12pm: The US has moved some foreign sources and warned others about their sources. This from our report:

The US state department has relocated a handful of foreign diplomatic sources identified in the secret embassy cables released via WikiLeaks and warned hundreds of others about their safety, American officials say. It is not aware of anyone who has been detained or assaulted as a result of the 2,700 cables released so far through several newspapers, including the Guardian. But the state department has set up a 30-strong team to warn foreign officials, businesspeople and human right activists identified in the main cache of more than 250,000 cables.

12.30pm: One cable that has come out in the last few days is from the US's Baghdad embassy in July 1990. The timing is key, it is the month before Iraq invaded Kuwait.

The cable - known as the "Glaspie cable" after its author, US ambassador April Glaspie - was already noteworthy before WikiLeaks. It concerns a meeting between Saddam Hussein and Glaspie and has come to be seen by some as evidence that the US gave Iraq a green light to invade Kuwait, with Glaspie telling Saddam the US took "no position on these Arab affairs".

Anyone wondering why I'm mentioning this now and not, say, a few days ago – I got waylaid by the series of leaks and counter-leaks surrounding their meeting, and was under the impression Glaspie's cable had been declassifed in 2008. Maybe it was, but the WikiLeaks publication is the only one I can find online.

It is worth reading. Titled Saddam's message of friendship to President Bush, Glaspie describes their meeting as the first time "in the memory of the current diplomatic corps" that the Iraqi leader had summoned a US ambassador. Relations are at that time tense between Iraq and Kuwait. Saddam bemoans Iraq's economic state - at one point suggesting it deserves a "Marshall plan" for losses sustained in the Iran-Iraq war - and accuses the Kuwaitis of overproducing oil, which he says means Iraq is not getting the high prices for its oil he says it needs.

The "no position on these Arab affairs" section is below, concerning a border dispute with Kuwait. Mubarak is the Egyptian president, who was mediating between the two sides.

ON THE BORDER QUESTION, SADDAM REFERRED TO THE 1961 AGREEMENT AND A "LINE OF PATROL" IT HAD ESTABLISHED. THE KUWAITIS, HE SAID, HAD TOLD MUBARAK IRAQ WAS 20 KILOMETERS "IN FRONT" OF THIS LINE. THE AMBASSADOR SAID THAT SHE HAD SERVED IN KUWAIT 20 YEARS BEFORE; THEN, AS NOW, WE TOOK NO POSITION ON THESE ARAB AFFAIRS

There has been plenty of US commentary on the cable. Juan Cole, a Middle East specialist, says it exonerates Glaspie – noting that she pressed Saddam on the meaning of his troop build-up on the Kuwaiti border ("What are your intentions?" she asks) and that her "no position" referred strictly to the Iraq-Kuwait border. "Ms Glaspie's detractors owe her an apology," Cole concludes.

The Foreign Policy blog has another post looking at the background and Glaspie's diplomatic career.

12.55pm: Julian Assange has agreed a book deal with Canongate – his book will be published in the UK in April. This from the publisher's email:



WikiLeaks has helped redefine our idea of investigative journalism and our understanding of how information should be disseminated. Assange, the visionary creator of and driving force behind this new publishing phenomenon, has a unique perspective on how WikiLeaks has evolved into one of today's most influential and fearless news organisations. In this revelatory account, Assange expands on the philosophies that underpin his stateless, ground-breaking media company. He draws on his own fascinating life story and offers compelling insights into the mercurial and highly driven man who has forced us to radically rethink such basic ideas as transparency, democracy and power. "I hope this book will become one of the unifying documents of our generation. In this highly personal work, I explain our global struggle to force a new relationship between the people and their governments." – Julian Assange

2.40pm: A development from one of the cables published in the You ask, we search exercise. The Italian parliamentary committee on security and intelligence wants to call before it the investigating magistrates who reported on the shooting of Nicola Calipari, an Italian intelligence officer, by US forces in Iraq.

3.00pm: Evgeny Morozov, a thinker on the political effects of the internet, has written an interesting piece on Wikileaks and the future of the net. Here's a quote:

Regardless of what happens to Assange, Wikileaks has the potential to catalyze a worldwide campaign that could do for the Internet what the Greens did for the environment in the 1970s: start a much-needed conversation about the potentially corrosive impact of corporate interests on the public good, a conversation that may eventually coalesce into a broader political movement

3.05pm: The US ambassador to the Vatican says relations between Washington and the Holy See will survive WikiLeaks.

4.30pm: We've been making inquiries about who - if anyone - Assange is working with on his book. Several co-writers have been approached, we hear, but no one is yet in place.

5.30pm: Assange's book won't be the only one from the WikiLeaks team. In a manner perhaps reminiscent of Peter Mandelson getting his New Labour memoirs out before Tony Blair, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who resigned as WikiLeaks spokesman in September, will be in print by February - beating Assange by two months.

"Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website" will "reveal the evolution, finances, and inner tensions" of WikiLeaks, according to Crown Publishing. Domscheit-Berg will also explain why he left WikiLeaks and his "disenchantment with the organization's lack of transparency, its abandonment of political neutrality, and the increasing concentration of power by Assange"

6.15pm: We're now finishing for the evening but will be back on Monday. If you want to recap, there is a round-up of the week from the New York Times's Lede blog that includes the WikiLeaks book, the Belarus spy agency that didn't have the time these days to look for UFOs and the curious case of what happened to Assange's shoes.

Finally, here is a line from the Morozov piece picked up on Twitter by Clay Shirky. It is a concise a summary as any of one of the key developments of the last five or six weeks.