F. William Engdahl
Published: Dec. 10, 2010 – Rense.com
The story on the surface makes for a script for a new Oliver Stone Hollywood thriller. A 39-year old Australian hacker holds the President of the United States and his State Department hostage to a gigantic cyber “leak,” unless the President leaves Julian Assange and his Wikileaks free to release hundreds of thousands of pages of sensitive US Government memos. A closer look at the details, so far carefully leaked by the most ultra-establishment of international media such as the New York Times, reveals a clear agenda. That agenda coincidentally serves to buttress the agenda of US geopolitics around the world from Iran to Russia to North Korea. The Wikileaks is a big and dangerous US intelligence Con Job which will likely be used to police the Internet.
It is almost too perfectly-scripted to be true. A discontented 22-year old US Army soldier on duty in Baghdad, Bradley Manning, a low-grade US Army intelligence analyst, described as a loner, a gay in the military, a disgruntled “computer geek,” sifts through classified information at Forward Operating Base Hammer. He decides to secretly download US State Department email communications from the entire world over a period of eight months for hours a day, onto his blank CDs while pretending to be listening to Lady Gaga. In addition to diplomatic cables, Manning is believed to have provided WikiLeaks with helicopter gun camera video of an errant US attack in Baghdad on unarmed journalists, and with war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Manning then is supposed to have tracked down a notorious former US computer hacker to get his 250,000 pages of classified US State Department cables out in the Internet for the whole world to see. He allegedly told the US hacker that the documents he had contained “incredible, awful things that belonged in the public domain and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington, DC.” The hacker turned him in to US authorities so the story goes. Manning is now incommunicado since months in US military confinement so we cannot ask him, conveniently. The Pentagon routinely hires the best hackers to design their security systems.
Then the plot thickens. The 250,000 pages end up at the desk of Julian Assange, the 39-year-old Australian founder of a supposedly anti-establishment website with the cute name Wikileaks. Assange decides to selectively choose several of the world’s most ultra-establishment news media to exclusively handle the leaking job for him as he seems to be on the run from Interpol, not for leaking classified information, but for allegedly having consensual sex with two Swedish women who later decided it was rape.
He selects as exclusive newspapers to decide what is to be leaked the New York Times which did such service in promoting faked propaganda against Saddam that led to the Iraqi war, the London Guardian and Der Spiegel. Assange claims he had no time to sift through so many pages so handed them to the trusted editors of the establishment media for them to decide what should be released. Very “anti-establishment” that. The New York Times even assigned one of its top people, David E. Sanger, to control the release of the Wikileaks material. Sanger is no establishment outsider. He sits as a member of the elite Council on Foreign Relations as well as the Aspen Institute Strategy Group together with the likes of Condi Rice, former Defense Secretary William Perry, former CIA head John Deutch, former State Department Deputy Secretary and now World Bank head Robert Zoellick among others.
Indeed a strange choice of media for a person who claims to be anti-establishment. But then Assange also says he believes the US Government version of 9/11 and calls the Bilderberg Group a normal meeting of people, a very establishment view.
Not so secret cables
The latest sensational Wikileaks documents allegedly from the US State Department embassies around the world to Washington are definitely not as Hillary Clinton claimed “an attack on America’s foreign policy interests that have endangered innocent people.” And they do not amount to what the Italian foreign minister, called the “September 11 of world diplomacy.” The British government calls them a threat to national security and an aide to Canada’s Prime Minister calls on the CIA to assassinate Assange, as does kooky would-be US Presidential hopeful Sarah Palin.
Most important, the 250000 cables are not “top secret” as we might have thought. Between two and three million US Government employees are cleared to see this level of “secret” document, and some 500,000 people around the world have access to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRnet) where the cables were stored. Siprnet is not recommended for distribution of top-secret information. Only 6% or 15,000 pages of the documents have been classified as even secret, a level below top-secret. Another 40% were the lowest level, “confidential”, while the rest were unclassified. In brief, it was not all that secret.
