Secret Archive Grim View of Afghan War - Wikileaks ONLINE

[Sweejak]

Tarpley on Assange in 2 parts, the top two.

feed://podcast.gcnlive.com/podcast/worl ... /pcast.php

[seemslikeadream]

Tarpley on Assange in 2 parts, the top two.

feed://podcast.gcnlive.com/podcast/worl ... /pcast.php

Thanks for the posts Swee

Mysterious 'insurance file' posted on WikiLeaks
(AFP) – 5 hours ago
WASHINGTON — Whistleblower website WikiLeaks has posted a mysterious encrypted "insurance file," touching off speculation about what it contains.
Wired magazine said the 1.4-gigabyte "insurance file" appeared on WikiLeaks' "Afghan War Diary" page several days after the site released tens of thousands of classified documents related to the war in Afghanistan.
Cryptome, another whistleblower site, said it may have been "pre-positioned for public release" in the event of a "takedown" of WikiLeaks by US authorities or if something happens to its founder, Julian Assange, an Australian national.
"In either scenario, WikiLeaks volunteers, under a prearranged agreement with Assange, could send out a password or passphrase to allow anyone who has downloaded the file to open it," Wired said.
The file is also available on a file-sharing site in addition to the WikiLeaks page.
Cryptome.org speculated the "insurance file" may contain the 15,000 Afghan files whose release WikiLeaks said it had delayed "as part of a harm minimization process demanded by our source."
WikiLeaks has never identified the source of the Afghan files but suspicion has fallen on Bradley Manning, a US Army intelligence analyst who is under arrest for allegedly leaking video of a 2007 US Apache helicopter strike in Baghdad in which civilians died.
Wired said the "insurance file" may contain more material from Manning, including war logs from Iraq, video from Afghanistan and 260,000 US State Department cables

.

[seemslikeadream]

On Wikileaks (III): "We'd like his cooperation..."
[Part I]

[Part II]

**********


Within the next few days, I will publish a detailed analysis of the criticisms of Wikileaks and the latest release of Afghanistan documents offered, not by conservative/rightwing bastards like Varadarajan (discussed in the last section of this article), but by what we might call the "radical left." As I will be explaining, I find the left's criticisms more incoherent and occasionally more offensive than those put forth by the right. The longer I consider the left's critique, the worse it gets in my view.

At the moment, I want to mention one particular response by some warriors of the left -- those brave souls who, like their counterparts on the right, demonstrate their peerless courage on a daily basis by repairing to their keyboards and pounding out another blog post, and frequently not even that: simply a comment to someone else's blog post. I hesitate to question the bravery of those who put life and limb in danger by moving fingers to keys, as they imperil the fate of nations by possibly spilling a few drops of coffee on their desks -- but I will screw my own courage to the sticking point and tell certain motherfuckers to go straight to hell.

Which motherfuckers do I have in mind? I'm so glad you asked. Those who say, in various ways: "Well, I don't see that Assange has put himself in any particular danger. C'mon, what do you think is actually likely to happen to him? Nothing, that's what." Some of the same individuals will go on to argue that Assange will just get a lot more publicity, which maybe is all he's really after. A few will add, in their preferred tone of world-weary cynicism: "We're all adults here, right? We know that's what motivates most people like this in the end." (I've seen more than a few comments which say all this, and even worse, and you probably have as well. No, I won't link to them.)

I've covered some aspects of these issues in the earlier parts of my Wikileaks series: in Part I, I discussed the dangers faced by Assange and by Bradley Manning (about whom many brave warriors of the left seem to have next to nothing to say, see below), and I also talked about the inability of many people to recognize genuine heroes in their midst (and if that shoe fits you, put it on, you bastard); in Part II, especially in the second half, I analyzed the nature and significance of Wikileaks' role in an obedience culture.

But Assange doesn't face any serious danger as the result of his actions? You really want to stick with that view? I suggest you reconsider it immediately. I'd missed this story when it appeared in June, but in light of recent developments, all of these concerns almost certainly have only increased in the interim:

Pentagon investigators are trying to determine the whereabouts of the Australian-born founder of the secretive website Wikileaks for fear that he may be about to publish a huge cache of classified State Department cables that, if made public, could do serious damage to national security, government officials tell The Daily Beast.

