US Intell planned to destroy Wikileaks

[Ed Jewett]

WikiLeaks Founder, “Constantly Annoyed that People Are Distracted by False Conspiracies Such as 9/11″

July 26th, 2010 People often ask me if I think this source or that source is disinfo…
My response is always: TREAT EVERY SOURCE AS DISINFO.
You’ll avoid disappointment when the thing starts serving up rat poison—which, unfortunately, happens a lot.
I haven’t shared this before, but in early 2008, someone from WikiLeaks wrote to me. This person wondered why I hadn’t mentioned WikiLeaks on Cryptogon. He wondered if maybe I hadn’t heard of it, or had concerns that it was a front of some sort.
I simply wrote back that I was aware of WikiLeaks, and that I was hopeful and skeptical at the same time.
That remains my stance today; on WikiLeaks and every other source.
So, who knows… I’ve read interesting things on WikiLeaks, many of which I have linked to from here. Does that mean that I’m sure it’s not some kind of front or honeypot? Not at all. How could I know for sure, given what’s knowable in the public domain about WikiLeaks?
Julian Assange’s recent comment in the Belfast Telegraph about 9/11, however, may be a more tangible source of concern for me. I know Assange isn’t an idiot, so I see three other possibilities:
1. He is profoundly ignorant of the vast body of material that demonstrates that the 9/11 spectacle was a false flag operation.
2. He’s “picking his battles” and not wanting to have to deal with the inevitable conspiracy theory stigma that could threaten his media access
3. He’s running a limited hangout/honeypot
Of these three options, I doubt that it’s number two.
Also, I’m aware of all the stuff John Young has up over at Cryptome from some anonymous mole on a private WikiLeaks list. Again, who knows.
Vet the data as you would anything else from any source. Use your skills of discernment. For me, the most worrying thing about WikiLeaks is the promotion it receives from the corporate media. Even the trash talking Wired is promoting Wikileaks by constantly mentioning it.
In the end, though, obsessing about disinfo this and disinfo that is generally a waste of time. It’s safe to assume that damn near everything we come across contains disinfo.
There is the issue of stench, however. Sources that say, categorically, that there’s nothing to see here on 9/11 smell really bad to me. As bad as anything can smell. (See my maggot bucket if you think that I don’t know what smells bad.)
We just saw the WikiLeaks release of the Afghanistan information, does Assange forget the pretext that was used for the invasion?
9/11 remains the elephant in the room.
Via: Belfast Telegraph:
His obsession with secrecy, both in others and maintaining his own, lends him the air of a conspiracy theorist. Is he one? “I believe in facts about conspiracies,” he says, choosing his words slowly. “Any time people with power plan in secret, they are conducting a conspiracy. So there are conspiracies everywhere. There are also crazed conspiracy theories. It’s important not to confuse these two. Generally, when there’s enough facts about a conspiracy we simply call this news.” What about 9/11? “I’m constantly annoyed that people are distracted by false conspiracies such as 9/11, when all around we provide evidence of real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud.” What about the Bilderberg conference? “That is vaguely conspiratorial, in a networking sense. We have published their meeting notes.”

[Ed Jewett]

Leaky Vessels: Wikileaks "Revelations" Will Comfort Warmongers, Confirm Conventional Wisdom Written by Chris Floyd Monday, 26 July 2010 14:08 1diggdigg



8Share

(Updated and revised.)

"I am shocked -- shocked! -- to find gambling is going on in here" -- Captain Renault at the gaming tables in Casablanca.

The much ballyhooed dump of intelligence and diplomatic files concerning the Afghan War has been trumpeted as some kind of shocking expose, "painting a different picture" than the official version of events -- revelations that are sure to rock the Anglo-American political establishments to their foundations.

The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel were given 92,000 reports by Wikileaks, including thousands of pages of raw "human intelligence" (i.e., uncorroborated claims and gossip from interested parties and anonymous sources pushing a multitude of agendas), and diplomatic notes passed between the promulgators of the occupation in Washington and their factotums "in country" -- reports which you might imagine also purvey a multitude of agendas ... not least the supreme agenda of all officials involved in a dubious enterprise: ass-covering.

Yet these reports are being treated as if they are the "grim truth" behind the shining picture of official propaganda. But what do these stories in the NYT and Guardian actually "reveal"? Let's see:

• That the occupation forces kill lots of civilians at checkpoints and botched raids, then lie about it afterward.
  
• That these killings make Afghans angry and fuel the insurgency.
  
• That elements of Pakistani intelligence are involved with some elements of the many resistance groups known collectively (and incorrectly) in the West as the Taliban.
  
• That the Americans are using more and more robot drones to kill people.
  
• That the Americans are running death squads in Afghanistan aimed at Taliban leaders.
  
• That Afghan officials are corrupt, and that Afghan police and military forces are woefully inadequate.
  