Most of the revelations so far have been unspectacular. In Germany the revelations led to the removal of a prominent young FDP politician close to Guido Westerwelle who apparently liked to talk too much to his counterpart at the US Embassy. The revelations about Russian politics, that a US Embassy official refers to Putin and Medvedev as “Batman and Robin,” tells more about the cultural level of current US State Department personnel than it does about internal Russian politics.
But for anyone who has studied the craft of intelligence and of disinformation, a clear pattern emerges in the Wikileaks drama. The focus is put on select US geopolitical targets, appearing as Hillary Clinton put it “to justify US sanctions against Iran.” They claim North Korea with China’s granting of free passage to Korean ships despite US State Department pleas, send dangerous missiles to Iran. Saudi Arabia’s ailing King Abdullah reportedly called Iran’s President a Hitler.
Excuse to police the Internet?
What is emerging from all the sound and Wikileaks fury in Washington is that the entire scandal is serving to advance a long-standing Obama and Bush agenda of policing the until-now free Internet. Already the US Government has shut the Wikileaks server in the United States though no identifiable US law has been broken.
The process of policing the Web was well underway before the current leaks scandal. In 2009 Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller and Republican Olympia Snowe introduced the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (S.773). It would give the President unlimited power to disconnect private-sector computers from the internet. The bill “would allow the president to ‘declare a cyber-security emergency’ relating to ‘non-governmental’ computer networks and do what’s necessary to respond to the threat.” We can expect that now this controversial piece of legislation will get top priority when a new Republican House and the Senate convene in January.
The US Department of Homeland Security, an agency created in the political hysteria following 9/11 2001 that has been compared to the Gestapo, has already begun policing the Internet. They are quietly seizing and shutting down internet websites (web domains) without due process or a proper trial. DHS simply seizes web domains that it wants to and posts an ominous “Department of Justice” logo on the web site. See an example at http://torrent-finder.com. Over 75 websites were seized and shut in a recent week. Right now, their focus is websites that they claim “violate copyrights,” yet the torrent-finder.com website that was seized by DHS contained no copyrighted content whatsoever. It was merely a search engine website that linked to destinations where people could access copyrighted content. Step by careful step freedom of speech can be taken away. Then what?
BBCNews, Siprnet: Where the leaked cables came from, 29 November, 2010, accessed in http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11863618
Ken Dilanian, Inside job: Stolen diplomatic cables show U.S. challenge of stopping authorized users, Los Angeles Times, November 29, 2010, accessed in: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sc-dc-1130-hackers-20101129,0,6716809.story
Source: http://rense.com/general92/lks.htm
WikiLeaks Ushers in Era of 'Hacktivists'
Friday, 10 Dec 2010 11:17 AM
By Arnaud De Borchgrave
The WikiLeaks pandemic spread like wildfire around planet Earth triggering a new age of uncertainty, anxiety — and fear. Nothing was sacred or secret. The loose-lips-sink-ships mentality is spreading to the ether, or at least the Internet whose true dimensions are hard to grasp.
The Library of Congress contains 40 million volumes, 250 million manuscripts, 10,000 new items coming in every day — and 525 miles of shelf space. But moving through the Internet every day is several thousand LOCs.
Like the Y2K panic of 1999 about the year 2000, hysteria about 2012 is all over the Internet again, either Dec. 21 or 23, the former is the winter solstice and the latter is when the Mayan calendar ends.
With 2 billion people out of almost 7 billion in the world online and 4.2 billion cell phones — Masai warriors in Kenya have been photographed with spear in one hand and holding a phone to the ear with the other — it had all the earmarks of a global Tower of Babel.
"Hacktivists" are taking revenge against companies that cut ties with WikiLeaks amid mounting political pressure. The intelligence research group Maldon wrote that "even the website, which is fast becoming a test case for freedom of speech online, could not have anticipated the lengths to which anonymous friends would go to protect it."
Mobilizing tens of thousands of computers to one purpose isn't new. Spare computer capacity has long been used in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, also to unlock the human genome.
Now the same globe-girdling collective power has been mobilized for electronic activism. It also has bred the phenomenon of transnational journalists who have no known loyalties — and multiple targets. These range from multinational capitalist corporations to anything that stands in the way of their left-leaning agenda.
