Saturday, 11 December 2010
Sunday, 5 December 2010
Assange: 'Will release poison pill of damaging secrets if killed or arrested"
The founder of WikiLeaks has warned that his supporters are primed to publish a 'deluge' of leaked government documents should his activities be curtailed by any country.
Julian Assange has distributed to fellow hackers an encrypted 'poison pill' of damaging secrets, thought to include details on BP and Guantanamo Bay.
He believes the file is his 'insurance' in case he is killed, arrested or the whistleblowing website is removed permanently from the internet.
Mr Assange - understood to be lying low in Britain - could be arrested by Scotland Yard officers as early as tomorrow.
A warrant for his arrest was issued last Thursday by Swedish prosecutors who want to quiz him over rape allegations.
The developments came as fresh revelations were published on the WikiLeaks website. They include:
- A leading Chinese politician coordinated the hacking of Google - which forced it to quit the Communist country - after finding unflattering articles about him on the website.
- UK firm Rolls Royce lost out on a £200million contract to supply helicopter engines to Spain after the U.S. lobbied Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero in Madrid. The deal was eventually signed by American company GE.
- And European Union President Herman Van Rompuy told a U.S. ambassador that European troops were still in Afghanistan only 'out of deference' to America.
Mr Assange, a reclusive Australian, has infuriated and embarrassed the U.S. in recent months by releasing hundreds of thousands of classified documents.
First, he published Army logs from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that suggested soldiers were complicit in murder and torture.
And last week he published the first of around 250,000 diplomatic cables from U.S. embassies, many containing sensitive information and embarrassing verdicts on leaders including David Cameron.
High-profile politicians in the U.S. including Sarah Palin, a narrow loser in the race to become the Republican presidential candidate in 2008, have suggested the computer programmer should be 'executed' for publishing leaked U.S. state secrets.
Mr Assange's British lawyer, Mark Stephens, warned today that WikiLeaks was holding further secret material which he dubbed a 'thermo-nuclear device' to be released if the organisation needed to protect itself.
He said many of the papers being retained contained 'material of equal importance to news-gathering' as those already published.
He said: 'They [WikiLeaks] have been subject to cyber-attacks and censorship around the world and they need to protect themselves.
'This is what they believe to be a thermo-nuclear device in the information age.
'It's interesting to note people as high up the American tree as Sarah Palin have called for him to be hunted down by American special forces and assassinated.
'We've seen a number of suggestions that he should be assassinated, again from credible sources around the world.
'This is all about a man who is a journalist. He received, unbidden, an electronic brown envelope that journalists receive.
'This particular journalist has put it out. What they are doing is criminalising him, criminalising journalistic activity.'
The prime suspect in the hunt for the person who stole the files is Bradley Manning, a 23-year-old U.S. Army intelligence analyst who is now in military custody.
The 'doomsday files' which have been downloaded from the WikiLeaks website by tens of thousands of supporters are understood to include information on Guantanamo Bay, and aeriel video of a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan that killed civilians, BP reports and Bank of America documents.
The files are encoded with a 256-digit key. Experts have said it is virtually unbreakable.
Mr Stephens told the BBC that legal moves to arrest Mr Assange, who is wanted for questioning over the rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion of two women during a visit to Sweden in August, appeared to be a 'political stunt'.
Originally the entire case was dropped by Sweden's chief prosecutor.
Mr Stephens said that only 'after the intervention of a Swedish politician' that a new prosecutor in Gothenburg - not Stockholm, where his client and two women had been - began a new case.
He denies the allegations vehemently and has described them as a 'smear'.
Mr Stephens said that Sweden had allowed U.S. planes carrying terror suspects - the illegal practice of extraordinary rendition - to use its airfields.
He said: 'It doesn't escape me that Sweden was one of those lick-spittle states which used its resources and facilities for rendition flights.'
He also confirmed that the WikiLeaks site had come under siege from 'a huge number of cyber-attacks'.
Reporters Without Borders condemns the blocking of Wikileaks
Reporters Without Borders condemns the blocking, cyber-attacks and political pressure being directed at cablegate.wikileaks.org, the website dedicated to the US diplomatic cables. The organization is also concerned by some of the extreme comments made by American authorities concerning WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange.
Earlier this week, after the publishing several hundred of the 250.000 cables it says it has in its possession, WikiLeaks had to move its site from its servers in Sweden to servers in the United States controlled by online retailer Amazon. Amazon quickly came under pressure to stop hosting WikiLeaks from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and its chairman, Sen. Joe Lieberman, in particular.
After being ousted from Amazon, WikiLeaks found a refuge for part of its content with the French Internet company OVH. But French digital economy minister Eric Besson today said the French government was looking at ways to ban hosting of the site.
WikiLeaks was also recently dropped by its domain name provider EveryDNS. Meanwhile, several countries well known for for their disregard of freedom of expression and information, including Thailand and China, have blocked access tocablegate.wikileaks.org.
This is the first time we have seen an attempt at the international community level to censor a website dedicated to the principle of transparency. We are shocked to find countries such as France and the United States suddenly bringing their policies on freedom of expression into line with those of China. We point out that in France and the United States, it is up to the courts, not politicians, to decide whether or not a website should be closed.
Meanwhile, two Republican senators, John Ensign and Scott Brown, and an independent Lieberman, have introduced a bill that would make it illegal to publish the names of U.S. military and intelligence agency informants. This could facilitate future prosecutions against WikiLeaks and its founder. But a criminal investigation is already under way and many U.S. politicians are calling vociferously for Assange’s arrest.
