While the wikileaks webapge is down their Twit page is still functioning http://twitter.com/wikileaks
MSNBC video clip of
New Wikileaks posting to be released
Wikileaks plans to release new classified documents on the Iraq war as early as Sunday night. Msnbc's Thomas Roberts talks to military expert Col. Jack Jacobs.
Pentagon braces for WikiLeaks release of secret Iraq reports
U.S. says only limited damage so far from previous leak of Afghan war logs
NBC, msnbc.com and news services
or http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39690010/ns/us_news-security/
WikiLeaks to release 400,000 secret war documents
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon is scouring through an Iraq war database to prepare for potential fallout from an expected release by WikiLeaks of some 400,000 secret military reports.
The massive release is set to dwarf the whistleblower website's publication of 77,000 classified US military documents on the war in Afghanistan in July, including the names of Afghan informants and other details from raw intelligence reports. Another 15,000 are due out soon.
In order to prepare for today's anticipated release of sensitive intelligence on the US-led Iraq war, officials set up a 120-person taskforce several weeks ago to comb through the database and "determine what the possible impacts might be," said Colonel David Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman.
The Department of Defence is concerned the leak compiles "significant activities" from the war, or SIGACTS, which include incidents such as known attacks against coalition troops, Iraqi security forces, civilians or infrastructure in the country.
The data was culled from an Iraq-based database that contained "significant acts, unit-level reporting, tactical reports, things of that nature," said Lapan, noting that Pentagon officials still do not know how many and which documents would be released.
He urged WikiLeaks to return the documents to the US military, which he said found no need to redact them in the interim.
"Our position is redactions don't help, it's returning the documents to their rightful owner," Lapan said.
"We don't believe WikiLeaks or others have the expertise needed. It's not as simple as just taking out names. There are other things and documents that aren't names that are also potentially damaging."
For the Iraq leak, Wikileaks is believed to be teaming up with the same news outlets as it did for the Afghanistan document dump - The New York Times, Britain's Guardian and Der Spiegel of Germany - and Newsweek magazine has reported that all partners would release the material simultaneously.
The July release caused uproar in the US government, with Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA director Michael Hayden warning it could undermine the post-9/11 effort to break down walls between rival intelligence agencies.
Difficulties in sharing intelligence information have been repeatedly identified as a problem plaguing spy and law enforcement services since the attacks of September 11, 2001.
In a speech earlier this month, Clapper said President Barack Obama was full of "angst" over a "haemorrhage" of leaks of sensitive intelligence from government officials.
"I think it's going to have a very chilling effect on the need to share," he said.
WikiLeaks has not identified the source of the documents it has released so far but suspicion has fallen on Bradley Manning, a US Army intelligence analyst who is currently in military custody.
Manning was arrested in May following the release by WikiLeaks of video footage of a US Apache helicopter strike in Iraq in which civilians died, and he has been charged with delivering defence information to an unauthorized source.
Launched in 2006, WikiLeaks is facing internal troubles amid criticism its releases harm US national security and an ongoing investigation into its founder, Julian Assange, over an alleged sex crime in Sweden.
It also has some money problems.
Assange told The Guardian that British firm Moneybookers, an online payment company it uses to collect donations, closed his website's account in August after the US and Australian governments blacklisted WikiLeaks in the days following the initial release of Afghan documents.
The website has been undergoing "scheduled maintenance" since September 29, but promises to "be back online as soon as possible."
- AFP
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11562494
17 October 2010 Last updated at 23:01 GMT
Pentagon braces for new Iraq war Wikileaks
Mr Assange founded the Wikileaks whistleblower website in 2006
The US military has assembled a 120-member team to prepare for the expected publication of some 400,000 Iraq war documents on the Wikileaks website.
The documents are thought to concern battle activity, Iraqi security forces and civilian casualties.
The Pentagon said it wants the documents back to avoid potentially damaging information being released.
Pentagon spokesman Col Dave Lapan said the team was reviewing the files on the Iraq war to discover what the possible impact of the Wikileaks release could be.
