner Chris Patten described Romania as a "feral nation" during discussions about EU expansion, according to a cable unearthed by the Daily Mail.

3.17pm: The US swept aside British torture fears over secret spy flights from the UK Cyprus base, according to our latest WikiLeaks story.

As the 2008 row escalated, the US rejected the British concerns over torture in unequivocal terms, with one senior official at the embassy in London baldly stating in one cable: "We cannot take a risk-avoidance approach to CT [counter-terrorism] in which the fear of potentially violating human rights allows terrorism to proliferate in Lebanon."

3.35pm:

3.55pm: So the US didn't get the World Cup in 2022, another disappointment after Chicago missing out on the 2016 Olympics. If only the US had sent Sarah Palin to lobby FIFA.

4.18pm: Tomorrow's print edition of The Economist contains a typically useful overview of the US embassy cable disclosures and WikiLeaks, suggesting that the nature of international diplomatic relations will be changed:

It would be an exaggeration to say that diplomacy will never be the same again. Self-interest means that countries will still send and receive private messages. But communication will be more difficult. The trading of opinions, insights and favours necessarily requires shadow, not light. Unofficial contacts such as businessmen, journalists, campaigners and other citizens who talk to American diplomats, out of goodwill or self-interest, will think twice about doing so.

After examining the US government's impotence in responding directly, it concludes:

In the longer term the odds are stacked against secrecy, particularly in countries that practise openness in other areas. One reason is that though individual jurisdictions often prevent a specific libel, privacy breach or copyright infringement, a story with a global reach will get out somewhere. Short of imposing Chinese-style firewalls and censorship, free countries cannot consistently stop their citizens finding out what their enemies tell them, including tales of the shadowy, sordid or sensational deeds done in their names.

4.35pm: Ross Douthat is a conservative who writes for the New York Times, and in his blog he takes the surprisingly common view that the problem with the WikiLeaks affair is that it will make matters worse and inspire a secrecy backlash:

It may be cathartic for critics of state power to cheer when Assange sticks an online thumb into leviathan's eye. But WikiLeaks is at best a temporary victory for transparency, and it's likely to spur the further insulation of the permanent state from scrutiny, accountability or even self-knowledge.

Quite how this would happen, the makers of this argument never quite explain but the nub is this: Don't complain that things are bad because they could get worse.

(Douthat does say: "Assange is not a terrorist." The effect is spoiled slightly by his very next sentence: "But he has this much in common with al-Qaida...")

An unexploded US Blu 24 bomblet from a cluster bomb, in northern Laos. Photograph: Barbara Walton/EPA

4.53pm:

Richard Norton-Taylor and Rob Evans

A secret plan by US and American officials to hoodwink Parliament over a global ban on cluster bombs is "damaging and disturbing", an MP and campaigners said today. It would allow the Americans to keep their cluster munitions on British territory. Ministers in the last Labour government had repeatedly said that the American weapons would be removed permanently. Liberal Democrat MP Jo Swinson said she had pressed ministers in the Labour government on whether the US would remove their cluster weapons from British soil. "I ... received strong assurances that the process would be transparent and straightforward. These allegations are therefore extremely damaging." A British official had suggested last year that the loophole should be concealed from parliament in case it "complicated or muddied" the debate among MPs, according to the leaked American account of a private meeting. David Miliband, Labour's foreign secretary, and Hilary Clinton, the US secretary of state, approved the "concept" of permitting US forces to store their cluster weapons on British soil as "temporary exceptions" and on a "case-by-case" basis for specific military operations, the leaked cable reported. Chris Bryant, the junior Labour foreign minister who guided Britain's ratification of the ban through Parliament, insisted the legislation was too tightly drawn to allow any exceptions.

He accepted that such negotiations could have taken place at more senior levels than he was privy to, but said he had "asked some pretty searching questions" about the issue.

"There are no exceptions allowed for in the way we drafted the bill. If the Americans are relying on that then they were being led up the garden path by somebody. The whole point of signing up to the treaty is that we undertook not only not to use them ourselves but to try to prevent their use by friends and allies." Thomas Nash, the co-ordinator of the campaign against the weapons, the Cluster Munition Coalition, said : "It's disturbing that the US is seeking to determine British policy on cluster munitions. Britain is bound by the Convention on Cluster Munitions and should not be assisting the US, or any other country, in using the weapons". Another campaigner, Richard Moyes, director of policy at Action on Armed Violence, warned that the idea of the temporary exceptions was "extremely problematic" as it was unclear how long they could last. It could become a blanket loophole, he said, adding :"Any US request should be brought before parliament for public scrutiny in advance". The Foreign Office rejects "any allegation that the Foreign Office deliberately misled Parliament or failed in our obligation to inform Parliament."