The officials acknowledge that even if they found the website founder, Julian Assange, it is not clear what they could do to block publication of the cables on Wikileaks, which is nominally based on a server in Sweden and bills itself as a champion of whistleblowers.

American officials said Pentagon investigators are convinced that Assange is in possession of at least some classified State Department cables leaked by a 22-year-old Army intelligence specialist, Bradley Manning of Potomac, Maryland, who is now in custody in Kuwait.

And given the contents of the cables, the feds have good reason to be concerned.

...

American officials would not discuss the methods being used to find Assange, nor would they say if they had information to suggest where he is now. "We'd like to know where he is; we'd like his cooperation in this," one U.S. official said of Assange.

"[W]e'd like his cooperation..."

I suggest you imagine a Mafia murderer, or any contract killer, saying those words. Or a killer employed by the Pentagon (in addition to all those killers already in the military services). He has Assange tightly bound in a chair, or possibly hanging from hooks on the wall or ceiling. Assange has been tortured for days, maybe weeks. As blood seeps from the numerous wounds Assange has already suffered -- wounds deliberately inflicted so as to cause unbearable pain, while ensuring that Assange remains alive precisely so that he can endure still more pain (which is the meaning, and the only meaning, of torture) -- the killers leans in and presses his mouth gently against Assange's ear. He gently and softly croons to his victim:

We only want your cooperation, Julian. I don't want to hurt you. Why are you making me hurt you? I never wanted to do this, and I want to stop right now. Just tell us what we want to know. Tell us and this will stop. Cooperate with us, Julian.

And if Assange doesn't cooperate, the torture will go on, and on, and on. Finally, Assange may die -- or he may go mad. Or he may be unable to endure any more and tell his torturers what they want to know.

By the way, it seems that what so concerns the U.S. government might be those 26,000 diplomatic cables that Manning said he had delivered to Wikileaks, and which Wikileaks denies receiving. It may be the case that Wikileaks did receive them, or at least a substantial number of them. And as the story excerpted above notes, "the feds have good reason to be concerned" about their contents. Or it may be that the concern noted in the story from June centered on the documents that Wikileaks just released. At this point, we can't know which cache of documents is involved. And since Assange has indicated he has many more documents still awaiting release, the government may be very agitated about something else altogether.

Also note this from the story: Assange canceled a scheduled appearance in Las Vegas in June, because of "security concerns." Far too dangerous for him to travel to the United States now. And:
Last week, Assange was scheduled to join famed Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg for a talk at New York's Personal Democracy Forum. Assange appeared via Skype from Australia instead, saying lawyers recommended he not return to the United States.
Many of the left-leaning critics of Wikileaks frequently condemn the U.S. as a cold-blooded killer, waging an endless series of criminal wars. Yet in this case, they seem unable or unwilling to acknowledge the very strong likelihood that the U.S. has targeted Assange. But the logic of the situation, and of Wikileaks' role, necessitates the conclusion that Assange has been targeted, and I'm aware of nothing that would suggest a contrary conclusion. All the evidence I've seen tends to establish that the U.S. government wants to stop Assange at a minimum, and eliminate him if necessary.

But he's not in any serious danger -- and perhaps he's only after more publicity? What I'd like to say in response is too rude even for me. Imagine the most offensive statement you can, and multiply it by ten, or a hundred.

And about Bradley Manning, here's the latest:

U.S. Army officials transferred PFC Bradley Manning from the Theater Field Confinement Facility in Kuwait to the Marine Corps Base Quantico Brig in Quantico, Virginia, on July 29. Manning remains in pretrial confinement pending an Article 32 investigation into the charges preferred against him on July 5. Manning was transferred because of the potential for lengthy continued pretrial confinement given the complexity of the charges and ongoing investigation. The field confinement facility in Kuwait is designed for short-term confinement.

The criminal investigation remains open. Preferral of charges represents an accusation only; Manning is presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty. The case will be processed in accordance with normal procedures under the Uniform Code of Military Justice

.
"[T]he potential for lengthy continued pretrial confinement..."

