Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land.

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Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land.

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Aug 27, 2010 4:29 pm

Jack has asked me to combine the Assange threads, let's see if we can keep all posts Assange here, thanks.




previous threads

Whistleblowers on US ‘massacre’ fear CIA stalker
Secret Archive Grim View of Afghan War - Wikileaks ONLINE
The political spinning of the WikiLeaks exposé: Antiwar whistle-blowing or war propaganda?
The Anti-Nuclear WANK Worm
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is 'annoyed' by 9/11 truth
On Wikileaks (VII): Take Up the Wikileaks Challenge with Pride and Honor
Julian Assange wanted in Sweden for alleged rapes
WikiLeaks founder hires star lawyer over Swedish claims
Fact-free accusations about WikiLeaks
The Real Grand Chessboard and the Profiteers of War
Slain U.S. Nazi Millionaire Had Parts for Dirty Bomb.
The BND, CIA and Kosovo's Deep Stat
How to train death squads and quash revolutions
Wikileaks is who?
wikileaks:-Cover-up of murder of civilians and journalists
WikiLeaks Personnel Are Under Physical Surveillance
Wikileaks to release over half a million 9/11 intercepts
Exposing the Black Budget
How to train death squads and quash revolutions
Fusion Centers Will Have Access to Classified Military Intel
Manhunt For Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange
WikiLeaks founder has his passport confiscated
Julian Assange ~ Oslo Freedom Forum 2010
WikiLeaks guy on AntiWar Radio now

Assange: The Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land...

By ISRAEL SHAMIR and PAUL BENNETT

…as no doubt the story of Julian Assange’s escapades in Sweden will be known once it inevitably makes its way into the hands of one of the goofier Hollywood directors – say Robert Zemeckis or Mel Brooks, or perhaps Stephen Herek of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. It would do better in the hands of Andy Wachowski, where he might do for Julian Assange what he once did for Keanu Reeves.

Who could ask for a more beautiful set-up? It’s a story fit for a tabloid, yet it might be transformed into something an intellectual could read without embarrassment. This latest adventure is the stuff of pulp fiction, and chock full of Langley spies, computer hackers, crazy feminists, flatfooted cops and sleazy rags in the female kingdom of Sweden!

Julian Assange is a character that might have been ripped from the celluloid frames of the Matrix: flaxen and lanky, he moves through cyberspace like a superman. When, on those rare occasions that he does emerge into the real world, it is to perform Kung Fu exercises. He hardly ever eats or drinks. His corporeal body can normally be found sitting in front of a MacPro or two, while his digital alter ego commutes and computes, battling the odds and the system in fantastic virtual combat. Like Neo, he is a natural-born hacker who hacked just for the heck of it until he discovered the Matrix. He had hundreds of remarkable hacking achievements to his name when in 1992 he pleaded guilty to twenty-two of them. We like to think that someday, after he has passed on in the fullness of time, he will become a kind of guardian angel for hackers, or perhaps the Greek God of Cyberspace with His Golden Board, forever surfing the web.

His adventurous style and quick wit have earned him many Swedish fans, and so when Fate led him into the sun-drenched late summer of Sweden, Julian found himself dazzled by reddening apples, cooling lakes, and boisterous crayfish-parties. Captain Neo soon paid the price for letting down his guard! It was only a few days later that this unassuming computer geek awoke to discover his own face plastered across a tabloid’s front page, and the headlines screaming Arrest of Double Rapist Imminent! Imagine yourself on vacation, visiting friends, and finding yourself suddenly the object of a nationwide manhunt. Captain Neo felt the eerie presence of the Matrix, and he pinched himself to make sure he was still in the real world. The newspaper was still there on the table, and it told him – and all of Sweden – that two women had accused him of rape, and that the police were closing in.

No, Captain Neo did not passively wait for the police to come to his door. Captain Neo is no stranger to the tactics of the Matrix. Ever since Julian’s WikiLeaks website had published the Afghan War Diary (a huge pile of secret intelligence reports that reveal the dirty war the US is running against Afghanistan), Uncle Sam has been hunting for ways to have him carted off to Guantanamo. The Right Wing News site has, just below an icon of Sarah Palin, recommended a summary death sentence for our hero: “Can we have a CIA agent with a sniper rifle rattle a bullet around his skull the next time he appears in public as a warning? You bet we can -- and we should. If that's too garish for people, then the CIA can kill him and make it look like an accident. Either way, Julian Assange deserves to die.” Other right-wing American sites bristle with similar murderous commentary about our beleaguered computer programmer.

Captain Neo understands death squads. To forestall further threats, Assange publicly placed a huge, encrypted file onto the WikiLeaks site. This file contains all the most sensitive secret information he has in his possession. He called it Insurance, and thousands of activists all over the world await the password that will release this Pandora’s Box onto the heads of the US administration.

Instead, the Matrix plays dirty and lets loose a sex bomb upon our intrepid Neo. When you can’t contest the message, you smear the messenger. Sweden is tailor-made for sending a young man into a honey trap. Sweden has particularly thorny anti-rape legislation, where a conviction might be secured from something as thin as an anonymous accuser’s allegation.

In any case, our lucky Neo Julian Assange was only able to enjoy his fugitive-from-justice status for a few hours. By noon, the charges were already dropped, and he was free to be defamed from one end of Sweden to the other, not to mention the countless websites. It’s a simple system: the websites show the headlines, and the headlines report the web gossip. It’s Character Assassination 101, but why in Sweden of all places couldn’t the dirty tricks department make the accusations stick?



Swedish bloggers uncovered the full story in a few hours. The complaint was lodged by a radical feminist Anna Ardin, 30, a one-time intern in the Swedish Foreign Service. She’s spokeswoman for Broderskapsrörelsen, the liberation theology-like Christian organization affiliated with Sweden's Social Democratic Party. She had invited Julian Assange to a crayfish party, and they had enjoyed some quality time together. When Ardin discovered that Julian shared a similar experience with a 20-year-old woman a day or two later, she obtained the younger woman’s cooperation in declaring before the police that changing partners in so rapid a manner constituted a sort of deceit. And deceit is a sort of rape. The prosecutor immediately issued an arrest warrant, and the press was duly notified. Once the facts were examined in the cold light of day, the charge of rape seemed ludicrous and was immediately dropped. In the meantime the younger woman, perhaps realizing how she had been used, withdrew her report, leaving the vengeful Anna Ardin standing alone.

However, before we absolve the Swedish police as unwitting, if zealous, dupes, please note that Swedish law strictly forbids police and prosecutors to release to the media the details of any rape-connected complaint. The Expressen had all the details of the case, including the names of the accused and the complainant, within a matter of minutes. Please note further that the right-wing tabloid Expressen belongs to the Bonnier family, the biggest media owners in Sweden, who are not only pro-American but very much pro-Israel, too. As you know, the pro-Israeli lobby is warmly supportive of America’s Middle Eastern wars, while Assange and his WikiLeaks have the potential to undermine America’s weakening support for the war.

Were the criminal reporters of the Expressen that good, or is it possible that Ms. Ardin willingly collaborated with the Expressen in targeting our plucky Neo? She interned for the editorial page ofGT , the Gothenberg edition of Expressen. f

Ardin has written and published on her blog a “revenge instruction”, describing how to commit a complete character assassination to legally destroy a person who “should be punished for what he did”. If the offence was of a sexual nature, the revenge also must also be sex-related, she wrote. Ardin was involved in Gender Studies in Uppsala University, in charge of gender equality in the Students’ Union, a junior inquisitor of sorts.

In other words, she was perfect for the job. In order to frame Julian in Singapore, they would have to fit him up with drugs. To frame Julian in England, they might have to report he had skinned and roasted cats or at least dumped a kitten in a trash bin. To hang a frame on Julian in Sweden only required reporting sex between consenting adults.

If the setup was so perfect, why did it fail? Overreach, as always. When Anna Ardin maneuvered the younger girl into assisting her in her revenge, she overreached herself. When the girl withdrew her report, Anna’s “deceit equals rape” accusation failed. However, this is just conjecture, and the true facts of the case lie deep in the vaults of the Expressen.

Hopefully it is all over, and our Neo will continue his perilous runs for the benefit of all civilization. And the Swedes? Perhaps now they will recognize that they went too far. “When the reporter from the Washington Post realized that I was not joking, (said a Swedish legal figure this week), that it does not need more than one woman's word for the police to arrest a man and charge him with rape, he said: “But my God, are you completely crazy? It's worse than Iraq of Saddam Hussein ...”
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land.

Postby jingofever » Fri Aug 27, 2010 7:18 pm

Julian Assange Gets The Bog Standard Smear Technique:
The Russians call it Kompromat - the use by the state of sexual accusations to destroy a public figure. When I was attacked in this way by the government I worked for, Uzbek dissidents smiled at me, shook their heads and said "Kompromat". They were used to it from the Soviet and Uzbek governments. They found it rather amusing to find that Western governments did it too.

Well, Julian Assange has been getting the bog standard Kompromat. I had imagined he would get something rather more spectacular, like being framed for murder and found hanging with an orange in his mouth. He deserves a better class of kompromat. If I am a whistleblower, then Julian is a veritable mighty pipe organ. Yet we just have the normal sex stuff, and very weak.

Bizarrely the offence for which Julian is wanted for questioning in Sweden was dropped from rape to sexual harassment, and then from sexual harassment to just harassment. The precise law in Swedish, as translated for me and other Sam Adams alumni by our colleague Major Frank Grevil, reads:

"He who lays hands on or by means of shooting from a firearm, throwing of stones, noise or in any other way harasses another person will be sentenced for harassment to fines or imprisonment for up to one year."

So from rape to non-sexual something. Actually I rather like that law - if we had it here, I could have had Jack Straw locked up for a year.

Julian tells us that the first woman accuser and prime mover had worked in the Swedish Embassy in Washington DC and had been expelled from Cuba for anti-Cuban government activity, as well as the rather different persona of being a feminist lesbian who owns lesbian night clubs.

Scott Ritter and I are well known whistleblowers subsequently accused of sexual offences. A less well known whistleblower is James Cameron, another FCO employee. Almost simultaneous with my case, a number of the sexual allegations the FCO made against Cameron were identical even in wording to those the FCO initially threw at me.

Another fascinating point about kompromat is that being cleared of the allegations - as happens in virtually every case - doesn't help, as the blackening of reputation has taken effect. In my own case I was formerly cleared of all allegations of both misconduct and gross misconduct, except for the Kafkaesque charge of having told defence witnesses of the existence of the allegations. The allegations were officially a state secret, even though it was the government who leaked them to the tabloids.

