Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - new wikileaks cache of defense department documents about iraq

roachboy · 10-22-2010, 10:46 AM

wiki leaks has still not released the new cache of documents.

here, however, is an interesting piece from nieman journalism lab at harvard:

Quote:

WikiLeaks vs. the world: The international leaking organization WikiLeaks has kept a relatively low profile since it dropped 92,000 pages of documents on the war in Afghanistan in July, but Spencer Ackerman wrote at Wired that WikiLeaks is getting ready to release as many as 400,000 pages of documents on the Iraq War as soon as next week, as two other Wired reporters looked at WikiLeaks’ internal conflict and the ongoing “scheduled maintenance” of its site. WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange responded by blasting Wired via Twitter, and Wired issued a defense.

One of the primary criticisms of WikiLeaks after their Afghanistan release was that they were putting the lives of American informants and intelligence agents at risk by revealing some of their identities. But late last week, we found out about an August memo by Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledging that no U.S. intelligence sources were compromised by the July leak. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald documented the numerous times government officials and others in the media asserted exactly the opposite.

Greenwald asserted that part of the reason for the government’s rhetoric is its fear of damage that could be caused by WikiLeaks future leaks, and sure enough, it’s already urging news organizations not to publish information from WikiLeaks’ Iraq documents. At The Link, Nadim Kobeissi wrote an interesting account of the battle over WikiLeaks so far, characterizing it as a struggle between the free, open ethos of the web and the highly structured, hierarchical nature of the U.S. government. “No nation has ever fought, or even imagined, a war with a nation that has no homeland and a people with no identity,” Kobeissi said.

This Week in Review: Hard news’ online value, a small but successful paywall, and the war on WikiLeaks » Nieman Journalism Lab

here's an ap story about the gates memo that undermines the (bogus) claim that american intel or military assets were put in danger by the last wikileaks action. it displaces the terrain of conflict from what was claimed to proactive political damage control....

Quote:

Gates: Limited damage from leak of Afghan war logs

(AP) – 6 days ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — No U.S. intelligence sources or practices were compromised by the posting of secret Afghan war logs by the WikiLeaks website, the Pentagon has concluded, but the military thinks the leaks could still cause significant damage to U.S. security interests.

The assessment, outlined in a letter obtained Friday by The Associated Press, suggests that some of the Obama administration's worst fears about the July disclosure of almost 77,000 secret U.S. war reports have so far failed to materialize.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates reported these conclusions in an Aug. 16 letter to Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who had requested a Pentagon assessment.

Questions persist about whether the disclosure undermined U.S. officials' ability to maintain the allegiance of allies and people from other countries who take risks to cooperate with the U.S.

"The mere fact of the disclosure erodes confidence in the ability of the military to keep secrets," said Steven Aftergood, whose Secrecy News blog tracks trends in government openness.

"And that can have subtle but real effects on recruitment of sources and on maintenance of relationships with individuals and with other security services," he added. "So it's something they have to take seriously."

WikiLeaks, a self-described whistle-blower website, is believed to be preparing to release an even larger set of classified Pentagon documents on the Iraq war as early as Sunday.

U.S. officials warned of dire consequences in the days following the July leak. In his letter to Levin, Gates struck a more measured tone in describing the impact.

"Our initial review indicates most of the information contained in these documents relates to tactical military operations," Gates wrote, suggesting the materials did not include the most sensitive kinds of information.

"The initial assessment in no way discounts the risk to national security; however, the review to date has not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources and methods compromised by this disclosure," he added.

A Pentagon spokesman, Marine Col. David Lapan, said Friday that the assessment of the July documents is still valid, even after a more thorough review. A special task force led by the Defense Intelligence Agency combed the posted reports for weeks to determine what might have been compromised.

Lapan said the since the Aug. 16 letter, Gates has kept members of Congress and their staffs apprised of the Pentagon's document review through phone calls, personal contacts and briefings.

Names of intelligence sources generally are classified at a higher level than the secret-level documents published by WikiLeaks. The documents provided a ground-level view of the war, from 2004 through 2009, based largely on narrow intelligence reports and other battlefield materials.

Gates noted that the documents contained the names of "cooperative Afghan nationals." These were not secret intelligence sources but Afghans who had decided to cut their ties to the Taliban.

The Taliban later vowed to punish these individuals, if the reports proved true.

"We assess this risk as likely to cause significant harm or damage to the national security interests of the United States and are examining mitigation options," Gates wrote. "We are working closely with our allies to determine what risks our mission partners may face as a result of the disclosure."