Reporters Without Borders can only condemn this determination to hound Assange and reiterates its conviction that WikiLeaks has a right under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment to publish these documents and is even playing a useful role by making them available to journalists and the greater public.
We stress that any restriction on the freedom to disseminate this body of documents will affect the entire press, which has given detailed coverage to the information made available by WikiLeaks, with five leading international newspapers actively cooperating in preparing it for publication.
Reporters Without Borders would also like to stress that it has always defended online freedom and the principle of “Net neutrality,” according to which Internet Service Providers and hosting companies should play no role in choosing the content that is placed online.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Mass Mirroring WikiLeaks
Mass-mirroring Wikileaks
Wikileaks is currently under heavy attack.
In order to make it impossible to ever fully remove Wikileaks from the Internet, we need your help.
if you have a unix-based server which is hosting a website on the Internet and you want to give wikileaks some of your hosting resources, you can help!
Please follow the following instructions:
- Setup an account where we can upload files using RSYNC+SSH (preferred) or FTP
- Put our SSH key in this server or create an FTP account
- Create a virtual host in your web server, which, for example, can be
wikileaks.yourdomain.com - send the IP address of your server to us, and the path where we should upload the content. (just fill the form below)
We will take care of all the rest: Sending pages to your server, updating them each time data is released, maintaining a list of such mirrors. If your server is down or if the account don't work anymore, we will automatically remove your server from the list.
Our content is only html/css/javascript/png static files, so we don't require much resource to host it.
The complete website should not take more than a couple of GB at the moment (with base website and cablegate data)
To add your mirror to the list, please download the SSH key you will find below, then fill the following form to add your website to our mirror list Here: http://wikileaks.nl/mass-mirror.html
PLEASE SHOW YOUR SUPPORT
HELP TAKE DOWN TYRANTS & CRIMINALS ABUSING THEIR POWER
Saturday, 4 December 2010
Please Copy & Paste : Support Julian Assange Wikileaks
Julian Assange Defence Fund
Please donate directly to the Julian Assange and other WikiLeaks Staff Defence Fund. These funds will be used exclusively for defence costs
To donate please do an electronic bank transfer (EFT) to:
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SWISS POST
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2. Online Transfer via Credit Card
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We don't accept paypal donations anymore. And here is why
6. Via Postal Mail
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Tuesday, 10 August 2010
Wikileaks asked to edit Afghan names from US files
Human rights groups are putting pressure on the website Wikileaks to remove the names of Afghan civilians from leaked US military reports.
The groups, which include Amnesty International, say Afghans identified as suppliers of information to the US military could face reprisals.
The Taliban has executed hundreds of Afghan civilians it accuses of collaborating with US-led forces.
The huge cache of classified papers is one of the biggest leaks in US history.
All are linked to the Afghan conflict and Wikileaks posted them last month under the title of the Afghan War Diary.
The human rights groups also include the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, the Open Society Institute and the International Crisis Group.
They say they have e-mailed their requests to Julian Assange, founder of the whistle-blowing website.
"There was no consideration about civilian lives," said Nader Nadery, of the commission.
"We said that in the future the names should be redacted and the ones that are already there need to be taken down. Even though it is late, it still worth doing."
He said he had not yet received any response to the requests.
The US condemned the Wikileaks disclosures as "irresponsible", saying their publication could threaten national security.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai said he was "shocked" at the scale of the leaks, but believed that most of the material was not new.
Mr Assange said at the time that Wikileaks had tried hard to ensure that the leaked documents did not put innocent people in danger.
"All the material is over seven months old so is of no current operational consequence, even though it may be of very significant investigative consequence," he said.
The documents covered the Afghan conflict from January 2004 to December 2009 and include previously unreported details of killings of civilians.
The records also reveal Nato concerns that Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency was helping the Taliban in Afghanistan, an accusation Islamabad has denied. LINK
U.S. Caught Lying About Iran Supplying Weapons to Insurgents
See you just cant believe one thing these guys say ...... NO CREDIBILITY WHAT SO EVER!
Don't believe the lies people .... the world needs Wikileaks to expose these killers.
Don't believe the lies people .... the world needs Wikileaks to expose these killers.
Rights groups urge WikiLeaks to redact Afghan names
WASHINGTON — Human rights groups have urged WikiLeaks to redact names of Afghans helping American forces from thousands of leaked US military documents, leading to a charged retort from the website's founder, the Wall Street Journal said Tuesday.
"We have seen the negative, sometimes deadly ramifications for those Afghans identified as working for or sympathizing with international forces," said a letter to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, accoring to the Journal, citing a person close to the exchange.
"We strongly urge your volunteers and staff to analyze all documents to ensure that those containing identifying information are taken down or redacted," said the letter from Amnesty International, Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, Open Society Institute, Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and International Crisis Group.
The message prompted Assange to question what the groups were themselves doing to examine the 70,000 classified documents on Afghanistan, which were published by WikiLeaks in late July, and whether they would be willing to help with the redaction process, the daily said.
The files contained a string of damaging claims, and included the names of some Afghan informants, leading to claims that the leaks have endangered lives.
Amnesty suggested they may be able to provide some resources to analyze the documents and some 15,000 other files that WikiLeaks is planning to release, and that Assange and the rights groups discuss the issue on a conference call.
"I'm very busy and have no time to deal with people who prefer to do nothing but cover their asses," Assange was reported to have replied.
"If Amnesty does nothing I shall issue a press release highlighting its refusal," he said, according to the Journal.
On its Twitter page, Wikileaks posted the update on August 8: "Pentagon wants to bankrupt us by refusing to assist review. Media won't take responsibility. Amnesty won't. What to do?"
