WikiLeaks to Release 400,000 Secret Documents Monday

[seemslikeadream]

WIKILEAKS PRESS CONFERENCE ON RELEASE OF MILITARY DOCUMENTS

http://www.c-span.org/Watch/Media/2010/ ... ments.aspx

[Nordic]

A lot of commenters have remarked on the fact that the latest Wikileaks provide nothing useful that would support legal prosecutions for America's war criminals and at the same time, that they "confirm" many otherwise baseless and even nonsensical allegations about Iran, spuriously portray Iraqis as responsible for the bulk of tortures and murders of civilians, and otherwise echo many neocon talking points under the guise of "whistle-blowing".

Maybe this has something to do with it?

Wikileaks Hacked By “Very Skilled” Attackers Prior To Iraq Doc Release
Oct. 22 2010 - 2:44 pm | 46,158 views | 1 recommendation | 3 comments
By ANDY GREENBERG

As the whistle-blower organization prepared earlier this week for a Saturday press conference that some believe will announce a major release of secret data regarding the Iraq war, a staffer wrote Wednesday on the organization’s twitter feed that its “communications infrastructure is currently under attack,” adding the cryptic message “Project BO move to coms channel S. Activate Reston5.”

A Wikileaks source who asks to remain anonymous now says that the organization’s XMPP server in Amsterdam, used to host its encrypted instant messaging communications, was compromised earlier this week by an unknown attacker, and the chat service had to be relocated to another server in Germany. “The server got attacked, hacked, and the private keys got out,” says the source. “We needed new private keys. Now it’s back online and secure.”

The source added that the attack represented the first breach in Wikileaks’ history, and that “the people who are behind it are very skilled,” declining to comment further on the details of the hack.

Wikileaks’ site has been largely disabled over the last several weeks, displaying only a note that the site is “undergoing scheduled maintenance” and “will be back online as soon as possible.” But the Wikileaks source says that the attack had no relation to the site’s downtime, and that it “should be back up by tomorrow morning.”

If a major leak is in the works, it wouldn’t the first time Wikileaks’ site has suffered technical issues and recovered in time to regain the spotlight. Last June its submissions page ceased to function, but was fixed in time for the release of the so-called “Afghan War Diary” in July.

Earlier this month, another whistle-blower document, Cryptome.org, was hacked and had its files temporarily deleted. But the Wikileaks source argues that “the people who hacked Cryptome were just schoolkids who got the password. There’s no connection between the hack of Cryptome and of Wikileaks.” ... Link

Ha! Yeah, that's a great point. Why wouldn't they do exactly that?

Maybe some of them can be addressed to Dan Rather.

[seemslikeadream]

WikiLeaks proved the US lied: Fisk

Broadcast: 28/10/2010
Reporter: Tony Jones
Middle East correspondent and author Robert Fisk joins Lateline to discuss WikiLeaks' recent release of secret military files from the Iraq war.

Transcript
TONY JONES, PRESENTER: Tonight's guest is veteran Middle-East correspondent and author Robert Fisk.

Following the release by WikiLeaks of nearly 400,000 classified US military documents, Mr Fisk wrote an angry piece headlined "The Shaming of America" in his newspaper The Independent.

He claimed the Pentagon's anger over the leaks was not because their secrecy had been breached, but because they'd been caught out telling lies, and he joined us just a short time ago from Beirut.

Robert Fisk, thanks for being there.

ROBERT FISK, JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR: You're welcome.

TONY JONES: Now, what's the significance of the close-to-400,000 secret US military documents that have been posted by WikiLeaks, as far as you're concerned?

ROBERT FISK: Well I think there are several very important elements to this story.

First of all, the individual items like, you know, there are witnesses, American witnesses to torture, they didn't do anything, that the Iraqis - security authorities were torturing Iraqis, that American air strikes were killing many civilians.

We knew about this, but it was always denied by the Americans. I was doing stories years ago about Iraqis torturing Iraqis and the stories were coming from American officers who were leaking them to me.

But of course every time I wrote them in the paper, the Americans denied that it was true. I went to the scenes of US air strikes. They were obviously limbs, hands, arms of children, babies, women, civilians, as well sometimes as armed men, and we wrote about this.

What the WikiLeaks does is it proves beyond any doubt that what we reported was correct and that what we were told by the American authorities was mendacious, it was a lie.

Just remember, the Americans now are saying, "Shame upon WikiLeaks. It's endangering lives in Iraq." I mean, invading Iraq endangered an awful lot of lives, didn't it?

