At Open Channel we're following the continuing release of the first of 251,287 diplomatic messages by WikiLeaks, the whistleblowing website, timed in concert with several news organizations that had early access to the documents so they could begin reporting.

Latest updates are at the top.

Editors at The New York Times are answering questions about the choices they made.

The Guardian tweaks Sarah Palin for turning the WikiLeaks release into a business opportunity: " At last Sarah Palin speaks on the Wikileaks revelations – well, she tweets on the subject. And being Sarah Palin, it's mainly about her: 'Inexplicable: I recently won in court to stop my book America by Heart from being leaked, but US Govt can't stop Wikileaks' treasonous act?'

The Guardian opines: "Well, one is under the jurisdiction of the United States' government and laws, and one isn't. Apart from that, inexplicable. But top marks for using this unlikely subject to plug your own book."

The Guardian also reports on a U.S. ambassador who was shocked by comments by Prince Andrew.

Israel waits
From LA Times: Israel, waiting for the WikiLeaks shoe to drop, still cleaning up past messes

An apology to Pakistan?
The U.S. ambassador writes a column about the disclosures. "I cannot vouch for the authenticity of any one of these documents," wrote Cameron Munter. "But I can say that the United States deeply regrets the disclosure of any information that was intended to be confidential. And we condemn it. Diplomats must engage in frank discussions with their colleagues, and they must be assured that these discussions will remain private."

One man's solution
A talk show host in Nashville offers this suggestion:"The wikileaks guy isn't hiding in a cave in Pakistan. Can't we find him and kill him!?!?!?!?" (Spotted by Phil Williams.)

A mystery solved
The Guardian's editor tells Yahoo's The Cutline that it gave a copy of the WikiLeaks documents to The New York Times. As noted below, The Times received the documents from a source that insisted on timing that coincided with publication by the other news organizations.

Gaddafi's fear of flying, even with his 'voluptuous blonde'
From the Washington Post: WikiLeaks cables reveal personal details on world leaders

Also from the Post: With better sharing of data comes danger

LA Times roundup is here: Iran 'must be stopped': Arab leaders pushed U.S. to attack, WikiLeaks disclosures show

But it's still early...
McClatchy Newspapers and Miami Herald: No evidence that WikiLeaks releases have hurt anyone 

• Embassy cables tell of elderly American's escape from Iran: Man, 75, rode horse over freezing mountain range into Turkey
• Fear of 'different world' if Iran gets nuclear weapons
• Israel primed to attack a nuclear Iran
• Secret EU plot to boycott Ahmadinejad inauguration
• Iran 'lied to UN inspectors about Qom nuclear site'
• Arab states scorn 'evil' Iran
• Iranian spies 'used Red Crescent to enter war zones'
• Briton teaches U.S. diplomats how to talk to Iran
• Editor's note: Publishing the cables

A historian's dream, a diplomat's nightmare
Guardian journalists and others discuss the release, its context and the highlights so far.

Diplomats are not spies, State spokesman says
(via NYTimes): P.J. Crowley, spokesman for the U.S. State Department, reacts on his Twitter feed to the cables encouraging U.S. diplomats at the UN to collect personal information on UN officials: "Contrary to some #Wikileaks’ reporting, our diplomats are diplomats. They are not intelligence assets." And then, "Diplomats collect information that shapes our policies and actions. Diplomats for all nations do the same thing."

Newsweek analysis by Christopher Dickey: WikiLeaks will achieve the opposite of its goal of transparency. He says diplomats will now be afraid to write anything candid, turning diplomacy into public relations. (It's worth noting that WikiLeaks' stated goal is transparency. What it's actual goal is, will be judged by its actions.)

 Google allows a word-by-word search of the (relatively few) documents released so far, using its "site" command. Phrase it like this, without the quotation marks: site:cablegate.wikileaks.org clinton. Like this.

