Cable Cooking and the War on Assange » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

The latest chapter in the quest for open government finds our embattled knight holed up within the grey brick Georgian walls of Ellingham Hall while the dark forces outside attempt a disorderly checkmate. The British courts have long debated whether to pack Julian Assange off to the star spangled torture chambers of Guantanamo, but have finally settled on simply extraditing him to the man-eating Nordic Amazons of Sweden, pending appeal. Meanwhile the chessboard has become crowded with ex-employees, ex-lovers, and ex-friends who compete among themselves to cast mud upon his memory. The same newspapers he enriched with headline stories gleefully prepare his epitaph, for no good deed goes unpunished among the masters of discourse. This is a very lonely time for our trusting hero, as yesterday’s oaths are traded for cold cash, and intimate confidences are betrayed.
via counterpunch.org

Wikileaks: Kristinn Hrafnsson on Guardian, New York Times and Julian Assange | Crikey

Wikileaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson has savaged The Guardian and New York Times for attempting to rush the publication of WikiLeaks material, suggesting the issue contributed to the falling-out between the online whistleblower site and the doyens of the progressive mainstream media.

The Guardian and The New York Times were the key English-language vehicles for the release of both the Iraq and Afghanistan “war logs” and the initial tranche of diplomatic cables WikiLeaks continues to release via over 50 outlets around the world. However, relations between the newspapers and WikiLeaks soured and both outlets and their senior staff have since launched stories highly critical of Julian Assange. The New York Times has also been revealed to have allowed the State Department to veto and censor WikiLeaks material.

Hrafnsson told Crikey the relationship between WikiLeaks and the newspapers had been going sour from before the release of the Iraq War logs in October 2010. “[The Guardian] said they’d been promised exclusivity; Julian said, ‘no — that was only for the print media.’”

According to Hrafnsson, who is currently in Sydney to participate in tonight’s IQ2 debate, “Is Wikileaks a force for good?”, WikiLeaks had wanted to put back the release of Iraq material for a couple of weeks to finalise the redacting of documents. “We needed to postpone the release. That was met with great resistance and attempts to politically manoeuvre us. The Guardian was trying to claim that the New York Times would break ranks and go early and would not accept the postponement. It wasn’t true. We called their bluff.”

This is a significant revelation, because a standard criticism of WikiLeaks from its enemies within governments and the foreign policy establishment, and indeed from the mainstream media itself, is that the site was too eager to release material that may have placed people identified in the documents in danger.

The contrast has regularly been made with more “responsible” mainstream media, which would have vetted and redacted the material more carefully. The claim has been specifically disproven in relation to a cable that was alleged to have placed Morgan Tsvangirai in danger, but which was revealed to have been released by The Guardian before Wikileaks.

Nonetheless, Hrafnsson says, “no one has been harmed as a result of our releases as far as we know. That has been confirmed by the Pentagon and NATO officials in Afghanistan…Almost a year has passed and we’ve heard of no repercussions. It’s easily forgotten that we withheld one in five field reports from Afghanistan to minimise any harm.”

Hrafnsson noted that the New York Times’s willingness to allow the Obama Administration to control its release of material also applied to the Iraq war logs. “The Times was a little bit too willing to appease the administration with its release of the war logs.” WikiLeaks now does not promise exclusivity to anyone, but still has a “professional and positive” relationship with its German mainstream media partner Der Spiegel, its other original media partner.

“I was never expecting [The Guardian and NYT] to be grateful but they could have been more honourable,” Hrafnsson said. “It was clear to me last fall [that The Guardian] saw themselves as the central unit in all of this and in full control. When they realised we wanted some control over how things were carried out, we saw rising animosity from them, which is rather strange. We considered them media partners on an equal footing. The Guardian and the New York Times decided to see us as a source, primarily, and I’ve always thought that was odd because, in my opinion as a journalist, you have a duty to your sources and you have to respect and protect your source. They certainly weren’t doing that.”