But, you know, if these leaks, if these 400,000 documents had confirmed that the Americans did stop torture, that they didn't kill civilians and air strikes, you know, US generals'd be handing this stuff out free of charge to journalists on the front steps of the Pentagon.

It's the fact that it proves how shameful our invasion and occupation of Iraq was that this has come as such a blow to the United States - and only, I might add, to the West.

You know, the reaction in the Arab world, when they looked through all stuff in the Arabic language press, particularly in Baghdad, was, "Well, so what's new? We knew all this. We were the people being tortured. We were the people being bombed by the Americans." It's in the West that we're saying, "My goodness! Is that the case? So the generals lied."

That's the big significance at this particular point of this.

One bigger significance, I think - and it was Al Jazeera who actually picked this up - was that this famous 242 message, which tells US troops from higher headquarters, presumably Ricardo Sanchez when he was a general in Baghdad, which says, "If you see abuse taking place, not by Americans, report it, but basically, just do nothing."

Al-Jazeera found that about the time that message was put out, Donald Rumsfeld had a press conference at the Pentagon in Washington with journalists present who did not understand the significance of what he was saying.

Because when he did that, the chief of the - the head of the joint chiefs of staff in uniform, Pace, General Pace, was saying, "Well, if a soldier ...," - we didn't know about the WikiLeaks. This was years ago. "If a soldier sees someone being tortured, of course he must stop it."

And the camera suddenly switches to Donald Rumsfeld and Pace's face falls at this point. He said, "Well, I think," - Rumsfeld says, "I think that in fact he doesn't have to physically intervene. He has to report it."

In other words, at that point Rumsfeld and presumably Sanchez had both agreed Americans would not intervene to stop torture, and that of course is against the Geneva Conventions.

TONY JONES: Let's go back to one step, and I'll come to more of the detail of the torture allegations in a moment. But to start with, these documents reveal 15,000 Iraqi civilian casualties that hitherto were unreported or undocumented. Now what do you make of these numbers?

ROBERT FISK: Well, look, the fact of the matter is nobody knows how many people have been killed in Iraq and there are numerous reasons for this.

If I can give you an anecdote of my own to show you why. In the worst period, when it was just beginning, the absolute total massacres in Baghdad, I was going in some danger, on my own, to the mortuary every day to count corpses. It's a very lugubrious thing to do at midday in a summer's day in Baghdad.

And, for example, I found that the senior mortician, whom I was talking to and got very friendly with, told me that so many bodies were coming in and so many people were not claiming them - because perhaps they didn't wanna be associated or they were the wrong religion - that they were just throwing them into mass graves outside Baghdad.

But when Americans brought corpses to the mortuary, the doctors were told not to perform post-mortems. Why was that, I wonder? Had they been tortured by other Iraqis and handed back to the Americans after being taken prisoner by Americans? I don't know the answer.

But all over Iraq there were mortuaries which were not taking the proper details down. Now what we know from this 15,000 more than we knew about is just that we have the body count organisation, which of course is not allied with any military body, which comes up with various figures.

And the figure of 66,000 dead, which is very small compared to what most people thought it would be, is 15,000 more than they had thought it might be.

But I think what you've got to say is overall, calculating by the thousands who were dying every month, sometimes in just three weeks in Baghdad alone, I think we're talking about at least 150,000, probably much more than that.

But again, you see, because you can't prove it, because you can't actually find it on paper, because there never was such a figure on paper because it was impossible to get - I'm sure the Americans would try to hide it if they did - you simply don't know and we won't know.

TONY JONES: I've just gotta interrupt you there for a moment because I want you to respond to what the Pentagon has actually said in its official response to this. It says, "The period," and you're talking about your own reporting, so ...

ROBERT FISK: A pleasure.

TONY JONES: ... the period covered by these reports has been well-chronicled by news reports, books and films and these field reports don't bring any new understanding to events.

ROBERT FISK: Yes, they do. What the field reports do prove that the Pentagon was lying at the time and we were right.

But what they're trying to say is, "Oh, it's on old story! We all knew about that." But the Pentagon was denying it all through those years. Their lies are not being chronicled by the Pentagon statement today. That's the point.

TONY JONES: What's the scale of the torture contained in the allegations here? It seems that there are, if I'm reading this correctly, 1,300 independent new US reports of torture by Iraqi police in police stations.

ROBERT FISK: Look, this is just the reports that the Americans chose to put in. There would be many other cases where they wouldn't have sent them in because they were tired or they were doing something else or they were chasing some other incident.