I repeat what I said before: Bradley Manning is 22 years old. If convicted on all charges, he faces imprisonment of up to 52 years. The U.S. government seeks to destroy Bradley Manning's entire life, when it has barely begun. But I'm enormously reassured by the reference in the official press release to the "normal procedures under the Uniform Code of Military Justice," and the mention that Manning is presumed innocent. "Military justice." I think this concept must be categorized together with "military intelligence."

I've already urged people to donate to Manning's defense fund, and I do so again. If I can manage to scrape up $35 -- which I did a short while ago -- then many of you can, too. I earnestly implore you to do so in the strongest possible terms. The donations might end up making a significant difference.

In my reading over the last week, I've seen that some of the same leftist writers who criticize Wikileaks have posted absolutely nothing about supporting Bradley Manning. I'll have more about this, and what I consider an altogether shocking omission, in upcoming parts of this series. (I realize that many factors determine those topics a writer covers and those he does not -- but it's not as if the writers I have in mind haven't had plenty of time to write about other issues, none of which approach the urgency of this matter in any respect. I also acknowledge that I myself have been guilty of what I now consider very egregious similar omissions in the past, for which I am deeply sorry. I'll do my best to see that the same kind of mistake isn't repeated in the future.) For the moment, I will simply ask: Given your repeated proclamations of your concern for the loss of innocent life and the brutality visited upon entirely undeserving victims, what the hell do you have a blog for? If you can't be bothered to urge that people support Manning in any way they can, you might as well take your blog and ... well, you know what you can do with it.

I suppose that some of these serious and sophisticated critics of Wikileaks will tell me again that Assange isn't in any real danger. It's rather more difficult to make the same argument about Manning, so they ignore his fate completely. Good job.

(I repeat: a full analysis of the left critique of Wikileaks is forthcoming very shortly. This issue isn't even one of the five or six major points I plan to cover. This is a bonus for the motherfuckers out there. I thus prove still another time how thoughtful and generous I am.)

[wintler2]

Good stuff SLAD, look forward to the rest.

On the twilight side of same planet..

Star Wars fans strike back with #wookieleaks on twitter

The Empire is striking back with Twitter's Wookieleaks in what appears to be a massive conspiracy to leak Star Wars classified documents to the world. At this time the Pentagon does not see Wookieleaks as a threat to National Security.

While the Pentagon steps up their efforts to stop the Wikileaks twitter fans are compiling and releasing one hilarious tweet after another from The Galactic News Network, also known to Earthlings as Twitter.

Thousands of hilarious comments compiled from all the Star Wars movies are keeping the world entertained today with some previously declassified information as well as some new, confidential and highly classified information that has Darth Vadar and Luke Skywalker wondering what embarrassing information may come out next.

A sampling of the top secret information released includes:
tcarmody -Despite billions invested on construction of an untested defense system, the new Death Star may not yet be fully operational. #wookieleaks
turkshead 'Insurgents' targeted by Imperial Stormtroopers revealed to be cute fuzzy Ewoks. #wookieleaks
SynthBio More oil soaked Gungans washed up on the shores of Naboo today as BP still says there is no leak. #Wookieleaks
GundamWZero Jar Jar Binks cited on impersonating a Jamaican...#wookieleaks
GunnulfTheRed Sources close to the Emperor claim that he was aware of the tragic design flaw that allowed Rebels to destroy the Death Star. #wookieleaks
PhishSlave Retired general, jedi Kenobi arrested after accusations of soliciting young farm boys on Tatooine
..

Who benefits from trivialising and/or keyword hijacking Wikileaks?

[Sweejak]

Key WikiLeaks Figure Detained, Phones Seized by US Customs
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/08/01/key- ... s-customs/

[wintler2]

Guy held and released is Jacob Applebaum, who is quoted as recently saying

.."All governments are on a continuum of tyranny," he said. "In the US, a cop with a gun can commit the most heinous crime and be given the benefit of the doubt. In the US, we don't have censorship but we do have collaborating news organisations."

[seemslikeadream]

Do Disclosures of Atrocities Change Anything?

