NBC

"U.S. military officials tell NBC News that investigators have been unable to make any direct connection between a jailed army private suspected with leaking secret documents and Julian Assange, founder of the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.

The officials say that while investigators have determined that Manning had allegedly unlawfully downloaded tens of thousands of documents onto his own computer and passed them to an unauthorized person, there is apparently no evidence he passed the files directly to Assange, or had any direct contact with the controversial WikiLeaks figure.

WikiLeaks' release of secret diplomatic cables last year caused a diplomatic stir and laid bare some of the most sensitive U.S. dealings with governments around the world. It also prompted an American effort to stifle WikiLeaks by pressuring financial institutions to cut off the flow of money to the organization.

U.S. Attorney General Eric holder has said his department is also considering whether it can prosecute the release of information under the Espionage Act.

WikiLeaks: Iran has cleared major hurdle to nuclear weapons

[propaganda alert]

compiled by Cem Ertür

21 January 2011

Somebody would have talked huh? — SnowCrash

Military staffer knew about attacks: report

The Local, December 12, 2010
Cached version

A Swedish Armed Forces (Försvarsmakten) employee warned an acquaintance to stay clear of an area in central Stockholm on Saturday where, several hours later, two explosions went off in what is being called a terrorist attack.

“If you can, avoid Drottninggatan today. A lot can happen there…just so you know,” the message said, according to the TT news agency.

Armed Forces spokesperson Jonas Svensson told TT on Sunday he was unaware of the message.

“I haven’t heard about this at all. Now I’m going to check out the information,” he told TT when confronted with the news.

Later the Swedish military said it was now “preparing how the issue will be dealt with”.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/exclusive-wikileaks-benefits-public-intelligence-officers/

By Nathan Diebenow
Thursday, December 9th, 2010

A Time Magazine 'Person of the Year' argues WikiLeaks serves the public good

A member of a group of former intelligence professionals that has rallied behind WikiLeaks suggested in a recent interview with Raw Story that the world would be a different and better place had the online secrets outlet come into existence years sooner.

“If there had been a mechanism like Wikileaks, 9/11 could have been prevented,” Coleen Rowley, a former special agent/legal counsel at the FBI's Minneapolis division, told Raw Story in an exclusive interview.

This is is the headline on CNN this morning: Is WikiLeaks engaged in 'cyber war'? source: http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovation/12/09/wikileaks.cyber.attacks/index.html?hpt=C1

Cyber war has been declared because of the wiki leaks.

There are some similarities between 911 and WLeaks:
1) Central 'bad guy' figure (Julian Assange vs Osama Bin Laden)
2) Incredible (ie not credible) lapse of US security for attack to take place (Lady Gaga CD vs. NORAD stand down)
3) Good excuse to take away liberties when no reason previously existed
4) Suspicious connections to the CIA (http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/assange-rape-accuser-cia-ties/ vs Al Qaeda in Afghanistan)

I've also read some stories on Alex Jones and CNN about attacks on PayPal and Mastercard. I'd guess it would take very skilled and organized people to accomplish such an attack so quickly. Again a government agency such as the CIA comes to mind.

Finally, it is a constitutional right to publish information obtained from a whistle blower and in fact in the US laws have been made to protect the source of the story.

Source: http://pakobserver.net/detailnews.asp?id=64803

WikiLeaks suggests 9/11 preplanned

Sultan M Hali

Of the virtual Tsunami released through the latest disclosure by WikiLeaks, the most dangerous is the revelation that United States officials in 1999 were pushing for a propaganda war, especially in Afghanistan and Pakistan, against Osama bin Laden before the deadly terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. “It is our impression that the USG (United States Government) is not doing as well as it might projecting public diplomacy on Osama Bin Laden (OBL),” adding, “We would like to suggest that Washington consider a review of this public diplomacy effort.” Cautioning that pending distribution of OBL “wanted” posters and matchbooks in Pakistan may increase OBL’s stature as a kind of folk hero”, the State Department cable dated January 26, 1999. Noted, “We frequently hear reports that some in the lower middle and lower classes, both urban and rural, consider OBL (Osama bin Laden) an ‘Islamic Hero’, because the US has named him ‘Public Enemy Number One’.” “That said it’s our impression that the majority of Muslims, at least in Pakistan, do not necessarily support this view,” it stressed.

by Jane Burgermeister
posted on Wednesday, December 1st, 2010 at 2:49 pm

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has won an award from the “Economist” magazine, a financial publication controlled by the Rothschild banking family, and he has also featured on an “Economist” video clip, raising questions about conflicts of interest. Assange predicted a bank run could be triggered by bank data leaks but he does not mention that this would result in the robbery of millions of people because of the way the fractional reserve banking system works, and profit the banks.

Is a false flag bank run hyped by the banker’s media and carried out by a Rothschild operative being planned to rob millions and to implement emergency laws?

Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder who plans to leak bank documents that will take down „one or two“ major banks according to Forbes, has won an award from the Economist, a magazine belonging to the Economist group, half of which is owned by the Financial times, a subsidiary of Pearson PLC. A group of independent shareholders, including many members of the staff and the Rothschild banking family of England.

