US Intell planned to destroy Wikileaks

[Jan Klimkowski]

According to Trowbridge Ford, Gareth "I zipped and padlocked myself into a sports bag in my MI6 safe house bath" Williams and linguist Gudrun Loftus are major sources of the wikileaks material:

Shortly afterwards, Williams learned that Houghton had really set him up by dealing with the Dutch rather than the Russians with his copied material, and went to Afghanistan to gather material showing just how serious NATO forces there, especially the British, American, and German ones. had been in violating human rights in trying to suppress the insurgents. In the process of making the logs understandable to those not familiar with the languages used, particularly German, Mrs. Loftus, it seems, helped out in the translations because Angela Merkel's government was increasing its assistance to the Afghan mission while other countries were reducing theirs or were thinking of doing so. Once they were completed, Williams handed them over in July to Julian Assange's Wikileaks, apparently with the expectation that material would be redacted to protect the identity of forces and personnel involved. Wikileaks turned the Afghan Logs over to The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel to pass on to the public. The choice of the German outlet as a source seemed to show Loftus's contribution to the project.


While the logs were redacted to prevent the identity of the forces involved, excesses by German forces around Kunduz were particularly noteable. In September of last year, the German commander there, Colonel Georg Klein, ordered the bombing of a crowd north of the city, looting two highjacked fuel tankers in the Kunduz river bed. Klein ordered the attack after Task Force 47, an elite special forces group, had been informed by a single source that it was a completely Taliban operation, and he agreed to the targeting of the two groups with 500-pound bombs from missiles, killing at least 142 people.


The rules of engagement allowed such action if there were no civilians in the area, and the German troops acted as if this were so, and so claimed, though the vast majority of those killed were civilians.(12) Actually, those killed were essentially civilians who the Taliban had mobilized to move the tankers. As in Britain's suppression of IRA terrorism, as Richard Norton-Taylor pointed out, the killing of 'high value' targets was done with no attempt to capture them, warning shots were hardly ever fired, and winning 'hearts and minds' of the Afghans was largely a myth, intended merely for the benefit of the folks back home. Lady Neville-Jones, Britain's Security Minister, hit the nail on the head when she said that the logs appeared to be the product of both leaking and hacking - what Williams could best provide.


What really infuriated Mrs. Loftus was that Merkel's government really did nothing about it - only accepting the resignations of Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung whose attempted cover up of the incident was exposed, and the retirement of German President Horst Köhler, another graduate of Tubingen University, after he said that German involvement in Afghanistant was good for world stability and its economy. Though Chancellor Merkel had belatedly promised a full investigation of the tragedy, the charges against Klein were ultimately dropped, and nothing has really been done about it.(13)


The unredacted leaks by Williams and Loftus, of course, just put them in greater jeopardy, as Julian Assange explained after an apparent meeting with one of them:"We have delayed the release of some 15,000 reports from the total archive as part of a harm minimization process remanded by our source. After further review, these reports will be released, with the occasional redactions and eventaully, in full, as the security situation in Afghanistant permits." (14)

http://codshit.blogspot.com/2010/11/gare...oftus.html

This claim may or may not be true, and may be better discussed in the Williams thread here:

http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...tcount=108