WikiLeaks release to feature corruption among world leaders, governments

[D-Mack]

Re: WikiLeaks release to feature corruption among world leaders, governments

After the first US related data dump (Iraq war logs) it was US officials saying there was no news.

Fast forward and prior to this data dump, it was US officials warning about huge revelations and afterward calling for Assange's head on a stick. And the media ran wild with their warnings - just look at your post that started this thread.

To see this shift in spin is interesting.

Here's what we do know. There are things that we thought we know that have been confirmed, i.e. US bombings in Yemen, the waste of money in Afpak, the arab leaders wanting to bomb Iran, etc. Real journalists at press briefings can use this confirmation where as before these things could still be officially denied.

Also, this whole thing blows up any notion that the US can be trusted to protect the combined databases of information about the citizenry.

It's easy to say everyone knew these things already, but if that's the case, how do the same people and types of people keep getting elected in the US? I'm not the one that voted for Clinton, Bush, Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Hastert, Delay, etc. etc. etc., but I'm the sucker because I don't assume that wikileaks is phony? That doesn't fly.

I mean nobody takes the time to present interesting tidbits, what I see on the news even here in old Europe, is he or she is called so and so. That's it.

Yes this whole database contains probably false information among correct information. Is it just low level stuff and the real stuff collected by intelligence agencies, of whom the US probably has more than the alphabet, is well protected?

I doubt there is some real dangerous stuff in there, let's see what the next days bring.

According to data collated by German newspaper Der Spiegel, one of five media outlets granted access to the more than 250,000 documents obtained by WikiLeaks, the June cable is the only one sent from Ireland which is classified “secret NOFORN” meaning it should not be made accessible to non-US nationals. Cables classified as “top secret” are not included in the data leaked to WikiLeaks.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/...284434205.html

Happily, none of the cables released so far appear to have earned the "top secret" classification received for the most sensitive diplomatic secrets.

Read more: Between lines on WikiLeaks, some reassuring revelations | freep.com | Detroit Free Press http://www.freep.com/article/2010120...#ixzz16rgxGn6e

Siprnet: where America stores its secret cables

Defence department's hidden internet is meant to be secure, but millions of officials and soldiers have access





How did such an enormous electronic database come into existence and then apparently be so easily leaked? The answer lies in the tag "Sipdis" which appears on the string of address codes heading each cable.
It stands for Siprnet Distribution. Siprnet is itself an acronym, for Secret Internet Protocol Router Network. Siprnet was designed to solve the chronic problem of big bureaucracies – how to share information easily and confidentially among large numbers of people spread around the world. Siprnet is a worldwide US military internet system, kept separate from the ordinary civilian internet and run by the defence department in Washington.


An internal guide for state department staff advises them to use the "Sipdis" designation only for "reporting and other informational messages deemed appropriate for release to the US government interagency community." The guide specifies a number of other channels for even more sensitive material including Nodis, Exdis, Roger and the Docklamp Channel (for communication between defence attaches and the Defence Intelligence Agency), and by now the vast majority of US missions worldwide are linked to the system.
This means that a diplomatic dispatch marked Sipdis is automatically downloaded on to its embassy's classified website. From there it can be accessed not only by anyone in the state department, but also by anyone in the US military who has a computer connected to Siprnet. Millions of US soldiers and officials have "secret" security clearance. The US general accounting office identified 3,067,000 people cleared to "secret" and above in a 1993 study. Since then, the size of the security establishment has grown appreciably. Another GAO report in May 2009 said: "Following the terrorist attacks on September 11 2001 the nation's defence and intelligence needs grew, prompting increased demand for personnel with security clearances." A state department spokesman today refused to say exactly how many people had access to Siprnet.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010...-secret-cables

[dbarberic]

Re: WikiLeaks release to feature corruption among world leaders, governments

Hmmm....

CNET
July 20, 2010 1:40 PM PDT
Wikileaks' estranged co-founder becomes a critic (Q&A)

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20...#ixzz16sDF8VJ5

NEW YORK--John Young was one of Wikileaks' early founders. Now he's one of the organization's more prominent critics.
Young, a 74-year-old architect who lives in Manhattan, publishes a document-leaking Web site called Cryptome.org that predates Wikileaks by over a decade. He's drawn fire from Microsoft after posting leaked internal documents about police requests, irked the U.K. government for disclosing the names of possible spies, and annoyed Homeland Security by disclosing a review of Democratic National Convention security measures.

Cryptome's history of publicizing leaks--while not yielding to pressure to remove them--is what led Young to be invited to join Wikileaks before its launch over three years ago. He also agreed to be the public face of the organization by listing his name on the domain name registration.

Operating a Web site to post leaked documents isn't very expensive (Young estimates he spends a little over $100 a month for Cryptome's server space). So when other Wikileaks founders started to talk about the need to raise $5 million and complained that an initial round of publicity had affected "our delicate negotiations with the Open Society Institute and other funding bodies," Young says, he resigned from the effort.

In the last few weeks, after the arrest of Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning cast a brighter spotlight on Wikileaks, Young has been trying to trace Wikileaks' money flows. On July 17, Wikileaks asked supporters for $200,000 to pay for Mannings' attorneys, even though co-founder Julian Assange said a few days earlier that the organization had already raised $1 million.

