Sweden used by CIA/Pentagon to launder Wikileaks releases

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By Wayne Madsen


WMR has learned from a long-time Republican Party consultant that the CIA used Sweden to launder the transfer to Wikileaks of carefully screened and redacted State Department cables and the subsequent release of the cables to pre-selected corporate news media entities. Sweden was chosen because of its so-called "press freedom and freedom of expression" traditions in an effort to make the release of the cables by Wikileaks appear to be unconnected to a covert CIA and Pentagon psychological operations program designed to place further controls on the Internet.

The Wikileaks operation was conducted with the help of two leading Swedish political leaders, both of whim have maintained a long association with the CIA and associated U.S. government entities. One of the conspirators is Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt who was discovered in high school in Sweden by U.S. Republican Party operative Karl Rove. Rove, a former executive director of the College Republicans, was, in the early 1980s, a GOP campaign
consultant who also began conducting overseas operations for the International Republican Institute (IRI) after its founding in 1983 as an overseas outreach branch of the Republicans --thanks to funding from the CIA-connected US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy, as well as the State Department.

In 1983, the same year the IRI was founded, Reinfeldt joined the Moderate Youth League, the youth wing of the Swedish Moderate Party, with Rove's encouragement. Just as Rove had used political chicanery in 1973 to defeat two opponents --Robert Edgeworth and Terry Dolan -- to be
elected chairman of the College Republicans, Reinfeldt ousted Moderate Youth League chairman Ulf Kristersson at the league's convention in Lycksele in 1992. Reinfeldt, the leader of conservative insurgents, garnered 58 votes to 55 for Kristersson, who represented the party's libertarian wing.

After the defeat of the Moderate Party government of Prime Minister Carl Bildt in 1994, Reinfeldt, in Rovian fashion, began to criticize the party leader. Reinfeldlt was also a strong critic of the modern Swedish welfare state. In 2003, Reinfeldt became Moderate Party leader and in 2006 his right-of-center coalition defeated the Social Democrats making Reinfeldt the Prime Minister.

One of Reinfeldt's closest advisers is Moderate Party member of parliament and avid anti-communist Council of Europe parliamentary official Goran Lindblad. Lindblad has been fond of offering political asylum and sanctuary in Sweden to dissidents, but not just any dissidents, only those that support an agenda in concert with the agenda pushed by the likes of Freedom
House of New York and George Soros's Open Society Institute, neo-con contrivances that oppose any form of communism, whether in China or Cuba, or any left-wing socialist governments for that matter -- the very same agenda promoted by Wikileaks.

Although it is not certain that Lindblad hekpoed lay the groundwork for the invitation to Wikileaks's founder Julian Assange to move his operations -- and his quarter million State Department cable cache -- to Sweden, there is yet another connection between a Swedish politician involved in the Assange criminal investigation for sex crimes in Sweden and the CIA.

Assange's legal representation in Sweden in being handled by the law firm Borgström & Bodstrom. The Bodstrom on the law office shingle hanging in Stockholm is Thomas Bodstrom, the Swedish Justice Minister from 2000 to 2006 in the Social Democratic government of Prime Minister Goran Persson. From 2006 to October 2010, Bodstrom was chairman of the Swedish parliament's Justice committee. After losing his chairmanship, Bodstrom moved in November 2010, along with his family, tonorthern Virginia -- just as the Wikileaks "story" unfolded. The Social Democrats refused to grant Bodstrom a leave of absence while maintaining his parliamentary seat. Bodstrom resigned his seat. WMR has learned from the Republican Party source that Bodstrom, upset over the decision of the Social Democrats, is now in negotiations
with Reinfeldt and the Moderates to switch parties. And, we have learned, the CIA is quietly grooming Bodstrom, a former Swedish soccer star, to be a future Prime Minister of Sweden for the conservative Moderate Party.

Bodstrom's colleague in the Persson cabinet was Par Nuder, the Minister of Finance, who also spent a large part of his youth in Israel. At the same time the Bodstrom family moved to
Virginia, Nuder joined the consultant-lobbying firm of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Albright Stonebridge Group, which she heads along with former Clinton national secxyurity adviser Sandy Berger and former Senator Warren Rudman (R-NH). Another executive at Albright Stonebridge is former Bill Clinton foreign policy adviser Wendy Sherman, who also serves on the Defense Policy Board under Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

Bodstrom is also an author of legal thriller novels and he has been called the "John Grisham of Sweden."

Bodstrom's father is Lennart Bodstrom, the Foreign Minister in the Social Democratic government of Prime Minister Olof Palme from 1982 to 1985. The elder Bodstrom was criticized for not heeding warnings that Soviet submarines were operating in Swedish waters and he survived a rare no-confidence motion against him in the parliament. However, WMR has learned that it was the CIA, which had arranged for U.S.-supplied Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) technology to be transferred to neutral Sweden and Langley did not want details of the system's capabilities to be tipped off to the Soviets. Lennart Bodstrom's ploy was to suppress the story of Soviet submarine activity to protect CIA and Swedish intelligence "sources and methods." WMR
has learned that Lennart Bodstrom's policy of non-engagement on Soviet submarines in Swedish waters was the result of a personal request by then-Vice President George H. W. Bush.

Bodstrom's law partner is Claes Borgstrom, Sweden's former Equal Opportunities Ombudsman and an avid, some would call it extremist, supporter of feminist causes. Borgstrom has been representing the two women who have accused Assange of sex crimes while he was in Sweden. One of the women, Anna Ardin, described as a "Christian feminist" has apparently left the country for the Palestinian West Bank and there are reports that she is no longer cooperating with the Swedish deputy prosecutor for Gothenburg, Marianne Ny. WMR has also learned that Bodstrom has had a close relationship with Ny.

The other woman who charged Assange is Sofia Wilen. It has been charged by some in Sweden that both women accusers were part of a carefully-arranged plot to bring sex charges against Assange in order to discontinue the Wikileaks Swedish asylum operation after the ultimate purpose was served: a major international news event designed to provide support for an increase by governments around the world, including Sweden, the United Kingdom -- where Assange is now free on restricted bail -- and the United States, to place draconian curbs on the Internet.


The ties that link the Wikielaks affair to a U.S. intelligence operation

One of Bodstrom's publishing outlets is owned by the Bonnier AB of Sweden, owned by the German-Jewish-descent family that also owns the Swedish tabloid Expressen and Dagens
Nyheter, the largest Swedish morning daily paper. The Bonniers are Sweden's wealthiest family. Bonnier Magazine Group owns Popular Science, Field & Stream, Yachting, Parenting, and other magazines in the United States.

In 2009, the Bonnier papers criticized Donald Bostrom for his article in the Social Democratic-owned paper Aftonbladet that charged Israel with harvesting the organs of Palestinians killed by the Israel Defense Force. The Swedish ambassador to Israel, Elisabet Borsiin Bonnier, broke with her own government and criticized the Aftonbladet article. Of course, the ambassador is a member of the family that owns Aftonbladet'scompetitors. Bostrom's article, that was condemned for being "anti-Semitic," was later proven to be right on
the mark with the arrest of Israeli and Jewish human organ traffickers in the United States and elsewhere and the exposure of Israeli-connected trafficking rings in Kosovo, Moldova, and other countries.

Details of the Assange investigation were leaked to Bonnier-owned Expressenand it is no
coincidence that Borgstrom's two sisters, Annette Kullenberg and Kerstin Vinterhed, work for papers owned by Bonnier AB. Bonnier director Jeanette Bonnier began as a reporter for Expressen, which received the inside information on the Assange "rape" case. Ironically, Jeanette Bonnier co-wrote the screenplay for the film Mänkan inte våldtas ("Men Can't be Raped."). Under Swedish media policies, the Swedish government provides financial subsidies to Bonnier AB and other Swedish publishers.

WMR has also learned that Assange and some of his Wikileaks team of ex-computer hackers had been hired as consultants by the Pentagon to stop Chinese hacking into Defense Department computer systems. During this operation, Wikileaks personnel had direct access to the State Department cables.

WMR has learned that it was a cell within the U.S. government that downloaded and copied the cables for the operation that would be used as an excuse to place restrictive and overarching government controls on the Internet.

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Democracy's Napster Moment

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By Micah White

A fight to the finish between the culture of the internet and the ancien régime.

Twenty-four hours after Julian Assange was arrested in London, a beekeeper in Colorado was leaked damning evidence that may explain why 29 percent of U.S. honeybee colonies died last winter. The confidential draft Environmental Protection Agency report suggested a connection between Bayer’s bestselling pesticide, clothianidin, and the mysterious die-off of bees. In the following days leaks— some minor, some significant and all damaging to the status quo—sprung up across the world.