Yet, even to this day, the FCO has refused to acknowledge in public that I was in fact cleared of all charges. This is even true of the new government. A letter I wrote for my MP to pass to William Hague, complaining that the FCO was obscuring the fact that I was cleared on all charges, received a reply from a junior Conservative minister stating that the allegations were serious and had needed to be properly investigated - but still failing to acknowledge the result of the process. Nor has there been any official revelation of who originated these "serious allegations".

Governments operate in the blackest of ways, especially when it comes to big war money and big oil money. I can see what they are doing to Julian Assange, I know what they did to me and others (another recent example - Brigadier Janis Karpinski was framed for shoplifting). In a very real sense, it makes little difference if they murdered David Kelly or terrified him into doing it himself. Telling the truth is hazardous in today's Western political system.
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land.

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Aug 27, 2010 7:38 pm

As Assange deals with his problems in Sweden, a potential problem for his organisation has been voiced in the US. Sonia Sotomayor, the newest judge on the US Supreme Court, said in response to a student's question at an event at Denver University this week that the question of balancing freedom of speech with national security is "very likely" to come before the court in the near future.

She went on to discuss the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, at which time the Supreme Court declined to block the release:

That was not the beginning of that question, but an issue that keeps arising from generation to generation, of how far we will permit government restriction on freedom of speech in favour of protection of the country. There's no black-and-white line.

There will no doubt be many arguments in the future over whether it is the role of the Supreme Court to determine whether there is such a line at all and, if so, where it lies. But for the moment, I think we can safely say Julian Assange and his followers would argue that there's no line at all.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land.

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Sep 06, 2010 11:18 am

Protecting the Public's Right to Know

Wikileaks and Shield Laws

By LAWRENCE DAVIDSON

Underneath the radar screen of the average American citizen, a legislative battle is going on for what is called a "Federal Shield Law." This is legislation that would "protect journalists from having to reveal anonymous sources when challenged by prosecutors in federal court." Actually, all but ten of the Unites States have such laws operating at the state level, but as of now there is no federal equivalent. Last year the House of Representatives passed a bill that would establish such a law and defined the categories of cases to which it would apply, but the Senate is yet to act. Why not? The answer to that is Wikileaks.


The Wikileaks Affair

It will be remembered that in July 2010 Wikileaks published on line tens of thousands of Defense Department documents, along with combat videos, concerning the conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This was "classified" material leaked to the web site by a whistle blower within the military. The documents show that the two wars were carried on with such loose rules of engagement as to result in massive civilian casualties. Before it released the documents, Wikileaks reviewed them as part of a "harm minimization process demanded by our source." As a result it withheld 15,000 documents. Nonetheless, as a former FBI attorney put it, the information that was released is "embarrassing, inconvenient and gets in the way of the war effort." Thus, ignoring Wikileaks own vetting process, the Defense Department accused the website of simply dumping classified material onto the web and thereby compromising the safety of U.S. troops and their allied informants, to say nothing of harming what is left of the U.S. reputation in the region.

These charges are to be taken seriously for one reason only. They come from an institution that can legally retaliate in a way that could have dire consequences for Wikileaks as well as that portion of the American public desiring to know the real consequences of policies pursued in their name. As to the substance of the charges themselves, there is much room for skepticism. The dumping charge is untrue on the face of it. Wikileaks did vet the material and that is why the 15,000 documents were withheld. We have only the Pentagon’s word for the allegation that the material made public endangered anyone. And the Pentagon, whose job in Iraq and Afghanistan seems to be the endangerment of everyone, is not a source to be trusted. The only charge made against Wikileaks that everyone can agree on is that the organization embarrassed the American government.

Enter the Shield Law Effort

As all this was going on U.S. news organizations and their journalist employees were pushing hard for a passage of a federal Shield Law. All expectations were that the Senate would pass its equivalent of the House bill this Fall. It is to be noted that the bill that passed the House last year specifically exempted cases that had to do with both terrorism and national security. The presiding judge on any such case can remove the Shield Law protection. In addition the House bill also limits protection of the Shield Law in cases having to do with classified military secrets.

Then came the Wikileaks Affair. The Senate’s linking of the Weakileaks to the Shield Law seems puzzling. The website’s July posting clearly falls under the national security and military secrets rubrics. So Wikileaks would not warrant Shield Law protection under the proposed law. Nonetheless, those opposed to the bill are using the Wikileaks Affair as a focal point for renewed opposition to the Shield Law. Perhaps, from their perspective those in opposition, all whistle blowers are at best the grown up version of the despised tattletales of their youth, at worst they are all just traitors of one sort or another.

Supporters of the bill have responded in two ways. First, the Senate sponsor of the legislation, Charles Shumer, Democrat from New York, is drafting new wording that would explicitly distance the bill from Wikileaks or similar organizations. The second and more important response comes from the country’s news organizations and journalists. They are all lining up to loudly condemn Wikileaks. They claim that Wikileaks is just "a drop box for leaked documents." It just "publishes raw data without editorial oversight." Wikileaks employees are not authentic journalists because the real ones always "go through a period of consultation before publishing sensitive material." The fact that these assertions are demonstrably untrue seems not to matter to either the news organizations or the journalists. Both have participated in maligning Wikileaks as a politically expedient tactic aimed at saving the federal Shield Law. For the sake of that end, both groups are quite willing to throw Wikileaks to the wolves.

What is Really at Stake Here?

It is a sign of the superficiality of our politicians and the vested interest orientation of American news organizations and their journalists that they have seriously misinterpreted the importance of the Wikileaks Affair. This is not about who is or who is not a "real" journalist. It is about the status and future of what is suppose to be an "open" society wherein people are accurately informed about decisions and policies that actually or potentially impact their lives. It is about the right to know and the right not to be misled.

The reason that the Wikileaks’ action in July caused such an uproar within the U.S. government is because public support for both the actions that initiated the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the policies that keep them going were and are based on lies and calculated omissions in public information. In other words, the administration of George W. Bush repeatedly misled the public and the administration of Barack Obama not only protects those responsible, but continues their practices. As a result millions have been killed and maimed and nothing of lasting positive significance has been gained. Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange have taken the position that this is not only morally wrong, but politically fatal for a country that purports to be an open democracy. The news organizations/journalists have taken the position that they don’t give a fig for this fatal threat as long as they can win protection in particular categories of cases that the government itself will define.

There is a lot at stake here. Yet it bears repeating that this entire affair has gone on below the radar screen of most citizens. The vast majority go along with what the government says even as they indulge in demeaning jokes about dishonest politicians. If they did not, things would be very different. The government uses the term "national security" and the vast majority of citizens, including the journalists, simply abdicate their right to know. They assume that these two almost magic words denote activities that save lives rather than destroy them. Along comes Wikileaks and it says no, Americans must know the consequences of the policies carried out by their government. America, here are the facts. The result, from the general public, has been a proverbial "whimper." No "bang" has been detected. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), the British critic and lexicographer, once observed that "about things on which the public thinks long it commonly attains to think right." I greatly admire Johnson, but on this he was wrong. Unless manipulated into doing so by the mass media, the public rarely if ever thinks long about anything,. Sadly, this includes the right, much less the need, to know what is done in its name.


Efforts Afoot to Oust Assange as WikiLeaks Leader

As frontman for wikileaks.org, Julian Assange, the floppy-haired Australian computer hacker, has become an internationally celebrated advocate for would-be whistle-blowers. But now that Swedish prosecutors have reopened a rape investigation of Assange and continue an inquiry into allegations that he was involved in "sexual coercion and sexual molestation"--all of which he denies--some fellow WikiLeaks activists are considering asking him to step down from his role as the group's public face, or ousting him if he won't leave voluntarily.
Two people familiar with the site's internal politics, who asked for anonymity to discuss them, say that moves are already afoot to restrict Assange's role. One of them says some activists, concerned that Assange had misused WikiLeaks' Twitter feed to suggest the Swedish investigation was the product of "dirty tricks," are discussing whether to limit his access to the service. Since the sex probe was originally opened on Aug. 20, the Web site has been down for "scheduled maintenance" on multiple occasions. The insiders say this has been part of an effort to tweak its operations so Assange will have less control over them. And they say anti-Assange factions within the organization are talking about putting together a summit later this month or in October at which Assange's future with the site would be debated. There should "absolutely" be a meeting, says Birgitta Jonsdottir, a site organizer. "He just needs to deal with his personal life and not let it overshadow WikiLeaks."

Despite their intentions, however, much is unclear about exactly what authority the activists have to dial back Assange's involvement. One of the insiders says it's far from certain Assange would attend any conference--and there may be no way to compel him to do so. Ironically, while WikiLeaks' online manifesto proclaims that "better transparency is at the heart of less corruption and better democracies," the organizers appear to be almost as secretive as the spy agencies they condemn.
It's not known how many members the group claims. An insider says the organization may have a governing council of nine members--but it's unclear who they are. One of the site's only recognized spokesmen besides Assange, for example, hides behind a pseudonym ("Daniel Schmitt"). And Kristinn Hrafnsson, an Icelandic artist who has also spoken for Wiki-Leaks and says he's an Assange supporter, tells NEWSWEEK He can't discuss the tension with Assange, or even describe how the site is governed, because they're not public matters. (Assange did not respond to an e-mail inquiry requesting comment, and his Swedish lawyer could not be reached.)
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land.

Postby anothershamus » Tue Sep 07, 2010 12:40 am

New site to me: http://rixstep.com/2/1/20100905,00.shtml


Assange/CIA: A Gift of Coincidence

The luck of Langley? You couldn't make this up.

Buy It? Try It!

Put on your tinfoil hat for a moment and try out this scenario.

1. WikiLeaks - now with an exposed frontman - release the Collateral Murder video, exposing the Pentagon as blatant liars. Then they follow this up with the release of some 75,000 documents on the US 'involvement' in Afghanistan. And they do this with the help and auspices of three major world news sources.

2. The powers that be in the US are already concerned. They've documented their situation in another document leaked to WikiLeaks. Their sole opportunity to stop WikiLeaks is by making whistleblowers feel unsafe to leak documents. Yet everything WikiLeaks do makes it obvious whistleblowers are in fact safe.