CNET caught up with Young at the Next HOPE hacker conference here last weekend, where he was attending the Wikileaks keynote speech. Following is a transcript made from a recorded interview with Young, lightly edited for space.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q: How many hours a day or days a week do you spend on Cryptome?
Young: Well, it varies. When I'm doing professional practice work, it's very little. I just answer e-mail and when something hot comes in, I'll put it up. Most of my time is spent on my architectural practice. So I do Cryptome between when I have time to get to it. It's by no means a full-time activity.

What you're doing sounds a lot like what Wikileaks is doing, no?
Young: Only superficially, Declan, because, and we can talk more about this, I initially thought that was what they were going to be doing when I first agreed to participate. But it became clear right away that they were going to set up an operation with multiple people involved. So the first difference is that I don't run an operation. I don't have any people working on this. This is strictly--and I like the term myself, but other people hate it--it's strictly an amateur version.
It's not like Wikileaks and their grand goals. I've never had any desire to overturn governments or do any of these noble things that they want to do. Or jack up journalism. This was just a way to get certain kinds of documents out to the public.
And so when they explained the amount of money they were going to try to raise, that was the basis for parting company with them. I thought it was going to be more like Cryptome, which is a collective of people contributing their time to it and not a centralized operation raising lots of money. Cryptome is not into that kind of thing. We parted company at that point. We're still not like Wikileaks in that we don't do any promotional work for our activities.

Who were the other Wikileaks founders?
Young: I'm not going to talk about those. I'll say Julian (Assange) was clearly there. I elected to conceal those names when I published these messages. And I think it's basically a violation of Cryptome's policy--to publish the names of people who do not want to be identified.

You had a falling-out with the other Wikileaks founders?
Young: Yes. But it was over this: someone said that the initial goal was $5 million. That caught my attention. One, because I think the type of stuff I was going to publish, you should never do it for money. Only because that contaminates the credibility and it turns it into a business opportunity where there's great treachery and lying going on.
And it will contaminate Wikileaks. It always does. In fact, that's the principal means by which noble endeavors are contaminated, the money trail. That's pretty obvious. I happen to think that amateur stuff is better than paid stuff.

How long were you involved before you resigned?
Young: Not long. A few weeks. It wasn't long. However, one of the things that happened is that somehow I got subscribed to that list under another nym and the messages kept coming in. I got to keep reading what they were saying about me after they booted me off. The messages kept coming in. So I published those too.

Did they criticize you for, well, leaking about Wikileaks?
Young: They certainly did. They accused me of being an old fart and jealous. And all these things that come up, that typically happen when someone doesn't like you. That's okay. I know you would never do that and journalists never do that, but ordinary people do this all the time.

Because journalism is a noble profession in all its guises?
Young: That's right. And there's no back-biting there.

Over the years you've been running Cryptome, you've had some encounters with federal agencies. What visits did you have and what were the agents concerned about?
Young: They were most concerned that we published lists. The names of spies. That was the first issue that brought us to their attention. There was a request, so we were told, from one of the British intelligence people to have that list removed.
And did you remove it?
Young: No. And not only that, but the FBI was always very polite. They said you've done nothing illegal, we're not pursuing a criminal investigation. These are just courtesies we're offering other governments. We had one with the Brits and one with the Japanese that brought them to our door.

You had no other interaction with, say, Homeland Security?
Young: The other was when we started our eyeball series of publishing photos. That brought one visit and one phone call. But again, they were polite and said there's nothing illegal about this. They never used a negative term. They just said the issue has been raised with us.
And by the way, I did a FOIA trying to get records of these visits, but I could never find anything. I did get business cards, though, and I asked for ID. They were very polite and gave me business cards and I published all that. They asked me not to publish their names. But what the hell, Declan, what else do I have to go with?

So if you've been publishing sensitive government information for so long, why have you not had the same encounters that Wikileaks has had? [Ed. Note: Wikileaks has claimed its representatives have been harassed by U.S. government agents.]
I don't think they've had any encounters. That's bogus. But that's okay. I know a lot of people who talk about how the government's after them. It's a fairly well-worn path. You know it from your own field. It remains to be seen whether any of this stuff holds up or not.
One of the tests is: unless you go to jail, it's all bogus. When I go to jail, you'll say he actually did it, finally. He came up with something that offended someone. So far that hasn't happened, no indictments or anything. These polite visits are the closest I've come.
Professionals are going to have nothing to do with Wikileaks, as you probably know if you check around. People who know security will not have anything to do with Wikileaks. But the public will.

Wikileaks pledges to maintain the confidentiality of sources and stressed that in the presentation over the weekend. Do you offer your contributors the same guarantee?
Young: No. That's just a pitch. You cannot provide any security over the Internet, much less any other form of communication. We actually post periodically warnings not to trust our site. Don't believe us. We offer no protection. You're strictly on your own.
We also say don't trust anyone who offers you protection, whether it's the U.S. government or anybody else. That's a story they put out. It's repeated to people who are a little nervous. They think they can always find someone to protect them. No, you can't. You've got to protect yourself. You know where I learned that? From the cypherpunks.

So Wikileaks cannot protect people. It's so leaky. It's unbelievable how leaky it is as far as security goes. But they do have a lot of smoke blowing on their site. Page after page after page about how they're going to protect you.
And I say, oh-oh. That's over-promising. The very over-promising is an indication that it doesn't work. And we know that from watching the field of intelligence and how governments operate. When they over-promise, you know they're hiding something. People who are really trustworthy do not go around broadcasting how trustworthy I am.