Is there anything in these breathless new recitations that we did not already know? For example, the NYT offers a few short vignettes from the leaked documents concerning botched raids and errant missiles that slaughter civilians. But in almost every case, these have already been extensively reported -- in the Times itself and other mainstream venues -- in much greater detail, with quotes and evidence from the victims and local eyewitnesses, and not just the self-interested, ass-covering perspective of official occupation reports. And the "revelation" that occupation forces are killing "an amazing number of people" who have "never proven to be a threat" at checkpoints was confirmed months ago by no less than Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the erstwhile commander of the whole shebang.

Likewise, the entanglement between Pakistani intelligence services and some elements of violent resistance in Afghanistan has been a constant theme of mainstream reportage on the Afghan War since the very beginning -- not to mention a relentless drumbeat of official "concern" in Washington. It is a rare week indeed when some Washington bigwig is not hinting darkly -- or declaring outright -- that Pakistan needs to "get with the program" in one way or another.

The increasing use of drones is also no secret; indeed, it is frequently featured in giddy press reports about these neat gizmos our boys are using to bravely blast villages on the other side of the world from comfortably padded chairs in Nevada control rooms.

And America's assassination squads have also been loudly proclaimed and hailed; scarcely a week goes by without a story about yet another "top-level" Taliban or al Qaeda dastard meeting his doom. And of course, the Peace Laureate's administration recently "leaked" the news that America is running hit squads, secret armies and other covert operators in more than 75 countries around the world -- with the Peace Laureate also proclaiming his right to assassinate American citizens when he feels like it.

As for the corruption and incompetence of the Afghan "government" installed by the foreign occupiers, and the untrustworthiness of the Afghan police and military being trained by the foreign occupiers to do their dirty work for them -- again, this too has been a running theme not only of media coverage but a plethora of official pronouncements. Has a month gone by in recent years when some top-level Washington figure has not scolded the powerless Afghan government for its manifold failings? Has a month gone by without long, detailed stories -- usually in the New York Times itself -- outlining the venality and brutality of the warlords, gangsters, religious extremists and corruptocrats that the United States has empowered in the occupied land?

Where then are the "revelations"? Anyone who has regularly read, well, the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel could not remotely be surprised by any of the facts (as opposed to the oceans of spin and supposition) buried in this mountain of leakage. These are not the Pentagon Papers or the Downing Street Memos; they do almost nothing to alter the public image of the war, and tell almost nothing that we don't already know.

In fact, the overall effect of the multi-part coverage of the documents is to paint a portrait of plucky, put-upon Americans trying their darnedest to get the job done despite the dastardly dealings and gooberish bumblings of the ungrateful little brown wretches we are trying to save from themselves. The NYT is quite explicit in this spin:

[T]he documents sketch a war hamstrung by an Afghan government, police force and army of questionable loyalty and competence, and by a Pakistani military that appears at best uncooperative and at worst to work from the shadows as an unspoken ally of the very insurgent forces the American-led coalition is trying to defeat.

So you see, if our noble enterprise is failing, it’s because the Afghans are idiots, the Pakistanis are backstabbers ... and the Iranians are behind it all, training Taliban fighters, making their bombs and bankrolling the political opposition to America's appointed satrap, Hamid Karzai.
Ah, here we get down to it. Here's metal more attractive for our militarists. The treachery of Iran is a constant theme in the leakage -- both in the raw, unsifted, uncorroborated "humint" and in the diplomatic cables of puzzled occupiers who cannot fathom why there should be any opposition to their enlightened rule. It must the fault of those perfidious Persians!

One can only imagine the lipsmacking and handclapping now rampant among the Bomb Iran crowd as they pore over these unsubstantiated rumors and Potomac ass-coverings which are being doled out -- by the "liberal" media, no less! -- as the new, grim truth about Afghanistan. The Guardian helpfully compiles the incendiary material for them:

Iran is engaged in an extensive covert campaign to arm, finance, train and equip Taliban insurgents, Afghan warlords allied to al-Qaida and suicide bombers fighting to eject British and western forces from Afghanistan, according to classified US military intelligence reports contained in the war logs.

The secret "threat reports", mostly comprising raw data provided by Afghan spies and paid informants, cannot be corroborated individually. Even if the claims are accurate, it is unclear whether the activities they describe took place with the full knowledge of Tehran or are the work of hardline elements of the semi-autonomous Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, ideological sympathisers of the Taliban, arms smugglers or criminal gangs ....

Yes, no doubt there are a great many "ideological sympathisers" of the Taliban's Shiite-hating Sunni extremists among the, er, Shiites in Iran. But such nuances don't matter; all that matters is that you get some headlines out there about "Iran's covert operations in Afghanistan." [Because, as we all know, it is an unmitigated evil for any nation to conduct covert operations in another country -- unless, of course, that nation is run by nice, clean, English-speaking people.]