A leaked meeting agenda suggested the Canadian Health Minister had lied in order to hide from public scrutiny efforts to privatize health care in Alberta; a divulged internal Thai government report testified that the military was responsible for three civilian deaths during unrest in May, contradicting earlier claims; a whistleblower confessed that ten years ago he was paid by the FBI to place a backdoor in OpenBSD, long presumed to be one of the most secure operating systems in the world; and a lawyer in Pakistan publicly named the undercover CIA station chief responsible for unmanned drone attacks in the country. The unmasked U.S. spy, Jonathan Banks, was forced to flee amidst angry popular protest.

And through it all, Wikileaks continued to supply the world with a daily dose of secret U.S. State Department cables.

Despite nervous assurances by U.S. Secretary of Defense Gates that the cable leaks will have “fairly modest” consequences for American foreign policy, it is growing increasingly clear that the emergence of Wikileaks signals a fundamental geopolitical shift. The memes of transparency and the free flow of information, ideals that underpin the net, are finally beginning to have concrete political consequences. This is truly, as a commentator at the BBC put it, “democracy’s Napster moment.” For just as Napster shattered the recording industry, so too does the secrecy spilling movement epitomized by Wikileaks have the potential to destabilize the West’s narrative and cultural hegemony.

This is a drama that is still unfolding. Assange may be extradited, disappeared, or murdered. Wikileaks may flourish or it may be the target of an never-before imagined internet crack down. France has already passed an Internet censorship law, and now there is talk that the UN is working to create a similar initiative on a global scale. In the weeks and months to come, we can expect a fight to the finish between the culture of the internet and the ancien régime. It is too early to know for certain who will come out the victor.

But what of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks? There has been relatively little discussion of his motivations. Most mainstream media dismiss him as an egoist, but there is something to his self-sacrificing, self-destructive pursuit of Truth that does not seem selfish, or concerned with fame. Could there be another motivation aside from egoism?

A story about Assange’s childhood has recently come to light which may help explain the origins of Wikileaks.

The rumor is that Julian Assange was once a talented Australian hacker whose nom de guerre was Mendax. If true, this is significant because Assange worked as a researcher on Underground, a 1997 book about the hacker community, in which the story of Mendax figures prominently.

The following excerpt from Chapter 8 of Underground may be an important clue in unraveling the origins of Wikileaks.

One night in Adelaide, when Mendax was about four, his mother and a friend were returning from a meeting of anti-nuclear protesters. The friend claimed to have scientific evidence that the British had conducted high-yield, above-ground nuclear tests at Maralinga, a desert area in north-west South Australia.

A 1984 Royal Commission subsequently revealed that between 1953 and 1963 the British government had tested nuclear bombs at the site, forcing more than 5000 Aborigines from their native lands. In December 1993, after years of stalling, the British government agreed to pay [sterling]20 million toward cleaning up the more than 200 square kilometres of contaminated lands. Back in 1968, however, the Menzies government had signed away Britain’s responsibility to clean up the site. In the 1970s, the Australian government was still in denial about exactly what had happened at Maralinga.

As Mendax’s mother and her friend drove through an Adelaide suburb carrying early evidence of the Maralinga tragedy, they noticed they were being followed by an unmarked car. They tried to lose the tail, without success. The friend, nervous, said he had to get the data to an Adelaide journalist before the police could stop him. Mendax’s mother quickly slipped into a back lane and the friend leapt from the car. She drove off, taking the police tail with her.

The plain-clothed police pulled her over shortly after, searched her car and demanded to know where her friend had gone and what had occurred at the meeting. When she was less than helpful, one officer told her, `You have a child out at 2 in the morning. I think you should get out of politics, lady. It could be said you were an unfit mother’.

A few days after this thinly veiled threat, her friend showed up at Mendax’s mother’s house, covered in fading bruises. He said the police had beaten him up, then set him up by planting hash on him. `I’m getting out of politics,’ he announced.

For the rest of the story about Assange/Mendax, and a detailed recounting of the many hacks he pulled off, read Underground for free online or watch the documentary WikiRebels.

Game Changer By Noam Scheiber Why Wikileaks will be the death of big business and big government. I confess that I’m torn. I had the same cranky reaction to Time’s Person of the Year choice as pretty much the entire Internet: It’s hard to see the calculation that makes Mark Zuckerberg more influential than Julian Assange in 2010. Still, there’s something about this conventional wisdom that’s annoying in its own right. When people riff about the impact of Wikileaks, you typically hear how it’s forever changed diplomacy or intelligence-gathering. The more ambitious accounts will mention the implications for journalism, too. All of that’s true and vaguely relevant. But it also misses the deeper point. The Wikileaks revolution isn’t only about airing secrets and transacting information. It’s about dismantling large organizations—from corporations to government bureaucracies. It may well lead to their extinction. At the most basic level, organizations have two functions: They make stuff (loosely defined) and they coordinate the activities of makers of stuff. The efficiency with which they do these things helps determine the organization’s size. So, for example, IBM can produce its own keyboards, or it can outsource its keyboard-making. Which option it chooses depends on whether IBM can produce keyboards more cheaply than a supplier can; and on whether it’s harder for IBM to coordinate with the supplier—getting the keyboards built correctly and on time—than to sort out those details internally. Even if the supplier can build keyboards more cheaply, IBM might decide against outsourcing because dealing with its in-house keyboard-maker is easier than dealing with outsiders. A government agency faces a roughly analogous choice. The State Department, say, can focus entirely on managing relationships with foreign governments. Or it can perform other tasks on top of that, like providing development aid. Because it’s generally easier to work with people who operate from similar assumptions, rely on the same data, and share a common set of goals and values—which is to say, it’s easier to coordinate with co-workers than with outsiders—organizations often perform these functions in-house. Indeed, that’s one reason they’ve historically grown so large. This has even been true over the last generation, when many business gurus predicted that information technology would make outsourcing nearly frictionless. Now consider what happens when you plug Wikileaks into this equation. All of a sudden, the very same things that made it more efficient to work with your colleagues—the fact that everyone had a detailed understanding of the mission and methodology—become enormous liabilities. In a Wikileaks world, the greater the number of people who intimately understand your organization,* the more candidates there are for revealing that information to millions of voyeurs. Wikileaks is, in effect, a huge tax on internal coordination. And, as any economist will tell you, the way to get less of something is to tax it. As a practical matter, that means the days of bureaucracies in the tens of thousands of employees are probably numbered. In a decade or two, we may not only see USAID spun off from the State Department. We may see dozens of mini-State Departments servicing separate regions of the world. Or hundreds of micro-State Departments—one for every country on the planet. Don’t like the stranglehold that a handful of megabanks have on the financial sector? Don’t worry! Twenty years from now there won’t be such a thing as megabanks, because the cost of employing 100,000 potential leakers will be prohibitive. Granted, there are a few key assumptions built into this prediction. The first is that Wikileaks is here to stay. Alas, this one’s a no-brainer. Daniel Ellsberg spent the better part of a year photocopying the 7,000 pages that became the Pentagon papers. Thanks to the IT revolution, copying and transferring data on that scale takes all of 15 seconds today. Perhaps more importantly, Wikileaks is a self-perpetuating phenomenon. Pre-Wikileaks, a would-be leaker’s only shot at wide-scale circulation was a newspaper or magazine. The problem with such outlets is that they tend to have their own views on how a story should be told. They interview corporate spokespeople and government officials to get their side of the story. They may bow to a censor’s request to suppress information. Wikileaks, on the other hand, promises mass distribution without the filter. And the more the organization proves it can get leaked information in front of tens of millions of readers, the more leakers will flock to it. Which is why Assange is clearly telling the truth when he says he’s sitting on more leaked documents than he knows what to do with—certainly in the millions of pages. “Our pipeline of leaks has been increasing exponentially as our profile rises,” he recently told Forbes. “Our ability to publish is increasing linearly.” And, even if Wikileaks were to disappear tomorrow—no doubt there are powerful people around the world rooting for that outcome—there are dozens of imitators waiting to replace it. Granted, Assange himself doesn’t purport to want to destroy large organizations, at least not most of the time. (There is stuff like this…) In his public statements, he says he simply wants to create powerful incentives for them to behave ethically. “It just means that it’s easier for honest CEOs to run an honest business, if the dishonest businesses are more affected negatively by leaks than honest businesses,” he told Forbes. He illustrates with the example of Chinese baby formula companies. Pre-Wikileaks, the entire industry had to follow suit when one manufacturer started skimping on protein, or risk being undercut by the lower-cost competitor. Thanks to Wikileaks, there’s a huge risk of being exposed, which discourages the skimper from cheating in the first place. I hope this happens. More likely, companies and governments will begin to fear the leaking of sensitive proprietary information whether they’re behaving ethically or not, because Wikileaks can’t ensure that only the unethical get exposed. Its definition of unethical clearly extends to organizations—like the U.S. State and Defense Departments—that see themselves as behaving ethically. In fact, there’s probably a greater incentive to expose generally ethical organizations, since the shock-value, and therefore the readership, will be much higher. It would be much bigger news if Google were bilking old ladies than if, say, Goldman Sachs were. That leaves these organizations with two options. The first is to tighten their security so as to disrupt or deter leaking. As it happens, some of the most brilliant minds in computer programming are hard at work on this problem. Unfortunately, as no less an authority than Zuckerberg has pointed out, these efforts are doomed to fail. “Technology”—which is to say, the technology that moves information rather than blocks it—“usually wins with these things,” he told Time’s Lev Grossman (inadvertently advancing the case for Assange as Person of the Year). The second option is to shrink. I have no idea what size organization is optimal for preventing leaks, but, presumably, it should be small enough to avoid wide-scale alienation, which clearly excludes big bureaucracies. Ideally, you’d want to stay small enough to preserve a sense of community, so that people’s ties to one another and the leadership act as a powerful check against leaking. My gut says it’s next to impossible to accomplish this with more than a few hundred people. The Obama campaign more or less managed it with a staff of 500. But the record of presidential campaigns (one industry where the pressure to leak has been intense for years) suggests that’s about the upper limit of what’s possible. I’d guess that most organizations a generation from now will be pretty small by contemporary standards, with highly convoluted cell-like structures. Large numbers of people within the organization may not even know one another’s name, much less what colleagues spend their days doing, or the information they see on a regular basis. There will be redundant layers of security and activity, so that the loss of any one node can’t disable the whole network. Which is to say, thanks to Wikileaks, the organizations of the future will look a lot like … Wikileaks. It’s your world, Julian Assange. Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of us are just living in it. Noam Scheiber is a senior editor for The New Republic and a Schwartz Fellow at The New America Foundation. *I’m obviously simplifying a bit here. For example, there are some contractors who have better access to information than salaried employees—Daniel Ellsberg, though a former Pentagon official, was at RAND when he leaked the Pentagon papers. For the sake of precision, we can probably assume an organization includes everyone who shares its most sensitive information, even if they don’t officially work there. But, as a general rule, it probably suffices to draw the line at employees.