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

The hope of the brave soldier who sent 92,000 secret U.S. documents to Wikileaks was that their disclosure would prompt public revulsion and increasing political pressure on Obama to seek with all speed a diplomatic conclusion to this war. The documents he sent Wikileaks included overwhelming documentary evidence – accepted by all as genuine, of:

* the methodical use of a death squad made up of US Special Forces, known as Task Force 373,

* willful, casual slaughter of civilians by Coalition personnel, with ensuing cover-ups,

*the utter failure of “counter-insurgency” and “nation building”,

*the venality and corruption of the Coalition’s Afghan allies,

*the complicity of Pakistan’s Intelligence Services with the Taliban,

Wikileaks’ founder, Julian Assange, skillfully arranged simultaneous publication of the secret material in the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel.

The story broke on the eve of a war-funding vote in the U.S. Congress. Thirty-six hours after the stories hit the news stands, the U.S. House of Representatives last Tuesday evening voted Aye to a bill already passed by the Senate that funds a $33 billion, 30,000-troop escalation in Afghanistan. The vote was 308 to 114. To be sure, more US Reps voted against escalation than a year ago when the Noes totted up to only 35. That’s a crumb of comfort, but the cruel truth is that in 24 hours the White House and Pentagon, with the help of licensed members of the Commentariat and papers like the Washington Post, had finessed the salvoes from Wikileaks.

“WikiLeaks disclosures unlikely to change course of Afghanistan war” was the Washington Post’s Tuesday morning headline. Beneath this headline the news story said the leaks had been discussed for only 90 seconds at a meeting of senior commanders in the Pentagon. The story cited “senior officials” in the White House even brazenly claiming that that it was precisely his reading of these same raw secret intelligence reports a year ago that prompted Obama “to pour more troops and money into a war effort that had not received sufficient attention or resources from the Bush administration.” (As in: “Get that death squad operating more efficiently” – an order consummated by Obama’s appointment of General McChrystal as his Afghan commander, transferred from his previous job as top U.S. Death Squad general in charge of the Pentagon’s world-wide operations in this area.)

There’s some truth in the claim that long before Wikileaks released the 92,000 files the overall rottenness and futility of the Afghan war had been graphically reported in the press. Earlier this year, for example, reporting by Jerome Starkey of The Times of London blew apart the U.S. military’s cover-up story after Special Forces troops killed two pregnant Afghan women and a girl in a February, 2010, raid, in which two Afghan government officials were also killed.

It’s oversell to describe the Wikileaks package as a latterday Pentagon Papers. But it’s undersell to dismiss them as “old stories”, as disingenuous detractors have been doing. The Wikileaks files are a damning, vivid series of snapshots of a disastrous and criminal enterprise. In these same files there is a compelling series of secret documents about the death squad operated by the US military known as Task Force 373. an undisclosed "black" unit of special forces, which has been hunting down targets for death or detention without trial. From Wikileaks we learn that more than 2,000 senior figures from the Taliban and al-Qaida are held on a "kill or capture" list, known as Jpel, the joint prioritized effects list.

There are logs showing that Task Force 373 simply killed their targets without attempting to capture. The logs reveal that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path.

One could watch Assange being interviewed on US news programs where he would raise the fact that the US military has been – is still – running a death squad along the model of the Phoenix Program. His interviewers simply changed the subject. Liberal gate-keepers complained that the Wikileaks documents were raw files, unmediated by responsible imperial journalists such as themselves. This echoed the usual ritual whines from the Pentagon about the untimely disclosures of “sources and methods”. (I recommend to CounterPunchers Doug Valentine's pieces on this site -- try the one from August 11, 2003 -- on the fundamental objective of big assassination programslike Phoenix in instilling general social terror in the target population.)

The bitter truth is that wars are not often ended by disclosures of their horrors and futility in the press, with consequent public uproar.

Disclosures from the mid-1950s that the French were torturing Algerians amid the war of independence were numerous. Henri Alleg’s famous 1958 account of his torture, La Question, sold 60,000 copies in a single day. Torture duly became more pervasive, and the war more savage, under the supervision of a nominally Socialist French government.

