(Updated and revised.)

(Updated and revised again, Tuesday, July 27)

"I am shocked -- shocked! -- to find gambling is going on in here" -- Captain Renault at the gaming tables in Casablanca.

The much ballyhooed dump of intelligence and diplomatic files concerning the Afghan War has been trumpeted as some kind of shocking expose, "painting a different picture" than the official version of events -- revelations that are sure to rock the Anglo-American political establishments to their foundations.

The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel were given 92,000 reports by Wikileaks, including thousands of pages of raw "human intelligence" (i.e., uncorroborated claims and gossip from interested parties and anonymous sources pushing a multitude of agendas), and diplomatic notes passed between the promulgators of the occupation in Washington and their factotums "in country" -- reports which you might imagine also purvey a multitude of agendas ... not least the supreme agenda of all officials involved in a dubious enterprise: ass-covering.

Yet these reports are being treated as if they are the "grim truth" behind the shining picture of official propaganda. But what do these stories in the NYT and Guardian actually "reveal"? Let's see:

• That the occupation forces kill lots of civilians at checkpoints and botched raids, then lie about it afterward.
• That these killings make Afghans angry and fuel the insurgency.
• That elements of Pakistani intelligence are involved with some elements of the many resistance groups known collectively (and incorrectly) in the West as the Taliban.
• That the Americans are using more and more robot drones to kill people.
• That the Americans are running death squads in Afghanistan aimed at Taliban leaders.
• That Afghan officials are corrupt, and that Afghan police and military forces are woefully inadequate.

Is there anything in these breathless new recitations that we did not already know? For example, the NYT offers a few short vignettes from the leaked documents concerning botched raids and errant missiles that slaughter civilians. But in almost every case, these have already been extensively reported -- in the Times itself and other mainstream venues -- in much greater detail, with quotes and evidence from the victims and local eyewitnesses, and not just the self-interested, ass-covering perspective of official occupation reports. And the "revelation" that occupation forces are killing "an amazing number of people" who have "never proven to be a threat" at checkpoints was confirmed months ago by no less than Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the erstwhile commander of the whole shebang.

Likewise, the entanglement between Pakistani intelligence services and some elements of violent resistance in Afghanistan has been a constant theme of mainstream reportage on the Afghan War since the very beginning -- not to mention a relentless drumbeat of official "concern" in Washington. It is a rare week indeed when some Washington bigwig is not hinting darkly -- or declaring outright -- that Pakistan needs to "get with the program" in one way or another.

The increasing use of drones is also no secret; indeed, it is frequently featured in giddy press reports about these neat gizmos our boys are using to bravely blast villages on the other side of the world from comfortably padded chairs in Nevada control rooms.

And America's assassination squads have also been loudly proclaimed and hailed; scarcely a week goes by without a story about yet another "top-level" Taliban or al Qaeda dastard meeting his doom. And of course, the Peace Laureate's administration recently "leaked" the news that America is running hit squads, secret armies and other covert operators in more than 75 countries around the world -- with the Peace Laureate also proclaiming his right to assassinate American citizens when he feels like it.

As for the corruption and incompetence of the Afghan "government" installed by the foreign occupiers, and the untrustworthiness of the Afghan police and military being trained by the foreign occupiers to do their dirty work for them -- again, this too has been a running theme not only of media coverage but a plethora of official pronouncements. Has a month gone by in recent years when some top-level Washington figure has not scolded the powerless Afghan government for its manifold failings? Has a month gone by without long, detailed stories -- usually in the New York Times itself -- outlining the venality and brutality of the warlords, gangsters, religious extremists and corruptocrats that the United States has empowered in the occupied land?

Where then are the "revelations"? Anyone who has regularly read, well, the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel could not remotely be surprised by any of the facts (as opposed to the oceans of spin and supposition) buried in this mountain of leakage. These are not the Pentagon Papers or the Downing Street Memos; they do almost nothing to alter the public image of the war, and tell almost nothing that we don't already know.

In fact, the overall effect of the multi-part coverage of the documents is to paint a portrait of plucky, put-upon Americans trying their darnedest to get the job done despite the dastardly dealings and gooberish bumblings of the ungrateful little brown wretches we are trying to save from themselves. The NYT is quite explicit in this spin:

[T]he documents sketch a war hamstrung by an Afghan government, police force and army of questionable loyalty and competence, and by a Pakistani military that appears at best uncooperative and at worst to work from the shadows as an unspoken ally of the very insurgent forces the American-led coalition is trying to defeat.

Ah, here we get down to it. Here's metal more attractive for our militarists. The treachery of Iran is a constant theme in the leakage -- both in the raw, unsifted, uncorroborated "humint" and in the diplomatic cables of puzzled occupiers who cannot fathom why there should be any opposition to their enlightened rule. It must the fault of those perfidious Persians!

One can only imagine the lipsmacking and handclapping now rampant among the Bomb Iran crowd as they pore over these unsubstantiated rumors and Potomac ass-coverings which are being doled out -- by the "liberal" media, no less! -- as the new, grim truth about Afghanistan. The Guardian helpfully compiles the incendiary material for them:

Iran is engaged in an extensive covert campaign to arm, finance, train and equip Taliban insurgents, Afghan warlords allied to al-Qaida and suicide bombers fighting to eject British and western forces from Afghanistan, according to classified US military intelligence reports contained in the war logs.