Col Lapan said the files were from an Iraq-based database that contained "significant acts, unit-level reporting, tactical reports, things of that nature".
He said the Pentagon did not know the timing of the leak but they were preparing for it to be as early as Monday or Tuesday.
Other sources said it may come later in the month.
'Smear campaign'
Col Lapan said the files should be returned to the Pentagon because "we don't believe Wikileaks or others have the expertise needed. It's not as simple as just taking out names. There are other things and documents that aren't names that are also potentially damaging."
Wikileaks' release in July of thousands of documents on the war in Afghanistan prompted US military officials to warn that the whistleblower website might cause the deaths of US soldiers and Afghan civilians because some of the documents contained the names of locals who had helped coalition forces.
But US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said in a letter to the head of the Senate Armed Services Committee that the leak had not revealed any "sensitive intelligence sources or methods".
There have been fears that such leaks could damage US intelligence sharing with other nations as well as intelligence sharing between US agencies.
The investigation into the Afghan leak has focused on Bradley Manning, a US army intelligence analyst who is in custody and has been charged with leaking a classified video of a US helicopter attack in Iraq in 2007 in which a dozen people were killed.
The Wikileaks website is currently offline "undergoing scheduled maintenance". Founder Julian Assange is being investigated in Sweden over an alleged sex crime.
He denies the charge and says the the allegations are part of a smear campaign by opponents of his whistle-blowing website.
Missing weapons, ethnic cleansing details may be part of Wikileaks' 400,000 Iraq War files
- From: AFP
- October 18, 2010
Where did the deadliest weapon of choice for insurgents - the IED - originate? WikiLeaks may have the answer / AP Source: AP
- New release likely tonight
- Five times bigger than Afghan leak
- Founder Assange under siege
THE Pentagon is scouring an Iraq war database to prepare for potential fallout from an expected release by WikiLeaks of some 400,000 secret military reports.
Officials set up the taskforce several weeks ago in order to prepare for tonight's anticipated release of sensitive intelligence on the US-led Iraq war.
They have been told to comb through the database and "determine what the possible impacts might be", Pentagon spokesman Colonel David Lapan said.
The Department of Defense is concerned the leak compiles "significant activities" from the war, or SIGACTS, which include incidents such as known attacks against coalition troops, Iraqi security forces, civilians or infrastructure in the country.
The data was culled from an Iraq-based database that contained "significant acts, unit-level reporting, tactical reports, things of that nature," Col Lapan said.
He noted that Pentagon officials did not know how many and which documents would be released.
The massive release is set to dwarf the whistleblower website's publication of 77,000 classified US military documents on the war in Afghanistan in July, including the names of Afghan informants and other details from raw intelligence reports.
Another 15,000 are due out soon.
That release, while gaining enormous media coverage and publicity for Wikileaks and its Australian founder Julian Assange, was largely ignored by a war-weary public.
However, aside from the further unrest it could ignite in Iraq and added discomfort for the 50,000 US troops and diplomats still stationed there, the Iraq files have much more explosive potential than the Afghanistan release.
Wired has pinpointed several areas of interest, such as the possibility of Iran's involvement in developing Improvised Explosive Devices, the loss of 200,000 US rifles and pistols in 2007 and evidence of ethnic cleansing.
Col Lapan urged WikiLeaks to return the documents to the US military, which he said found no need to redact them in the interim.
"Our position is redactions don't help, it's returning the documents to their rightful owner," he said.
"We don't believe WikiLeaks or others have the expertise needed.
"It's not as simple as just taking out names. There are other things and documents that aren't names that are also potentially damaging."
For the Iraq leak, Wikileaks is believed to be teaming up with the same news outlets as it did for the Afghanistan document dump - The New York Times, Britain's Guardian and Der Spiegel of Germany.
Newsweek magazine has reported that all partners would release the material simultaneously.
The July release caused uproar in the US government, with Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA director Michael Hayden warning it could undermine the post-9/11 effort to break down walls between rival intelligence agencies.
Difficulties in sharing intelligence information have been repeatedly identified as a problem plaguing spy and law enforcement services since the attacks of September 11, 2001.