WikiLeaks: Advancing an Israeli Agenda?

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By Maidhc Ó Cathail

Like 9/11, WikiLeaks has been singularly good for Israel.

Asked on the night of September 11, 2001 what the terrorist attacks meant for U.S.-Israel relations, Benjamin Netanyahu, the then former prime minister, tactlessly but accurately replied, “It’s very good.” And on the day after WikiLeaks’ publication of U.S. diplomatic cables, Netanyahu “strode” into a press conference at the Israeli Journalists Association, looking “undoubtedly delighted” with the group’s latest embarrassment of U.S. President Barack Obama.

“Thanks to WikiLeaks,” Aluf Benn wrote in Haaretz, “there is now no fear Washington will exert heavy pressure on Israel to freeze settlement construction or to accelerate negotiations on a withdrawal from the territories.” Instead, also courtesy of WikiLeaks, the world’s attention had been shifted exactly where a “vindicated” Netanyahu wanted it – toward Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons program.

“Our region has been hostage to a narrative that is the result of 60 years of propaganda, which paints Israel as the greatest threat,” Netanyahu told the assembled journalists. “In reality leaders understand that that view is bankrupt. For the first time in history there is agreement that Iran is the threat.” While there is considerable dispute about the extent to which Arab leaders share Netanyahu’s understanding of “the Iranian threat,” the Arab public overwhelmingly considers Israel to be a far greater threat.

Nevertheless, according to Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit, Julian Assange “has shattered the accepted dogma on the understanding in the Middle East in the 21st century.” WikiLeaks, crowed Shavit, “proved” that the Israeli occupation and colonization of Palestine was not the main cause of instability in the Middle East. Instead, the secret cables “revealed” that “the entire Arab world” is concerned about “one problem only — Iran, Iran, Iran.” Thus, Shavit concluded, the only way to bring peace to the region was to deal with “Iran first.”

Strangely, the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange seems to accept the Israeli vision of “war is peace” in the Middle East. In an interview with Time magazine, Assange singled out Netanyahu as an example of a world leader who believed the publication of Arab leaders’ provocative privately expressed comments “will lead to some kind of increase in the peace process in the Middle East and particularly in relation to Iran.”

Even more puzzling, Assange had an op-ed piece in Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian, in which he quoted something the media mogul had written in 1958: “In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win.” In choosing another pro-Israel apologist as a model of transparency, is it possible that Assange is ignorant of the key role played by Murdoch’s media empire in propagating the lies that led the New York Times to dub the war in Iraq “Mr. Murdoch’s War”?

Assange seems equally oblivious to the significant contribution made by the New York Times itself to the war whose conduct he now claims to oppose. On September 8, 2002, the paper of record led with a front-page story by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, which falsely claimed that Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy aluminum tubes as part of its “worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb.” As Michael Massing later wrote, “In the following months, the tubes would become a key prop in the administration’s case for war, and the Times played a critical part in legitimizing it.” Chosen by Assange to publish its leaked documents because it is one of “the best newspapers in the world for investigative research,” the pro-Israel Times is now busily spinning the leaks to push America into an equally unnecessary but even more disastrous war with Iran.

Given that the WikiLeaks revelations have been such an unexpected “diplomatic coup” for Israel, its American lobby appears to be strangely divided over the issue. On one side, there are those like David Frum, Jeffrey Goldberg and Michael Ledeen who delight in being able henceforth to cloak their incessant Iran warmongering behind a specious Arab cover. “Those who suggest that it’s some ‘Israel lobby’ or Jewish cabal that is driving the confrontation with Iran” should be embarrassed by the leaks, writes Frum. “WikiLeaks confirms that the region’s Arab governments express even more anxiety than Israel about the Iranian nuclear weapons program.”

Meanwhile, the most virulent attacks on WikiLeaks have come from some of Israel’s staunchest supporters. William Kristol, editor of Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly Standard, wants Congress to enable Obama to “Whack WikiLeaks.” Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, appear only too willing to oblige. Both senators have called for the prosecution of Assange under the 1917 Espionage Act. Feinstein is also working with Senator Charles Schumer on media legislation that would allow the prosecution of organizations like WikiLeaks.

How do we reconcile the Israel lobby’s apparently schizophrenic reaction to WikiLeaks? Could it be that Julian Assange has killed two birds for Israel with one document dump?

Thanks to WikiLeaks, the well-publicized remarks of a few Arab leaders provide much-needed cover for pro-Israelis as they relentlessly press America to whack Iran. At the same time, the disclosure of U.S. diplomatic secrets has given the likes of Joe Lieberman another excuse to “kill the internet” — to prevent Americans from ever finding out how they got into such a mess in the Middle East.

But just like 9/11, no matter how much WikiLeaks has benefited Israel, most observers still seem loath to consider the Tel Aviv connection.

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They bombed al-Jazeera's reporters. Now the US is after our integrity

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By Wadah Khanfar

Al-Jazeera reporters have been tortured and killed in defence of their values. That's why the WikiLeaks story must be challenged

A lot can change in five years. In December 2005 the Guardian opened its pages for me to respond to a leak – the Bush-Blair memo in which both leaders discussed the possibility of bombing Al-Jazeera's Qatar HQ, where more than 1,000 people work. While those who leaked the memo were imprisoned, its detailed contents were never disclosed. Earlier this year I learned from a senior US official that the discussions had indeed taken place.

I was not surprised. Our bureaus in Kabul and Iraq had previously been bombed by the US in an attempt to stifle the channel's independence; one of our journalists in Iraq was killed. But this did not deter us from our mission to provide "the opinion and the other opinion" – our motto; to give a voice to the voiceless; to hold centres of power to account; and to uphold our editorial independence no matter what the cost. We maintained these values even as the US bombed our offices, continuing our coverage of both sides of the story.

The Arab world, the region in which we are located, continues to see its share of bloodshed and war. Our audience, often the victim of these conflicts, demands honesty, credibility and integrity. If we get a story wrong, or are biased, it could mean the difference between life and death for viewers. They have come to expect independence as a standard.

This week our independence was once again called into question. Cables from the US embassy in Doha were made accessible by WikiLeaks, alleging that Qatar was using Al-Jazeera as a tool for its foreign policy. While nothing could be further from the truth, US diplomats had the freedom to express their opinions. But interpretation and conjecture cannot take the place of analysis and fact. They focused on the source of our funding rather than our reporting, in an attempt to tarnish our work. Judgments made in the cables are plainly erroneous, such as the assertion that we softened our coverage of Saudi Arabia and the Iranian elections due to political pressure – one needs only to look at our reporting of these events to see that this is not the case. We are journalists not politicians – we are not driven by political agendas, for or against anyone.