It is a fact - and I discovered this in police stations myself, and by talking to policemen - that if you got arrested, particularly if you were handed over by the Americans to the Iraqis as a suspected "terrorist", you would be tortured.

Now maybe it would be slapped around. In some cases the Americans themselves were smashing people around with plastic bottles full of water and when the water broke they slashed them across the face. But in most cases, they handed them to the Iraqis.

It was a kind of domestic form of rendition. If the Americans caught someone in Afghanistan and couldn't make them talk, they'd ship them off to Morocco or Egypt where they'd pull out their toe nails and then perhaps they would talk.

So in a sense this was a miniature rendition. The Americans caught people, they sent them to the Iraqi security services.

They knew what would happen. Well they knew that 1,300 it'd happened. And they knew very well that they would be tortured, and they were.

And that's why so many Iraqis who've ever been arrested, when you talk to them in Baghdad, they'll say, "Yes, I was tortured, routinely, always and without exception." And that's the situation.

This 1,300 figure doesn't actually mean anything. We're talking of tens of thousands of prisoners who've been brutalised and abused by the Iraqis with American knowledge - that's what we're talking about.

TONY JONES: We saw with the revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib Prison by Americans, but it took some time for that story to really take hold.

Is that what's happening here? And is there evidence, direct evidence in these new documents that the Americans actually turned a blind eye? You referred to that memo, the secret memo Frago 242, as it's called?

ROBERT FISK: Yeah, I mean, they were being ordered to turn a blind eye. They could report it, but the fact that the American administration and Ricardo Sanchez, who was the general at the time - he was the general at the time of Abu Ghraib - did nothing about it, means it was a blind eye.

You've gotta remember this has also been happening in Afghanistan, where prisoners taken by NATO troops, including Americans, have actually been executed or simply tortured to death by Afghans, the same kind of, again, domestic rendition. "We're handing them over to you. We believe they're terrorists." And they disappear, or they're tortured, or they come out - sometimes.

I had a very interesting conversation a couple of days ago with a former senior American officer in Iraq who was trying to justify what happened. He said, "Well, you know, we're all against torture, but in a war situation, we have to take a different attitude."

And I said, "What? Hold on a second, if you see someone across the road being tortured, your duty as a human being is to cross the road and stop it, otherwise you can be taken by a policemen to a court."

He said, "Yeah, yeah, but that's OK as a morality in London or Paris or New York," he said, "but it's not the same when you're at war." And I said, "But if it's not the same, why did you go to war to end torture?" You know, it's a round-trip situation.

But you shouldn't mistake the fact that these figures that we're getting are merely proof that the generals lied at the time. They're a very small version of what actually happened, because these are only the versions which we know that the Americans knew about, or chose to know about, or chose to report at the time.

TONY JONES: Britain's deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, a Liberal Democrat who, to be fair, opposed the war in the beginning, says the allegations are extraordinarily serious, the allegations of torture.

He wants them investigated. Now the Russians are calling for an investigation, the Danes are investigating whether detainees they handed over to Afghans - to Iraqis, I should say, were tortured. There's also a call from the United Nations for an investigation. Where do you think it's going to go?

ROBERT FISK: Nowhere. You've gotta remember there's a certain hypocrisy for the Russians to start talking about allegations of torture when during their eight-year occupation of Afghanistan, they tortured even more people and killed even more Afghans than the Americans killed Iraqis.

So, you know, I think there's a certain hypocrisy behind it all.

It's good to see old Clegg in Britain calling for an investigation. It won't happen and he knows that Cameron won't back it.

I'm talking about the British prime minister in the coalition government in London.

But it's good that we're hearing at least politicians saying, "This is terrible, terrible," I just wish they'd said it at the time, when of course we had Mr Bush denying it and Mr Blair denying it and the result was that Mr Blair is now the peace envoy in the Middle East - heaven spare us, but there we go.

I think there's an awful lot of hypocrisy here. The fact of the matter is that routinely when armies go abroad to other countries far away, they torture and they abuse and they turn blind eyes. Look at Korea, look at Vietnam. I could go through a whole lot more. And it will happen again. I don't think we care about the people whose lands we occupy and that is the problem.

TONY JONES: Let's go the question of the significance of this for journalism because you've said, "This is the most important proof so far that the internet is now doing a better job than newspaper or TV journalism."

ROBERT FISK: Yeah, I didn't say it was doing a better job. I don't think the internet does. I think it's full of hate and spite and lies.

