Wikileaks has been under attack by US inelligence at least since 2008 as the summary of classified report shows- during the Bush administration they began setting the stage for designating Wikileaks not just a nuisance but as an enemy of the state and knowingly or unknowingly this effort to destroy Wikileaks and other Whistleblower organizations has continued during the presidency of Barack Obama while the Mainstream Media being defenders of US military, CIA, Special Forces, Homeland Security etc. are doing little to raise doubts about this policy.
(U) Executive Summary
(S//NF) Wikileaks.org, a publicly accessible Internet Web site, represents a potential force protection, counterintelligence, operational security (OPSEC), and information security (INFOSEC) threat to the US Army.
The intentional or unintentional leaking and posting of US Army sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.org could result in increased threats to DoD personnel, equipment, facilities, or installations.
The leakage of sensitive and classified DoD information also calls attention to the insider threat, when a person or persons motivated by a particular cause or issue wittingly provides information to domestic or foreign personnel or organizations to be published by the news media or on the Internet.
Such information could be of value to foreign intelligence and security services (FISS), foreign military forces, foreign insurgents, and foreign terrorist groups for collecting information or for planning attacks against US force, both within the United States and abroad.
From classified official document from The US Intelligence Service(U) Wikileaks.org—An Online Reference to Foreign
Intelligence Services, Insurgents, or Terrorist Groups?
Anyway what a shocker Bush and Cheney knew that Gitmo prisoners were innocent .
Once again this news should be enough this time to start an investigation of the Bush administration to see how many more laws have they broken. Such An investigation to have any meaning must be followed by trials with the possibility of stiff jail sentences public shame & ridicule or at least that those in the Bush administration or in other government departments found guilty on various charges whether for taking part in illegal policies such as torture or having used their position to take part in War Profiteering if not incarcerated should lose their gov't pensions etc. Burt this is highly unlikely since as in former time it is thought quite rude and brutish for a member of the royalty to go after their equals. Obama as the new Ceasar is quite unwilling as it were to go after the former Ceasar George W. Bush and his courtly entourage including the Court Jester Karl Rove.
Ex-Bush Official Willing to Testify Bush, Cheney Knew Gitmo Prisoners Innocent,09 April 2010 by: Jason Leopold, t r u t h o u t
Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once declared that individuals captured by the US military in the aftermath of 9/11 and shipped off to the Guantanamo Bay prison facility represented the "worst of the worst."
During a radio interview in June 2005, Rumsfeld said the detainees at Guantanamo, "all of whom were captured on a battlefield," are "terrorists, trainers, bomb makers, recruiters, financiers, [Osama Bin Laden's] body guards, would-be suicide bombers, probably the 20th hijacker, 9/11 hijacker."
"We're learning a great deal of information about how al-Qaida operates, and able to stop other terrorist attacks," he added.
But Rumsfeld knowingly lied, according to a former top Bush administration official.
And so did then Vice President Dick Cheney when he said, also in 2002 and in dozens of public statements thereafter, that Guantanamo prisoners "are the worst of a very bad lot" and "dangerous" and "devoted to killing millions of Americans, innocent Americans, if they can, and they are perfectly prepared to die in the effort."
Now, in a sworn declaration obtained exclusively by Truthout, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell during George W. Bush's first term in office, said he would be willing to state, under penalty of perjury, what top Bush officials knew and when they knew it.
He claims that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others knew the "vast majority" of prisoners captured in the so-called War on Terror were innocent and the administration refused to set them free once those facts were established because of the political repercussions that would have ensued.
"By late August 2002, I found that of the initial 742 detainees that had arrived at Guantánamo, the majority of them had never seen a US soldier in the process of their initial detention and their captivity had not been subjected to any meaningful review," Wilkerson's declaration says. "Secretary Powell was also trying to bring pressure to bear regarding a number of specific detentions because children as young as 12 and 13 and elderly as old as 92 or 93 had been shipped to Guantánamo. By that time, I also understood that the deliberate choice to send detainees to Guantánamo was an attempt to place them outside the jurisdiction of the US legal system."
He added that it became "more and more clear many of the men were innocent, or at a minimum their guilt was impossible to determine let alone prove in any court of law, civilian or military."
That brings me to another point about the Baghdad Video of a number of unarmed Iraqis being mowed down by a helicopter Gunship happened during President Bush's time in office and so is another possible crime to add to the indictments against Bush and Cheney is this not enough ?
This week Wikileaks made public a video of A US helicopter gunship crew murdering unarmed civilians in Baghdad in 2007 . This should have raised a lot of questions in newspaper editorials and on TV then maybe Americans might question - since when did this become acceptable even to any reasonable citizen .
The media sees any questioning of the military as being an attack on America . To the Bush minions at Fox News and CNN realize that since this atrocity and others were committed by troops during Bush's reign that this might besmirch Bush's administration and its conduct during War Time.
And Wikileaks is promising another video which involves the US soldiers killing of 95 unarmed civilians. But given the lack of news coverage and the dismissive attitude towards the Baghdad Massacre video they need not worry . The Media are just not interested or think their audience is indifferent or it would upset them and a happy consumer is a good consumer as they say.
So the public release of the Baghdad Massacre Video & the implications of the cover up of this atrocity committed by US military personnel should have been the big news; the front page news as it were of the past week and beyond. The story of a mass killing of unarmed civilians by US Helicopter Gunship should have created a furor . The point is that with this piece of video evidence maybe more Americans will realize this is important .
For instance how far up does this coverup go up the chain of command. Were President Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld part of this or any other coverup. Or is the truth worse that orders to kill large numbers of unarmed citizens was an official policy from the top or that there was a breakdown in communication was it ignorance and dereliction of duty or criminal negligence have military units going rogue or trying to compete with Blackwater/XEServices .
Is Obama going to refuse to take more action against these criminals as more is revealed in these testimonies. Or does he still think Bush or Cheney or Karl Rove would be gracious enough to back off -instead they are nightly news trashing their president when a few years ago Americans were told that criticizing the war was a traitor . Obama should realize these are not nice guys they have shown their utter contempt for President Obama.
Instead the focus is on questioning the veracity, motives of the personnel at Wikileaks who if American could be tried for treason or in the event have some of them secretly put into indefinite detention after being black bagged and renditioned to a super secret US prison where they can be interrogated using torture or simply have them disappeared or killed as enemies of the state. Even now under Obama any of these things are possible and they have laid the groundwork so they could call such action legal.
Wikileaks has managed to get hold of Secret documents pertaining to undermining and by one means or another censoring Wikileaks. So this isn't just paranoia on the part of personnel at Wikileaks but is a concerted effort to destroy Wikileaks through survelliance , intimidation . So freedom of speech does not include the leaking of classified material which may reflect badly on the US military or other institutions.
PDF File available at Wikileaks
US Intelligence & Wikileaks
"U.S. Intelligence planned to destroy WikiLeaks" WikiLeaks release: March 15, 2010
keywords: WikiLeaks, U.S. intelligence, U.S. Army, National Ground Intelligence Center, NGIC, classified, SECRET,
NOFORN
restraint: Classified SECRET/NOFORN (US)
title: Wikileaks.org - An Online Reference to Foreign Intelligence Services, Insurgents, Or Terrorist Groups? date: March 18, 2008
group: United States Army Counterintelligence Center, Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch; Department of Defence Intelligence Analysis Program author: Michael D. Horvath
link: http://wikileaks.org/file/us-intel-wikileaks.pdf
pages: 32
Description
By Julian Assange (julian@wikileaks.org)
This document is a classifed (SECRET/NOFORN) 32 page U.S. counterintelligence investigation into WikiLeaks.
“The possibility that current employees or moles within DoD or elsewhere in the U.S. government are providing sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.org cannot be ruled out”. It concocts a plan to fatally marginalize
the organization. Since WikiLeaks uses “trust as a center of gravity by protecting the anonymity and identity of the insiders, leakers or whisteblowers”, the report recommends “The identification, exposure, termination of employment,criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistlblowers could potentially damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the Wikileaks.org Web site”.
[As two years have passed since the date of the report, with no WikiLeaks’ source exposed, it appears that this plan was ineffective]. As an odd justification for the plan, the report claims that “Several foreign countries including China, Israel, North Kora, Russia, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe have denounced or blocked access to the Wikileaks.org website”.
The report provides further justification by enumerating embarrassing stories broken by WikiLeaks—U.S. equipment expenditure in Iraq, probable U.S. violations of the Cemical Warfare Convention Treaty in Iraq, the battle over the Iraqi town of Fallujah and human rights violations at Guantanmo Bay. Note that the report contains a number of inaccurances, for instance, the claim that WikiLeaks has no editorial control. The report concludes with 13 items of intelligence to be answered about WikiLeaks.
Wikileaks: Inside the Group That Has Exposed the Secrets of Sarah Palin, Scientology and the PentagonApril 8, 2010 Mother Jones via Alternet.org
Since 2006,Wikileaks has posted more than 1.2 million documents. Governments and corporations have tried to shut them down. They've failed.
The clock struck 3 a.m. Julian Assange slept soundly inside a guarded private compound in Nairobi, Kenya. Suddenly, six men with guns emerged from the darkness.
A day earlier, they had disabled the alarm system on the electric fence and buried weapons by the pool. Catching a guard by surprise, they commanded him to hit the ground. He obliged, momentarily, then jumped up and began shouting. As the rest of the compound's security team rushed outside, the intruders fled into the night.
Since its launch in December, 2006, WikiLeaks has posted more than 1.2 million documents totaling more than 10 million pages. It has published the operating manuals from the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, NATO's secret plan for the Afghan war, and inventories of US military materiel in Iraq and Afghanistan. In September 2007, a few weeks before Assange's alleged close call in Nairobi, it posted a document exposing corruption in the highest levels of the Kenyan government. Assange claims that the site receives as many as 10,000 new documents daily.
WikiLeaks' commitment to what might be called extreme transparency also means that it won't turn away documents that have questionable news value or are just plain dishy. It's posted Sarah Palin's hacked emails and Wesley Snipes' tax returns, as well as fraternity initiation manuals and a trove of secret Scientology manuals. According to WikiLeaks' credo, to refuse a leak is tantamount to helping the bad guys. "We never censor," Assange declares
...Though the site appears secure for now, its foes have not given up on finding its weaknesses. In March, WikiLeaks published an internal report (PDF) written by an analyst at the Army Counterintelligence Center titled "WikiLeaks.org—An Online Reference to Foreign Intelligence Services, Insurgents, or Terrorist Groups?" The analyst stated that sensitive information posted by WikiLeaks could endanger American soldiers and that the site could be used "to post fabricated information; to post misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda." He concluded that identifying and prosecuting the insiders who pass information on to WikiLeaks "would damage and potentially destroy this center of gravity and deter others from taking similar actions."
WikiLeaks said the report was proof that "U.S. Intelligence planned to destroy" the site. Soon afterwards, Assange asserted that he'd been tailed by two State Department employees on a flight out of Iceland, where he had been lobbying for a new press freedom law. He tweeted that "WikiLeaks is currently under an aggressive US and Icelandic surveillance operation."
Amid this swirl of wanted and unwanted attention, Assange (pronounced A-sanj) lives like a man on the lam. He won't reveal his age—"Why make it easy for the bastards?" He prefers talking on the phone instead of meeting in person, and seems to never use the same number twice. His voice is often hushed, and gaps fill the conversation, as if he's constantly checking over his shoulder. Like him, the organization behind his next-generation whistleblowing machine can also be maddeningly opaque. It's been accused of being conspiratorial, reckless, and even duplicitous in its pursuit of exposing the powerful. "It's a good thing that there's a channel for getting information out that's reliable and can't be compromised," says Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig. But, he adds, "There's a difference between what you can legally do, what you can technically do, and what you ought to do."
Inquiry Puts Spotlight on US Special Forces in Afghanistanby Laura King at The Chicago Tribune Via CommonDreams.org, April 9, 2010
A joint U.S.-Afghan investigation into a raid in February may shed light on the secretive role of Special Forces, who are said to account for a disproportionate number of civilian deaths.
KABUL, Afghanistan - In nearly nine years of warfare in Afghanistan, U.S. Special Forces have done their fighting in the shadows, governed by rules largely of their own making. Now, these elite and secretive troops, their actions long shielded from public scrutiny, are the focus of a high-profile investigation that could shed unprecedented light on their methods and tactics.
A new investigation has been opened, military officials in Afghanistan said Thursday, to further look into the differences between findings by Afghanistan's Interior Ministry and an initial American inquiry, which remains classified.
Special Forces are inextricably linked to one of the most contentious issues between the Afghan government and Western forces: civilian deaths and injuries. Special Forces account for a disproportionate share of civilian casualties caused by Western troops, military officials and human rights groups say, though there are no precise figures because so many of their missions are deemed secret.
U.S. Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who took command of Western forces in Afghanistan last summer, has said such casualties are highly damaging to the Western effort, because they galvanize opposition to the foreign troop presence and fuel support for the insurgency.
McChrystal last year instituted strict new rules of engagement meant to limit civilian casualties. But even under the new rules, Special Forces members, who have the task of hunting down key Taliban figures, continue to have more operational leeway than other troops.
In mountain villages and desert hamlets, the Special Forces inspire dread among Afghans, who tend to speak of them in whispers. Their strikes are usually swift and violent, most often taking place in the dead of night.
At Western military bases, Special Forces troops are readily identifiable by shaggy beards, vaguely Afghan-looking dress, preternaturally fit physiques and a forbidding manner. Usually housed in separate compounds, they rarely mix with other troops and tend to react explosively if anyone snaps a photo that might show their faces.
and so it goes,
GORD.
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