Tag Archive for 'Wikileaks'

Wikileaks contributed to the Arab Spring?

Published on 7 July 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Julian Assange says it played a factor in the US being less able to back dictators in the region:

So, Cablegate as a whole caused these elites that prop each other up into region within the Arab speaking countries, and, within, between Europe and these countries and between the United States and these countries, to have to deal with their own political crises, and not spend time giving intelligence briefings on activists, or sending in, um, the SAS, or other support, and activists within Tunisia saw this, very quickly, I think they started to see an opportunity, and that information, uh, our site, a number of Wikileaks sites, were then immedietly, um, banned by the Tunisian government, Al Akbar was banned by the Tunisian government, a hacker attack was launched on Al Akbar, many had been launched at us but we had come to defend against them. Al Akbar was taken down, their whole newspaper was redirected to a Saudi sex site, believe it or not, there is such a thing as a Saudi sex site, and they rested it back through involvement to the foreign, the foreign ministry back in Lebanon, and then, what I believe to be state-based computer hackers, cause of the degree, the sophistication of the attack, came in and wiped out all of Al Akbar’s cable publishing efforts.

The betrayal of whistle-blower hero Bradley Manning

Published on 5 July 2011 in General. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

An interesting feature in New York magazine about the alleged leaker to Wikileaks of countless US documents. Manning is a hero because he saw American illegality in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond and wanted to act. Not remain silent. He was bullied in the US military as a gay man. A troubled soul who has changed the course of history, for the better.

This extract details his exchange with hacker Adrian Lamo, the man who eventually turned him into the authorities:

I wanted to talk to Lamo, and after I tracked him down online, he invited me to the Coliseum, a Long Island motor inn where he greeted me at the door of his small room. He wore a half-smile, quipped that he was staying until he exhausted his finances or died, and made a beeline for the bed—he was unsteady on his feet. And then he shut his eyes. And kept them shut for much of our three-hour conversation. He was articulate, even thoughtful, but didn’t seem entirely present. He often paused for 30-second intervals before speaking.

It was only when I asked about his life as a hacker that Lamo seemed to become fully engaged. “It is the one thing I get excited about,” he told me. Lamo is a high-school and college dropout, but as a hacker he thought of himself as a bold explorer of new worlds, a Columbus. His hacks were at once clever and incredibly dumb—and always sensational. “Why not go in and behave like a user and see what can be made to behave differently than expected?,” he explained. Lamo didn’t damage the systems he entered—“I didn’t want to be malicious”—but left behind a quirky signature, as if to say, “I could have hurt you.” At Yahoo News, he edited a couple of stories. Later, he hunkered down at a Kinko’s copy shop for 24 hours and, with nothing but his laptop, hacked so deep into MCI Worldcom’s computer system that he could have fired then-CEO Bernie Ebbers. “I was tempted,” Lamo told me—but he just took a screen shot.

Lamo’s hacks made him famous mostly because he ran to the press after each one. Unfortunately, the FBI turned out to be an avid reader of his press. In 2003, the govern­ment arrested him for busting into the New York Times’ computers—Lamo had added his name to the list of op-ed contributors and created several Nexis ­accounts, mainly to keep up with news of himself. At the time, Lamo was furious at the government. His arrest “strikes a blow against openness,” he said. Hackers rallied around him. As far as they were concerned, his only crime was “that of outsmarting you”—the government.

In the Coliseum Motor Inn, Lamo lit a cigarette, a Camel with a pellet of menthol in the filter, and sucked on it like a straw. Smoking seemed to make him wistful. “[WorldCom] is a long time ago now,” he told me.

Lamo’s life as a hacker had come to an end at 22, and with it, a part of him seemed to die. He’d been sentenced to house arrest rather than prison, but he told me, “I’ve been diagnosed with major depression that largely began after my clash with the FBI.” (Two weeks before Manning reached out, Lamo had been confined to a mental-health facility.)

If Lamo suffered, he didn’t let on to his public. Hacking was now out of the question, but arrest had enhanced his fame. Young admirers reached out to him, ­including, in 2007, a 17-year-old named Lauren Robinson. “I liked his ideals and such back then,” she told me. Within a year, they were married—Lamo was 26 at the time. At first the romance was exciting. Soon, though, reality set in, Robinson recalled. “We’d sit around on computers all day,” she complained. As she saw it, his main activity was tending “the Adrian Lamo persona,” which existed almost exclusively online. “Eighty-five percent of his time was on a computer,” she said. He refused to work for pay. “I won’t whore out my skills,” he told Robinson. His father paid their rent. In the real world, Lamo was barely hanging on. But as Robinson, now divorced, recalled, online his reputation was intact. “People kind of saw him as a hacker idol,” she said. Bradley Manning must have too.

