rigorousintuition.ca

nathan28 wrote:Is there any indication of what is claimed to be in the "history insurance" file?

It’s here:

Julian Assange answers your questions
The Guardian, Dec 3 2010

Julian Assange:
The Cable Gate archive has been spread, along with significant material from the US and other countries to over 100,000 people in encrypted form. If something happens to us, the key parts will be released automatically. Further, the Cable Gate archives is in the hands of multiple news organisations. History will win. The world will be elevated to a better place. Will we survive? That depends on you.

But get this- former US intelligence officer Michael Tanji says that "he" (Manning) "certainly had access" to Top Secret information through SIPRnet though "whether he shared/leaked that has yet to be discovered." Wha?!!! That's news! I haven't seen anyone speculate in this direction anywhere.

As a side note, the interview directly following Tanji's, has Mikko Hypponen denying any possibility of Top Secret documents on SIPRnet. On air he’s a representative of an anti-virus company but he’s identified as computer security expert in the show's copy- see below:

Tech Podcast: SIPRnet and the WikiLeaks cables
Our show this week takes a look at where all those cables came from; namely, a US government Intra-net system called SIPRnet, which began life in the mid-1990s as a secure way for the US military to achieve command and control. After 9/11, and the subsequent investigations into failures in US intelligence, SIPRnet was opened up to more users, including US State Department personnel. In this week’s podcast, you’ll hear computer security expert Mikko Hypponen and former US intelligence officer Michael Tanji detail the good and bad of increased access to a system like SIPRnet, and the challenges in securing it.

So what if, Cowbell…

Cosmic Cowbell wrote:

IMO. He'll continue to threaten TPTB with "the Key" if he is held and his bluff will be called. He (or his associates) may release the key, he/they may not. A question I have if this occurs is this. Since anyone could have downloaded what I'll assume is an un-redacted cable dump, and there is indeed information that may put lives in danger in various parts of the world for whatever reason, would/could JA be charge as an accomplice in any violence which may occur as a result?

… what if the "significant material from the US and other countries" in JA's Insurance File is really, really, really damaging (as in war crime convictions or worse 911 is an inside job! Ha!) and the US State Dept thinks/knows he has it. That would account for their naked, murderous zeal. It would also account for Assange's release from jail today, which I wasn't expecting.

Picture it- the Australian consul visits him in jail ‘cause he's been instructed by Kevin Rudd to do so (Rudd's already been let in on the secret by Assange's cohorts and that's why he is happy to beak off to the US and even his own- US installed- PM.) Assange tells the consul to tell his US counterpart xyz. A bit of negotiating and bingo! the door to the prison is opened.

If this is the case- and of course it it's just speculation, that Tanji guy could have it wrong no doubt- then one wonders if Assange will/can use that leverage to help Bradley Manning in some way. How would that happen? Could we tell?

And then there's this…

Did anyone else notice that Assange had signaled from his prison van? You can bet the US spooks did and nearly peed their pants.

Lookee lookee:


I let them know what we have...


We're close to an agreement...


Don't release the key yet..


I'm okay. See you in a couple of days...







Also this other Tech Podcast is worth listening to once you get past the old news in the first few minutes. The tl;dr is: The US has been pushing other countries towards more transparency; the world is moving that way anyway; Wikileaks and/or it's like, are inevitable. Etc.

Tech Podcast: Leaks, leaks and more Wikileaks

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, we’re going to try to hit the story from as many angles as we can. You’ll want to listen in, as we’ll have former hackers, current Anonymous volunteers, and all manner of smart netizens (Jeff Jarvis, Evgeny Morozov, and Wendy Hall to name but three) pick the story apart and tell you why it matters to your life, both online and offline.

Interpret as you will. Screw that... Thanks, Plutonia.

Plutonia wrote:… what if the "significant material from the US and other countries" in JA's Insurance File is really, really, really damaging (as in war crime convictions or worse 911 is an inside job! Ha!) and the US State Dept thinks/knows he has it. That would account for their naked, murderous zeal. It would also account for Assange's release from jail today, which I wasn't expecting.