Wired's Kevin Poulsen, who reports on hacking, has a roundup of the day's events. He reminds us that the Army intelligence specialist accused of pilfering the documents, Bradley Manning, smuggled them out of a secure facility on a CD-RW labeled "Lady Gaga."

 AP posts a timeline of WikiLeaks and its leaks. 

Nightly News video:

What these documents tell us about the Arab world
Marc Lynch describes the Arab reaction and disclosures, at Foreign Policy. He muses on the effects of revealing what Arab leaders really say, behind closed doors, particularly about Iran.

"Will Arab leaders pay any significant political price for these positions, as they clearly feared?   Or will it turn out that in this era of authoritarian retrenchment they really can get away with whatever diplomatic heresies they like even if it outrages public opinion?  Will the publication of their private views lead them to become less forthcoming in their behavior in order to prove their bona fides -- i.e. less supportive of containing or attacking Iran, or less willing to deal with Israel? Or will a limited public response to revelations about their private positions lead them to become bolder in acting on their true feelings?" 

Setting the timing
A question: Why did the New York Times release the documents at the same time as the other news organizations, if it didn't get the documents from WikiLeaks?

The Times says it did not receive the documents from WikiLeaks, but from another source. And The Times says it has had the documents for several weeks? So why did it release them today, when other news organizations did? Why not, say, yesterday? The Times editor's note sheds only a little light on this, saying its source set the timing: "The documents — some 250,000 individual cables, the daily traffic between the State Department and more than 270 American diplomatic outposts around the world — were made available to The Times by a source who insisted on anonymity. They were originally obtained by WikiLeaks, an organization devoted to exposing official secrets, allegedly from a disenchanted, low-level Army intelligence analyst who exploited a security loophole. ... Except for the timing of publication, the material was provided without conditions."

So it appears that the Times is making the point that it didn't get the documents from WikiLeaks, but acknowledging that whoever gave the documents to the Times set the timing, which happens to be the same timing that WikiLeaks (or an intermediary) set for the other news organizations working under the embargo. It's curious: Has the Times decided that it would prefer (for legal reasons?) to receive the WikiLeaks data dumps through an intermediary? Or did WikiLeaks choose to use a third person to get the documents to The Times, and perhaps to the others? It will be interesting to read more about this in the editors' memoirs.

We asked the editor of the Times, Bill Keller, about this. Here's his reply, in full: "We agreed to coordinate timing with the other news organizations to avoid a stampede that would make for sloppy journalism and increase the risk of publishing something dangerous. Our agreement meant we had time to absorb the material and supply context. As you will see over the next week or so, this is careful journalism. It also allowed time for serious (and fruitful, in my view) discussions with the government about what to redact."

Yahoo's The Cutline blog says The Guardian fills in the missing piece: The British newspaper gave a set of the documents to The Times.

At Wired, Kevin Poulsen's take on all this: "The paper was among the outlets given embargoed access to earlier WikiLeaks disclosures, but fell out of favor with the organization when it profiled its leader, Julian Assange."

WikiLeaks says tomorrow it will invite other news organizations to "apply" for access to the cables under an embargo.

More from The Washington Post
"Secret cables reveal Iran has advanced missiles, is distrusted by U.S. allies in Persian Gulf." "The diplomatic memos disclose the extent to which many of the United States's allies in the Arab world repeatedly implored Washington to stop Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons."

WikiLeaks site is up
The WikiLeaks direct link for its cables site is finally working: http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/. Only a small portion of the cables have been posted, more than 200, with more expected. The documents posted so far have source names redacted, although anyone close to any of the governments could use these documents to quickly tell who is talking to (or working for) the U.S. embassy.

U.S. statement condemns release as "reprehensible."

Cable shows U.S. concern about the mental health of the president of Argentina.

From the Telegraph: Taliban courts prepare to punish any Afghan informers named in the diplomatic cables.

Times says its copy of the documents did not come directly from WikiLeaks (via Yahoo).

Senators in Washington: prosecute leakers.

What "inappropriate behavior" by a British royal will we be reading about?