Assange, 39, an Australian former hacker and computer programmer, has said he believed the publication would help focus public debate on the war in Afghanistan and on possible atrocities by US-led forces.
US Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, have however insisted the move endangered locals providing information to US-led NATO forces in Afghanistan.
WikiLeaks has never identified the source of the Afghan files, but suspicion has fallen on Bradley Manning, a US Army intelligence analyst under arrest for allegedly leaking video footage of a 2007 US Apache helicopter strike in Baghdad in which civilians died.
Manning is being held in a US military jail after being transferred from a US military base in Kuwait.
Monday, 9 August 2010
Ex-DOJer helped expose alleged Wikileaks source
Adrian Lamo, who says U.S. Army intelligence specialist Bradley Manning was sending files to Wikileaks.
A former top U.S. Justice Department prosecutor helped to turn over an alleged Wikileaks source to the FBI and Army intelligence, CNET has learned.
Mark Rasch, previously the head of the Justice Department's computer crime unit who is now in private practice in the Washington, D.C. area, said during a telephone interview that he identified investigators who would want to know that an U.S. Army intelligence analyst in Kuwait may have handed over sensitive documents to the world's most famous document-leaking Web site.
Bradley Manning was charged last month with leaking sensitive information and illegally obtaining "more than 150,000 diplomatic cables" from the State Department. A Web site, bradleymanning.org, has been set up in his defense, and Wikileaks has helped to raise funds for his defense.
"I didn't take him down," Rasch said. "I just put the people who wanted to report him in touch with the people they wanted to talk to."
Adrian Lamo, a convicted hacker now living in Carmichael, Calif., says Manning contacted him and confessed to turning over sensitive files to Wikileaks, including a controversial video showing troops firing on Reuters journalists. Lamo says he became worried that Manning's leaks were endangering the lives of American soldiers and decided to blow the whistle.
Lamo contacted Chet Uber, a computer security specialist and the founder of a group called Project Vigilant. Uber then contacted Rasch.
"I got a call from Chet saying Adrian has a guy he's been chatting with online who has access to classified cables," Rasch said. "So I found him people in the intelligence community and law enforcement community he could report it to."
In an interview with CNET, Uber described how Lamo contacted him. "Adrian calls me in a panic, saying this guy Brad Manning is sending me e-mails, some of them are encrypted," Uber recalled. "He keeps talking about having access to classified data, (saying) 'I don't know what to do.'"
Uber said he told Lamo to take all the data related to those conversations and place it on a drive, then "give me about 10 minutes and I'm going to give you some numbers...I said, 'Adrian, people probably are dying.'"
"What I can tell you is that (Manning) is committing treason," Uber said. "He's passing classified information during wartime to a non-U.S. entity, Julian Assange. That's treason."
For his part, Lamo disputed Uber's characterization of the conversation, saying that time and memory likely distorted the details. He said that he was also in touch separately with a friend, Tim Webster, who is a former Army counterintelligence agent.
Lamo said his general attitude toward turning in Manning was: "Aw, f*ck. Why'd you have to make me do this?"
India Passes Whistleblower Protection Bill
New Delhi, Aug 9
Amid the global debate over whistleblowers' website, WikiLeaks, the Indian cabinet on Monday, Aug 9, cleared the redrafted Public Interest Disclosure (Protection of Informers) Bill, 2010 to protect whistleblowers.
The bill proposes three years imprisonment and fine of up to Rs 50,000 against the revelation of the identity of a whistleblower.
The bill took birth from the brutal murder of NHAI engineer Satyendra Dubey, who complained against corruption in the Golden Quadrilateral project.
The bill also gains significance in the backdrop of the storm raised by WikiLeaks after it posted classified information on Afghanistan war on its website leading to questions being raised on how many heads would roll due to this. LINK
Amid the global debate over whistleblowers' website, WikiLeaks, the Indian cabinet on Monday, Aug 9, cleared the redrafted Public Interest Disclosure (Protection of Informers) Bill, 2010 to protect whistleblowers.
The bills helps those who make public interest disclosures and ensures that the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) has the power it needs to protect whistleblowers from any disciplinary action for exposing corruption in a government department.
The bill proposes three years imprisonment and fine of up to Rs 50,000 against the revelation of the identity of a whistleblower.
The bill took birth from the brutal murder of NHAI engineer Satyendra Dubey, who complained against corruption in the Golden Quadrilateral project.
The bill also gains significance in the backdrop of the storm raised by WikiLeaks after it posted classified information on Afghanistan war on its website leading to questions being raised on how many heads would roll due to this. LINK
A War Based on CIA Lies
An amazing speech by Mike Prysner, reminding us of the horrors of war inflicted on innocent people through the false intelligence of the CIA and their henchmen. When they're not downloading child porn or instigating new methods to manipulate people they're killing innocent children through this unjust occupation.
Wikileaks is a beacon of truth in a world brainwashed through mass media & government lies , do not believe the shit that comes out of your television do your own research.
Wikileaks is a beacon of truth in a world brainwashed through mass media & government lies , do not believe the shit that comes out of your television do your own research.
WikiLeaks Driving Them GAGA!
Is Julian Assange, the Australian former computer hacker running the website WikiLeaks, a journalist or a criminal? The debate is running hot in the US. Who is Assange to set himself up as the judge of what should be kept secret and what should be exposed, the Pentagon chiefs are asking.