It sounds like you've become more critical of Wikileaks over time.
Young: It's not just them. It's also that they're behaving like untrustworthy organizations. So yes, if the shoe fits, fine.
I don't want to limit this to Wikileaks, but yes, they're acting like a cult. They're acting like a religion. They're acting like a government. They're acting like a bunch of spies. They're hiding their identity. They don't account for the money. They promise all sorts of good things. They seldom let you know what they're really up to. They have rituals and all sorts of wonderful stuff. So I admire them for their showmanship and their entertainment value. But I certainly would not trust them with information if it had any value, or if it put me at risk or anyone that I cared about at risk.
Nevertheless, it's a fascinating development that's come along, to monetize this kind of thing. That's what they're up to. You start with free samples.

You've been trying to follow some of Wikileaks' money flows. You contacted the German charity and posted their response. They said they're going to have some information to you perhaps in early August. Does that make you feel any better about the money trail?
Young: No. To clarify, they're going to publish it on their Web site. They said, "you could mirror it or point to it." So it's not just for me.
But it's only a tiny sliver of what Wikileaks claims it's raised. whether Wikileaks has raised a million dollars as they've claimed, or whether they're trying to prime the pump, I don't know. (German charity) Wal Holland has only handled a very tiny amount of this, and they've said that, "We know nothing about the rest."
I notice that Wikileaks is touting the revelation that's going to come. But it doesn't fit the claims that Wikileaks is making about how much it's raised. There's nothing wrong with that. People exaggerate all the time for effect. So back to why I admire Wikileaks: they've got chutzpah.

What do you think of Wikileaks' spat with Adrian Lamo? You've been publishing some of the correspondence.
Young: None of the stuff that Lamo has made available has been verified. Early on, I said chat logs can be forged, you can make this stuff up. So far there's nothing of substance here. It's a story that's being played. I'm not seeing any credible information that this story has any substance at all other than as a story.
It's being treated almost as if there's something of substance here because the chat logs have come out. But I've not seen any verification. And chat logs are notoriously (easy to) forge by authorities and other people, as with other digital stuff. So I don't know whether there's anything to this or not. But I'm following it because it's kind of a test of how gullible people can be with a good story. And all frauds work that way.
And I think Wikileaks is wary too. I think they're not sure that anything's actually happened here or if they're not being sucked into a trap.
The kind of sacred character of these chat logs is weird. I don't know why anyone believes these have any genuine quality at all, just because Lamo allegedly handed them over.
I saw the two e-mail messages that you sent to Adrian Lamo. Have you received a response to your questions? [Ed. Note: Lamo, an ex-hacker, says he tipped off authorities that Manning was leaking classified information.]
Young: Not yet, no. I don't know if I will. But those are questions I would have liked to have asked at (Sunday afternoon's) panel. Except there was no time.
There's lots of interesting things going on if this is a genuine investigation. And since Lamo said (he would be) transparent so everyone would know what was happening, well, I happen to believe the whole legal thing should be transparent too. That was the basis of my questions.
If you want to get transparent, really get transparent. And don't let the feds tell you what you can and cannot do. There are some interesting issues here because the feds don't want this stuff to become public and yet they haven't kept him from talking. So let's see how far he goes. We'd all like to know more about how this is actually working.

There was suspicion from day one that this was entrapment run by someone unknown to suck a number of people into a trap. So we actually don't know. But it's certainly a standard counterintelligence technique. And they're usually pretty elaborate and pretty carefully run. They'll even prosecute people as part of the cover story. That actually was talked about at (Sunday's) panel. They'll try to conceal who was informing and betraying others by pretending to prosecute them.

How do you expect this affair to resolve itself? Do you expect Manning to be sentenced to a significant prison term?
Young: I don't think so. Based on what I have seen so far, and these so-called State Department cables, as someone said on (Sunday's) panel, does anyone know if they actually exist? The answer is no. Nobody knows if these exist or not. The videos are not terribly incriminating. The cables seem to be what's being plumped as a crucial thing, but we don't know if they exist or not.

[renewable]

Re: WikiLeaks release to feature corruption among world leaders, governments

http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/Wor...01012115844381

WikiLeaks is back online after Amazon stopped hosting the website which posted thousands of US government documents this week.

WikiLeaks had taken up residence on Amazon's self-service web servers at the weekend after internet-based attacks against its Swedish host, Bahnhof.

WikiLeaks said on Twitter: "WikiLeaks servers at Amazon ousted.

"It was kicked off the Amazon servers at the request of Senator Joe Lieberman.

"The issue, for me is how come it took the Americans so long to figure out WikiLeaks was being hosted in their own country and by Amazon no less. That seems extraordinary."

Amazon.com would not comment on its relationship with WikiLeaks.

[Slimprofits]

Re: WikiLeaks release to feature corruption among world leaders, governments

WikiLeaks to target Mexico, narcotics

By Diana Washington Valdez \ El Paso Times
Posted: 11/30/2010 12:00:00 AM MST



WikiLeaks, a whistleblowing online site, obtained 2,836 U.S. documents related to Mexico and 8,324 documents related to narcotics -- both areas of great interest to the border region.


