WikiLeaks suggests news outlets publishing Iraq docs soon

The Pentagon has been bracing all week for online whistleblower WikiLeaks to publish roughly 500,000 classified Iraq war documents, perhaps again in collaboration with news organizations who provide context and analysis of what's in the massive cache. [See Update]

And now the wait is all but over. WikiLeaks, via Twitter, advised looking in the next few hours at the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel — the three publications that worked with WikiLeaks before the release of a huge cache of released Afghanistan war documents in July — and several other news outlets, including CNN, the BBC, Le Monde, Al-Jazeera and Channel 4 (U.K.). "We maximise impact," the tweet read.

The Upshot has learned from a source that the New York Times will publish its Wikileaks story online in the early evening on Friday. (Politico's Mike Allen tweeted that the Times story on WikiLeaks' publication of the Iraq documents will run on Saturday's front page.)

In recent weeks, some of these news outlets, including the New York Times and Channel 4, declined to confirm to The Upshot whether or not they would be reviewing and preparing reports on the Iraq documents before WikiLeaks published them online. This reticence isn't surprising, since news organizations rarely comment on articles before publication.

If WikiLeaks is correct, and all those outlets have articles prepared, there will be plenty of immediate coverage of this huge leak of classified information.

Update: WikiLeaks announced minutes after this post that Al-Jazeera broke the embargo that news outlets were adhering to before posting what they uncovered in the Iraq docs. Therefore, WikiLeaks released other organizations from their embargo agreements. Here's Al-Jazeera's video on the U.S. military ordering not to investigate torture.