The book by Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding, WikiLeaks, was “most interesting in what it leaves out about the saga,” according to Hrafnsson.

Hrafnsson admitted the decision by Paypal, Mastercard and Visa to refuse to process donations for WL “has affected our ability to grow and expand”, and the Bank of America has also banned direct transfers to WL (not surprisingly, as it has long been rumoured Wikileaks holds a cache of damaging Bank of America documents, although this now seems unlikely).

“We are a small robust organisation so we’ve been able to keep going but possibly at a slower pace than we would have wanted. We are not going to allow these powerful financial giants to stop us. We will ask volunteers to go into the street with buckets and collect change if necessary…We are surviving. We have some funds to work from.”

Hrafnsson also rejects claims — usually aired by the foreign policy establishment — that diplomatic cable releases have made governments more secretive. “The sky hasn’t fallen in. People are still interacting — perhaps on a more open and honest basis than before.” He notes Robert Gates’s recent condemnation of European NATO partners for not playing a big enough role in Afghanistan and other conflicts.

Hrafnsson feels it is more rewarding working for WikiLeaks than the mainstream media. “It has changed the way I perceive journalism. I think it’s a terribly important addition to the world of journalism and will strengthen journalism in the long run. The aim of journalism is to unearth a fact and, of course, to have an impact. WikiLeaks has certainly had an impact.”

via crikey.com.au

WikiLeaks Cables Detail Qaddafi Family’s Exploits

In the newspaper he controlled, Seif indignantly denied the report — the big spender, he said, was his brother, Muatassim, Libya’s national security adviser, according to an American diplomatic cable from the capital, Tripoli.

It was Muatassim, too, the cable said, who had demanded $1.2 billion in 2008 from the chairman of Libya’s national oil corporation, reportedly to establish his own militia. That would let him keep up with yet another brother, Khamis, commander of a special-forces group that “effectively serves as a regime protection unit.”

As the Qaddafi clan conducts a bloody struggle to hold onto power in Libya, cables obtained by WikiLeaks offer a vivid account of the lavish spending, rampant nepotism and bitter rivalries that have defined what a 2006 cable called “Qadhafi Incorporated,” using the State Department’s preference from the multiple spellings for Libya’s troubled first family.

The glimpses of the clan’s antics in recent years that have reached Libyans despite Col. Qaddafi’s tight control of the media have added to the public anger now boiling over. And the tensions between siblings could emerge as a factor in the chaos in the oil-rich African country.

Though the Qaddafi children are described as jockeying for position as their father ages — three sons fought to profit from a new Coca-Cola franchise — they have been well taken care of, cables say. “All of the Qaddafi children and favorites are supposed to have income streams from the National Oil Company and oil service subsidiaries,” one cable from 2006 says.

A year ago, a cable reported that proliferating scandals had sent the clan into a “tailspin” and “provided local observers with enough dirt for a Libyan soap opera.” Muatassim had repeated his St. Barts New Year’s fest, this time hiring the pop singers Beyoncé and Usher. An unnamed “local political observer” in Tripoli told American diplomats that Muatassim’s “carousing and extravagance angered some locals, who viewed his activities as impious and embarrassing to the nation.”

Another brother, Hannibal, meanwhile, had fled London after being accused of physically abusing his wife, Aline, and after the intervention of a Qaddafi daughter, Ayesha, who traveled to London despite being “many months pregnant,” the cable reported. Ayesha, along with Col. Qaddafi’s second wife, Safiya, the mother of six of his eight children, “advised Aline to report to the police that she had been hurt in an ‘accident,’ and not to mention anything about abuse,” the cable said.

Amid his siblings’ shenanigans, Seif, the president’s second-eldest son, had been “opportunely disengaged from local affairs,” spending the holidays hunting in New Zealand. His philanthropy, the Qaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation, had sent hundreds of tons of aid to earthquake-ravaged Haiti, and he was seen as a reasonable prospect to succeed his father.