3. Suddenly a spurious article appears at a lesser Swedish website implying that Swedish source protection won't help WikiLeaks much. The fact that WikiLeaks run their submission system through an intricate offshoot of the EFF's TOR onion router and that WikiLeaks won't keep any data trails anyway is astutely sidestepped.

4. The WikiLeaks Twitter feed responds by downplaying the article, the clear message being that WikiLeaks whistleblowers are not in danger.

5. WikiLeaks frontman Julian Assange decides to go for full Swedish source protection anyway, despite it being mostly irrelevant. The tactic will be to seek residence in Sweden and then apply for the so-called utgivningsbevis.

6. Julian Assange decides to surface in Sweden to make formal applications for both documents from the Swedish authorities.

7. A rather notorious rabble-rouser contacts Assange, inviting him to talk at a small conference. Assange also sets up a meet with Rick Falkvinge of the Pirate Party. Falkvinge wants to sponsor some WikiLeaks servers. These servers will then be placed in the 'bunker' run by Swedish ISP Bahnhof and located in a huge compound under Vitabergsparken in Stockholm.

8. Now someone else gets into this circle - a girl from outside Stockholm who in her few years has spent considerable time abroad, studying in both Paris and Wales and exhibiting her photography in Brooklyn in the US.

9. She tells rabble-rouser she's fascinated by Assange and would like a ticket to Assange's speech. The rabble-rouser announced that tickets would be given 'prio press' - priority to the media. Girl #2 - 'T20' - comes as a photographer.

10. Assange's speech is online at YouTube. You can see T20 sitting in the front row, in front of the rabble-rouser and across from Assange at the other end of the room. She has her single lens reflex camera and keeps going 'click click click' all through the speech.

11. T20 hangs out at the back entrance to the venue afterwards, hoping to get a moment with Assange. She succeeds. She chitchats her way into his circle and when Assange explains they're going out to lunch, he asks her if she'd like to follow along. Now we're getting there.

12. T20 flirts with Assange at the lunch table, doing otherwise silly things like asking him if his ordinary nondescript knäckebrödssmörgås tastes good. She's literally talking about a piece of quite common Swedish hard bread with a piece of cheese on it. She's batting the eyelashes, has his attention, her perfume's in his nostrils, her seductive smile distracting him. He responds in quite an expected manner by giving her a piece of the sandwich.

13. Things intensify now. She takes him to a small cinema to watch a low budget movie. Not a lot of people there, mostly empty theatre.

14. After a while they move to the back of the theatre for more privacy. Things are moving along nicely now.

15. They go to a nearby park after the movie where Assange takes a twenty minute 'power nap'. He's going to a crayfish party that evening and is very tired.

16. T20 suggests they meet again - this time at a hotel. Assange is smart enough to not accept the offer. Too easy to be a setup. He instead opines for her flat outside Stockholm. They'll be doing this three days later.

17. Assange goes to his crayfish party, everything is frid och fröjd for the next three days, then he meets up with T20 again.

18. T20 and Assange make the journey out of Stockholm and spend the night in T20's flat. Assange leaves the honey trap the following morning.

As the former US military brass at Fabius Maximus said on numerous occasions, there are just too many coincidences here for this to be believable. Circumstance would in such case have delivered Assange's head on a silver platter to the CIA - literally a gift of coincidence.

If you can't take the frontman out, if you can't discredit the organisation to scare whistleblowers away, you can at least try to screw things up for them for a while. As Max Forte at Zero Anthropology pointed out, as soon as you produce a single global head for an otherwise amorphous organisation, decapitation becomes a real threat.

If Assange - or whatever face WikiLeaks put on their operations - were to visit Singapore, you might have tried with drugs or child pornography. But when he decides (or is 'encouraged') to visit Sweden, there are far better and far easier methods.

Rape cases are extraordinarily difficult to prove. Not always - but some of the time. The Swedish solution to this dilemma was to remove the requirement for proof. Simply put: any Swedish woman can report a rape without providing any proof, cook up a good enough story, and take it through the court system.

The magistrates will determine if the 'victim' is believable. They will also make an assessment if they can think of any reason she'd want to fabricate such a thing. And on that basis alone, will put people away in prison.

Rape cases are appealed from district court level to the appeals court all the time. And it's not exactly uncommon for the magistrates in the appeals court to come to entirely different conclusions. All they're doing - in both courts - is size up a supposed victim's testimony, trying to divine - as human lie detectors - whether the plaintiff is telling the truth. The other version - that of the suspect - is of no consequence. It doesn't matter if the suspect denies everything - most criminals will deny everything anyway. The suspect's testimony's ignored, the verdict's based on a single story, no evidence is ever needed.

19. The powers that be decide to try to lure Assange into a honey trap, get a girl to seduce him, and then cry 'rape'. This isn't your ordinary rape either - it boils down to the use or non-use of a condom. For you want to make a charge stick long enough to do damage.

Sweden has a huge discussion forum in Flashback.org. In a country with a mere nine million residents, Flashback can boast nearly a half million members. Do the math there. And the discussion thread about Assange has grown to over ten thousand posts over the past fortnight. And it's become the #1 hunting place for foreign reporters who want to find out what's going on.

The contributors at Flashback are far better journalists than the hyenas from the mainstream who watch over them. They've really dug into things, uncovered the identities of the two girls, lots more. This is where most of the international media got their information - together with the clumsy Google Translate of course.

Trying to connect the dots, trying to see what's really happening, has always been the ultimate goal at Flashback. But almost everyone there has been looking in a single direction - towards the 'rabble-rouser'. Towards one Anna Ardin, a queer/lesbian militant feminist, cofounder of the first lesbian nightclub on her home island of Gotland, author of the Swedish version of the seven step programme for exacting revenge on enemies and several other masters degree papers on the Cuban resistance and the systematic use of rape in matriarchies (!) to preserve power. She seemed a likely target and was already widely hated for her previous actions.

And Ardin seemed to play into everyone's hands by scrubbing her Internet presence, by getting her name removed from a Pirate Party press release, by password-protecting her website, by pruning her Twitter history, and so forth. This of course was considered highly suspect by the detectives at Flashback.

That T20 did the same thing didn't mean as much to them. And yet the facts remain: T20 is not only the instigator of the relationship with Julian Assange, the one who suggested they take their passion to a hotel - a strange thing in Sweden - but she's also the one who contacted with Ardin - not the other way around.

T20 seems pretty good at getting what she wants and making it look like other people wanted it. T20 contacted Ardin. We can only speculate about what that conversation was all about.

It could have started with T20 telling Ardin she'd slept with Assange. So did I, replies Ardin. How was he? asks T20. He was [OK/heavenly/boring], says Ardin. And the following morning I got paranoid the rubber broke, sort of lost it a second there, reveals Ardin, haha.

T20 now has an approach. I too had a problem with a rubber, T20 tells Ardin. It wasn't that it broke - he suddenly didn't want to use it anymore!

Ardin is the perfect person to tell this to. It doesn't take much to fan her flames - not when she's once cited a colleague for paging through his notes when a feminist friend of hers was speaking onstage. Ardin is like an explosion waiting for a spark. T20's got a box full of matches.

Ardin might have been trying to be helpful. After all, it's T20's story that turns into a rape charge, not Ardin's. Perhaps T20 snuck in the bit about being afraid of HIV. That's a good one too: you can't see if you're positive for perhaps only two weeks, perhaps half a year. So ask Assange if he's tested himself or make him test himself now.

[No mention anywhere if either of the girls actually contacted Assange in this matter of course.]

Can we get the police to force Assange to test himself? asks T20. Ardin is the perfect assistant - she's been working with hysterical sex crime charges for years. She knows the law. She's also the perfect dupe.

Ardin and T20 somehow end up at the Klara police station. T20 gives an extended one hour forty minute long story to the people at the desk. Ardin's story is already complete. Ardin might have already summarised T20's story for them in addition to giving her own.

Someone in the police station rings up the prosecutor on duty - who just happens to be Maria Kjellstrand, whose husband works in the office of Beatrice Ask, who is Sweden's minister of justice, a position previously held by Thomas Bodström who gave away The Pirate Bay to the White House and who today runs a law firm with Claes Borgström who's made a career out of supporting militant radical feminist ideas - and who magically appears out of nowhere later on to become the two girls' legal counsel, despite being obscenely expensive.

Someone leaks a story - at this point known only by four other people - to Expressen. One of their reporters is already home and speeds at 135 km/h and runs lights to get back to the office ASAP. But Expressen has source protection so you can't know and can't even try to find out who leaked it. There were only four people at that point who knew of the circumstances - three policemen and Maria Kjellstrand. One of them leaked. Or it could have been T20 according to plan.

Now Expressen rings up Maria Kjellstrand. She's asked to confirm the details. This is of course illegal: Kjellstrand can lose her job and face prosecution for breaking the law of secrecy. All state employees sign secrecy agreements which are in effect up to two years after leaving their employment. Nothing may be revealed.

This holds for hospital workers, social workers, everybody. Nobody says a word, no one reveals any identities. You sign your agreement to abide or you don't get the job. And if you're a low snake and violate the agreement, you'll have hell to pay.

Not so for Maria Kjellstrand. This is the one crime that's been proven so far along in the Assange affair but it will never go to trial. There's been a JO-anmälan against Kjellstrand, but that's not the same thing. The wheels of justice might still be able to turn, but it won't be as easy as convicting a man of rape.

They couldn't take Assange out. WikiLeaks have a lot of people who can be a frontman. They have an impressive board of directors and close to 1,000 collaborators across the globe. They have a close association with the legendary German Chaos Computer Club where Daniel Schmitt has been a frontman for WikiLeaks. Any one of a number of people could step up to get the headlines, to keep up public support, to continue to fill the coffers.

They can't scare whistleblowers from leaking info. The WikiLeaks system is just too sophisticated, source protection or not. There are no sources in the WikiLeaks system. WikiLeaks operators never worry about the authenticity of the sources - they concentrate solely on the authenticity of the documents. They spent quite some time in Baghdad before releasing Collateral Murder, meeting with the families of the victims involved - even meeting with the two children from the van. The WikiLeaks system is too smart for the CIA spooks and the credibility of the organisation is just too high.

So what's left? Not much. You can always try messing with them for a while. If there's nothing else left, if you're pissed. A smear campaign. A honey trap. And truth be told: if the CIA wanted to damage Assange, the way things turned out is exactly how they'd have gone about it. Don't trust a single website on this - but if a collection of former Pentagon brass say it has to be this way, then you have to give them the benefit of the doubt and take the suggestion seriously.

