Will WikiLeaks unravel the American 'secret government'?

[David Guyatt]

The below is, well, nice. So nice.

I do so like a newcomer that ups the ante by playing to established power by pretending not to. And, as we all can affirm by now, we can be thoroughly content that the "media" will fulfill its sacred duty to, ahem, inform the public of every leak in an unbiased, unprejudiced and timely fashion and to call on its fourth estate position to call grubbinment malfeasance to account.

Not.

One really has to admire the total absence of subtlety and beauty of military psyops in the below. Military thinkers (sic) and the void of creativity they bring (outside of killing, maiming and harm of course) is legendary.

It makes our days so interesting.

I give you "Openleaks": :hahaha::hahaha::hahaha:

Hosted by Back to Google News
WikiLeaks dissidents to launch rival OpenLeaks project
By Marc Preel (AFP) – 3 hours ago

STOCKHOLM — Former WikiLeaks supporters at odds with founder Julian Assange will shortly launch OpenLeaks, a rival project aiming to get secret documents directly to media, one of them said Friday.
"I can confirm that we will be operating under the name 'OpenLeaks'," former Icelandic WikiLeaks member Herbert Snorrason told AFP.
Unlike WikiLeaks, OpenLeaks will not publish leaked documents directly online but instead make leaks available to partner media.
"This is not a single website that would gather material and publish it but rather a system provider to which people can upload information anonymously," Snorrason said.
The domain name openleaks.org on Friday redirected to a blank page with a circular arrow logo and the mention "Coming soon!".
"OpenLeaks is a technology project that is aiming to be a service provider for third parties that want to be able to accept material from anonymous sources," Daniel Domscheit-Berg, WikiLeaks' former spokesman in Germany, added in a Swedish public television (SVT) documentary obtained by AFP.
"We will be partnering up with organisations that will have a receiving 'drop box' on their sites operated by them. We will not be receiving nor distributing information directly," Snorrason, a 25 year old history student, said.
The Icelander, who quit WikiLeaks after a public feud with Assange, had already in November told AFP about a rival project.
"If 'Newspaper X' is one of our partners, that paper will have a 'Send us anonymous information' link on their site. People can then click on that link and forward their information without the risk of the information being traced back to them," he explained.
"If 'Newspaper X' does not want to leak the information they have received, a system will be in place for other partner media to review the information and share it if they choose to do so," he added.
In SVT's "WikiRebels -- The Documentary" to be broadcast Sunday, Daniel Domscheit-Berg and Herbert Snorrason explain how they quit WikiLeaks because of disagreements with Assange on how to run the site and because of personal conflict with the 39-year-old Australian.
"If you preach transparency to everyone else, you have to be transparent yourself. You have to fulfill the same standards you expect of others," Domscheit-Berg says.
"Eventually it ended with me arguing with Julian about basically his dictatorial behavior, which ended with Julian saying to me that if I had problems with him I could just piss off, I quote," says Snorrason.
Founded in 2006, whistleblowing website WikiLeaks emerged into the media spotlight this year with major document leaks on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It unleashed a major diplomatic storm this month by releasing thousands of secret US embassy cables.
One of the WikiLeaks founders, former hacker Julian Assange, is now in jail in London pending a hearing on extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over sexual assault allegations.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/art...e03ae0.5a1

PS, please send your juicy leaks to us so that we can track who you are and suppress them. We are open 24/7 in our dedicated office located in Crystal City, Arlington, Virginia.

[Ed Jewett]

Jan, no argument from me on your clarification about deletion.

Matter of fact, without disagreeing with the dismantling or the individual doing the dismantling, I saw a piece from a different place that may or may not have been supportive of the argument, but I am now reticent to post it or much of anything else (I'll probably get over that shortly) for fear of being branded somehow as a poor thinker, a contaminant, a purposeful disinformationalist, or something else. (I may have to beef up my "legend" before I can be considered worthy; maybe I'll have some young student of media production do up a YouTube on me.)

What I see going on in America and the American commentaries from some sides of the debate is akin to self-recruitment in the thought police. I think falsified credentials are being crafted as we speak.

We even have Janet Napolitano from Der Heimat Protectors Collective encouraging -- via public service announcements carried by leading retailers' in-house video tellies -- to report what it is we see. Well, I see lots of crimes being committed in lots of places, and the Wikileaks hypercaliboondanza taking people's attentions away from the continued fraud and theft perpetrated by Wall Street, the Fed, and its primary spokeperson, I Have Hope as a Progressive Liberal (but I'm really strengthening the theft of the middle class and the vacuuming of wealth and rights), otherwise known as Barry Soetoro.