Even if someone produced a video of Donald Rumsfeld roasting some chestnuts — and a nun! — over an open fire (and then eating her liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti), the front men for this greedy, unprincipled pugnocracy would probably try to impress upon us all the importance of "looking forward, not backward."

compared2what? wrote: Um....That was a rhetorical question about Padilla. Right?

Yes. But an important one, I think.

DrVolin wrote:

compared2what? wrote: Um....That was a rhetorical question about Padilla. Right?

Yes. But an important one, I think.

I couldn't agree more. I hope that I more or less addressed it to your satisfaction. The shorter version of my response, strictly wrt him would have been something along the lines of:

I don't know, but I don't forget about him. I imagine that he's been damaged beyond any realistic hope of full recovery. But possibly not beyond every realistic hope of some recovery, should things ever progress to the point that his ongoing torture becomes a legal and political impossibility and his receipt of treatment, aid and reparation a legal and political mandate. That's the end point I aim to make it possible some day to reach by arguing Assange's case in the present.

Or words to that effect.

norton ash wrote:

Interpret as you will. Screw that... Thanks, Plutonia.

Simulist wrote:Even if someone produced a video of Donald Rumsfeld roasting some chestnuts — and a nun! — over an open fire (and then eating her liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti), the front men for this greedy, unprincipled pugnocracy would probably try to impress upon us all the importance of "looking forward, not backward."

I'm not so sure. Just because we can't imagine information damning enough to scare Hillary and co, doesn't mean they can't.

The New York Times and WikiLeaks
16 December 2010
In the ongoing campaign of persecution against WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, the New York Times, the principal voice of American liberalism, has played a particularly filthy role.

Since the initial release of US State Department documents late last month, the Times has sought to downplay the significance of the revelations. It has largely ceased publication of new articles on the cables, confining those that it does produce to its inside pages. From the start, it has tailored its coverage to bolster US interests. The more significant exposures of US criminality are ignored.

As for the escalating international campaign targeting Assange, the Times has maintained a deliberate silence. It has not published a single editorial on Assange’s arrest or the calls from sections of the US political and media establishment for him to be killed and for WikiLeaks to be branded a terrorist organization. This is tantamount to tacit support for this campaign.

The role of the Times as an adjunct of the state was brazenly proclaimed by Executive Editor Bill Keller in extraordinary comments posted November 29 in response to a series of letters arguing that the Times has no right to report on the classified documents.

Keller began by declaring that he was “uncomfortable” with the notion that the editors of the Times “can decide to release information that the government wants to keep secret.” The editor’s “discomfort” at performing what has traditionally been considered one of the most essential roles of the media says a great deal about the real function of organs such as the New York Times.

“We have as much at stake in the war against terror as anyone,” Keller continued. “So the thought that something we report might increase the dangers faced by the country is daunting and humbling… When we find ourselves in possession of government secrets, we think long and hard about whether to disclose them.”
Here Keller accepts entirely the legitimacy of the “war on terror,” which, as he is well aware, has been used as a catch-all pretext for a series of criminal wars. The Times itself played a critical role in legitimizing the lies used to launch the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. By declaring that the newspaper has as much a stake in the “war on terror” as anyone, Keller is, in fact, proclaiming the Times’ unconditional support for the interests of American imperialism.

In considering whether to disclose information, Keller wrote, the Times engages in “extensive and serious discussions with the government.” Here he evinces no conception of the press as an institution independent of the state. That the Times should discuss its publishing decisions regularly with the US government is for him perfectly natural.

In a passage that could have come straight from Orwell, Keller wrote, “We agree wholeheartedly that transparency is not an absolute good. Freedom of the press includes freedom not to publish, and that is a freedom we exercise with some regularity” [emphasis added].

For Keller, the question of the freedom of the press is not a matter of the right of the public to know state secrets through the investigative inquiries of the press, but the right of the state, through its connections in the media, to keep information “with some regularity” from the American people. It is already known that the Times decided to sit on stories involving illegal domestic spying and torture carried out by the United States. How many other crimes is the newspaper helping to cover up?

In relation to the recently released documents, Keller continued, “We have withheld from publication a good deal of information in these cables that, on our own and in consultation with government officials, we believed could put lives at risk or could harm the national interest.” These conditions for withholding information from the American people—“could put lives at risk or could harm the national interest”—are so broad as to cover virtually anything.

