Re: The how and why of whistleblower smears
Posted: Mon Mar 28, 2016 4:17 am
WikiLeaks Preparing to Release More Afghan Documents
by Associated Press
August 12, 2010
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
July 27: Founder and editor of the WikiLeaks website, Julian Assange, faces the media during a debate event, held in London. (AP)
LONDON -- WikiLeaks spokesman Julian Assange said Thursday his organization is preparing to release the rest of the secret Afghan war documents it has on file. The Pentagon warned that would be more damaging to security and risk more lives than the organization's initial release of some 76,000 war documents.
That extraordinary disclosure, which laid bare classified military documents covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010, has angered U.S. officials, energized critics of the NATO-led campaign, and drawn the attention of the Taliban, which has promised to use the material to track down people it considers traitors.
The Pentagon says it believes it has identified the additional 15,000 classified documents, and said Thursday that their exposure would be even more damaging to the military than what has already been published.
Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell described the prospective publication as the "height of irresponsibility."
"It would compound a mistake that has already put far too many lives at risk," he said.
Speaking via videolink to London's Frontline Club, Assange brushed aside the Pentagon's demands that he stop publishing their intelligence. He gave no specific timeframe for the release of the 15,000 remaining files, but said his organization had gone through about half of them.
"We're about 7,000 reports in," he said, describing the process of combing through the files to ensure that no Afghans would be hurt by their disclosure as "very expensive and very painstaking."
Still, he told the audience that he would "absolutely" publish them. He gave no indication whether he would give the documents to media outlets The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel -- as he has before -- or simply dump them on the WikiLeaks website.
The leaks exposed unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings by NATO forces and covert operations against Taliban figures. Assange has said that hundreds of those reports should be investigated by the media for evidence of war crimes.
WikiLeaks' supporters say the blow-by-blow account of the conflict reveal the horror of the campaign's daily grind. Detractors say the site has recklessly endangered the war effort and Afghan informants working to stop the Taliban.
The Pentagon has a task force of about 100 people reading the leaked documents to assess the damage done and working, for instance, to alert Afghans who might be identified by name and now could be in danger.
Taliban spokesmen have said they would use the material to try to hunt down people who've been cooperating with what the Taliban considers a foreign invader. That has aroused the concern of several human rights group operating in Afghanistan -- as well as Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, which on Thursday accused WikiLeaks of recklessness.
Jean-Francois Julliard, the group's secretary-general, said that WikiLeaks showed "incredible irresponsibility" when posting the documents online.
"WikiLeaks has in the past played a useful role by making information available ... that exposed serious violations of human rights and civil liberties which the Bush administration committed in the name of its war against terror," Julliard said in an open letter to Assange posted to his group's website.
"But revealing the identity of hundreds of people who collaborated with the coalition in Afghanistan is highly dangerous."
WikiLeaks, through its account on micro-blogging website Twitter, dismissed the letter as "some idiot statement, based on a bunch of quotes we never made."
While he acknowledged that some of the critiques leveled at his group were legitimate, he said the Pentagon -- as well as human rights groups -- had so far refused to help WikiLeaks purge the name of Afghan informants from the files.
At the State Department, spokesman Mark Toner said he was not aware of any effort by department officials to contact WikiLeaks.
Defense Department spokesman Col. David Lapan dismissed WikiLeaks' claims that they were reviewing the documents and removing information that could harm civilians.
"They don't have the expertise to determine what might be too sensitive to publish," he said. As for when the Pentagon expected WikiLeaks to release the documents, Lapan said:"WikiLeaks is about as predictable as North Korea."
A team of more than a hundred analysts from across the U.S. military, lead by the Defense Intelligence Agency, is poring over the WikiLeaks documents, according to defense officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss matters of intelligence. Called the Information Review Task Force, the team is working out of the Crystal-City, Virginia-based Counterintelligence Collaboration Center.
The analysts are combing the documents, trying to determine the implications of the WikiLeaks release -- everything from whether military or intelligence-gathering tactics and procedures have been revealed and compromised, to whether specific intelligence sources have been endangered. They're also looking for incidents of civilian casualties that might not have previously been reported, anything concerning allies or coalition partners, and even "derogatory comments regarding Afghan culture or Islam."
The officials said the ultimate goal is to ensure the safety of U.S. and coalition members. The team is operating independently of an ongoing Army criminal investigation, and that of other law enforcement agencies, the officials said.
In the meanwhile, the U.S. has also reportedly urged its allies to look into Assange and his international network of activists, although it's not clear how aggressive Washington has been in prodding its foreign friends.
Earlier Thursday the Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith told The Associated Press that Washington had not approached the his government about pursuing possible criminal charges against Assange, an Australian citizen, or about putting restrictions on his travel.
"Quite clearly we're working closely with the United States on these matters," Smith said, citing Australia's Defense Department and the Pentagon as the agencies working together. "These are very serious matters for concern."