''By the standards of US law - including under the Supreme Court decision in the Pentagon Papers case - he should be considered a criminal,'' wrote the conservative columnist Marc Thiessen on the Washington Post website PostPartisan. ''He is in unlawful possession of classified information. He has released tens of thousands of documents, which the Taliban are using at this moment to target and execute Afghans who co-operated with US and NATO forces. And he is threatening to release many thousands more, which could put more American, Afghan and allied lives at risk. His actions are a clear violation of US law. He should face justice for these crimes.''
Over at Time magazine, another commentator went for the journalism description. Michael Scherer wrote that Assange was doing exactly what ''respectable and responsible reporters working for top-flight news organisations" try to do. He is a Seymour Hersh of the digital age, in other words.
But the three news organisations that Assange allowed to look through his initial trove of 76,000 US Army documents on Afghanistan and other subjects - The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel - are rushing to disavow his description of them as ''partners'' of WikiLeaks. To them, they insist, WikiLeaks is just a source.
The issue is getting tense. The Obama administration is weighing up whether it can prosecute Assange under espionage laws - one problem being he is not spying for anyone but the US and other publics, though he is certainly in possession of secrets. The Pentagon is meanwhile pleading with Assange to return the 15,000 other secret papers he is withholding.
Upping the ante, WikiLeaks has uploaded a massive (1.4 gigabyte) file titled ''Insurance'' encrypted with a cipher so complex that it is virtually unbreakable unless Assange has left some weakness in its mathematics or accidentally divulges a password.
The file is even bigger than the 76,000 documents released last month. The speculation is that it contains the 260,000 diplomatic documents from the State Department - containing details of ''almost criminal black dealings'' - mentioned by the US Army private Bradley Manning, 22, now under arrest on suspicion of leaking the horrifying video of a US Army helicopter shooting up what turned out to be a group of journalists and other civilians in Baghdad.
The irony widely noticed about this torrent of opened-up secrets is that so far it tells us what we already know, at least in the bigger picture, about the war in Afghanistan, and is unlikely to be a game-changer except perhaps in adding to public disillusionment about the prospects of success. This isn't anything like the 1948 disclosure by Moscow's spies of the successful US-British decryption of KGB messages, which resulted in the intelligence window being closed.
The most irresponsible aspect of the WikiLeaks exercise would be the failure to black out the identities of Afghans working with the Western forces. Assange admits he has not been through all the documents in detail. There appear to be several scores of names and villages mentioned. To the extent that this collaboration is not already known locally, the leaks put the identified Afghans at risk of assassination.
Yet it won't be WikiLeaks that loses this war for the US. Let's look at another disclosure which came out about the same time: the three-part report in The Washington Post about ''Top Secret America''. Compiled from open sources, it revealed an archipelago of highly secret buildings across the country, focused on Washington, where an intelligence industry employs no fewer than 854,000 people with ''top secret'' security clearances, almost four times the number of troops deployed on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq in the supposed war on terrorism.
Some 1271 government organisations and 1931 companies are involved in work at top secret level. There has been such a ''gusher'' of funding (the word of the Defence Secretary, Robert Gates) since the September 11, 2001, attacks that anyone with a top secret clearance is wooed with bonuses, enormous salaries and company BMWs by firms anxious to cash in. The core intelligence agencies are getting left with younger, inexperienced analysts with sketchy knowledge of the cultures and languages of target countries.
If Assange cannot look through his 92,000 leaked documents, the ''super users'' at the top of the analytical pyramid have no hope of digesting even the 50,000 intelligence reports published for internal government use each year. Many go unread.
Every day, the National Security Agency intercepts and stores 1.7 billion emails, phone calls and other data transmissions, before using keyword or voice recognition software to filter out suspicious messages. Clues are buried in such a volume of material that often it has only been after a terrorism event that they are found. Military commanders have complained they get little intelligence of operational use out of this industry, the Post reported.
It is not surprising that many outsiders regard this secret industry with suspicion. It consumes huge sums - $US75 billion ($82 billion) at the official count, which the Post said did not include all private-sector activity - and invades a lot of privacy, for indifferent results, making it fair game for WikiLeaks.
It would not be surprising if some of the brilliant and creative recruited into ''Top Secret America'' also get disillusioned with their work and what they see, and get tempted to disclose mistakes, waste or wrongdoing.
Leaking is as easy as loading files on to a CD and slipping it into a Lady Gaga cover, as Manning apparently did.
There is a clash of cultures here, and anyone who knows young people will know who will ultimately win.
Sunday, 8 August 2010
WIKILEAKS Must not reveal any more war logs
PROPAGANDA ALERT : DAILY NEWS ATTACK
The Pentagon has asked Julian Assange to "do the right thing" and give back 15,000 secret U.S. Afghan war records that his Wikileaks website is set to release.
Assange has no concept of what "the right thing" means. Look at what happened after his first document dump. When Assange released those 70,000 classified files last month, he couldn't have been more dismissive of claims he was endangering lives. "There's no tactically significant information in this material. We have looked at it," he said.
But - oopsie! - there were names of Afghans who had supported U.S. troops. Then a Taliban spokesman announced how they'd treat the just-discovered traitors: "If they are U.S. spies, then we know how to punish them."
Suffering a brief bout of doubt, Assange brought the next batch of secrets, the 15,000 files in question, to the Pentagon - for help in redacting sensitive information.
After a review, the Pentagon said there's no way to release the files without jeopardizing more lives.
Now, Wikileaks says it plans to release the documents anyway.
Assange's conscience was the first thing he killed.
Activists rally to 'Free Bradley Manning' in WikiLeaks case
Quantico, Virginia (CNN) -- Activists rallied outside the Marine Corps base at Quantico, Virginia, Sunday to applaud the man military officials suspect leaked scores of military documents to the WikiLeaks website -- a 22-year-old Army private named Bradley Manning.