The same 2010 cable said young Libyan contacts had reported that Seif al-Islam is the ‘hope’ of ‘Libya al-Ghad’ (Libya of tomorrow), with men in their twenties saying that they aspire to be like Seif and think he is the right person to run the country. They describe him as educated, cultured, and someone who wants a better future for Libya,” by contrast with his brothers, the cable said.

That was then. Today the young protesters on the streets are demanding the ouster of the entire family, and it was Seif el-Qaddafi who declared on television at 1 a.m. Monday that Libya faced civil war and “rivers of blood” if the people did not rally around his father.

As for the 68-year-old Colonel Qaddafi, the cables provide an arresting portrait, describing him as a hypochondriac who fears flying over water and often fasts on Mondays and Thursdays. The cables said he was an avid fan of horse racing and flamenco dancing who once added “King of Culture” to the long list of titles he had awarded himself. The memos also said he was accompanied everywhere by a “voluptuous blonde,” the senior member of his posse of Ukrainian nurses.

After Colonel Qaddafi abandoned his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction in 2003, many American officials praised his cooperation. Visiting with a congressional delegation in 2009, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Independent of Connecticut told the leader and his party-loving national security adviser, Muatassim, that Libya was “an important ally in the war on terrorism, noting that common enemies sometimes make better friends.”

Before Condoleezza Rice visited Libya in 2008 — the first secretary of state to do so since 1953 — the embassy in Tripoli sought to accentuate the positive. True, Colonel Qaddafi was “notoriously mercurial” and “avoids making eye contact,” the cable warned Ms. Rice, and “there may be long, uncomfortable periods of silence.” But he was “a voracious consumer of news,” the cable added, who had such distinctive ideas as resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a single new state called “Isratine.”

“A self-styled intellectual and philosopher,” the cable told Ms. Rice, “he has been eagerly anticipating for several years the opportunity to share with you his views on global affairs.”

Andrew W. Lehren contributed reporting from New York.

via nytimes.com

Who Is Silencing Bank Whistle Blowers? - Reporting Wrongdoing

Ever wonder why we don’t hear from bank whistle blowers given all the fraud in the banking and mortgage industries?  Bank whistle blowers are being silenced.  See:  Who Is Silencing Bank Whistle Blowers?pdf

How Is It Done? - The New York Times reports  Bank of America hired Booze, Allen, Hamilton - one of our nation’s largest National Security contractors - to guide them in response to possible Wikileaks disclosures.

Large National Security contractors often supply personnel to to multiple federal agencies and advise policy makers at high levels. Contractors can commit crimes, cover them up and get complicity from law enforcement agencies.  GolfShadow-01_1186974-w

For individual bank whistle blowers, the deals may be cut on the back nine of our country’s most exclusive golf clubs. 

An executive at one of these National Security contractors wants a half point cut on his mortgage or personal line of credit, the bank executive has “a problem they want contained.” 

A Deal Is Cut, The Whistle Blower Is Silenced:

The whistle blower’s telephone and email are monitored, disrupted and corrupted. Their employment opportunities and livelihood are eliminated.  They are targeted for harassment, vandalism and a stalk and smear campaign.  The whistle blower may  become a training target for the contractor’s covert operators.

What’s happening to whistle blowers now can easily be used against competitors, political opponents, dissidents and other annoying undesirables. 

It can happen to you as well as to me.

Email and PowerPoint presentations from National Security contractor HBGary released by Anonymous show plans to harass Chamber of Commerce critics and Wikileaks supporters.  Google:  HBGary Anonymous for details.

This supports our assertions that the reason we don’t hear from bank whistle blowers is that companies like HBGary silence them.

Help Stop It Before It Hurts You Or Someone You Love.

Photograph from Dreamstime

via reportingwrongdoing.com

Biting the source that feeds you - Other Views

It’s the climax of the 1975 hit Three Days of the Condor. On a Manhattan sidewalk fugitive CIA analyst Robert Redford, having outgunned his assassins, confronts his double-dealing boss, who demands he join the sinister plot to control the world’s oil. No way, Redford says, he’s already blown the whistle. And the camera pans across the street where a truckload of newsprint is being delivered – to The New York Times. Game over.