However, the public will have to wait to learn what most of those cables contain because WikiLeaks does not plan to release all 251,287 of its leaked documents at once.


http://www.elpasotimes.com/news/ci_1...ce=most_viewed

[Slimprofits]

Re: WikiLeaks release to feature corruption among world leaders, governments

Glenn Greenwald:

Joe Lieberman and whole host of others emulate Chinese dictators on wikileaks

If there's Nothing New in these documents, can Jonathan Capehart (or any other "journalist" claiming this) please point to where The Washington Post previously reported on these facts, all revealed by the WikiLeaks disclosures:

(1) the U.S. military formally adopted a policy of turning a blind eye to systematic, pervasive torture and other abuses by Iraqi forces;
(2) the State Department threatened Germany not to criminally investigate the CIA's kidnapping of one of its citizens who turned out to be completely innocent;
(3) the State Department under Bush and Obama applied continuous pressure on the Spanish Government to suppress investigations of the CIA's torture of its citizens and the 2003 killing of a Spanish photojournalist when the U.S. military fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad (see The Philadelphia Inquirer's Will Bunch today about this: "The day Barack Obama Lied to me");
(4) the British Government privately promised to shield Bush officials from embarrassment as part of its Iraq War "investigation";
(5) there were at least 15,000 people killed in Iraq that were previously uncounted;
(6) "American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world" about the Iraq war as it was prosecuted, a conclusion the Post's own former Baghdad Bureau Chief wrote was proven by the WikiLeaks documents;
(7) the U.S.'s own Ambassador concluded that the July, 2009 removal of the Honduran President was illegal -- a coup -- but the State Department did not want to conclude that and thus ignored it until it was too late to matter;
(8) U.S. and British officials colluded to allow the U.S. to keep cluster bombs on British soil even though Britain had signed the treaty banning such weapons, and,
(9) Hillary Clinton's State Department ordered diplomats to collect passwords, emails, and biometric data on U.N. and other foreign officials, almost certainly in violation of the Vienna Treaty of 1961.

That's just a sampling.


This is what Joe Lieberman and his comrades are desperately trying to suppress -- literally prevent it from being accessible on the Internet. And "journalists" like Capehart play along by continuing to insist there's "nothing new" being revealed by WikiLeaks despite their never having reported any of this. And since the disclosures, does anyone believe that any of these revelations have received anything close to meaningful attention by the American establishment media? But remember -- as Capehart's newspaper taught us today -- "revelations by the organization WikiLeaks have received blanket coverage this week on television, in newspapers" in Free America -- showing what a Vibrant, Adversarial Press we are blessed with -- but "in many Arab countries, the mainstream media have largely avoided reporting on the sensitive contents of the cables."

[don]

Re: WikiLeaks release to feature corruption among world leaders, governments

Not a bad summary of the latest...


Amazon Drops WikiLeaks on Request of Sen. Lieberman; Lie of the Day from Hillary Clinton; How NOT to Stop Leaks; Why we have Leaks



WikiLeaks just gave Senator Joe Lieberman, Amazon, and the Department of Homeland Security what I consider to be a well deserved finger. Amazon dropped WikiLeaks from its servers but is now back up on servers in Sweden at http://www.wikileaks.org/

Let's tie this all together starting with the Wall Street Journal Report WikiLeaks Site Kicked Off Amazon Servers

Amazon.com Inc. has stopped hosting WikiLeaks from its Web servers, prompting the controversial group to move its website to a European provider.

Wikileaks said in a Twitter message that it had been "ousted" by the Seattle company, which sells Web services and storage in addition to being an online retailer.

In its message, Wikileaks said its money is "now spent to employ people in Europe." The organization recently released a trove of sensitive U.S. State Department documents, and turned to Amazon's Web services after it claimed its servers in Sweden were targeted by computer attacks.

White House Seeks New Ways to Hide Damaging Data

Political HotSheet reports White House Moves to Change Classified Information Procedures in Response to WikiLeaks

President Obama's national security team is coordinating new interagency efforts to review and improve the way the government handles classified information, in the wake of the latest WikiLeaks release of secret information.

The White House announced today that Russell Travers, a deputy director at the National Counterterrorism Center, will lead a comprehensive effort to identify and develop the structural reforms needed to prevent future leaks.

The State Department and Defense Department are also conducting their own security reviews.

Meanwhile, Congress is set to pass whistle-blowing legislation to help government employees report corruption or mismanagement so they do not feel compelled to turn over secret information to outside groups like WikiLeaks. The Senate is expected to pass the bill this week, followed by the House.

Whistle-Blower Bill Gains Steam

The response from the administration is not to crack down on abuses but rather to provide new ways of ignoring abuses.

Just ask yourself, has anyone outside of Bernie Madoff ever been prosecuted, fired, or even reprimanded over fraud, torture, kickbacks, or anything else? Here's the bonus-point followup question: How many times did the SEC fail to act on information that proved Bernie Madoff was a crook?

The answer to those questions help explain this pathetic response: After WikiLeaks, Whistle-Blower Bill Gains Steam

Following the latest baring of U.S. secrets on the Internet, Congress is poised to pass legislation giving employees in the most sensitive government jobs a way to report corruption, waste and mismanagement without turning to outside organizations like WikiLeaks.