So far, the Pentagon has not reported any incidents of reprisals against Afghans named in the leaked documents.

Gates told a news conference on July 29, just a few days after the documents were posted by WikiLeaks, that he had enlisted the help of the FBI to investigate a leak with "potentially dramatic and grievously harmful consequences."

"The battlefield consequences of the release of these documents are potentially severe and dangerous for our troops, our allies and Afghan partners, and may well damage our relationships and reputation in that key part of the world," he said. "Intelligence sources and methods, as well as military tactics, techniques and procedures, will become known to our adversaries."

At the same news conference, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the WikiLeaks operators could face blame for any deadly consequences.

"The truth is, they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family," Mullen said.

More recently, U.S. intelligence officials have said the July disclosures sharpened a debate over how far to go in sharing sensitive information within the government, a practice that expanded after Sept. 11, 2001, in order to help prevent future terrorist attacks.

In a speech Oct. 6 to the Bipartisan Policy Center, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, called the July leaks "a big yellow flag" for those concerned about protecting classified information.

"I think it's going to have a very chilling effect on the need to share," Clapper said.

Military investigators say Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, who served as an intelligence specialist in Baghdad, is a person of interest in the investigation into who provided the Afghan war logs to WikiLeaks.

The Associated Press: Gates: Limited damage from leak of Afghan war logs

this link takes you to the story cited above in the link about the american war on wikileaks:

The Internet War | Features | The Link

from the article:

Quote:

Weeks after the WikiLeaks conference, the site released a cache of over 92,000 classified Afghanistan war documents, free for the world to browse through, conveniently coupling the release with a leaked Central Intelligence Agency document that examines the possibility of the U.S. being perceived as an exporter of terrorism.

The Pentagon, already on a full-swing manhunt for Assange, intensified its war against WikiLeaks. Pentagon spokesmen called for the “return” of the leaked documents—a move that is necessary by law for the Pentagon to be capable of later accusing WikiLeaks of espionage.

The FBI and the U.S. government joined forces, declaring its $9-million “Going Dark” program combined with an Obama-backed bill that would outlaw all encryption that the government can’t obtain backdoor access to, thus outlawing all encryption WikiLeaks depends on to provide security for its sources. The U.S. Government aimed to garner an “Eye of Sauron” of the Internet.

In late September, the U.S. government furthered its war against WikiLeaks with a new bill—the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act—which seems like an anti-piracy bill, if one doesn’t bother to closely examine the fine print.

“The list is for domains ‘dedicated to infringing activity’, which is defined very broadly,” said Aaron Swartz on his anti-web-censorship site DemandProgress.org. “Any site where counterfeit goods or copyrighted material are ‘central to the activity of the Internet site’ would be blocked.”

It doesn’t seem far-removed for a government that already plans to accuse WikiLeaks of espionage to accuse it of harboring “counterfeit goods.” The United States has launched a full-scale attack on the rights, privacy and freedom of its own people in a desperate, scrambling attempt to deal with WikiLeaks’s truth-speaking.
An Ideal Held at Gunpoint

In March, WikiLeaks published a classified CIA document that discussed in detail various means the U.S. government could employ to destroy WikiLeaks.

“Websites such as WikiLeaks.org have trust as their most important centre of gravity by protecting the anonymity and identity of the insider, leaker, or whistleblower,” the report stated. “Successful identification, prosecution, termination of employment, and exposure of persons leaking the information by the governments and businesses affected by information posted to WikiLeaks.org would damage and potentially destroy this centre of gravity and deter others from taking similar actions.”

Many have realized the chilling similarity between the report’s suggested strategy for dismantling WikiLeaks and Manning’s recent arrest.

“It looks like we’re about to be attacked by everything the U.S has,” said WikiLeaks via Twitter in June. Those words were prophetic.

the article pitches this conflict as one of a vertically organized authoritarian structure--the american military machine---against the horizontal world of the net for control over information.

so what's at issue here isn't really an inside/outside matter that pits the military Insiders against those pesky civilians who imagine that the Professional Actions of Warriors should be subject to political control. the issue here is about information flows and who controls them. beyond that, the issue is about accountability.

within that, it is interesting to find out about the lengths the american state is willing to go to in order to eliminate information sources that do not repeat the party line.

war is peace.

edit: this link takes you to a democracy now! interview with daniel ellsburg that outlines the war against wikileaks in more detail.

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/10/..._intel_leak_in