Journalists across the world picked up the story, and while some were careful to place it in context, many uncritically took the claims as fact. The Guardian's report went well beyond even what was stated in the cables; the article clearly misunderstood the rhetorical statements reportedly made by Qatar's prime minister, which then fed the false claim that al-Jazeera was being used as a "bargaining chip". Those who understand the Middle East also know that Al-Jazeera's coverage is no obstacle to a durable peace in the region. Context, analysis and a deep knowledge of the region are essential to a proper reading of the cables. Without these, journalism is another unwitting tool for centres of power.

The region where we are situated is host to some of the most repressive governments in the world, where freedom of expression is silenced, journalists languish in prisons, and independent civil institutions are rare. Allegations that we lack independence are part of our daily routine – they no longer surprise us.

But we take measures to protect our editorial integrity in spite of intimidation from governments and regimes – our journalists have been banned, imprisoned, tortured and killed. Al-Jazeera's bureaus have routinely been closed, many times by Arab regimes with which Qatar has good relationships. Although banned in these countries, we continue to cover their stories with depth and balance. To institutionalise our independence we have ensured diversity among our staff, and have more than 50 nationalities represented – with no majority of any one nationality.

Questions about al-Jazeera's independence and its relationship with Qatar, our primary source of funding, are asked in almost any interview I give. Because the region has a history of state-controlled media it's assumed our host country must impact upon our editorial policy. But the Qatari government has kept its distance – it is similar to the kind of model one sees in other publicly funded arm's length broadcasters such as the BBC. Qatar's prime minister openly criticises al-Jazeera, and has talked about the "headaches" caused by our independence. But we subject state officials to the same hard questions and journalistic standards we have for everyone else. Al-Jazeera has strong editorial policies to protect its independence from the influence of power – one only has to look at the screen to witness this.

While we don't claim to get it right all of the time (we are only human), we have got it right most of the time. We have placed a great deal of value on reporting from the field. Had the US diplomats actually watched al-Jazeera's reports, they would have heard the voices and players who were shaping conflicts, wars and emerging democracies. By analysing our content they would have gained insights into the region. When George Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq and most media outlets echoed his simplistic version of events, al-Jazeera was providing pictures and analyses that predicted the coming storm. At the time we were roundly criticised, often by states who had friendly relations with Qatar. And in Afghanistan, while others broadcast images of progress and calm, al-Jazeera highlighted the growing influence of the Taliban, reflecting the politics on the ground. In these cases and many others, time has vindicated our reporting. Had these diplomats listened to the voices reflected in our coverage perhaps some of their mistakes could have been averted.

Those who lobby against al-Jazeera seek to delegitimise the work of dedicated and courageous journalists who put their lives on the line. For 14 years we have committed ourselves to safeguarding our editorial independence. Our audiences rely on us for this, and we will not be affected by pressure from regimes, states, media or other centres of power. We have full confidence in our mission as journalists.

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Related:

Qatar okays use of airbase for U.S. attack on Iran [Qatar okayed use of airbase for U.S. massive attacks on iraq twice previously]

Al-Jazeera is a Zionist tool that promotes the Jewish 'War on Terror' and perpetuates the myth of Al-Qaeda across the Arab World. Most if not all amateurish audio and video tapes were faked by Al-Jazeera and/or its Zionist sister Intel center. Al-Jazeera also Promotes the 'Al-Qaeda did 9/11' scum. I personally sent copies of '911 Eyewitness' for their consideration, twice, the latter was recorded delivery. Never got a reply and to my knowledge Al-Jazeera never aired '911 Eyewitness'

The Bombing Aljazeera Silly Joke

Riz Khan: 'Al-Jazeera is not an Arab news channel'

Al Jazeera - Another Fairy Tale

Where Did Al-Jazeera got VIDEO OF 1st plane hitting 1st Tower?

Flashback: 60 seconds that may change your mind. Remember until now we have been told the only video of this was taken from the Naudet 9/11 video.



WTC1 North Tower Plane Impact on 9/11 - Naudet

See also

Jules Naudet's 9/11 Film was Staged

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Private Manning and the Making of Wkileaks

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by Denver Nicks

Editor’s note: “Private Manning and the Making of Wikileaks” has been widely considered the definitive article on the life of Bradley Manning. It is the first article to correlate Manning’s whistleblowing with that of the Silkwood/Kerr-Mcgee scandal, the first to extensively mine his social network for clues about his upbringing, and the first to debunk the common (and still pervasive) media myth that Manning was a troubled child with emotional problems. The reporting below, by Denver Nicks, offers the most nuanced and complex portrayal of Manning to date and has been cited by several national outlets for its in-depth analysis of this enigmatic Oklahoman.

The Inside Story of the Oklahoman Behind the Biggest Military Intelligence Leak Ever

Midnight, May 22nd, 2010. Army intelligence analyst Private First Class Bradley E. Manning is sitting at a computer at Contingency Operating Station Hammer, east of Baghdad. He is online, chatting with Adrian Lamo, an ex-hacker and sometimes-journalist based in San Francisco.

“Hypothetical question,” he asks Lamo. “If you had free reign over classified networks for long periods of time… say, 8-9 months… and you saw incredible things, awful things… things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC… what would you do?”

Manning, 22, is probing Lamo for guidance–and approval.

“I can’t believe what I’m confessing to you,” he types.

Outside of the chats, little is known about Bradley Manning. We know that he grew up in Crescent, Oklahoma, a town made famous by one of the biggest whistleblowing events in American history a decade before Bradley was born. Currently, he’s in solitary confinement at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, awaiting trial, and unable to speak to the press. His family and many of his close friends have been advised not to talk to the media. If the allegations against Private Manning are true, the 22-year-old from Oklahoma is responsible for the biggest leak of military secrets in American history,

Records of the chats, which continued over several days, portray a dejected, disillusioned soldier. His long-distance relationship has ended, he’s been demoted from Specialist to Private First class after he struck another soldier and the army has removed the bolt from his rifle out of concern for his mental state.

“I’m a total fucking wreck right now,” he tells Lamo.

Brad feels alone, invisible, like his career and his relationship–the life he had finally built after years of drifting–is falling apart. For months, he’d been disenchanted with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He points to a specific instance, in which, investigating 15 detainees for printing “anti-Iraqi literature” he found that the paper in question was merely a scholarly critique of corruption in the government and brought the revelation to an officer.

“He didn’t want to hear any of it,” he says. “He told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the FPs in finding *MORE* detainees.”

Brad had lost faith in the American military as a force for good in the world.

“I don’t believe in good guys versus bad guys anymore,” he tells Lamo. “Only a plethora of states acting in self interest.”

In further chats with Lamo, Brad describes how he used his security clearance and computer skills to access confidential government networks and download classified material, including video of American soldiers killing civilians, hundreds of thousands of internal military reports and more than 260,000 diplomatic cables. Disclosure of the classified material, he says, will have implications of “global scope, and breathtaking depth.” He tells Lamo he’s been delivering the classified information to Julian Assange, the quixotic founder of the shadowy whistleblowers website Wikileaks, which is releasing it publicly for the world to see.

The information he allegedly unleashed into cyberspace reverberated across the globe. The anti-war Left seized upon the leaks as evidence that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are unjust and unwinnable. The Taliban promised to kill those Afghans who, the documents reveal, have collaborated with the Americans. President Obama said the leaks endanger the lives of American troops. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor predicted the leaks will lead to a new free-speech ruling in the supreme court, which could overturn the precedent set in the Pentagon Papers case, the foundation of modern-day jurisprudence on questions of national security and freedom of speech.

Crescent, Oklahoma is stamped out in a one-square-mile rectangular grid and bisected by Highway 74, which becomes Grand Avenue in town. On this main thoroughfare is “the stop sign,” a frequently referenced landmark when locals give directions. There is the gas station, where men gather in the mornings to talk and drink coffee; the Baptist church – one of 15 churches in town – an unadorned, rectangular block, with a plain white spire and beige metal siding; Kelly’s Café, where locals fill the dining room to capacity at lunchtime. A towering, white grain elevator looms over the skyline. There are a few empty shells of buildings on Grand Avenue, but Crescent lacks the bombed-out look of crumbling decay visible in so many small Oklahoma towns. The cliché is unavoidable–Crescent, by all appearances, is a happy, healthy little town.

Crescent’s favorite son is Geese Ausbie, the “Crown Prince of the Harlem Globetrotters,” but there’s another character who isn’t as cherished, a 28-year-old woman who spoke up in 1974 and got the world’s attention.

Several miles south of town, on the Cimarron River, a decommissioned Kerr-McGee plutonium plant sleeps in quiet, conspicuous retirement. The plant was closed in 1975, a year after plant employee Karen Silkwood was last seen alive at a union meeting at the Hub Café (now closed, across the street from Kelly’s). After the meeting, Silkwood drove south on Highway 74 toward Oklahoma City to meet with a reporter from the New York Times allegedly carrying documentation of gross safety violations at the plant. Silkwood’s car was discovered crumpled in the embankment, its driver dead. The documents were never found.