But what I was saying is - I was asking a question: what does this huge revelation of military secrets, unprecedented in history, what does it say about the old-style journalism that would be personified, for example, by Seymour Hersch in the United States, the guy who broke the My Lai story and regularly writes revelatory stories about the American military in the New Yorker.

Here's a guy who goes to his sources within the military, gets a pretty good frame of the picture. But what is that compared to being able to press a button and get almost half a million military secrets on a screen in front of you?

Now, what happens to all these big teams of investigating journalists that the New York Times boasts of, and which, in the days when it was a serious paper, the British Sunday Times used to have?

Is there any point in having "investigative journalism" anymore if you're just gonna sit back and wait for some strange code-breaker from Australia to plonk them all on a screen in front of you?

The real danger I think is that journalists will start to get lazy. We'll say, "Oh, well, there's no point in investigating torture. It'll pop up on WikiLeaks at some point."

And that means that WikiLeaks makes the choice of what secrets you see and what secrets you don't see. And it may be there are many other tortures of different kinds associated with us or not that we should be learning about.

So, number one, we're allowing WikiLeaks to set the agenda of whose torture we look at and whose we don't.

And number two, the great danger of people saying, "Well, there's no point in reading Seymour Hersch," or Rupert Murdoch's father revealing some truths about Gallipoli, for example. Those days are gone if we journalists just sit and just press a button and say, "OK, on Saturday, Der Spiegel, Al-Jazeera, the Guardian, the New York Times will run the latest stuff off the web.

TONY JONES: Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon papers all those years ago, regards WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as pretty much a hero.

And I'm wondering if you feel the same way. And I know you've expressed doubts about some of their methods, but bear this in mind: some of his closest collaborators have expressed their extreme concern about the fact that in the first tranche of documents, the names of Afghan informers were included and now the Taliban is talking about taking retribution against those people.

ROBERT FISK: Yeah, I knew as soon as I heard that that the Taliban would not miss the opportunity of putting that line in.

Look, I think Ellsberg is wrong. There are two things here: first of all that everything's now on screens, everything's now interneted, and it can be changed and put up in their millions.

In the past, you see, in previous wars - Vietnam, Korea, World War I, World War II, all the way back - everything was on paper. You have a battalion file, written down, typed up, in triplicate, with numbers on and it would go into files.

If there was a leak, you could trace it. So there weren't many leaks. Ellsberg's own papers, the Pentagon papers, were on paper, they were not on screen, they were not on computers. And it needed someone from inside to risk his career, perhaps his life, to grab the material that proved the lie.

Ellsberg did - that's what he's so famous and I think he's a very fine man. Assange didn't do that. Individual American soldiers, possibly at a higher grade than we realise, were involved in leaking this stuff - and I can imagine some of the reasons why.

When you go to Iraq or Afghanistan or talk to - when I'm in the States and talk to American officers, up to and including the rank of colonel, they're outraged by what's happened.

Above the rank of colonel, they're approving of the administration 'cause they wanna get their retirement pensions and keep the badges on their shoulders. But the fact of the matter is that these days, you see, it's the ordinary junior ranks who are putting this stuff up.

And it's people like Assange who are in no danger at all. I mean, Ellsberg was in grave danger, possibly of his life, but certainly his - he might have gone to prison for a very long time. We had stuff on paper, now it's not on paper, and there's no risk involved any longer - not frankly, however much - how romantic Assange thinks he is, or not, as the case may be in actually putting this stuff out.

TONY JONES: Robert Fisk, I'm afraid to say that we are out of time. Once again we thank you for joining us on Lateline. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. We thank you very much for being there.

ROBERT FISK: You're very welcome. Thank you.

[elfismiles]

WikiLeaks and the Culture of Classification
October 28, 2010 | 0853 GMT
By Scott Stewart

On Friday, Oct. 22, the organization known as WikiLeaks published a cache of 391,832 classified documents on its website. The documents are mostly field reports filed by U.S. military forces in Iraq from January 2004 to December 2009 (the months of May 2004 and March 2009 are missing). The bulk of the documents (379,565, or about 97 percent) were classified at the secret level, with 204 classified at the lower confidential level. The remaining 12,062 documents were either unclassified or bore no classification.

This large batch of documents is believed to have been released by Pfc. Bradley Manning, who was arrested in May 2010 by the U.S. Army Criminal Investigations Command and charged with transferring thousands of classified documents onto his personal computer and then transmitting them to an unauthorized person. Manning is also alleged to have been the source of the classified information released by WikiLeaks pertaining to the war in Afghanistan in July 2010.