Ahh, Hollywood. But what really happens when you’re a major league whistleblower? Say you’ve acquired sensitive documents of huge public importance, very hush-hush. Although it’s bound to annoy powerful people and may expose you to reprisal, you deliver them to the world’s mightiest news media, including The New York Times, which use them in sensational articles that have worldwide impact.

The Condor’s triumphant fourth day? Well, no. Sure you’ve handed over official secrets of global significance at considerable personal risk. That’s not enough. You’ve also got to be charming. Make sure your clothes are laundered and wrinkle-free. You may be living out of a backpack and pulling impossible hours culling data, but don’t forget to bathe regularly. And even if one of the organizations you’ve given this material to violates the conditions you set, don’t you dare get angry.

And know this: That every conversation you have with the reporters you’re working with, every snarky comment they make about you, every detail of your collaboration, may be used in a high-profile account of the whole affair that will portray you as a peevish, contemptuous, slouching, disheveled, foul-smelling, paranoid, self-serving, manipulative, volatile ideologue.

Those descriptors come more or less verbatim from the remarkable cover story by The New York Times’ top editor, Bill Keller, in the newspaper’s Jan. 30 Sunday magazine, titled “The Boy Who Kicked the Hornet’s [sic] Nest.” It is Keller’s 8,000-word version of his newspaper’s dealings with Julian Assange, the 39-year-old Australian-born founder of Wikileaks, the worldwide online anti-secrecy network that last year provided The Times and other leading newspapers with a vast and extraordinarily rich trove of classified U.S. government documents.

Keller’s account is adapted from his introduction to a book the Times is publishing that reprints the stories that the newspaper published from Wikileaks’ material, which Keller acknowledges was of “immense value.” Hence, first the Times got a series of exceptional stories about frontline military and diplomatic realities, and now it’s republishing those stories as a book that, no doubt, is destined for The Times’ best-seller lists.

So you’d have to say that Assange, on balance, has done well by the Times. He provided it with solid information, nothing spun, nothing fraudulent – its authenticity never, to my knowledge, even challenged – and he gave the Times plenty of time, as well as the editorial discretion, to use the material in whatever ways it deemed appropriate.

So why is Keller’s account so nasty? E-mails he received from reporters who worked closely with Assange – did they know they were writing for publication? – are quoted describing Assange “like a bag lady walking in off the street … He smelled as if he hadn’t bathed in days.” Assange’s hours of unpaid labor are brushed by, yet when he’s angered after The Guardian of London, his principal media conduit, enlisted The Times for a later phase of the project despite Assange’s clear instructions to the contrary, he’s described as having “a tantrum.” Time and again he’s described with such terms as “arrogant, thin-spinned, conspiratorial,” as given to “bombast and dark conspiracy theories.”

What gives? Since when is an honest source pilloried? You would have thought Assange had deceived the paper, like the trusted U.S. officials who in 2002 fed The Times garbage about an Iraqi nuclear program and helped dupe the United States into a murderous and needless war. When will a top Times editor publish an account that even names those sources, let alone belittles them for their wardrobes?

The Times let those lying dogs sleep, yet Keller, a journalist of unimpeachable accomplishment and stature, just had to trash a guy whose organization has struck the most powerful blow against official secrecy in a generation, somebody who may yet be jailed for what he did, an eccentric but unquestionably transformational media player.

Perhaps Keller’s institutional vanity was offended that Assange had suggested he was “the great puppet master of the news media”– an assertion never actually tied to Assange, but which the Times thought worth highlighting graphically in Keller’s story.

Maybe that explains Keller’s eagerness to distance his organization from Wikileaks: They’re not like us. We’re careful and professional (and well-coiffed)? Perhaps it’s nothing more profound than rivalry.