President Barack Obama is expected to sign the bill, which supporters say will discourage leaks of classified information. The legislation would allow intelligence agency whistle-blowers to raise concerns within their agencies instead of giving classified materials to WikiLeaks or other outlets, which is illegal.

Without protections spelled out in law, whistle-blowers risk being fired or demoted for informing their chains of command about misconduct, according to Tom Devine, legal director at the Government Accountability Project. That leaves no alternative to anonymous - and potentially damaging - leaks unless whistle-blowers are willing to jeopardize their careers, he said.

Anyone who believes that propaganda has holes in the head. The WhiteHouse is not interested in acting on anything, the WhiteHouse is interested in stopping leaks.

So now we will get legislation that will allow whistle-blowers to submit reports to some undefined administration hack who will promptly throw the whistles into the ashcan.

Lie of the Day from Hillary Clinton

Inquiring minds are reading a statement from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that WikiLeaks Won't Hurt U.S. Diplomacy

The recent leak of thousands of sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables will have no adverse effect on America's international relations, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton declared Wednesday at a security summit.

"I have certainly raised the issue of the leaks in order to assure our colleagues that it will not in any way interfere with American diplomacy or our commitment to continuing important work that is ongoing," Clinton said.

"I have not any had any concerns expressed about whether any nation will not continue to work with and discuss matters of importance to us both going forward," she added.

"I anticipate that there will be a lot of questions that people have every right and reason to ask, and we stand ready to discuss them at any time with our counterparts around the world," Clinton added.

Series of Lies

How's that for a series of lies? If people have every right to ask questions, how the hell can questions be asked if the US government classifies everything it does not want anyone to know?

The US has no interest in discussing waterboarding, torture, the killing of innocent civilians with our allies or anyone else. The US wants to and is going to do everything it can to suppress that information.

If WikiLeaks has damaging information about Bank of America, we should all want to see it. We should all stand up for the rights to make that data public, not sweep it under the rug.

We do not have a Department of Homeland Security, we have a Department of Homeland Insecurity putting on a pathetic parade of pomp with full body scanners and pat downs that will not do a damn thing.

Why We Have Leaks

No one has bothered to tackle the question why we have security problems and leaks.

I will tell you why: The US has troops in 140 countries around the world, we arrogantly go where we have no vested interest going, we support corrupt regimes when it suits our purposes, we follow the asinine creed "the enemy of our enemy is our friend", and we believe we - and we alone - act as the moral authority to be the world's policeman.

When you do that you make enemies. When you make enemies you create security problems.

Instead of addressing WHY we make enemies, we setup sham terrorist organizations like the Department of Homeland Security whose efforts make us less secure.

Running List of Needed Criminal Investigations

Instead of addressing fundamental problems we want to stop leaks.

I will tell you how to stop leaks: Don't do stupid things! Stop trying to be the world's policeman. Prosecute fraud.

I have a running list of things we have ignored in FDIC Authorizes $1 Billion Lawsuits Against Failed-Bank Executives; Token Search for Low-Profile Scapegoats

It's time to update my rolling list of who should be criminally indicted and why.

April 29, 2010: Barofsky Threatens Criminal Charges in AIG Coverup, Goldman Sachs Abacus Deal, TARP Insider Trading; New York Fed Implicated

April 16, 2010: Rant of the Day: No Ethics, No Fiduciary Responsibility, No Separation of Duty; Complete Ethics Overhaul Needed

March 2, 2010: Geithner's Illegal Money-Laundering Scheme Exposed; Harry Markopolos Says “Don’t Trust Your Government”

January 31, 2010: 77 Fraud, Money Laundering, Insider Trading, and Tax Evasion Investigations Underway Regarding TARP

January 28, 2010: Secret Deals Involving No One; AIG Coverup Conspiracy Unravels

January 26, 2010: Questions Geithner Cannot Escape

January 07, 2010: Time To Indict Geithner For Securities Fraud

October 20, 2009: Bernanke Guilty of Coercion and Market Manipulation

July 17, 2009: Paulson Admits Coercion; Where are the Indictments?

June 26, 2009: Bernanke Suffers From Selective Memory Loss; Paulson Calls Bank of America "Turd in the Punchbowl"

April 24, 2009: Let the Criminal Indictments Begin: Paulson, Bernanke, Lewis

How NOT to Stop Leaks

Fools like Lieberman think we can stop leaks by legislation. We can't. We can only stop leaks by fostering an attitude from the top that will prosecute fraud and corruption instead of looking for scapegoats, and instead of pursuing policeman policies that "the end justifies the means"

President Obama is a blatant liar. He promised to release details of US torture of prisoners. He failed to do so. I praise WikiLeaks or anyone else who is willing to disclose the hypocrisy of this president and this administration.

I am not a Republican. I am an independent. I praise WikiLeaks or anyone else who is willing to disclose the hypocrisy of Republicans as well.

I fear for our country and the path it is taking.

We need to elect someone willing to stand up TO the banks, stand up TO our bloated military, stand up TO public unions, and stand FOR less government spending, stand FOR prosecuting fraud wherever it takes, stand FOR smaller government.

