Tag Archives: wikileaks

Which “Bastards”? More Discrepancies In Wikileaks “Revelations”

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Maximilien Forte at Zero Anthropology:

“Which Bastards?

When asked by Larry King on Monday, 26 July, who he meant to call “bastards” when he told Der Spiegel “I enjoy crushing bastards,” Assange specified he meant U.S. forces. Assange must also believe that those studying these documents will not focus as much on the atrocities committed by the Taleban, such as the devastating carnage caused by their IEDs and suicide bombers, and their apparent disregard for the scores of civilians that are killed as a result of going after one target with a massive bomb–The Guardian, with what is arguably the best coverage of the three newspapers to have obtained the documents a month in advance of their public release, has already covered this aspect quite quickly. In these same reports, the Taleban appear to be using hammers to kill mosquitoes. Left at that level of discussion, we have data, but not much understanding–for example, of why the Taleban have nonetheless gained strength and support, or why we may view their deadly attacks as something for which the U.S. and NATO share partial responsibility, for having overthrown and persecuted the Taleban after invading and occupying their country, thereby provoking a hostile and asymmetric reaction. It would be a silly or wicked person who would argue that Afghans have no right to fight back.

While I generally agree with Assange’s sentiments, to the extent that they are knowable, I do not share his optimism about the impact of these documents. Information is not power, and it is not meaning. To make sense of these documents requires interpretation and argumentation that goes beyond and outside the limits of what are, after all, reports reflective of an American optic, produced by combatants. Source criticism and cross checking will be paramount, and to the extent that is not done, Wikileaks may witness members of the public using the same documents to not only bolster the arguments to support continuation of this war, but even an escalation to direct hostilities with Iran (see The Guardian, and see the justified alarm expressed by Marc Lynch at Foreign Policy). There is also debate between The Guardian and The New York Times over the extent to which the reports can be trusted when it comes to Pakistan’s supposed role in aiding the Taleban and conducting covert operations against the government of Afghanistan and western forces–that dispute happened within the first day of reporting on the documents, and disagreement over their credibility did not stop the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan from verbally thrashing each other in public, again within 24 hours of the documents’ release. These reports overall contain enough to hurt those who are critics of U.S. foreign policy, as much as they will hurt those who support it. They contain as much potential for escalating and expanding conflict, as they contain for mobilizing popular support to stop it. I also understand that my commentary here may well be premature, but then so are all the current commentaries.
What Should Matter to Social Scientists?

To bring this discussion closer to the concerns of anthropologists and social scientists generally, there are a few points that I feel need to be made. One concerns the extent to which these records are only a partial selection of all records produced by the U.S. military. That is a significant problem, because we cannot know if the items excluded would in some way modify any conclusions we reach about the records we have. Wikileaks received a total of about 110,000 records, and released about 92,000. It is hard to believe that a period covering six years of war could have produced only this amount. To my knowledge, Julian Assange has not been asked any questions about this issue. We therefore also do not know why these records were included and others excluded. This issue will come up again when I speak about what the records reveal about the workings of the Human Terrain System.

A second problem, and it is a major one, concerns Assange’s assertions that the items were redacted to minimize the risk of harm to the sources indicated in the records. From what we have seen already, just with reference to Human Terrain Teams alone and their sources, that is completely untrue. There is no evidence whatsoever of any kind of redaction. Moreover, when one deletes information for a record, one is supposed to mark the text in some way to say either “name deleted” or “sentence deleted,” etc., and I see no evidence of that. In addition, who comprises Wikileaks’ team of redactors, and on the basis of what knowledge and expertise, as either war fighters, or people with experience and knowledge of Afghanistan, could they make calls about what was “harmless” versus “harmful” information? Which specialists did they consult, and for how long did they have the records to study? Not a word about this, merely bland and general assurances.

Indeed, Assange’s statements about Wikileaks’ “harm minimization process” seem to only focus on the safety of his “bastards,” noting that the documents “do not generally cover top-secret operations” and that they “delayed the release of some 15,000 reports” as “demanded by our source” (source). This is an exchange Assange had with Der Spiegel on this issue:

SPIEGEL: The material contains military secrets and names of sources. By publishing it, aren’t you endangering the lives of international troops and their informants in Afghanistan?

Assange: The Kabul files contain no information related to current troop movements. The source went through their own harm-minimization process and instructed us to conduct our usual review to make sure there was not a significant chance of innocents being negatively affected. We understand the importance of protecting confidential sources, and we understand why it is important to protect certain US and ISAF sources [emphasis added].

SPIEGEL: So what, specifically, did you do to minimize any possible harm?

Assange: We identified cases where there may be a reasonable chance of harm occurring to the innocent. Those records were identified and edited accordingly.

A third problem has to do with source criticism, source confirmation, and Assange’s call for crowdsourcing. Anthropologists should relate to this issue personally. Imagine that someone gets hold of your fieldnotes, and releases a part of them. No analysis, no contextualization, no doubts about the veracity of what an informant told you is in those notes. They are released, and then members of a broad public take hold of their interpretation, and take what is reported as the truth of a situation. Wouldn’t this make you freak out? Are any of our books and journal articles a mere transcription of our fieldnotes? So who is this “crowd” that will make solid arguments from these notes? How will they check their veracity? Do they know who wrote these reports, under what conditions, under what limitations, and with what motivations? Will they travel to Afghanistan and cover the ground covered by these military units? What other documents will they use to confirm these reports, or will they trust them blindly? These are already some of the issues being raised about the alleged Iran-Al Qaeda connection, and Pakistan’s role in supporting the Taleban.”

Wikileaks’ Julian Assange “In Danger” From Pentagon?

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More on the ubiquitous founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange. I maintain a neutral to positive rating on Assange, despite criticism of him. The whistleblower emails on anthropogenic global warming that were published on Wikileaks (climategate) hugely damaged the climate cabal, but there are some credible writers who maintain that he’s passing off disinfo as well. I honestly can’t tell one way or other. Lately it’s occurred to me that that the controversy might relate to infighting between factions of the intelligence community, but how is the question. Anyway, that’s pure speculation on my part. Continue reading →

Wikileaks’ Role In Julius Baer Case Linked to Soros, Sachs, & Spooks?

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From The Wayne Madsen Report (a subscription-based service) comes this analysis (April, 2010) of the attack on the financial privacy of Swiss money manager, Julius Baer Group, exposed by whistle-blower Rudolf Elmer:

“WMR’s financial intelligence sources report that the unauthorized disclosure of a compact disk to Wikileaks that contained financial details of the clients of the secretive and usually highly-secure Zurich-based independent money management Julius Baer Group was designed to destroy the firm’s standing with its customers and make it ripe for a hostile takeover by interests associated with multi-billionaire vulture capitalist George Soros, including Goldman Sachs. Julius Baer was founded in the 19th century. Continue reading →

Army Intelligence Analyst Arrested in Wikileaks “Helicopter Attack” Video Probe

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From Wired.com:

“Federal officials have arrested an Army intelligence analyst who boasted of giving classified U.S. combat video and hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records to whistleblower site Wikileaks, Wired.com has learned.

SPC Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland, was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad, where he was arrested nearly two weeks ago by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. A family member says he’s being held in custody in Kuwait, and has not been formally charged. Continue reading →

Reports Suggest Wikileaks May Be Front – Updated

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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….