After Ron Ridenhour and then Seymour Hersh broke the My Lai massacre in 1968 in Vietnam with over 500 men, women and babies methodically, beaten, sexually abused, tortured and then murdered by American GIs, -- a tactless disclosure of “methods” -- there was public revulsion, then an escalation in slaughter. The war ran for another seven years.

It is true, as Noam Chomsky pointed out to me last week, when I asked him for positive examples, that popular protest in the wake of press disclosures “impelled Congress to call off the direct US role in the grotesque bombing of rural Cambodia. Similarly in the late 70s, under popular pressure Congress barred Carter, later Reagan, from direct participation in virtual genocide in the Guatemalan highlands, so the Pentagon had to evade legislation in devious ways and Reagan had to call in terrorist states, primarily Israel, to carry out the massacres.”

Even though New York Times editors edited out the word “indiscriminate” from Thomas Friedman’s news report of Israel’s bombing of Beirut in 1982, tv news footage from Lebanon prompted President Reagan to order Israeli prime minister Begin to stop, and he did. (On one account, which I tend to believe, the late Michael Deaver, was watching live footage of the bombing in his White House office and went into Reagan, saying "This is disgusting and you should stop it.")

It happened again when Peres's forces bombed the UN compound in Qana in 1996, causing much international outrage, and Clinton ordered it ended. There was a repeat once more in 2006, with another bombing of Qana that aroused a lot of international protest. But as Chomsky concludes in his note to me, “I think one will find very few such examples, and almost none in the case of really major war crimes.”

So one can conclude pessimistically that exposure of war crimes, torture and so forth, often leads to intensification of the atrocities, with government and influential newspapers and commentators supervising a kind of hardening process. "Yes, this - murder, torture, wholesale slaughter of civilians - is indeed what it takes." Even though this pattern is long-standing, it often comes as a great surprise. A friend of mine was at a dinner with the CBS news producers, shortly before they broke the Abu Ghraib tortures. Almost everyone at the table thought that Bush might well be impeached.

The important constituency here is liberals, who duly rise to the challenge of unpleasant disclosures of imperial crimes. In the wake of scandals such as those revealed at Abu Ghraib, or in the Wikileaks files, they are particularly eager to proclaim that they “can take it” – i.e., endure convincing accounts of monstrous tortures, targeted assassinations by US forces, obliteration of wedding parties or entire villages, and emerge with ringing affirmations of the fundamental overall morality of the imperial enterprise. This was very common in the Vietnam war and repeated in subsequent imperial ventures such the sanctions and ensuing attack on Iraq, and now the war in Afghanistan. Of course in the case of Israel it’s an entire way of life for a handsome slice of America’s liberals.

What does end wars? One side is annihilated, the money runs out, the troops mutiny, the government falls, or fears it will. With the U.S. war in Afghanistan none of these conditions has yet been met. The U.S. began the destruction of Afghanistan in 1979, when President Jimmy Carter and his National Security Advisor Zbigniev Brzezinksi started financing the mullahs and warlords in the largest and most expensive operation in the CIA’s history until that time. Here we are, more than three decades later, half buried under a mountain of horrifying news stories about a destroyed land of desolate savagery and what did one hear on many news commentaries earlier this week? Indignant bleats often by liberals, about Wikileaks’ “irresponsibility” in releasing the documents; twitchy questions such as that asked by The Nation’s Chris Hayes on the Rachel Maddow Show: “I wonder ultimately to whom WikiLeaks ends up being accountable.”

The answer to that last question was given definitively in 1851 by Robert Lowe, editorial writer for the London Times. He had been instructed by his editor to refute the claim of a government minister that if the press hoped to share the influence of statesmen, it “must also share in the responsibilities of statesmen.”

“The first duty of the press,” Lowe wrote, “is to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of the events of the time, and instantly, by disclosing them, to make them the common property of the nation… The Press lives by disclosures… For us, with whom publicity and truth are the air and light of existence, there can be no greater disgrace than to recoil from the frank and accurate disclosure of facts as they are. We are bound to tell the truth as we find it, without fear of consequences – to lend no convenient shelter to acts of injustice and oppression, but to consign them at once to the judgment of the world.”

