Questioning WikiLeaks Thread

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Questioning WikiLeaks Thread

Postby Montag » Mon Oct 25, 2010 2:50 pm

Secret war at the heart of Wikileaks
by Jerome Taylor

October 25, 2010
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media ... 15637.html

excerpt:

A civil war at the heart of Wikileaks has virtually paralysed the whistle-blowing website from publishing any new exposés outside of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, say former staffers and volunteers.

The website's recent unveiling of more than 390,000 secret US military documents from the Iraq war – on top of the 77,000 Afghan war logs it published earlier this year – has been hailed as one of the most explosive intelligence leaks in living memory, providing an astonishing level of previously unknown detail on two deeply controversial conflicts.

But a number of former members say that the website's obsession with pursuing the US military has resulted in Wikileaks losing sight of its founding principle that all leaks should be made available to the public no matter how large or small.

Speaking to The Independent last night, the Wikileaks founder Julian Assange hit back at the claims, accusing former colleagues of being "peripheral players... spreading poisonous false rumours".

At least a dozen key supporters of the website are known to have left in recent months. They say Wikileaks has ignored reams of new exposés because so much attention has been paid to the Iraq and Afghan conflicts.

The heavily encrypted arm of the website that allows users to safely send information to the organisation has been offline for four weeks, making new submissions impossible.

According to former supporters, the submission section is down because a number of key personnel have fallen out with Assange over the direction of the website and his behaviour. "Outside of the Iraq and Afghan dossiers, Wikileaks has been incapacitated by internal turmoil and politics," Smari McCarthy, a former Wikileaks volunteer and freedom of information campaigners from Iceland, told The Independent.

"Key people have become very concerned about the direction of Wikileaks with regard to its strong focus on US military files at the expense of ignoring everything else. There were also serious disagreements over the decision not to redact the names of Afghan civilians; something which I'm pleased to see was not repeated with the Iraq dossiers."

Wikileaks admits that one member of the submission team has left but says that wing of the website is down for a system overhaul and will be back online soon.

Part of the problem for Wikileaks has been the huge amount of data it has had to mine in processing the Afghan and Iraq war logs, which comprised tens of thousands of field reports written in dense military jargon. But some of those who have grown uncomfortable with the direction of the website say more attention should still have been paid to leaks from outside of the US military – specifically the dramatic increase in submissions from whistleblowers within closed countries, dictatorships and corporations.
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Re: Questioning WikiLeaks Thread

Postby Montag » Mon Oct 25, 2010 3:36 pm

Is WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange a workplace bully?
http://blog.ebosswatch.com/2010/10/is-w ... ace-bully/

excerpt:
The workplace dynamics of WikiLeaks and the management style of founder Julian Assange are becoming better known to the public. On October 23, the New York Times published an article that highlights an increased disillusionment with Assange and the work environment that he is creating.

Since WikiLeaks reportedly depends on about 40 core volunteers and several hundred mostly unpaid supporters to maintain the ongoing operation of the website and its servers and infrastructure, a hostile work environment that ends up driving away supporters could prove to be especially damaging to the whistleblower site.

The following are excerpts from the New York Times article WikiLeaks Founder on the Run, Trailed by Notoriety:

Now it is not just governments that denounce him: some of his own comrades are abandoning him for what they see as erratic and imperious behavior, and a nearly delusional grandeur unmatched by an awareness that the digital secrets he reveals can have a price in flesh and blood.

After the Sweden scandal, strains within WikiLeaks reached a breaking point, with some of Mr. Assange’s closest collaborators publicly defecting. The New York Times spoke with dozens of people who have worked with and supported him in Iceland, Sweden, Germany, Britain and the United States. What emerged was a picture of the founder of WikiLeaks as its prime innovator and charismatic force but as someone whose growing celebrity has been matched by an increasingly dictatorial, eccentric and capricious style.

When Herbert Snorrason, a 25-year-old political activist in Iceland, questioned Mr. Assange’s judgment over a number of issues in an online exchange last month, Mr. Assange was uncompromising. “I don’t like your tone,” he said, according to a transcript. “If it continues, you’re out.”