While some of what has emerged from Wikileaks is eye-opening, it is merely confirmation of what was already known or suspected by aonyone doing some astute observation; it might be akin to the leaks' perpetrators thumbing their noses at those who think they can change things or do anything to bring these people to justice. In that vein, it fits right in with the observations of Vince Salandria about Dealey Plaza and pertinent to 9/11 as well; here it is, in plain sight; we are powerful, you can't stop us. it might be cognitive infiltration in action.

Well, enough of that... I've made progress in "A Terrible Mistake"; I'm in the section on assassinations, highlighter in hand.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Jan, no argument from me on your clarification about deletion.

Matter of fact, without disagreeing with the dismantling or the individual doing the dismantling, I saw a piece from a different place that may or may not have been supportive of the argument, but I am now reticent to post it or much of anything else (I'll probably get over that shortly) for fear of being branded somehow as a poor thinker, a contaminant, a purposeful disinformationalist, or something else. (I may have to beef up my "legend" before I can be considered worthy; maybe I'll have some young student of media production do up a YouTube on me.)

Ed - in the kindest possible sense, please get over it now and post such material!

David has already acknowledged in the Wikileaks movie thread that some of his deductions may need revising and refining in the light of new information.

The process of investigative research must always be open to new information, the testing of that information, and the incorporation of that information if it is proven sound, into the working hypothesis of what really happened.

My own view is that at the heart of this particular spat is the knowledge that wikileaks must have infiltrators amongst its cadre.

Assange himself, with his LSD cult background, and early prosecution for computer hacking, must have come to the attention of intelligence agencies in his teens. He would have been a prime target for recruitment. And of course he may been "known" to certain agencies from his infancy.

There are three main possibilities for Assange:

i) he is the pure archangel of information liberation;

ii) he is an asset of one or more intelligence agencies;

iii) he is largely pure but being played by forces beyond his comprehension. Ie he is a Mechanic, unaware of the motives of the Sponsors.

All three of these options are possible.

I do not know which one is the truth, so I continue to consider them all.

However, the most important element is the information and the light it shines.

Or fails to shine.

Keep it coming.

[Ed Jewett]

Relax, Jan. I'm over it. Those comments weren't histrionics, a desperate plea for support, or the words of a persona wanting recognition. They were simply a bit of hyperbole in a statement to make the point that tremendous efforts are made (indeed, the main issue of the Wikileaks business) to suppress the availability or sharing of information. Not just here, but on other Internet discussion boards, in the media, everywhere. Rest assured I am a part-time information liberator; I am a Jeffersonian. I have every intent of continuing to do what I do within the limitations of my time, abilities and life's situation.

By the way, I like your three options. My jury is still out too, though it is at least at the point of asking the bailiff to send in fresh copies of the testimony or ask the judge for clarification of the court's rules. It is extremely hard work to be aware of one's own conscious and unconscious mental filters (I've been reading Seymour and Albarelli); it is even harder work to get it to stretch sufficiently so as to consider possibilities never before encountered.

I think it wise to take things like your three options, or my prior questions about the technologies, knowledge and access necessary to obtain information that has been released, or similar queries and theses, and begin to set up a template for better evaluation.

We are already at a point where it is incumbent upon us to discern from reality and satire, or poking fun at the matter. [See http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/12/wik...rk_wo.html ] The mere fact that there is organized comedic analysis and mimicry is an indicator of something.

[Ed Jewett]