William Kristol's advice for the U.S. on the WikiLeaks release, in the Weekly Standard: No apologies, no complaints, no explanations, no excuses.

On Twitter, users are reading about a hacker who claims responsibility for the denial-of-service attack against WikiLeaks.

From The Telegraph, a profile of Bradley Manning, suspected of stealing and distributing the diplomatic cables. So far he has been charged with distributing just one diplomatic cable.

Washington Post video: The founder of WikiLeaks answers questions from Post readers.

In Israel, the newspaper Haaretz explores a 2009 cable about Iranian nuclear ambitions: "A 2009 American government cable released Sunday by the WikiLeaks website quotes Defense Minister Ehud Barak as telling visiting American officials that a strike on Iran's nuclear facilities was viable until the end of 2010, but after that "any military solution would result in unacceptable collateral damage."

Locked out of the early release, the Washington Post provides perspective. From among all the stories in these documents, the Post seems to choose the most interesting: spying at the UN. "The documents suggest American diplomats were ordered to engage in low-level spying by obtaining personal information on foreign diplomats such as frequent flier and credit card numbers, presumably to better track their movements."

In a closing of the barn door after the horse has ridden away, the Pentagon has tightened rules on use of flash drives.

Talk back to the editors
Editors at The New York Times are inviting questions on the WikiLeaks release. See the bottom of this editor's note or send an e-mail. And Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger will be online Monday at 4 p.m. in London.

The Guardian is blogging about WikiLeaks here.

One more from Der Spiegel: WikiLeaks FAQ: What do the cables really tell us?

More from the Guardian UK):

• U.S. cables leak sparks global diplomacy crisis
• Explore the database of U.S. cables
• Diplomats ordered to spy on UN leadership
• Saudi Arabia urges U.S. attack on Iran to stop nuclear programme
• US view of Kim Jong-il, Putin, Sarkozy and Berlusconi
• Commentary: The job of the media is not to protect power from embarrassment
• How 250,000 U.S. embassy cables were leaked
• Siprnet, where America stores its secret cables
• Data blog: What the cables tell us

The four New York Times articles:

• Cables shine light into secret diplomatic channels
• Around the world, distress over Iran
• Iran fortifies its arsenal with the aid of North Korea
• Mixing diplomacy with spying

The Times is following reaction on its Lede Blog.

And a selection of notable messages, via The Times.

More from Der Spiegel:

• A superpower's view of the world. "Never before has a superpower lost control of such vast amounts of such sensitive information."
• The German dispatches: Internal source kept U.S. informed of Merkel coalition negotiations
• 'Tribune of Anatolia': Diplomatic cables reveal U.S. doubts about Turkey's government
• Orders from Clinton: U.S. diplomats told to spy on other countries at United Nations

It's interesting to see the manpower tally at the bottom of a news article. Here's the New York Times contributor list for its lede article, a roster which few news organizations could match: Scott Shane reported from Washington, and Andrew W. Lehren from New York. Reporting was contributed by Jo Becker, C. J. Chivers and James Glanz from New York; Eric Lichtblau, Michael R. Gordon, David E. Sanger, Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt and Ginger Thompson from Washington; and Jane Perlez from Islamabad, Pakistan.

The New York Times publishes letters between WikiLeaks and the U.S. government.

The White House issues a condemnation of the WikiLeaks disclosures: "We condemn in the strongest terms the unauthorized disclosure of classified documents and sensitive national security information. ... President Obama supports responsible, accountable, and open government at home and around the world, but this reckless and dangerous action runs counter to that goal,” the statement said. “By releasing stolen and classified documents, WikiLeaks has put at risk not only the cause of human rights but also the lives and work of these individuals."

The New York Times posts the first four articles of a series drawn from the new cables. A huge trove of State Department communiqués offer an extraordinary look at the inner workings, and sharp elbows, of diplomacy. The first article leads with disclosures on a standoff with Pakistan over nuclear fuel, gaming of an eventual collapse of the North Korean regime, bargaining with countries to take Guantanamo prisoners, suspicions of corruption in the Afghan government, and Chinese efforts to hack into computers in the U.S.