The secret "threat reports", mostly comprising raw data provided by Afghan spies and paid informants, cannot be corroborated individually. Even if the claims are accurate, it is unclear whether the activities they describe took place with the full knowledge of Tehran or are the work of hardline elements of the semi-autonomous Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, ideological sympathisers of the Taliban, arms smugglers or criminal gangs ....

Yes, no doubt there are a great many "ideological sympathisers" of the Taliban's Shiite-hating Sunni extremists among the, er, Shiites in Iran. But such nuances don't matter; all that matters is that you get some headlines out there about "Iran's covert operations in Afghanistan." [Because, as we all know, it is an unmitigated evil for any nation to conduct covert operations in another country -- unless, of course, that nation is run by nice, clean, English-speaking people.]

The Guardian details a number of raw humint reports on Iranian dastardy, then makes a curious claim for its other sources:

Summaries of US embassy diplomatic cables and situation assessments contained and distributed through the war logs offer firmer ground than some of the raw intelligence data, given that they are evidently written by American officials and represent an official record, or official evaluation, of high-level meetings.

Why should the "situation assessments" of ass-covering bureaucrats necessarily be "firmer" than the gossip and denunciations being retailed in the "humint" reports? Especially if they are telling Washington exactly what it wants to hear: the Iranians are behind our manifest failures, both militarily and politically. The Guardian:

Summaries of classified diplomatic cables produced by the US embassy in Kabul, contained in the war logs, reveal high-level concern about Tehran's growing political influence in Afghanistan. Senior US and Afghan officials appear at a loss over how to counter Iran's alleged bribery and manipulation of opposition parties and MPs whom Afghan government officials dismiss as Tehran's "puppets"....

"Over the past several months Iran has taken a series of steps to expand and deepen its influence," says a secret cable sourced to the US embassy in Kabul and written in May 2007 by CSTC-A DCG for Pol-Mil Affairs [combined security transition command deputy commanding general for political and military affairs]. The cable cites the creation of the opposition National Front and National Unity Council, which it claims are under Iranian influence.

Wow, that's heavy stuff, man. An apparatchik in the US embassy says that the political opposition to America's man in Kabul is just Iranian puppetry. Obviously, those Afghan ragheads couldn't possibly put together an opposition by themselves. (It's just like that Civil Rights stuff back in the day; it was all a Communist front. You know our docile darkies would never have tried to get above their raising if the Commies hadn't stirred them up.)

We see here a reflection of one of the enduring principles of the American power structure: that no one could ever have any reasonable objections to the enlightened hegemony of our elites. Any opposition to their dominance and privilege has to come from "outside agitators," sinister troublemakers driven by motiveless evil to destroy all that's good and holy in this world.

So in the end, what really is the "takeaway" from this barrage of high-profile "revelations" dished up by these bold liberal gadflies speaking truth to power? Let's recap:

Occupation forces kill lots of civilians. But everybody already knew that -- and it's been obvious for years that nobody cares. How does this alter the prevailing conventional wisdom about the war?

Pakistan is pursuing its own strategic interests in the region: interests that don't always mesh with those of the United States. Again, this has been a constantly -- obsessively -- reported aspect of the war since its earliest days. How does this alter the prevailing conventional wisdom about the war?

The Afghan government installed by the occupation is corrupt and dysfunctional. Again, this theme has been sounded at every level of the American government -- including by two presidents -- for years.  How does this alter the prevailing  conventional wisdom of the war?

There is often a dichotomy between official statements about the war's progress and the reality of the war on the ground. Again, has there been a month in the last nine years that prominent stories outlining this fact have not appeared in major mainstream publications? Is this not a well-known phenomenon of every single military conflict in human history? How does this alter the prevailing conventional wisdom about the war?

Iran is evil and is helping bad guys kill Americans and should be stopped. It goes without saying that this too has been a relentless drumbeat of the American power structure for many years. The occupation forces in Iraq began blaming Iran for the rise of the insurgency and the political instability almost the moment after George W. Bush proclaimed "mission accomplished" and all hell broke loose in the conquered land. The Obama administration has "continued" -- and expanded -- the Bush Regime's demonization of Iran, and its extensive military preparations for an attack on that country. The current administration's "diplomatic effort" is led by a woman who pledged to "obliterate" Iran -- that is, to kill tens of millions of innocent people -- if Iran attacked Israel. The American power structure has seized upon every single scrap of Curveball-quality "intelligence" -- every rumor, every lie, every exaggeration, every fabrication -- to convince the American people that Iran is about to nuke downtown Omaha with burqa-clad atom bombs.

So once again, and for the last time, we ask the question: How does this alter the prevailing conventional wisdom about the war?