Australia, which has some 1,550 troops in Afghanistan, has already launched its own investigation into whether posting classified military documents had compromised the national interest or endangered soldiers.
by Associated Press
August 12, 2010
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July 27: Founder and editor of the WikiLeaks website, Julian Assange, faces the media during a debate event, held in London. (AP)
LONDON -- WikiLeaks spokesman Julian Assange said Thursday his organization is preparing to release the rest of the secret Afghan war documents it has on file. The Pentagon warned that would be more damaging to security and risk more lives than the organization's initial release of some 76,000 war documents.
That extraordinary disclosure, which laid bare classified military documents covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010, has angered U.S. officials, energized critics of the NATO-led campaign, and drawn the attention of the Taliban, which has promised to use the material to track down people it considers traitors.
Afghanistan -- This country was able to manage some slow modernization during the 1950s under King Mohammed Zahir, who had assumed the throne in 1933. Afghan development has always hinged on a large hydroelectric and water project in the center of the country, which has never been fully carried out. The King was deposed in 1973, and by 1978 there emerged the progressive regime of Noor Mohammed Taraki, a pro- Marxist poet and novelist with very special talents. Taraki legalized trade unions, instituted a minimum wage, and promoted housing, health care, and public sanitation. He favored improvements in the status of women. Taraki tried to eradicate the cultivation of the opium poppy, which had made his country the world's leading producer of heroin. Taraki also cancelled all debts owed by farmers, including tenant farmers, and began a land reform program to break up the holdings of absentee landlords and latifundists. Taraki thus offended the feudal interest, which was strong in the country. Brzezinski regarded Taraki as a Soviet asset, although he was largely indigenous in origin. As Brzezinski later boasted to the Nouvel Ohservateur, US destabilization teams launched a clandestine operation against Taraki in early 1979, prominently playing the Islamic fundamentalist card. In September 1979 there followed a US-backed coup by the CIA asset Hafizulla Amin, who executed Taraki and rolled back his reforms in the name of setting up a fundamentalist Islamic state in the service of the feudal landowners. Amin's reactionary measures resulted in a backlash against him, and he was himself toppled within two months. In the face of renewed assaults by Brzezinski's opium-poppy mujaheddin, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan at Christmas, 1979. During the various phases of the Afghan war that followed, the CIA always supported the most benighted, the most reactionary, the most opium-mongering factions -- especially their favorite, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The CIA was looking for forces of absolute self-isolating negativity, incapable of getting along with Iran or anyone else. In the decade of war that followed (December 1979-February 1989), Afghanistan was economically and demographically destroyed. The second generation of Brzezinski's mujaheddin, the Islamic fundamentalist students or Taliban, assumed power in 1994. Like Pol Pot in Cambodia in the wake of Kissinger's bombing destruction of that country in the 1970s, the Taliban represented an unspeakable retrogression towards barbarity. But, just as Kissinger and G.H.W. Bush had supported Pol Pot, the Bush 41 administration found many ways to support the Taliban, who were viewed as ideal because of their inability to ally with Iran or any of the ex-Soviet central Asian republics. As Michael Parenti has pointed out, the US taxpayers paid the salaries of the entire Taliban government in 1999. (Parenti 65) And under Bush 43, this support became even more explicit, as UNOCAL lobbyists sought a deal with the Taliban to build their oil pipeline to central Asia. During this phase, Kissinger, neocon Zalmay Khalilzad, retired State Department anti-terror official Robert Oakley and Leili Helms (daughter of the former CIA director) were successfully lobbying on behalf of Unocal. The goal was to keep the Taliban regime off the State Department terrorist state list, since listing there would have blocked any pipeline deal. In his first spring in office, Bush offered a large grant to the Taliban. This caused columnist Robert Scheer to comment: "Enslave your girls and women, harbor anti-US terrorists, destroy every vestige of civilization in your homeland, and the Bush administration will embrace you. That's the message sent with the recent gift of $43 million to the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan. The gift ... makes the US the main sponsor of the Taliban." ("Bush's Faustian Deal with the Taliban," Los Angeles Times, May 22, 2001)
-- 9/11 Synthetic Terror Made in USA, by Webster Griffin Tarpley
The Pentagon says it believes it has identified the additional 15,000 classified documents, and said Thursday that their exposure would be even more damaging to the military than what has already been published.
Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell described the prospective publication as the "height of irresponsibility."
"It would compound a mistake that has already put far too many lives at risk," he said.
Speaking via videolink to London's Frontline Club, Assange brushed aside the Pentagon's demands that he stop publishing their intelligence. He gave no specific timeframe for the release of the 15,000 remaining files, but said his organization had gone through about half of them.
"We're about 7,000 reports in," he said, describing the process of combing through the files to ensure that no Afghans would be hurt by their disclosure as "very expensive and very painstaking."