President Obama is not that person, nor was President Bush. We need a Ron Paul, or someone like him, willing to do what is needed before we destroy ourselves.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

[dbarberic]

Re: WikiLeaks release to feature corruption among world leaders, governments

Time - WikiLeaks Shows the Skills of US Diplomats

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/08599203428400

The WikiLeak documents, by contrast, show Washington pursuing privately pretty much the policies it has articulated publicly. Whether on Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan or North Korea, the cables confirm what we know to be U.S. foreign policy. And often this foreign policy is concerned with broader regional security, not narrow American interests. Ambassadors are not caught pushing other countries in order to make deals secretly to strengthen the U.S., but rather to solve festering problems.
The cables also show an American diplomatic establishment that is pretty good at analysis. The British scholar Timothy Garton Ash concurs, writing in the Guardian, "My personal opinion of the State Department has gone up several notches. [W]hat we find here is often first-rate." It is also often well wrought.

.....

If we're looking for bad government policies, perhaps the place to look is not in the cables but in the new data-sharing craze. The leaks are, in some ways, an unintended consequence of Washington's finally getting its information act together. For more than a decade, one often heard complaints that the U.S. government was a dinosaur in the information age. The 9/11 commission charged that various departments' computer systems could not share information. Well, the government solved that problem, allowing Defense Department computers to reach into the foreign service's cable traffic.

Blah, blah, blah: our diplomats are highly skilled, care about the interests of all, our ananlysis to top notch, and our computer systems are now more sophisticated because they can share data.

[don]

Re: WikiLeaks release to feature corruption among world leaders, governments

Blah, blah, blah: our diplomats are highly skilled, care about the interests of all, our ananlysis to top notch, and our computer systems are now more sophisticated because they can share data.

no question about it....

[LorenS]

Re: WikiLeaks release to feature corruption among world leaders, governments

If you haven't done anything wrong you have nothing to fear.

[Southernguy]

Re: WikiLeaks release to feature corruption among world leaders, governments

Wikilleaks force some press to lie......
And a small piece of advice: try to find some time and read de actual cables.....they´re very, very interesting and illustrating.
Documents Show NYT and Washington Post Shilling for US Government on Iran Missile "Threat"

Wikileaks Exposes Complicity of the Press

By GARETH PORTER
A diplomatic cable from last February released by Wikileaks provides a detailed account of how Russian specialists on the Iranian ballistic missile program refuted the U.S. suggestion that Iran has missiles that could target European capitals or intends to develop such a capability.
In fact, the Russians challenged the very existence of the mystery missile the U.S. claims Iran acquired from North Korea.
But readers of the two leading U.S. newspapers never learned those key facts about the document.
The New York Times and Washington Post reported only that the United States believed Iran had acquired such missiles - supposedly called the BM-25 - from North Korea. Neither newspaper reported the detailed Russian refutation of the U.S. view on the issue or the lack of hard evidence for the BM-25 from the U.S. side.
The Times, which had obtained the diplomatic cables not from Wikileaks but from The Guardian, according to a Washington Post story Monday, did not publish the text of the cable.
The Times story said the newspaper had made the decision not to publish "at the request of the Obama administration". That meant that its readers could not compare the highly- distorted account of the document in the Times story against the original document without searching the Wikileaks website.
As a result, a key Wikileaks document which should have resulted in stories calling into question the thrust of the Obama administration's ballistic missile defense policy in Europe based on an alleged Iranian missile threat has instead produced a spate of stories buttressing anti-Iran hysteria.
The full text of the U.S. State Department report on the meeting of the Joint Threat Assessment in Washington Dec. 22, 2009, which is available on the Wikileaks website, shows that there was a dramatic confrontation over the issue of the mysterious BM-25 missile.
The BM-25 has been described as a surface-to-surface missile based on a now-obsolete Soviet submarine-launched ballistic missile, the R-27 or SS-N-6. The purported missile is said to be capable of reaching ranges of 2,400 to 4,000 km – putting much of Europe within its range.
The head of the U.S. delegation to the meeting, Vann H. Van Diepen, acting assistant secretary for international security and nonproliferation, said the United States "believes" Iran had acquired 19 of those missiles from North Korea, according to the leaked document.
But an official of the Russian Defense Ministry dismissed published reports of such a missile, which he said were "without reference to any reliable sources".
He observed that there had never been a test of such a missile in either North Korea or Iran, and that the Russian government was "unaware that the missile had ever been seen". The Russians asked the U.S. side for any evidence of the existence of such a missile.
U.S. officials did not claim to have photographic or other hard evidence of the missile, but said the North Koreans had paraded the missile through the streets of Pyongyong. The Russians responded that they had reviewed a video of that parade, and had found that it was an entirely different missile.
The Russian official said there was no evidence for claims that 19 of these missiles had been shipped to Iran in 2005, and that it would have been impossible to conceal such a transfer. The Russians also said it was difficult to believe Iran would have purchased a missile system that had never even been tested.
U.S. delegation chief Van Dieppen cited one piece of circumstantial evidence that Iran had done work on the "steering (vernier) engines" of the BM-25. Internet photos of the weld lines and tank volumes on the second stage of Iran's space launch vehicle, the Safir, he said, show that the ratio of oxidizer to propellant is not consistent with the propellants used in the past by the Shahab-3.
That suggests that the Safir was using the same system that had been used in the R-27, according to Van Dieppen.
The Russians asserted, however, that the propellant used in the Safir was not the one used in the R-27.
Even more important evidence from the Safir launch that Iran does not have any BM-25 missiles was noted in an authoritative study of the Iranian missile program published by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) last May.
The study found that Iran had not used the main engine associated with the purported BM-25 to help boost its Safir space-launch vehicle.
If Iran had indeed possessed the more powerful engine associated with the original Russian R-27, the study observes, the Safir would have been able to launch a much larger satellite into orbit. But in fact the Safir was "clearly underpowered" and barely able to put its 27 kg satellite into low earth orbit, according to the IISS study.
The same study also points out that the original R-27 was designed to operate in a submarine launch tube, and a road- mobile variant would require major structural modifications. Yet another reason for doubt reported by IISS is that the propellant combination in the R-27 would not work in a land- mobile missile, because "the oxidizer must be maintained within a narrow temperature range".
Van Diepen suggested two other Iranian options: use of the Shahab-3 technology with "clustered or stacked engines" or the development of a solid-propellant MRBM with a more powerful engine.
The Russians expressed strong doubts about both options, however, saying they were sceptical of Iranian claims to have a missile with a 2,000 km range. They pointed out that the longest range on a missile tested thus far is 1,700 km, and that it was achieved only by significantly reducing throw weight.
Van Diepen cited "modeling" studies that showed Iran could achieve a greater range, and that adding an additional 300 km "is not a great technological stretch". But the Russian delegation insisted that the additional length of the flight could cause various parts of the missile to burn through and missile could fall apart.
The head of the Russian delegation, Valimir Nazarov, deputy secretary of the Russian Security Council, said Russia believes any assessment of the Iranian missile program must be based not only on modeling but on "consideration of the real technical barriers faced by Iran".
One of several such barriers cited by the Russians was the lack of the "structural materials" needed for longer-range missiles that could threaten the United States or Russia, such as "high quality aluminum".
The Russians maintained that, even assuming favorable conditions, Iran would be able to begin a program to develop ballistic missiles that could reach Central Europe or Moscow only after 2015 at the earliest.
The Russians denied, however, that Iran has such an intention, arguing that its ballistic missile program continues to be directed toward "regional concerns" – meaning deterring an attack on Iran by Israel.
The U.S. delegation never addressed the issue of Iranian intentions – a position consistent with the dominant role of weapons specialists in the U.S. intelligence community's assessments of Iran and their overwhelming focus on capabilities and lack of interest in intentions.
Michael Elleman, the senior author of the IISS study of the Iranian missile programme, told me the report of the U.S.- Russian exchange highlights the differences in the two countries' approaches to the subject. "The Russians talked about the most likely set of outcomes," said Elleman, "whereas the U.S. side focused on what might happen."
*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.
Full text of the U.S. State Department report on the meeting of the Joint Threat Assessment in Washington Dec. 22, 2009