It doesn't, of course. These media "bombshells" will simply bounce off the hardened shell of American exceptionalism -- which easily countenances the slaughter of civilians and "targeted killings" and "indefinite detention" and any number of other atrocities anyway. In fact, I predict the chief "takeaway" from the story will be this:

American forces are doing their best to help the poor Afghans, but the ungrateful natives are too weak and corrupt to be trusted, while America's good intentions are also being thwarted by evil outsiders.

For our many War Machinists across the political spectrum, getting this mythological message out via "critical" stories in "liberal" publications will be much more effective than dishing up another serving of patriotic hokum on Fox news or at a presidential press conference. (And in fact, on Tuesday Obama claimed that the leaks actually supported the need for his two death-dealing, destabilizing, terror-exacerbating, corruption-oozing "surges" in Afghanistan.) The way the narrative is being framed at the outset -- the small selection of stories being offered as the first "face" of the leaks from the mountains of material as yet unmined -- evokes the age-old question: in the end, cui bono?

The war chiefs are assuming that these 92,000 files about the Afghan war were obtained by an American private serving in Iraq, the unfortunate Bradley Manning. (Wikileaks denies that this particular cache comes from Manning.) Manning is already under arrest for the "crime" of leaking something far more disturbing than any written document: a video showing the slaughter of Iraqi civilians by American Apache helicopters in 2007. Washington knows that a couple of moving pictures on the tee-vee have a far greater potential to disturb the moral sleep of the American people than tens of thousands of newspaper reports -- or leaked documents -- detailing similar killings. (That said, in the end the Apache video has had zero effect on public perceptions of the Iraq War, which most people believe is "over," or on public support for the murderous machinations of the Terror War in general, which most people believe needs to continue in one form or another, to "keep us safe.") The only kind of grim truth attended to by anyone in America these days is that which can be shown in moving pictures. (Although the number of people who are upset even by that seems to be rapidly diminishing. That's why Manning had to be put away.

Ultimately, I suppose on balance it is better to have this material than not to have it. But I still question the usefulness of rolling out mountains of raw "human intelligence" -- precisely the same kind of unfiltered junk that was "stovepiped" to build the false case for the mass-murdering invasion of Iraq -- about Iran, al Qaeda, Pakistan; even North Korea gets into the mix. None of this can be checked -- but all of it will be extremely useful to those who want to build cases for more and more military action, death squads and covert actions around the world.

And it seems very odd that intelligence reports and bureaucratic memos by forces carrying out a prolonged, brutal military occupation of another country are now being treated by "liberal" media outlets as holy writ which paints a "true" picture of the war -- a picture that omits any reference to American war-related corruption, for instance, not only in Afghanistan but more especially in Washington, or to America's wider "Great Game" machinations in Central Asia, involving pipelines, strategic bases and "containing China," etc.

If I believed anything would come of this document dump, if I believed it would actually lead to, say, the prosecution of even one single person for a war-related crime, or to a genuine debate over the morality of the war in the political and media establishments, or even a 5 point rise in public opposition to the Terror War project, then I would rejoice, and embrace the flashy packages of the NYT, Guardian and Der Spiegel at their own self-inflated valuation.

But I honestly believe that the net effect will be simply to entrench the conventional wisdom about the war in the halls of power -- and in the echo chambers of opinion -- on both sides of the Atlantic. We have already seen far too many atrocities, brutalities and acts of criminal folly countenanced, when they are not actually praised, far too many times -- over and over and over again -- in the course of the last decade to believe that these disgorgings of junk intelligence and apparatchik memos will make any difference.

Any difference for the better, that is. For I believe they will supply plenty of ammunition to those bent on further murder and plunder.

 (*NOTE: A few sentences have been rewritten today (July 27) to reflect new information and to clarify a couple of  points in the original.**)

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Dongi123 said:

No matter how you cut it or how hard the US Gov't tries to obfuscate the facts, the war in Afghanistan is lost. It is Vietnam for the twenty-first century. Attacking Iran would be the nadir of desperation giving America the chance to compound a miserable failure with an even worse disaster. From mistakes such as these, Empires fall. And, don't forget the Chinese, holders of vast numbers of American Treasury bonds. They are investing huge amounts of money in the development of Iranian natural gas resources; a source of energy for future Chinese industrial needs. I think we cross the People's Government at our national peril. Come to think of it, I feel Obama's chances for a second term are becoming more and more at risk. The Nobel laureate apparently is listening to his generals - a dark and dangerous path indeed. Just ask the spirits of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson about the costs of listening to such short sighted and single minded advisers.

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July 26, 2010
Votes: +9

john kelley said:

... "more than 90,000 records of incidents"... six years of war... "At least 195 civilians are admitted to have been killed" hmmmm... Chris said: "Washington knows that a couple of moving pictures on the tee-vee have a far greater potential to disturb the moral sleep of the American people than tens of thousands of newspaper reports -- or leaked documents -- detailing similar killings." Yeah, in fact, where's the video they were promising us? You know, the one showing a US air attack on Afghan civilians near Granai. The attack that killed 147 civilians. Or was it 86? "Any difference for the better,..."