Wikileaks: A Big Dangerous US Government Con Job

by F. William Engdahl


Global Research, December 10, 2010

The story on the surface makes for a script for a new Oliver Stone Hollywood thriller. A 39-year old Australian hacker holds the President of the United States and his State Department hostage to a gigantic cyber “leak,” unless the President leaves Julian Assange and his Wikileaks free to release hundreds of thousands of pages of sensitive US Government memos. A closer look at the details, so far carefully leaked by the most ultra-establishment of international media such as the New York Times, reveals a clear agenda. That agenda coincidentally serves to buttress the agenda of US geopolitics around the world from Iran to Russia to North Korea. The Wikileaks is a big and dangerous US intelligence Con Job which will likely be used to police the Internet.
It is almost too perfectly-scripted to be true. A discontented 22-year old US Army soldier on duty in Baghdad, Bradley Manning, a low-grade US Army intelligence analyst, described as a loner, a gay in the military, a disgruntled “computer geek,” sifts through classified information at Forward Operating Base Hammer. He decides to secretly download US State Department email communications from the entire world over a period of eight months for hours a day, onto his blank CDs while pretending to be listening to Lady Gaga. In addition to diplomatic cables, Manning is believed to have provided WikiLeaks with helicopter gun camera video of an errant US attack in Baghdad on unarmed journalists, and with war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Manning then is supposed to have tracked down a notorious former US computer hacker to get his 250,000 pages of classified US State Department cables out in the Internet for the whole world to see. He allegedly told the US hacker that the documents he had contained "incredible, awful things that belonged in the public domain and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington, DC." The hacker turned him in to US authorities so the story goes. Manning is now incommunicado since months in US military confinement so we cannot ask him, conveniently. The Pentagon routinely hires the best hackers to design their security systems.
Then the plot thickens. The 250,000 pages end up at the desk of Julian Assange, the 39-year-old Australian founder of a supposedly anti-establishment website with the cute name Wikileaks. Assange decides to selectively choose several of the world’s most ultra-establishment news media to exclusively handle the leaking job for him as he seems to be on the run from Interpol, not for leaking classified information, but for allegedly having consensual sex with two Swedish women who later decided it was rape.
He selects as exclusive newspapers to decide what is to be leaked the New York Times which did such service in promoting faked propaganda against Saddam that led to the Iraqi war, the London Guardian and Der Spiegel. Assange claims he had no time to sift through so many pages so handed them to the trusted editors of the establishment media for them to decide what should be released. Very “anti-establishment” that. The New York Times even assigned one of its top people, David E. Sanger, to control the release of the Wikileaks material. Sanger is no establishment outsider. He sits as a member of the elite Council on Foreign Relations as well as the Aspen Institute Strategy Group together with the likes of Condi Rice, former Defense Secretary William Perry, former CIA head John Deutch, former State Department Deputy Secretary and now World Bank head Robert Zoellick among others.
Indeed a strange choice of media for a person who claims to be anti-establishment. But then Assange also says he believes the US Government version of 9/11 and calls the Bilderberg Group a normal meeting of people, a very establishment view.
Not so secret cables…
The latest sensational Wikileaks documents allegedly from the US State Department embassies around the world to Washington are definitely not as Hillary Clinton claimed "an attack on America's foreign policy interests that have endangered innocent people." And they do not amount to what the Italian foreign minister, called the "September 11 of world diplomacy." The British government calls them a threat to national security and an aide to Canada’s Prime Minister calls on the CIA to assassinate Assange, as does kooky would-be US Presidential hopeful Sarah Palin.
Most important, the 250,000 cables are not "top secret" as we might have thought. Between two and three million US Government employees are cleared to see this level of "secret" document,[1] and some 500,000 people around the world have access to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRnet) where the cables were stored. Siprnet is not recommended for distribution of top-secret information. Only 6% or 15,000 pages of the documents have been classified as even secret, a level below top-secret. Another 40% were the lowest level, "confidential", while the rest were unclassified. In brief, it was not all that secret.[2]
Most of the revelations so far have been unspectacular. In Germany the revelations led to the removal of a prominent young FDP politician close to Guido Westerwelle who apparently liked to talk too much to his counterpart at the US Embassy. The revelations about Russian politics, that a US Embassy official refers to Putin and Medvedev as “Batman and Robin,” tells more about the cultural level of current US State Department personnel than it does about internal Russian politics.
But for anyone who has studied the craft of intelligence and of disinformation, a clear pattern emerges in the Wikileaks drama. The focus is put on select US geopolitical targets, appearing as Hillary Clinton put it “to justify US sanctions against Iran.” They claim North Korea with China’s granting of free passage to Korean ships despite US State Department pleas, send dangerous missiles to Iran. Saudi Arabia’s ailing King Abdullah reportedly called Iran’s President a Hitler.
Excuse to police the Internet?
What is emerging from all the sound and Wikileaks fury in Washington is that the entire scandal is serving to advance a long-standing Obama and Bush agenda of policing the until-now free Internet. Already the US Government has shut the Wikileaks server in the United States though no identifiable US law has been broken.
The process of policing the Web was well underway before the current leaks scandal. In 2009 Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller and Republican Olympia Snowe introduced the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (S.773). It would give the President unlimited power to disconnect private-sector computers from the internet. The bill "would allow the president to 'declare a cyber-security emergency' relating to 'non-governmental' computer networks and do what's necessary to respond to the threat." We can expect that now this controversial piece of legislation will get top priority when a new Republican House and the Senate convene in January.
The US Department of Homeland Security, an agency created in the political hysteria following 9/11 2001 that has been compared to the Gestapo, has already begun policing the Internet. They are quietly seizing and shutting down internet websites (web domains) without due process or a proper trial. DHS simply seizes web domains that it wants to and posts an ominous "Department of Justice" logo on the web site. See an example at http://torrent-finder.com. Over 75 websites were seized and shut in a recent week. Right now, their focus is websites that they claim "violate copyrights," yet the torrent-finder.com website that was seized by DHS contained no copyrighted content whatsoever. It was merely a search engine website that linked to destinations where people could access copyrighted content. Step by careful step freedom of speech can be taken away. Then what?