Mr. Assange cast himself as indispensable. “I am the heart and soul of this organization, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organizer, financier, and all the rest,” he said. “If you have a problem with me,” he told Mr. Snorrason, using an expletive, he should quit.

In an interview about the exchange, Mr. Snorrason’s conclusion was stark. “He is not in his right mind,” he said. In London, Mr. Assange was dismissive of all those who have criticized him. “These are not consequential people,” he said.

“About a dozen” disillusioned volunteers have left recently, said Smari McCarthy, an Icelandic volunteer who has distanced himself in the recent turmoil. In late summer, Mr. Assange suspended Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a German who had been the WikiLeaks spokesman under the pseudonym Daniel Schmitt, accusing him of unspecified “bad behavior.” Many more activists, Mr. McCarthy said, are likely to follow.

But if Mr. Assange is sustained by his sense of mission, faith is fading among his fellow conspirators. His mood was caught vividly in an exchange on Sept. 20 with another senior WikiLeaks figure. In an encrypted online chat, a transcript of which was passed to The Times, Mr. Assange was dismissive of his colleagues. He described them as “a confederacy of fools,” and asked his interlocutor, “Am I dealing with a complete retard?”
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Re: Questioning WikiLeaks Thread

Postby Montag » Mon Oct 25, 2010 3:44 pm

WikiLeaks: Pouring Fuel on the Iran Fire?
http://www.fpif.org/blog/wikileaks_pour ... _iran_fire

At Danger Room, Spencer Ackerman and Noah Shachtman write: "No one would accuse WikiLeaks of being pro-war. . . . Not when its founder, Julian Assange, said that its trove of reports from the Afghan conflict suggested . . . American 'war crimes.'" They continue.

So it's more than a little ironic that, with its newest document dump from the Iraq campaign, WikiLeaks may have just bolstered one of the Bush administration's most controversial claims about the Iraq war: that Iran supplied many of the Iraq insurgency's deadliest weapons and worked hand-in-glove with some of its most lethal militias.

For example . . .

. . . its elite Quds Force trained Iraqi Shiite insurgents and imported deadly weapons like the shape-charged Explosively Formed Projectile bombs [and] "neuroparalytic" chemical weapons . . . into Iraq [as well as a] surface-to-air missile, .50 caliber rifles, rockets and much more. [Also] Iranian agents plotted to kidnap U.S. troops from out of their Humvees.

In other words, aren't Assange and WikiLeaks just adding ammunition to those calling for an attack on Iran to halt its nuclear program? In fact, though, withholding documents unflattering to Iran for fear of fomenting yet more war would only undermine the credibility of their work. Future efforts on their part to draw the brakes on unwarranted American interventions abroad would thus be compromised.

Progressives, meanwhile, must guard against the temptation to jump to the defense of Iran. Attempting to undermine the credibility of WikiLeaks is as much of a losing proposition as defending Iran's dubious contention that it has no aspirations to nuclear weapons. Instead of defending Iran, we need to stay focused on the role that the United States played in eliciting such responses as aiding and abetting Iraqi insurgents and developing the capability to manufacture nuclear weapons.
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Re: Questioning WikiLeaks Thread

Postby Montag » Tue Oct 26, 2010 12:56 pm

Iran: US behind Wikileaks revelations
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/148225.html

excerpt:
A senior Iranian diplomat says recent revelations by whistleblower website Wikileaks are Washington’s ploy to cover up human rights violations by the US.

In the largest-ever revelation of secret US military documents, Wikileaks released nearly 400,000 classified reports about the US-led war in Iraq.

The leaked documents, which cover the period between January 1, 2004, and January 1, 2010, have shed light on a myriad of crimes and offences committed in Iraq over the past few years, including assassinations, murders, torture and rape.

“It seems that these [revelations] are made upon the order of the US,” Secretary-General of Iran’s High Council for Human Rights Mohammad-Javad Larijani said on Monday at the summit for reviewing the human rights situation in the US.

“The message of Wikileaks documents is that the Iraqi people have been tortured by Iraq’s security forces, and the only wrongdoing of Americans is that they witnessed the incidents and remained silent,” IRNA quoted Larijani as saying.