[Laodicean]

Washington Post's Marc A. Thiessen:

WikiLeaks must be stopped

Let's be clear: WikiLeaks is not a news organization; it is a criminal enterprise. Its reason for existence is to obtain classified national security information and disseminate it as widely as possible -- including to the United States' enemies. These actions are likely a violation of the Espionage Act, and they arguably constitute material support for terrorism. The Web site must be shut down and prevented from releasing more documents -- and its leadership brought to justice.

Read more of Marc's BS here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... inionsbox1

[82_28]

There ya go, the exact reason people across the nets suspected an ulterior and propagandistic motive for all the hullabaloo.

As Kevin at Cryptogon said and has been posted already, but I will post again for those who may have missed it:

People often ask me if I think this source or that source is disinfo…

My response is always: TREAT EVERY SOURCE AS DISINFO.

You’ll avoid disappointment when the thing starts serving up rat poison—which, unfortunately, happens a lot.

I haven’t shared this before, but in early 2008, someone from WikiLeaks wrote to me. This person wondered why I hadn’t mentioned WikiLeaks on Cryptogon. He wondered if maybe I hadn’t heard of it, or had concerns that it was a front of some sort.

I simply wrote back that I was aware of WikiLeaks, and that I was hopeful and skeptical at the same time.

That remains my stance today; on WikiLeaks and every other source.

So, who knows… I’ve read interesting things on WikiLeaks, many of which I have linked to from here. Does that mean that I’m sure it’s not some kind of front or honeypot? Not at all. How could I know for sure, given what’s knowable in the public domain about WikiLeaks?

Julian Assange’s recent comment in the Belfast Telegraph about 9/11, however, may be a more tangible source of concern for me. I know Assange isn’t an idiot, so I see three other possibilities:

1. He is profoundly ignorant of the vast body of material that demonstrates that the 9/11 spectacle was a false flag operation.

2. He’s “picking his battles” and not wanting to have to deal with the inevitable conspiracy theory stigma that could threaten his media access

3. He’s running a limited hangout/honeypot

Of these three options, I doubt that it’s number two.

Also, I’m aware of all the stuff John Young has up over at Cryptome from some anonymous mole on a private WikiLeaks list. Again, who knows.

Vet the data as you would anything else from any source. Use your skills of discernment. For me, the most worrying thing about WikiLeaks is the promotion it receives from the corporate media. Even the trash talking Wired is promoting Wikileaks by constantly mentioning it.

In the end, though, obsessing about disinfo this and disinfo that is generally a waste of time. It’s safe to assume that damn near everything we come across contains disinfo.

There is the issue of stench, however. Sources that say, categorically, that there’s nothing to see here on 9/11 smell really bad to me. As bad as anything can smell. (See my maggot bucket if you think that I don’t know what smells bad.)

We just saw the WikiLeaks release of the Afghanistan information, does Assange forget the pretext that was used for the invasion?

9/11 remains the elephant in the room.

http://cryptogon.com/?p=16641

That retard at the Washington Post is simply the next step to getting distributed, electronic DIY info, commentary and conversation in the eventual Full Nelson. Chris Floyd put it well too. There's nothing in the Afghanistan leaks that should surprise anyone who's been paying attention in the first place. Assange and wikileaks could have been set up or they could be party to it. Who the fuck knows?

[seemslikeadream]