Source: http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/opinion-zone/2010/11/real-problem-wikileaks-exposes

. . . but if what the Guardian is reporting is true and potentially 3 million people had access to this information, the only surprise is it took this long for someone to leak it.

(This is another very good example of the US government's ability to keep a secret.)

The real problem Wikileaks exposes

By Bruce McQuain
Created Nov 29 2010 - 7:48am

While it is certainly at least embarrassing and in many cases dangerous that US diplomatic cables have been leaked to the press, if one looks deeply enough, it is hardly surprising. The access granted by the US government to the cables which have been released in the past couple of days numbers into the millions of people.  That revelation makes it hard to imagine that the information wouldn't end up being leaked.

from BBC News

Whistle-blowing website Wikileaks says it has come under attack from a computer-hacking operation, ahead of a release of secret US documents.

"We are currently under a mass distributed denial of service attack," it said on its Twitter feed earlier.

It added that several newspapers will go ahead and publish the documents released to them by Wikileaks even if the site goes down.

The US state department has said the release will put many lives at risk.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has said the US authorities are afraid of being held to account.

Wikileaks has said the release of classified messages sent by US embassies will be bigger than past releases on Afghanistan and Iraq.

The newspapers set to publish details of the US embassy cables include Spain's El Pais, France's Le Monde, Germany's Speigel, the UK's Guardian and the New York Times.

The latest leak is expected to include documents covering US dealings and diplomats' confidential views of countries including Australia, Britain, Canada, Israel, Russia and Turkey.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/us_usa_iraq_leaks

Pentagon braces for huge WikiLeaks dump on Iraq war

By Phil Stewart Phil Stewart

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Pentagon said on Sunday it had a 120-member team prepared to review a massive leak of as many as 500,000 Iraq war documents, which are expected to be released by the WikiLeaks website sometime this month.

Frustrated investigators might have chosen to leak information that their superiors bottled up, perhaps averting the terrorism attacks.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-rowley-wikileaks-20101015,0,5616717.story

By Coleen Rowley and Bogdan Dzakovic
October 15, 2010

If WikiLeaks had been around in 2001, could the events of 9/11 have been prevented? The idea is worth considering.

The organization has drawn both high praise and searing criticism for its mission of publishing leaked documents without revealing their source, but we suspect the world hasn't yet fully seen its potential. Let us explain.

There were a lot of us in the run-up to Sept. 11 who had seen warning signs that something devastating might be in the planning stages. But we worked for ossified bureaucracies incapable of acting quickly and decisively. Lately, the two of us have been wondering how things might have been different if there had been a quick, confidential way to get information out.

The attacks of September 11 were a pretext to a war already under consideration, Gul said. "I think some of the neocons, who were very close to President [George W.] Bush, they wanted that he could embark on a universal adventure of Pax Americana, and they thought that the world was lying prostrate in front of them," he said. The 2001 terrorist attacks helped win the public support for the neocon plans, he said.

There was no legitimate reason for the United States to attack Afghanistan, Gul said, because the FBI had no solid evidence that Osama bin Laden was involved in the attacks on New York and Washington. "Why has not a single individual connected to 9/11 been caught in America so far, and why hasn't Osama bin Laden been charged?" With no evidence anyone in Afghanistan was involved, there is no way to legitimize the U.S. occupation, Gul said."

http://afghanistan.blogs.cnn.com/2010/08/06/ex-pakistan-spy-chief-afghanistan-war-lost-cause/
Ex-Pakistan spy chief: Afghanistan war 'lost cause'

By Michael Collins

"I'm constantly annoyed that people are distracted by false conspiracies such as 9/11, when all around we provide evidence of real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud." Julian Asange, Wikileaks, July 19 (Image right)

John Young was one of the co-founders of Wikileaks. He quickly left the organization in disagreement with some of its policies (CNET). Young was a natural choice for Wikileaks since he has operated a leak website, CRYPTOME, since 1996. His site just released two articles on July 31 attributed to Wikileaks' Julian Assange (me@i.1.org). The announcement read:

By Michael Collins

"So once again, and for the last time, we ask the question: How does this alter the prevailing conventional wisdom about the war?" Chris Floyd, Leaky Vessels: Wikileaks "Revelations" Will Comfort Warmongers, Confirm Conventional Wisdom, Empire Burlesque, July 26, 27

Wikileaks head honcho Julian Assange may be annoyed with the 911 Truth movement and all those conspiracy theories. But he may be appalled when he reads that one of the leading authors and researchers on imperialism and the Iraq war, Chris Floyd, has taken him to task for making much ado about nothing.

Floyd makes his case early on in the article, with maximum effect:

The latest wikileaks release appears to be directly targeted at Pakistan - at least that is the way it is being spun in the news.

Specifically they are saying that Pakistan is colluding with the Taliban.

The Pakistan connection was the top story on the BBC World News yesterday. Extraordinarily, the news presenter admitted that the US military may indeed welcome the release of this information!

The Pakistan Government is vehemently rejecting the accusations of supporting the Taliban. On the BBC the Pakistani government spokesperson said that the whole affair was an attempt to sabotage the US/Pakistan relationship. This comes at a time when the US is stepping up predator drone attacks against targets in Pakistan.