“This is while the US had the main role in these incidents and is the defendant,” the Iranian diplomat added.

Larijani said unfortunately the Internet, which was supposed to provide all people with vast information, is being used for publishing anti-information in the world.

The head of Iran’s human rights council stressed that the US and certain Western countries take advantage of human rights violations and that “it is necessary to prevent and resist these political abuses.”

The new Wikileaks documents comprise the second such release from the controversial website, which accused the United States of “war crimes” after earlier releasing some 92,000 similar secret military files detailing operations in Afghanistan.

These documents charge the United States Defense Department with instructing American troops to ignore reports recounting torture; they also suggest “hundreds” of civilians have been killed at US military checkpoints since the beginning of the war.

Refusing to discus the Wikikeaks disclosures, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton merely condemned the leak of any document “putting Americans at risk.”

“We should condemn in the most clear terms the disclosure of any information by individuals and or organizations which puts the lives of United States and its partners’ service members and civilians at risk,” she said.
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Re: Questioning WikiLeaks Thread

Postby Project Willow » Fri Nov 26, 2010 8:10 pm

I don't follow Dave Emory and don't know much about his work, and the blond link looks funny on the surface, but I thought I would paste this here.

http://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-724-wiki-of-the-damned/

Intro­duc­tion: The first of two pro­grams deal­ing with Wik­iLeaks, this broad­cast exam­ines an intel­li­gence–con­nected mind con­trol cult with which Wik­iLeaks king­pin Julian Assange appears to be affil­i­ated. As well con­nected as it is ruth­less and crim­i­nal, the San­ti­nike­tan Park Asso­ci­a­tion of Anne Hamilton-Byrne con­di­tioned chil­dren with drugs, sen­sory depri­va­tion, sleep depri­va­tion, tor­ture and rit­ual sex­ual abuse in order to pro­duce sub­jects who bent to the will of the group’s leader.
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Re: Questioning WikiLeaks Thread

Postby Montag » Mon Nov 29, 2010 9:49 am

Wikileaks Secret Dreams
http://cryptome.org/0003/wikileaks-dreams.htm

If the next big Wikileaks dump is composed of State Department cables what then is in the insurance.aes256 file or other information reserved for protection against shutdown?

It would be foolish of Wikileaks to release all it has and lose the protection of threatening future releases.

The size of the encrypted 1.2GB insurance file might fit thousands of cables but it might contain other material not yet publicly disclosed.

Wikileaks reportedly has hundreds of other files which have been received but not published because of the attention given to the Afghan and Iraq war files.

Files on other governments have been mentioned: Russia, China, European and Asian nations.

What would be impressive would be files on North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and perhaps most signficantly, Israel -- its weaponry, war plans, assassination squads, foreign sources of funds, Mossad and its collaborators.

Files on weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, biological, chemical, radiological. Top secret files of the IAEA on nuclear non-proliferation contributed and deceptively withheld by a bevy of nations, i.e., the CIA's Valerie Plame and related front companies.

Files of global WMD research laboratories and the status of reserve stocks of offensive and defensive weapons.

War plans of all nations, for and against one another.

Reports and training literature on black prisons and torture chambers held by and shared among military and spy agencies.

Files of clandestine spy agencies and their operatives.

Files on human rights abuses, for example, secret Red Cross reports on visits to the world's prisons.

Files of billionaire political meddlers.

Files of the major world banks and their attorneys.

Files of national tax agencies.

Perhaps the crown jewels would be the volumnious archives of The Vatican's two millennia of worldwide complicity with the globe's most evil empires. Second best, the Islamic version.

But why stop with information of exaggerated importance hoarded and bragged about by simple-minded secretkeepers?

Dream of what else should be known but has been forever out of reach. What nightmare would most terrify fabricators and marketers of deepest secrets? Even demolish newby Wikileaks and its venerable media and governmental collaborators now paranoically plotting secretly with and against each other what would best advance their mutual interests.