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July 26, 2010
Votes: +4

stoney o said:

... My response after sniffing around the coverage of the WikiLeaks effluent and the constant tracing-back-to-blaming-Iran makes me think this is all a form of limited hangout... a calculated, cynical realization that the truth is beginning to corrode The Official Myth, and a determination to use WikiLeaks as a way to prop up the Imperial Project of Constant War: Current Chapter - Iran. Of course, realism suggests that this actually is nothing more than spin control, but I enjoy entertaining the more cynical suspicion that it's a limited hangout.

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July 26, 2010
Votes: +7

scott douglas said:

... My response reading Jason Raimondo this morning was, 'uh. mmmhhm. where's the bombshell, dude?' Chris is right. They are publishing this to stoke the fever of the ever metastasizing White racially-hysteric 'we must not lose a war!' crowd. And, since we could never lose a war to the unassisted natives of any provincial object of our mercantilist fancy -- that means 'we must never lose a war' to...Iran. That theme has been in the background of most of the posts here recently; hinted at, but not expounded upon. The atrocity is indeed about to be expanded, timing dependent on the electoral math as perceived by the current Imperial Ghoul and his partee... It's true, this is a gambit which will plunge the West into a nightmarish retrenchment. But the Plutocrats fear nothing. They will be stoking their vaults with the profit to be made from human misery even as average folks are being machine-gunned in the dark, dead streets of their race-war plagued Imperial Homeland. (Registered Trademark. Satan, Inc.)

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July 26, 2010
Votes: +5

scott douglas said:

	Mister Geppetto alert ...just saw Waheed Omar, Karzai's spokesperson, denouncing the 'leaks' as 'nothing new.'
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July 26, 2010
Votes: +1

Grandma Jefferson said:

Gazing into the Abyss, as It Gazes Back... War on Iran, and Pakistan, and North Korea, and Yemen, and Somalia and Iraq and Afghanistan and...Chris is right, as usual. This will merely be used to catapult the propaganda of perpetual wars to keep us safe, laid over the bigoted memes of the "barbaric, corrupt, ungrateful" ME puppet governments everywhere, and our atrocities justified as accidents, or bad intelligence from those same greedy ingrates. Not that the beer-narcotized morons here give a shit, one way or the other. Thus, the wars will continue, and we will never leave these spreading hellholes we create, until thrown out. And the Everest sized mountains of mutilated corpses will continue to grow, as we render the entire region uninhabitable for eons, DU having a half life of 4.5 billion years. This means it will be poisoning the land long after the human species is dust. http://www.ccnr.org/decay_U238.html It is amusing that the butler's outrage is directed at the leakers, though, and not the screaming atrocities enabled by his cretinous predecessor. But we all understand the reasons for this, since they are exactly his own.

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July 27, 2010
Votes: +9

paul said:

	... This was my immediate reaction too - that it almost looked like Wikileaks was being used as a conduit for what ultimately is pro-war propaganda, in the context of our depraved and war-besotted society.
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July 27, 2010
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de Malfosse said:

... possessing a mordant sense of humor allows me to enjoy the spin of this story as presented by FOX news. it appears to be the usual gov't dichotomy that leaves the uninitiated scratching their heads. it was a combination of "horror!! millions of troops will die!! embassy security everywhere has been compromised!! the enemy will learn how we operate!! oh, it's all Old News of no present relevance so move along, move along, nothing to see here."

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July 27, 2010
Votes: +1

nonbeliever said:

... Yes, Chris, I very much believe that you are completely right. The circumstances of the spin mean little - whether the leaks were responded to or initiated by counterinpro - the fact of the matter is that the Pentagon spends 10's of million dollars a year in false information and can spin any story any way they choose to. Nobody can compete, and so far as the major newspapers are concerned, there is no competition either. That is why I am especially suspicious that the New York Times was one of the outlets chosen for this "leak". Really, who would choose or trust such a source to release sensitive information? Very sus in itself. Sadly, as someone notes above, and as you allude to in your article, good-hearted but pathetically conventional sites like Anti-War.com fall totally for the story of the "leak" and will waste countless man hours and precious money analyzing the pre-approved leaks as if they meant something. Love you man - keep up the good work.

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July 27, 2010
Votes: +6

JeanDavid said:

Is this what it seems? Considering how this stuff does not appear to be news at all, and reading the comments in the official press, it seems possible to entertain the idea that the CIA leaked this stuff. They may have gathered up all these documents that seem to be harmless in fact, and dumped them on WikiLeaks to overwhelm them, to anaesthetize the reading public, and to hide what is really going on. I would not know if this is the case or not, but I agree that this stuff is not the Pentegon Papers.