LEAKS
by Amy Davidson
AUGUST 9, 2010

Last September, an assessment of the war in Afghanistan, by the American commander General Stanley McChrystal, was leaked to the press. The timing was not incidental. President Obama was trying to make up his mind about what kind of war he wanted to wage, for how long, and with how many soldiers. McChrystal had a definite opinion: the best way to win was to send forty-five thousand more troops to Afghanistan—the sooner the better.
That same month, American soldiers in Balkh Province, in the north of Afghanistan, were planning a search-and-clear operation. It was not going well. According to a report written by a member of Task Force Warrior, a unit of the 10th Mountain Division, local civilians would not coöperate, whereupon Afghan soldiers and policemen “harassed and beat” them. The area’s residents “had a negative opinion” of their nation’s security forces, the writer noted. A police district commander
is reported to have had forcible sexual contact with a 16 ye old AC [Afghan civilian] female. When AC from the area went to complain to the ANP [Afghan National Police] district commander about the incident, the district commander ordered his body guard to open fire on the AC. The body guard refused at which time the district commander shot him in front of the AC.
This dispatch was one of some seventy-six thousand classified American military documents, mostly field reports, released online by WikiLeaks, an organization committed to making secrets public. (The group says that, at the insistence of its source, it delayed the publication of fifteen thousand other documents as part of “a harm minimization process”; still, the names of some Afghan informants were posted.) WikiLeaks gave the Times, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel an advance look at the entire archive, which covers events from January, 2004, to December, 2009, in every corner of Afghanistan.
Almost immediately, a consensus emerged that little in the files was actually secret or new. There is something to that. We did know, in a general sense, much of what they document: that the regime of President Hamid Karzai is corrupt and unpopular, that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency has ties to the Taliban, that too many civilians are dying. There had been reports, including some in this magazine, of targeted killings. And we knew that the Afghan security forces were a disaster, even after we had spent twenty-seven billion dollars to train them. But knowing specifically what happened to a sixteen-year-old girl and to the man who stood up to her alleged rapist—and knowing that her attacker may have been in a position to do what he did because he was backed by our troops and our money—is different.
And what do we still not know? The documents are labelled in various ways, among them whether an incident involved an “enemy” or a “friend.” The Balkh report is marked “enemy,” and it does mention insurgents killing a motorist. But the designation, of this and many of the other reports, raises a larger question: Do we know who in Afghanistan is our enemy and who is our friend? Al Qaeda is our enemy, of course, but after that the lines get blurry. Is a police chief who might chase insurgents one day but creates more of them by alienating the civilian population the next our enemy or our friend? When our soldiers go to the chief’s village and are met with hostility, whose fight are they walking into?

The Afghan security forces apparently can’t tell their friends from their enemies, either. In February, 2008, according to one report, an Afghan policeman “was in the public shower smoking hash” when two Afghan National Army guys walked in. That sounds like the setup for a joke, but the punch line wasn’t funny: the policeman “felt threatened and a fire fight occurred.” In September, 2007, Afghan soldiers went looking for five policemen who had abandoned their post and, minutes later, brought one of them back with a bullet in his head. “Their story is that they tried to fire a warning shot and accidentally hit [the policeman],” the report notes. The area’s entire police force was then “withdrawn to prevent an attempted honor killing.” Both shootings are categorized as “friendly fire.”
If the problem were just undisciplined local units, then a solution that McChrystal advocated—more money and more training—might have a chance. So might a recent plan to set up another police force. But the confusion of friends and enemies goes much deeper. We pay Pakistan a billion dollars a year to fight the Taliban and other insurgents, and yet the WikiLeaks archive is riddled with reports like one from May, 2007, about the I.S.I. sending the Haqqani network, which regularly attacks American forces, “1000 motorcycles” for suicide bombers. More fundamentally, our counterinsurgency strategy relies on strengthening Karzai—“our friend and ally,” as Obama referred to him in May. But many Afghan civilians don’t regard him as their friend, and they associate us with his failings. Karzai’s own friends include dubious warlords, who serve in his government; his brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, the provincial council leader in Kandahar Province, is allegedly involved in criminal enterprises. (He has denied it.)
Last week, the White House stressed that much had changed in the seven months since the final entry in the WikiLeaks files. And that is true: we are now more deeply enmeshed in Afghanistan. Obama has doubled the number of troops there, and more are dying—more than sixty were killed in July, the highest monthly toll for Americans since the war began. McChrystal was fired in June, but Obama emphasized that his successor, David Petraeus, would pursue the same strategy. An experiment in being stern about high-level corruption ended with Karzai musing about joining the Taliban and the Administration backing down. Karzai’s initial reaction to the files bespeaks a sense of impunity. His spokesman, Waheed Omar, “was asked whether there was anything in the leaked documents that angered Mr. Karzai or that he thought unfair,” the Times reported. “No, I don’t think so,” Omar said.
Some American observers similarly implied that the lack of broad revelations rendered the contents of the files insignificant. In an Op-Ed for the Times, Andrew Exum, a former Army officer and adviser to McChrystal, wrote that one might “be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about.” The Washington Post reported that a “dismissive attitude dominated the national security think tanks.” The Wall Street Journal noted, in an editorial, “Among the many nonscoops in the documents, we learn that war is hell.” The prevailing view in those quarters was that there is no alternative: this is the war we have. But perhaps the leaked documents will persuade us to challenge that sense of resignation. We could reëxamine other proposals, like the one for a pared-down campaign narrowly focussed on hunting Al Qaeda—a plan that McChrystal’s leaked report helped quash. We might even decide, nine years after our arrival, that it is time to leave Afghanistan.