OK, you can take your tinfoil hat off now. And ask yourself if the above story is still as plausible without it.
Postscript: Who's Kidding Who?

There's an incredible propaganda campaign going on right now. The latest trick is to refer to Assange simply as 'the rapist'. There are right wing hawks from hotbeds such as those used by Condi Rice and Richard Perle involved.

Their tentacles reach all over the world. This is an exclusive club. From formal spook agencies to boards of directors for powerful companies to their friends and colleagues in comparable offices in other countries, to local spook organisations there, and so forth. It's all buddy-buddy.

The hysteria on sites such as Twitter has died down somewhat, and lacking any reliable information on the case, this is probably for the best. But the number of unwitting dupes who ostensibly can't bother reading but continue to post links to smear articles seems to continue almost unabated. Many of these 'twitters' use techniques to sidestep provisions in the Twitter system to filter out spam.

Some of them have tried to defend their actions by claiming they're not taking sides. But their actions belie what they're really doing.

Being victimised by a media smear is not something for those who keep on top of a story. A media smear is only effective on those who don't keep on top of it - those who browse through news sites and only see the headlines. They don't read the story - they see only the headline. The headline is what sticks in their mind.

Such is the nature of the smear campaign.

A Swedish 'legal expert' published an op-ed at one of the big sites recently. The article itself was fairly neutral - and even came out in express support of the whistleblowers, even going so far as to encourage news sites to take their chances with prosecution if it means preserving the integrity of news reporting.

But you wouldn't know that by reading only the headline for the article. Whether by bad luck or by evil intervention, the headline served to put a little fear in the hearts of whistleblowers. Not a good thing and certainly not accurate.

So too with the spurious story from the Daily Beast claiming to have had an interview with Julian Assange's good friend Birgitta Jónsdóttir where she describes him as a bit of a male chauvinist.

Birgitta's too smart to say anything like that in the first place. Scandinavians don't hang their laundry in public, as they say. Despite several inquiries by a great number of people, she's not come forward to either corroborate or deny the Daily Beast story. Her second last tweet at time of publication is a link to Nicholas Mead's excellent 'How to Smear a Hero'.

A few years back a friend and colleague was contacted by Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet. The reporter began by asking if he was the famous computer security expert by the same name.

'I don't know if I'd call myself a computer security expert but I'm probably the one you want. What's on your mind?'

'We'd like to know if you have anything to say about the new computer virus set to spread throughout the country in the holiday season.'

'I never heard of it.'

'Well there's supposedly a new computer virus that's going to attack in the holiday season.'

'But I never heard of it. So I can't comment on it, can I?'

'OK. But what would you say if there was a big computer virus set to hit Sweden in the coming weeks?'

'That wouldn't be good. Obviously. But again: I've not heard anything about any computer virus coming to the country so I really can't comment.'

'OK. Thank you for your time. Good-bye.'

The 'security expert' went shopping a few hours later and saw his name splashed all over the headlines at the kiosks, the grocery stores, the convenience stores.

'SECURITY EXPERT WARNS VIRUS WILL HIT SWEDEN DURING HOLIDAY SEASON'

'I'll never talk to those scumbags again', he said.

More than ever it becomes apparent 'source material' such as provided by WikiLeaks is the only way to know the truth.

See Also
http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Special:Support
)'(
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land.

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Sep 07, 2010 11:00 am

anothershamus wrote:New site to me: http://rixstep.com/2/1/20100905,00.shtml


Assange/CIA: A Gift of Coincidence



THANKS!

new to me also


WikiLeaks' Julian Assange drops Swedish top lawyer Silbersky, requests new representation

By The Associated Press (CP) – 21 minutes ago

STOCKHOLM — WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has requested a new lawyer to represent him in Sweden after a prosecutor decided to reopen a rape investigation against him.

In a note to the Stockholm district court Tuesday a representative of Assange wrote he is not satisfied with prominent Swedish lawyer Leif Silbersky and wants Bjorn Hurtig instead.

The note said Silbersky hasn't been sufficiently engaged enough in the case.

A senior prosecutor reopened a rape investigation last week against the founder of the whistle-blower website because of allegations from two Swedish women.

Assange denies the claims, suggesting they are part of a smear campaign by opponents of WikiLeaks, which has angered Washington by publishing thousands of leaked U.S. military documents.
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land.

Postby Dradin Kastell » Wed Sep 08, 2010 7:39 am

I'm a bit confused whether I should post this here because its not about Assange as such but rather about the Swedish pirate/Pirate Party/upcoming election angle I posted about in the "...wanted in Sweden for alleged rapes thread". Basically it was to with how the establishment in Sweden also have very good domestic reasons to strike out against the "data freedom" crowd at the moment. So, in that vein:

Police in File-Sharing Raids Across Europe, WikiLeaks Host Targeted
Written by enigmax on September 07, 2010

Police in up to 14 countries around Europe have coordinated to carry out raids against suspected file-sharing servers this morning. Locations in The Netherlands, Czech Republic and Hungary were targeted but Sweden appears to have borne the brunt of the action. Seven locations including PRQ, which hosts WikiLeaks, have been raided.

This morning news is coming in which indicates that very significant raids against illicit file-sharing are taking place in locations across Europe.

Police in up to 14 European countries are said to be involved in an operation, said to be in the planning for two years, targeting the Warez Scene, the network of individuals and servers at the top of the so-called ‘Piracy Pyramid’.

Details are scarce at the moment, but it is believed that at the behest of Belgian authorities, raids have gone ahead in The Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Germany, Great Britain, Czech Republic, Hungary and Sweden.

Not unusually, Sweden appears to have borne the brunt of the activity with a total of seven locations raided including Stockholm, Malmö, Umeå, Eskilstuna and Solna.

Armed with IP addresses, this morning police officers turned up at the Solna premises of PRQ, the company that in part hosts WikiLeaks.There is no suggestion that the controversial whistle-blowing site is connected to the operation.

“At 9:00 this morning, five policemen were here,” explained PRQ’s Mikael Viberg. “They were interested in who were using two IP addresses from 2009 and onwards. We have no records of our clients but we’re handing over the e-mail addresses for those behind the IPs. However, it’s rare that our clients have mail addresses that are traceable.”

This is a breaking news story and will be updated.

Update: Swedish Prosecutor Frederick Ingblad told Swedish news outlet Expressen.se, “I can confirm that [this operation] is not about Wikileaks.”

Update 2: Thus far, four people are said to be being questioned on suspicion of breaching copyright law. Servers and computers have been seized in Sweden.

Update 3:Police raided the Umeå University.
Saved in: Anti-Piracy Gangs, Copyright Issues
Tags: prq


http://torrentfreak.com/police-in-file-sharing-raids-across-europe-wikileaks-host-targeted-100907/


Major file-sharing bust in Europe targets P2P admins
By Nate Anderson | Last updated September 7, 2010 11:52 AM

Sweden's Frederick Ingblad is a specialized intellectual property prosecutor, and this morning he made a very specialized announcement: at the request of Belgian authorities, Ingbland and Swedish police had just made a series of coordinated raids on ISPs and universities. Their target: "The Scene."

For two years, Belgium has been looking into the online operations that obtain, crack, and distribute software, games, and media, operations collectively referred to as The Scene. Ingblad targeted several ISPs, Umeå University, and sites in Malmo and Eslöv. The ISP raids were to gain information on particular IP addresses (Sweden has a recent law requiring ISPs to retain more information on their users for just such cases), but some of the other raids were actually made to scoop up individuals. Four people have been detained, along with servers and personal computers.

PRQ was one of the targeted ISPs. "At 9:00 this morning, five policemen were here," PRQ’s Mikael Viberg told the file-sharing news site Torrentfreak. "They were interested in who were using two IP addresses from 2009 and onwards. We have no records of our clients but we're handing over the e-mail addresses for those behind the IPs. However, it's rare that our clients have mail addresses that are traceable."

The new investigation goes beyond the "Whac-A-Mole" approach to online infringement, in which the authorities hammer one site only to see content migrate immediately elsewhere. In this case, the idea is more like rounding up all the top mole agitators at once.

Beyond Ingblad and his work in Sweden, 14 other countries were involved, including Norway, the UK, Germany, and Italy. Movies were a special focus of the investigation, which is attempting to cripple all the key "top sites" and the administrators that compete to obtain and distribute the newest cinematic fare, much of it appearing even before its official theatrical release. The targets, in other words, don't appear to be mere distributors and trackers, but those that supply the initial content—a relatively small number of people and sites.

Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten says that one Norwegian man was taken into custody after the Belgians provided an IP address that was eventually traced to an address in Rogaland (southwest Norway). The man allegedly participated in The Scene through a IRC (Internet Relay Chat) network and apparently served up his material from a fiber connection to his home. A criminal case looks likely to follow.

Sweden's Pirate Party, which is facing elections in the next two weeks, was "highly critical" of the raids and blasted the decision to "criminalize an entire generation." PRQ also hosts some Wikileaks servers, and the Pirate Party was hugely critical of the "American pressure" to shut down that site. Prosecutor Ingblad confirmed today, however, that Wikileaks was not targeted in the crackdown.

While the current strategy targets movies and involved Belgian investigators infiltrating the release networks, the music industry has shifted a similar model. Rather than suing individuals, going after the major distribution channels has become the preferred legal strategy. Last month, music's international trade group was boasting about a record-setting bust in Bulgaria, a country where the piracy rate is "almost 100 percent," and which shut down four sites and secured "servers containing more than 120 terabytes of unlicensed content, the equivalent of more than 200,000 CD-Rs."


http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/09/major-file-sharing-bust-in-europe-targets-p2p-admins.ars
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land.

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Sep 08, 2010 10:10 am

5 Jaw-Dropping Stories in Wikileaks' Archives Begging for National Attention
Many files, beyond the Afghan War Diary and the 'Collateral Murder' video, continue to hide in plain sight on Wikileaks’ Web site.
September 3, 2010 |


In December 2008, I received an email message from Julian Assange -- the now world-famous public face of the whistleblower organization, Wikileaks. I don’t recall why or how it came about, but he invited me to join a counterinsurgency “analysis team” alongside a number of other academics, journalists and analysts.

The idea was to offer us embargoed material, much as Wikileaks recently did with the files of the Afghan War Diary -- a 6-year archive of tens of thousands of classified military documents, dealing with the U.S. war in Afghanistan -- giving the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel advance access to the documents. The reason for doing so was because Wikileaks had released a number of important U.S. military counterinsurgency manuals in the preceding months, but few reporters had shown much interest in them. Operating in a media environment where breaking the story is key and the fear of being scooped limits the amount of time and energy publications are willing to invest on documents sitting out in public, Assange carried out a trial run of a strategy that served Wikileaks exceptionally well this year.