The Guardian details a number of raw humint reports on Iranian dastardy, then makes a curious claim for its other sources:

Summaries of US embassy diplomatic cables and situation assessments contained and distributed through the war logs offer firmer ground than some of the raw intelligence data, given that they are evidently written by American officials and represent an official record, or official evaluation, of high-level meetings.

Why should the "situation assessments" of ass-covering bureaucrats necessarily be "firmer" than the gossip and denunciations being retailed in the "humint" reports? Especially if they are telling Washington exactly what it wants to hear: the Iranians are behind our manifest failures, both militarily and politically. The Guardian:

Summaries of classified diplomatic cables produced by the US embassy in Kabul, contained in the war logs, reveal high-level concern about Tehran's growing political influence in Afghanistan. Senior US and Afghan officials appear at a loss over how to counter Iran's alleged bribery and manipulation of opposition parties and MPs whom Afghan government officials dismiss as Tehran's "puppets"....

"Over the past several months Iran has taken a series of steps to expand and deepen its influence," says a secret cable sourced to the US embassy in Kabul and written in May 2007 by CSTC-A DCG for Pol-Mil Affairs [combined security transition command deputy commanding general for political and military affairs]. The cable cites the creation of the opposition National Front and National Unity Council, which it claims are under Iranian influence.

Wow, that's heavy stuff, man. An apparatchik in the US embassy says that the political opposition to America's man in Kabul is just Iranian puppetry. Obviously, those Afghan ragheads couldn't possibly put together an opposition by themselves. (It's just like that Civil Rights stuff back in the day; it was all a Communist front. You know our docile darkies would never have tried to get above their raising if the Commies hadn't stirred them up.)

We see here a reflection of one of the enduring principles of the American power structure: that no one could ever have any reasonable objections to the enlightened hegemony of our elites. Any opposition to their dominance and privilege has to come from "outside agitators," sinister troublemakers driven by motiveless evil to destroy all that's good and holy in this world.

So in the end, what really is the "takeaway" from this barrage of high-profile "revelations" dished up by these bold liberal gadflies speaking truth to power? Let's recap:

Occupation forces kill lots of civilians. But everybody already knew that -- and it's been obvious for years that nobody cares. How does this alter the prevailing conventional wisdom about the war?

Pakistan is pursuing its own strategic interests in the region: interests that don't always mesh with those of the United States. Again, this has been a constantly -- obsessively -- reported aspect of the war since its earliest days. How does this alter the prevailing conventional wisdom about the war?

The Afghan government installed by the occupation is corrupt and dysfunctional. Again, this theme has been sounded at every level of the American government -- including by two presidents -- for years. How does this alter the prevailing conventional wisdom of the war?

There is often a dichotomy between official statements about the war's progress and the reality of the war on the ground. Again, has there been a month in the last nine years that prominent stories outlining this fact have not appeared in major mainstream publications? Is this not a well-known phenomenon of every single military conflict in human history? How does this alter the prevailing conventional wisdom about the war?

Iran is evil and is helping bad guys kill Americans and should be stopped. It goes without saying that this too has been a relentless drumbeat of the American power structure for many years. The occupation forces in Iraq began blaming Iran for the rise of the insurgency and the political instability almost the moment after George W. Bush proclaimed "mission accomplished" and all hell broke loose in the conquered land. The Obama administration has "continued" -- and expanded -- the Bush Regime's demonization of Iran, and its extensive military preparations for an attack on that country. The current administration's "diplomatic effort" is led by a woman who pledged to "obliterate" Iran -- that is, to kill tens of millions of innocent people -- if Iran attacked Israel. The American power structure has seized upon every single scrap of Curveball-quality "intelligence" -- every rumor, every lie, every exaggeration, every fabrication -- to convince the American people that Iran is about to nuke downtown Omaha with burqa-clad atom bombs.

So once again, and for the last time, we ask the question: How does this alter the prevailing conventional wisdom about the war?

It doesn't, of course. These media "bombshells" will simply bounce off the hardened shell of American exceptionalism -- which easily countenances the slaughter of civilians and "targeted killings" and "indefinite detention" and any number of other atrocities anyway. In fact, I predict the chief "takeaway" from the story will be this:

American forces are doing their best to help the poor Afghans, but the ungrateful natives are too weak and corrupt to be trusted, while America's good intentions are also being thwarted by evil outsiders.

Getting this message out via "critical" stories in "liberal" publications is much more effective than dishing up another serving of patriotic hokum on Fox News or at a presidential press conference. In fact, it is so much more effective that one almost begins to wonder about the ultimate provenance of the leaks. Did some deep-delving gamester allow these files to get out? Most likely not; but their ultimate effect does provoke the age-old question, cui bono?