WikiLeaks released the Iraq war documents, as it did the Afghanistan war documents, to a number of news outlets for analysis several weeks in advance of their formal public release. These news organizations included The New York Times, Der Spiegel, The Guardian and Al Jazeera, each of which released special reports to coincide with the formal release of the documents Oct. 22.

Due to its investigation of Manning, the U.S. government also had a pretty good idea of what the material was before it was released and had formed a special task force to review it for sensitive and potentially damaging information prior to the release. The Pentagon has denounced the release of the information, which it considers a crime. It has also demanded the return of its stolen property and warned that the documents place Iraqis at risk of retaliation and also the lives of U.S. troops from terrorist groups that are mining the documents for operational information they can use in planning their attacks.

When one takes a careful look at the classified documents released by WikiLeaks, it becomes quickly apparent that they contain very few true secrets. Indeed, the main points being emphasized by Al Jazeera and the other media outlets after all the intense research they conducted before the public release of the documents seem to highlight a number of issues that had been well-known and well-chronicled for years. For example, the press has widely reported that the Iraqi government was torturing its own people; many civilians were killed during the six years the documents covered; sectarian death squads were operating inside Iraq; and the Iranian government was funding Shiite militias. None of this is news. But, when one steps back from the documents themselves and looks at the larger picture, there are some interesting issues that have been raised by the release of these documents and the reaction to their release.


The Documents

The documents released in this WikiLeaks cache were taken from the U.S. government’s Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet), a network used to distribute classified but not particularly sensitive information. SIPRNet is authorized only for the transmission of information classified at the secret level and below. It cannot be used for information classified top secret or more closely guarded intelligence that is classified at the secret level. The regulations by which information is classified by the U.S. government are outlined in Executive Order 13526. Under this order, secret is the second-highest level of classification and applies to information that, if released, would be reasonably expected to cause serious damage to U.S. national security.

Due to the nature of SIPRNet, most of the information that was downloaded from it and sent to WikiLeaks consisted of raw field reports from U.S. troops in Iraq. These reports discussed things units encountered, such as IED attacks, ambushes, the bodies of murdered civilians, friendly-fire incidents, traffic accidents, etc. For the most part, the reports contained raw information and not vetted, processed intelligence. The documents also did not contain information that was the result of intelligence-collection operations, and therefore did not reveal sensitive intelligence sources and methods. Although the WikiLeaks material is often compared to the 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers, there really is very little similarity. The Pentagon Papers consisted of a top secret-level study completed for the U.S. secretary of defense and not raw, low-level battlefield reports.

To provide a sense of the material involved in the WikiLeaks release, we will examine two typical reports. The first, classified at the secret level, is from an American military police (MP) company reporting that Iraqi police on Oct. 28, 2006, found the body of a person whose name was redacted in a village who had been executed. In the other report, also classified at the secret level, we see that on Jan. 1, 2004, Iraqi police called an American MP unit in Baghdad to report that an improvised explosive device (IED) had detonated and that there was another suspicious object found at the scene. The MP unit responded, confirmed the presence of the suspicious object and then called an explosive ordnance disposal unit, which came to the site and destroyed the second IED. Now, while it may have been justified to classify such reports at the secret level at the time they were written to protect information pertaining to military operations, clearly, the release of these two reports in October 2010 has not caused any serious damage to U.S. national security.

Another factor to consider when reading raw information from the field is that, while they offer a degree of granular detail that cannot be found in higher-level intelligence analysis, they can often be misleading or otherwise erroneous. As anyone who has ever interviewed a witness can tell you, in a stressful situation people often miss or misinterpret important factual details. That’s just how most people are wired. This situation can be compounded when a witness is placed in a completely alien culture. This is not to say that all these reports are flawed, but just to note that raw information must often be double-checked and vetted before it can be used to create a reliable estimate of the situation on the battlefield. Clearly, the readers of these reports released by WikiLeaks now do not have the ability to conduct that type of follow-up.


Few True Secrets

By saying there are very few true secrets in the cache of documents released by WikiLeaks, we mean things that would cause serious damage to national security. And no, we are not about to point out the things that we believe could be truly damaging. However, it is important to understand up front that something that causes embarrassment and discomfort to a particular administration or agency does not necessarily damage national security.

As to the charges that the documents are being mined by militant groups for information that can be used in attacks against U.S. troops deployed overseas, this is undoubtedly true. It would be foolish for the Taliban, the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) and other militant groups not to read the documents and attempt to benefit from them. However, there are very few things noted in these reports pertaining to the tactics, techniques and procedures (TTP) used by U.S. forces that could not be learned by simply observing combat operations — and the Taliban and ISI have been carefully studying U.S. TTP every hour of every day for many years now. These documents are far less valuable than years of careful, direct observation and regular first-hand interaction.