And Times editors post a note explaining their decision to publish, and to withhold many of the documents: "The Times believes that the documents serve an important public interest, illuminating the goals, successes, compromises and frustrations of American diplomacy in a way that other accounts cannot match. ... The Times has taken care to exclude, in its articles and in supplementary material, in print and online, information that would endanger confidential informants or compromise national security. The Times’s redactions were shared with other news organizations and communicated to WikiLeaks, in the hope that they would similarly edit the documents they planned to post online."

From other news organizations taht had advance access to the messages: The Guardian (UK), Der Spiegel (English language version of the German news magazine), Le Monde (French), and El País (Spanish).

A political meltdown
The summary by Der Spiegel: "Included are 243,270 diplomatic cables filed by US embassies to the State Department and 8,017 directives that the State Department sent to its diplomatic outposts around the world. In the coming days, the participating media will show in a series of investigative stories how America seeks to steer the world. The development is no less than a political meltdown for American foreign policy."

Our roundup story from NBC News sources is here.

Trying to pump up the volume, WikiLeaks begs the Web to use a hashtag #cablegate to discuss the release.

Pages from the German magazine Der Spiegel have been released early. Report by Jerusalem Post:'Ahmadinejad is Hitler; Sarkozy is a naked emperor.'

Cover of Der Spiegel is posted by Gawker among others.

WikiLeaks claims to be under a denial-of-service attack. As of 12:52 p.m. Eastern time, the WikiLeaks Web site is failing to load, or is timing out.

12:42 p.m. Eastern: New report from The New York Times, one of the news organizations expected to publish some of the documents.

Roundups here from Reuters and CNN.

WikiLeaks says information will be released this evening by El Pais, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, Guardian & New York Times

Gawker says tweets from Germany suggest the release will be a let-down, without explosive items.

Reuters: Italian foreign minister calls the release the 9/11 of diplomacy

Also see Michael Isikoff's report Friday on Open Channel: Harmful documents or hyperventilating?

What should we be investigating? Send documents and story ideas to NBC's Open Channel.

Pentagon officials are expressing strong concerns about what they expect may be the biggest and most damaging WikiLeaks document dump yet: hundreds of thousands of internal U.S. government cables that reveal private communications with foreign governments, sources tell NBC News.

WikiLeaks fired back on its Twitter account on Tuesday evening, "The Pentagon is hyperventilating again over fears of being held to account."

But a senior administration official tells NBC that the expected release of State Department documents by Wikileaks may have grave national security and foreign policy implications. "This stuff is very very damaging," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "It’s stuff from all over the world and goes well beyond Iraq and Afghanistan. It's classified, sensitive cables -- our ambassadors' talks with the leadership of foreign governments, candid assessments of people, readouts on meetings. ... Some of this will be embarrassing."

The official said about 250,000 State Department documents are involved and are expected to be posted soon by WikiLeaks, with excerpts and portions also published by the New York Times and other news organizations.

The expected release suggests that Obama administration attempts to crack down on WikiLeaks disclosures are failing. But officials suspect that Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, accused of leaking past Iraq documents and videos, may have had access to the State Department cables through interagency computer networks and may have supplied them to WikiLeaks before he was taken into custody. The charges against him in June included downloading more than 150,000 cables (he was charged then with distributing only one), and he bragged about having obtained 260,000 cables.

The Pentagon already has a 100-person task force investigating WikiLeaks disclosures and is working with the Justice Department on a criminal investigation. The upcoming disclosures could prompt officials to ratchet up the probe, possibly by subpoenaing Julian Asange, the Australian founder of WikiLeaks. To date, Justice Department officials have not taken such a step. "The question is, at what point, do you take the gloves off?" the official said. (Asange was recently made the subject of an Interpol arrest warrant based on allegations of rape in Sweden. WikiLeaks did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.)