The assumption is that these 92,000 files about the Afghan war were obtained by an American private serving in Iraq, the unfortunate Bradley Manning, who is now under arrest for the "crime" of leaking something far more disturbing than any written document: a video showing the slaughter of Iraqi civilians by American Apache helicopters in 2007. Washington knows that a couple of moving pictures on the tee-vee have a far greater potential to disturb the moral sleep of the American people than tens of thousands of newspaper reports -- or leaked documents -- detailing similar killings. (That said, in the end the Apache video has had zero effect on public perceptions of the Iraq War, which most people believe is "over," or on public support for the murderous machinations of the Terror War in general, which most people believe needs to continue in one form or another, to "keep us safe.") The only kind of grim truth attended to by anyone in America these days is that which can be shown in moving pictures. (Although the number of people who are upset even by that seems to be rapidly diminishing. That's why Manning had to be put away.

I don't question the bravery or sincerity of Manning or of Julian Assanage in bringing the latest material to light. And I suppose on balance it is better to have it than not to have it. But I still question the usefulness of rolling out mountains of raw "human intelligence" -- precisely the same kind of unfiltered junk that was "stovepiped" to build the false case for the mass-murdering invasion of Iraq -- about Iran, al Qaeda, Pakistan; even North Korea gets into the mix. None of this can be checked -- but all of it will be extremely useful to those who want to build cases for more and more military action, death squads and covert actions around the world.

And it seems very odd that intelligence reports and bureaucratic memos by forces carrying out a prolonged, brutal military occupation of another country are now being treated by "liberal" media outlets as holy writ which paints a "true" picture of the war -- a picture that omits any reference to American war-related corruption, for instance, not only in Afghanistan but more especially in Washington, or to America's wider "Great Game" machinations in Central Asia, involving pipelines, strategic bases and "containing China," etc.
If I believed anything would come of this document dump, if I believed it would actually lead to, say, the prosecution of even one single person for a war-related crime, or to a genuine debate over the morality of the war in the political and media establishments, or even a 5 point rise in public opposition to the Terror War project, then I would rejoice, and embrace the flashy packages of the NYT, Guardian and Der Spiegel at their own self-inflated valuation.

But I honestly believe that the net effect will be simply to entrench the conventional wisdom about the war in the halls of power -- and in the echo chambers of opinion -- on both sides of the Atlantic. We have already seen far too many atrocities, brutalities and acts of criminal folly countenanced, when they are not actually praised, far too many times -- over and over and over again -- in the course of the last decade to believe that these disgorgings of junk intelligence and apparatchik memos will make any difference.

Any difference for the better, that is. For I believe they will supply plenty of ammunition to those bent on further murder and plunder.
(*Note: This piece has been revised for typos, with some new content added, since its original posting.*)

[Peter Lemkin]

TF 373 is key.

Agreed...Vietnamistanization :afraid: Very sad and evil. I really feel sorry for the average person in Afghanistan who are taking a life and death chance just going about their lives with our murder drones and murder squads roaming around killing everything living they cross the path of and have lists - often filled with names given by informers with a personal grudge against the named person(s). A totally immoral war - wrong premise [lies]; wrong place; wrong motive; just wrong.....and a new President who campaigned on ending it and has escalated it...shows who's team he's really on....it ain't ours.

[Peter Presland]

Whilst this thread title originally referred to what on the face of it appears to be a genuine leaked US Intelligence document, I'm beginning to think that a more apt title might now be something like "US Intell plans to co-opt WikiLeaks or - if it can't be co-opted - to use it".

I'm not a big fan of George Friedman of Stratfor. I cancelled the Stratfor RSS feed because his stuff was so transparent in its subtle promotion of official Western agendas. That said, this latest piece is worth perusing and reading between Friedman's lines. Broadly it argues that, apart from a few gory details, there's nothing there that we did not already know; that, absent catastrophic system security failings (not entirely out of the question I guess), the data could not have been collected from its diverse sources by a low-ranking individual - and/or at all without detection). It hints that a powerful internal agenda is served by the leaks. It concludes:

The WikiLeaks, from what we have seen so far, detail power, interest and reality as we have known it. They do not reveal a new reality. Much will be made about the shocking truth that has been shown, which, as mentioned above, shocks only those who wish to be shocked. The Afghan war is about an insufficient American and allied force fighting a capable enemy on its home ground and a Pakistan positioning itself for the inevitable outcome. The WikiLeaks contain all the details.
We are left with the mystery of who compiled all of these documents and who had access to them with enough time and facilities to transmit them to the outside world in a blatant and sustained breach of protocol. The image we have is of an unidentified individual or small group working to get a “shocking truth” out to the public, only the truth is not shocking — it is what was known all along in excruciating detail. Who would want to detail a truth that is already known, with access to all this documentation and the ability to transmit it unimpeded? Whoever it proves to have been has just made the most powerful case yet for withdrawal from Afghanistan sooner rather than later.