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July 27, 2010
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cyanide said:

It's wonderful cover -- for mainstream media criminals -- the NYT, the WaPo, etc. -- to claim they didn't know any of these things before Wikileaks spilled the beans all over them. And it also -- as Chris pointed out -- provides ample grounds to deny that any of the beans actually exist. I mean: If the sources are "highly suspect" (as Chris claims). . . . As for "staring into the abyss" -- I doubt that "The Abyss" looks scary to people like Obama, Biden, Billary, Petraeus, et al. They (like the rest of us) have been consuming a soup of well-cooked statistics for the past 30 years (at least). The reality they see is shaped by the numbers (and other evidence) they consume. War with Iran may look to them like the Garden of Eden. We all ask jokingly what planet those people live on: maybe it's time we asked ourselves seriously and then confront the obvious answer with appropriate action. True believers such as the Obama/Bushmen spend their lives "inside the whale" (tip of the hat to Mr. Orwell), where they are fed a diet of lies, misinformation and plain old bullshit. Were one of us to confine a child in a locked room and raise him up in the same way, would not that child seem certifiably insane to those (s)he meets when we suddenly open the door and shove him/her out into the "real" world? It's as if Mr. Obama and his ilk were a small herd of Morks suddenly cast into a world full of homicidal Mindys. Anyone who thinks there's a non-violent resolution to this mess had better think again.

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July 27, 2010
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scott douglas said:

... I was so impatient reading the comments that it became clear to me just now how mad I might be in regard to this ongoing issue... Nothing to say, except that the Masters are insane and that I purchase my gaosline from a Citgo franchise each and every month in order to support the Bolivarian revolution...It costs me major cash, bros... War is right around the corner. This is the summer of '11. Most are oblivious as to what is "comin' 'round the Mountain when She comes..." The show-down with our favourite 'regional power' will finish, finally, this Oligargy... involving a bloody, catastrophic roll-up of the Imperial system. There will be a lot of domestic conflict: Maybe racially instigated class war. I am repeating myslf, but I feal it. You should hve heard the trouble when I sarted this comment...

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July 27, 2010
Votes: +2

scott douglas said:

	incoherant, crazy-ass comment? Scott. What? Well...You guys know...Losing it, daily...
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July 27, 2010
Votes: +0

bilejones said:

Cyanide "True believers such as the Obama/Bushmen spend their lives "inside the whale" (tip of the hat to Mr. Orwell), where they are fed a diet of lies, misinformation and plain old bullshit. Were one of us to confine a child in a locked room and raise him up in the same way, would not that child seem certifiably insane to those (s)he meets when we suddenly open the door and shove him/her out into the "real" world? " You have it exactly backwards. They know exactly what they are doing and why, they know what the results will be. It's the serfs who get fed the bullshit, and worse, believe it. There's a reason why the Obama, Bush and Clinton kids don't go to government schools.

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July 27, 2010
Votes: +3

GeoffreyTransom said:

Dont be TOO Cynical, Mr Floyd... These 91000-odd documents are the thin edge of the wedge; your chums at WL understand the longer game. The repository (having been checked for barium meals and beacons, and then encrypted and stored via several distributed betworks) was distributed to the three major outlets (Guardian, Speigel and the NYT) in advance in order to take advantage of two things... (1) if the material was made publicly available BEFORE a major news outlet got it, there would have been no incentive for the mainswamp to cover it (think "ClimateGate": there were HUGE problems getting traction for that, because it went viral before it could be a 'scoop'); (2) the three newspapers in question were chosen carefully (NYT because it is desperate, Guardian because it is SocDem and therefore ascendant, Spegiel because it's been reliable) and were geographically separate... in order to place the major media in all three countries in a form of "prisoners's dilemma"; the chosen three did not know what access their local competitors were given (in fact, other news organs were working on the material at the same time but dropped it when it was clear that NYT/Guardian/Speigel were ready to run). This 'action' has been a triumph - from planning to execution, everything has gone precisely as planned (including the ludicrous response of the Magic Mulatto... flailing around like a clown and spouting Soviet-era rhetoric and looking like a man caught in flagrante in an airport bathroom). The material has been given coverage in all major media in the West... coverage that vastly exceeds the 'day 1' coverage of Collateral Murder. What this means is that WL got it right - which means that NEXT TIME (and the next time is bigger and more interesting) the media will be clamouring for more. Their readerships, having now been given a peek under the curtain, will be waiting with bated breath for the full 'reveal'. WL has several more repositories of this nature, and a bunch more battle-cam death-porn; the decryption is not hard, but finding and removing barium meals and so forth takes TIME... and the customer's appetite grows with every new revelation of the stinking mass of pus that underlies their 'honourable' political and military leaders. Be aware that the smears have started (WL is a CIA front, Julian has bad skin and dresses funny)... but it's just the flailing of a wounded parasitic organism. There is only one end-game: the good guys win. Yay! Cheerio GT

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July 28, 2010 | url
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stoney o said:

... bilejones has it right: "You have it exactly backwards. They know exactly what they are doing and why, they know what the results will be. It's the serfs who get fed the bullshit, and worse, believe it." Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, McChrystal, Prince, Pelosi, Reid, Geithner, Frank, Dodd, Feinstein, Obama, Biden, Powell, Clinton... they all know precisely what end lays ahead. They are stockpiling riches now, via militarism and at-home thievery of the public treasury, to secure themselves a materially "comfortable" near-term future. They are hoping the US Military and its kissing cousin, the mercenary multitudes of Blackwater/Xe et alia, will protect them from us angry impoverished plebes and proles. Some of those Fed Politico elites have homes in foreign countries, to which they will flee when the feces start hitting the impeller. But make no mistake -- this has not been mismanagement or incompetence. It is designed to widen the gulf between the haves and the have-nots, so as to protect the haves from the eventual angry rage of the have-nots, who indeed will rise up in a rage when enough are convinced they've been fleeced. Right now, there aren't enough have-nots who get the picture. But the number is growing. I've seen the increasing awakening on the InterWebToobz and among my friends over the past 2-3 years. We're not going to get past this period in US History without seeing some mayhem. I wish it were possible to change things otherwise, but the present period resembles the years running up to 1776 -- and we know how that turned out. There's a reason why that tiny group of disaffected complainers that Grandma Jefferson loves to hate chose the name "Tea Party" for their self-description: they're already at the point of being ready to replicate 1776, psychologically. They simply don't have a cohesive view on who or what is to blame. Sure, the GOP has co-opted some of them and created a mainstream media phenomenon of ill-informed, irrational bigotry. But the original self-identified "Tea Party" of the modern era, they weren't complaining about Obama's race or citizenship -- they were concerned with bloated government, endless war, and a lack of attention to real domestic issues.

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July 28, 2010
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john kelley said:

... Chris said: "If I believed anything would come of this document dump, if I believed it would actually lead to, say, the prosecution of even one single person for a war-related crime, or to a genuine debate over the morality of the war in the political and media establishments, or even a 5 point rise in public opposition to the Terror War project, then I would rejoice, and embrace the flashy packages of the NYT, Guardian and Der Spiegel at their own self-inflated valuation." From the June 7th New Yorker profile on Julian Assange, NO SECRETS: "In 2007, he(Assange)published thousands of pages of secret military information detailing a vast number of Army procurements in Iraq and Afghanistan. He and a volunteer spent weeks building a searchable database, studying the Army's purchasing codes, and adding up the cost of the procurements-billions of dollars in all. The database catalogued matériel that every unit had ordered: machine guns, Humvees, cash-counting machines, satellite phones. Assange hoped that journalists would pore through it, but barely any did. "I am so angry," he said. "This was such a fucking fantastic leak: the Army's force structure of Afghanistan and Iraq, down to the last chair, and nothing."

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July 28, 2010
Votes: +0

GeoffreyTransom said:

The 2007 leak compared with this one... John Kelley has hit the nail on the head - the release mechanism in 2007 was based on a rather naive view: that if WL released something of incredible importance, they could simply rely on the mainstream media to pick up the story. That's why the mechanism this time was FAR more 'manipulative': the mainswamp outlets were put into a corner whereby if they decided to try to take a 'pass' on the story, they risked being 'scooped' by a competitor (and they also knew that WL's profile has gone stratospheric since 2007 - particularly since the Collateral Murder video). As I mentioned above, the outlets that released the material were not led to believe that they had EXCLUSIVE advance access in their own markets... so (for example) the NYT faced the prospect that some other US outlet would run the story, and then WL would release material indicating that the NYT was given the option and punted. WL is getting smarter - in part because of new blood, but also because Julian Assange has had a slightly more up-close view of the corrupt nexus between the political class and the media. Notice how much traction this stuff has had relative to the 2007 stuff (how many of you folks even were AWARE of the 2007 leak?). WL now has a "we can't be ignored" version of media traction, and mainswamp journalists don't just take WL staffers' calls - they check the site and they actively canvas WL staffers as to what is in the works. And as to things that you will read about how WL is a CIA front, and so forth... remember that WL leaked the CIA and FBI documents what DETAILED how they would go about trying to smear WL: casting aspersions on the motives of the organisation is a key element of that. Wait for the next release, ladies and jellybeans - if you think that this stuff is tame, you won't be disappointed. In reality, you have to view this action in its context: the recent media coverage of this leak may cover material that you and I all know about... but it is the FIRST TIME that the majority of Joe Couch-Potato types have had this material stuck in their faces by the TV that they trust. And it gets bigger and more uncontestable from here... Cheerio GT

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July 28, 2010 | url
Votes: +2

stoney o said:

	... Shorter Geoffrey Transom: "I worship Assange, and my view of him controls reality." We didn't need two long-winded posts, saying that over and over and over again. We get it, Geoffrey. We see the altar you have built, and we watched your ceremony of worship. We smell the incense and we have been splashed with the Sweat of Assange (holy water). We get it, Geoffrey.
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July 28, 2010
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stoney o said:

	uh oh. Assange the profiteering self-promoter? http://wtcdemolition.com/blog/node/2901
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July 28, 2010
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john kelley said:

	... stoney o said: "they're already at the point of being ready to replicate 1776, psychologically." Get real pal. That "tiny group of disaffected complainers" wants their guns and their jobs. They, like most of their compatriots, are hardcore consumers and their "intellectual" branch is comprised of hardcore capitalists. When the shit really hits the fan they'll still be wondering what happened.
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July 28, 2010
Votes: +4

stoney o said:

... Mr Kelley, I don't think you understand what you're saying when you tell me to "get real." I wonder if you know who you're responding to here. And I wonder how, from Europe, you are so well-versed on what is going on here in America. Try remembering I'm living in a state where "Tea Party" people outnumber the non-TP's. Try remembering that you're getting your sense of what the TP is about from 3d and 4th hand stories. Try remembering that the MSM overblows and distorts the TP. Of all the regular commenters here at Chris Floyd's, the only ones who have consistently showed an understanding of the Tea Party phenomenon in an objective light have been me and bilejones. The rest of the gang are following the TP caricatures offered by the liberal and progressive punditry of such unreliable outlets as Daily Kos, Huffington Post, firedoglake, Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, and the rest of the highly-partisn gang. A partisan view will never have an objective understanding of the TP's origins nor its present composition. The partisan view will consistently distort the TP and see it as whack-job idiots with IQs below 70, committing incest in between trips to check the still in the holler. That stuff makes for a good laugh of the "I'm better than YOU!" type, but it's hardly a reasonsble take on reality. Come on, dude.

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July 28, 2010
Votes: -1

GeoffreyTransom said:

Shorter Stoney-O: "No matter what anyone does for humanity... if they don't buy into the 9/11 Truth movement, they must be shouted down from the rooftops." God save me from fucking zealots - they are the most useful idiots on the planet when properly exploited (and I say that as a zealot myself: just not a dumb one). Let me just say that I do not believe that 19 chaps armed with box-cutters could take over 4 planes. Nor do I think that 4 aircraft being piloted by trainees could evade the US air defence system for hours without direct intervention in the standing orders of the system. I don't think that religious zealots who are about to try to hijack planes leave their instruction manuals in rental cars. Nor do I believe that steel framed buildings collapse as a result of fire. And anyone who claims that governments would never do such a thing to their own people is naive in the extreme. Join the dots. That's different from their being documentary EVIDENCE for it: the moment any such evidence emerged, it would be on WL. Now, take a pill and think a bit harder. If, in doing the media rounds for this leak, Assange had started babbling like a 9/11 kook, what would the media message have been? It would NOT have been "Wikileaks Releases 91000 Afghan War Documents". It would have been "Australian 'Hacker' is a 9/11 Fruitbat"... and tht would have been the need of Wikileaks as a means of intrusion into the public psyche. You're obviously quite excited about finding an alternative theory for 9/11, as are many many people. Let's just say that joining the attempts at character assassination of Wikileaks is doing Dick Cheney's job for him... you may as well be on the same team. And you're stupid enbough to do it without even gettin' paid (I assume). So, y'know... well played. Cheerio GT PS - I don't worship anybody or anything: the religious impulse is a vestige of primitive tribal stupidity that humanity shold have left back in the Stone Age where it belongs.

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July 28, 2010 | url
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GeoffreyTransom said:

Oh - one last thing... I always forget to mention it because it's so fucking obvious tht it should go without saying... Do you really think it's a shock that the mainswamp media CHOSE to focus on parts of the repository that reinforce their existing marching orders? (i.e., 'Iran bad'; 'Pakistan maybe bad', 'US good, even if they kill a fuckload of children'). After all, they were cherry-picking from the regime's OWN MATERIAL. Wikileaks didn't create the content in the repository - it also didn't choose the editorial policy of the NYT. If folks have an issue about the way the material was 'spun' in the media, that's fine... but it has nothing whatsoever to do with WL. (Again - for those who need to be guided in a thought process: imagine if WL had only given a 'sampler' to the newspapers - WL would then be accused of hiding something and of having an agenda). As to the John Young interview (linked above): that's your 'gotcha'? Jesus... to me that interview seemed quite neutral. People part ways all the time - differences in strategic vision, differences in ideology, or simply personality clashes. Cryptome does excellent work, and Young is a highly principled man - some of what he says about the need to focus on identity protection of leakers has merit. It's easy to see how CNet wanted to move the narrative to 'source protection' - to try and get Bradley Manning's arrest and WL connected in the reader's mental map. It was hardly WL's fault that Bradley Manning got pinched. To the extent that he's not a fictional character, it is understandable tha he felt the need to unburden: the psychological burden of being a whistleblower is hard for sensitive people to handle). Young's approach can be boiled down to: sit back and wait for stuff to fall into your lap; put it out there and hope that some folks happen across you site by word of mouse. That's fine as far as it goes - I have trawled through the Cryptome repository on Jim Bell a dozen times at least: my link to Bell's "Assassination Politics" is the cryptome link. ( http://cryptome.org/jya/ap.htm ) . He has strong views about money corrupting the process, and those views are valid, too: if I ever got the sense that Wikileaks was behaving badly in that sense, I would turn on them like a genetically-modified doberman. But the fund raising has not tapped dubious sources (i.e., the formal capital market) and it's clear that the profile of WL - and of whistleblowing in general - has been phenomenally enhanced. (And running WL's servers costs a lot more than $100 a month). And CNET (from which the interview was lifted) is owned by CBS, so, y'know... d'you think they had an agenda to try to drive wedges into the leak movement? Sheesh... Cheerio GT PS.. I'm on the WL listserv too (under a nym, duh). There's been MUCH worse stuff said about me than about John Young; passionate people say rude stuff to each other all the time.