In a speech earlier this month, Mr Clapper said President Barack Obama was full of "angst" over a "haemorrhage" of leaks of sensitive intelligence from government officials.
"I think it's going to have a very chilling effect on the need to share," he said.
WikiLeaks has not identified the source of the documents it has released so far but suspicion has fallen on Bradley Manning, a US Army intelligence analyst who is currently in military custody.
Manning was arrested in May following the release by WikiLeaks of video footage of a US Apache helicopter strike in Iraq in which civilians died, and he has been charged with delivering defense information to an unauthorised source.
Launched in 2006, WikiLeaks is facing internal troubles amid criticism its releases harm US national security and an ongoing investigation into its founder, Julian Assange, over an alleged sex crime in Sweden.
It also has some money problems.
Assange told The Guardian that British firm Moneybookers, an online payment company it uses to collect donations, closed his website's account in August after the US and Australian governments blacklisted WikiLeaks in the days following the initial release of Afghan documents.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/oct/14/wikileaks-says-funding-is-blocked
The website has been undergoing "scheduled maintenance" since September 29, but promises to "be back online as soon as possible."
- By Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter
- October 15, 2010 |
- 7:00 am |
After a brief quiescence, the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks is about to explode again onto the global stage with the impending release of almost 400,000 secret U.S. Army reports from the Iraq War, marking the largest military leak in U.S. history.
Measured by size, the database will dwarf the 92,000-entry Afghan war log WikiLeaks partially published last July. “It will be huge,” says a source familiar with WikiLeaks’ operations, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Former WikiLeaks staffers say the document dump was at one time scheduled for Monday, October 18, though the publication date may well have been moved since then. Some large media outlets were provided an embargoed copy of the database in August.
In Washington, the Pentagon is bracing for the impact. The Defense Department believes the leak is a compilation of the “Significant Activities,” or SIGACTS, (http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iraq_sigacts.htm) reports from the Iraq War, and officials have assembled a 120-person taskforce that’s been scouring the database to prepare for the leak, according to spokesman Col. Dave Lapan.
“They’ve been doing that analysis for some time and have been providing information to Central Command and to our allies, so that they could prepare for a possible impact of the release [and] could take appropriate steps,” says Lapan. “There are … things that could be contained in the documents that could be harmful to operations, to sources and methods.”
The Iraq release comes at a crucial time for the 4-year-old WikiLeaks, which has been rankled by internal conflict, shaken by outside criticism and knocked off-message by a lingering sex-crime investigation of its founder, Julian Assange, in Sweden. At least half-a-dozen staffers have resigned from the organization in recent weeks, including key technical staff, according to four ex-staffers interviewed by Wired.com. A “scheduled maintenance” of the WikiLeaks website that began September 29 has stretched to more than two weeks.
The beleaguered Assange was cautious in a Sept. 30 public debate at City University in London, where he asked organizers to bar attending journalists and students from recording, photographing or videotaping his appearance.
The controversies dogging the site followed a string of triumphs: a series of high-profile leaks aimed at U.S. and NATO war efforts. In April, the site published a highly controversial classified video of a 2007 Army helicopter attack in Baghdad.
The attack killed two Reuters employees and an unarmed Iraqi man who stumbled onto the scene and tried to rescue one of the wounded. The man’s two children suffered serious injuries in the hail of gunfire. WikiLeaks titled the video “Collateral Murder,” and raised $150,000 from supporters in two days following its release.
Then in July, the site published the Afghan logs, generating headlines around the world. But WikiLeaks’ handling of that release garnered its first widespread criticism from ideological allies. Although the organization withheld 15,000 records from publication to redact the names of Afghan informants who might be at risk of Taliban reprisal, names of some collaborators were still found in the thousands of documents that were published.
Although there’s no evidence that anyone has suffered harm as a result of the names being exposed, WikiLeaks’ handling of the matter drew criticism from human rights organizations and the international free press group Reporters Without Borders, which accused the site of being reckless. Not surprisingly, the Pentagon was also displeased and issued formal demands that WikiLeaks “return” all classified documents in its possession.