5.13pm: My colleague Oliver Burkeman in New York alerts us to the news that Todd Schnitt – yes, the Todd Schnitt – is gunning for Julian Assange:

The elegantly-named Schnitt has announced on his radio programme – The Schnitt Show – that he's offering a $50,000 bounty for "credible information" that leads to the capture of Assange, according to ABC Action News, which alongside carries this much more interesting item: "Man killed in scooter/wheelchair crash – watch video"

John Hooper tiny Photograph: Guardian

5.41pm:

The change to the Italian prime minister's plans was signalled just hours after the publication of US diplomatic cables alleging the two men had a secret business association in addition to their known personal and political links.

John Hooper also records the difficulties the WikiLeaks revelations have caused for Berlusconi back home in Italy in an already hostile political climate:

The release of the cables by Wikileaks deepened the crisis surrounding Berlusconi's already embattled government, which faces a motion of no-confidence on 14 December. Five centrist groups today stepped up the pressure on the prime minister, calling on him to resign and announcing that, if he refused to do so, they would table a censure motion of their own. One of the groups, Freedom and Future for Italy, was created by Berlusconi's former ally, Gianfranco Fini, who split from the prime minister in July. On paper at least, the split left the government without a majority in the lower house of parliament.

6.01pm: We are not the only ones blogging this stuff. Hats off to Greg Mitchell at The Nation, who has been putting in the hard work following all the US embassy cable news. The volume is now so great that it's difficult to keep up but Greg manages.

Thanks to Greg for finding this link on Glenn Beck's desperate attempts to suggest a serious connection between WikiLeaks and Beck's bête noir, George Soros.

6.19pm: You've probably already seen this but ... the Onion reports:

Julian Assange Fired From IT Job At Pentagon

We gave him his first warning after the whole Iraq and Afghanistan war diaries thing, and strike two was when he forwarded that video montage of Nicolas Cage yelling to the entire staff," Defense Department human resources director Curtis Shannon said.

6.34pm: Many other publications are now on board the WikiLeaks express, including the right-wing Washington Times, which produces an excellent piece from the US embassy cables that shows the extent of secret diplomacy in the Middle East that goes on:

A classified 2009 diplomatic cable disclosed this week provides a rare glimpse into the secret and often high-level diplomacy between Israel and Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, all countries that officially do not recognize the Jewish state. Contrary to the condemnatory rhetoric opposing Israel in public, Arab diplomats behind the scenes have asked Israel to carry messages to the US government and urged tougher action on Iran.

There's a nice quote from Yacov Hadas, deputy director of Israel's Foreign Ministry, telling an American diplomat: "They believe Israel can work magic" with the US.

6.51pm: When the US embassy cables were first released, Foreign Policy breezily derided them as "document vomit", while its national security writer Tom Ricks declared his blog to be a "WikiLeaks-free zone".

And guess what? Yesterday FP launched a new blog on its site, Wikileaked, to cope with "the massive amounts of WikiLeaks related content coming in". It's very good, combing through the cables to find gems like this description of Turkmenistan's president Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov:

Berdimuhamedov does not like people who are smarter than he is. Since he's not a very bright guy, our source offered, he is suspicious of a lot of people.

And this "assassination attempt" on Berdimuhamedov – by a cat:

Another incident reportedly occurred two months ago that was feared to be an assassination attempt. It was committed by a cat that ran in front of the President's car as he was traveling to his residence in the village of Archibil.

7.22pm: The New York Times finds experts struggling to figure out how the US can prosecute Assange and WikiLeaks:

"There is a haze of uncertainty over all of this," said Stephen I. Vladeck, an American University law professor who has written about the Espionage Act, a 1917 law that prohibits the unauthorized retention or transmission of defense-related documents. "The government has never brought an Espionage Act prosecution that would look remotely like this one," he said. "I suspect that has a lot to do with why nothing has happened yet."

US Vice President Joe Biden

7.44pm:

Vice President Biden described the complex nature of the security problem in Afghanistan, commenting that besides the demography, geography and history of the region, we have a lot going for us.

8.07pm: The Guardian's Ewen MacAskill and Robert Booth report that the US state department's wishlist of information to be gathered on senior members of UN was drawn up by the CIA, not the State Department.

A senior US intelligence official said: "It shouldn't surprise anyone that US officials at the United Nations seek information on how other nations view topics of mutual concern. If you look at the list of topics of interest in this routine cable, the priorities represent not only what Americans view as critical issues, but our allies as well. "No one should think of American diplomats as spies. But our diplomats do, in fact, help add to our country's body of knowledge on a wide range of important issues. That's logical and entirely appropriate, and they do so in strict accord with American law."