[Sweejak]

Washington Post's Marc A. Thiessen:

WikiLeaks must be stopped

Marc A. Thiessen must be stopped.

[Nordic]

If we had a free and working press, wikileaks would not be necessary.

[smiths]

its a testament to the paranoia of the times,

a man pops up and claims to be weilding a great power for the good of humankind against the forces of evil,
both sides attack him as a dangerous enemy and no-one has the ability to work out which side he his actually on

i hope he is telling the truth about his mission and motives, but i dont know,
and i acknowledge that by raising my hopes he has already gained a certain kind of power over me,

i suspect that if he is genuine then working the media in the way he has is a kind one kind of insurance policy, the higher his profile the trickier it is to get rid of him,
as for the insurance file on wikileaks, i am sure he would have worked out a plan to get it all out no matter what became of him long before that turned up

[cptmarginal]

Probability analysis of the insurance.aes256 file posted by WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks recently published a mysterious 1.4GB file entitled “insurance.aes256″ on their Afghan War Logs page, with no explanation. While much speculation has been going on as to the origins and purpose of the file, I have not been able to find any evidence for any of these theories. Many sources are saying that it is an encrypted file. Some are saying that the file could be garbage or some kind of hoax. Others are saying that it is ‘insurance’ against WikiLeaks being taken down by the United States government.

You can download the insurance.aes256 file yourself using a BitTorrent client via this magnet link. If you don’t have a BitTorrent client, or can’t/don’t want to install one, you can use this BitLet link (requires Java.)

Because of the file’s name, many media sources such as Wired that are picking up this story are saying that the file is encrypted with the AES256 algorithm. This may not be true, as Wikileaks has not said anything about the file itself. Even if it really is an encrypted file, there would be no way to tell if it really is AES256 or some other algorithm.

Most good encryption algorithms produce output that is statistically random, meaning that the output of the encryption algorithm is indistinguishable from true random number sources (such as white noise, quantum effects, or nuclear radiation). This also means that output from one encryption algorithm is indistinguishable from another algorithm.

What this means for WikiLeaks is that the file could be just random numbers designed to fool everyone into thinking that it is something big, or it could be encrypted with a different algorithm than the file says (plausible deniability.)

The AES algorithm is used by some United States military intelligence systems. It is believed by some that AES has a secret backdoor put in place by the NSA. See this, this, this, and especially this, for starters! Several attacks have been discovered in the past on AES, such as the related-key and XSL attacks, that lower the number of operations it would require to brute-force an encrypted piece of information. If the NSA really does have a backdoor, and the file is what everyone is saying it is, someone in the government with sufficient security clearance may already know what is in the file without even having the encryption key. But enough with speculation, let’s move on to the analysis…

Using a small program written by John Walker, I ran a simple probability analysis to see if there were any statistical anomalies in the file. I wanted to see whether or not the file was statistically random. This might give us clues about the file.

The chart below shows the probability of each 8-bit byte, and some general statistics at the end.

Click here to open the Probability Analysis chart»

According to the results, the file is almost completely random. There is a very tiny bias towards 0 bits showing up more than 1 bits, but this is insignificant. Again, it could just be 1.4GB of random garbage designed as disinformation intended to throw us off, or it could be some big secrets that WikiLeaks is blackmailing the government with.

I’m working on getting some N-gram charts and maybe some more autocorrelation data on this file eventually. If anyone has any information, feel free to leave a comment in the section below.

[mentalgongfu2]

Disclaimer: all Intuition, no Rigor.

Trying to parse this stuff, I am immediately reminded of Fitzmas distractions while the Empire continues its course.