An Oscar-nominated film was made about the incident, and the name Silkwood became a rallying cry for union organizers. But, for Crescent locals, the story is more than lore. Many in Crescent know someone who worked at the plant with Karen Silkwood, and for years the town’s residents shared an association with whistleblowing and martyrdom.

Perry’s Roadhouse is several miles south of town and effectively Crescent’s bar. Bumper stickers decorate a back wall: “Don’t steal, the government hates competition,” and “U.S. Government Philosophy: If it ain’t broke, fix it till it is.”

Perry’s isn’t far from where Silkwood died on the same highway, and a few questions from a reporter still get locals speculating. An acquaintance says Silkwood was a drug addict. Perry heard that Kerr-McGee got the state to resurface the road, covering the skid marks before they could be analyzed. A friend of a friend says she backed into a telephone pole, putting the dent in her back bumper that, some believe, is evidence she was run off the road. Invariably, someone will add that Karen Silkwood was not from Crescent and lived in Oklahoma City.

The memory of the Silkwood incident lurks far in the background of life in Crescent–for the most part people don’t particularly care to talk about it, and, polite that Crescent locals are, when they do, most don’t have much to say. Still, the story remains unsettled. When Bradley Manning was growing up it was 20 years less settled.

Several miles north of Crescent, on Highway 74, a paved county road turns off the highway and into the countryside. The Manning family lived out here, in a two-story house in the country, near the end of a gravel road before it turns to dirt. Trees obscured the view of the house from the street and cast shadows over the property. There was an above ground swimming pool and a bountiful garden that produced what one neighbor called the biggest asparagus stalks he’d ever seen. The house was isolated and quaint. Neighbors were a quarter mile and more away. Brad grew up here with his older sister, Casey, his mother, Susan, and his father, Brian.

Brian Manning spent five years in the navy in the late 1970s, working with the high tech naval systems of the day. He studied computer science in California, and went to work for Hertz Rent-a-Car as an Information Technology manager. While in the Navy he spent time at Cawdor Barracks, in Wales. He married a Welsh woman, Susan, and moved with his family to Crescent, from where he could commute to the Hertz office in Oklahoma City.

By all appearances, according to people who knew the family, Brian Manning, who did not respond to interview requests, was a difficult man to live with.

“He was just real demeaning,” said Rhonda Curtis, a neighbor. Another neighbor, who asked to be called James, put it more bluntly.

“Brian’s a dick.”

Brian Manning’s own words, however, contradict the image of a domineering jerk. While his son was in Iraq, in December of 2009, Brian posted on Brad’s Facebook wall:

“Happy Birthday Son!…Did your gift arrive? I sent it yonks ago.”

When Bradley returned home briefly on leave, in January 2011, his dad posted again, “Welcome back son!”

Less than a minute later, apparently after reading that his son’s profile listed Potomac, Maryland as his hometown, Brian added, “and your hometown is Crescent, Oklahoma.”

As a little boy, Brad was high-strung and abnormally intelligent. Like his parents, he has always been smallish.

“We used to think of him kind of like a cocker spaniel,” said Rhonda Curtis.

“He was just a little nerd,” said Danielle, Rhonda’s daughter, and a childhood friend of Brad’s. As kids, she and Brad rode bikes around the neighborhood, swam in his pool, played Super Mario Brothers at her house and Donkey Kong at his.

Bring up Bradley Manning in Crescent, and you’re likely to hear that he was, “too smart for his own good.” He was a promising saxophonist in the middle school band, always excelled in the science fair, and starred on the quiz bowl team. On bus trips to quiz bowl competitions around Oklahoma, he and a small group of friends passed the time talking about ideas and big picture questions of right and wrong.

“We’d talk about stuff that, for that age, was pretty deep,” said Shanée Watson, who recently graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We discussed morality and philosophy a lot—I know that sounds weird, but that’s what we did.”

He was polite and obedient in class, with no disciplinary record at all from his elementary and middle school years. He did not, however, shy away from confrontation.

“You would say something, and he would have an opinion, which was a little unusual for a middle school kid,” said Rick McCombs, currently the school principal, who was a high school history teacher and coach when Brad was in school. “Don’t get me wrong, we had the cut-ups and the clowns and the mean ones and the bullies and those kinds of things, but this young man actually kind of thought on his own.”

While still in elementary school, Brad first expressed an interest in joining the U.S. military.

“He was basically really into America,” said his friend Jordan Davis, in an email. “He wanted to serve his country.”

Brad’s school bus ride home was an hour long, and acquaintances say he spent most of the trip quietly doing his homework, while other kids had paper ball and spit wad fights.

Johnny Thompson, whose bus stop was last on the route, just after Brad’s, recalls a quiet but not exactly anti-social kid. “After everyone else was gone I’d actually go over there and talk with him a little bit,” Thompson said. “He was pretty nice if you were nice to him.”

As Brad got older his playfulness receded. He stopped playing with neighborhood kids, spending more time on the top floor of his home where he had his computer–this was the late 1990s, just as the Internet was becoming a truly global phenomenon, with, literally, a world of opportunity for a young man who felt increasingly alienated from the community he lived in.

Events in Brad’s life collided to put tremendous stress on the boy. As his peers were confronting their own sexuality in a context that was, at worst, prudish and ambivalent towards it, Brad was shouldering an added burden.

While Brad was in middle school, Brian Manning came home one day and announced he was leaving Susan. He moved out abruptly. Eventually, Susan and Brad moved into town, to a small rental house near the Baptist church. Brad’s grades dropped. Amidst the disintegration of his family, pubescent Brad was coming to terms with his own sexuality. Shanée Watson recalls Brad gathering she and Jordan Davis near a tree at Jordan’s grandmother’s house to give them important news. Brad told them that he would very shortly be moving with his mom to Wales for high school. He also told his two best friends he was gay.

This moment warrants pause. Bradley Manning, still effectively a boy, had few friends, and his family had all but fallen apart. In a time before Facebook and sustained long-distance friendships, he was leaving his two best friends for what could easily have been the last time (for Shanée Watson, it was). He didn’t need to tell them he was gay in order to confess a hidden affection, to explain a behavior or even to allow his friends to know him better–in a short time he would be gone. And yet, presumably for no other reason than that he was who he was and wanted to live honestly in his own skin, he felt compelled, in a conservative, religious town, to confide in his friends that he was a homosexual. Not only must it have taken tremendous courage for such a young man, it displays a crucial aspect of Brad’s personality. As his Facebook profile still says today, “Take me for who I am, or face the consequences!”

Brad moved to Wales with his mother to a much bigger small town, Haverfordwest, population 13,367, where he attended high school. He was teased for being effeminate but was not, apparently, open about his homosexuality. Friends say he was quiet, and kept his personal life to himself. He’d stopped playing the saxophone, got into electronic music and spent a lot of time on the computer. Though small and provincial itself, Haverfordwest must have been an exotic metropolis compared to Crescent.

After finishing high school, he returned to the United States, moved in with his dad in Oklahoma City and went to work for Zoto, a software company. Brad’s strained relationship with his father cut that living arrangement short – the situation turned toxic, at least in part because of his homosexuality, and his dad kicked him out. He was homeless, moved to Tulsa and stayed with his friend Jordan Davis. He eventually moved into a south Tulsa apartment near Davis’s, lived alone, and worked low wage jobs at F.Y.E., a retail entertainment chain, and Incredible Pizza.

Brad drifted from Tulsa to Chicago to Potomac, Maryland, in the outer suburbs of Washington, D.C. He moved in with an aunt and began to get a steadier footing. He had jobs at Starbucks and Abercrombie and Fitch, took classes at a Community College, and had enough money and stability to take a trip back to Chicago for the Lollapalooza music festival.

Not long after his trip to Lollapalooza, in the late summer of 2007, Brad joined the army. He’d long expressed interest in serving, and the army was a natural next step for an unsettled but talented and ambitious young man.

“I think he thought it would be incredibly interesting, and exciting,” Jordan Davis told me in an email. “He was proud of our successes as a country. He valued our freedom, but probably our economic freedom the most. I think he saw the US as a force for good in the world.”

Brad did basic training at Fort Leonard, in Missouri, but he sustained a nerve injury in his left arm, and his future in the army was put on hold. That Christmas on Facebook he posted cheerful pictures of a visit with his family in Oklahoma, including pictures of his father. After the holidays, Brad returned to basic training in Missouri. He graduated in April 2008 and moved to Fort Huachuca, in southern Arizona, excited to be back in contact with the civilian world. “Hit me up on the phonezors if you can!” he posted.

While at Fort Huachuca, Brad was reprimanded for putting mundane video messages to friends on YouTube that carelessly revealed sensitive information. The infraction must not have been serious, because by August he’d graduated from training as an intelligence analyst with a security clearance.