"We are here to say that if he, indeed, was the whistle-blower, then we are proud of him," said Medea Benjamin, founder of anti-war group Code Pink. "In the United States that I know and love, transparency is a positive thing."
Manning, who served as an intelligence analyst in Iraq, is the military's focus in the investigation into the largest-ever intelligence leak in American history, to WikiLeaks.org.
He is being detained at Quantico pending a military investigation in a separate case, in which he's charged with eight violations of the U.S. Criminal Code, including for allegedly leaking a secret military video from the Iraq war to WikiLeaks.
Outside the Quantico gates, about 80 protesters chanted "Bradley Manning told their tale, war criminals off to jail" and held signs calling on the military to "Free Bradley Manning."
Many wore pink and seemed out-of-place in a small community where people sported military haircuts and displayed Marine bumper stickers on their cars.
Ray McGovern, who said he was formerly a CIA analyst, lauded Manning for allegedly releasing information about America's "war of aggression".
"What Bradley Manning has done is to give us as Americans the opportunity to realize what's really going on there," McGovern said.
"If Americans can't realize now that they have the ground truth, literally the ground truth from these Army reports, if they can't realize and move to end these kinds of wars, then there's very little hope for our children or our grandchildren."
About 300 yards away, a handful of counter-protesters wearing the military's trademark olive green held a poster that showed Manning with bloody hands. They called the leak treasonous.
"If Bradley Manning is the one that leaked these documents, he has already put his fellow soldiers at risk," said Jim Hanson, who writes for the pro-military website BlackFive.
"I think the military and the government have some things that should be kept secret. The public knows that ... There is no 'right to know' secret information."
U.S. War criminals threaten WikiLeaks
U.S. War criminals threaten WikiLeaks
By Patrick Martin
The drumbeat of calls for repression and violence against WikiLeaks and Private Bradley Manning is a major threat to democratic rights. All sections of the U.S. political establishment, Democratic and Republican, liberal and conservative, are seeking to retaliate against those who are exposing atrocities by the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq, and intimidate all critics of these wars of aggression by American imperialism.
The most strident rhetoric has come from the ultra-right. Republican Congressman Mike Rogers of Michigan, a former FBI agent who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, told a local radio station Monday that he thought the death penalty would be appropriate punishment for Manning if he is convicted on charges of leaking classified military documents to WikiLeaks.
Pfc. Manning, who worked at an Army intelligence facility in Iraq, is now imprisoned at the Quantico, Virginia Marine Corps base, awaiting trial on charges that he supplied WikiLeaks with classified video of a U.S. helicopter gunship mowing down Iraqi civilians in a Baghdad neighborhood in 2007. Pentagon officials have also named Manning a “person of interest” in the leak of 92,000 classified after-action reports dating from 2004 to 2010 on operations in Afghanistan, which document the killing of hundreds of Afghan civilians.
Speaking to radio station WHMI August 2, Rogers declared, “I argue the death penalty clearly should be considered here. He clearly aided the enemy to what may result in the death of U.S. soldiers or those cooperating. If that is not a capital offense, I don’t know what is.”
Rogers was referring to media claims, echoing Pentagon propaganda, that Afghan informants and spies who are aiding the U.S. military could be targeted by the Taliban for retaliation if their names are uncovered in the files made public by WikiLeaks. “We know for a fact that people will likely be killed because of this information being disclosed,” he continued. “That’s pretty serious. If they don't charge him with treason, they ought to charge him with murder.”
Right-wing media pundits have called for a direct assault by the U.S. government on WikiLeaks. On Fox News Sunday, commentator Liz Cheney, daughter of the former vice-president, called on the Obama administration to shut down the Internet-based organization, presumably through the use of the Pentagon’s cyber warfare capability.
On Tuesday, in a column in the Washington Post, former Bush White House aide Marc A. Thiessen, now a weekly contributor to the newspaper, said the government should kidnap and imprison Julian Assange, co-founder of WikiLeaks.
“WikiLeaks is not a news organization; it is a criminal enterprise,” Thiessen declared. “Its reason for existence is to obtain classified national security information and disseminate it as widely as possible—including to the United States’ enemies.” He argued that there is ample precedent for using the powers of “rendition” exercised by the CIA against those engaged in “material support for terrorism”
“Assange is a non-U.S. citizen operating outside the territory of the United States,” he wrote. “This means the government has a wide range of options for dealing with him. It can employ not only law enforcement but also intelligence and military assets to bring Assange to justice and put his criminal syndicate out of business.”
Thiessen contended that if Iceland or Belgium refused to extradite him, “the United States can arrest Assange on their territory without their knowledge or approval.” Under existing U.S. law, he claimed, “we do not need permission to apprehend Assange or his co-conspirators anywhere in the world.”
Liberal Democrats have chimed in with their own proposals to target Wikileaks. According to a report Wednesday in the New York Times, two Senate Democrats, Charles Schumer of New York and Diane Feinstein of California, are drafting an amendment to the “media shield” legislation now being considered in Congress “to make clear that the bill’s protections extend only to traditional news-gathering activities and not to web sites that serve as a conduit for the mass dissemination of secret documents.”
The bill was originally drafted in response to a series of cases in which reporters were jailed for refusing to disclose their sources to judges, prosecutors or plaintiffs in lawsuits. In order to avoid WikiLeaks taking advantage of such a shield law, Schumer and Feinstein want to specifically exclude whistleblower sites.