Undaunted, Assange secretly inked deals with media outlets in several countries in August to provide them with embargoed access to the much larger database of Iraq War documents, according to ex-staffers. The agreements created strife inside WikiLeaks.
Former Icelandic WikiLeaks volunteer Herbert Snorrason told Wired.com last month that he was alarmed by the aggressive timetable for the release, which provided WikiLeaks’ volunteers too little time to redact the names of U.S. collaborators and informants in Iraq.
“The release date which was established was completely unrealistic,” said 25-year-old Snorrason. “We found out that the level of redactions performed on the Afghanistan documents was not sufficient. I announced that if the next batch did not receive full attention, I would not be willing to cooperate.”
Wired.com was not able to determine what, if any, portion of the Iraq database WikiLeaks plans to withhold from its website.
Another criticism behind the recent resignations from WikiLeaks is the charge that Assange has neglected hundreds or thousands of small, regionally important leaks submitted from around the world, in favor of headline-making leaks targeting the U.S. government. The Iraq War log, says former WikiLeaks spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg, would continue that focus. Although publication of the documents will likely garner praise from WikiLeaks supporters, it won’t fix the problems that are endemic to the organization, he says.
“It might distract from the issues at hand for a bit if it happens,” says Domscheit-Berg. “But it doesn’t change a thing about the situation. WikiLeaks is supposed to be more than those releases. I think it might rejuvenate WikiLeaks if WikiLeaks started to pump out all those others docs that are waiting.”
In addition to the potential impact publication of the war log will have on the U.S., NATO allies and the nascent Iraqi government, it could also jolt the pending court martial case against Army Pfc. Bradley Manning.
Bradley Manning (Facebook.com)
Manning, a 23-year-old former Army intelligence analyst, was arrested last May after confessing to a former hacker that he’d supplied WikiLeaks with classified videos and documents, including the “Collateral Murder” video, and a database of 260,000 State Department diplomatic cables.
It was Manning’s online chats with former hacker Adrian Lamo — who turned him in to authorities — that provided the first indication that WikiLeaks possessed the Iraq log. Manning described leaking a database of half-a-million reports from the Iraq War dated from 2004 through 2009, which he said included date stamps of events, latitude and longitude, and casualty figures.
The Army formally charged Manning with the “Collateral Murder” leak in July, and the Pentagon describes him as a “person of interest” in the Afghan war log leak, though Manning did not mention leaking a database of events from the Afghan war.
His attorney did not return a phone call for this story.
Manning is being held in solitary confinement in the Marine Corps brig at Quantico, Virginia. Assange has never confirmed that Manning was a source of leaked data to WikiLeaks, but has pledged financial assistance for Manning’s criminal defense, which supporters estimate could cost $100,000.
The non-profit Wau Holland Foundation in Germany, which manages the bulk of WikiLeaks’ contributions, confirmed to Wired.com that Assange has authorized the release of money for Manning’s defense, but did not provide any other details. In all, WikiLeaks has about $1 million in contributions in its coffers.
Top photo by Spc. Joshua E. Powell
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/oct/14/wikileaks-says-funding-is-blocked
WikiLeaks says funding has been blocked after government blacklisting
Founder Julian Assange hits out at decision by Moneybookers, which collects the whistleblowing website's donations
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange holds up a copy of the Guardian after thousands of US military documents were leaked and exposed Photograph: Andrew Winning/REUTERS
The whistleblowing group WikiLeaks claims that it has had its funding blocked and that it is the victim of financial warfare by the US government.
Moneybookers, a British-registered internet payment company that collects WikiLeaks donations, emailed the organisation to say it had closed down its account because it had been put on an official US watchlist and on an Australian government blacklist.
The apparent blacklisting came a few days after the Pentagon publicly expressed its anger at WikiLeaks and its founder, Australian citizen Julian Assange, for obtaining thousands of classified military documents about the war in Afghanistan, in one of the US army's biggest leaks of information. The documents caused a sensation when they were made available to the Guardian, the New York Times and German magazine Der Spiegel, revealing hitherto unreported civilian casualties.