After Fort Huachuca, Brad was stationed at Fort Drum in upstate New York. It was an election year, and Brad was pulling for the celebrity freshman senator from Illinois, Barack Obama. Also on the ballot that year was California’s Proposition 8, which, in a significant setback for the gay rights movement, banned gay marriage in the state when it passed on Election Day.

Just days later, Brad went to a rally against Proposition 8 in front of city hall in Syracuse, New York, and an hour and a half from Ft. Drum. At the rally, a soldier was interviewed anonymously by high school senior Phim Her for Syracuse.com, a local news website. The soldier was Bradley Manning.

“I was kicked out of my home, and I once lost my job [because I am gay],” he told her. “The world is not moving fast enough for us at home, work, or the battlefield.” Brad told her that, for him, the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy is the worst thing about being in the military. “I’ve been living a double life,” he said.

After Proposition 8 passed, Brad’s Facebook wall becomes a flurry of activity, much of it related to the gay rights movement, though most updates were ordinary messages from a happy young man, newly in love. He spent the holiday season in the Washington, D.C. area, and just before Christmas announced a relationship with a new boyfriend. He began posting more often than ever. “Bradley Manning is a happy bunny.” “Bradley Manning is cuddling in bed tonight.” For an active duty soldier, he was remarkably transparent about his sexuality on his Facebook wall. After returning to base: “Bradley Manning is in the barracks, alone. I miss you Tyler!” And, “Bradley Manning is glad he is working and active again, yet heartbroken being so far away from hubby.”

Over the next several months Brad’s posts are nearly all related to progressive politics or his boyfriend. He seems happy and confident, comfortable in his life and positive about the future.

In September 2009, his relationship status changed to single, and posts between he and Tyler tapered off, though they maintained friendly communication. This was likely a safety measure in light of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. A month later he deployed to Iraq.

Brad arrived in Iraq in late October 2009. His infrequent status updates are mostly mundane: “Bradley Manning has soft sheets, a comforter, and a plush pillow… however, the war against dust has begun,” and “Bradley Manning is starting to get used to living in Groundhog Day.”

After gay marriage failed on the ballot in Maine, he posted, “Bradley Manning feels betrayed…again.” In late November he posted, “Bradley Manning feels forgotten already,” but for the most part he remained positive. The holidays brought a flood of well-wishers, but Brad was notably quiet. Considering what was to follow, Brad’s wall posts from this period are strikingly boring.

At the end of January 2010, Brad returned to the U.S. for a brief visit. He landed in D.C. just as a massive blizzard blanketed the city, and his plans were partly derailed. But as he left he wasn’t dispirited: “Bradley Manning is hopefully returning to his place of duty over the next few days. Hope I don’t get caught up in this next storm,” he posted on February 8.

This is the period in which Brad is accused of having leaked at least some documents to Wikileaks. Bradley Manning is officially charged with leaking classified information between November 19, 2009, and May 27, 2010. In his chats with Adrian Lamo, Brad references a “test” document he leaked to Julian Assange (presumably to verify Assange’s identity), a classified diplomatic cable from the U.S. Embassy in Reykjavik, sent January 13, 2010. Wikileaks posted the document on February 18, 2010.

If Brad was indeed the source of Reykjavik13, as the document has come to be known, he had to have leaked it sometime before mid-February, and Wikileaks tends to take time to analyze and verify the authenticity of leaked documents, if possible. Brad didn’t return to Baghdad from his visit home until February 11, and he left for home on January 21. If Brad leaked Reykjavik13, he almost certainly did so sometime over the eight-day period from January 13, 2010, when the cable originated, and January 21, 2010, when he left Baghdad for the United States.

The timing debunks the overarching narrative in the media that Brad was an anti-social outcast lashing out at the world and crying for attention when he decided to leak military secrets. On January 14, 2010, the day after Reykjavik13 originated, Brad posted, “Bradley Manning feels so alone,” to his Facebook wall–perhaps this is the period when he decided to become a leaker. He appears distraught, there is no doubt, but hardly the emotional wreck portrayed in the Lamo chats that took place months later.

Over the next several months, when Brad may have leaked most of the documents, he appears happy and carefree. His posts are peppered with smiley emoticons. On March 14, he “wishes everyone a Happy Pi Day!” Not until April 30, after a change in his boyfriend’s relationship status does his emotional state seem to deteriorate. That day he posts that he “is now left with the sinking feeling that he doesn’t have anything left…” Days later, on May 5, 2010, he says he “is beyond frustrated with people and society at large,” and the next day he “is not a piece of equipment.”

This is Brad’s last Facebook post. Later that month he apparently initiated a chat with Adrian Lamo, who had recently been profiled in Wired Magazine. Brad, it seems, broke down to Lamo and over a series of days confessed his shocking breach of U.S. military security.

The magnitude of classified material Brad is suspected to have leaked is astounding. He appears to have leaked the Collateral Murder video, in which American soldiers in an Apache helicopter gleefully gun down a group of innocent men, including a Reuters photojournalist and his driver, killing 16 and sending two children to the hospital, a video of the 2009 Granai airstrike in Afghanistan, in which as many as 140 civilians, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. attack on a suspected military compound, a cache of nearly 100,000 field reports from Afghanistan, known popularly as the Afghan War logs, about 260,000 diplomatic cables and a set of as many as half a million documents relating to the Iraq war that, even on their own, likely constitute the biggest leak of military secrets in history.

Lamo notified the authorities.

Brad’s Facebook status, on June 5, 2010, probably posted by someone else, reads: “Some of you may have heard that I have been arrested for disclosure of classified information to unauthorized persons. See [link to the Collateral Murder video].” He’d been arrested days before, and was then being held in Kuwait, before being transferred to the brig at Quantico.

Brad currently faces three counts of unlawfully transferring confidential material to a non-secure computer–military jargon for leaking state secrets. If convicted, he could spend a half a century in prison. U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) has called for his execution.

On July 25^th, 2010, Wikileaks released the Afghan War Logs. The documents reveal hundreds of civilian deaths in unreported incidents, rapidly escalating Taliban attacks, and indications that the Pakistani intelligence service, ostensibly a U.S. ally, works intimately and supportively with the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. The Guardian called the logs “a devastating portrait of the failing war.” The New York Times called them “an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal.”

Critics of Wikileaks accused the group of publishing documents that included the names of Afghan informants, putting their lives in danger. Wikileaks withheld publication of 15,000 documents to redact the names of others to whom the leaks could bring harm, and claims to have invited the Pentagon to help—though the Pentagon denies this. The Pentagon has said that it will not cooperate with Wikileaks under any circumstances, has called on the group to stop publishing leaks and demanded that it immediately return all classified material. The Daily Beast has reported that the Pentagon now has a 120-person strong “Wikileaks War Room” to minimize harm from the leaks, to try to preempt them and to collect information to be used, at some indeterminate future date, in prosecuting Julian Assange for espionage.

Wikileaks anticipated becoming an enemy of the state. Quietly and without fanfare, with threats to its existence rising, Wikileaks uploaded to its website an encrypted document called “Insurance file”, which has been downloaded more than 100,000 times to date. The file is about 20-times bigger than the Afghan War Logs. If – or when – Wikileaks releases the password for the file, the whole world will know what it contains. In Wikileaks, the Pentagon is confronting a challenge like none before. The agent was Assange, but the raw material likely came from Bradley Manning.

Since its debut on the world stage in 2006, Wikileaks has posted a document leaked from Somalia’s Islamist rebels, the contents of Sarah Palin’s email account, documents temporarily discrediting now-vindicated climate change scientists, internal papers from the Church of Scientology, the membership list of the pseudo-fascist British National Party and more. Big scoops all, but not until Collateral Murder and the Afghan War Logs did the American government initiate a concerted effort to shut the website down. Once a source of newsworthy if mostly innocuous revelations, Wikileaks has officially become a threat to national security. If the allegations against him are true, Brad made Wikileaks what it is today.

The last day I spent in Crescent was a bright Sunday morning. I sat on a bench not far from the Hub Café, where Karen Silkwood spent some of her last moments. As trucks lumbered down Grand Avenue and drivers waved hello, the town came to life.

I went to Sunday school at the Baptist Church. In the class for young adults I attended, we discussed the familiar troubles of jobs, children and romance–troubles Bradley Manning is unlikely to experience for many, many years, if ever again. Toward the end of class we bowed our heads, and Rick McCombs, the principal of Crescent schools, led a prayer for Bradley Manning and his family.

After church, I spoke with Johnny Thompson, Brad’s old buddy from the long bus ride home. We met up at a gas station and talked about his life growing up in Crescent: the boredom, the tragedy of the closing of the arcade in the laundromat, the ridicule from kids in bigger cities, the independent streak instilled in him by being a social outcast in a small town. At the end of the interview, I turned my recorder off and started to stand. Thompson asked me to turn it back on.

“Just one last thing,” he said. “No matter what he did, every memory I have of him is just a little kid I talked with on the bus. It don’t even really seem right that he’s some big criminal right now.”