I never wrote anything on the embargoed counterinsurgency manuals and the “analysis team” either petered out or gave up on me. But just as was the case then, today there are many files, beyond the much-publicized Afghan War Diary and the “Collateral Murder” video of a U.S. Army Apache attack helicopter mowing down people in Baghdad in 2007, that continue to hide in plain sight on Wikileaks’ Web site. Below are just five examples of the types of documents available at Wikileaks.org that deserve in-depth analysis and national media attention.

COIN of the Realm

Those counterinsurgency (COIN) manuals I read and then never wrote about, as well as other related materials, are still available at Wikileaks and have taken on ever-increasing importance as COIN has become the strategy du jour for the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Wikileaks currently offers no fewer than eight core U.S. counterinsurgency manuals and handbooks as well as numerous supporting materials with special bearing on COIN operations. One of the most important is the U.S. Special Forces Southern Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Handbook of 2006 which was designed to provide “guidance to the commanders and staffs of combined-arms forces that have a primary mission of eliminating insurgent forces and discusses the nature of organized guerrilla units and underground elements and their supporters.”

The handbook is notable for the fact that it is incredibly unsophisticated and rehashes lots of well-worn material on guerrillas and conventional efforts to defeat them. As a result, it explains a great deal about why and how the U.S. finds itself nearly a decade into a war against a rather rag-tag insurgency without exceptionally fervent popular support or the sponsorship of a major power.

Another COIN-related document of special interest on Wikileaks’ Web site is the September 2008 U.S. Army Special Operations Forces Unconventional Warfare manual. Defined as “[o]perations conducted by, with, or through irregular forces in support of a resistance movement, an insurgency, or conventional military operations,” unconventional warfare (UW) is just one of the panoply of other non-traditional types of operations, like irregular warfare and counterinsurgency, that the U.S. military both studies and carries out. At nearly 250 pages, the acronym-filled manual offers everything from a stilted primer on U.S. “national power” to guidance on when to begin conducting psychological operations in a UW campaign (“as early as possible”) to obtuse and near-useless formulations that, in almost any other publication, would be red-lined by an editor. For example:

The information environment is the total of individuals, organizations, and systems that collect, process, disseminate, or act on information. The actors include leaders, decision makers, individuals, and organizations. Resources include the materials and systems employed to collect, analyze, apply, or disseminate information. The information environment is where humans and automated systems observe, orient, decide, and act upon information, and is therefore the principal environment of decision making. Even though the information environment is considered distinct, it resides within each of the four domains of air, land, sea, and space.

The manual is also filled with dubious assertions, like this one that people from the Indian tribes of the Great Plains, the Philippines, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, and Afghanistan, to name a few locales, might dispute:

The United States avoids resorting to military force, preferring to wield all other instruments of power in the pursuit of national objectives and in the context of international competition and conflict. Therefore, diplomacy routinely blocks the need for the application of the military instrument of power.

Other U.S. Military Material

U.S. military documents found at Wikileaks’ Web site are not, however, limited to COIN-related material. There are, to take just two examples, the March 2004 Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for Camp Delta -- the main prison facility at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- and the U.S. military’s Rules of Engagement (ROE) for Iraq circa 2005, both of which are of potential use to reporters and scholars evaluating U.S. military treatment of noncombatants during the Bush years.

One very different but no less interesting report is the “Marine Corps Midrange Threat Estimate: 2005-2015," which was prepared by Marine Corps Intelligence’s Global Threats Branch. “Marine Corps forces will be challenged by emerging technical, military, and geopolitical threats; by thegrowing resourcefulness and the ingenuity of non-state actors and terrorist networks; and by natural disasters,” begins the report. “The U.S. military must develop more agile strategies and adaptive tactics if it is to succeed in this complex environment.” The Marines were changing, said the report, to do just that.

“The threat environment facing today’s Marines can be defined in three words: unconventional, unforeseen, and unpredictable,” reads the document. Despite admitting that future threats were largely unforeseeable, Marine Intelligence still endeavored to forecast the likelihood of various intervention scenarios “based on an independent, data-driven methodology that assessed the conditions for possible Marine intervention or assistance in the selected countries,” more specifically, “20 states of interest that represent a wide range of potential future security challenges for the Marine Corps.”

For those interested in keeping score over the next five years, the Marine Corps’ report forecasts that counterterrorism missions by U.S. Marines in Albania, Bangladesh, Colombia and Saudi Arabia are “possible” -- the mid-range on the three-point scale of likelihood -- as are COIN missions in Liberia, Syria and Uzbekistan. Countries that rated “high” on the scale, when it came to the chance of conducting counterterrorism operations, included Ethiopia, Georgia, Mauritania, and Nigeria, while Iran and North Korea were rated as “high” when it came “major regional contingencies” -- that is full-scale wars.

Insider Information from the CIA

Wikileaks offers access to a number of documents prepared by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) which, if not for the site, would likely be totally out of the reach of the very taxpayers who foot the bill for them. These files include everything from a report about the threat Al Qaeda poses to the United States, which was prepared by the Agency’s Counterterrorism Center’s Office of Terrorism Analysis in 2005 to a 10-page book listing the briefings about the U.S. use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” (also known as torture) provided to members of Congress during 2009.

Another especially intriguing CIA document, with special bearing on the war in Afghanistan, was released by Wikileaks this spring and offers a window into the ways in which the United States thinks about allied countries, their people and the worth of their opinions.

Since taking office in January 2009, President Barack Obama has repeatedly escalated the war in Afghanistan, increasing troop numbers, boosting air strikes by unmanned drones, and sending more CIA agents and covert operators into the country. Over that same time period, opposition to the war in allied NATO countries has been on the rise, as Canada declared it would withdraw its 2,800 soldiers by the end of 2011 and the Dutch government collapsed under the weight of anti-war sentiment.

This spring, a month after the Dutch government fell, the CIA “Red Cell” -- an analytic team “charged by the Director of Intelligence with taking a pronounced ‘out-of-the-box’ approach that will provoke thought and offer an alternative viewpoint” -- issued a report on “Sustaining West European Support for the NATO-led Mission” in Afghanistan. The document, produced in collaboration with an Agency “strategic communications” expert and analysts from the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), outlines strategies for manipulating public opinion in France, Germany, and other allied NATO nations in order to further U.S. war aims in Afghanistan.

The report, classified confidential, and not surprisingly, not to be shown to foreign nationals, noted that public apathy in France and Germany -- where most citizens have paid scant attention to the war -- has allowed their national governments “to disregard popular opposition and steadily increase their troop contributions to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)… despite the opposition of 80 percent of German and French respondents to increased ISAF deployments.” The document cautions that increased ISAF casualties or press coverage of civilian carnage might catch the attention of the European public and increase hostility toward the war effort. The worse case scenario being that, as elections approach, the Dutch troop withdrawal might cause “politicians elsewhere [to] cite a precedent for ‘listening to the voters.’”

To forestall the possibility that NATO nations will respond to public will, the CIA report suggests focused propaganda campaigns, dubbed an “iterative strategic communication program.” For France, it suggests tailored messages focused on civilians and refugees that will “leverage French (and other European) guilt” to the advantage of the U.S. For Germans, increasing positive press about the military situation combined with scare tactics highlighting the possibility that defeat in Afghanistan might “heighten Germany’s exposure to terrorism, opium, and refugees” were offered as viable strategies. The CIA team also indicated that Afghan women could be deployed, as part of a concerted strategy, to manipulate public opinion in support of the war effort.

Foreign Government Documents

While classified U.S. government records may be the highest profile materials that appear on Wikileaks.org, they are far from alone. Other governments have also seen their documents, whether leaked directly to Wikileaks or reposted from elsewhere, exposed via the Web site. One example is a secret, 186-page database of settlements, written in Hebrew, that was compiled by the Israeli government. Writing about it earlier this year, Steven Aftergood, the head of the project on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists explained:
The database provides a concise description of each of the dozens of settlements, including their location, legal status, population, and even the origins of their names, which are often Biblically inspired. Crucially, the database makes clear that unauthorized and illegal construction activity has taken place in most of the settlements.
Another example of the type of foreign government information available through Wikileaks is the Indian Army’s doctrine from 2004, which demonstrates that stilted language and statements of the obvious are not limited to U.S. military manuals. Consider this gem:
Offensive operations are a decisive form of winning a war. Their purpose is to attain the desired end state and achieve decisive victory. Offensive operations seek to seize the initiative from the enemy, retain it and exploit the dividends accruing from such actions. These operations end when the force either achieves the desired end state or reaches its culmination point.
Corporate Documents

Earlier this year, Aftergood castigated Wikileaks for posting everything from documents detailing the secret rituals of sororities to those shedding light on the shadowy rites of Masons and Mormons. “This is not whistleblowing and it is not journalism,” he wrote. “It is a kind of information vandalism.”

Wikileaks also offers a selection of internal corporate memos, manuals and emails, some of which intersect with matters of politics, law enforcement and/or national security issues. One prime example is an email reportedly sent by Anthony Jones, the vice president and senior site executive of mega-defense contractor Boeing's Huntsville, Alabama operations to plant employees in an effort to combat Obama administration efforts to make cuts to the company’s ground-based midcourse missile defense system. Offering subordinates talking points and contact information for Congressional representatives, the email even suggests that workers’ families might also become involved in the campaign. Missing from the note is even a mention of Boeing’s financial interests. The email, instead, frames all concerns in terms of U.S. national security.

Another corporate document that is available at Wikileaks.org is the Microsoft Global Criminal Compliance Handbook. In February of this year, Cryptome.org -- a Web site that, since the 1990s, has “welcome[d] documents for publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide, in particular material on freedom of expression, privacy, cryptology, dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence, and secret governance” -- posted the manual and was shut down by its hosting provider, Network Solutions, at Microsoft’s behest. Labeled “Confidential For Law Enforcement Use Only,” the 22-page manual contains no trade secrets, but did allow Microsoft customers to learn just what information the software giant is retaining from their Hotmail and Xbox Live accounts and under what circumstances it will be turned over to law enforcement when presented with a subpoena, court order or search warrant. (“Xbox Live records every IP address you ever use to login and stores them for perpetuity,” Wired.com’s Ryan Singel noted in an article published earlier this year.)