Still, he told the audience that he would "absolutely" publish them. He gave no indication whether he would give the documents to media outlets The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel -- as he has before -- or simply dump them on the WikiLeaks website.
The leaks exposed unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings by NATO forces and covert operations against Taliban figures. Assange has said that hundreds of those reports should be investigated by the media for evidence of war crimes.
WikiLeaks' supporters say the blow-by-blow account of the conflict reveal the horror of the campaign's daily grind. Detractors say the site has recklessly endangered the war effort and Afghan informants working to stop the Taliban.
The Pentagon has a task force of about 100 people reading the leaked documents to assess the damage done and working, for instance, to alert Afghans who might be identified by name and now could be in danger.
Taliban spokesmen have said they would use the material to try to hunt down people who've been cooperating with what the Taliban considers a foreign invader. That has aroused the concern of several human rights group operating in Afghanistan -- as well as Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, which on Thursday accused WikiLeaks of recklessness.
Jean-Francois Julliard, the group's secretary-general, said that WikiLeaks showed "incredible irresponsibility" when posting the documents online.
"WikiLeaks has in the past played a useful role by making information available ... that exposed serious violations of human rights and civil liberties which the Bush administration committed in the name of its war against terror," Julliard said in an open letter to Assange posted to his group's website.
"But revealing the identity of hundreds of people who collaborated with the coalition in Afghanistan is highly dangerous."
Or could US air security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority? The former US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus, has said: “The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defence of incompetence.”
Nor is the US response after 9/11 any better. No serious attempt has ever been made to catch Bin Laden. In late September and early October 2001, leaders of Pakistan's two Islamist parties negotiated Bin Laden's extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for 9/11. However, a US official said, significantly, that “casting our objectives too narrowly” risked “a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance Mr. Bin Laden was captured.” The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, went so far as to say that “the goal has never been to get Bin Laden” (AP, April 5, 2002). The whistleblowing FBI agent Robert Wright told ABC News (December 19, 2002) that FBI headquarters wanted no arrests. And in November 2001 the US airforce complained it had had al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in its sights as many as 10 times over the previous six weeks, but had been unable to attack because they did not receive permission quickly enough (Time Magazine, May 13, 2002). None of this assembled evidence, all of which comes from sources already in the public domain, is compatible with the idea of a real, determined war on terrorism. (Michael Meacher, “This war on terrorism is bogus.” The Guardian, September 6, 2003)
-- This War on Terrorism is Bogus: The 9/11 Attacks Gave the U.S. An Ideal Pretext to Use Force to Secure Its Global Domination, by Michael Meacher
WikiLeaks, through its account on micro-blogging website Twitter, dismissed the letter as "some idiot statement, based on a bunch of quotes we never made."
While he acknowledged that some of the critiques leveled at his group were legitimate, he said the Pentagon -- as well as human rights groups -- had so far refused to help WikiLeaks purge the name of Afghan informants from the files.
At the State Department, spokesman Mark Toner said he was not aware of any effort by department officials to contact WikiLeaks.
Defense Department spokesman Col. David Lapan dismissed WikiLeaks' claims that they were reviewing the documents and removing information that could harm civilians.
"They don't have the expertise to determine what might be too sensitive to publish," he said. As for when the Pentagon expected WikiLeaks to release the documents, Lapan said:"WikiLeaks is about as predictable as North Korea."
A team of more than a hundred analysts from across the U.S. military, lead by the Defense Intelligence Agency, is poring over the WikiLeaks documents, according to defense officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss matters of intelligence. Called the Information Review Task Force, the team is working out of the Crystal-City, Virginia-based Counterintelligence Collaboration Center.
The analysts are combing the documents, trying to determine the implications of the WikiLeaks release -- everything from whether military or intelligence-gathering tactics and procedures have been revealed and compromised, to whether specific intelligence sources have been endangered. They're also looking for incidents of civilian casualties that might not have previously been reported, anything concerning allies or coalition partners, and even "derogatory comments regarding Afghan culture or Islam."
The officials said the ultimate goal is to ensure the safety of U.S. and coalition members. The team is operating independently of an ongoing Army criminal investigation, and that of other law enforcement agencies, the officials said.
In the meanwhile, the U.S. has also reportedly urged its allies to look into Assange and his international network of activists, although it's not clear how aggressive Washington has been in prodding its foreign friends.
Earlier Thursday the Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith told The Associated Press that Washington had not approached the his government about pursuing possible criminal charges against Assange, an Australian citizen, or about putting restrictions on his travel.
"Quite clearly we're working closely with the United States on these matters," Smith said, citing Australia's Defense Department and the Pentagon as the agencies working together. "These are very serious matters for concern."
Australia, which has some 1,550 troops in Afghanistan, has already launched its own investigation into whether posting classified military documents had compromised the national interest or endangered soldiers.