Update 3: The site which hosts Wikileaks, PeRiQuito (PRQ), is a Swedish internet service provider, reportedly famous both for the notoriety of some of its clients ( it houses pedophilia advocates NAMBLA, as well as Chechen rebels and an anti-copyright group, PiracyBay.org) and for its fierce protectiveness toward them.

Update 2: Assange not only gave the Afghan scoop to three pillars of the mainstream media, he actually endorsed them, an odd gesture for someone who’s publicly disdained the media,

Update:

I found some intriguing material by Assange cited by a Daily Bell commenter, Adam, and I add one quote below, as insight into Assange’s undoubtedly colorful personality:

“The decision as to what should be enforced and what may be ignored is political. This does not mean that rights are unimportant, but rather, that politics (the societal control of freedom) is so important as to subsume rights.”

One shouldn’t perhaps read too much into such statements, but someone could see this as the rationale for Assange’s seeming disregard for privacy rights in his recent incarnation as the Galileo (! – his own language) of cyberspace.

ORIGINAL POST:

From the Wall Street Journal (July 27, 2010):

“In a rare show of bipartisan co-operation the liberal Democrat Kucinich together with the libertarian oriented Ron Paul (R) forced a rare debate on the Afghan war and presence of U.S. military advisors and special forces in Pakistan.”

And this “rare show” occurs soon after the recent disclosure by former hacker Julian Assange’s whistle-blower site Wikileaks of raw intelligence files from the Afghan war? Furthermore, the Wikileaks data dump itself followed hard on the heels of a detailed Washington Post report on the cancerous burgeoning of intelligence agencies in the US government.

If one needed any more evidence that Wikileaks is government-connected, it seems to be here in this media “event”: The media moving seamlessly to reinforce a message, while both ends of the antiwar spectrum act in concert.

However, while the US and UK media seem to have taken Wikileaks at face value, European commentary has been more subdued and even skeptical:

The center-left Berliner Zeitung, in an editorial titled “Disclosure 75,000 Times,” believes the leaks are part of a conspiracy concocted by the U.S. government itself. The newspaper writes: “One can draw two conclusions from the publication of the war logs: A) We need time, more time than has so far been stated publicly, to get to a handle on Afghanistan. So we will need to stay there longer, with even more troops. B) We have not succeeded so far. So we will not succeed in the years to come. So we should leave as soon as possible. … It might be that the reports have found their way into the public arena at this point in time in order to promote the first conclusion. Maybe the source feeding Wikileaks is not as far removed from the American government as we assume. Maybe Wikileaks is being used to create a climate in which the anticipated withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan can be reversed.”

To me, as well, the whole business seems orchestrated….so far as I’ve studied it

(Caveat: I’ve read through only a small portion of the data so far).

Is the data dump a “good guy” outing from the intel agencies themselves. …liberals and libertarians joining force on behalf of reigning in a war gone awry? Or, is it a step in the opposite direction, making the Af-Pak action more doable, which is what this Obama pronouncement seems to suggest?

As I  commented recently at The Daily Bell, where the hard-working editors were at first inclined to take a “wait and see” approach, Wikileaks has always seemed a bit odd to me. As well as to many others, such as, John Young, the founder of the original document disclosure site, Cryptome,.

Assange’s trashing of 9-11 research as conspiracy, the theatrics, the fuzzy background of the founder, the nature of Wikileaks’ global interests (China, the Middle East, the Sudan, the Horn of Africa), and its M.O., all seem suspicious.

Some things reported on the web on his background are also pretty colorful, although I don’t know if they’re true or not:

“Apparently that [Lila: Assange’s] father was a member of a terrifying cult run by a psychotic nurse named Anne-Hamilton Byrne who ran a child-kidnapping cult on the outskirts of Melbourne wherein Ms. Byrne dyed the stolen children’s hair blonde and fed them LSD.)  ( see story here )”

(Of course, even if the story were true, it’s not evidence in itself that there’s anything wrong with Assange’s father, let alone Assange).

More pertinently, there’s the resemblance of Wikileaks’ mandate to that of its name-sake, ex-Chicago commodity trader and porn merchant Jimmy Wales’ intel-addled Wikipedia. All this has raised suspicions from scores of veteran media-watchers, from Alex Constantine to Rush Limbaugh (probably the only time the two have coincided on anything).

This latest disclosure has done nothing to assuage suspicions about the outfit.

More and more, I’m inclined to believe that no politician or major media outlet is to be trusted. None. Period.

However honest they are personally, they end up being used by the dishonest forces around them.

Perhaps we have to admit that politics and the media are not the way things will ultimately change. Perhaps the machinations are too extensive and too sophisticated. This country is, after all, the home of Madison Avenue, and has had a hundred years since Bernays to develop every permutation of meme and sideshow in the game of propaganda.

That goes against the beliefs both of those who see the Internet as the ultimate liberating force (among whom I counted myself until very recently) and those who see it as a sinister force created to lure the population into government data bases.

The Internet has affected…and will continue to vitally affect… the outcome – for short bursts. But every step of the way will be dogged by rear-guard disinformation from the powers-that-be. Over the longer haul, expect these powers to rewrite history, erase evidence, muddy the issues, and subvert truth even as it emerges, bloodied from the welter of events.

The outcome is not as foregone as either Net optimists or Net cynics believe it to be.