A Pentagon official sent an e-mail to the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday advising that a new WikiLeaks disclosure was expected soon. Bloomberg reported Tuesday evening that Elizabeth King, assistant secretary for legislative affairs, wrote that the documents “touch on an enormous range of very sensitive foreign policy issues. She told committee staff, “We anticipate that the release could negatively impact U.S. foreign relations.” Bloomberg reported that King wrote that the The New York Times, the U.K.’s The Guardian and Der Spiegel of Germany “are each currently working with WikiLeaks to coordinate the release of these State Department documents.”

WikiLeaks itself has said on its Twitter account on Sunday that "next release is 7x of Iraq War logs," a reference to its last release.

The  State Department spokesman, P.J. Crowley, said Wednesday, "These revelations are harmful to the United States and our interests. They are going to create tension in relationships between our diplomats and our friends around the world."

AP quoted Crowley telling reporters that U.S. diplomatic stations have begun notifying governments that the release may come within days, apparently based on State Department documents."We wish this would not happen, but we are obviously prepared for the possibility that it will,"Crowley said.

NBC quoted Crowley saying, "This will be harmful to national security and will put lives at risk." He said these kinds of cables include classified information about activities and personnel. The cables are "diplomacy in action."

Wired has more background on the case, including Manning's claim, in an online chat with the (former) hacker who turned him in, that he had 260,000 diplomatic cables. In the chat, Manning said, "Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public."

(This post was updated to note that Manning was charged in June with obtaining diplomatic cables.)

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What should we be investigating? Send documents and story ideas to NBC's Open Channel.

More stories from NBC investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff.

Giovanni Russonello

One of the roles of an investigative reporter is to nail down the details. Even when everyone already thinks they know the story, you check it out. We know that banks are doing worse, but which banks, and how much worse? We think we know all sorts of things, but to really know them we have to dig into the details.

Here's an example:

You may have heard that Massey Energy, which operates the coal mine where 29 miners died in April, has a spotty safety record. NBC and others have reported, for example, that the company had a history of serious violations.

Yet through it all, the CEO of Massey Energy told a consistent story: Violations are "a normal part of the mining process," and his company's safety record was "average."

Giovanni Russonello, a young journalist in a professional program at American University, checked out that claim. It was either going to be true, or not true. And he had a plan: Although the Mine Safety and Health Administration doesn't normally list the controlling company — the company controlling the coal, and therefore the safety standards — Russonello could look those up.

His conclusion: Massey Energy's safety record was already the worst of any U.S. coal company before the accident in April. It tied with one other company for the most fatalities, but it mines a lot less coal, making it the clear loser in terms of fatalities per coal produced. And when it came to safety violations, Massey was far and away the leader.

We've published his story today at msnbc.com, through a continuing partnership with the Investigative Reporting Workshop at AU.

Russonello explains how he chose to pursue the story.

I graduated from college in May, and headed straight to POLITICO for a three-month internship. I'd had past journalism internships at the Washington Examiner, Gotham Gazette and ABC News (where I interned at the Polling Unit).

I came to the Investigative Reporting Workshop full-time in September, as the personal researcher for Executive Editor Charles Lewis, who is writing his sixth book. He's investigating how truth, power and journalistic inquiry intersect in 21st-century America, with a focus on how the public is constantly denied access to vital information because corporate and government interests have such a powerful grip on the news cycle. My job essentially consists of eight hours a day spent reading through records and news articles, taking notes on corporate or government misconduct that the public learned about only after the fact — when the waves of injustice had subsided and the wrongdoing had already transpired.

At one point, I was looking into the Upper Big Branch disaster and all the revelations that were reported immediately afterward about Massey's safety record, and I realized that there remained major holes in the reporting. Most egregious was the fact that Massey hadn't been called on its terrible fatality record prior to the explosion at Upper Big Branch.