Notes


1. BBCNews, Siprnet: Where the leaked cables came from, 29 November, 2010, accessed in http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11863618

2. Ken Dilanian, Inside job: Stolen diplomatic cables show U.S. challenge of stopping authorized users, Los Angeles Times, November 29, 2010, accessed in http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sc-dc-1130-hackers-20101129,0,6716809.story

[Bernice Moore]

assange accuser i am a CIA Agent..


http://www.datelinezero.com/2010/12/10/w...cia-agent/

[Myra Bronstein]

Wikileaks: A Big Dangerous US Government Con Job

by F. William Engdahl


Global Research, December 10, 2010

The story on the surface makes for a script for a new Oliver Stone Hollywood thriller. ...

Good column with excellent questions. Thanks for posting it Ed.

[Peter Presland]

This thread is a doozy. Posts 373 and 374 from Jan and Ed above illustrate just how personally awkward this and similar issues can be. They are an object lesson in how to deal with such awkwardness in IMHO.

I read that Engdahl article yesterday on GS and agree; it makes for both uncomfortable and enlightening reading - induced cognitive dissonance I think is the approximate psycho term. I too keep all of Jan's possibilities on Assange open too

BTW - for info, I have now got a working mirror of the entire Wilileaks site up and running on Wikispooks: WikiSpooks Wikileaks mirror. That's well over 500 working mirrors now!

I was uncomfortable about using their form and giving WikiLeaks techies access to my server so I had to mount a DIY effort which was a bit of a struggle. I will refresh it to the latest release version this morning. Also, I intend altering the home page so that I can quickly point the various sections (Cablegate, Afghan Diaries, Iraq, collateral Murder etc), at the mirrors/archives of my choosing.

On a slightly ominous note, when I came to log on this morning I found the database server had crashed or at least was not running. It's NEVER done that before. There has been massive activity recorded in the logs but too soon to say if it was malicious yet.

[Peter Lemkin]

This thread is a doozy. Posts 373 and 374 from Jan and Ed above illustrate just how personally awkward this and similar issues can be. They are an object lesson in how to deal with such awkwardness in IMHO.

I read that Engdahl article yesterday on GS and agree; it makes for both uncomfortable and enlightening reading - induced cognitive dissonance I think is the approximate psycho term. I too keep all of Jan's possibilities on Assange open too

BTW - for info, I have now got a working mirror of the entire Wilileaks site up and running on Wikispooks: WikiSpooks Wikileaks mirror. That's well over 500 working mirrors now!

I was uncomfortable about using their form and giving WikiLeaks techies access to my server so I had to mount a DIY effort which was a bit of a struggle. I will refresh it to the latest release version this morning. Also, I intend altering the home page so that I can quickly point the various sections (Cablegate, Afghan Diaries, Iraq, collateral Murder etc), at the mirrors/archives of my choosing.

On a slightly ominous note, when I came to log on this morning I found the database server had crashed or at least was not running. It's NEVER done that before. There has been massive activity recorded in the logs but too soon to say if it was malicious yet.

Could well be malicious....it would be light work for the DIA or NSA computers to simultaneously do mischief to hundreds or even thousands of websites. Since they claim to be able to do denial of service and other ways of bringing down servers and sites en masse, if not universally, this is easy pickins. I think for now they don't want to have any such traced back to them...for now.mokin:

[Magda Hassan]

Good work there Peter! Some good friends of Deep Politics forum are also arranging a mirror site. Members here and visitors are welcome to contribute to it but I'll be sending out some PMs and emails for this also. There are over 1600 mirrors last time I looked. And it is all good.