Sunday, October 31, 2010
Secret War Document: Friendly Action on 19 August 2004 - RECOVERY TEAM ENGAGED IVO BAGHDAD (ZONE )
Secret War Document: Friendly Action on 19 August 2004 - RECOVERY TEAM ENGAGED IVO BAGHDAD (ZONE ) -
WikiLeaks proved the US lied: Fisk
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Broadcast: 28/10/2010
Reporter: Tony Jones
Broadcast: 28/10/2010
Reporter: Tony Jones
TONY JONES, PRESENTER: Tonight's guest is veteran Middle-East correspondent and author Robert Fisk.
Following the release by WikiLeaks of nearly 400,000 classified US military documents, Mr Fisk wrote an angry piece headlined "The Shaming of America" in his newspaper The Independent.
He claimed the Pentagon's anger over the leaks was not because their secrecy had been breached, but because they'd been caught out telling lies, and he joined us just a short time ago from Beirut.
Robert Fisk, thanks for being there.
ROBERT FISK, JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR: You're welcome.
TONY JONES: Now, what's the significance of the close-to-400,000 secret US military documents that have been posted by WikiLeaks, as far as you're concerned?
ROBERT FISK: Well I think there are several very important elements to this story.
First of all, the individual items like, you know, there are witnesses, American witnesses to torture, they didn't do anything, that the Iraqis - security authorities were torturing Iraqis, that American air strikes were killing many civilians.
We knew about this, but it was always denied by the Americans. I was doing stories years ago about Iraqis torturing Iraqis and the stories were coming from American officers who were leaking them to me.
But of course every time I wrote them in the paper, the Americans denied that it was true. I went to the scenes of US air strikes. They were obviously limbs, hands, arms of children, babies, women, civilians, as well sometimes as armed men, and we wrote about this.
What the WikiLeaks does is it proves beyond any doubt that what we reported was correct and that what we were told by the American authorities was mendacious, it was a lie.
Just remember, the Americans now are saying, "Shame upon WikiLeaks. It's endangering lives in Iraq." I mean, invading Iraq endangered an awful lot of lives, didn't it?
But, you know, if these leaks, if these 400,000 documents had confirmed that the Americans did stop torture, that they didn't kill civilians and air strikes, you know, US generals'd be handing this stuff out free of charge to journalists on the front steps of the Pentagon.
It's the fact that it proves how shameful our invasion and occupation of Iraq was that this has come as such a blow to the United States - and only, I might add, to the West.
You know, the reaction in the Arab world, when they looked through all stuff in the Arabic language press, particularly in Baghdad, was, "Well, so what's new? We knew all this. We were the people being tortured. We were the people being bombed by the Americans." It's in the West that we're saying, "My goodness! Is that the case? So the generals lied."
That's the big significance at this particular point of this.
One bigger significance, I think - and it was Al Jazeera who actually picked this up - was that this famous 242 message, which tells US troops from higher headquarters, presumably Ricardo Sanchez when he was a general in Baghdad, which says, "If you see abuse taking place, not by Americans, report it, but basically, just do nothing."
Al-Jazeera found that about the time that message was put out, Donald Rumsfeld had a press conference at the Pentagon in Washington with journalists present who did not understand the significance of what he was saying.
Because when he did that, the chief of the - the head of the joint chiefs of staff in uniform, Pace, General Pace, was saying, "Well, if a soldier ...," - we didn't know about the WikiLeaks. This was years ago. "If a soldier sees someone being tortured, of course he must stop it."
And the camera suddenly switches to Donald Rumsfeld and Pace's face falls at this point. He said, "Well, I think," - Rumsfeld says, "I think that in fact he doesn't have to physically intervene. He has to report it."
In other words, at that point Rumsfeld and presumably Sanchez had both agreed Americans would not intervene to stop torture, and that of course is against the Geneva Conventions.
TONY JONES: Let's go back to one step, and I'll come to more of the detail of the torture allegations in a moment. But to start with, these documents reveal 15,000 Iraqi civilian casualties that hitherto were unreported or undocumented. Now what do you make of these numbers?
ROBERT FISK: Well, look, the fact of the matter is nobody knows how many people have been killed in Iraq and there are numerous reasons for this.
If I can give you an anecdote of my own to show you why. In the worst period, when it was just beginning, the absolute total massacres in Baghdad, I was going in some danger, on my own, to the mortuary every day to count corpses. It's a very lugubrious thing to do at midday in a summer's day in Baghdad.
And, for example, I found that the senior mortician, whom I was talking to and got very friendly with, told me that so many bodies were coming in and so many people were not claiming them - because perhaps they didn't wanna be associated or they were the wrong religion - that they were just throwing them into mass graves outside Baghdad.
But when Americans brought corpses to the mortuary, the doctors were told not to perform post-mortems. Why was that, I wonder? Had they been tortured by other Iraqis and handed back to the Americans after being taken prisoner by Americans? I don't know the answer.
But all over Iraq there were mortuaries which were not taking the proper details down. Now what we know from this 15,000 more than we knew about is just that we have the body count organisation, which of course is not allied with any military body, which comes up with various figures.
And the figure of 66,000 dead, which is very small compared to what most people thought it would be, is 15,000 more than they had thought it might be.
But I think what you've got to say is overall, calculating by the thousands who were dying every month, sometimes in just three weeks in Baghdad alone, I think we're talking about at least 150,000, probably much more than that.
But again, you see, because you can't prove it, because you can't actually find it on paper, because there never was such a figure on paper because it was impossible to get - I'm sure the Americans would try to hide it if they did - you simply don't know and we won't know.
TONY JONES: I've just gotta interrupt you there for a moment because I want you to respond to what the Pentagon has actually said in its official response to this. It says, "The period," and you're talking about your own reporting, so ...
ROBERT FISK: A pleasure.
TONY JONES: ... the period covered by these reports has been well-chronicled by news reports, books and films and these field reports don't bring any new understanding to events.
ROBERT FISK: Yes, they do. What the field reports do prove that the Pentagon was lying at the time and we were right.
But what they're trying to say is, "Oh, it's on old story! We all knew about that." But the Pentagon was denying it all through those years. Their lies are not being chronicled by the Pentagon statement today. That's the point.
TONY JONES: What's the scale of the torture contained in the allegations here? It seems that there are, if I'm reading this correctly, 1,300 independent new US reports of torture by Iraqi police in police stations.
ROBERT FISK: Look, this is just the reports that the Americans chose to put in. There would be many other cases where they wouldn't have sent them in because they were tired or they were doing something else or they were chasing some other incident.
It is a fact - and I discovered this in police stations myself, and by talking to policemen - that if you got arrested, particularly if you were handed over by the Americans to the Iraqis as a suspected "terrorist", you would be tortured.
Now maybe it would be slapped around. In some cases the Americans themselves were smashing people around with plastic bottles full of water and when the water broke they slashed them across the face. But in most cases, they handed them to the Iraqis.
It was a kind of domestic form of rendition. If the Americans caught someone in Afghanistan and couldn't make them talk, they'd ship them off to Morocco or Egypt where they'd pull out their toe nails and then perhaps they would talk.
So in a sense this was a miniature rendition. The Americans caught people, they sent them to the Iraqi security services.
They knew what would happen. Well they knew that 1,300 it'd happened. And they knew very well that they would be tortured, and they were.
And that's why so many Iraqis who've ever been arrested, when you talk to them in Baghdad, they'll say, "Yes, I was tortured, routinely, always and without exception." And that's the situation.
This 1,300 figure doesn't actually mean anything. We're talking of tens of thousands of prisoners who've been brutalised and abused by the Iraqis with American knowledge - that's what we're talking about.
TONY JONES: We saw with the revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib Prison by Americans, but it took some time for that story to really take hold.
Is that what's happening here? And is there evidence, direct evidence in these new documents that the Americans actually turned a blind eye? You referred to that memo, the secret memo Frago 242, as it's called?
ROBERT FISK: Yeah, I mean, they were being ordered to turn a blind eye. They could report it, but the fact that the American administration and Ricardo Sanchez, who was the general at the time - he was the general at the time of Abu Ghraib - did nothing about it, means it was a blind eye.
You've gotta remember this has also been happening in Afghanistan, where prisoners taken by NATO troops, including Americans, have actually been executed or simply tortured to death by Afghans, the same kind of, again, domestic rendition. "We're handing them over to you. We believe they're terrorists." And they disappear, or they're tortured, or they come out - sometimes.
I had a very interesting conversation a couple of days ago with a former senior American officer in Iraq who was trying to justify what happened. He said, "Well, you know, we're all against torture, but in a war situation, we have to take a different attitude."
And I said, "What? Hold on a second, if you see someone across the road being tortured, your duty as a human being is to cross the road and stop it, otherwise you can be taken by a policemen to a court."
He said, "Yeah, yeah, but that's OK as a morality in London or Paris or New York," he said, "but it's not the same when you're at war." And I said, "But if it's not the same, why did you go to war to end torture?" You know, it's a round-trip situation.
But you shouldn't mistake the fact that these figures that we're getting are merely proof that the generals lied at the time. They're a very small version of what actually happened, because these are only the versions which we know that the Americans knew about, or chose to know about, or chose to report at the time.
TONY JONES: Britain's deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, a Liberal Democrat who, to be fair, opposed the war in the beginning, says the allegations are extraordinarily serious, the allegations of torture.
He wants them investigated. Now the Russians are calling for an investigation, the Danes are investigating whether detainees they handed over to Afghans - to Iraqis, I should say, were tortured. There's also a call from the United Nations for an investigation. Where do you think it's going to go?
ROBERT FISK: Nowhere. You've gotta remember there's a certain hypocrisy for the Russians to start talking about allegations of torture when during their eight-year occupation of Afghanistan, they tortured even more people and killed even more Afghans than the Americans killed Iraqis.
So, you know, I think there's a certain hypocrisy behind it all.
It's good to see old Clegg in Britain calling for an investigation. It won't happen and he knows that Cameron won't back it.
I'm talking about the British prime minister in the coalition government in London.
But it's good that we're hearing at least politicians saying, "This is terrible, terrible," I just wish they'd said it at the time, when of course we had Mr Bush denying it and Mr Blair denying it and the result was that Mr Blair is now the peace envoy in the Middle East - heaven spare us, but there we go.
I think there's an awful lot of hypocrisy here. The fact of the matter is that routinely when armies go abroad to other countries far away, they torture and they abuse and they turn blind eyes. Look at Korea, look at Vietnam. I could go through a whole lot more. And it will happen again. I don't think we care about the people whose lands we occupy and that is the problem.
TONY JONES: Let's go the question of the significance of this for journalism because you've said, "This is the most important proof so far that the internet is now doing a better job than newspaper or TV journalism."
ROBERT FISK: Yeah, I didn't say it was doing a better job. I don't think the internet does. I think it's full of hate and spite and lies.
But what I was saying is - I was asking a question: what does this huge revelation of military secrets, unprecedented in history, what does it say about the old-style journalism that would be personified, for example, by Seymour Hersch in the United States, the guy who broke the My Lai story and regularly writes revelatory stories about the American military in the New Yorker.
Here's a guy who goes to his sources within the military, gets a pretty good frame of the picture. But what is that compared to being able to press a button and get almost half a million military secrets on a screen in front of you?
Now, what happens to all these big teams of investigating journalists that the New York Times boasts of, and which, in the days when it was a serious paper, the British Sunday Times used to have?
Is there any point in having "investigative journalism" anymore if you're just gonna sit back and wait for some strange code-breaker from Australia to plonk them all on a screen in front of you?
The real danger I think is that journalists will start to get lazy. We'll say, "Oh, well, there's no point in investigating torture. It'll pop up on WikiLeaks at some point."
And that means that WikiLeaks makes the choice of what secrets you see and what secrets you don't see. And it may be there are many other tortures of different kinds associated with us or not that we should be learning about.
So, number one, we're allowing WikiLeaks to set the agenda of whose torture we look at and whose we don't.
And number two, the great danger of people saying, "Well, there's no point in reading Seymour Hersch," or Rupert Murdoch's father revealing some truths about Gallipoli, for example. Those days are gone if we journalists just sit and just press a button and say, "OK, on Saturday, Der Spiegel, Al-Jazeera, the Guardian, the New York Times will run the latest stuff off the web.
TONY JONES: Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon papers all those years ago, regards WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as pretty much a hero.
And I'm wondering if you feel the same way. And I know you've expressed doubts about some of their methods, but bear this in mind: some of his closest collaborators have expressed their extreme concern about the fact that in the first tranche of documents, the names of Afghan informers were included and now the Taliban is talking about taking retribution against those people.
ROBERT FISK: Yeah, I knew as soon as I heard that that the Taliban would not miss the opportunity of putting that line in.
Look, I think Ellsberg is wrong. There are two things here: first of all that everything's now on screens, everything's now interneted, and it can be changed and put up in their millions.
In the past, you see, in previous wars - Vietnam, Korea, World War I, World War II, all the way back - everything was on paper. You have a battalion file, written down, typed up, in triplicate, with numbers on and it would go into files.
If there was a leak, you could trace it. So there weren't many leaks. Ellsberg's own papers, the Pentagon papers, were on paper, they were not on screen, they were not on computers. And it needed someone from inside to risk his career, perhaps his life, to grab the material that proved the lie.
Ellsberg did - that's what he's so famous and I think he's a very fine man. Assange didn't do that. Individual American soldiers, possibly at a higher grade than we realise, were involved in leaking this stuff - and I can imagine some of the reasons why.
When you go to Iraq or Afghanistan or talk to - when I'm in the States and talk to American officers, up to and including the rank of colonel, they're outraged by what's happened.
Above the rank of colonel, they're approving of the administration 'cause they wanna get their retirement pensions and keep the badges on their shoulders. But the fact of the matter is that these days, you see, it's the ordinary junior ranks who are putting this stuff up.
And it's people like Assange who are in no danger at all. I mean, Ellsberg was in grave danger, possibly of his life, but certainly his - he might have gone to prison for a very long time. We had stuff on paper, now it's not on paper, and there's no risk involved any longer - not frankly, however much - how romantic Assange thinks he is, or not, as the case may be in actually putting this stuff out.
TONY JONES: Robert Fisk, I'm afraid to say that we are out of time. Once again we thank you for joining us on Lateline. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. We thank you very much for being there.
Following the release by WikiLeaks of nearly 400,000 classified US military documents, Mr Fisk wrote an angry piece headlined "The Shaming of America" in his newspaper The Independent.
He claimed the Pentagon's anger over the leaks was not because their secrecy had been breached, but because they'd been caught out telling lies, and he joined us just a short time ago from Beirut.
Robert Fisk, thanks for being there.
ROBERT FISK, JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR: You're welcome.
TONY JONES: Now, what's the significance of the close-to-400,000 secret US military documents that have been posted by WikiLeaks, as far as you're concerned?
ROBERT FISK: Well I think there are several very important elements to this story.
First of all, the individual items like, you know, there are witnesses, American witnesses to torture, they didn't do anything, that the Iraqis - security authorities were torturing Iraqis, that American air strikes were killing many civilians.
We knew about this, but it was always denied by the Americans. I was doing stories years ago about Iraqis torturing Iraqis and the stories were coming from American officers who were leaking them to me.
But of course every time I wrote them in the paper, the Americans denied that it was true. I went to the scenes of US air strikes. They were obviously limbs, hands, arms of children, babies, women, civilians, as well sometimes as armed men, and we wrote about this.
What the WikiLeaks does is it proves beyond any doubt that what we reported was correct and that what we were told by the American authorities was mendacious, it was a lie.
Just remember, the Americans now are saying, "Shame upon WikiLeaks. It's endangering lives in Iraq." I mean, invading Iraq endangered an awful lot of lives, didn't it?
But, you know, if these leaks, if these 400,000 documents had confirmed that the Americans did stop torture, that they didn't kill civilians and air strikes, you know, US generals'd be handing this stuff out free of charge to journalists on the front steps of the Pentagon.
It's the fact that it proves how shameful our invasion and occupation of Iraq was that this has come as such a blow to the United States - and only, I might add, to the West.
You know, the reaction in the Arab world, when they looked through all stuff in the Arabic language press, particularly in Baghdad, was, "Well, so what's new? We knew all this. We were the people being tortured. We were the people being bombed by the Americans." It's in the West that we're saying, "My goodness! Is that the case? So the generals lied."
That's the big significance at this particular point of this.
One bigger significance, I think - and it was Al Jazeera who actually picked this up - was that this famous 242 message, which tells US troops from higher headquarters, presumably Ricardo Sanchez when he was a general in Baghdad, which says, "If you see abuse taking place, not by Americans, report it, but basically, just do nothing."
Al-Jazeera found that about the time that message was put out, Donald Rumsfeld had a press conference at the Pentagon in Washington with journalists present who did not understand the significance of what he was saying.
Because when he did that, the chief of the - the head of the joint chiefs of staff in uniform, Pace, General Pace, was saying, "Well, if a soldier ...," - we didn't know about the WikiLeaks. This was years ago. "If a soldier sees someone being tortured, of course he must stop it."
And the camera suddenly switches to Donald Rumsfeld and Pace's face falls at this point. He said, "Well, I think," - Rumsfeld says, "I think that in fact he doesn't have to physically intervene. He has to report it."
In other words, at that point Rumsfeld and presumably Sanchez had both agreed Americans would not intervene to stop torture, and that of course is against the Geneva Conventions.
TONY JONES: Let's go back to one step, and I'll come to more of the detail of the torture allegations in a moment. But to start with, these documents reveal 15,000 Iraqi civilian casualties that hitherto were unreported or undocumented. Now what do you make of these numbers?
ROBERT FISK: Well, look, the fact of the matter is nobody knows how many people have been killed in Iraq and there are numerous reasons for this.
If I can give you an anecdote of my own to show you why. In the worst period, when it was just beginning, the absolute total massacres in Baghdad, I was going in some danger, on my own, to the mortuary every day to count corpses. It's a very lugubrious thing to do at midday in a summer's day in Baghdad.
And, for example, I found that the senior mortician, whom I was talking to and got very friendly with, told me that so many bodies were coming in and so many people were not claiming them - because perhaps they didn't wanna be associated or they were the wrong religion - that they were just throwing them into mass graves outside Baghdad.
But when Americans brought corpses to the mortuary, the doctors were told not to perform post-mortems. Why was that, I wonder? Had they been tortured by other Iraqis and handed back to the Americans after being taken prisoner by Americans? I don't know the answer.
But all over Iraq there were mortuaries which were not taking the proper details down. Now what we know from this 15,000 more than we knew about is just that we have the body count organisation, which of course is not allied with any military body, which comes up with various figures.
And the figure of 66,000 dead, which is very small compared to what most people thought it would be, is 15,000 more than they had thought it might be.
But I think what you've got to say is overall, calculating by the thousands who were dying every month, sometimes in just three weeks in Baghdad alone, I think we're talking about at least 150,000, probably much more than that.
But again, you see, because you can't prove it, because you can't actually find it on paper, because there never was such a figure on paper because it was impossible to get - I'm sure the Americans would try to hide it if they did - you simply don't know and we won't know.
TONY JONES: I've just gotta interrupt you there for a moment because I want you to respond to what the Pentagon has actually said in its official response to this. It says, "The period," and you're talking about your own reporting, so ...
ROBERT FISK: A pleasure.
TONY JONES: ... the period covered by these reports has been well-chronicled by news reports, books and films and these field reports don't bring any new understanding to events.
ROBERT FISK: Yes, they do. What the field reports do prove that the Pentagon was lying at the time and we were right.
But what they're trying to say is, "Oh, it's on old story! We all knew about that." But the Pentagon was denying it all through those years. Their lies are not being chronicled by the Pentagon statement today. That's the point.
TONY JONES: What's the scale of the torture contained in the allegations here? It seems that there are, if I'm reading this correctly, 1,300 independent new US reports of torture by Iraqi police in police stations.
ROBERT FISK: Look, this is just the reports that the Americans chose to put in. There would be many other cases where they wouldn't have sent them in because they were tired or they were doing something else or they were chasing some other incident.
It is a fact - and I discovered this in police stations myself, and by talking to policemen - that if you got arrested, particularly if you were handed over by the Americans to the Iraqis as a suspected "terrorist", you would be tortured.
Now maybe it would be slapped around. In some cases the Americans themselves were smashing people around with plastic bottles full of water and when the water broke they slashed them across the face. But in most cases, they handed them to the Iraqis.
It was a kind of domestic form of rendition. If the Americans caught someone in Afghanistan and couldn't make them talk, they'd ship them off to Morocco or Egypt where they'd pull out their toe nails and then perhaps they would talk.
So in a sense this was a miniature rendition. The Americans caught people, they sent them to the Iraqi security services.
They knew what would happen. Well they knew that 1,300 it'd happened. And they knew very well that they would be tortured, and they were.
And that's why so many Iraqis who've ever been arrested, when you talk to them in Baghdad, they'll say, "Yes, I was tortured, routinely, always and without exception." And that's the situation.
This 1,300 figure doesn't actually mean anything. We're talking of tens of thousands of prisoners who've been brutalised and abused by the Iraqis with American knowledge - that's what we're talking about.
TONY JONES: We saw with the revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib Prison by Americans, but it took some time for that story to really take hold.
Is that what's happening here? And is there evidence, direct evidence in these new documents that the Americans actually turned a blind eye? You referred to that memo, the secret memo Frago 242, as it's called?
ROBERT FISK: Yeah, I mean, they were being ordered to turn a blind eye. They could report it, but the fact that the American administration and Ricardo Sanchez, who was the general at the time - he was the general at the time of Abu Ghraib - did nothing about it, means it was a blind eye.
You've gotta remember this has also been happening in Afghanistan, where prisoners taken by NATO troops, including Americans, have actually been executed or simply tortured to death by Afghans, the same kind of, again, domestic rendition. "We're handing them over to you. We believe they're terrorists." And they disappear, or they're tortured, or they come out - sometimes.
I had a very interesting conversation a couple of days ago with a former senior American officer in Iraq who was trying to justify what happened. He said, "Well, you know, we're all against torture, but in a war situation, we have to take a different attitude."
And I said, "What? Hold on a second, if you see someone across the road being tortured, your duty as a human being is to cross the road and stop it, otherwise you can be taken by a policemen to a court."
He said, "Yeah, yeah, but that's OK as a morality in London or Paris or New York," he said, "but it's not the same when you're at war." And I said, "But if it's not the same, why did you go to war to end torture?" You know, it's a round-trip situation.
But you shouldn't mistake the fact that these figures that we're getting are merely proof that the generals lied at the time. They're a very small version of what actually happened, because these are only the versions which we know that the Americans knew about, or chose to know about, or chose to report at the time.
TONY JONES: Britain's deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, a Liberal Democrat who, to be fair, opposed the war in the beginning, says the allegations are extraordinarily serious, the allegations of torture.
He wants them investigated. Now the Russians are calling for an investigation, the Danes are investigating whether detainees they handed over to Afghans - to Iraqis, I should say, were tortured. There's also a call from the United Nations for an investigation. Where do you think it's going to go?
ROBERT FISK: Nowhere. You've gotta remember there's a certain hypocrisy for the Russians to start talking about allegations of torture when during their eight-year occupation of Afghanistan, they tortured even more people and killed even more Afghans than the Americans killed Iraqis.
So, you know, I think there's a certain hypocrisy behind it all.
It's good to see old Clegg in Britain calling for an investigation. It won't happen and he knows that Cameron won't back it.
I'm talking about the British prime minister in the coalition government in London.
But it's good that we're hearing at least politicians saying, "This is terrible, terrible," I just wish they'd said it at the time, when of course we had Mr Bush denying it and Mr Blair denying it and the result was that Mr Blair is now the peace envoy in the Middle East - heaven spare us, but there we go.
I think there's an awful lot of hypocrisy here. The fact of the matter is that routinely when armies go abroad to other countries far away, they torture and they abuse and they turn blind eyes. Look at Korea, look at Vietnam. I could go through a whole lot more. And it will happen again. I don't think we care about the people whose lands we occupy and that is the problem.
TONY JONES: Let's go the question of the significance of this for journalism because you've said, "This is the most important proof so far that the internet is now doing a better job than newspaper or TV journalism."
ROBERT FISK: Yeah, I didn't say it was doing a better job. I don't think the internet does. I think it's full of hate and spite and lies.
But what I was saying is - I was asking a question: what does this huge revelation of military secrets, unprecedented in history, what does it say about the old-style journalism that would be personified, for example, by Seymour Hersch in the United States, the guy who broke the My Lai story and regularly writes revelatory stories about the American military in the New Yorker.
Here's a guy who goes to his sources within the military, gets a pretty good frame of the picture. But what is that compared to being able to press a button and get almost half a million military secrets on a screen in front of you?
Now, what happens to all these big teams of investigating journalists that the New York Times boasts of, and which, in the days when it was a serious paper, the British Sunday Times used to have?
Is there any point in having "investigative journalism" anymore if you're just gonna sit back and wait for some strange code-breaker from Australia to plonk them all on a screen in front of you?
The real danger I think is that journalists will start to get lazy. We'll say, "Oh, well, there's no point in investigating torture. It'll pop up on WikiLeaks at some point."
And that means that WikiLeaks makes the choice of what secrets you see and what secrets you don't see. And it may be there are many other tortures of different kinds associated with us or not that we should be learning about.
So, number one, we're allowing WikiLeaks to set the agenda of whose torture we look at and whose we don't.
And number two, the great danger of people saying, "Well, there's no point in reading Seymour Hersch," or Rupert Murdoch's father revealing some truths about Gallipoli, for example. Those days are gone if we journalists just sit and just press a button and say, "OK, on Saturday, Der Spiegel, Al-Jazeera, the Guardian, the New York Times will run the latest stuff off the web.
TONY JONES: Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon papers all those years ago, regards WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as pretty much a hero.
And I'm wondering if you feel the same way. And I know you've expressed doubts about some of their methods, but bear this in mind: some of his closest collaborators have expressed their extreme concern about the fact that in the first tranche of documents, the names of Afghan informers were included and now the Taliban is talking about taking retribution against those people.
ROBERT FISK: Yeah, I knew as soon as I heard that that the Taliban would not miss the opportunity of putting that line in.
Look, I think Ellsberg is wrong. There are two things here: first of all that everything's now on screens, everything's now interneted, and it can be changed and put up in their millions.
In the past, you see, in previous wars - Vietnam, Korea, World War I, World War II, all the way back - everything was on paper. You have a battalion file, written down, typed up, in triplicate, with numbers on and it would go into files.
If there was a leak, you could trace it. So there weren't many leaks. Ellsberg's own papers, the Pentagon papers, were on paper, they were not on screen, they were not on computers. And it needed someone from inside to risk his career, perhaps his life, to grab the material that proved the lie.
Ellsberg did - that's what he's so famous and I think he's a very fine man. Assange didn't do that. Individual American soldiers, possibly at a higher grade than we realise, were involved in leaking this stuff - and I can imagine some of the reasons why.
When you go to Iraq or Afghanistan or talk to - when I'm in the States and talk to American officers, up to and including the rank of colonel, they're outraged by what's happened.
Above the rank of colonel, they're approving of the administration 'cause they wanna get their retirement pensions and keep the badges on their shoulders. But the fact of the matter is that these days, you see, it's the ordinary junior ranks who are putting this stuff up.
And it's people like Assange who are in no danger at all. I mean, Ellsberg was in grave danger, possibly of his life, but certainly his - he might have gone to prison for a very long time. We had stuff on paper, now it's not on paper, and there's no risk involved any longer - not frankly, however much - how romantic Assange thinks he is, or not, as the case may be in actually putting this stuff out.
TONY JONES: Robert Fisk, I'm afraid to say that we are out of time. Once again we thank you for joining us on Lateline. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. We thank you very much for being there.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Whitehouse: Government should address WikiLeaks
Over the last few days, the website WikiLeaks and its Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange have made international news headlines by publishing almost 400,000 classified United States military field reports from the War in Iraq. Such a publication brings up questions of credibility and responsibility that the US government, WikiLeaks, and the American people should answer.
Assange, an Australian computer hacker who started the site in 2006, has a reputation and flair for the dramatic. His Monday-night round table discussion in London was no different. "The Pentagon lies, and it lies frequently," he said.
The event, held at Frontline Club, sold out before I heard about it. Thanks to modern technology I got to watch a live stream of it. For almost two hours, Assange took questions from the crowd and CBS News correspondent Elizabeth Palmer, who hosted the discussion.
With every answer, the messy-haired Assange cultivated a notion of WikiLeaks as the hero and most everybody else, especially the US government, as a villain. His explanation of such a dichotomy was comical, as most issues of great significance are hardly that black and white. Just minutes before his comment about the Pentagon lying, Assange responded to a question about WikiLeaks' goals. "Truth doesn't need a policy objective," he said. In other words, the government lies and WikiLeaks tells the truth.
Such a declaration makes for a nice quote, but is it credible? Can we trust WikiLeaks to provide people the "truth," as Assange so often claims? How does an organization with a goal of increasing transparency lack such transparency in its own organization? His answer on Monday night amounted to an assertion that getting delicate information requires anonymity and secrecy. His answer is a convenient one. In this way, he can publish any information he gets without having the ability to fully corroborate it with the source. Any journalist, as Assange claims to be, should be wary of any information gathered in such a clandestine way. That being said, WikiLeaks claims to make a "detailed examination" of all its documents to judge their credibility and has made a name for itself as a source of accuracy. From a case of $3 billion corruption in Kenya to the insider trading documents from JP Morgan, the site has continued to be right about the information it publishes. The site goes as far as to say it "has correctly identified the veracity of every document it has published."
Because of the WikiLeak's history for accuracy, the American government has a responsibility to address and investigate the information contained in the reports. I want to know if the information in those 391,831 documents is accurate. If it's false, tell me why. If it's true, and I'm betting it's true, make the necessary steps to correct the inaccuracies of past reports and statements. The most obvious example of this is the reports of torture. Torture is not acceptable. It violates the inalienable rights set fourth in the Declaration of Independence.
Saying either Assange or the American government is correct and telling the "truth" is unproductive. The inherent debate between security interests and transparency interests locate this debate in more of a gray area. It is difficult to assess the increased security risks based on this report. So far, however, no WikiLeaks-related deaths have been reported as a result of either large-scale publication of documents. The question now is can the US government see WikiLeaks' side of the security-transparency debate? I hope the answer is a yes. For the hypocrisy of ignoring the released information is something I'd rather not think about.
Ray Whitehouse is a Medill junior and is currently studying abroad in London. He can be reached at ray.whitehouse@gmail.com
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
WikiLeaks has more secret documents: Pentagon
Washington, Oct 27 (PTI) The Pentagon has said that the whistle-blower website WikiLeaks may be possessing more secret documents including files on Afghanistan and a video clip.
WikiLeaks is believed to have about 15,000 classified documents from the Afghan war, as many as 260,000 diplomatic cables and a video of casualties in Afghanistan, Pentagon spokesman Col Dave Lapan told reporters.
"We believe that WikiLeaks has in its possession additional documents that may be released in the future. They still have the 15,000 documents from Afghanistan. They still have a video from Afghanistan. Those are things they have talked about publicly," he said.
"And we have reason to believe they have other documents as well," Lapan said, adding that he has no further information on those.
The Department of Defence has publicly asked WikiLeaks to stop publishing these documents and return them.
However, WikiLeaks has gone ahead to publish these documents, which Pentagon says have endangered the lives of hundreds of its people in Afghanistan and Iraq.
WikiLeaks is believed to have about 15,000 classified documents from the Afghan war, as many as 260,000 diplomatic cables and a video of casualties in Afghanistan, Pentagon spokesman Col Dave Lapan told reporters.
"We believe that WikiLeaks has in its possession additional documents that may be released in the future. They still have the 15,000 documents from Afghanistan. They still have a video from Afghanistan. Those are things they have talked about publicly," he said.
"And we have reason to believe they have other documents as well," Lapan said, adding that he has no further information on those.
The Department of Defence has publicly asked WikiLeaks to stop publishing these documents and return them.
However, WikiLeaks has gone ahead to publish these documents, which Pentagon says have endangered the lives of hundreds of its people in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Where did WikiLeaks Hosted?
WikiLeaks describes itself as “an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking”. WikiLeaks is hosted by PRQ, a Sweden-based company providing “highly secure, no-questions-asked hosting services.” PRQ is said to have “almost no information about its clientele and maintains few if any of its own logs.” The servers are spread around the world with the central server located in Sweden. Julian Assange has said that the servers are located in Sweden (and the other countries) "specifically because those nations offer legal protection to the disclosures made on the site". He talks about the Swedish constitution, which gives the information providers total legal protection. It is forbidden according to Swedish law for any administrative authority to make inquiries about the sources of any type of newspaper. Due to these laws, and by being hosted by PRQ makes it difficult to take WikiLeaks offline. Furthermore, "Wikileaks maintains its own servers at undisclosed locations, keeps no logs and uses military-grade encryption to protect sources and other confidential information." Such arrangements have been called "bulletproof hosting."
On August 17, 2010, it was announced that the Swedish Pirate Party will be hosting and managing many of WikiLeaks' new servers. The party donates servers and bandwidth to WikiLeaks without charge. Technicians of the party will make sure that the servers are maintained and working. Some servers are hosted in underground cold war era nuclear shelter. The physical security layer is 30m White Mountains solid bedrock.
WikiLeaks is based on several software packages, including MediaWiki, Freenet, Tor, and PGP. WikiLeaks strongly encouraged postings via Tor due to the strong privacy needs of its users.
On August 17, 2010, it was announced that the Swedish Pirate Party will be hosting and managing many of WikiLeaks' new servers. The party donates servers and bandwidth to WikiLeaks without charge. Technicians of the party will make sure that the servers are maintained and working. Some servers are hosted in underground cold war era nuclear shelter. The physical security layer is 30m White Mountains solid bedrock.
WikiLeaks is based on several software packages, including MediaWiki, Freenet, Tor, and PGP. WikiLeaks strongly encouraged postings via Tor due to the strong privacy needs of its users.
Monday, October 25, 2010
Administration of WikiLeaks
According to a January 2010 interview, the WikiLeaks team then consisted of five people working full-time and about 800 people who worked occasionally, none of whom were compensated. WikiLeaks has no official headquarters. The expenses per year are about €200,000, mainly for servers and bureaucracy, but would reach €600,000 if work currently done by volunteers were paid for. WikiLeaks does not pay for lawyers, as hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal support have been donated by media organisations such as the Associated Press, The Los Angeles Times, and the National Newspaper Publishers Association. Its only revenue stream is donations, but WikiLeaks is planning to add an auction model to sell early access to documents. According to the Wau Holland Foundation, WikiLeaks receives no money for personnel costs, only for hardware, travelling and bandwidth. An article in TechEYE.net wrote
Relation with the Wikimedia Foundation
It is sometimes assumed that WikiLeaks is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation and is connected to Wikipedia, Wikibooks, and other Wiki-organizations. This is not the case and WikiLeaks has no relationship with any of those groups. The private information protection models of WikiLeaks and Wikipedia are different. Wikipedia makes no guarantee, log and will reveal (if requested) the tracking information (such as IP addresses) of readers or contributors and applies restrictions to discovered Tor anonymity network exit nodes.
As a charity accountable under German law, donations for Wikileaks can be made to the foundation. Funds are held in escrow and are given to Wikileaks after the whistleblower website files an application containing a statement with proof of payment. The foundation does not pay any sort of salary nor give any renumeration [sic] to Wikileaks' personnel, corroborating the statement of the site's German representative Daniel Schmitt (real name Daniel Domscheit-Berg) on national television that all personnel works [sic] voluntarily, even its speakers.
Relation with the Wikimedia Foundation
It is sometimes assumed that WikiLeaks is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation and is connected to Wikipedia, Wikibooks, and other Wiki-organizations. This is not the case and WikiLeaks has no relationship with any of those groups. The private information protection models of WikiLeaks and Wikipedia are different. Wikipedia makes no guarantee, log and will reveal (if requested) the tracking information (such as IP addresses) of readers or contributors and applies restrictions to discovered Tor anonymity network exit nodes.
Site management issues
There has been public disagreement between Julian Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who resigned on September 28, 2010 as WikiLeaks' spokesman. In October 2010, it was reported that Moneybookers, which collected donations for WikiLeaks, had ended its relationship with the site. Moneybookers stated that its decision had been made "to comply with money laundering or other investigations conducted by government authorities, agencies or commissions."
There has been public disagreement between Julian Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who resigned on September 28, 2010 as WikiLeaks' spokesman. In October 2010, it was reported that Moneybookers, which collected donations for WikiLeaks, had ended its relationship with the site. Moneybookers stated that its decision had been made "to comply with money laundering or other investigations conducted by government authorities, agencies or commissions."
Legal wrangles on WikiLeaks (BBC)
It provoked controversy when it first appeared on the net in December 2006 and still splits opinion. For some it is lauded as the future of investigative journalism. For others it is a risk.
In mid-March 2010 the site's director, Julian Assange, published a document purportedly from the US intelligence services, claiming that Wikileaks represented a "threat to the US Army".
The US government later confirmed to the BBC that the documents were genuine.
Continue reading the main story
“
Start Quote
[To] keep our sources safe, we have had to spread assets, encrypt everything, and move telecommunications and people around the world”
Julian Assange
"The unauthorised publication of Army and DoD [Department of Defense) sensitive documents on Wikileaks provides foreign intelligence services access to information that they may use to harm Army and DoD interests," a spokesperson told BBC News.
The site now claims to host more than one million documents.
Anyone can submit to Wikileaks anonymously, but a team of reviewers - volunteers from the mainstream press, journalists and Wikileaks staff - decides what is published.
"We use advanced cryptographic techniques and legal techniques to protect sources," Mr Assange told the BBC in February.
The site says that it accepts "classified, censored or otherwise restricted material of political, diplomatic or ethical significance" but does not take "rumour, opinion or other kinds of first hand reporting or material that is already publicly available".
"We specialise in allowing whistle-blowers and journalists who have been censored to get material out to the public," said Mr Assange.
It is operated by an organisation known as the Sunshine Press and claims to be "funded by human rights campaigners, investigative journalists, technologists and the general public".
Since Wikileaks first appeared on the net, it has faced various legal challenges to take it offline.
In 2008, for example, the Swiss Bank Julius Baer won a court ruling to block the site after Wikileaks posted "several hundred" documents about its offshore activities.
However, various "mirrors" of the site - hosted on different servers around the world - continued to operate.
The order was eventually overturned.
In mid-March 2010 the site's director, Julian Assange, published a document purportedly from the US intelligence services, claiming that Wikileaks represented a "threat to the US Army".
The US government later confirmed to the BBC that the documents were genuine.
Continue reading the main story
“
Start Quote
[To] keep our sources safe, we have had to spread assets, encrypt everything, and move telecommunications and people around the world”
Julian Assange
"The unauthorised publication of Army and DoD [Department of Defense) sensitive documents on Wikileaks provides foreign intelligence services access to information that they may use to harm Army and DoD interests," a spokesperson told BBC News.
The site now claims to host more than one million documents.
Anyone can submit to Wikileaks anonymously, but a team of reviewers - volunteers from the mainstream press, journalists and Wikileaks staff - decides what is published.
"We use advanced cryptographic techniques and legal techniques to protect sources," Mr Assange told the BBC in February.
The site says that it accepts "classified, censored or otherwise restricted material of political, diplomatic or ethical significance" but does not take "rumour, opinion or other kinds of first hand reporting or material that is already publicly available".
"We specialise in allowing whistle-blowers and journalists who have been censored to get material out to the public," said Mr Assange.
It is operated by an organisation known as the Sunshine Press and claims to be "funded by human rights campaigners, investigative journalists, technologists and the general public".
Since Wikileaks first appeared on the net, it has faced various legal challenges to take it offline.
In 2008, for example, the Swiss Bank Julius Baer won a court ruling to block the site after Wikileaks posted "several hundred" documents about its offshore activities.
However, various "mirrors" of the site - hosted on different servers around the world - continued to operate.
The order was eventually overturned.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
SMALL UNIT ACTIONS BY -___ CAV IVO AT TAJI: ___ AIF KIA
کلِک ایک فوجی ہیلی کاپٹر نے فروری 2007ء میں بغداد میں امریکی فوج کے اڈے پر حملہ کرنے والے شدت پسندوں کو اس وقت گولیوں کا نشانہ بنایا جب وہ ہتھیار ڈال رہے تھے۔
Who: -___ cav
___ x aif kia
___ x wia
___ x aif truck and 1x mortar tube, multiple mortar rds destroyed.
221131feb07: ___ sent to check on bda of counter mortar fire vic .
: ___ gained ___ with 1x ___ truck leaving poo site and has pid a tripod and mortar tube.
: ___ cleared to engage with 30mm.
: ___ reports truck with mortar tube destroyed, ___ aif left area prior to apache firing.
: ___ reports the truck with mortar rds still cooking off mortar rounds.
221233feb07: ___ reports aif got into a ___ headed north, engaged and then they came out wanting to surrender.
: ___ reports they got back into truck and are heading north.
: ___ cleared to engage . / ___ states they can not surrender to aircraft and are still valid targets.
: ___ reports they missed with hellfire and individuals have ran into another shack.
: ___ approves ___ to engage shack.
: ___ reports engaged and destroyed shack with 2x aif. Bda is shack / dump truck destroyed.
: ___ continued to observe for approx ___ minutes with nftr. ___ is off station to refuel and ___ att.
Summary:
1x engagement with 30mm
2x aif kia
___ x mortar system destroyed
___ x ___ truck destroyed with many secondary explosions.
___ x ___ destroyed
___ x shack destroyed
-closed-
History of WikiLeaks (wikipedia)
WikiLeaks first appeared in public on the Internet in January 2007. The site states that it was "founded by Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and start-up company technologists, from the Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa". The creators of WikiLeaks have not been formally identified. It has been represented in public since January 2007 by Julian Assange and others. Assange describes himself as a member of WikiLeaks' advisory board. News reports in The Australian have called Assange the "founder of Wikileaks". As of June 2009, the site had over 1,200 registered volunteers and listed an advisory board comprising Assange, Phillip Adams, Wang Dan, C. J. Hinke, Ben Laurie, Tashi Namgyal Khamsitsang, Xiao Qiang, Chico Whitaker and Wang Youcai. Despite appearing on the list, when contacted by Mother Jones magazine in 2010, Khamsitsang said that while he received an e-mail from WikiLeaks, he had never agreed to be an advisor.
WikiLeaks states that its "primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to people of all regions who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations."
In January 2007, the website stated that it had over 1.2 million leaked documents that it was preparing to publish. An article in The New Yorker said
Assange responded to the suggestion that eavesdropping on Chinese hackers played a crucial part in the early days of WikiLeaks by saying "the imputation is incorrect. The facts concern a 2006 investigation into Chinese espionage one of our contacts were involved in. Somewhere between none and handful of those documents were ever released on WikiLeaks. Non-government targets of the Chinese espionage, such as Tibetan associations were informed (by us)". The group has subsequently released a number of other significant documents which have become front-page news items, ranging from documentation of equipment expenditures and holdings in the Afghanistan war to corruption in Kenya.
The organization's stated goal is to ensure that whistle-blowers and journalists are not jailed for emailing sensitive or classified documents, as happened to Chinese journalist Shi Tao, who was sentenced to 10 years in 2005 after publicising an email from Chinese officials about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
The project has drawn comparisons to Daniel Ellsberg's leaking of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. In the United States, the leaking of some documents may be legally protected. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution guarantees anonymity, at least in the area of political discourse. Author and journalist Whitley Strieber has spoken about the benefits of the WikiLeaks project, noting that "Leaking a government document can mean jail, but jail sentences for this can be fairly short. However, there are many places where it means long incarceration or even death, such as China and parts of Africa and the Middle East."
On 24 December 2009, WikiLeaks announced that it was experiencing a shortage of funds and suspended all access to its website except for a form to submit new material. Material that was previously published was no longer available, although some could still be accessed on unofficial mirrors. WikiLeaks stated on its website that it would resume full operation once the operational costs were covered. WikiLeaks saw this as a kind of strike "to ensure that everyone who is involved stops normal work and actually spends time raising revenue". While it was initially hoped that funds could be secured by 6 January 2010, it was only on 3 February 2010 that WikiLeaks announced that its minimum fundraising goal had been achieved.
On 22 January 2010, PayPal suspended WikiLeaks' donation account and froze its assets. WikiLeaks said that this had happened before, and was done for "no obvious reason". The account was restored on 25 January 2010.
On May 18, 2010, WikiLeaks announced that its website and archive were back up.
As of June 2010, WikiLeaks was a finalist for a grant of more than half a million dollars from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, but did not make the cut. WikiLeaks commented, "Wikileaks was highest rated project in the Knight challenge, strongly recommended to the board but gets no funding. Go figure”. WikiLeaks said that the Knight foundation announced the award to "'12 Grantees who will impact future of news' – but not WikiLeaks" and questioned whether Knight foundation was "really looking for impact". A spokesman of the Knight Foundation disputed parts of WikiLeaks' statement, saying "WikiLeaks was not recommended by Knight staff to the board." However, he declined to say whether WikiLeaks was the project rated highest by the Knight advisory panel, which consists of non-staffers, among them journalist Jennifer 8. Lee, who has done PR work for WikiLeaks with the press and on social networking sites.
On July 17, Jacob Appelbaum spoke on behalf of WikiLeaks at the 2010 Hackers on Planet Earth conference in New York City, replacing Assange due to the presence of federal agents at the conference. He announced that the WikiLeaks submission system was again up and running, after it had been temporarily suspended. Assange was a surprise speaker at a TED conference on 19 July 2010 in Oxford, and confirmed that WikiLeaks was now accepting submissions again.
Upon returning to the U.S. from Holland, on July 29, Appelbaum was detained for three hours at the airport by U.S. agents, according to anonymous sources. The sources told Cnet that Appelbaum's bag was searched, receipts from his bag were photocopied, his laptop was inspected, although in what manner was unclear. Appelbaum reportedly refused to answer questions without a lawyer present, and was not allowed to make a phone call. His three mobile phones were reportedly taken and not returned. On July 31, he spoke at a Defcon conference and mentioned his phone being "seized". After speaking, he was approached by two FBI agents and questioned.
WikiLeaks states that its "primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to people of all regions who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations."
In January 2007, the website stated that it had over 1.2 million leaked documents that it was preparing to publish. An article in The New Yorker said
One of the WikiLeaks activists owned a server that was being used as a node for the Tor network. Millions of secret transmissions passed through it. The activist noticed that hackers from China were using the network to gather foreign governments’ information, and began to record this traffic. Only a small fraction has ever been posted on WikiLeaks, but the initial tranche served as the site’s foundation, and Assange was able to say, "[w]e have received over one million documents from thirteen countries."
Assange responded to the suggestion that eavesdropping on Chinese hackers played a crucial part in the early days of WikiLeaks by saying "the imputation is incorrect. The facts concern a 2006 investigation into Chinese espionage one of our contacts were involved in. Somewhere between none and handful of those documents were ever released on WikiLeaks. Non-government targets of the Chinese espionage, such as Tibetan associations were informed (by us)". The group has subsequently released a number of other significant documents which have become front-page news items, ranging from documentation of equipment expenditures and holdings in the Afghanistan war to corruption in Kenya.
The organization's stated goal is to ensure that whistle-blowers and journalists are not jailed for emailing sensitive or classified documents, as happened to Chinese journalist Shi Tao, who was sentenced to 10 years in 2005 after publicising an email from Chinese officials about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
The project has drawn comparisons to Daniel Ellsberg's leaking of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. In the United States, the leaking of some documents may be legally protected. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution guarantees anonymity, at least in the area of political discourse. Author and journalist Whitley Strieber has spoken about the benefits of the WikiLeaks project, noting that "Leaking a government document can mean jail, but jail sentences for this can be fairly short. However, there are many places where it means long incarceration or even death, such as China and parts of Africa and the Middle East."
On 24 December 2009, WikiLeaks announced that it was experiencing a shortage of funds and suspended all access to its website except for a form to submit new material. Material that was previously published was no longer available, although some could still be accessed on unofficial mirrors. WikiLeaks stated on its website that it would resume full operation once the operational costs were covered. WikiLeaks saw this as a kind of strike "to ensure that everyone who is involved stops normal work and actually spends time raising revenue". While it was initially hoped that funds could be secured by 6 January 2010, it was only on 3 February 2010 that WikiLeaks announced that its minimum fundraising goal had been achieved.
On 22 January 2010, PayPal suspended WikiLeaks' donation account and froze its assets. WikiLeaks said that this had happened before, and was done for "no obvious reason". The account was restored on 25 January 2010.
On May 18, 2010, WikiLeaks announced that its website and archive were back up.
As of June 2010, WikiLeaks was a finalist for a grant of more than half a million dollars from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, but did not make the cut. WikiLeaks commented, "Wikileaks was highest rated project in the Knight challenge, strongly recommended to the board but gets no funding. Go figure”. WikiLeaks said that the Knight foundation announced the award to "'12 Grantees who will impact future of news' – but not WikiLeaks" and questioned whether Knight foundation was "really looking for impact". A spokesman of the Knight Foundation disputed parts of WikiLeaks' statement, saying "WikiLeaks was not recommended by Knight staff to the board." However, he declined to say whether WikiLeaks was the project rated highest by the Knight advisory panel, which consists of non-staffers, among them journalist Jennifer 8. Lee, who has done PR work for WikiLeaks with the press and on social networking sites.
On July 17, Jacob Appelbaum spoke on behalf of WikiLeaks at the 2010 Hackers on Planet Earth conference in New York City, replacing Assange due to the presence of federal agents at the conference. He announced that the WikiLeaks submission system was again up and running, after it had been temporarily suspended. Assange was a surprise speaker at a TED conference on 19 July 2010 in Oxford, and confirmed that WikiLeaks was now accepting submissions again.
Upon returning to the U.S. from Holland, on July 29, Appelbaum was detained for three hours at the airport by U.S. agents, according to anonymous sources. The sources told Cnet that Appelbaum's bag was searched, receipts from his bag were photocopied, his laptop was inspected, although in what manner was unclear. Appelbaum reportedly refused to answer questions without a lawyer present, and was not allowed to make a phone call. His three mobile phones were reportedly taken and not returned. On July 31, he spoke at a Defcon conference and mentioned his phone being "seized". After speaking, he was approached by two FBI agents and questioned.
What is Wikileaks? (BBC)
Whistle-blowing website Wikileaks is once again at the centre of attention.
Months after releasing some 90,000 secret records of US military incident and intelligence reports about the war in Afghanistan, Wikileaks has posted online almost 400,000 similar documents detailing events in Iraq after the 2003 invasion.
It is the latest in a long list of "leaks" published by the secretive site, which has established a reputation for publishing sensitive material from governments and other high-profile organisations.
In April 2010, for example, Wikileaks posted a video on its website that shows a US Apache helicopter killing at least 12 people - including two Reuters journalists - during an attack in Baghdad in 2007. A US military analyst is currently awaiting trial, on charges of leaking the material along with other sensitive military and diplomatic material.
In October 2009, it posted a list of names and addresses of people it claimed belonged to the British National Party (BNP). The BNP said the list was a "malicious forgery".
And during the 2008 US elections, it published screenshots of the e-mail inbox, pictures and address book of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
Other controversial documents hosted on the site include a copy of the Standard Operating Procedures for Camp Delta, a document that detailed restrictions placed on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
Months after releasing some 90,000 secret records of US military incident and intelligence reports about the war in Afghanistan, Wikileaks has posted online almost 400,000 similar documents detailing events in Iraq after the 2003 invasion.
It is the latest in a long list of "leaks" published by the secretive site, which has established a reputation for publishing sensitive material from governments and other high-profile organisations.
In April 2010, for example, Wikileaks posted a video on its website that shows a US Apache helicopter killing at least 12 people - including two Reuters journalists - during an attack in Baghdad in 2007. A US military analyst is currently awaiting trial, on charges of leaking the material along with other sensitive military and diplomatic material.
In October 2009, it posted a list of names and addresses of people it claimed belonged to the British National Party (BNP). The BNP said the list was a "malicious forgery".
And during the 2008 US elections, it published screenshots of the e-mail inbox, pictures and address book of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
Other controversial documents hosted on the site include a copy of the Standard Operating Procedures for Camp Delta, a document that detailed restrictions placed on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
What is Wikileaks? (Telegraph.co.uk)
It has just released confidential documents that shed light on the war in Afghanistan, but how has Wikileaks become one of the most important whistle-blowing sites on the web?
The news that the largest leak in American military history came via the website Wikileaks will not surprise long-term watchers of the controversial, multi-award-winning site. Despite a recent period of near-bankruptcy, it has consistently released information that major corporations and governments wanted to conceal – the Abu Ghraib “torture manual”, footage from American jets allegedly committing war crimes, the secrets of Scientology and even Sarah Palin’s private emails have all been published by the site.
Founded by secretive Australian Julian Assange, Wikileaks was originally based in Sweden and garnered 1.2 million leaked documents in time for its launch in January 2007. It taps in to the world’s web users’ desire either for justice or revenge on former employers or acquaintances, but its most significant stories have been held up as largely in the public interest. The Abu Ghraib revelations resulted in international condemnation of American methods and arguably contributed to political commitments from Barack Obama to close down the detention centre. Assange claims that by using the global community of internet users, his site is able to promote accuracy, scrutiny and discussion of sensitive information.
Anybody with web access can submit a story to Wikileaks. The site, however, states that its "primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, sub-saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to people of all regions who wish to reveal unethical behaviour in their governments and corporations." Wikileaks has now evolved an editorial policy by which only documents "of political, diplomatic, historical or ethical interest" are in fact published, and it has recently ceased to permit users to comment directly on stories. Earlier this year, Assange said that submissions are vetted by five reviewers, and that the background of the “leaker” is also checked.
A number of countries and companies, notably Australia, China and Bank Julius Baer have tried to censor the site or have it taken offline, but its complex method of web-hosting has ensured that it is very difficult for its servers to be identified. Wikileaks has also used a Swedish company called PRQ, which specialises in “bulletproof hosting”, asking no questions and maintaining few records of its clients so that it cannot be accused of promoting material that could be illegal.
The site has been heavily criticised in the past for endangering the lives of individuals, just as American and Pakistani representatives have said this latest leak of American military logs will too. But only last weak Assange told America’s Wired magazine that Wikileaks was "getting an enormous quantity of whistle-blower disclosures of high calibre". The only reason more has not been released was a lack of volunteer journalists to verify the submissions, he said, adding that BP was set to be one of his site’s future subjects.
Iraq War Logs
At 5pm EST Friday 22nd October 2010 WikiLeaks released the largest classified military leak in history. The 391,832 reports ('The Iraq War Logs'), document the war and occupation in Iraq, from 1st January 2004 to 31st December 2009 (except for the months of May 2004 and March 2009) as told by soldiers in the United States Army. Each is a 'SIGACT' or Significant Action in the war. They detail events as seen and heard by the US military troops on the ground in Iraq and are the first real glimpse into the secret history of the war that the United States government has been privy to throughout.
The reports detail 109,032 deaths in Iraq, comprised of 66,081 'civilians'; 23,984 'enemy' (those labeled as insurgents); 15,196 'host nation' (Iraqi government forces) and 3,771 'friendly' (coalition forces). The majority of the deaths (66,000, over 60%) of these are civilian deaths.That is 31 civilians dying every day during the six year period. For comparison, the 'Afghan War Diaries', previously released by WikiLeaks, covering the same period, detail the deaths of some 20,000 people. Iraq during the same period, was five times as lethal with equivallent population size.
The reports detail 109,032 deaths in Iraq, comprised of 66,081 'civilians'; 23,984 'enemy' (those labeled as insurgents); 15,196 'host nation' (Iraqi government forces) and 3,771 'friendly' (coalition forces). The majority of the deaths (66,000, over 60%) of these are civilian deaths.That is 31 civilians dying every day during the six year period. For comparison, the 'Afghan War Diaries', previously released by WikiLeaks, covering the same period, detail the deaths of some 20,000 people. Iraq during the same period, was five times as lethal with equivallent population size.
Julian Assange
Julian Paul Assange (pronounced /əˈsɑːnʒ/ ə-SAHNZH; born 1971) is an Australian internet activist best known for his involvement with Wikileaks, a whistleblower website. Assange was a physics and mathematics student, a hacker, and a computer programmer, before taking on his current role as Wikileaks' spokesperson and editor-in-chief.
WikiPedia
| Born | 1971 Townsville, Queensland, Australia |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Currently Editor in chief and spokespersonfor Wikileaks Previously Journalist, programmer, internet activist, and internet hacker |
| Board member of | Wikileaks |
| Children | Daniel Assange[1] |
| Awards | Amnesty International UK Media Awards 2009, Sam Adams Award 2010 |
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