Full article here

[Peter Lemkin]

Sorry, I have to disagree at this point and with what I see and know and 'sense'. One too many wheels within the wheels in your position. I think this is a real whistleblower to a real whiistleblowing site and had really harmed the beast. Of course they will try to spin it as not 'any big deal'.....but I think they are terrified. There is NEWS [i.e. something new] in these revelations....maybe you and I had a sense of this, the public and the MSM did not...and now they have had their faces pushed in the crap and will have to face it and wash it off....and do something about it - and the rest that is coming. We'll have to agree to disagree at this point.

[Peter Presland]

Sorry, I have to disagree at this point and with what I see and know and 'sense'. One too many wheels within the wheels in your position. I think this is a real whistleblower to a real whiistleblowing site and had really harmed the beast. Of course they will try to spin it as not 'any big deal'.....but I think they are terrified. There is NEWS [i.e. something new] in these revelations....maybe you and I had a sense of this, the public and the MSM did not...and now they have had their faces pushed in the crap and will have to face it and wash it off....and do something about the it - and the rest that is coming. We'll have to agree to disagree at this point.

Peter

I think any disagreement is confined to my being a fence-sitter on the source and source motivation for providing this material (a very uncomfortable place to be I might add) and you judging it kosher.

I do not doubt the sincerity of Assange being determined to publish what the MSM reflexively colludes in hiding. I just agree with John Young. I think he is probably naive is his understanding of the methods, determination and overwhelming resources of the Spooks in dealing with him as a problem. That's all.

How he responds to their initiatives (assuming he sees them coming at all) is moot. My guess is he will refuse co-option - unless they are in a position to make him an offer he can't refuse, that is - but that his ambition will render him vulnerable to the vast range of alternative strategies at their disposal.

Nevertheless I wish him the very best of luck.

[Jan Klimkowski]

In one of the pieces above, there's an attempt to discredit wikileaks, Assange, and these leaked documents as follows:

Yet these reports are being treated as if they are the "grim truth" behind the shining picture of official propaganda. But what do these stories in the NYT and Guardian actually "reveal"? Let's see:

That the occupation forces kill lots of civilians at checkpoints and botched raids, then lie about it afterward.
That these killings make Afghans angry and fuel the insurgency.
That elements of Pakistani intelligence are involved with some elements of the many resistance groups known collectively (and incorrectly) in the West as the Taliban.
That the Americans are using more and more robot drones to kill people.
That the Americans are running death squads in Afghanistan aimed at Taliban leaders.
That Afghan officials are corrupt, and that Afghan police and military forces are woefully inadequate.

Is there anything in these breathless new recitations that we did not already know?

This attack constitutes ignorant garbage.

In best spindoctor fairy tale fashion, the UK govt is still denying it colluded in, and perpetrated, acts of torture during the so-called "War on Terror".

There is zero chance that the US govt, the UK govt, or NATO will ever officially admit to "running death squads".

Any politician or military leader sanctioning a death squad is prima facie guilty of a war crime.

Any "killings" (to use a neutral word) committed by such a "death squad" constitute extra judicial killing, and hence a war crime.

The killing of any civilian by a US, UK or NATO-approved "death squad" would be an aggravated war crime.

The documents provided by a courageous whistle-blower, and made available by wikileaks, are incredibly important evidence substantiating the claim that "TF 373", which appears to be code for covert US, UK and NATO special forces operations, does indeed include extra-judicial killings of both "human targets" and entirely innocent civilians.

It appears that "TF373" often behaves like a "death squad".

This will NEVER be officially admitted by the political and military leaders who have approved the operations of "TF 373".

[Peter Lemkin]

You can be sure that TF 373 was renamed yesterday....and will likely change its name weekly from now on...but not stop its death squad activities. As far as I read history, the USA and its followers-on have had and used death squads rather continuously from WW2 to present....sometimes being more active here, then there, sometimes at several places at once. We are at a time when they are especially active [again] and now can pin down two places they regularly go on missions. [They have always also done single (or a few missions) here and there, as needed by the murderous goons in power]. ecruity: The sad fact is those in power really belong in prison for War Crimes on the current wars [among other things] as they did in Nicaragua, Vietnam, Guatemala, Cuba, Panama, Granada, Chile, Greece, Gladio Ops..and on and on and on...and lets not forget they also belong in prison for murder and sedition for the likes of Dallas, Memphis and L.A.....and all the thousands of other 'single hits'. It is not just the USA...and UK...but they are way 'up there' along with Israel, Russia and a few others - in this very ignoble league. We have our very own death squads and we train death squads that do our bidding and attack our targets. Sick hardly begins to describe the lack of morality and anti-democracy, anti-freedom, anti-humanistic, murderous, oligarchic, militaristic criminally-insane bastards in power.......reminds me of the last days of Rome.

