Update: I thought back to the climate-gate e-mails, which, I’d momentarily forgotten, were uploaded to wikileaks. If wikileaks were a Soros-funded disinformation operation, I wonder if it would be uploading emails that damage the AGW theory. That tends to make me wonder about the reason the left-liberals might not like wikileaks.

Update III: Here’s Justin Raimondo on the subject. Raimondo thinks the only people who criticize wikileaks are limousine liberals and tin-foil hat conspiracists…for now, I’ll let him have the last word:

“A child could understand this, but it’s way beyond the executive director of the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, and also far beyond the comprehension of the “liberal” Mother Jones magazine, which ought to change its name to Encounter. Kushner “reports” this nonsense uncritically, and even cites the loony John Young, of Cryptome.org, who rants:

“’WikiLeaks is a fraud,’ [Young] wrote to Assange’s list, hinting that the new site was a CIA data mining operation. ‘Fuck your cute hustle and disinformation campaign against legitimate dissent. Same old shit, working for the enemy.’”

Kushner has all bases covered: the white-wine-and-brie liberals who would rather look the other way while their hero Obama slaughters children on the streets of Baghdad, and the tinfoil hat crowd who can be convinced Wikileaks is a “false flag” operation.”

Update II: I should reiterate, I don’t endorse the WM piece. I merely present it…

Update I: I should also add that it doesn’t mean the documents they unearth might not be very important or useful. That’s not what I think this report is suggesting. A front always has a legitimate purpose, which gives it its credibility. How to differentiate disinformation from honest error? Well, evidence of someone/some outfit being funded by intelligence or government agencies; obvious lies or distortions repeated even when evidence contradicts the distortion; giving credence to very few sources or setting up some voices as totally credible and not listening to the range of voices; character assassination rather than rational debate, stigmatization; lack of self-criticism; unwillingness to rethink ideas when faced with new facts.

From The Wayne Madson Report via Alex Constantine:

“In January 2007, John Young, who runs cryptome.org, a site that publishes a wealth of sensitive and classified information, left Wikileaks, claiming the operation was a CIA front. Young also published some 150 email messages sent by Wikileaks activists on cryptome. They include a disparaging comment about this editor [Alex Constantine] by Wikileaks co-founder Dr. Julian Assange of Australia. Assange lists as one of his professions “hacker.” His German co-founder of Wikileaks uses a pseudonym, “Daniel Schmitt.”

Wikileaks claims it is “a multi-jurisdictional organization to protect internal dissidents, whistleblowers, journalists and bloggers who face legal or other threats related to publishing” [whose] primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we are of assistance to people of all nations who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations. We aim for maximum political impact. We have received over 1.2 million documents so far from dissident communities and anonymous sources.”

In China, Wikileaks is suspected of having Mossad connections. It is pointed out that its first “leak” was from an Al Shabbab “insider” in Somalia. Al Shabbab is the Muslim insurgent group that the neocons have linked to “Al Qaeda.”

Asian intelligence sources also point out that Assange’s “PhD” is from Moffett University, an on-line diploma mill and that while he is said to hail from Nairobi, Kenya, he actually is from Australia where his exploits have included computer hacking and software piracy.

WMR has confirmed Young’s contention that Wikileaks is a CIA front operation. Wikileaks is intimately involved in a $20 million CIA operation that U.S.-based Chinese dissidents that hack into computers in China. Some of the Chinese hackers route special hacking program through Chinese computers that then target U.S. government and military computer systems. After this hacking is accomplished, the U.S. government announces through friendly media outlets that U.S. computers have been subjected to a Chinese cyber-attack. The “threat” increases an already-bloated cyber-defense and offense budget and plays into the fears of the American public and businesses that heavily rely on information technology.”

My Comment:

Julian Assange was always sending me emails and requests to join wikileaks a couple of years ago. I thought the outfit was interesting, but I don’t really deal in “secret” documents or cloak-and-dagger stuff, because something founded on distrust is bound to founder on distrust.

Even media activism has the same result. You start wondering if everything you’re reading is disinformation. At a certain point, you have to ask, so what if it is? Can’t I still arrive at the right conclusions by operating from strict rules of reason and ethics?

It seems to me that you can figure out what is going on without going under cover or hacking or stealing classified information because propaganda has a very distinctive flavor you get to recognize after some time.  I’ll leave the exciting spy v spy stuff to more adventurous sorts.  I can’t confirm anything in this piece, but since it’s something I’ve wondered about myself and since it looks like there’s at least one other person (besides Alex Constantine) who’s wondering as well, Assange’s co-worker, it becomes blog-worthy.  I remain agnostic.-to-mildly skeptic about wikileaks….