The Times quoted Paul J. Boyle, senior vice president for public policy at the Newspaper Association of America, the industry trade group, endorsing such a policy, which would reserve this type of First Amendment protection for “traditional news organizations subject to American law and having editorial controls and experience in news judgment.” In other words, such safeguards would be reserved to the corporate-controlled media, run by people loyal to the American ruling elite and the capitalist state.
The major concern of those targeting WikiLeaks and Private Manning is that the leaks of internal government documents provide evidence to justify war crimes prosecution of U.S. government officials, past and present. To save their own skins, they want to criminalize the exposure of these atrocities, rather than the atrocities themselves.
The language being employed in media and official circles is dangerous and chilling. It makes clear that nine years of uninterrupted military aggression have provided the basis for major attacks on democratic rights in the United States and the preparation of more openly dictatorial forms of rule.
Launched on the basis of systematic lying, both about the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the supposed danger of “weapons of mass destruction,” these wars are criminal in every sense of the word. Millions have been killed, maimed or driven from their homes, and more than five thousand Americans have died to advance the interests of U.S. imperialism in the oil rich Persian Gulf and Central Asia.
Officials of the Bush and Obama administrations are manifestly guilty of war crimes, ranging from launching aggressive war—the core charge against the Nazis in Nuremberg—to the systematic assassination of opponents in both Iraq and Afghanistan. This last practice, documented by WikiLeaks in the activities of Army Task Force 373 in Afghanistan, is a full-scale repetition of one of the principal horrors of the Vietnam War, the CIA’s Phoenix Program, which murdered 20,000 suspected supporters of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front.
After the Phoenix Program was exposed in the U.S. media, including the publication of the Pentagon Papers, government-sponsored assassination became politically discredited and was officially outlawed—until the onset of the “war on terror.” Now such methods are being effectively legalized, as politicians of both parties, backed by their media apologists, boast of their right to “take out” opponents, using bombs, missiles or direct hand-to-hand violence.
WikiLeaks and Private Manning are being targeted because they have done what a cowardly and spineless media has refused to do—tell the truth about the crimes of American imperialism. Working people in the United States and around the world must demand the dropping of all threats and charges against WikiLeaks, an end to the government harassment and targeting of whistleblowers, and the immediate release of Private Bradley Manning.
Pfc. Manning, who worked at an Army intelligence facility in Iraq, is now imprisoned at the Quantico, Virginia Marine Corps base, awaiting trial on charges that he supplied WikiLeaks with classified video of a U.S. helicopter gunship mowing down Iraqi civilians in a Baghdad neighborhood in 2007. Pentagon officials have also named Manning a “person of interest” in the leak of 92,000 classified after-action reports dating from 2004 to 2010 on operations in Afghanistan, which document the killing of hundreds of Afghan civilians.
Speaking to radio station WHMI August 2, Rogers declared, “I argue the death penalty clearly should be considered here. He clearly aided the enemy to what may result in the death of U.S. soldiers or those cooperating. If that is not a capital offense, I don’t know what is.”
Rogers was referring to media claims, echoing Pentagon propaganda, that Afghan informants and spies who are aiding the U.S. military could be targeted by the Taliban for retaliation if their names are uncovered in the files made public by WikiLeaks. “We know for a fact that people will likely be killed because of this information being disclosed,” he continued. “That’s pretty serious. If they don't charge him with treason, they ought to charge him with murder.”
Right-wing media pundits have called for a direct assault by the U.S. government on WikiLeaks. On Fox News Sunday, commentator Liz Cheney, daughter of the former vice-president, called on the Obama administration to shut down the Internet-based organization, presumably through the use of the Pentagon’s cyber warfare capability.
On Tuesday, in a column in the Washington Post, former Bush White House aide Marc A. Thiessen, now a weekly contributor to the newspaper, said the government should kidnap and imprison Julian Assange, co-founder of WikiLeaks.
“WikiLeaks is not a news organization; it is a criminal enterprise,” Thiessen declared. “Its reason for existence is to obtain classified national security information and disseminate it as widely as possible—including to the United States’ enemies.” He argued that there is ample precedent for using the powers of “rendition” exercised by the CIA against those engaged in “material support for terrorism”
“Assange is a non-U.S. citizen operating outside the territory of the United States,” he wrote. “This means the government has a wide range of options for dealing with him. It can employ not only law enforcement but also intelligence and military assets to bring Assange to justice and put his criminal syndicate out of business.”
Thiessen contended that if Iceland or Belgium refused to extradite him, “the United States can arrest Assange on their territory without their knowledge or approval.” Under existing U.S. law, he claimed, “we do not need permission to apprehend Assange or his co-conspirators anywhere in the world.”
Liberal Democrats have chimed in with their own proposals to target Wikileaks. According to a report Wednesday in the New York Times, two Senate Democrats, Charles Schumer of New York and Diane Feinstein of California, are drafting an amendment to the “media shield” legislation now being considered in Congress “to make clear that the bill’s protections extend only to traditional news-gathering activities and not to web sites that serve as a conduit for the mass dissemination of secret documents.”
The bill was originally drafted in response to a series of cases in which reporters were jailed for refusing to disclose their sources to judges, prosecutors or plaintiffs in lawsuits. In order to avoid WikiLeaks taking advantage of such a shield law, Schumer and Feinstein want to specifically exclude whistleblower sites.
The Times quoted Paul J. Boyle, senior vice president for public policy at the Newspaper Association of America, the industry trade group, endorsing such a policy, which would reserve this type of First Amendment protection for “traditional news organizations subject to American law and having editorial controls and experience in news judgment.” In other words, such safeguards would be reserved to the corporate-controlled media, run by people loyal to the American ruling elite and the capitalist state.