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July 28, 2010 | url
Votes: +1

GeoffreyTransom said:

Interesting - a comment disappeared... The one that started... "Hey there BileJones, Although I understand the motivation of the Tea Party types (those who aren't agents provocateurs and FBI plants), they have it back-asswards if they think that they have a snowball's chance of a successful second Revolution by the normal 'serried ranks' mechanism. The technology of death has advanced significantly since 1776 (and since 1945) and so direct confrontation with the State's thug-drones would be suicide, pure and simple. Had the British had helicopters and tanks in 1776, Washington and his mates would have died in an oubliette. Also, vermin like [Waco babykiller] are abundant in the government's ranks and have NO QUALMS WHATSOEVER about putting bullets into civilians. The way forward was outlined by Jim Bell in "Assassination Politics" back in 1996. It has a dumb name that was designed to infuriate (and did - Bell is STILL in prison). But the gist is: the shitbags take off their Kevlar and balaclavas when they go home... THAT is when their "operational effectiveness" can be degraded." It's Chris' site, so he can do what he likes with comments; it doesn't remove them from subscribers' inboxes. Cheerio GT

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July 28, 2010 | url
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Chris said:

	... Yes, I can do with comments what I like. And I almost never do anything at all with them, just let them stand as they are. But I don't like comments that call for sneaking around and assassinating people. So I 'unpublished' it. I'd do the same if Task Force 373 came around looking for recruits. That's all.
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July 28, 2010
Votes: +1

stoney o said:

... Mr "Transom" has an exquisite sense of projecting fables onto those who post here. I didn't say that 9/11 conspiracy is the determinant of reality, but Transom suggests I think that. Which is a nutshell/thumbnail tell-tale on what "Transom" actually thinks, isn't it? Scapegoating, spectre-chasing, strawman-destruction. Impressive to all who can't think for themselves, doubtless. I almost want to salute "Geoffrey Transom," if only for the creativity he shows in lying about my thoughts, motives, and underlying presumptions. Almost.

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July 29, 2010
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Michael Drew said:

	If not worship, then close. Mr. Transom, You do quite a poor job of convincing that you don't do something very nearly like worship "WL."
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August 06, 2010
Votes: +0

GeoffreyTransom said:

More fruit-battery... @Stoney-O: Let's see how an impartial observer (me) might get that view about someone who tries to smear WL - using links to a 911 fruitbat site that reprise a CNet (CBS) ambush piece. Why not link direct to CNet? Fact is, you got had. You got took. You got played, and you got pwned. You were the smear-campaign's bitch, and you were too dumb to realise that the NYT was going to write what they wrote REGARDLESS of the content of the material... if you dojn't feel silly about that, you really really should. You fell for the "Wikileaks is a false front' narrative - Hook, line, sinker, trace and half the rod - and you're incapable of getting past it. It's called 'cognitive dissonance', which is why you feel the need to escalate to the point of writing embarrassing, semi-coherent claptrap about "spectre-chasing" - having been chasing the nefarious spectre of Wikileaks-as-honeypot. About transference, having had a transference job pulled on you like some debutante. Folks who wre dumb enough to mentally link the NYTs TREATMENT of the material with WL's LEAKING of the material, are the hardest thing about those who have chosen Isaiah's Job (read Nock if that reference is lost on you). @Michael Drew - it's good to see that folks are so out of touch with the concept of 'worship' that they think that making perfectly reasonable remarks in defence of an organisation constitutes 'worship'. The less worship there is in the world, the better - so to see that the term is now virtually meaningless suits me just fine. What I simply will not do is stand by and watch some internet 'gotcha' merchants get taken in by a false narrative and poison the water in places that should be furnishing help. And now to a general audience: How many of you are mirroring WL material (or furnishing freenet nodes to enable its encrypted distribution)? You should ALL be - it can be done with no risk whatsoever to yourself. As I mentioned elsewhere, WL is weathering the Death Machine's coflailing now, and it's not fun. It has got to the point where WL has posted an insurance file - and it has been made clear to folks who like the darkness, that the file contains information that is orders of magnitude more sensitive than what has been released to date. You have no idea how many disgruntled people there are within the world's intelligence agencies (no surprise since an intel analyst pulls down shit money - $75k tops). Read Arthur Silber's string of pieces on WL... admittedly they're quite long and polysyllabic, so they're not designed for intertubes gotcha-merchants, but this audience is reasonably literate. Cheerio GT

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August 06, 2010 | url
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GeoffreyTransom said:

Oh - one more thing... There are no quotes in my surname - it's not clear what Stoney-O was trying to achieve by using them (besides some sophomoric attempt to sow doubt). So for the record: it's not a nym, and I'm not impersonating the 'real' Geoffrey Transom. I'm the former economic 'think tank' guy, and I'm the guy who wrote crap on financial-market expectations for the Australian Treasury - you'll find that on my LinkedIn profile, my IntenseDebate profile, my Disqus profile and even my Skype profile. Same photo everywhere, too. If I was a cutout I would be too obvious. And in the interests of full disclosure: the think tank I was at is now working for the US State Department, but I sure the fuck ain't. Cheerio again GT

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August 06, 2010 | url
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