It wasn’t even much of a hack, Manning told Lamo, according to the logs. The Army’s “infosec”—Manning used the military term for information security—was so sloppy that a lowly intel analyst could sift through the government’s most closely held secrets. “it was vulnerable as fuck,” he wrote to Lamo. Manning downloaded data onto a CD marked “Lady Gaga,” lip-syncing as he supposedly did his job: “pretty simple, and unglamorous,” he wrote. No one had ever taken note of him, and no one did now: “everyone just sat at their workstations … watching music ­videos / car chases / buildings exploding … and writing more stuff to CD/DVD.” Then, the government alleged, he fed it to WikiLeaks.

In their online conversations, Lamo wanted to know more and encouraged Manning any way he could. He flirted. The two exchanged photos, assuring one another of their “sexiness,” according to a person who read the unedited portions of the chat logs, sent each other emoticon hearts, and used endearments like “sweetie.”

But Lamo wasn’t Assange, offering Manning a part in a noble cause. Even as he flirted, Lamo contacted a friend connected with military counterintelligence. Lamo didn’t want to find himself on the wrong side of the FBI again. Also, as Lamo saw it, Manning posed a threat to the nation. Manning said he leaked hundreds of thousands of secret diplomatic cables: “holy fracking crap, 260,000 documents, do you think you could go through those and say they’re not going to cause any lives to be lost.”

Lamo, who soon started working with the authorities, led Manning on.

bradass87: “i think im in more potential heat than you ever were.”

“Not mandatorily,” Lamo reassured him.

Manning isn’t a classic whistle-blower. Disturbing information didn’t cross his desk, prodding him to act. Manning snooped—according to the timetable he proposed to Lamo, he’d been at it since almost the moment he arrived in Iraq. “i had always questioned how things worked, and investigated to find the truth,” he said. One of Manning’s first discoveries was a troubling 2007 video of an Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad. In the video, the viewer watches through the crosshairs of a .30-caliber gun—almost complicit—as the gunner killed two ­Reuters journalists, mistaking a Tele­photo lens for a weapon, and wounded two children. For Assange, the meaning of the video was clear, and to make his point he edited the video into a version he called “Collateral Murder.” It caused a worldwide scandal and overnight gave WikiLeaks, a tiny group of activists, credibility.

“What is your endgame?” Lamo asked Manning.

Manning didn’t have one. He’d started leaking as a way to protest the conduct of the war. The Apache helicopter killings were “wrong,” he wrote to Lamo. But soon he embraced a broader principle: Open the drawers. “information should be free,” he told Lamo, reciting the hacker mantra. According to the chat logs, Manning said he leaked Iraq and Afghan war logs, reports on Guantánamo prisoners, and a cache of diplomatic secrets. “explaining how the first world exploits the third, in detail, from an internal perspective,” Manning thought of himself as honorable, even heroic—“I guess I’m too idealistic,” he said. “i want people to see the truth … regardless of who they are … ­because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.” He hoped to provoke “worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms … if not … then we’re doomed as a species.” He added a personal coda: “i will officially give up on the society we have if nothing happens.”

Lamo played Manning, reassuring him while, in reality, he had nothing but disdain for him. When Lamo was arrested, he’d been offended by the government prosecution—“criminalizing curiosity,” he called it. Now he was offended by Manning. “He’s a traitor at best,” Lamo said. And, worse, a child. “He was almost eager to explain his leaks, current, past, and future. Like a kid showing off a new toy,” Lamo told me. He was disgusted by the way in which Manning conflated his own precious moral awakening with the future of U.S. diplomacy. The leaks could “compromise our ability to make the world a better place, which we do in a lot of ways,” Lamo later said.

Assange, Goodman and Žižek speak in UK about Wikileaks

Published on 4 July 2011 in General. 1 Comment Tags: .

Watch live streaming video from democracynow at livestream.com

Wikileaks suffers privatised censorship

Published on 29 June 2011 in General. 1 Comment Tags: , .

More here.

Wikileaks meets the Social Network via US State Department

Published on 28 June 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Of course the war against Libya is about securing oil

Published on 24 June 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

And yet most in the corporate press prattle about human rights and “humanitarian intervention”.

Yes, Gaddafi is a brute but that’s nothing new. “Saving civilians” is the catch-cry of those backing NATO action.