After all, at the end of Three Days of the Condor, it’s Redford’s renegade boss who gets the last word: “How do you know they’ll print it?” Redford has no answer. Nowadays, he wouldn’t need one. We’d be reading the Condor’s files on Wikileaks.

via miamiherald.com

Cables Expose U.S. Dealings With Egypt - WikiLeaks Archive

In fact, a confidential diplomatic cable signed by the American ambassador to Egypt, Margaret Scobey, advised Mrs. Clinton to avoid even mentioning the name of the man, Ayman Nour, even though his imprisonment in 2005 had been condemned worldwide, not least by the Bush administration.

The cable is among a trove of dispatches made public by the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks that paint a vivid picture of the delicate dealings between the United States and Egypt, its staunchest Arab ally. They show in detail how diplomats repeatedly raised concerns with Egyptian officials about jailed dissidents and bloggers, and kept tabs on reports of torture by the police.

But they also reveal that relations with Mr. Mubarak warmed up because President Obama played down the public “name and shame” approach of the Bush administration. A cable prepared for a visit by Gen. David H. Petraeus in 2009 said the United States, while blunt in private, now avoided “the public confrontations that had become routine over the past several years.”

This balancing of private pressure with strong public support for Mr. Mubarak has become increasingly tenuous in recent days. Throngs of angry Egyptians have taken to the streets and the White House, worried about being identified with a reviled regime, has challenged the president publicly.

On Thursday, Mr. Obama praised Mr. Mubarak as a partner but said he needed to undertake political and economic reforms. In an interview posted on YouTube, Mr. Obama said neither the police nor the protesters should resort to violence. “It is very important,” he added, “that people have mechanisms in order to express legitimate grievances.”

It is not known what Mrs. Clinton said to Mr. Mubarak in their first meeting, at the Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheik. But she set the public tone afterward, when she was asked by an Arab television journalist about a State Department report critical of Egypt’s human rights record.

“We hope that it will be taken in the spirit in which it is offered, that we all have room for improvement,” Mrs. Clinton said, adding that Mr. Mubarak and his wife, Suzanne, were friends of her family, and that it was up to the Egyptian people to decide the president’s future.

The cables, which cover the first year of the Obama presidency, leave little doubt about how valuable an ally Mr. Mubarak has been, detailing how he backed the United States in its confrontation with Iran, played mediator between Israel and the Palestinians and supported Iraq’s fledgling government, despite his opposition to the American-led war.

Privately, Ambassador Scobey pressed Egypt’s interior minister to free three bloggers, as well as a Coptic priest who performed a wedding for a Christian convert, according to one of her cables to Washington. She also asked that three American pro-democracy groups be granted formal permission to operate in the country, a request the Egyptians rejected.

However effusive the Americans were about Mr. Mubarak in public, the cables offered a less flattering picture of Egypt’s first lady, Suzanne Mubarak. During a visit to the Sinai, one reported, she commandeered a bus that had been bought with money from the United States Agency for International Development and that had been meant to carry children to school.

Egyptian state security was concerned enough about American activities in Sinai, according to another cable, that it surreptitiously recorded a meeting between diplomats and members of a local council.

Yet many more of the cables describe collaboration between the United States and Egypt. In her 2009 visit, Mrs. Clinton was trying to revive the moribund peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. Mr. Mubarak was central to this: the cables detail his efforts to broker a cease-fire between Israelis and the militant group Hamas in Gaza, as well as American pressure on him to curb the smuggling of weapons to Hamas from Egypt through tunnels.

Mrs. Clinton was also laying out Mr. Obama’s rationale for engaging Iran — an overture, the cables report, that Mr. Mubarak predicted would fail. A May 2009 cable before Mr. Mubarak’s first visit to the Obama White House noted that Egyptian officials told a visiting American diplomat, Dennis B. Ross, that “we should prepare for confrontation through isolation.”