Not only did the Times censor itself, it worked essentially as an arm of the US government in trying to get other news organizations with access to the documents to follow its lead. Keller noted in his November 29 posting that the Times sought to inform the other news organizations in possession of the documents of “both the State Department’s concerns about specific disclosures and our own plans to edit out sensitive material. The other news organizations supported these redactions.”

For the Times, the release of the documents by WikiLeaks is a misfortune. Keller would prefer that this information—and previous leaks documenting the criminal character of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—were kept secret. Given that the information was coming out anyway, however, the role of the Times was to vet it and function as a “gatekeeper” and guardian of state secrets.

The Times had the option, Keller wrote, “to ignore the secret documents, knowing they would be widely read anyway, picked over, possibly published without removal of dangerous information, probably used to advance various agendas [i.e., agendas opposed to the policy of the US government]; or, to study them, put them in context, and publish articles based on them, along with a carefully redacted selection of actual documents. We chose the latter course.”

In a recent interview on National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air” program, the New York Times’ chief Washington correspondent David Sanger was, if anything, even more explicit. “We are filtering it out to try to avoid the greatest harm to individuals, ongoing operations [i.e., military and secret intelligence operations], and so forth… Had we waited for this all to appear on the Internet… we would not have had as much time to think as hard as we did about what should and should not be redacted.”

A more open self-condemnation and exposure of the Times and the US media as a whole would be hard to imagine. The decay of democratic consciousness within the US media establishment has reached a level that such declarations of journalistic prostitution can be made without a trace of shame. The American media is “embedded” with the US military and intelligence apparatus not merely on the battlefield, but at all times and under all conditions.

Keller functions as a state operative and the Times as a state institution. After reading these comments, no person in his right mind would go to the Times with information potentially harmful to the US government. Such a meeting would undoubtedly be followed by a call from Keller to the State Department or to US intelligence agencies.

Such statements would have struck journalists of a previous generation as unimaginable. Even if newspapers in earlier times engaged in discussions with the government—and they did—it would have been considered impermissible to acknowledge this openly.

Everything Keller says is a repudiation of the position the Times took in relation to the Pentagon Papers. In 1971, the Times faced a US government suit attempting to prevent it from publishing leaked documents exposing the lies and crimes associated with the US war in Vietnam. The newspaper refused to reveal to the government what documents it had. It considered such a move to be a violation of principles central to the freedom of the press and to democracy as a whole.

To open up the Times documents to government inspection, the newspaper’s lawyer, Floyd Abrams, argued at one court hearing, would be to expose it to “a fishing expedition through files of a newspaper which are as protected by the First Amendment as one could imagine.”

After the Supreme Court sided with the Times and declared that publication of the Pentagon Papers could go forward, the newspaper wrote in an editorial that the decision had implications beyond the freedom of the press. “We believe,” the Times declared, “that its more profound significance lies in the implicit but inescapable conclusion that the American people have a presumptive right to be informed of the political decisions of their Government.”

Not only does the Times now consider this “presumptive right” to be void, it sees the role of the mass media—in contrast to organizations such as WikiLeaks—as guaranteeing government secrecy.

The thoroughgoing decay of democratic consciousness evinced by the New York Times—which has long functioned as a principal voice of the bourgeois political establishment—is one reflection of a broader transformation of American society. A state-controlled press is an inevitable corollary of the emergence of a corporate aristocracy.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/dec20 ... -d16.shtml

*

The Hacktivist wrote: Everytime I think of Ted Kaczynski it breaks my heart. Now there, my friends, is a mind controlled puppet, and a brilliant one at that.

I can't say that I agree with you. Or even that I see the case for your view.

I can see the case for his having had a part of his mind broken by trauma sustained in the course of being subjected to mind-control-related experimentation on people who hadn't given their informed consent to it, carried out by scientists who were -- by proxy -- working for the federal government back when he was a student at Harvard.

And I can also see the case for his therefore subsequently having come to regard sending bombs to scientists who did DARPA-type work as an act in furtherance of a vitally necessary political revolution.

I don't see how you figure he was a puppet, though. Seems to me that he was acting in accordance with his convictions.

And you are correct, of course, nobody should be held in the conditions you describe, I lose sleep over it personally.