But a close examination of Wikileaks documents and more honest reporting shows that Libyan oil nationalism was deeply worrying Western governments and multinational oil companies.

Hence, a bombing was justified on spurious grounds. Medialens examines the evidence.

Understanding cyber warfare from the other side

Published on 17 June 2011 in General. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , .

The US is unsurprisingly worried about cyber attacks from hackers, Russia, China or even a friendly nation. The future of warfare may well be fought in a different space altogether.

But this report proves how unprepared America is for the inevitable attempts to understand its inner workings. The problem lies in how hackers are viewed. Is Wikileaks in the same category? Clearly not, but Washington’s counter-attack may be far too draconian for a supposed democracy:

The Pentagon is about to roll out an expanded effort to safeguard its contractors from hackers and is building a virtual firing range in cyberspace to test new technologies, according to officials familiar with the plans, as a recent wave of cyber attacks boosts concerns about U.S. vulnerability to digital warfare.

The twin efforts show how President Barack Obama’s administration is racing on multiple fronts to plug the holes in U.S. cyber defenses.

Notwithstanding the military’s efforts, however, the overall gap appears to be widening, as adversaries and criminals move faster than government and corporations, and technologies such as mobile applications for smart phones proliferate more rapidly than policymakers can respond, officials and analysts said.

A Reuters examination of American cyber readiness produced the following findings:

* Spin-offs of the malicious code dubbed “agent.btz” used to attack the military’s U.S. Central Command in 2008 are still roiling U.S. networks today. People inside and outside the U.S. government strongly suspect Russia was behind the attack, which was the most significant known breach of military networks.

* There are serious questions about the security of “cloud computing,” even as the U.S. government prepares to embrace that technology in a big way for its cost savings.

* The U.S. electrical grid and other critical nodes are still vulnerable to cyber attack, 13 years after then-President Bill Clinton declared that protecting critical infrastructure was a national priority.

* While some progress has been made in coordinating among government agencies with different missions, and across the public-private sector gap, much remains to be done.

* Government officials say one of the things they fear most is a so-called “zero-day attack,” exploiting a vulnerability unknown to the software developer until the strike hits.

That’s the technique that was used by the Stuxnet worm that snarled Iran’s enriched uranium-producing centrifuges last summer, and which many experts say may have been created by the United States or Israel. A mere 12 months later, would-be hackers can readily find digital tool kits for building Stuxnet-like weapons on the Internet, according to a private-sector expert who requested anonymity.

“We’re much better off (technologically) than we were a few years ago, but we have not kept pace with opponents,” said Jim Lewis, a cyber expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank. “The network is so deeply flawed that it can’t be secured.”

“IT’S LIKE AN INSECT INFESTATION”

In recent months hackers have broken into the SecurID tokens used by millions of people, targeting data from defense contractors Lockheed Martin, L3 and almost certainly others; launched a sophisticated strike on the International Monetary Fund; and breached digital barriers to grab account information from Sony, Google, Citigroup and a long list of others.

The latest high-profile victims were the public websites of the CIA and the U.S. Senate – whose committees are drafting legislation to improve coordination of cyber defenses.

Terabytes of data are flying out the door, and billions of dollars are lost in remediation costs and reputational harm, government and private security experts said in interviews. The head of the U.S. military’s Cyber Command, General Keith Alexander, has estimated that Pentagon computer systems are probed by would-be assailants 250,000 times each hour.

Some question and answers about responsibility of writers

Published on 16 June 2011 in General and Israel. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Following my essay in the latest edition of literary journal Overland on cultural boycotts, politics, Palestine and Sri Lanka, the magazine interviewed me on various matters:

Passionate and outspoken about Israel/Palestine, among other things, Antony Loewenstein is a freelance independent journalist based in Sydney. Author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution, he is a denizen of the Twittersphere. Antony speaks regularly at literary festivals around the world and his essay ‘Boycotts and Literary Festivals’ is published in the 203 edition of Overland.

What was your pathway to becoming a speaker at literary festivals?

I wrote a book and many festivals in Australia invited me. It was My Israel Question, first published in 2006, and told the story of a dissident Jew challenging Zionist power in the West and the realities of occupation for Palestinians. Many Jews hated it, smeared me and tried to shut down the debate. It was typical Zionist behaviour. Thankfully, they failed miserably, despite continuing to try, and even today literary festival directors tell me that the Zionist lobby still tries to pressure them to not invite me to speak on the Middle East, or anything really. This is what Zionism has done to my people, convince them that victimhood is a natural state of affairs and that honest discussion about Israel/Palestine is too threatening to be heard by non-Jews.