Frankly, combatants who have been intensely watching U.S. and coalition forces and engaging them in combat for the better part of a decade are not very likely to learn much from dated American after-action reports. The insurgents and sectarian groups in Iraq own the human terrain; they know who U.S. troops are meeting with, when they meet them and where. There is very little that this level of reporting is going to reveal to them that they could not already have learned via observation. Remember, these reports do not deal with highly classified human-intelligence or technical-intelligence operations.

This is not to say that the alleged actions of Manning are somehow justified. From the statements released in connection with the case by the government, Manning knew the information he was downloading was classified and needed to be protected. He also appeared to know that his actions were illegal and could get him in trouble. He deserves to face the legal consequences of his actions.

This is also not a justification for the actions of WikiLeaks and the media outlets that are exploiting and profiting from the release of this information. What we are saying is that the hype surrounding the release is just that. There were a lot of classified documents released, but very few of them contained information that would truly shed new light on the actions of U.S. troops in Iraq or their allies or damage U.S. national security. While the amount of information released in this case was huge, it was far less damaging than the information released by convicted spies such as Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames — information that crippled sensitive intelligence operations and resulted in the execution or imprisonment of extremely valuable human intelligence sources.


Culture of Classification

Perhaps one of the most interesting facets of the WikiLeaks case is that it highlights the culture of classification that is so pervasive inside the U.S. government. Only 204 of the 391,832 documents were classified at the confidential level, while 379,565 of them were classified at the secret level. This demonstrates the propensity of the U.S. government culture to classify documents at the highest possible classification rather than at the lowest level really required to protect that information. In this culture, higher is better.

Furthermore, while much of this material may have been somewhat sensitive at the time it was reported, most of that sensitivity has been lost over time, and many of the documents, like the two reports referenced above, no longer need to be classified. Executive Order 13526 provides the ability for classifying agencies to set dates for materials to be declassified. Indeed, according to the executive order, a date for declassification is supposed to be set every time a document is classified. But, in practice, such declassification provisions are rarely used and most people just expect the documents to remain classified for the entire authorized period, which is 10 years in most cases and 25 years when dealing with sensitive topics such as intelligence sources and methods or nuclear weapons. In the culture of classification, longer is also seen as better.

This culture tends to create so much classified material that stays classified for so long that it becomes very difficult for government employees and security managers to determine what is really sensitive and what truly needs to be protected. There is certainly a lot of very sensitive information that needs to be carefully guarded, but not everything is a secret. This culture also tends to reinforce the belief among government employees that knowledge is power and that one can become powerful by having access to information and denying that access to others. And this belief can often contribute to the bureaucratic jealously that results in the failure to share intelligence — a practice that was criticized so heavily in the 9/11 Commission Report.

It has been very interesting to watch the reaction to the WikiLeaks case by those who are a part of the culture of classification. Some U.S. government agencies, such as the FBI, have bridled under the post-9/11 mandates to share their information more widely and have been trying to scale back the practice. As anyone who has dealt with the FBI can attest, they tend to be a semi-permeable membrane when it comes to the flow of information. For the bureau, intelligence flows only one way — in. The FBI is certainly not alone. There are many organizations that are very hesitant to share information with other government agencies, even when those agencies have a legitimate need to know. The WikiLeaks cases have provided such people a justification to continue to stovepipe information.

In addition to the glaring personnel security issues regarding Manning’s access to classified information systems, these cases are in large part the result of a classified information system overloaded with vast quantities of information that simply does not need to be protected at the secret level. And, ironically, overloading the system in such a way actually weakens the information-protection process by making it difficult to determine which information truly needs to be protected. Instead of seeking to weed out the over-classified material and concentrate on protecting the truly sensitive information, the culture of classification reacts by using the WikiLeaks cases as justification for continuing to classify information at the highest possible levels and for sharing the intelligence it generates with fewer people. The ultimate irony is that the WikiLeaks cases will help strengthen and perpetuate the broken system that helped lead to the disclosures in the first place.



Read more: WikiLeaks and the Culture of Classification | STRATFOR

http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20101027 ... sification

[Montag]

Pack Assange off to Guantanamo, US conservatives tell Obama
by David Usborne

October 27, 2010
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 17399.html

The White House and the Pentagon have failed to confront and contain the threat to national security posed by WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange who should be arrested as an "enemy combatant", voices on the US conservative right insisted yesterday.