So after days of searching, I got a hold of some documents from the Mine Safety and Health Administration revealing that no other company had been responsible for more miner deaths in the 10 years prior to the infamous accident. With the help of our computer-assisted reporting guru, Jacob Fenton, I went a little deeper -- analyzing violations and other safety measures -- and then I wrote up the story.

Russonello is at the start of his career, but his story is a good example of investigative reporting at its best: carefully researched, with a clear methodology that is shared with the reader. That's valuable, even when the result is something we "already knew."

Check out his story.

Here are NBC News investigative reports from the past week that you may not have seen:

TODAY's Jeff Rossen had two interesting reports on food safety.

In the first, Rossen explores the dangers of toxic fish from overseas, and a lack of testing by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Read the story here, along with more than 400 comments. Here's the FDA response.

And here's the video on fish inspections:

Rossen's second report takes a tour of food courts in several well-known malls, finding critical violations that can make you sick. Rossen toured with a food safety expert, and he checked the food safety inspection reports, which are public records in every state. (Have you checked yours? Our partner, EveryBlock, has food safety reports in certain cities. Here are inspections in New York City. Often you have to go down to the local health department or another city or state office to read them. But you do have the right to read and photocopy them in the U.S. Here's a state-by-state guide to open records.)

Read Jeff Rossen's story here.

And here's the video on mall food:

In a report for msnbc.com, NBC investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff of NBC News explored the implications of the arrest of a Malaysian man accused of selling credit card numbers. That's rather routine. But the man, Lin Mun Poo, is accused of tapping into the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, as well as a defense contractor that manages systems for U.S. troop movements.

Isikoff reports, "While there is much about Poo's alleged activities that remain unexplained — including his purpose in accessing the military contractor's computers — his case underscores the continued vulnerabilities of computer networks that are critical to the country’s national security, U.S. intelligence experts said."

Read the full story here.

And this morning, Bob Sullivan at The Red Tape Chronicles has the story on the collateral damage in the mortgage meltdown, a woman who paid her bills on time but is next door to someone who didn't.

Open Channel is a new blog from msnbc.com and NBC News, for and about investigative reporting. We hope you'll share your story ideas, documents and comments.

Open Channel serves several roles. It's a place to:

• Gather the investigative reporting by the staff at msnbc.com and NBC News. The principal contributors are NBC News correspondents Michael Isikoff and Lisa Myers, producers Rich Gardella and Amna Nawaz, and reporter Bill Dedman of msnbc.com. Projects editor Mike Brunker of msnbc.com is a player-coach on the team. We also expect to have contributions from many others on our news staffs.
• Point you to investigative work by other news organizations and the growing group of nonprofit and university groups devoted to investigative reporting. Every day we'll post a round-up of investigative work on the Web.
• Share with you our work in progress, to seek your input. You may have a document or know of a source who could help with a story we're working on. Sometimes we won't be able to divulge what story is in the works, lest we alert the competition, but there are times when we will be able to call out for your contributions. And after publication or broadcast of an investigative report, we can be more transparent about the choices we've made. Open Channel gives us a place to share updates on continuing stories.

And something new:

• Hear your suggestions for investigative ideas.

What sort of ideas are we looking for?

We're about investigative reporting on topics that matter: corruption or conflicts of interest, broken systems and lax enforcement, abuses by institutions and individuals with power. Holding accountable those who possess power in the world, whether that's national government, state or local government, nonprofits, or the press itself.

What is investigative reporting? That's not an easy question to answer. Certainly, the tools of the investigative reporter are applied in all good journalism. The investigative reporter's work often is distinguished by subject matter (serious subjects, often hidden ones) and by the tools employed (especially time, public records and insiders willing to share their knowledge).

It may be easier to define what investigative reporting is not: It's not a press release. It's not a group seeking publicity for its campaign. It's not reporting in support of a company's stock price or a politician's reputation or a party's ideology.

We know what politicians and institutions are saying. There's plenty of that. But what are they doing? That's where we need more reporting.

Thanks for joining us at Open Channel. We're eager to hear from you.

Bill Dedman, moderator