The audiences at my literary festival events, since the beginning, have been largely supportive of my stance – though I don’t just speak about Israel/Palestine, also Wikileaks, freedom of speech, web censorship and disaster capitalism – and curiously the strongest Zionist supporters of Israel rarely raise their voices at literary festivals. Instead, they’ll later go into print arguing that festivals were biased against Israel (as happened recently by the Zionist lobby in Australia, condemning my supposedly extremist views on Israel during the Sydney Writer’s Festival). As I say, victimhood comes so naturally to some Jews.

I often have mixed feelings about attending writers’ festivals. I rarely reject an invitation – and have been lucky to speak at events in Australia, India and Indonesia – but it’s often a cozy club that shuns controversy. I like to provoke, not merely for the sake of it, but I know the middle-class audience will not generally hear such thoughts in events about ‘the art of the novel’ or ‘where is the US in 2011?’ I guess if I wrote about knitting or frogs, it may be harder to stir debates.

What is the purpose of a literary festival?

It should be to entertain, challenge and dissect contemporary life. As books sell less in our societies, attendance at literary festivals has increased. People crave intelligent discussion. They generally aren’t receiving that in the corporate media. To see massive audiences in Sydney, Ubud or Jaipur sitting or standing to hear robust debates on the ways of the world can only be a good thing. But there is an important caveat. Do these events too often provide comfort for the listener, a warm glow about themselves and their existence and all-too-rarely tackle the real effects of, say, government policies or the civilian murders in our various wars in the Muslim world?

I argue for a far more politicised literary scene, where intellectuals aren’t so keen to be loved and embraced by an audience but the art of discomfort is raised as an art form. This is why I argue for boycotts in my Overland piece, relating to Palestine and Sri Lanka. Surely our responsibility as artists is not to kow-tow to the powerful but challenge them? And surely our duty is to make people think about the role of non-violent resistance to situations in which we in the West have a role? Literary festivals are a unique opportunity to capture a large audience and throw around some ideas, thoughts which may percolate. If a reader can digest this, still buy a book and ponder something they hadn’t pondered before, my job here is done.

Writer discomfort, to being feted at literary festivals, is my natural state of being. I welcome it.

As a writer, what inspires you?

Passion, direct action, living life in a way that doesn’t ignore the hypocrisy of our realities, lived experiences, detailed journalism, inspiring tales of heroism (that don’t involve women giving up everything and living in Italy for a few months) and voices that struggle to be heard. I’ve always seen my job as a writer as to highlight and brighten the silenced voices in our society. It may be a Tamil or Palestinian, somebody living under occupation or the worker of a multinational who gets shafted for simply doing her job. This may sound pompous or self-important but frankly most journalists say they believe these things but then spend most of their lives dying to be insulated within the power structures of society.

The recent debate in Sydney over Marrickville council embracing boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) over Israel was a rare example of government seeing injustice and trying to do something about it. The faux controversy concocted by the Murdoch press, Zionist lobby and Jewish establishment proved just how toxic the occupation of Palestinian lands has become. As a writer, I savoured the few brave individuals who stood up in the face of overwhelming bullying and spoke eloquently for Palestinian rights and real peace with justice in the Middle East. This position is not something that will be taught on a Zionist lobby trip to Israel (something undertaken by most politicians in Australia and many journalists) but real investigation. There are times, though, when I nearly despair, such as my recent visit to New York and attendance at the Celebrate Israel parade.

I think anger is an under-valued attribute in a good writer.

Where are you now, with your writing practice?

I know far more today than when I started my professional career in 2003. In some ways my anger is far more targeted and my writing has improved because of it. I’m pleased that both my current books, My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution, are currently being updated and translated in various countries around the world. I’m working on a book about the modern Left and another about disaster capitalism in Australia and the world. And that’s just for starters. I’m rather busy. I constantly struggle with the sheer volume of information that exists out there. The internet is a blessing and a curse. Taking time away from this device would be just lovely but I’m not too sure how to do it. Feeling connected as a writer is one of the most pleasing aspects of my job. From a schoolgirl who uses my work in her classes to an Iranian dissident who reaches out to raise the brutal nature of the Ahmadinejad regime.

Our society is infected with writers who seem to see their role as robots, spokespeople for a predictable cause, afraid to offend or provoke. Being on the road as a writer is a humbling experience, hearing people’s stories, but it can also be lonely. Being challenged on my positions, as I often am over an issue like Palestine, can (usually) only make my work better. The ignorance and cowardly behaviour of our media and political elites over such questions – Wikileaks, Palestine or refugee policies – is indicative of a wider societal malaise and sometimes I’m not surprised that I have so few friends in the media. It’s not a loss. Who wouldn’t want to breathlessly report on the latest press release by the Gillard government? Sigh.

If anything, I hope my Overland piece stimulates thought over the far-too-comfortable and insulated work of the literary and arts scenes in the West. Self-congratulatory back-slaps may feel good at the time but history ain’t being written by time-keepers.

Of course Wikileaks is a force for good in the world

Published on 11 June 2011 in General. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Stuart Rees, head of the Sydney Peace Foundation and presenter to Julian Assange of the Sydney Peace Medal recently, writes in today’s Sydney Morning Herald why Wikileaks matters:

The WikiLeaks revelations are a watershed in decades of struggles to unmask what really occurs in the conduct of powerful people and institutions, in governments, corporations and the military.

Julian Assange’s creativity, plus the courage and initiatives of whistleblowers, has made a significant contribution to the global understanding of democracy and the promotion of human rights. WikiLeaks cables have exposed corruption, demystified the activities of diplomats and emphasised the indispensability of freedom of speech. Its revelations have encouraged movements across the Middle East to resist oppression and to advocate universal human rights and democracy.

The controversy highlights a struggle between violent and non-violent philosophies and practices. Bogus claims about national security have been used for decades to conceal militaristic ways of thinking and acting, as shown in the 2007 video of murder from a helicopter over Baghdad. Emphasis on transparency in government, on holding governors accountable and on freedom of speech illustrates the non-violent alternatives in policy-making of all kinds.

Powerful people’s ”we must seek revenge” reaction to Assange and Private Bradley Manning, the US soldier due to be tried over the alleged leaking of US government secrets to WikiLeaks, shows the threat it poses to centuries-old assumptions about government: that only a few can comprehend the mysteries of Whitehall, Washington or Canberra or even of corporate boardrooms or the governing bodies of universities.

It looks as though powerful people – politicians, media commentators, senior managers – have been given a painful laxative that is having such an effect they’re running around crying that we’ll all suffer if they have to take the WikiLeaks potion again. On the contrary, all citizens, shareholders and students will benefit from a new transparency in governance. And there should be inestimable benefits for the powerful. If they’ve taken their WikiLeaks medicine, they should eventually get better.

Once they recover from the pain and embarrassment, they may even be grateful that all the energy needed to keep secrets and pretend that they always acted in people’s best interests will no longer be required.

US and West pushed dodgy election in Haiti

Published on 10 June 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Wikileaks has the story, again:

The United States, the European Union and the United Nations decided to support Haiti’s recent presidential and parliamentary elections despite believing that the country’s electoral body, “almost certainly in conjunction with President Preval,” had “emasculated the opposition” by unwisely and unjustly excluding the country’s largest party, according to a secret US Embassy cable.

The cable was obtained by WikilLeaks and made available to the Haitian newspaper Haïti Liberté, which is collaborating with The Nation on a series of reports on US and UN policy toward the country.

At a December 1, 2009, meeting, a group of international election donors, including ambassadors from Brazil, Canada, Spain and the United States, concluded that “the international community has too much invested in Haiti’s democracy to walk away from the upcoming elections, despite its imperfections,” in the words of the EU representative, according to US Ambassador Kenneth Merten’s December 2009 cable.

Haiti’s electoral body, the Provisional Electoral Council (CEP), banned the Fanmi Lavalas (FL) from participating in the polls on a technicality. The FL is the party of then-exiled former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was overthrown on February 29, 2004, and flown to Africa as part of a coup d’état that was supported by France, Canada, and the United States.

This history made Canadian Ambassador Gilles Rivard worry at the December donor meeting that “support for the elections as they now stand would be interpreted by many in Haiti as support for Preval and the CEP’s decision against Lavalas.” He said that the CEP had reneged on a pledge to “reconsider their exclusion of Lavalas.”

“If this is the kind of partnership we have with the CEP going into the elections, what kind of transparency can we expect from them as the process unfolds?” Rivard asked.

Despite the Lavalas exclusion, the European Union and Canada proposed that donors “help level the playing field”—they could, for instance, “purchase radio air time for opposition politicians to plug their candidacies.” They were presumably referring to “opposition candidates” who would come from parties other than the FL.

How Western firms helping repressive regimes monitor Skype

Published on 1 June 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

We have been warned:

When young dissidents in Egypt were organizing an election-monitoring project last fall, they discussed their plans over Skype, the popular Internet phone service, believing it to be secure.

But someone else was listening in—Egypt’s security service.

An internal memo from the “Electronic Penetration Department” even boasted it had intercepted one conversation in which an activist stressed the importance of using Skype “because it cannot be penetrated online by any security device.”

Skype, which Microsoft Corp. is acquiring for $8.5 billion, is best known as a cheap way to make international phone calls. But the Luxembourg-based service also is the communications tool of choice for dissidents around the world because its powerful encryption technology evades traditional wiretaps.

Throughout the recent Middle East uprisings, protesters have used Skype for confidential video conferences, phone calls, instant messages and file exchanges. In Iran, opposition leaders and dissidents used Skype to plot strategy and organize a February protest. Skype also is a favorite among activists in Saudi Arabia and Vietnam, according to State Department cables released by WikiLeaks.

In March, following the Egyptian revolution that toppled President Hosni Mubarak, some activists raided the headquarters of Amn Al Dowla, the state security agency, uncovering the secret memo about intercepting Skype calls. In addition, 26-year-old activist Basem Fathi says he found files describing his love life and trips to the beach, apparently gleaned from intercepted emails and phone calls.

“I believe that they were collecting every little detail they were hearing from our mouths and putting them in a file,” he says.

A cottage industry of U.S. and other companies is now designing and selling tools that can be used to block or eavesdrop on Skype conversations. One technique: Using special “spyware,” or software that intercepts an audio stream from a computer—thereby hearing what’s being said and effectively bypassing Skype’s encryption. Egypt’s spy service last year tested one product, FinSpy, made by Britain’s Gamma International UK Ltd., according to Egyptian government documents and Gamma’s local reseller.

Wikileaks reveals how US views anti-Americanism

Published on 19 May 2011 in General. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

Very narrowly:

Discussing a draft declaration from South American and Arab State leaders, a United States government operative lists a series of “anti-American digs” against the US and Israel that were later excluded from the text.

What is considered anti-American is stunning and revealing. This quiet, unassuming cable shows a bizarre and expansive US foreign policy agenda in 2005.

Among statements considered to be anti-American:

  • Reaffirming the necessity of resolving all conflicts non-violently;
  • Emphasizing the importance of respecting the unity, sovereignty, and independence of Iraq, and not interfering in its internal processes;
  • Committing to implementing all UN resolutions non-selectively;
  • Recognizing the need for protection of intellectual property, but not when it affects national development, especially in terms of national health policies;
  • Emphasizing the need to eliminate distortions (subsidies) in agriculture, which impede developed nations from exploiting comparative advantages;
  • Welcoming the recent entry into force of the Kyoto Agreement, and calling on the international community to better protect the global climate.

The cable also described aspirations for a nuclear weapons-free Middle East as “anti-Israeli sentiment”.

An unusually clear window into a USG operatives’s worldview at the time.

Evidence that world powers think always about oil

Published on 17 May 2011 in General. 1 Comment Tags: , .

Confirmation:

Of the 251,287 WikiLeaks documents McClatchy obtained, 23,927 of them — nearly one in 10 — reference oil. Gazprom alone is mentioned in 1,789.

In the cables, U.S. diplomats can be found plotting ways to prevent state entities such as Gazprom from taking control of key petroleum facilities, pressing oil companies to adjust their policies to match U.S. foreign policy goals, helping U.S.-based oil companies arrange deals on favorable terms and pressing foreign governments to assist companies that are willing to do the U.S.’s bidding.

Human rights at stake, says Amnesty, and Wikileaks helped

Published on 15 May 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Hard to disagree:

The world faces a watershed moment in human rights with tyrants and despots coming under increasing pressure from the internet, social networking sites and the activities of WikiLeaks, Amnesty International says in its annual roundup.

The rights group singles out WikiLeaks and the newspapers that pored over its previously confidential government files, among them the Guardian, as a catalyst in a series of uprisings against repressive regimes, notably the overthrow of Tunisia’s long-serving president, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.

“The year 2010 may well be remembered as a watershed year when activists and journalists used new technology to speak truth to power and, in so doing, pushed for greater respect for human rights,” Amnesty’s secretary general, Salil Shetty, says in an introduction to the document. “It is also the year when repressive governments faced the real possibility that their days were numbered.”

But, Shetty adds, the situation in the Middle East and North Africa, and elsewhere, remains unpredictable: “There is a serious fightback from the forces of repression. The international community must seize the opportunity for change and ensure that 2011 is not a false dawn for human rights.”

Reminding the establishment why Wikileaks enables us all

Published on 11 May 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Last night in Britain Julian Assange won the Sydney Peace Foundation award for his commitment to democracy and human rights:



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Remembering the war against Tamils; accountability required

Published on 11 May 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Sri Lanka remains a country talking about recovery after decades of war and yet Colombo refuses to accept responsibility for the crimes committed during the conflict.

This recently Wikileaks document from May 2009 gives an insight into the final days of the civil war, when the lives of civilians were irrelevant to government forces (and many Tamil Tigers, too):

SUMMARY: May 16-17 marked a watershed day in Sri Lanka´s conflict with the LTTE, as an estimated 72,000 civilians escaped the safe zone. Remnants of the LTTE continued to mount resistance in an area of less than one square kilometer in the government´s unilaterally declared “no fire zone.” President Rajapaksa is expected to announce the end of fighting in Parliament on May 19. The Defense Secretary announced publicly on May 17 that there were no civilians remaining in the conflict zone. However, a Tamil member of Parliament and [TEXT REMOVED BY AFTENPOSTEN] separately contacted Embassy to report that tens of thousands of civilians were still in the conflict area and at grave risk. Ambassador contacted senior GSL officials throughout the day, including Secretary of Defense Gothabaya Rajapaksa and Foreign Minister Bogollagama, to urge acceptance of a mediated surrender of the remaining Tigers and maximum restraint on the part of the military to avoid further civilian casualties, particularly after the reports from the Bishop of Mannar of continued high numbers of civilians in the safe zone. Rajapaksa refused to accept mediated surrender on the grounds that the fighting was all but over, but said troops had been instructed to accept anyone who wishes to surrender. Ambassador spoke to Presidential Advisor Basil Rajapaksa to request access for the ICRC to evacuate dead and wounded. Rajapaksa refused, contending the GSL could manage on its own. Four government of Sri Lanka doctors and an Additional Government Agent escaped from the conflict zone on May 16 and were taken into custody by the military. One doctor with serious wounds was airlifted to Colombo, two or three other doctors were held for interrogation at Omanthai, and the Additional Government Agent was taken to an IDP camp. UNSYG Chief of Staff Nambiar, now in Colombo, was promised access to live UAV footage of the safe zone. He also has requested to visit the safe zone and the camps in Vavuniya.

Wikileaks wins award for courage

Published on 11 May 2011 in General. 2 Comments Tags: , , , .

Bloody well deserved:

Julian Assange, the founder of whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, has been awarded an award “for exceptional courage in pursuit of human rights”.

Mr Assange was given the Sydney Peace Medal at a ceremony at the Frontline Club in central London today.

The Sydney Peace Foundation said that it was making the award to recognise Mr in recognition of the need “for greater transparency and accountability of governments”.

Professor Stuart Rees, director of the foundation, said: “By challenging centuries old practices of government secrecy and by championing people’s right to know, WikiLeaks and Julian Assange have created the potential for a new order in journalism and in the free flow of information.”

Speaking at the event, Mr Assange referred to whistleblowers as “heroes” and said it appeared the website had played a “significant role” in the recent Arab uprisings in north Africa by releasing US diplomatic cables in December that were later translated into Arabic and French.

He said WikiLeaks was part of England’s historic “free speech traditions, these go back in the UK to the time of the English Civil War of the 1640s”. He said: “The real value of this award, and the Sydney Peace Foundation is that it makes explicit the link between peace and justice.

“It does not take the safe feel good option of shunning controversy by uttering platitudes. Instead it goes into difficult terrain by identifying organisations and individuals who are directly engaged in struggles of one kind or another.

“With WikiLeaks we are all engaged in a struggle, a generational struggle for a proposition that citizens have a right and a duty to scrutinise the state.”

Julian Assange talks about Middle East uprisings and why Wikileaks still matters

Published on 9 May 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Wall Street Journal launches Wikileaks-type site with laughable protection

Published on 6 May 2011 in General. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

Really:

The Wall Street Journal is trying to make a play for whistleblowers with its very own Wikileaks clone, SafeHouse. But SafeHouse is the opposite of safe, thanks to basic security flaws and fine print that lets the Journal rat on leakers.

SafeHouse, which launched today to much fanfare, promises to let leakers “securely share information with the Wall Street Journal,” by uploading documents directly to its servers, just like Wikileaks! But unlike Wikileaks, SafeHouse includes a doozy of a caveat in its Terms of Use:

“Except when we have a separately negotiated confidentiality agreement… we reserve the right to disclose any information about you to law enforcement authorities or to a requesting third party, without notice, in order to comply with any applicable laws and/or requests under legal process, to operate our systems properly, to protect the property or rights of Dow Jones or any affiliated companies, and to safeguard the interests of others.”

So, go ahead and upload your explosive documents to SafeHouse. But if they publish a scoop based on your material and someone gets mad, they can sell you out to anyone for any reason, including the insanely broad one of safeguarding “the interests of others.” (And Rupert Murdoch, who controls the paper, sure has a lot of interests!)

What’s Australia’s real role in pursuing “war on terror” in Muslim world?

Published on 5 May 2011 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

Back in November I broke a story that detailed covert Australian missions across the Middle East, mostly off the books and often skirting legality.

Today’s piece in the Sydney Morning Herald by Rafael Epstein appears to add important points to the role Australia is playing alongside the US and Britain in these war zones but so many questions remain, not least the actual tasks of counter-insurgency that often merely inflame anti-Western hatred. There’s much more on this story to come:

Australian special forces soldiers have been serving in highly secretive US and British hit squads in Afghanistan, and some have served with the US unit whose men killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan this week.

The Herald has confirmed that, since 2001, Australians from the SAS and Commando regiments have successfully served on “third country deployments” alongside some of the most highly classified, best-trained and well-resourced combat groups in Afghanistan. Crucially, the Australians have been refused permission to participate in cross-border raids into Pakistan.

The so-called ”capture-or-kill” squads ramped up their pursuit of senior insurgent leaders under the Obama administration, especially after US General David Petraeus took command in Afghanistan last year. They do not operate under NATO’s protocols and rules of engagement, but fight under the banner of the US-led Operation Enduring Freedom, which gives them ”greater freedom of action”, an Australian source said.

Dozens of Australian soldiers have served in Afghanistan with America’s Taskforce 373, and the British-led Taskforce 42, designations detailed last year in cables released by WikiLeaks.

These units have been rebadged, but sources have requested their new number designations not be disclosed, due to the secret nature of their work.

The Herald has confirmed that repeated requests from senior special forces officers were refused when they asked for small numbers of Australian personnel to serve in operations crossing into Pakistan.

One source said the requests were ”beyond the risk profile considered acceptable”, following internal legal advice.

Military sources insist the US- and British-led squads aim to capture, rather than kill, their targets, but with many insurgent leaders regarded as experienced fighters, efforts to arrest are often regarded as a more dangerous option. Another Australian source said the squads “don’t take many prisoners”.

Australian soldiers deployed with these teams go through a legal process allowing them to operate under another country’s flag while ensuring their status as members of the Australian Defence Force. However they are not allowed to participate in many anti-narcotics missions and are barred from deploying inside Pakistan because “if the Aussies breach the rules and they’re found out, it’s over”, one source said.

As many as six Australians at any one time are stationed with elite units such as the British Special Air Service and Special Boat Service, the US 75th Ranger Regiment, and ”Tier One” units, the Combat Application Group or Delta Force and the Navy SEALs Special Warfare Development Group. It was this last group that raided bin Laden’s compound.

The Australians and their counterparts are specially trained and equipped, have priority over almost all other military activity in Afghanistan and have access to many more remote-control drones, helicopters and observation satellites than the special forces that serve under the NATO banner.

Most Australian special forces are deployed with the ADF’s Special Operations Task Group in Oruzgan, and operate under rules and regulations set by NATO, after agreement with the President of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai.

They operate with significant numbers of Afghan soldiers and abide by rules of engagement governing the International Security Assistance Force.

The British and American-led teams – often including an Australian member – follow a different set of rules and regulations, and have been criticised by human rights groups and some of the newspapers that first detailed their existence.

However Australian sources have told the Herald that the secret squads are subject to even greater scrutiny than NATO combat groups and have to explain and justify the precise detail of almost every operation, often personally reporting to the staff of General Petraeus.

The US Taskforce 373 is split into four groups, allowing it to operate all over Afghanistan, with some of its soldiers based at Bagram airbase outside Kabul and others at the Kandahar airbase, near the country’s second biggest city.

The taskforce consists of soldiers trained to target insurgent leaders. There is also other specialised training including targeting moving vehicles.

Overall in Afghanistan allied special operations forces have mounted more than 1600 missions in the first three months of this year, an average of 18 a night. They have captured or killed close to 3000 insurgents, General Petraeus has told US newspapers.