Secrecy begets ever more secrecy. Dream of the end of secrecy.
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Re: Questioning WikiLeaks Thread

Postby Stephen Morgan » Mon Nov 29, 2010 10:09 am

http://threatchaos.com/home-mainmenu-1/ ... -thejester
The man behind the DDoS attack is supposedly a former SpecOps soldier.

http://www.defamer.com.au/2010/06/the-s ... n-assange/
The man behind (or in front of) wikileaks

https://wikispooks.com/wiki/File:FBI-pe ... ymbols.pdf
Someone asked for the FBI pedophile symbols thing, which seems to have been removed from wikileaks. I certainly can't find anyway to navigate to anything other than the latest material from the front page and googling site:www.wikileaks.org just brings up links to 404 errors.
Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible. -- Lawrence of Arabia
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Re: Questioning WikiLeaks Thread

Postby Montag » Mon Nov 29, 2010 10:14 am

Wikispooks awesome, I didn't know of that site.

update: I thought their name was an attempt at satire on Wikileaks (saying it was an intelligence front of course). After reading their about section, it looks like that is just their name. They just picked up on the Wiki thing, I guess.
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Re: Questioning WikiLeaks Thread

Postby tazmic » Mon Nov 29, 2010 1:23 pm

Image
"It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out." - Heraclitus

"There aren't enough small numbers to meet the many demands made of them." - Strong Law of Small Numbers
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Re: Questioning WikiLeaks Thread

Postby Montag » Mon Nov 29, 2010 5:18 pm

Shouldn't Wikileaks be Renamed Zioleaks?
http://desertpeace.wordpress.com/2010/1 ... -zioleaks/
Israel is in it’s full glory today because of the latest Wikileaks ‘leaks’. As was said in a previous post, Had WikiLeaks didn’t exist, Israel would have had to invent it. It appears that in reality, it was.

Even the Palestinian Authority, Israel’s puppet, has it’s strings tangled over the latest accusations… Cable among hundreds of thousands revealed by WikiLeaks says that Israel tried to coordinate Operation Cast Lead with Fatah and Egypt. A full report from HaAretz can be read here…. Palestinians: Gaza war claim exposed by WikiLeaks is untrue

Israel’s rejoicing in the matter can be seen in a number of articles from the Israeli press…

WikiLeaks fiasco doesn’t embarrass Israel one bit

Netanyahu: WikiLeaks cables prove Israel is right on Iran

Analysis: Wikileaks vindicate, don’t damage, Israel
PM on WikiLeaks: ‘Now World Knows what Arabs Say About Iran’
WikiLeaks: Ahmadinejad Is Hitler
WikiLeaks: Barak Warned That Iran Strike Was Viable Until End of 2010


WikiLeaks: Good for Israel



Bottom line is…. not a single criticism of Israel appears anywhere in this latest dump; an impossibility in the wake of the lethal Israeli attack on the aid flotilla last May! Makes one question the validity of the ‘leaks’.
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Re: Questioning WikiLeaks Thread

Postby Montag » Tue Nov 30, 2010 12:25 am

Is Wikileaks a front for the CIA or Mossad?
by Richard Spencer

November 29, 2010
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/richa ... or-mossad/

Wikileaks, according to every news agency, newspaper and television station across the world, is a huge embarrassment, a disaster for the United States.

You will therefore be surprised to learn that Wikileaks is in fact a US-front organisation, or at the very least a Mossad operation. It is intent on undermining peace in the Middle East, and discrediting the region’s leaders and Iran in particular.

That, at least, was the view of an Iranian analyst interviewed just now on al-Jazeera. The Wikileaks disclosures should be seen, he said, in light of the battle for power between the Republican and Democratic “factions” in the US regime.

All bizarre and nonsensical conspiracy theory of course.

Except.

Well, I don’t buy the conspiracy theory. But one thing’s for sure – the leaks reflect far worse on Middle Eastern regimes, including but not only Iran, than on the United States.

Leaving aside the “Bomb bomb bomb Iran” stuff, what for example will President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen say to his people now he has been clearly revealed to have got the US to lie on his behalf (not that it wasn’t common knowledge)?

As I have just said in an online commentary, the disclosures, based as they are on diplomatic cables, set out extremely clearly the thinking underlying US government policy – including rationales that cannot usually be given publicly for fear of offending allies or revealing secrets. Their partiality might be questioned – but their coherence can’t.