I'm sorry to hear it. Does this help?



Also...

Ben D wrote:

The Hacktivist wrote: The cables clearly show the likes of the US saying one thing in private and another in public, Israel is certainly no saint and they have plenty of blood on their hands, but they dont play that game, they are too smart for it because they know sooner or later it will come back and bite you in the ass like it is now re: the US, et. al.

Why is that so hard to understand for some? That has been Israel's policy forever.

Et, to the extent that one reads between the lines when we hear the statement "we neither confirm or deny ...", generally the Israelis don't pull any punches but I would not conclude from that that they don't 'play that game' of duplicity.

In any event, since I'm not convinced that Wikileaks is the real deal due to fact that I would consider that had it really posed as a potential thorn to imperial global ambitions, it would have been either infiltrated and taken over or put out of play long ago. I also take it as a given that CIA, MI6, MOSSAD, and some other intelligence agencies including ASIO, cooperate at some levels regarding potential threats to the world order envisaged by imperial elite, Therefore it follows that to my mind, the Wikileaks question is still an open one, but I trust that if I postulate MOSSAD as a player, it is no more an attack on Israel as it is on Australia, USA, or UK.

I too like it when people say what they mean and mean what they say!

...why does Ben D. appear to be addressing you as "Et"?

Ben D wrote:

The Hacktivist wrote: The cables clearly show the likes of the US saying one thing in private and another in public, Israel is certainly no saint and they have plenty of blood on their hands, but they dont play that game, they are too smart for it because they know sooner or later it will come back and bite you in the ass like it is now re: the US, et. al.

Why is that so hard to understand for some? That has been Israel's policy forever.

Et, to the extent that one reads between the lines when we hear the statement "we neither confirm or deny ...", generally the Israelis don't pull any punches but I would not conclude from that that they don't 'play that game' of duplicity.

In any event, since I'm not convinced that Wikileaks is the real deal due to fact that I would consider that had it really posed as a potential thorn to imperial global ambitions, it would have been either infiltrated and taken over or put out of play long ago. I also take it as a given that CIA, MI6, MOSSAD, and some other intelligence agencies including ASIO, cooperate at some levels regarding potential threats to the world order envisaged by imperial elite, Therefore it follows that to my mind, the Wikileaks question is still an open one, but I trust that if I postulate MOSSAD as a player, it is no more an attack on Israel as it is on Australia, USA, or UK.

I too like it when people say what they mean and mean what they say!

Ben D, why do you appear to be addressing the Hacktivist as "Et"?

Okay, I'm gone, for GD posting purposes.

Thanks for the thread, JackRrrr! Love you! Bye!

Bye, everybody!

compared2what? wrote:Ben D, why do you appear to be addressing the Hacktivist as "Et"?

I was wondering about that too. Latin for "and" perhaps?

"What you don't know, can't hurt them."

That's the banner at the top of this forum. Why?
I can understand the hostility of the empire. I can understand the hostility of much of the mainstream press. I failt to understand why folk who visit this particular forum are content to see a man hounded into a special hell for the rest of his life, he has 8 weeks of freedom left, just so they can check his credentials by waiting to see the colour of his blood.

Plutonia wrote:

norton ash wrote:

Interpret as you will. Screw that... Thanks, Plutonia.

Simulist wrote:Even if someone produced a video of Donald Rumsfeld roasting some chestnuts — and a nun! — over an open fire (and then eating her liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti), the front men for this greedy, unprincipled pugnocracy would probably try to impress upon us all the importance of "looking forward, not backward."

I'm not so sure. Just because we can't imagine information damning enough to scare Hillary and co, doesn't mean they can't.

I'm just feeling really, really stupid, because I saw one of those pictures (the first) and I thought, "Why are they showing him scratching his nose? It must be to cut him down some more." But when you see the rest there's no doubt that he's signalling! We can't know what, but it's a brilliant find, Plutonia, and your interpretation is plausible and suggested by the body language. Thanks for spotting it. Is this elsewhere on the Web? Are we actually breaking stories on this thread?

.

JackRiddler wrote:Is this elsewhere on the Web? Are we actually breaking stories on this thread?

I haven't seen it anywhere.

I caught it 'cause I was thinking of tells and trying to identify some around wikileaks.

I do see some cross-over between the Yes Men's culture hacks and this:

8bitagent wrote:Yet....it's not wikileaks, but mainstream news that's had the biggest whoppers when it comes to the deep state.

Some of the headlines in the last half year include "CIA made fake bin Laden video"(washingtonpost, which also stated the CIA in 2003 wanted to make a video of Saddam allegedly having sex with a young boy),
"al Qaeda leader dined at Pentagon after 9/11"(Fox), "Witness In Defense Pentagon Case Exposes 9/11 intelligence coverup"(fox), "BP helped get Lockerbie bomber free?"(Reuters), "Pfizer having to pay up in deadly child experiments and creating AIDS like virus"(Rawstory), etc.

Here is an example of why WikiLeaks has pissed in so many people's cornflakes:

http://dronewarsuk.wordpress.com/2010/1 ... ry-so-far/

Wikileaks, Cablegate and Drones (the story so far….)
by disarmingman on 01/12/2010
Although Wikileaks has only released a small amount of US diplomatic cables so far – the full release is expected later this week – there has already been some significant information about the use of armed drones. [Also see list of cables released so far on Guardian website)

US drone strikes in Pakistan
Despite repeatedly denying that it allows the US to carry out drone strikes on its territory many believe that, in private, the Pakistani government and military do in fact allow the attacks. These suspicions appear confirmed by a cable reporting Pakistani PM as saying “I don’t care if they do it as long as they get the right people. We’ll protest in the National Assembly and then ignore it.”

Another cable reveals that Pakistan has allowed US special forces to be embedded into the Pakistan military to help direct the CIA’s drone strikes. This will be extremely controversial within Pakistan. While some US forces have been undertaking training work in Pakistan since 2008, this revelation will be extremely embarrassing for the Pakistani military and, as the Guardian reports “permission for the active combat deployment almost certainly came with the personal consent of the army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani.”

A third cable quotes a local FATA official as supporting the drones strikes “as they were surgical and clearly hitting high value targets…” and “ “everyone knew that they only hit the house or location of very bad people.” However a recent poll suggests that three-quarters of FATA residents oppose the US drone strikes.

Yemen
A leaked cable has confirmed that it was a US drone strike in south Yemen in December 2009 that killed 41 local residents. Yemen had claimed it was their forces who undertook the attack but as the New York Times reported:

“We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Mr. Saleh said, according to the cable sent by the American ambassador, prompting Yemen’s deputy prime minister to “joke that he had just ‘lied’ by telling Parliament” that Yemen had carried out the strikes.

In a press release Amnesty International has called on the US government to:

Investigate the serious allegations of the use of drones by US forces for targeted killings of individuals in Yemen and clarify the chain of command and rules governing the use of such drones. Ensure that all US military and security support given to Yemen, and all US military and security operations carried out in Yemen, are designed and implemented so as to adhere fully with relevant international human rights law and standards, and that such human rights standards are made fully operational in training programmes and systems of monitoring and accountability.

Drones: Toys for the boys
As Danger Room puts it, armed drones are on every military’s Christmas list at the moment.

Several cables report the growing desire for Predator and Reaper drones. For example Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces, after reporting that he was worried about the growing strength of Iran reportedly said “That’s why we need it first…. give me Predator B.”

Turkey too wants the Predator drone with the Chief of the Turkish General Staff, General Ilker Basbug, saying it was urgent that they received the drone to make up for the decreasing US presence in Iraq.

With much less than 1% of the cables so far being releases, we are sure there will be plenty more information about the use of armed drones coming from Wikileaklsover the next few weeks.

The story cites two leaked cables (links are broken):

2007/01/07ABUDHABI145
2009/10/09ANKARA1472

You catch that? The loser at a free weblog now has spin control on those cables, just like everyone else. This isn't like reading the Pravda in Soviet Russia or the New York Times today and having to cut through the editorial codes and perspectives. This is like having the exact same evidence all to your lonesome self. This is the difference between "Brave Arab Leadership Believes UAV Campaign Key in War on Terror" and "Rich Elitist Assholes To Use Robots To Kill Poor Afghani Farm Kids", based on exactly the same amount of information that the same assholes at the Post and Times and der Spiegel have access to.