Thompson, a stonemason, has the hulking look of an overgrown boy soon to become a man. His dark, smoky eyes are fidgety and uncertain, betraying a humble, earnest sensitivity.

“I was worried that they might execute him.”

Thompson had caught my eye days earlier, when he mentioned in passing that he was reading the classic subversive novel written by Oklahoma City native Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man. I asked if I could interview him later. He said sure, then walked away. As I too walked toward my car, he turned and added, “Not everyone in Crescent’s a bunch of rednecks.”

Denver Nicks is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. His work has appeared in The Daily Beast, AlterNet, High Country News, and other publications. His next assignment takes him to Karachi, Pakistan, where he’ll be reporting for Express Tribune.

Is Bradley Manning a scapegoat? Our government gave top-secret security clearance to Bradley Manning and 850,000 other people. Now my dear ole Uncle Sam sees that he should not have told his "secrets" to 850,000 people, so he is going to put this one poor guy away for 50 years? I guess this is supposed to be a warning to the other 850,000 to keep their mouths shut. If Uncle Sam had thoroughly vetted all these people, we wouldn't have 850,000 folks walking around with our nation's "secrets" at their finger tips. Most of them would have been denied or would still be waiting for security clearance, if my government had been doing it's job. The person who needs to go to jail is the guy at the top who authorized security clearances for all these folks. http://oklahomacitizen.org/2010/08/09/bradley-manning-scapegoat

Bradley Manning still scapegoat? The Economist sums it up the best about Assange, same would apply to Bradley Manning: "If Mr Assange is murdered tomorrow, if WikiLeaks' servers are cut off for a few hours, or a few days, or forever, nothing fundamental is really changed. With or without WikiLeaks, the technology exists to allow whistleblowers to leak data and documents while maintaining anonymity. With or without WikiLeaks, the personel, technical know-how, and ideological will exists to enable anonymous leaking and to make this information available to the public. Jailing Thomas Edison in 1890 would not have darkened the night." Transparency & Democracy: Why the U.S. Should Free Bradley Manning

If Assange is a spy, then so am I

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The first step to understanding Wikyleaks is to stop imagining Julian Assange is Wikyleaks. He is NOT. He is just a member of a very large movement (More than a few thousands actually) The next important thing is to support the other scapegoat (Bradley Manning currently held in solitary confinement at a military Gulag in Quantico, Virginia. He is not allowed to see his parents or other visitors.)


By Mark Lee Hunter


The job and duty of journalists is to expose lies and their consequences. Julian Assange has shown that one does not need to be a journalist to help. That does not make him a spy.

The founder of Wikileaks is a spy? That's what Sarah Palin says. But that makes me a spy, too. I don't agree. I'm a journalist. And what Julian Assange is doing is a form of journalism: He is publishing the news.

If you're like most people, you think that journalists are liars and lackeys, spouting “news” that is barely credible, bent by the profit of the big interests that run the media. (That's what the Pew Center's surveys tell us.) This time, the political class is complaining because a website and its allies in the press are publishing information that is absolutely credible.

Has publishing the truth become a crime? Wikileaks: the truth is not treason, by Ryan Gallagher "There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice which does not live by secrecy." – Joseph Pulitzer. At approximately 6pm on Wednesday, Amazon ousted wikileaks.org from its servers after concerted and aggressive political pressure from America’s Homeland Security Committee. The move came after three solid days of ‘Cablegate’ – the largest intelligence leak in history. 251,287 dispatches from more than 250 US embassies and consulates, to be published slowly but surely in the weeks and months ahead. Among them are allegations of corruption, cover-ups and secret collusion between US and UK officials; dirty tactics exposed on a grand scale. Politicians, diplomats and corporations across the world must now be trembling. Could they be next? As international reaction testifies, the repercussions of Cablegate are massive. Wikileaks is changing the world without invitation, and the political establishment does not approve. A global witch-hunt for Julian Assange, Wikileaks’ co-founder and figurehead, is now in full swing. Assange should be "hunted" and "executed" say prominent American politicians, who want him extradited and charged under the country’s 1917 Espionage Act, a law introduced to combat socialists and pacifists during the Red Scare. “Obama should put out a contract [to have Assange assassinated] and maybe use a drone or something,” said Professor Tom Flanagan, a former advisor to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. While in France, the birthplace of the Enlightenment, Wikileaks was described as a “threat to democracy”. Even David Cameron, a devout convert to the church of “A New Politics”, has strongly condemned Wikileaks for their hand in Cablegate. “We condemn the unauthorised release of classified information," his spokesman said on Monday. “Governments need to be able to operate on a confidential basis when dealing with this kind of information.” Yet it was only 10 months ago, in February, that Cameron stood before an audience and proclaimed his commitment to open government and transparency. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” he said at the time. In February, though, Cameron was not Prime Minister. He was still masquerading as a fresh faced candidate for change – a new alternative to the ugly political past. He could afford to pontificate about wild things like “open government” and “transparency” because there was no way to test him on it. He could tell the public what they wanted to hear, and then backtrack from his position once in government – the oldest trick in the book. His Cablegate position confirms this is indeed what he has done, quite blatantly, on the principle of “transparency”. So far Cameron’s strategy on Cablegate has been one of avoidance and denial. "We are not going to get drawn into the detail of the documents," said his spokesman. The Prime Minister was instead in Zurich yesterday alongside David Beckham and Prince William, making a failed bid to host the World Cup in 2018. But he cannot evade the encroaching reality of this exposé for much longer. According to the cables released so far, British officials not only promised to protect US interests during the Iraq inquiry, but also made a deal with the US to allow the country to keep cluster bombs in the UK despite the ban on the munitions signed by Gordon Brown. The cluster bombs issue, it is said, was deliberately concealed from parliament and was approved by then Foreign Secretary David Miliband. Clearly this raises serious questions about what appears to be a festering culture of backroom democracy across the western world, in which Britain is complicit. Diplomatic secrecy, as critics of Wikileaks argue, may well be in some cases entirely justified and necessary – however not if it means nurturing what Assange himself describes as the “corruption of governance". The central problem, it seems, is that this “corruption of governance” runs so deep. It is embedded within the very DNA of the political class and has been for generations, hence the high-level, across the board political resistance and opposition to the brand of total transparency advocated by Wikileaks. Yet as politicians and other powerful figures call for the head of Assange, in their haste they have forgotten he is merely the figurehead of the organisation. The human face of Wikileaks, he is bold, brave and deeply principled. His commitment and dedication to truth and justice should be applauded. But they could hang, draw and quarter Assange and Wikileaks would still survive – thrive, even. “You can kill a man but you can't kill an idea,” as the civil rights activist Medgar Evers once said. And an idea is precisely what Wikileaks has become. It is no longer simply a website – it is a pure expression of democratic ideals, a philosophy realised by the force of technology. The powerful may condemn and attempt to repress Wikileaks and all it represents, but the situation has long since spun far from their control. Facilitated by the internet, a new battleground has been established. All traditions now hang in the balance and all bets are off.

Let's be clear on a key technical matter: You don't have to be a spy to obtain such information. Sometimes looking at things that aren't secret tells you where to find the secret. (That's how the real spies usually work.) Sometimes the information is simply left, by mistake, where someone can grab it. And very often, someone gives it to you.

No one seems to be asking the question, but it is central to this firestorm: Why would someone - especially someone who works, say, for the government or a big bank - do such a thing? Why would they give away the secrets of the institutions they work for?

There are two main reasons that people talk: pride (“Yes, we can!”) and pain (“No, we can't”). Of the two, pain is by far the stronger motivator. You will tell your doctor things that you might not tell your best friend. And some people in our governments know the kind of things that can make you sick just thinking about them.

Why tell such things to a journalist? Because when you know a dirty secret, it eats you up. The only way to feel better is to tell someone, and the best cure is to tell someone who can tell the world. The dream is that telling the truth will put an end to the dirty secret, and we can go back to doing our jobs as if we believed in them.

This is the real secret that Wikileaks has so stunningly recalled to view: Some of the people in our own governments are so disgusted by what they must know, see and do to keep their jobs that they will tell someone else about it. They want certain ways of doing business to stop, and they don't believe that any other means can be effective.

But why did they go to Wikileaks instead of a newspaper in the first place? Because they lost confidence in the news media. It was not so long ago that when people were revolted by what they saw happening, they went to journalists. Now, people trust us so little that they give the news that matters to a website. The success of Wikileaks is a terrible comment on the news industry.

But it would be even worse for journalists if Wikileaks did not exist, because it is proving that if we do our jobs as we are supposed to, and listen to what people want to tell us, we can indeed make it much more difficult for certain things to continue, things that should never have happened in the first place.

Will we do that job even if we can be charged with espionage? I doubt it. And that is no doubt one of the forces driving the controversy over Wikileaks: If charges can be made to stick against Assange, they can be made to stick against any reporter who publishes similar news.