Like other Arab leaders, Mr. Mubarak is depicted in the cables as obsessed with Iran, which he told American diplomats was extending its tentacles from “the Gulf to Morocco” through proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah. He views these groups — particularly Hamas, a “brother” of Egypt’s banned Muslim Brotherhood — as a direct threat to his own rule.

In a meeting with General Petraeus on June 29, 2009, Mr. Mubarak said the Iranian government wanted to establish “pockets” of influence inside Egypt, according to a cable. General Petraeus told him the United States was responding to similar fears among Persian Gulf states by deploying more Patriot missiles and upgrading its F-16 fighter jets stationed in the region.

Despite obvious American sympathy for Mr. Mubarak’s security concerns, there is little evidence that the diplomats believed the president, now 82, was at risk of losing his grip on power. The May 2009 cable noted that riots over bread prices had broken out in Egypt in 2008 for the first time since 1977. And it said the growing influence of the Muslim Brotherhood had prompted the government to resort to “heavy-handed tactics against individuals and groups.”

via nytimes.com

New York Times, Al-Jazeera Do An End-Run Around WikiLeaks: Tech News and Analysis «

The New York Times is considering creating an electronic tip line so that leakers of classified documents can go direct instead of having to use a middleman like WikiLeaks, according to executive editor Bill Keller. Keller said the plan is still in its formative stages, but the idea is to create a “kind of EZPass lane for leakers,” to make it easier for them to contact the paper and deliver information. And the Times isn’t the only one doing this; Al-Jazeera has already launched its own drop-box for leaks called the Transparency Unit, and recently released thousands of documents related to the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

When WikiLeaks first burst into public view last summer with a treasure trove of secret documents about the war in Afghanistan, then followed that up with a classified video of an American military attack in Iraq, one of the first things some media-industry observers wondered was: why didn’t the sources of this material — widely believed to be Bradley Manning, a U.S. intelligence officer now in a military prison in Virginia — just go directly to a newspaper like the New York Times instead of leaking it to some shadowy organization like WikiLeaks? The Times probably wondered that too, which is why it’s not surprising to hear that the paper is working on its own digital tip line.

In some ways, it’s surprising that it has taken the Times and other entities like Al-Jazeera this long to come up with this idea. Media outlets have always relied on those with access to secret or confidential information — either about companies or about governments — to deliver material in brown envelopes that are dropped off at the front desk or handed over to people in parking garages, as the famous Watergate documents were in 1972. Doug Saunders, the European bureau chief for the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail compared WikiLeaks to a brown envelope when it first came to prominence, and said it was nothing more than a middleman, which to a large extent is true.

WikiLeaks’ leader Julian Assange

The key difference with WikiLeaks, however, is it’s also a publisher; it can instantly release whatever documents it wishes on its own website or dozens of other sites that it has relationships with, although so far it has only released the same documents that the New York Times and The Guardian and other media outlets have (with names of some individuals redacted to prevent them from being targeted). The main thing WikiLeaks gains by working with the NYT and other traditional media entities is a broader reach — in effect, publicity for the leaks, as Icelandic MP and early WikiLeaks supporter Birgitta Jonsdottir explained in a recent speech in Toronto.

So will more leakers go direct to either the New York Times or Al-Jazeera? Possibly. But the one thing sources gain by going through WikiLeaks instead of a specific media outlet is the knowledge that they aren’t relying on one entity’s view of the documents — in other words, that the New York Times doesn’t control what gets released or what gets written about and how, since WikiLeaks typically works with several competing organizations at once. For anyone who remembers how the Times behaved when it was reporting about the issues leading up to the Iraq War, that could be a very powerful incentive to use WikiLeaks rather than going direct.

But WikiLeaks is about to get some more competition on that front as well: a new organization called OpenLeaks, set up by former WikiLeaks staffer Daniel Domscheit-Berg, is expected to launch soon with a much more distributed model that was developed in part as a response to criticism about WikiLeaks and the behavior of front-man Julian Assange. For better or worse, the organization appears to have opened a Pandora’s box when it comes to political transparency that may never be closed.

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