[don]

Re: WikiLeaks release to feature corruption among world leaders, governments

The job of the MSM is to deflect and turn these leaks to whatever advantage they can concocted.

[Slimprofits]

Re: WikiLeaks release to feature corruption among world leaders, governments

Look at how the NYT and WaPo reporting of the cable has been used.

It's fuel for both the "bomb iran camp" and for the "wikileaks is a front for the bomb Iran camp".

This is just fascinating to watch...

[don]

Re: WikiLeaks release to feature corruption among world leaders, governments

I posted this on both threads. It's relevant to both...

The temptation to see WikiLeaks as a neo-Baudelairean artificial paradise - the marriage of libertarian anarchism and cyber-knowledge - could not be more seductive. Now no more than 40 people are helping founder Julian Assange, plus 800 from the outside.

All this with a 200,000 euro (US$264,000) annual budget - and a nomad home base.

The book of sand

Let's examine Assange's crime. Here he is, in his own words, in "State and Terrorist Conspiracies":

To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us, and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not. Firstly we must understand what aspect of government or neo-corporatist behavior we wish to change or remove. Secondly we must develop a way of thinking about this behavior that is strong enough to carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity. Finally we must use these insights to inspire within us and others a course of ennobling, and effective action.

So Assange understands WikiLeaks as an anti-virus that should guide our navigation across the distortion of political language. If language is a virus from outer space, as William Naked Lunch Burroughs put it, WikiLeaks should be the antidote. Assange basically believes that the (cumulative) revelation of secrets will lead to the production of no future secrets. It's an anarchic/romantic/utopian vision.

It's vital to remember that Assange configures the US essentially as a huge authoritarian conspiracy. American political activist Noam Chomsky would say the same thing (and they wouldn't want to arrest him for it). The difference is that Assange deploys a combat strategy: he aims to corrode the ability of the system to conspire. That's where the metaphor of the computer network fits in. Assange wants to fight the power of the system, treating it as a computer choking in the desert sands. Were he alive, it would be smashing to see the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges penning a short story about this.

On top of writing his own "Book of Sand", Assange is also counter-attacking the Pentagon's counter-insurgency doctrine. He's not in "tracking-the-Taliban-and taking-them-out" mode. This is just a detail. If the conspiracy is an electronic network - let's say, the (foreign policy) Matrix - what he wants is to strike at its cognitive ability by debasing the quality of the information.

Here intervenes another crucial element. The ability of the conspiracy to deceive everyone through massive propaganda is equivalent to the conspiracy's penchant for deceiving itself through its own propaganda.