View Wikileaks: Where is Julian Assange? in a larger map

8.19pm:

WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange has become our modern-day Carmen San Diego. Without the game show.

If you don't get that reference to an obscure American children's programme of the 90s, the New York Times explained in 1991:

The decision to produce Carmen Sandiego is in part a response to recent studies that reveal a tremendous ignorance of geography among Americans: according to a National Geographic survey, one in four cannot locate the Soviet Union or the Pacific Ocean.

8.49pm: Never mind Julian Assange, where in the world is WikiLeaks, after Amazon kicked it off its servers by bending in the mildest of political breezes?

According to the Los Angeles Times, the WikiLeaks' online archives are safely stored in a bomb shelter inside a Swedish mountain, which looks remarkably like a Dr Evil-style lair:

Truly the stuff of spy films, the site features solid steel doors and high-powered computers and is resilient against a nuclear attack.

Have a look at the pictures: deep inside the bunker someone is stroking a white cat and wearing a monocle.

9.08pm: A lot of new US embassy cables in the pipeline on Afghanistan. Stay tuned.

9.19pm: Joe Lieberman strikes again, putting pressure on another US tech provider to WikiLeaks, reports Nancy Scola of techPresident:

Tableau, the Seattle-based data visualization company that had been hosting Wikileaks charts showing different visualizations of the State Department cables, is saying this afternoon that it took down the charts at Senator Joe Lieberman's request.

9.32pm: The Guardian has just posted a tranche of new material from the US embassy cables on the subject of Afghanistan, including this shocking detail in a cable from US ambassador Karl Eikenberry:

In one astonishing incident in October 2009 the then [Afghani] vice-president, Ahmad Zia Massoud, was stopped and questioned in Dubai when he flew into the emirate with $52m in cash, according to one diplomatic report. Massoud, the younger brother of the legendary anti-Soviet resistance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, was detained by officials from the US and the United Arab Emirates trying to stop money laundering, it says. However, the vice-president was allowed to go on his way without explaining where the money came from.

Others just posted include cables showing that surrender is the only option being offered to the Taliban, despite talk of negotiations:

The Obama administration and Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, are determined to reject talks with Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, and have consistently worked to split his movement, according to US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks. "We have no illusion that Mullah Omar could ever join the government," General David Petraeus, the top US commander in Afghanistan, is quoted as saying in a cable to Washington on 20 January 2009. "There will be no power-sharing with elements of the Taliban," said Richard Holbrooke, Obama's special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, in another cable citing the Taliban's "unpalatable social programmes" and links with al-Qaida.

You read the whole lot here.

9.55pm: Some hot stuff about Gordon Brown from the US embassy cables about to land ... stayed tuned.

10.17pm: A new poll out today shows that Americans aren't too happy about the leaked US embassy cables, and think they hurt national security, but only a bare majority class such leaking as an act of treason:

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 72% of likely voters say that when media outlets release secret government documents, they are hurting national security rather than providing a public service. Only 14% believe the opposite is true and that the media is serving the public. Just as many (14%) are not sure.

Rasmussen found that 51% of US voters consider the leaking of secret documents an "act of treason", while 28% disagree and do not think leaking such information is treasonous, and the remaining 21% are undecided.

Barack Obama and Gordon Brown: US diplomats repeatedly aired doubts about Brown's leadership. Photograph: Ron Edmonds/AP

10.34pm:

In a scathing assessment of the former prime minister, George Bush's last ambassador to London blamed Brown for presiding over a "post-Blair rudderlessness" which prompted senior Labour figures to complain of their despair to the embassy. The diplomatic cables confirm that Barack Obama's allies were irritated by Brown's intense manner: he interrupted a Thanksgiving call to the current president's ambassador to lobby for a Tobin tax on financial transactions in the face of US opposition. "Prime minister Brown continues to press hard … despite being fully aware of US opposition to the tax," Louis Susman wrote in December last year.

10.53pm: One particularly delightful US cable about to be posted discusses Shriti Vadera, one of Gordon Brown's closest advisors, in some detail, saying "Vadera bears watching".

The 2009 profile pays tribute to Vadera's "intelligence and ability to implement policy" and underlines the high regard that she was held in by Brown and other members of the government. But it also includes some devastating gossip:

One Private Secretary told us Vadera would regularly scream from her desk, "Get me a cup of coffee" with a string of expletives attached, something almost unheard of in the polite British civil service and prompting three scheduling assistants to leave her office in three months. She also reportedly had screaming matches in front of subordinates with Development Secretary Douglas Alexander while she was at DFID. Insiders tell us she was moved from DFID at Alexander's request, though the move was billed as a promotion to the media. It is worth noting that Vadera can also be charismatic and charming, especially with external visitors.

Update: the full cable is here.