What Else Wikileaks Has to Offer

While most media outlets and bloggers alike, are seemingly content to wait for Wikileaks to unveil a second batch of documents -- roughly 15,000 in all -- about the Afghan war in the days ahead, other important materials are waiting for intrepid reporters and researchers to wade in and make something of the information.

While the chilling “Collateral Murder” video and the gargantuan Afghan War Diary have, quite rightly, garnered a tremendous amount of attention for Wikileaks.org this year, the site has long offered much more in the way of classified, shadowy or otherwise unavailable material from public and private sources. It remains a relatively untapped or at least undertapped treasure trove for journalists, bloggers and academic researchers willing to put in the time and effort.

Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com. An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and regularly at TomDispatch. His latest book, The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Verso), which brings together leading analysts from across the political spectrum, will be published later this month. He is currently a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute. You can follow him on Twitter @NickTurse, on at http://nickturse.tumblr.com/Tumblr, and on Facebook. His website is NickTurse.com.
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They could still get him out of office.
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Don’t forget that.
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Sep 14, 2010 9:18 pm

Making a Mockery of the Real Crime of Rape

Assange Beseiged

By ISRAEL SHAMIR and PAUL BENNETT

The plot thickens as our favorite hero of the Matrix; our own “Captain Neo” Julian Assange, faces danger yet again. When we last parted company with the legendary founder of WikiLeaks, he was breathing a sigh of relief after dodging spurious double-rape charges. The complaints were dropped, and our hero was free to roam the globe once again. But soap opera plots are repetitive; the story was quickly recycled and now our brave captain is again under threat of being castrated on Stockholm’s Stora Torget, or whatever the latest craven penalty is for molesting sacred Nordic virgins in a land where Vikings once ruled.

In other words, the farcical rape charges have once again been leveled against the Pentagon’s Public Enemy Number One. Julian Assange now stands accused of: (1) not calling a young woman the day after he had enjoyed a night with her, (2) asking her to pay for his bus ticket, (3) having unsafe sex, and (4) participating in two brief affairs in the course of one week. These four minor charges, worthy of Leopold Bloom’s mock trial in the Nightown chapter in Ulysses, have been shaken and fermented until they were able to cook up a half-baked rape case! Step down Iran; Sweden takes the cake! While Iran is notorious for unyielding conservative sentences against adulterers, Sweden shows us what the liberal side of the coin looks like as she invents criminal charges for failing to telephone and for careless use of preservatives in consensual acts of affection. Worse, they are purposely conflating consensual sex with rape for political purposes. In this, Sweden makes a mockery of the very real crime of violent rape.

The Swedes have a practical reason behind their deceptively slapstick police-work. The WikiLeaks founder, pursued by malevolent forces around the world, sought momentary relief beneath Sweden’s reputation as a bastion of free speech. But the moment Julian sought the protection of Swedish media law, the CIA immediately threatened to discontinue intelligence sharing with SEPO, the Swedish Secret Service. That got the present right-wing government out of its chair, as it does everything it can to bury the Prime Minister Olof Palme’s legacy of careful neutrality. The suspicion of whether the rape farce is an orchestrated campaign, might be illuminated by these facts: (1) Sweden sent troops to Afghanistan, (2) Assange’s WikiLeaks published the Afghan War Diary which exposed this cruel and needless neo-colonial campaign. Furthermore, the expected release of new secret materials by WikiLeaks might just influence the general elections on September 19. Perhaps that explains the sudden police raid on a WikiLeaks server.

An American Tea Party website the RightwingNews.com suggested that “a CIA agent with a sniper rifle rattle a bullet around [Assange’s] skull the next time he appears in public as a warning”. Rest assured that the CIA is wiser than the Tea Party. They at least have learned the lesson of Che Guevara. Nowadays they ruin a rebel’s reputation instead of wasting a bullet. They won’t raise Assange up to become a martyr, they simply use his own erstwhile allies to reduce him to a laughing stock. They stain him with opprobrium. It is much more certain and final than the marksman’s shot. History is witness to their growing efficiency in using this tactic. In the 70’s, they could only bring themselves to say that Philip Agee was a womanizer and a drunkard. Nowadays they do not stint at charges of pedophilia, for example to humiliate Scott Ritter for failing to go along with George W Bush’s charade of Iraqi WMD. As you might expect, the rape campaign against Assange might be just an initial volley. Perhaps they will decide he is a pedophile too. The unspoken threat is enough to send some faint-hearted supporters of WikiLeaks scurrying for cover.

The bullet can always come later, once the victim has been successfully isolated by the smear campaign. The Gospels tell us that hardly anyone followed Jesus to Golgotha, though just a week earlier the people of Jerusalem hailed Him with hosannas. A Jewish anti-Gospel explains that this was the result of a successful smear campaign managed by Judas, a surprisingly modernist reading for an early medieval story.

For a smear that really sticks, you need to get it from an ex-apostle. An accusation by a Caiaphas does not impress. If you are targeting a leftist, hire leftists. For example, Trotskyites were willing and useful tools against the Communists. Pseudo Anti-Zionists are currently being used to hamstring a genuine Pro-Palestinian movement. Who are the Judases of this campaign against our Julian?

An anonymous group claiming to be “Wikileaks insiders” uploaded a new site full of “revelations” about Assange’s past and present, claiming he lives in luxury in South Africa on donated funds – though he appears almost daily in Swedish media and police reports.
Another ex-apostle is the Icelander politician Birgitta Jonsdottir, who is misrepresented as a “Wikileaks spokesperson”. She called on Assange “to step down” and leave Wikileaks to drift without his guidance – as if WikiLeaks is somehow separate from Assange.
The pseudo-progressive organization Reporters Sans Frontières attacked Assange for endangering the lives of innocent American secret agents in Afghanistan. Despite its ‘leftist’ terminology, RSF is a private organization drawing funds from US government sources aiming to destabilize Cuba. It is connected to Cuban émigrés in Miami.
Anna Ardin (the official complainant) is often described by the media as a “leftist”. She has ties to the US-financed anti-Castro and anti-communist groups. She published her anti-Castro diatribes (see here and here) in the Swedish-language publication Revista de Asignaturas Cubanas put out by Misceláneas de Cuba. From Oslo, Professor Michael Seltzer points out that this periodical is the product of a well-financed anti-Castro organization in Sweden. He further notes that the group is connected with Union Liberal Cubana led by Carlos Alberto Montaner whose CIA ties were exposed here. Note that Ardin was deported from Cuba for subversive activities. In Cuba she interacted with the feminist anti-Castro group Las damas de blanco (the Ladies in White). This group receives US government funds and the convicted anti-communist terrorist Luis Posada Carriles is a friend and supporter. Wikipedia quotes Hebe de Bonafini, president of the Argentine Madres de Plaza de Mayo as saying that “the so-called Ladies in White defend the terrorism of the United States.”
However we do not have to accept the single-bullet theory. Life is more complicated than that. In addition to her anti-Castro, pro-CIA streak, Anna Ardin apparently indulges in her favorite sport of male-bashing. A Swedish forum reports that she is an expert on sexual harassment and the male “master suppression techniques”. Once, as she was lecturing, a male student in the audience looked at his notes instead of staring at her. Anna Ardin reported him for sexual harassment because he discriminated against her for being a woman and because she claimed he made use of the male “master suppression technique” in trying to make her feel invisible. As soon as the student learned about her complaint, he contacted her to apologize and explain himself. Anna Ardin’s response was to once again report him for sexual harassment, again because he was using the “master suppression technique”, this time to belittle her feelings.

Ardin is apparently involved with a “Christian” Social-Democrat group. The Swedish church has a precious few male priests: what was once the struggle for female equality has ended up with men being effectively removed from service. Nowadays very few Swedish male-female couples marry in the church, or get married at all; most Swedish gay couples, however, are proud to become “man and wife” in the church. This is all good news for wealthy Swedes: deserted churches sell their properties (once enjoyed by the community) to be fenced off by the nouveau riche created by the latest privatization wave. So much for Swedish social democracy!

The second accuser, Sofia Wilen, 26, is Anna’ friend. Here is a video of an Assange press conference where one can see the girls together. Those present at the conference marveled at her groupie-like behavior. Though rock stars are used to girls dying to have sex with them, it is much less common in the harsh field of political journalism. Sofia worked hard to bed Assange, according to her own confession; she was also the first to complain to police. She is little known and her motives are vague. Why might a young woman (who shares her life with American artist Seth Benson) pursue such a sordid political adventure?

The brilliant Israeli writer Gilad Atzmon describes, in his funny novel My One and Only Love, how the secret services employ young ladies for honey-traps. Is this the case here? Perhaps it is nothing more than a case of gold digging. New legislation, in Sweden and all over Europe, has made men extremely vulnerable to extortion scams of this sort. A young Swedish woman, 26 (her name withheld) succeeded in winning over a million dollars during the course of one vacation in Greece, as reported by the Daily Telegraph. She complained of being raped. Four men were arrested, their names disclosed, and their jobs jeopardized. She went back home a millionaire, her sacred identity safely preserved. Her success begs imitation: according to an EU report, Sweden has twenty times more rape complaints than were generated by the hot-blooded Italians. Most are dismissed right away, and justly so.

Rape is a horrible crime, and it should not be stretched to encompass minor misdemeanors and moral failings (like the failure to give an encouraging phone call the next day). Tellingly, when the complainant’s advocate was asked why the young women were unsure whether they were raped, he replied: “They are not lawyers”. Rape (like murder) is a crime that one needs no lawyers to understand. Rape is a capital crime: if the rape charges are proved false, then certainly the complainant should be charged with criminal defamation.

As for Julian Assange, we need him. We need our captain Neo, whether chaste or womanizer, in order to uncover the secret doings of our governments behind the Matrix. For our own sakes, we must all do our part to protect him from castrating feminists and secret services alike.


WikiLeaks readying the ‘biggest leak of military intelligence ever’

By Agence France-Presse
Sunday, September 12th, 2010 -- 6:44 pm

Whistleblower website WikiLeaks is teaming up with news outlets to release a "massive cache" of classified US military field reports on the conflict in Iraq, Newsweek magazine reported recently.

Newsweek quoted Iain Overton, editor of The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a London-based journalism nonprofit, as saying the material constitutes the "biggest leak of military intelligence" ever.