Frustration with the failure of President Barack Obama to combat WikiLeaks has grown since the release of almost 400,000 secret documents that exposed the extent of abuse of prisoners in Iraq by US and Iraqi personnel.

One Fox commentator went so far as to call for the WikiLeaks figurehead to be treated as a prisoner of war. Christian Whiton,a former State Department official, demanded that America seize Mr Assange and deal with him and other WikiLeaks staff as "enemy combatants". Calling for "non-judicial action" against them, he implied that they should be in Guantanamo Bay with Taliban inmates.

Nor was Whiton alone in his stance. "The government also should be waging war on the WikiLeaks web presence," an editorial in the conservative Washington Times railed this week. Other infuriated conservative commentators made similar demands on websites of such august institutions as the neoconservative thinktank the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

However, the right is not united in its response to the latest paper blizzard. Before the cries for muscle-flexing began, some on the right thought they saw snippets in the new documents to stand up the discredited theory at the centre of the 2003 invasion – that there were weapons of mass destruction hidden in Iraq. "There were weapons of mass destruction after all," was a weekend headline in the New York Post, also Murdoch-owned.

Closer inspection of passages referring to the discovery of equipment by coalition forces in Iraq reveal they were left over from early efforts by Saddam Hussein to build a deadly arsenal and do not point to his concealing hardware when the invasion was ordered.

But it is the inability of America to silence WikiLeaks that is stirring the greatest passion among conservatives. On the AEI website, Marc Thiessen, a former spokesman for the late Senator Jesse Helms, noted a Twitter post from Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, saying that the leaks put lives at risk.

"Mullen is right – the release of these documents was irresponsible and dangerous. But, with all respect to the chairman, a Twitter posting is not exactly the cyber response that these WikiLeaks disclosures warrant," he wrote.

[Simulist]

"Mullen is right – the release of these documents was irresponsible and dangerous. But, with all respect to the chairman, a Twitter posting is not exactly the cyber response that these WikiLeaks disclosures warrant," he wrote.

People are so funny.

Most of the people who think the leak was "irresponsible and dangerous" appear to have no trouble at all with two unnecessary wars or the carnage and atrocities that have resulted from them, as highlighted by the leak.

Leak: "Bad. Very, very bad."

Atrocities: "Meh."

[Skunkboy]

Wikileaks Docs Underestimate Iraqi Dead

By John Tirman

October 30, 2010 "AlterNet" Oct, 26, 2010 -- The nearly 400,000 documents on the Iraq War released by Wikileaks last Friday has stirred an unusual flurry of attention to the persistent brutalizing of civilians during the war, a topic forsaken by the major news media when the conflict was raging. But the English-language newspapers provided with the documents in advance -- the New York Times and the Guardian (London) -- are again misunderstanding the scope of the war’s mayhem.

The revelations about the U.S. military turning a blind eye to abuse of detainees and the rampaging of private security contractors, most of them American firms like Xe (aka Blackwater) are disturbing, to be sure, if not exactly surprising. The pattern of American commanders’ misleading statements or outright dishonesty, which Wikileaks’ release of documents from the Afghanistan war last summer already amply demonstrated, is now becoming a military tradition. But the headlines, for once, focused on the death tolls of civilians. This is refreshing, since the Times and other major news media in the U.S. have only grudgingly addressed Iraqi suffering, and even then in peculiarly misinformed ways.

For all their value, the newly leaked documents will, unfortunately, reinforce the lower estimates of Iraqi mortality. The reports raise the number of civilians killed by about 15,000 over the estimate of Iraq Body Count (IBC), a London-based NGO. IBC’s count, however widely cited, is accumulated by scanning mainly English-language news media reports. It’s a crude method, given that not all deaths are reported in the news media, the number of reporters and their interests change over time, and most of the press was stuck in Baghdad during the most severe violence in 2004-07. IBC itself acknowledges that they are probably low by a factor of two, meaning their count should be 200,000 and the new data would make that at least 215,000. Even then, IBC does not count “insurgents” or security forces, or non-violent deaths that are attributable to the war.

The news reports stirred by Wikileaks’ documents accepted the low IBC count as the baseline and did not bother to suggest that other, more credible estimates have been much higher. The lead story in the Times said that the new count “suggest numbers that are roughly in line with those compiled by several sources, including Iraq Body Count.” Those “several” other sources, likely the U.N. office in Baghdad and the Brookings Index compiled by Michael O’Hanlon (which the Times runs as a regular op-ed), use roughly the same method as IBC and the military, so it is hardly validating to find them in agreement. The Associated Press stories were also using the low numbers.