11.08pm: Nicholas Watt, the Guardian's chief political correspondent, blogs how the US embassy cables puncture Gordon Brown's hopes for a transatlantic career as an respected elder statesman:

The cables paint a picture, familiar to Brown's aides and now to the rest of us as we digest the books about his period in No 10, of a prime minister who grabbed hold of an idea and then rammed it down the throats of friend and foe. This means Brown sometimes forgot the diplomatic niceties.

11.23pm: These cables are going to keep British politics junkies busy for a while. Here's pen portraits of the likely Labour leadership contenders written by US diplomats in 2008. "As Gordon Brown lurches from political disaster to disaster," the cable begins, "Westminster is abuzz with speculation about whether he will be replaced as Prime Minister and Labour Parxty [sic] leader, and, if so, by whom."

The list ranks David Miliband first, and doesn't even mention his brother Ed as a contender. The Guardian has the highlights here but the American portrait of Ed Balls is particularly interesting:

Balls has performed badly as Schools Secretary and is accused of shirking responsibility.... Balls has shown himself to be less than suited to the top job: his public speaking is derided as "dull," his slightly awkward manner as "charmless," and he has many enemies within the party, precisely because of his relationship with the PM. Party insiders accuse him of cowardice because he tells Brown what he thinks Brown wants to hear.

11.47pm: The Guardian's comment pages carry a chilling op-ed by Alan Dershowitz, who warns that the cables about Middle Eastern diplomacy may have increased the possibility of war:

The disclosure that virtually every Arab country, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, would favour a military attack, as a last resort, to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons could have a discernible effect on the policies of several countries.

Mexican navy officers with arrested members of the Beltran Leyva drug cartel. Photograph: Reuters

12.16am:

Classified diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks also reveal a growing sense of alarm within Mexico's government that time is running out in the battle against organised crime and that it could "lose" entire regions. The memos detail blunders in the fight against drug cartels and a desperate search for a new strategy to save President Felipe Calderón's administration from a bloodsoaked fiasco.

Mexico's struggle is a story shamefully under-reported – El Pais has more (in Spanish), including candid comments by a government minister, Geronimo Gutierrez:

It is damaging Mexico's international reputation, hurting foreign investment, and leading to a sense of government impotence, Gutierrez said.

El Pais comments: "Un discurso tan descarnado, pronunciado en la intimidad de una reunión con colegas estadounidenses, jamás ha sido pronunciado en público por ningún mandatario gubernamental."

[Such bleak comments, made in a secret meeting with American colleagues, have never been made in public by a member of the government.]

12.23am: Political fall-out in Germany from the US embassy cables over the identity of the political insider ("Helmut M") who gave secret briefings to the US ambassador about the negotiations to form Germany's governing coalition, reports Der Spiegel:

Germany's business-friendly Free Democratic Party has identified the top-level national party employee responsible for passing secret information on to US diplomats during the negotiations to form the current German government in 2009. A worker at the party's headquarters who was chief of staff to the party's chairman and also the head of international relations for the national party came forward and admitted to being the source, an FDP party spokesperson said.

12.44am: Amazon has broken its silence over its abrupt booting of WikiLeaks off its Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers in the US, denying that it did so because of political pressure, in this statement:

There have been reports that a government inquiry prompted us not to serve WikiLeaks any longer. That is inaccurate. There have also been reports that it was prompted by massive DDOS attacks. That too is inaccurate. There were indeed large-scale DDOS attacks, but they were successfully defended against. Amazon Web Services (AWS) rents computer infrastructure on a self-service basis. AWS does not pre-screen its customers, but it does have terms of service that must be followed. WikiLeaks was not following them. There were several parts they were violating. For example, our terms of service state that "you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content … that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity." It's clear that WikiLeaks doesn't own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content. Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren't putting innocent people in jeopardy. Human rights organizations have in fact written to WikiLeaks asking them to exercise caution and not release the names or identities of human rights defenders who might be persecuted by their governments. We've been running AWS for over four years and have hundreds of thousands of customers storing all kinds of data on AWS. Some of this data is controversial, and that's perfectly fine. But, when companies or people go about securing and storing large quantities of data that isn't rightfully theirs, and publishing this data without ensuring it won't injure others, it's a violation of our terms of service, and folks need to go operate elsewhere.

So Amazon acted, in part, on what it imagines might be the case ("putting innocent people in jeopardy") rather than any evidence?

1am: Time to wrap it up for the evening. Far from becoming exhausted, the US embassy cables bonanza continue to run and run – so that Egyptian newspapers are now getting their hands on unpublished cables, such as this from Al-Masry Al-Youm, detailing the new underground steel fence being constructed between Egypt and Gaza.

As Michael Hastings, a contributing editor to Rolling Stone, tweeted yesterday: