Category: Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy

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Journal: DoD, WikiLeaks, JCS, Security Ad Naseum…

07 Other Atrocities, Civil Society, Corruption, Ethics, Government, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), IO Impotency, Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Media, Methods & Process, Military, Officers Call, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy

Defense News August 23, 2010

Experts: DoD Could Have Prevented WikiLeaks Leak

By William Matthews

While senior Pentagon officials resort to bluster in hopes of preventing the WikiLeaks website from posting any more secret Afghan war documents on the Internet, security experts say there is a lot the U.S. military could have done to prevent the classified documents from being leaked in the first place.

Steps range from the sophisticated — installing automated monitoring systems on classified networks — to the mundane — disabling CD burners and USB ports on network computers.

“The technology is available” to protect highly sensitive information, said Tom Conway, director of federal business development at computer security giant McAfee. “The Defense Department doesn’t have it, but it is commercially available. We’ve got some major commercial clients using it.”

Full Article Below the Line (Not Easily Available on Internet); Lengthy Comment Follows Article

Continue reading “Journal: DoD, WikiLeaks, JCS, Security Ad Naseum…”

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Opening Beijing’s Seven Secrets

02 China, 07 Other Atrocities, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Open Government, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy

Waiting for Wikileaks: Beijing's Seven Secrets

by Perry Link (Aug 18, 2010)

While people in the US and elsewhere have been reacting to the release by Wikileaks of classified US documents on the Afghan War, Chinese bloggers have been discussing the event in parallel with another in their own country. On July 21 in Beijing, four days before Wikileaks published its documents, Chinese President Hu Jintao convened a high-level meeting to discuss ways to prevent leaks from the archives of the Communist Party of China.

In emails, tweets, and web postings, Chinese bloggers, both inside China and overseas, began listing key episodes in recent Chinese history that have remained shrouded in mystery and for which they would love to see archives opened:

1. The famine during the Great Leap Forward in 1959-62. Somewhere between 20 and 50 million people died because of bad policy, not “bad weather.” What exactly happened? What policies caused the famine and what policies suppressed information on it? How much grain was in state granaries while people starved? Is it true that Mao sold grain to the Soviet Union during those years in order to buy nuclear weapons?

Continue reading “Opening Beijing's Seven Secrets”

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Journal: Traitor to Some, Hero to Others

10 Security, 11 Society, InfoOps (IO), Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Officers Call, Open Government, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy
Marcus Aurelius Recommends

(COMMENT:  Really too bad that individuals like this are entitled to Constitutional protections…  If he in fact compromised assets, as I have read in open press, they will be lucky if all the Taliban does is shoot them.)

Washington Post
August 14, 2010
Pg. 2

Army Analyst Celebrated As Antiwar Hero

Many rally to soldier's defense after disclosure of classified documents

By Michael W. Savage

For antiwar campaigners from Seattle to Iceland, a new name has become a byword for anti-establishment heroism: Army Pfc. Bradley E. Manning.

Manning, a 22-year-old intelligence analyst, is suspected of leaking thousands of classified documents about the Afghanistan war to the Web site WikiLeaks.

FULL STORY ONLINE

Phi Beta Iota: This needs to be evaluated at multiple levels.

Continue reading “Journal: Traitor to Some, Hero to Others”

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CIA Deceives Supreme Court + Former Guantanamo Detainee Running For Office in Afghanistan

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, Corruption, Government, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy

CIA hid terrorism prisoners from US Supreme Court

August 12, 2010 by JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |

The Central Intelligence Agency purposefully concealed at least four terrorism detainees from the US legal system, including the Supreme Court, according to an exclusive report by the Associated Press. The news agency has revealed that the CIA secretly transported the four to Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp on Cuba in 2003, two years before it publicly admitted their capture. It then secretly transferred them again to other sites in its black site prison network in various countries around the world, just three months before their prolonged stay at Guantánamo would entitle them to legal representation. While at Guantánamo, the four prisoners, Abd al-Nashiri, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, Ramzi Binalshibh and Abu Zubaydah, were kept at a facility known as ‘Strawberry Fields’, which is detached from the main prison site at the bay. By hiding the four, the Bush Administration managed to keep them under CIA custody while denying them legal representation for two years longer than allowed by US law.

Former Guantanamo Detainee Running For Office in Afghanistan

Quil Lawrence, August 10, 2010 | wgbh.org |

Izatullah Nusrat, 42, was held at the U.S. facility in Guantanamo for nearly five years. Now he is back in Afghanistan and running for election to Parliament in the Sept. 18 election. Nusrat has harsh words for Americans, but he favors working with the current government over the Taliban and says he wants the fighting to stop.

Related:
More Lies: CIA said recordings didn't exist..9/11 interrogation tapes found under desk (Aug 17, 2010)

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Journal: Just How Important is the WikiLeaks AF Dump?

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Analysis, Budgets & Funding, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Methods & Process, Misinformation & Propaganda, Officers Call, Reform, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy
Chuck Spinney Recommends

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Kiss This War Goodbye

By FRANK RICH, New York Times,  July 31, 2010

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on August 1, 2010, on page WK8 of the New York edition.

IT was on a Sunday morning, June 13, 1971, that The Times published its first installment of the Pentagon Papers. Few readers may have been more excited than a circle of aspiring undergraduate journalists who’d worked at The Harvard Crimson. Though the identity of The Times’s source wouldn’t eke out for several days, we knew the whistle-blower had to be Daniel Ellsberg, an intense research fellow at M.I.T. and former Robert McNamara acolyte who’d become an antiwar activist around Boston. We recognized the papers’ contents, as reported in The Times, because we’d heard the war stories from the loquacious Ellsberg himself.
. . . . . . .

What was often forgotten last week is that the Pentagon Papers had no game-changing news about that war either and also described events predating the then-current president.

. . . . . . .

The papers’ punch was in the many inside details they added to the war’s chronicle over four previous administrations and, especially, in their shocking and irrefutable evidence that Nixon’s immediate predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, had systematically lied to the country about his intentions and the war’s progress.

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Wyly Brothers, Top Republican Bankrollers, Accused of Massive Fraud

09 Justice, Commerce, Corruption, Open Government, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy
article source

By Dave Levinthal on July 29, 2010

Charles Wyly Jr. and Samuel Wyly, Texas businessmen and brothers who are among the nation's most generous campaign donors to Republican political candidates and causes, were today hit with a Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit accusing them of fraud worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

The SEC accuses the Wylys of pocketing $550 million in undisclosed money over 13 years.

“The cloak of secrecy has been lifted from the complex web of foreign structures used by the Wylys to evade the securities laws,” Lorin Reisner, the SEC’s deputy enforcement director, said in a statement this afternoon. “They used these structures to conceal hundreds of millions of dollars of gains in violation of the disclosure requirements for corporate insiders.”

Beneficiaries of Wyly brothers cash together compose a who's who of the decade's most notable Republicans, with dozens of top GOP partisans' campaign coffers touched by Wyly money.

Together with their wives, the Wyly brothers have donated nearly $2.5 million to Republican candidates and committees during the past 20 years, a Center for Responsive Politics analysis reveals. Continue reading “Wyly Brothers, Top Republican Bankrollers, Accused of Massive Fraud”