Hours after WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was detained in London, a group of electronic privateers disrupted networks of payment companies' websites, including MasterCard and Visa. Dubbed Operation Payback, its electronic guerrillas have a long history of online sabotage. They call themselves Anonymous and their Botnet, an online weapon of mass destruction, is made up of volunteers who relinquish control of their computers.
A denial-of-service attack is a standard electronic weapon that targets and overwhelms the site of a server. Thus, the Recording Association of America was targeted when it tried to suppress online piracy.
Now operating in the same global electronic league is the pro-al-Qaida caliphate that publishes the new magazine "Aspire," replete with instructions on how to build explosive devices and offering exciting trips with lots of adventure fighting for Allah in Yemen and Somalia.
These were the same ideas that led to the underpants bomber who almost blew up an airliner as it headed toward a landing in Detroit inward bound from Amsterdam. Or motivated the mercifully incompetent would-be Times Square bomber, now in prison for life. Maj. Nidal Hasan, a U.S. Army psychiatrist and devout Muslim, was proselytized online by a U.S.-born Yemeni cleric and is now charged with killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas.
Dubbed by his many anti-establishment admirers the "Scarlet Pimpernel of cyberspace," Assange is "uncompromising in his scrutiny of big business and big government," says the Maldon group.
The Australian-born Assange's parents met at an anti-Vietnam War demonstration and instilled in their son a sense of rebellion. They were on the move constantly as they operated a touring theater company, which led to 37 different schools for Julian. He left home at 17 and went on to study pure mathematics and physics at university.
An early convert to the Internet, it became his true passion, and he joined a computer underground group that hacked the e-mail accounts of the rich and influential to mine their secrets.
After publishing an expose on physicists who sold their research to military and intelligence agencies, reports Maldon, Assange went on to found WikiLeaks in 2007. The site describes itself as the "uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis" and has grown to be regarded as the most extensive and safest platform for whistleblowers to leak to.
One of Assange's major scoops was the publication last April of a secret video taken in 2007 of a U.S. helicopter attack in Iraq that killed a dozen civilians, including two unarmed Reuter's journalists.
In a major blast before Assange's arrest, WikiLeaks listed key infrastructure sites whose loss could critically impact the national security and public health of the United States, from bauxite mines in Guinea to snake-bite anti-venom manufacturing in Italy to a hydroelectric dam in Canada — all potential targets for terrorist attacks.
The U.S. political and economic scene is tailor-made for WikiLeakers' next attacks — with or without Assange. The progressive Paladin in the White House is no more. There are 15 million jobless and even more if one counts those whose benefits have run out and those who have stopped looking. There are several million of still vigorous over 50 who can see neither job nor retirement benefits for the rest of their lives.
And some companies, e.g., Great Lakes Integrated in Cleveland, plan to keep about 90 percent of its work force temporary — permanently. Nationwide there is a 25 percent increase in temporary employment. While companies save themselves a bundle, temps also tend to spend less in the general economy.
By prolonging tax cuts for the wealthy and the rest of the population, President Barack Obama lost the support of his liberal constituencies.
In open rebellion, congressional Democrats withheld support. Obama, they said, had embraced the signature domestic policy of Bush 43's presidency. But they also know it will be approved in the new Congress. Kicking cans down the road may be good politics — but it is disastrous financially and economically.
With China's still-growing mountain of U.S. treasuries, the United States currently owes China more than $1 trillion. The U.S. federal budget of $3.8 trillion has an estimated deficit of $1.5 trillion. And the national debt has just gone over $13 trillion — at the rate of $4.15 billion a day.
The latest global study of scholastic achievement shows the United States below average in math and no better than average in reading. China won hands down — in all categories. Time to bring China and Pakistan into an Afghan settlement? Long overdue. Word of mouth only. No WikiLeaks.
Source: Newsmax
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TIME MAGAZINE to name Julian Assange ‘MAN OF THE YEAR’
--> --> WikiLeaks… The Revolution has Begun!! <—<--