Newsweek said the stash of Iraq documents held by WikiLeaks is believed to be about three times as large as the number of US military field reports on Afghanistan released earlier this year by WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks, in collaboration with The New York Times, Britain's Guardian and Der Spiegel of Germany, published 77,000 Afghan war documents in July and has said it will release another 15,000 related documents soon.

Overton told Newsweek that his organization was working with WikiLeaks and television and print media in several countries on stories and programs based on the Iraq documents.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Sep 14, 2010 9:20 pm

Making a Mockery of the Real Crime of Rape

Assange Beseiged

By ISRAEL SHAMIR and PAUL BENNETT

The plot thickens as our favorite hero of the Matrix; our own “Captain Neo” Julian Assange, faces danger yet again. When we last parted company with the legendary founder of WikiLeaks, he was breathing a sigh of relief after dodging spurious double-rape charges. The complaints were dropped, and our hero was free to roam the globe once again. But soap opera plots are repetitive; the story was quickly recycled and now our brave captain is again under threat of being castrated on Stockholm’s Stora Torget, or whatever the latest craven penalty is for molesting sacred Nordic virgins in a land where Vikings once ruled.

In other words, the farcical rape charges have once again been leveled against the Pentagon’s Public Enemy Number One. Julian Assange now stands accused of: (1) not calling a young woman the day after he had enjoyed a night with her, (2) asking her to pay for his bus ticket, (3) having unsafe sex, and (4) participating in two brief affairs in the course of one week. These four minor charges, worthy of Leopold Bloom’s mock trial in the Nightown chapter in Ulysses, have been shaken and fermented until they were able to cook up a half-baked rape case! Step down Iran; Sweden takes the cake! While Iran is notorious for unyielding conservative sentences against adulterers, Sweden shows us what the liberal side of the coin looks like as she invents criminal charges for failing to telephone and for careless use of preservatives in consensual acts of affection. Worse, they are purposely conflating consensual sex with rape for political purposes. In this, Sweden makes a mockery of the very real crime of violent rape.

The Swedes have a practical reason behind their deceptively slapstick police-work. The WikiLeaks founder, pursued by malevolent forces around the world, sought momentary relief beneath Sweden’s reputation as a bastion of free speech. But the moment Julian sought the protection of Swedish media law, the CIA immediately threatened to discontinue intelligence sharing with SEPO, the Swedish Secret Service. That got the present right-wing government out of its chair, as it does everything it can to bury the Prime Minister Olof Palme’s legacy of careful neutrality. The suspicion of whether the rape farce is an orchestrated campaign, might be illuminated by these facts: (1) Sweden sent troops to Afghanistan, (2) Assange’s WikiLeaks published the Afghan War Diary which exposed this cruel and needless neo-colonial campaign. Furthermore, the expected release of new secret materials by WikiLeaks might just influence the general elections on September 19. Perhaps that explains the sudden police raid on a WikiLeaks server.

An American Tea Party website the RightwingNews.com suggested that “a CIA agent with a sniper rifle rattle a bullet around [Assange’s] skull the next time he appears in public as a warning”. Rest assured that the CIA is wiser than the Tea Party. They at least have learned the lesson of Che Guevara. Nowadays they ruin a rebel’s reputation instead of wasting a bullet. They won’t raise Assange up to become a martyr, they simply use his own erstwhile allies to reduce him to a laughing stock. They stain him with opprobrium. It is much more certain and final than the marksman’s shot. History is witness to their growing efficiency in using this tactic. In the 70’s, they could only bring themselves to say that Philip Agee was a womanizer and a drunkard. Nowadays they do not stint at charges of pedophilia, for example to humiliate Scott Ritter for failing to go along with George W Bush’s charade of Iraqi WMD. As you might expect, the rape campaign against Assange might be just an initial volley. Perhaps they will decide he is a pedophile too. The unspoken threat is enough to send some faint-hearted supporters of WikiLeaks scurrying for cover.

The bullet can always come later, once the victim has been successfully isolated by the smear campaign. The Gospels tell us that hardly anyone followed Jesus to Golgotha, though just a week earlier the people of Jerusalem hailed Him with hosannas. A Jewish anti-Gospel explains that this was the result of a successful smear campaign managed by Judas, a surprisingly modernist reading for an early medieval story.

For a smear that really sticks, you need to get it from an ex-apostle. An accusation by a Caiaphas does not impress. If you are targeting a leftist, hire leftists. For example, Trotskyites were willing and useful tools against the Communists. Pseudo Anti-Zionists are currently being used to hamstring a genuine Pro-Palestinian movement. Who are the Judases of this campaign against our Julian?

An anonymous group claiming to be “Wikileaks insiders” uploaded a new site full of “revelations” about Assange’s past and present, claiming he lives in luxury in South Africa on donated funds – though he appears almost daily in Swedish media and police reports.
Another ex-apostle is the Icelander politician Birgitta Jonsdottir, who is misrepresented as a “Wikileaks spokesperson”. She called on Assange “to step down” and leave Wikileaks to drift without his guidance – as if WikiLeaks is somehow separate from Assange.
The pseudo-progressive organization Reporters Sans Frontières attacked Assange for endangering the lives of innocent American secret agents in Afghanistan. Despite its ‘leftist’ terminology, RSF is a private organization drawing funds from US government sources aiming to destabilize Cuba. It is connected to Cuban émigrés in Miami.
Anna Ardin (the official complainant) is often described by the media as a “leftist”. She has ties to the US-financed anti-Castro and anti-communist groups. She published her anti-Castro diatribes (see here and here) in the Swedish-language publication Revista de Asignaturas Cubanas put out by Misceláneas de Cuba. From Oslo, Professor Michael Seltzer points out that this periodical is the product of a well-financed anti-Castro organization in Sweden. He further notes that the group is connected with Union Liberal Cubana led by Carlos Alberto Montaner whose CIA ties were exposed here. Note that Ardin was deported from Cuba for subversive activities. In Cuba she interacted with the feminist anti-Castro group Las damas de blanco (the Ladies in White). This group receives US government funds and the convicted anti-communist terrorist Luis Posada Carriles is a friend and supporter. Wikipedia quotes Hebe de Bonafini, president of the Argentine Madres de Plaza de Mayo as saying that “the so-called Ladies in White defend the terrorism of the United States.”
However we do not have to accept the single-bullet theory. Life is more complicated than that. In addition to her anti-Castro, pro-CIA streak, Anna Ardin apparently indulges in her favorite sport of male-bashing. A Swedish forum reports that she is an expert on sexual harassment and the male “master suppression techniques”. Once, as she was lecturing, a male student in the audience looked at his notes instead of staring at her. Anna Ardin reported him for sexual harassment because he discriminated against her for being a woman and because she claimed he made use of the male “master suppression technique” in trying to make her feel invisible. As soon as the student learned about her complaint, he contacted her to apologize and explain himself. Anna Ardin’s response was to once again report him for sexual harassment, again because he was using the “master suppression technique”, this time to belittle her feelings.

Ardin is apparently involved with a “Christian” Social-Democrat group. The Swedish church has a precious few male priests: what was once the struggle for female equality has ended up with men being effectively removed from service. Nowadays very few Swedish male-female couples marry in the church, or get married at all; most Swedish gay couples, however, are proud to become “man and wife” in the church. This is all good news for wealthy Swedes: deserted churches sell their properties (once enjoyed by the community) to be fenced off by the nouveau riche created by the latest privatization wave. So much for Swedish social democracy!

The second accuser, Sofia Wilen, 26, is Anna’ friend. Here is a video of an Assange press conference where one can see the girls together. Those present at the conference marveled at her groupie-like behavior. Though rock stars are used to girls dying to have sex with them, it is much less common in the harsh field of political journalism. Sofia worked hard to bed Assange, according to her own confession; she was also the first to complain to police. She is little known and her motives are vague. Why might a young woman (who shares her life with American artist Seth Benson) pursue such a sordid political adventure?

The brilliant Israeli writer Gilad Atzmon describes, in his funny novel My One and Only Love, how the secret services employ young ladies for honey-traps. Is this the case here? Perhaps it is nothing more than a case of gold digging. New legislation, in Sweden and all over Europe, has made men extremely vulnerable to extortion scams of this sort. A young Swedish woman, 26 (her name withheld) succeeded in winning over a million dollars during the course of one vacation in Greece, as reported by the Daily Telegraph. She complained of being raped. Four men were arrested, their names disclosed, and their jobs jeopardized. She went back home a millionaire, her sacred identity safely preserved. Her success begs imitation: according to an EU report, Sweden has twenty times more rape complaints than were generated by the hot-blooded Italians. Most are dismissed right away, and justly so.

Rape is a horrible crime, and it should not be stretched to encompass minor misdemeanors and moral failings (like the failure to give an encouraging phone call the next day). Tellingly, when the complainant’s advocate was asked why the young women were unsure whether they were raped, he replied: “They are not lawyers”. Rape (like murder) is a crime that one needs no lawyers to understand. Rape is a capital crime: if the rape charges are proved false, then certainly the complainant should be charged with criminal defamation.

As for Julian Assange, we need him. We need our captain Neo, whether chaste or womanizer, in order to uncover the secret doings of our governments behind the Matrix. For our own sakes, we must all do our part to protect him from castrating feminists and secret services alike.


WikiLeaks readying the ‘biggest leak of military intelligence ever’

By Agence France-Presse
Sunday, September 12th, 2010 -- 6:44 pm

Whistleblower website WikiLeaks is teaming up with news outlets to release a "massive cache" of classified US military field reports on the conflict in Iraq, Newsweek magazine reported recently.

Newsweek quoted Iain Overton, editor of The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a London-based journalism nonprofit, as saying the material constitutes the "biggest leak of military intelligence" ever.

Newsweek said the stash of Iraq documents held by WikiLeaks is believed to be about three times as large as the number of US military field reports on Afghanistan released earlier this year by WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks, in collaboration with The New York Times, Britain's Guardian and Der Spiegel of Germany, published 77,000 Afghan war documents in July and has said it will release another 15,000 related documents soon.

Overton told Newsweek that his organization was working with WikiLeaks and television and print media in several countries on stories and programs based on the Iraq documents.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby bks » Wed Sep 29, 2010 11:22 am

Raft of resignations at Wikileaks? Assange Growing More Autocratic?

[snip]
Key members of WikiLeaks were angered to learn last month that Assange had secretly provided media outlets with embargoed access to the vast database, under an arrangement similar to the one WikiLeaks made with three newspapers that released documents from the Afghanistan war in July. WikiLeaks is set to release the Iraq trove on Oct. 18, according to ex-staffers — far too early, in the view of some of them, to properly redact the names of U.S. collaborators and informants in Iraq. . .

[snip]
Snorrason says he does not know the source of the Iraq documents, and made clear he wouldn’t identify that source if he did. But he expressed some concern that Assange’s decision to release the massive database would impact the legal case of Pfc. Bradley Manning, who has been charged with improperly downloading and leaking classified information to WikiLeaks. Manning disclosed to a former hacker in May that he had given WikiLeaks a database covering 500,000 events in the Iraq War between 2004 and 2009. Manning said the database included reports, dates, and latitude and longitude of events, as well as casualty figures. . .


http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/0 ... z10vrM28An
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby wintler2 » Wed Sep 29, 2010 9:24 pm

Wired.com wrote: "..expressed some concern that Assange’s decision to release the massive database would impact the legal case of Pfc. Bradley Manning, .."

Manning leaked the material because he wanted it in public. How predictably creepy for Wired to try and spin his & Wikileaks success into a black mark.
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby 82_28 » Wed Sep 29, 2010 9:34 pm

Didn't many of us all call this months ago - along with the good Chris Floyd? This is how it all goes down, we just didn't know the details yet.

Note how the .gov and .mil have revised the frequency of stories which one would purport to think only serve to say, "hey, we're human too."

That "killing Afghanis for sport" shit didn't originate out of wikileaks. The military leaked it itself. What a brave and noble deed. No need for "illegal" or "immoral" leaking. The Pentagon gets all vetting and oversight done on its own.

It reminds me of when I was a kid and I had to eat the meat on my plate. I hated meat. I would just try and cut it up into smaller and smaller pieces until it would disappear and my mom wouldn't notice I hadn't eaten any of it.
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Oct 17, 2010 10:33 pm

How propaganda is disseminated: WikiLeaks Edition
BY GLENN GREENWALD

AP
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
This is how the U.S. government and American media jointly disseminate propaganda: in the immediate wake of some newsworthy War on Terror event, U.S. Government officials (usually anonymous) make wild and reckless -- though unverifiable -- claims. The U.S. media mindlessly trumpets them around the world without question or challenge. Those claims become consecrated as widely accepted fact. And then weeks, months or years later, those claims get quietly exposed as being utter falsehoods, by which point it does not matter, because the goal is already well-achieved: the falsehoods are ingrained as accepted truth.

I've documented how this process works in the context of American air attacks (it's immediately celebrated that we Killed the Evil Targeted Terrorist Leader [who invariably turns out to be alive and then allegedly killed again in the next air strike], while the dead are always, by definition, "militants"); with covered-up American war crimes, with the Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman frauds -- the same process was also evident with the Israeli attack on the flotilla -- and now we find a quite vivid illustration of this deceitful process in the context of WikiLeaks' release of Afghanistan war documents:

CNN, July 29, 2010:

Top military official: WikiLeaks founder may have 'blood' on his hands

The top U.S. military officer said Thursday that Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, was risking lives to make a political point by publishing thousands of military reports from Afghanistan.

"Mr. Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family," Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a news conference at the Pentagon. . . .

In equally stern comments and at the same session, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said the massive leak will have significant impact on troops and allies, giving away techniques and procedures.

"The battlefield consequences of the release of these documents are potentially severe and dangerous for our troops, our allies and Afghan partners, and may well damage our relationships and reputation in that key part of the world," Gates said. "Intelligence sources and methods, as well as military tactics, techniques and procedures will become known to our adversaries."

The Guardian, July 26, 2010:

The White House today condemned whistleblower WikiLeaks, accusing the website of putting the lives of US, UK and coalition troops in danger and threatening America's national security of the US after it posted more than 90,000 leaked US military documents about the war in Afghanistan.

Sen. Carl Levin, CNN, August 1, 2010:

CANDY CROWLEY: I want to turn you to WikiLeaks, which also comes under your bailiwick to a certain extent. Some 90,000 documents with secret information or top secret information. Can you quantify the damage?

LEVIN: Not yet. I think that's being assessed right now as to how many sources of information that gave us information that was useful to us are now in jeopardy. That -- that determination and damage assessment is being made right now by the Pentagon.But there quite clearly was damage.

DoD Spokesman Geoff Morrell, August 5, 2010:

WikiLeaks's public disclosure last week of a large number of our documents has already threatened the safety of our troops, our allies and Afghan citizens who are working with us to help bring about peace and stability in that part of the world.

The Heritage Foundation's Conn Carroll, August 24, 2010:

Julian Assanage -- you know, molesting charges aside -- is a criminal. He broke the law.He is, you know, a murderer of American and Afghani people. His carelessness has killed people.

Steven Aftergood, self-proclaimed transparency advocate and leading WikiLeaks critic, August 16, 2010:

Wikileaks has failed to demonstrate similar discernment in handling classified records, and it will be up to others to try to repair the damage it has caused.

Liz Cheney, August 2, 2010:

Dick Cheney's daughter, Liz Cheney wants the government of Iceland to stop its Wikileaks support. . . . "Our Government should make sure that Mr. Assange, Wikileaks founder and spokesman, never gets a U.S. Visa -- He has blood on his hands," Liz Cheney said.

She didn't stop there. She went on to say: "What he's done is very clearly aiding and abetting al Qaeda. And as I said, he may very well be responsible for the deaths of American soldiers in Afghanistan," she concluded.

Newt Gingrich, Newsmax interview, July 31, 2010:

Q: What does that do the Afghanistan war effort, and how does that put our men and women at risk?

GINGRICH: The release of these documents should be regarded as an act of treason. When you release 70 or 80,000 documents, you don't know how many people you're going to kill . . . . Frankly, I think we should be very aggressive about the website that was set up, WikiLeaks, and I think we should be very, very strong on the condemnation of the newspapers that published them.

Paul Rieckhoff, August 2, 2010:

At the end of the day I think Admiral Mullen is right. I think Julian Assange and WikiLeaks already probably have blood on their hands.

CNN, today:

The online leak of thousands of secret military documents from the war in Afghanistan by the website WikiLeaks did not disclose any sensitive intelligence sources or methods, the Department of Defense concluded. . . .

The assessment, revealed in a letter from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Michigan), comes after a thorough Pentagon review of the more than 70,000 documents posted to the controversial whistle-blower site in July. . . .

The defense secretary said that the published documents do contain names of some cooperating Afghans, who could face reprisal by Taliban.

But a senior NATO official in Kabul told CNN that there has not been a single case of Afghans needing protection or to be moved because of the leak.

Let's repeat that. Despite Gates' ongoing assertion that "the initial assessment in no way discounts the risk to national security" and that "there is still concern Afghans named in the published documents could be retaliated against by the Taliban," even the DoD and NATO admit that the WikiLeaks release "did not disclose any sensitive intelligence sources or methods" and that "there has not been a single case of Afghans needing protection or to be moved because of the leak." Nonetheless, the accusation that WikiLeaks and Assange have "blood on their hands" was -- as intended -- trumpeted around the world for weeks without much question or challenge.

It's been clear from the start that -- despite the valid concern that WikiLeaks should have been more vigilant in redacting the names of innocent Afghan civilians -- the Pentagon (and its media and pundit servants) were drastically exaggerating the harms, as The Associated Press noted on August 17:

The WikiLeaks leak is unrivaled in its scope, but so far there is no evidence that any Afghans named in the leaked documents as defectors or informants from the Taliban insurgency have been harmed in retaliation.


Some private analysts, in fact, think the danger has been overstated. "I am underwhelmed by this argument. The Pentagon is hyping," says John Prados, a military and intelligence historian who works for the anti-secrecy National Security Archive. He said in an interview that relatively few names have surfaced and it's not clear whether their present circumstances leave them in jeopardy.

And on August 11, even the DOD was forced to admit to The Washington Post the complete absence of any evidence to support its wild accusations: "'We have yet to see any harm come to anyone in Afghanistan that we can directly tie to exposure in the WikiLeaks documents,' [Pentagon spokesman Geoff] Morrell said." Nonetheless, the initial spate of hysterically accusatory rhetoric, combined with the uncritical media dissemination, poisoned public opinion about WikiLeaks, and the fact that those accusations have been subsequently revealed as baseless will receive little attention and undo none of that deceit-based damage.

The benefits to the Government from spewing baseless accusations against WikiLeaks are obvious: they inure the public to the thuggish steps being taken to cripple and otherwise intimidate the whistleblowing site from exposing more government secrets about the truth of our wars. WikiLeaks' American spokesman, Jacob Appelbaum, was detained for hours at the airport when entering the U.S. in August, had his property seized (his laptop and cellphones), and was threatened with similar treatment each time he re-enters the U.S., and the following day was interrogated by FBI agents at a conference at which he spoke in New York. This week, WikiLeaks was notified that the service it uses to collect online donations "had closed down its account because it had been put on an official US watchlist and on an Australian government blacklist." And, of course, both the organization itself and Julian Assange have been repeatedly and publicly threatened with prosecution.

The effort to smear WikiLeaks is a by-product not only of anger over past disclosures, but fear of future ones as well. As CBS News reported yesterday: "The Pentagon is bracing for the possible release of as many as 400,000 potentially explosive secret military documents on the U.S.-Iraq war by WikiLeaks. The self-described whistleblower website could release the files as early as Sunday. . . . part of the fear about the potential release is the unknown: Defense officials are not sure exactly what documents WikiLeaks has."

Whatever else is true about this latest release (and future leaks by WikiLeaks as well), substantially greater caution is obviously warranted when assessing and repeating Pentagon accusations about the damage caused by these new documents and the supposed recklessness of WikiLeaks in releasing them. But that is unlikely to happen. If our established media is governed by any overarching principle, it's this: when the U.S. military speaks, its pronouncements -- especially in the beginning -- are to be respected, believed and repeated without question or challenge no matter how many times that deference proves to be unwarranted.

* * * * *

In order to combat the Obama supporter claim that his failures are due to an obstructionist Congress, Jane Hamsher has been asking various people to identify steps which Obama could take now to address various problems that require no action from Congress. My response is here; Alan Grayson's is here; James Galbraith's is here; Bill Black's is here.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Oct 18, 2010 9:07 am

'US fearing exposure of Iraq war truth'



The WikiLeaks documents are expected to include details about the torture scandalin Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison as well as thewar's civilian casualties,ethnic cleansingbeing carried out under US forces' watch anduse of unconventional weapons.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
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