Ultimately, they put the onus on Middle Eastern countries to explain themselves. The cables are America’s own explanations. Neither Iran nor many of its Arab friends and enemies like being held to account overmuch.

Now they have been. No wonder Iran thinks it’s a plot; I wonder if other countries agree. I wouldn’t be surprised.
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Re: Questioning WikiLeaks Thread

Postby chevalier » Tue Nov 30, 2010 1:55 am

Montag wrote:Wikispooks awesome, I didn't know of that site.

update: I thought their name was an attempt at satire on Wikileaks (saying it was an intelligence front of course). After reading their about section, it looks like that is just their name. They just picked up on the Wiki thing, I guess.


The cool thing about Wikispooks is: it's actually a real wiki! The lamest thing about Wikileaks is its name.

~chevalier~
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Re: Questioning WikiLeaks Thread

Postby Montag » Tue Nov 30, 2010 2:32 am

chevalier wrote:
The cool thing about Wikispooks is: it's actually a real wiki! The lamest thing about Wikileaks is its name.

~chevalier~


And check out what I found on their blog today (Wikispooks):


I posted this in the video section, but no one commented on it -- they usually don't there, so I don't really know if anyone's watched it.
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Re: Questioning WikiLeaks Thread

Postby AlicetheKurious » Tue Nov 30, 2010 2:33 am

Montag wrote:Is Wikileaks a front for the CIA or Mossad?


Since the former has been so deeply and widely penetrated by the latter, that question is a koan.

The question should be which government's agenda is furthered by the leaks. Last night, Al-Jazeera's coverage was all about how the latest "dump" has destroyed the assumption of confidentiality that Arab officials counted on when speaking to US diplomats or other officials, and that from now on they'll watch very carefully what they say, knowing that it may very well be splashed on the world's headlines at some future date. The WikiLeaks have created severe tension between the US government and its Arab "allies", have exacerbated tensions between the Iranian and Arab governments, and between the Arab governments themselves.

True, the WikiLeaks have not included information that could be used to prosecute individual American war criminals but other than that, they have done a great deal to damage America's ability to conduct its foreign policy, most especially with regard to confidential two-way communications with Arab client* states.

On Edit: * This should not be taken to mean that the "client" Arab regimes will no longer do what they're told: they have no choice.

Who benefits?
Last edited by AlicetheKurious on Tue Nov 30, 2010 3:07 am, edited 2 times in total.
"If you're not careful the newspapers will have you hating the oppressed and loving the people doing the oppressing." - Malcolm X
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Re: Questioning WikiLeaks Thread

Postby Montag » Tue Nov 30, 2010 2:46 am

AlicetheKurious wrote:
Since the former has been so deeply and widely penetrated by the latter, that question is a koan.

The question should be which government's agenda is furthered by the leaks. Last night, Al-Jazeera's coverage was all about how the latest "dump" has destroyed the assumption of confidentiality that Arab officials counted on when speaking to US diplomats or other officials, and that from now on they'll watch very carefully what they say, knowing that it may very well be splashed on the world's headlines at some future date. The WikiLeaks have created severe tension between the US government and its Arab "allies", have exacerbated tensions between the Iranian and Arab governments, and between the Arab governments themselves.

True, the WikiLeaks have not included information that could be used to prosecute individual American war criminals but other than that, they have done a great deal to damage America's ability to conduct its foreign policy, most especially in its relations with Arab client states.

Who benefits?


I just posted that b/c it was in the Western MSM. Though the Telegraph is a strange paper I have seen articles on crop circles and cattle mutilation there. They seem willing to go off the reservation at times (not sure if this stuff is funny to them, helps them sell papers, what is the case). Can't recall the last time I saw something referenced as a possible psyop in a mainstream newspaper. Of course, his source was Al Jazeera, where you will see this sort of thing, haha.

I plead ignorance on what intelligence agencies have penetrated others. From what I know the the CIA, Mossad and MI6 are very close. I've also heard the CIA and ISI are close, but I wouldn't think the ISI like the Mossad very much, but maybe I'm wrong in that.
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