That's how we get to the Assange strategy of deploying a tsunami of leaks as a key actor/vector in the informational landscape. And that takes us to another crucial point: it doesn't matter whether these leaks are new, gossip or wishful thinking (as long as they are authentic). The - very ambitious - mother idea is to undermine the system of information and thus "force the computer to crash", making the conspiracy turn against itself in self-defense. WikiLeaks believes we can only destroy a conspiracy by rendering it hallucinatory and paranoid in relation to itself.

All this also takes us farther into crucial territory. The bulk of the cablegate-inspired global-talk-show tsunami has totally missed the point. Once again, it doesn't matter that most cables are gossip - trashy tabloid stuff. See it as Assange's way of illustrating how the conspiracy works. He is not interested in journalistic scoops (as much as his media partners, from the Guardian to Der Spiegel may be); what he wants is to strangle the nodes that make the conspiracy possible - to render the system "dumb and dumber".

No doubt cablegate shows how the US State Department seems to be in dumb-and-dumber territory - not even creative enough to do their own versions of "pimp my cable". This is already an extraordinary victory for an organization different from anything we have seen so far, which is doing things that journalists do or should be doing, and then some. And there will be more, on a major bank's secrets (probably Bank of America), on China's secrets, on Russia's secrets.

Mirror, mirror on the net

The US government and most of corporate media predictably rolled out their defense mechanism, as in "there's nothing new in these cables". Some might have suspected that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had ordered American diplomats to spy on their colleagues at the United Nations. Another thing entirely is to have an official cable confirmation. If UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was not such a wimp, he would be throwing a monumental diplomatic fit by now.

And then, at the same time, the US government and virtually the whole establishment - from neo-conservatives to Obama-light practitioners - want to pull out all stops to delete WikiLeaks or, even take out Assange, as George W Bush wanted to do with bin Laden. Grizzly nutjob Sarah Palin says Assange is worse than al-Qaeda. Such hysteria lead an Atlanta radio station to ask listeners whether Assange should be executed or imprisoned (no third option; execution won). Redneck Baptist priest Mike Huckabee, who might have been the Republican contender for president in 2008 and is now a talk-show fixture, goes for execution as well.

Who to believe? These freaks, or two frustrated US federal investigators who told the Los Angeles Times that if WikiLeaks had been active in 2001, it would have prevented 9/11?

French philosophers avid to escape their own irrelevancy foment conspiracy theories, lamenting that WikiLeaks gives the media unprecedented powers; other blame the Internet ogre for gobbling up journalists. That's the beauty of the leaks - this is the stuff conspiracies are made of.

Under this framework it is very enlightening to listen to what eminent Cold Warrior Zbigniew Brzezinski has to say. He told the US Public Broadcasting Service that cablegate is "seeded" with "surprisingly pointed" information, and that "seeding" is too easy to accomplish.

Example: those cables saying that the Chinese are inclined to cooperate with the US in view of a possible Korean unification under the aegis of South Korea (I debunk this in my previous article, See TheNaked Emperor.

Dr Zbig says that WikiLeaks may have been manipulated by intelligence services with "very specific objectives". They could be, as he hints, internal US elements who want to embarass the Barack Obama administration. But he also suspects "foreign elements". In this case, the first on the list would be none other than the state of Israel.

As conspiracy theories go, this one is a cracker; could WikiLeaks be the head of a real invisible "snake" - a massive Israeli disinformation campaign? Evidence would include cables seriously compromising the US-Turkey relationship; the cumulative cables painting a picture of a Sunni Arab-wide consensus for attacking Iran; and the fact that the cables reveal nothing that demonstrates how Israel has jeopardized US interests in the Middle East over and over again.

In an interview with American talk show host Larry King, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin went Dr Zbig one better and said this was in fact a manipulation - the cables as a deliberate plot to discredit Russia (this was before Russia clinched the 2018 World Cup; now everyone is drowning in torrents of Stoli and no one gives a damn about cables anymore). Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad said virtually the same thing regarding Iran.


And then there's the conspiracy that didn't happen: how come the Pentagon, for all its ultra-high tech-savvy ways, has not been willing, or able, to completely shut down WikiLeaks?

There's thunderous chatter everywhere on WikiLeaks' "motives" for releasing these cables. We just need to go back to Assange's thinking to realize there's no "motive". The intellectual void and political autism of America's diplomats is self-evident; they can only "understand" the Other: the world in terms of good guys and bad guys. The great French-Swiss film director Jean-Luc Godard is 80 this Friday. How fresh if he would shoot a remake of Made in USA, now featuring the perplexity of the system as it contemplates its reflection in a giant digital mirror.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

[thisandthat.nowandth]

Re: WikiLeaks release to feature corruption among world leaders, governments

Emphasis mine....

State Dept. Bars Staffers from WikiLeaks, Warns Students

The U.S. State Department has imposed an order barring employees from reading the leaked WikiLeaks cables. State Department staffers have been told not to read cables because they were classified and subject to security clearances. The State Department’s WikiLeaks censorship has even been extended to university students. An email to students at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs says: "The documents released during the past few months through Wikileaks are still considered classified documents. [The State Department] recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter. Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government."

democracynow.org

Condemned to life (without chance of parole) in the dwindling private sector economy.



-joaquin-

[D-Mack]

Re: WikiLeaks release to feature corruption among world leaders, governments

Here is the Brzezinski intrview