There is no doubt in my mind that a good number of the people screaming for Assange's head would like the news media either to go away, or to function as a docile servant of the powers that be. Of course a society can exist without watchdog media, and many do. But those are generally awful places to live, except for the people who own them.

If the government has secrets, let it try to keep them. Any adult understands that running an organization may require its leaders to lie from time to time. But the job and duty of journalists is to expose those lies and their consequences. Julian Assange has shown that one does not need to be a journalist to help. That does not make him a spy.

Hounding Assange and criminalizing whistleblowers will do far more damage to democracy than a pack of scribes and hackers ever could. You don't need to be a spy to guess that secret. The people screaming for Assange's blood are the architects and allies of disastrous policies that are being rejected even within the government. They are trying to conceal their failure, and Wikileaks is the proof that they failed. It must not be silenced, and journalists should be the first to know it.

Mark Lee Hunter is Adjunct Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the INSEAD Social Innovation Centre. He was a participant in openDemocracy's New News Seminar He is the author of Story-Based Inquiry: A Manual for Investigative Journalists (UNESCO 2009) and a founding member of the Global Investigative Journalism Network.


With us or Against us?

Read Johann Hari's commentary:

Every one of us owes a debt to Julian Assange. Thanks to him, we now know that our governments are pursuing policies that place you and your family in considerably greater danger. Wikileaks has informed us they have secretly launched war on yet another Muslim country, sanctioned torture, kidnapped innocent people from the streets of free countries and intimidated the police into hushing it up, and covered up the killing of 15,000 civilians – five times the number killed on 9/11. Each one of these acts has increased the number of jihadis. We can only change these policies if we know about them – and Assange has given us the black-and-white proof. More

WHY WIKILEAKS IS A GOOD THING AGAIN?

While you were watching Fox:

WikiLeaks has revealed the National Socialist Movement's neo-nazi internal workings.

August 21st, 2009

http://boingboing.net/2009/08/21/wikileaks-publishes-1.html

While you were watching CNN:

WikiLeaks revealed allegations of U.S. troops abusing Iraqi prisoners even after Abu Ghraib.

October 23rd, 2010

http://www.iraqwarlogs.com/2010/10/23/secret-files-reveal-allegations-of-prisoner-abuse-by-american-troops-after-abu-ghrai/

WikiLeaks brought you:

Mission Accomplished The WikiLeaks Iraq war logs have caused the UN to urge for a full U.S. torture investigation. November 16th, 2010 http://af.reuters.com/article/zimbabweNews/idAFLDE6AF1DR20101116

While you were watching ABC:

WikiLeaks uncovered the truth behind Iceland's 2009 financial crisis, bringing many corrupt managers to justice.

August 1st, 2009

http://icelandweatherreport.com/2009/08/kaupthings-loan-book-exposed-and-an-injunction-ordered-against-ruv.html

While you were reading the New York Times:

It's all about Freedom WikiLeaks has revealed how U.S. soldiers used Iraqi civilians as human bomb detectors. October 23rd, 2010 http://www.iraqwarlogs.com/2010/10/23/human-bomb-detectors/

While you were reading the London Times:

WikiLeaks has convinced the European Parliament to form a transatlantic inquiry into torture cases in Iraq.

November 11th, 2010

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=IM-PRESS&reference=20101110IPR93910&format=XML&language=EN

Information Who cares?

WikiLeaks released a video showing a U.S. army helicopter slaughtering Reuters journalists and Iraqi children in cold blood.

April 3rd, 2010

http://youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0

Who cares about Numbers

WikiLeaks exposed hidden logs of the Afghanistan war showing high rates of civilian casualties and other facts previously denied by the US.

July 28th, 2010

http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/wikileaks-reveals-more-state-secrets-afghan-war-diary-992

WikiLeaks revealed more than 15,000 civilian deaths in Iraq that had previously been concealed by the U.S. government.

October 23rd, 2010

http://www.iraqwarlogs.com/2010/10/23/iraqs-bloodbath/

So what else is new?

WikiLeaks has revealed hundreds of significant Afghanistan war incidents that were hidden by the U.S. government.

July 25th, 2010

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/datablog/interactive/2010/jul/25/afghanistan-war-logs-events

Another Mission Accomplished WikiLeaks has released the most comprehensive and detailed account of any war ever to have entered the public record. October 26th, 2010 http://blog.amnestyusa.org/us/failed-accountability-wikileaks-show-true-cost-of-war/

WikiLeaks revealed the previously unreported deaths of four Canadian soldiers at the hands of U.S. friendly fire in Afghanistan.

July 27th, 2010

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/07/27/hillier-wikileaks-friendly-fire-allegation.html

WikiLeaks exposed how the U.S. pressured Spain to drop the case of a cameraman that was killed in a 2003 attack on journalists in Baghdad.

December 1st, 2010

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/12/1/us_pressured_spain_to_drop_case

WikiLeaks revealed how the CIA kidnapped an innocent German and tortured him for months, then attempting to stop Germany from arresting its operatives.

December 1st, 2010

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/12/01/wikileaks-and-the-el.html

WikiLeaks revealed how the CIA kidnapped an innocent German and tortured him for months, then attempting to stop Germany from arresting its operatives.

December 1st, 2010

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/12/01/wikileaks-and-the-el.html

WikiLeaks has shown how U.S. troops repeatedly failed to detail civilian deaths in Iraq, even in large-scale seiges.

October 22nd, 2010

http://www.iraqwarlogs.com/2010/10/22/us-troops-fail-to-record-civilian-deaths-in-one-of-iraqs-biggest-battles/

WikiLeaks has revealed illegal government wiretapping in Canada.

August 6th, 2010

http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2010/08/wikileaks-canadas-unauthorized-wiretaps.html

WikiLeaks showed how the Obama administration handed over Iraqi detainees despite reports of torture.

October 23rd, 2010

http://www.iraqwarlogs.com/2010/10/23/obama-administration-handed-over-detainees/

WikiLeaks exposed a U.S. chopper that slaughtered surrendering Iraqis after ruling that surrendering to a helicopter was "illegal".

October 23rd, 2010

http://www.iraqwarlogs.com/2010/10/23/us-commits-%E2%80%9Cwar-crime%E2%80%9D-as-apache-helicopter-cleared-to-gun-surrendering-insurgents/

WikiLeaks revealed how the CIA and Hillary Clinton ordered U.S. diplomats to spy on UN leadership, even collecting DNA data.

December 2nd, 2010

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/02/wikileaks-cables-cia-united-nations

WikiLeaks clarified the terms of operation at Guantanamo Bay, one of the most controversial detention centers in the world.

November 14th, 2007

http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/11/gitmo

WikiLeaks has demonstrated how Australia, Finland and Denmark are using child pornography as an excuse to censor legitimate websites.

June 29th, 2009

http://cyberlaw.org.uk/2009/06/29/wikileaks-italian-secret-internet-censorship-list-287-site-subset-21-jun-2009/

WikiLeaks ended the corrupt rule of the Arap-Moi family in Kenya.

July 26th, 2010

http://habarizanyumbani.jambonewspot.com/2010/07/26/wikileaks-founder-on-kenya-corruption-and-more/

WikiLeaks exposed Scientology, a religion that scams its followers into a delusional set of beliefs in exchange for their money.

March 11th, 2008

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/11/2348242

WikiLeaks released Thailand's classified Internet censorship list.

December 21st, 2008

http://wikileaks.info/wiki/1,203_new_websites_censored_by_Thailand/index.htm

WikiLeaks showed how the U.S. tried to thwart Spanish probes into Gitmo torture and CIA 'extraordinary rendition' cases.

December 1st, 2010

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/12/1/wikileaks_cables_reveal_us_tried_to

What else?

WikiLeaks exposed 217 cases of UN peace-keepers being accused of sexually abusing and impregnating girls in eastern Congo.

January 14th, 2009

http://mirror.wikileaks.info/wiki/UN_finds_217_sex_abuse_claims_against_blue_helmets/index.html

WikiLeaks detailed December 2006, the bloodiest month in Iraq's war, with 103 civilians dying every day.

October 15th, 2010

http://www.iraqwarlogs.com/2010/10/15/bloodiest-month/

etc ... etc ...


But most important of all:

Mission Accomplished WikiLeaks has never exposed a source and has provided lawyers and financial backing for the trial of alleged whistleblower Bradley Manning. October 19th, 2010 http://thelinknewspaper.ca/article/517

Uncle Sam (israel's bitch), the world's Bully has been exposed. period. Labeling Wikileaks a 'terrorist organisation' is as ridiculous as prosecuting Assange for espionage.

Julian Assange is spending his second night in a 600 year-old dump cell without heating whilst some "talking Heads" are busy calling him names. The question to ask now is: will they break him? The answer?

You have NO excuse not to fight for your freedom, any way you personally deem appropriate.

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