[Peter Lemkin]

AMY GOODMAN: As Julian Assange’s roots lie in the world of computer hacking and political hactivism, and the focus on WikiLeaks is bringing new attention on the underground world of hackers, I’m joined here in New York by a well-known member of the hacking community who goes by the name Emmanuel Goldstein—yes, from the figure in 1984, George Orwell. He’s the editor of the magazine 2600: The Hacker’s Quarterly. He’s also the organizer of the HOPE, or Hackers on Planet Earth, conferences.

Julian Assange had been slated to be the keynote speaker at the most recent conference, which took place earlier this month. But he didn’t make it. Former hacker Adrian Lamo, who turned in Private Bradley Manning to the authorities, did attend the conference. Private Manning is the one who was arrested for taking documents or downloading documents and giving them over to WikiLeaks. This is some of what Adrian Lamo said and how he was challenged.

ADRIAN LAMO: I think that the government behaved themselves better than a lot of people would give them credit for. To set the record clear, I am not an informant. I’m a witness in a criminal case. It’s not that different, in my eyes, from being a witness in any other case that could involve potential loss of life.

EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN: Adrian, I mean, you say it’s—you know, it’s been a pleasant experience for you, you know, working with the government on this, I guess. But Bradley Manning, the alleged leaker, is currently sitting in prison in Kuwait, I believe, and he could be locked up for the rest of his life. How do you feel about that?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Tortured!

ADRIAN LAMO: I think that it’s a little bit ludicrous to say that Bradley Manning is going to be tortured. We don’t do that to our citizens.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Guantánamo!

ADRIAN LAMO: I mean, obviously it’s been much worse for him, but it’s certainly been no picnic for me. And I knew from the get-go that it was going to be a low point in my interactions with the community. And I—

UNIDENTIFIED: Yet you could have ignored him. When he first contacted you, you were not obliged to ever answer him. You could have simply ignored him, and none of this would have ever happened.

ADRIAN LAMO: And Mr. Manning could have ignored the diplomatic cables, and he could have ignored the collateral murder video, but he followed his conscience, as I did mine.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: From my perspective, I see what you have done as treason.


AMY GOODMAN: Former hacker Adrian Lamo questioned at the Hackers on Planet Earth, or HOPE, conference last week.

Emmanuel Goldstein, organizer of the conference, welcome to Democracy Now!

EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN: Good morning, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go back for a minute. Before we talk about Adrian Lamo, I’d like to talk about this conference that Julian Assange was supposed to be the keynote speaker for. What happened?

EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN: Well, we originally talked to Julian a few months ago, after "Collateral Murder" was released. And—

AMY GOODMAN: And explain what "Collateral Murder" was.

EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN: Well, that was the videotape that showed US soldiers firing on unarmed civilians and journalists, resulting in many deaths, something that the US government had suppressed.

AMY GOODMAN: This was videotape, July 12th, 2007, that WikiLeaks released. And if you want to see that video, you can go to our website at democracynow.org. But go ahead, Emmanuel.

EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN: And when we saw the extent with which this was gaining interest throughout the world, Julian seemed a natural fit for something like the HOPE conference, because we have controversial speakers dedicated to freedom of speech or releasing information to the public, and Julian does have roots, as you have said, in the hacker world. And we didn’t know that the hacker world would continue to play a part in this story to the extent that it would keep Julian from being able to enter this country safely, because of the ensuing controversy.

AMY GOODMAN: So, what happened before the conference?

EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN: Well, before the conference, Wired published a news story, basically featuring Adrian Lamo, the former hacker that you just made reference to. That caught the attention of Bradley Manning, the Army specialist accused of leaking that video, along with other documents. Allegedly, from what I have heard, he entrusted Adrian Lamo and told him all kinds of information, and Adrian felt compelled to go to the authorities and thus turned Bradley Manning in. And that has resulted in quite a bit of consternation, in general, from the hacker community, which holds these values very dear to its heart, as far as releasing information to the public, getting to the truth of the matter, uncovering cover-ups. WikiLeaks is something that I would say most of the hacker community views as essential, as are other leak sites that focus on this kind of thing.

AMY GOODMAN: The Department of Homeland Security came to your conference or came before the conference?

EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN: We had federal agents come the first day of the conference. They came to our registration desk, demanded access. And we told them that unless you have a search warrant, the only access you’re going to get is if you buy a badge to the conference. And they bought badges.

AMY GOODMAN: And Julian Assange didn’t come?

EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN: Well, Julian Assange wanted to come. We wanted him to come, but we certainly didn’t want to put him in any danger. And up until the last moment, we were considering all kinds of possibilities, and we kept that close to our hearts. We didn’t want to reveal too much information as far as where exactly he was at the time. In the end, though, the decision that was reached was to have another representative of WikiLeaks give the talk, and Jacob Appelbaum stood in for him and gave a very compelling talk. And I think it also points out that WikiLeaks is not one person. WikiLeaks is an unknown number of people throughout the globe, and it’s a lot stronger than the media, than people think. So, I’m just worried that Julian might be seen as the threat to the US government or the military. And that’s not the case. We’re all the threat, anybody who wants the truth, anybody who wants information to get out there. We’re the threat to that kind of thinking. And it’s not going to go away. As long as the internet exists, as long as democracy exists, this kind of thing is going to happen constantly.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain how WikiLeaks.org works, Emmanuel.

EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN: Well, not being a part of the organization myself, I can’t say exactly how it works. How I would run something like this would be to set up a whole bunch of servers throughout the world, backing up each other. In case troops storm into a colocation facility in one country, there’s another one that will take its place. On the internet, censorship is basically seen as a network problem, and we route around censorship. We get to the source in a different way. So if you take out one machine, there’s another one to take its place. And you would have to pretty much take apart the entire internet to defeat that kind of a system.

The other thing I would run in such a system is basically a lack of logs. What that means is I wouldn’t keep records of who sent me an email, of the correspondence between people, of who accessed the website. Indymedia had something similar years ago, where information was demanded of it by the government, and they didn’t have the information, because they didn’t keep logs. If you keep logs, you have a lot of information about the people who visit your site or who email you. You can get their IP, and that leads to their geographic location. You can even get things like the kind of browser they use if they go to your website. But if you don’t keep logs, you don’t have any of that. And we’re not obligated to keep logs. And I think that’s something very important in this society where we’re basically obsessed with record keeping. We don’t have to keep these records. If we run a website and we want to keep it truly anonymous, then we just let people go to it and not keep tabs on who they are or their demographics or anything like that. Information is what’s important.

AMY GOODMAN: Now I want to talk about Adrian Lamo and this questioning you did of him at your conference, you and others. He’s the one who dealt with Bradley Manning, who’s now in jail. Reading from Wired, "Manning is charged with improperly downloading more than 150,000 State Department cables from SIPRnet, where they were accessible through an information-sharing program called Net-Centric Diplomacy. He’s charged with leaking more than 50 of them. In his online chats, Manning claimed to have leaked 260,000 cables to Wikileaks, which he said documented years of secret foreign policy and 'almost-criminal political back dealings,'" he said. First of all, explain all of that. What is SIPRnet?

EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN: Well, I’m not actually an expert on the military—

AMY GOODMAN: S-I-P-R-net.

EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN: —the military networks. That is one such network that Bradley Manning allegedly had access to.

AMY GOODMAN: And the information-sharing program called Net-Centric Diplomacy?

EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN: I imagine that’s some kind of a program similar to torrents, where you’re able to anonymously share information. Again, I’m not familiar with that, but these are tools that are used by people who want to disseminate information in a fairly secure and anonymous manner.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, it’s interesting. Here he was—he was in Iraq, and he was downloading. Again, he was charged with only leaking fifty cables. When you see what he had access to—and these were—most of these were about Afghanistan.

EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN: Mm-hmm.

AMY GOODMAN: How does he have access to this trove of hundreds of thousands of documents, sitting—an Army specialist in Iraq?

EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN: How does anyone have access to such an enormous amount of information?

AMY GOODMAN: He said he went in with DVDs or CDs that said things like "Lady Gaga" on them. He would erase them and download them onto those CDs.

EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN: It was an incredibly low-tech way of doing things, if this is in fact what happened. He would go in with a CD, pretend to be to listening to it; in actuality, he’d be writing to the CD. It’s ingenious, a kind of thing that movies are made out of. But the real question here is, how is the military guarding their allegedly secret information? Not very well. If Bradley Manning did in fact have this access and did in fact make use of it, how many other people had this kind of access? Where else might this leak have gotten to, if it didn’t go to WikiLeaks first? Imagine if Bradley Manning wasn’t somebody who supported the United States and democracy? What if he was an enemy agent that leaked this information to some other regime or some terrorist organization? We wouldn’t be talking about it now, but they would have that information. The important thing is, when there’s bad security, that everybody know there’s bad security. When there are cover-ups, everybody needs to know about the cover-ups. That’s the way a democratic society works.

AMY GOODMAN: Emmanuel Goldstein, Adrian Lamo, who he is?

EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN: Adrian Lamo is an enigma. He’s somebody in the hacker community who has received a lot of attention over the years for various things. And this latest escapade is certainly the most controversial of anything he’s done in the past.

AMY GOODMAN: What was he known for in the past?

EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN: He was known for hacking into the New York Times website, which I guess is kind of a rite of passage for hackers.