The major concern of those targeting WikiLeaks and Private Manning is that the leaks of internal government documents provide evidence to justify war crimes prosecution of U.S. government officials, past and present. To save their own skins, they want to criminalize the exposure of these atrocities, rather than the atrocities themselves.
The language being employed in media and official circles is dangerous and chilling. It makes clear that nine years of uninterrupted military aggression have provided the basis for major attacks on democratic rights in the United States and the preparation of more openly dictatorial forms of rule.
Launched on the basis of systematic lying, both about the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the supposed danger of “weapons of mass destruction,” these wars are criminal in every sense of the word. Millions have been killed, maimed or driven from their homes, and more than five thousand Americans have died to advance the interests of U.S. imperialism in the oil rich Persian Gulf and Central Asia.
Officials of the Bush and Obama administrations are manifestly guilty of war crimes, ranging from launching aggressive war—the core charge against the Nazis in Nuremberg—to the systematic assassination of opponents in both Iraq and Afghanistan. This last practice, documented by WikiLeaks in the activities of Army Task Force 373 in Afghanistan, is a full-scale repetition of one of the principal horrors of the Vietnam War, the CIA’s Phoenix Program, which murdered 20,000 suspected supporters of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front.
After the Phoenix Program was exposed in the U.S. media, including the publication of the Pentagon Papers, government-sponsored assassination became politically discredited and was officially outlawed—until the onset of the “war on terror.” Now such methods are being effectively legalized, as politicians of both parties, backed by their media apologists, boast of their right to “take out” opponents, using bombs, missiles or direct hand-to-hand violence.
WikiLeaks and Private Manning are being targeted because they have done what a cowardly and spineless media has refused to do—tell the truth about the crimes of American imperialism. Working people in the United States and around the world must demand the dropping of all threats and charges against WikiLeaks, an end to the government harassment and targeting of whistleblowers, and the immediate release of Private Bradley Manning.
See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism
Spycraft: The Secret History of the CIA's Spytechs, from Communism to Al-Qaeda
Swedish protection does not apply to Wikileaks
The protection of sources under Swedish law made the site Wikileaks to route their traffic through servers in Stockholm. But the legal protection only applies to sites with publication license – something Wikileaks is lacking.
The website Wikileaks has lately been in the news because of its publication of Afghan War logs, one of the largest and most controversial intelligence leaks to date. The organisation behind the website publishes leaked documents while preserving the anonymity of sources.
Wikileaks claims that Swedish law protects their sources. But this is a promise they can not make, according to experts, this since Wikileaks has no publication license in Sweden.
The Swedish protection of sources is one of the strongest in the world. The constitution protects people who share information to the media from being sought by the authorities.
But having the server placed in Sweden is not equal to having it covered by the Swedish legal protection of sources.
“It seems to me too easy to claim that Wikileaks sources would be protected - in any case - here in Sweden," says Håkan Rustand, deputy Chancellor of Justice, to daily Sydsvenska Dagbladet.
Anders R Olsson is a writer, journalist, and expert on freedom of expression issues. He finds it strange that Wikileaks did not seem to be clear about the rules. He also points out that the prohibition of seeking sources is not absolute, even if the media is constitutionally protected.
“Is it about top secret data - things that really are of great importance for the Armed Forces - the police and prosecutors shall try to find the leak and prosecute the person," he says.
Now, Wikileaks promises to review their claim of Swedish legal protection to their 'sources, according to an email to Swedish public radio SR.
"We'll let the lawyers look at it again ..." it says in the commentary from Wikileaks. Link
Dialogue with Pak must despite WikiLeaks: India
NEW DELHI: It is vital to talk to Pakistan despite WikiLeaks expose on the role of the Pakistani intelligence in terror attacks on Indian interests, Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao has said.
In a wide-ranging interview with a private news channel, Rao also made it clear that Islamabad cannot be given a blank cheque on the future of Afghanistan.
Underlining that dialogue was the most effective means of addressing contentious issues, she said that giving up the talks would not serve any purpose "in getting Pakistan to stop its pursuit of terrorism against India".
The foreign secretary was asked if this held true despite WikiLeaks disclosures that Pakistan was directly and clearly involving in instigating terror against India, including in Afghanistan.
"I believe that dialogue is the most effective means to tackle outstanding issues with Pakistan," she said. "In other words, dialogue is the most intelligent means of addressing points of contention."
Dialogue, she said, "has served the purpose of putting across our deepest concerns in Pakistan".
She said that what WikiLeaks had come out with was known to India for a long time.
"The role of officials agencies from Pakistan in promoting terrorism against India is something we have been speaking of and drawing attention to for a long time now," Rao said.
"We understand and we know that country better perhaps than any other country in the world."
She denied that India was dependent on the US to curb Pakistan's terror machine.
"We are not dependent on any third country when it comes to transacting relations with Pakistan," she said. "We deal directly with Pakistan, and bilateral issues are taken up bilaterally with that country."
Turning to Afghanistan, Rao said that Washington's increasing leaning on Islamabad for an American military withdrawal would not diminish Indian interests in that country.
"We are confident about our profile in Afghanistan and the fact that our interests will be well recognized by the international community," she said.
"This is increasingly evident in the dialogue we have with our key partners."
Rao added that "Pakistan cannot be given a blank cheque" vis-a-vis Afghanistan and any assistance to Pakistan ostensibly for counter-insurgency "could very well be used against India as the history of the last 60 years goes".
She sought to allay fears that Pakistan would virtually take over Afghanistan once the US military left, saying Afghans were too independent a people to allow themselves to be subjugated.
"Afghanistan is a fiercely independent country. And the take away we have had from meetings with the Afghan leadership in the recent past is that they are zealous about guarding that independence."
A former Indian envoy in Beijing, Rao said the relationship between India and China was complex but would be the "big story of the 21st century".
"A story based on dialogue, which we intend to conduct intelligently and which we intend to conduct with confidence so that our concerns are protected always," she added.
Rao said the two Asian giants not only have a multi-pronged, multi-sectoral dialogue but also consulted each other on multilateral issues.
India and China fought a war in 1962 but have since witnessed an increasing economic relationship, with trade volume expected to increase to $60 billion by the end of this year. LINK
In a wide-ranging interview with a private news channel, Rao also made it clear that Islamabad cannot be given a blank cheque on the future of Afghanistan.
Underlining that dialogue was the most effective means of addressing contentious issues, she said that giving up the talks would not serve any purpose "in getting Pakistan to stop its pursuit of terrorism against India".
The foreign secretary was asked if this held true despite WikiLeaks disclosures that Pakistan was directly and clearly involving in instigating terror against India, including in Afghanistan.
"I believe that dialogue is the most effective means to tackle outstanding issues with Pakistan," she said. "In other words, dialogue is the most intelligent means of addressing points of contention."
Dialogue, she said, "has served the purpose of putting across our deepest concerns in Pakistan".
She said that what WikiLeaks had come out with was known to India for a long time.
"The role of officials agencies from Pakistan in promoting terrorism against India is something we have been speaking of and drawing attention to for a long time now," Rao said.
"We understand and we know that country better perhaps than any other country in the world."
She denied that India was dependent on the US to curb Pakistan's terror machine.
"We are not dependent on any third country when it comes to transacting relations with Pakistan," she said. "We deal directly with Pakistan, and bilateral issues are taken up bilaterally with that country."
Turning to Afghanistan, Rao said that Washington's increasing leaning on Islamabad for an American military withdrawal would not diminish Indian interests in that country.
"We are confident about our profile in Afghanistan and the fact that our interests will be well recognized by the international community," she said.
"This is increasingly evident in the dialogue we have with our key partners."
Rao added that "Pakistan cannot be given a blank cheque" vis-a-vis Afghanistan and any assistance to Pakistan ostensibly for counter-insurgency "could very well be used against India as the history of the last 60 years goes".
She sought to allay fears that Pakistan would virtually take over Afghanistan once the US military left, saying Afghans were too independent a people to allow themselves to be subjugated.
"Afghanistan is a fiercely independent country. And the take away we have had from meetings with the Afghan leadership in the recent past is that they are zealous about guarding that independence."
A former Indian envoy in Beijing, Rao said the relationship between India and China was complex but would be the "big story of the 21st century".
"A story based on dialogue, which we intend to conduct intelligently and which we intend to conduct with confidence so that our concerns are protected always," she added.
Rao said the two Asian giants not only have a multi-pronged, multi-sectoral dialogue but also consulted each other on multilateral issues.
India and China fought a war in 1962 but have since witnessed an increasing economic relationship, with trade volume expected to increase to $60 billion by the end of this year. LINK
Wikileaks cracks NATO's Master Narrative for Afghanistan
Wikileaks cracks NATO's Master Narrative for Afghanistan
Wikileaks has cracked the encryption to a key document relating to the war in Afghanistan. The document, titled "NATO in Afghanistan: Master Narrative", details the "story" NATO representatives are to give to, and to avoid giving to, journalists.
The encrypted document, which is dated October 6, and believed to be current, can be found on the Pentagon Central Command (CENTCOM) website oneteam.centcom.mil. [UPDATE: Fri Feb 27 15:18:38 GMT 2009, the entire Pentagon site is now down--probably in response to this editorial, parts of the site can still be seen in Google's cache ]
The encryption password is progress, which perhaps reflects the Pentagon's desire to stay on-message, even to itself.
Among the revelations, which we encourage the press to review in detail, is Jordan's presence as secret member of the US lead occupation force, the ISAF.
Jordan is a middle eastern monarchy, backed by the US, and historically the CIA's closest partner in its extraordinary rendition program. "the practice of torture is routine" in the country, according to a January 2007 report by UN special investigator for torture, Manfred Nowak.[1]
The document states NATO spokespersons are to keep Jordan's involvement secret. Publicly, Jordan withdrew in 2001 and the country does not appear on this month's public list of ISAF member states.[2]
Some other notes on matters to treat delicately are:
- Any decision on the end date/end state will be taken by the respective national and/or Alliance political committee. Under no circumstances should the mission end-date be a topic for speculation in public by any NATO/ISAF spokespeople.
- The term "compensation" is inappropriate and should not be used because it brings with it legal implications that do not apply.
- Any talk of stationing or deploying Russian military assets in Afghanistan is out of the question and has never been the subject of any considerations.
- Only if pressed: ISAF forces are frequently fired at from inside Pakistan, very close to the border. In some cases defensive fire is required, against specific threats. Wherever possible, such fire is pre-coordinated with the Pakistani military.
Altogether four classified or restricted NATO documents on the Pentagon Central Command (CENTCOM) site were discovered to share the 'progress' password. Wikileaks has decrypted the documents and released them in full:
- NATO Media Operations Centre: NATO in Afghanistan: Master Narrative, 6 Oct 2008
- ISAF Afghanistan Theatre Strategic Communications Strategy, 25 Oct 2008
- NATO-ISAF Afghanistan Strategic Communications External Linkages, 20 Oct 2008
- NATO-ISAF Strategic Communications Ends, Ways and Means, slide, 20 Oct 2008
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