WikiLeaks defied Pentagon calls to return the war logs and destroy all copies. Instead, it has been reported that it intends to release an even larger cache of military documents, disclosing other abuses in Iraq.
Moneybookers moved against WikiLeaks on 13 August, according to the correspondence, less than a week after the Pentagon made public threats of reprisals against the organisation. Moneybookers wrote to Assange: "Following an audit of your account by our security department, we must advise that your account has been closed … to comply with money laundering or other investigations conducted by government authorities."
When Assange emailed to ask what the problem was, he says he was told in response by Daniel Stromberg, the Moneybookers e-commerce manager for the Nordic region: "When I did my regular overview of my customers, I noticed that something was wrong with your account and I emailed our risk and legal department to solve this issue.
"Below I have copied the answer I received from them: 'Hi Daniel, you can inform him that initially his account was suspended due to being accessed from a blacklisted IP address. However, following recent publicity and the subsequently addition of the WikiLeaks entity to blacklists in Australia and watchlists in the USA, we have terminated the business relationship.'"
Assange said: "This is likely to cause a huge backlash against Moneybookers. Craven behaviour in relation to the US government is unlikely to be seen sympathetically."
Moneybookers, which is registered in the UK but controlled by the Bahrain-based group Investcorp, would not make anyone available to explain the decision. Its public relations firm, 77PR, said: "We have never had any request, inquiry or correspondence from any authority regarding this former customer." Asked how this could be reconciled with the references in the correspondence to a blacklist, it said: "We stick with our original statement."
| |||||
| 17 October 2010 CENTCOM Iraq War SIGACTS File Lists -- Wikileaks Pre-Empt?Wired reports 15 October 2010 about the upcoming Wikileaks dump: "In Washington, the Pentagon is bracing for the impact. The Defense Department believes the leak is a compilation of the “Significant Activities,” or SIGACTS, reports from the Iraq War, and officials have assembled a 120-person taskforce that’s been scouring the database to prepare for the leak, according to spokesman Col. Dave Lapan." CENTCOM has posted four long lists of SIGACTS Data (not the files themselves) in its FOIA Reading Room for 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007 (through 7/16/2007), all dated 30 July 2007: http://www2.centcom.mil/sites/foia/rr/default.aspx For the four years about 236,000 SIGACTS files are listed by Date Occurred, Attack Type, Target and City. Again, these are only lists of files. Excerpt: It is not known if these are related to the upcoming Wikileaks dump, and if so, whether they are intended to pre-empt or diminish the impact of the dump. SecDef Gates' recently reported private letter on the limited security significance of the Wikileaks Afghan War dump, along with these files, could be an information management campaign to defuse the Wikileaks bombshell campaign. Downloading the PDFs was erratic this morning so Cryptome offers the four as a single package and individually, Zipped: http://cryptome.org/0002/sigacts/centcom-sigacts.zip (9.5MB) 2007, ~66,000 files listed, 2,369 pages, 2.5MB 2006, ~81,000 files listed, 2,882 pages, 3.1MB 2005, ~54,000 files listed, 1,944 pages, 2.3MB 2004,~35,000 files listed, 1,265 pages, 1.5MB |
![[Image]](http://cryptome.org/0002/sigacts/centcom-sigacts.jpg)
Superbombs and Secret Jails: What to Look for in WikiLeaks’ Iraq Docs
- By Spencer Ackerman
- October 15, 2010 |
- 7:00 am |
- Categories: Iraq
The Afghanistan war logs were just the beginning. Coming as early as next week, WikiLeaks plans to disclose a new trove of military documents, this time covering some of the toughest years of the Iraq war. Up to 400,000 reports from 2004 to 2009 could be revealed this time — five times the size of the Afghan document dump.
It’s a perilous time in Iraq. Politicians are stitching together a new government. U.S. troops are supposed to leave by next December.
Pentagon leaders were furious over the Afghanistan documents, but the American public largely greeted them with yawns. Iraqis might not be so sanguine.
It’s hard to imagine Iraq will fall back into widespread chaos over the disclosures. But they can’t be good for the United States, as it tries to create a new postwar relationship with Iraq, or for the 50,000 U.S. troops and diplomats still over there.
We don’t know what’s in the documents. But here’s what we’ll be looking to find in the trove — and some unanswered questions that the documents might address.
The Rise of Roadside Bombs
Iraq is more a war. It was a proving ground for today’s signature weapon: the improvised explosive device. Insurgents raided Iraq’s military weapons silos to jury-rig devices set off by a simple cellphone.
Later, they bent bomb casings into cones to form the deadlier Explosively Formed Projectile, essentially a bomb that shoots a jet of molten metal into and through an armored vehicle.
Conflicting reports credited the “superbombs” to Iran, or not. Look to the WikiLeaked documents for supporting evidence either way.
Early on, the military found that its jammers — devices emitting frequencies to block those believed to detonate bombs — didn’t work. Worse, rumor was the jammers actually set the bombs off themselves.
We could be about to learn a lot more about how U.S. forces endured the first new bomb threat of the 21st century.
Abu Ghraib and Missing Jails
The Abu Ghraib detainee-abuse scandal was one of the worst strategic debacles in recent U.S. history. Aides to Gen. David Petraeus candidly said it inspired foreign fighters to join the Iraq insurgency.
Only one prison scandal came to light after Abu Ghraib: torture at the Special Ops facility known as “Camp Nama.” But journalists lost visibility into how the United States ran its detention complex in Iraq. Only in 2007, when Petraeus put Maj. Gen. Doug Stone in charge of rehabbing captured insurgents, did any sunlight return.
What happened for three years in the U.S. jails where tens of thousands of Iraqis were held?
Lost U.S. Guns
The Government Accountability Office reported in 2007 that the military had simply lost nearly 200,000 AK-47s and pistols it intended for Iraqi soldiers and police. Its documentation was a mess in 2004 and ‘05, when Petraeus ran the training mission. Many of those guns are believed to have made their way to the black market and to insurgents.
The leaks may shed some light on how thousands of guns fell off the back of a truck.
Ethnic Cleansing of Baghdad
Shiite death squads and Sunni insurgents each preyed on the other side’s civilians in 2005 and 2006. More than a million Baghdadis were displaced from their homes in a massive demographic shift between March 2006 and July 2007.
It’s never been clear how much the U.S. military knew about the cleansing. Low-level units watched it happen. And American psychological-operations troops certainly played on the religious splits to win local support.
But Gen. George Casey, then the top general in Iraq and now the Army’s chief of staff, has never answered questions about it. If the logs document the cleansing, he may have to speak up.
Drones
As much as the air war in Iraq became defined by the “Shock and Awe” bombing raids of its opening salvo, from the start there were at least ten types of unmanned planes the United States used for surveillance — from the Marines’ Dragon Eye to the Air Force’s iconic Predator.
But how did they prove their value to soldiers and Marines in Iraq? Gen. Petraeus says drones were crucial to the spring 2008 battle in Sadr City, finding targets for the troops below. And a secret task force used drone-fired missiles to kill bomb-planting insurgents.
What other spy gear was employed? Bob Woodward claims a “secret weapon” helped turned the war’s tide.
Could we see hints of it in the new WikiLeaks?
The Air War And More ‘Collateral Murders’
WikiLeaks makes no apologies for its antiwar agenda. Its Iraq and Afghanistan disclosures are designed to weaken support for both wars.
That’s why we should expect to see a lot more material like its gruesome April video showing an Apache helicopter killing people — including a Reuters photographer — who didn’t threaten its crew. The video suggests that other combat aircraft in the confusing urban environments of Iraq might have also engaged in similar mistargeting.
If there are accounts of civilian casualties from what used to be an intense, violent air war — including, perhaps, hidden military documentation about the so-called “Collateral Murder” incident — WikiLeaks is going to publish them.
Photo: Defense Department
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