Counting casualties is a tricky business, especially in the midst of a nasty sectarian war that was essentially enabled by an occupying force. The methods used by IBC and the others are “passive” surveillance: they rely on reporting (from journalists, morgues, and now soldiers) that is not able to capture more than a fraction of all fatalities. For example, only those killed who are not immediately known (and taken by family) go to a morgue. As noted, journalists were mainly in Baghdad, but most violence occurred elsewhere. And the information released by Wikileaks are from U.S. soldiers in their “after action” reports, meaning that they had to be involved in or near to the violence, and had to report it correctly (identifying the dead as civilians, not all insurgents, and they were wont to do), if indeed they did so at all. Other violence would go unreported.

The most important point here is that by using passive surveillance, one never knows what deaths are being missed. The Times admitted these shortcomings: “The reports were only as good as the soldiers calling them in.” But it still left the impression that the death toll likely stood at about 115,000 civilians.

There were other estimates, of course, which relied on a proven method in epidemiology, a population-based survey in which qualified researchers would visit randomly selected households and ask questions to gauge the level of killing. Several such surveys have been taken in Iraq. Two, in fact, used this method at almost exactly the same time -- in mid-2006 -- with one managed by researchers at the John Hopkins School of Public Health (and commissioned by a program I run at MIT), and the other by the Iraqi Ministry of Health. Both found much higher numbers, although the surveys’ data do not agree in some important respects. Still, the Hopkins survey found 650,000 “excess deaths” from the war, including violent and non-violent causes, with the MoH at 400,000. And both were done well before the violence and other impacts -- a crippled health care system, poor hygiene, etc. -- took many more lives. Both measured all Iraqi deaths, not just civilians, especially important in a conflict where the line between civilian and “insurgent” is often blurry.

The most authoritative review of all the mortality estimates -- passive and active -- appeared in the professional journal Conflict and Health in March 2008, and concluded that population-based surveys are superior (for the reasons discussed here), and that “of the population-based studies, the [Hopkins] studies provided the most rigorous methodology.” The passive reporting, these experts agree, suffers from under-reporting and inability to capture indirect deaths, and thereby called into question the estimates of IBC, the Brookings index, the U.N. office in Baghdad, and other such efforts.

There is also the matter of corroborating evidence, which typically is overlooked. Two pieces in particular are powerful. The first is the number of displaced Iraqis, estimated between 3.5 and 5 million. Hundreds of interviews of those in Syria and Jordan suggest nearly all fled because of violence in their neighborhoods. No war has produced more than about a 10 to 1 ratio of displaced to dead, and in most wars the ratio is about 5 to 1 or narrower. The 5 to 1 ratio would translate into at least 700,000 deaths in Iraq.

The second and less reliable number is the overwhelming number of widows, some from earlier wars, which the Iraqi government has variously estimated at about 750,000.

The evidence, then, is rather clear and compelling. Something like 700,000 or more Iraqis have been killed either through direct or “structural” violence in the period since the U.S. invaded more than seven years ago. The number could easily be as high as a million. Most were killed by other Iraqis, or the deplorable conditions that wars wreak and persist in Iraq.

Do the numbers matter? Are 115,000 less morally onerous than a million? Well, yes. But that is not the point here. The major news media in this country supported the invasion. It’s an embarrassment that the war was not only fought on false premises that they in effect promoted, but that the consequences have been so devastating, with more fatalities than were attributed to Saddam Hussein.

What else explains this negligence apart from stubborn unwillingness to learn the science of conflict mortality? Possibly, they fear a right-wing backlash or government opprobrium. But this cowardice has its consequences, too. For more than a year, the Republicans have woven a victory narrative about Iraq, and arguing that shaky case is easier with the lower mortality figures. Whether the American public cares about the deaths of others is a debatable proposition. But the media’s negligence surely serves to make the next invasion easier.

John Tirman is Executive Director of MIT's Center for International Studies.

© 2010 Independent Media Institute.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.inf ... e26713.htm

[Twyla LaSarc]

Remember, these are the miltary's official numbers.

They are not going to add in peripheral deaths due to stress and environmetal and social degradation. They just don't and never did. They didn't 'count bodies' in VN either.

When it comes to anyone noticing your death in a war, you had better be wearing a recognizable uniform of either side. Otherwise, they will literally bulldoze you into a trench and call it a day. This is the inevitable result of our 'rules of warfare'.