AMY GOODMAN: And what did he do there?

EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN: I don’t think he really did anything other than change some wording on a web page. And we defended him at the time, because there was a spate of people being imprisoned for such minor crimes as simply hacking into a web page. We didn’t see anything bad about that, and I still don’t see anything wrong with that kind of expression, as long as no damage is committed. Adrian has been somebody who’s been in touch with a lot of people in the hacker community. He even runs our Facebook group, 2600 magazine’s Facebook group. Because it’s so decentralized, anybody can really run it. We never really cared.

But, unfortunately, he—by doing this, he placed himself in a situation where he was faced with what I believe is an impossible choice: do you continue to listen to somebody who is claiming to have leaked all these documents, or do you turn them in and clear your conscience and not go to prison yourself, if you’re found to be co-conspiring with him? I think Adrian put himself in that situation. It think it was a choice to continue to be in the spotlight by talking to people that were claiming all kinds of things. Keep in mind, we don’t even know if Bradley Manning ever gave 260,000 documents to WikiLeaks. We don’t know that.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, he wasn’t charged with that. He’s charged with fifty cables.

EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN: Right, which is a big difference. And fifty cables could be completely innocuous. There could be no information of any worth in there whatsoever. But by saying 260,000, we think that it’s an attack on the country, our defense is in shambles because of this. And that’s not the case at all. Bradley Manning, in my opinion, is a hero for releasing information that uncovered all kinds of scandals. And we need people to do that. That is how our society is strengthened.

AMY GOODMAN: How unusual is WikiLeaks.org, Emmanuel Goldstein?

EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN: It’s not as unusual as you might think. There’s a site right here in New York called Cryptome.org, run by John Young, that’s been doing this kind of thing for over ten years. There are all sorts of sites—

AMY GOODMAN: That’s C-R-Y-P-T-O-M-E?

EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN: Dot-org, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Dot-org.

EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN: There are all kinds of sites throughout the world dedicated to releasing information that somebody or something says is classified. At 2600 magazine, we’ve been releasing leaked information for over twenty-five years. What happens is—

AMY GOODMAN: Like what?

EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN: Well, corporate information on computer systems, something that shows how easily vulnerable everything from phone systems to cash registers are in a corporation. And what happens when you do this, you get threatened. You get threatened with lawsuits and all kinds of government action. But the way that we have dealt with it, which has been quite successful, for the most part, is simply to tell people when you’re threatened. And if somebody sends you a threatening letter, you print the threatening letter. And generally they back off when they realize that this is bad publicity for them and that it’s not going to get anywhere, and you’re going to continue to do what you’re doing.

AMY GOODMAN: I don’t know if people realize how many hackers have been imprisoned, have been jailed.

EMMANUEL GOLDSTIEN: Far too many. Hackers are not the threat. We’ve been saying this for decades. They are the messenger. They are ones who tell people that, “Hey, this computer system, this bit of technology, it’s not what you think it is. It either has spyware capabilities, it has no security. It’s something evil that is being used against people. Or it’s something good that can be compromised in an evil way.” Whatever it is, it’s usually something that people that designed these things don’t want to hear, and they’d rather we shut up. And the best way to shut hackers up is to imprison them. Well, that’s great, if you don’t have a voice and if you don’t have the means of getting the word out that hackers are being discriminated against. And we’ve been able to do that over the years with Kevin Mitnick case, with the Bernie S. case, with the fiber optic case, so many more instances of hackers being imprisoned simply because they’re giving out information.

AMY GOODMAN: We only have fifteen seconds, but why did you adopt the nom de plume or nom de guerre, however you want to put it, Emmanuel Goldstein?

EMMANUEL GOLDSTIEN: Well, it’s interesting. Emmanuel Goldstein in George Orwell’s 1984 is seen as the enemy of the people, but I should point out that in the end of the book—I don’t want to spoil it for anybody—he is actually a fictitious creation of the government.

AMY GOODMAN: Hmm. Emmanuel Goldstein, thanks so much for being with us, well-known figure in the hacker community, editor of the magazine 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, organizer of the HOPE conferences.

[Peter Lemkin]

While the main crimes are murder, torture and illegal occupation and terror of the nation of Afghanistan who never attacked America [!], one wonders what is going on with the drugs. In going randomly through some of the Wikileaks materials I came across this report http://wardiary.wikileaks.org/afg/event/...n1505.html which on the face of it says a USMC group [size I don't know, but not large] came upon a group of trucks filled with processed opium, no 'enemy', no 'neutrals' and seized the opium and 'destroyed it'...I wonder.....:hmmmm2: A few truckloads of processed opium would be worth a few million dollars and certainly soothe the nerves of the troops..... could even be turned into legit medical anti-pain medications:bike: No chain of custody of the opium...just a note; 'destroyed'.:bandit: