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Nose out.  The still image that exposes the whole 911 illusion. noplanes!


Wanted by the CIA: Wikileaks founder Julian Assange

By Matthew Bell  Monday, 19 July 2010


There are not many journalists who, when you ask them if they are being followed by the CIA, say "We have surveillance events from time to time." Actually it's not a question I've ever asked before, and Julian Assange does not call himself a journalist.

But the answer is typical of this 41-year-old former computer-hacker: cryptic, dispassionate, and faintly self-important.

As the founder of Wikileaks – a website that publishes millions of documents, from military intelligence to internal company memos and has, in four years, exposed more secrets than many newspapers have in a century – Assange has become the pin-up of web-age investigative journalists. The US has wanted him for questioning since March, after he posed a video showing an American helicopter attack that left several Iraqi civilians and two Reuters journalists dead.

Understandably, he now avoids the US, and keeps his movements secret, though it's thought he operates out of Sweden and is spending time in Iceland, where a change in the law is creating a libel-free haven for journalists. But if the CIA spooks wanted him that badly, couldn't they have turned up, as a hundred adoring student journalists did, to hear him talk at the Centre for Investigative Journalism 10 days ago?

Perhaps it's just as well they didn't, as Assange is not a natural public speaker. He is more at home trawling data or decrypting the codes that mask it. His philosophy is that the more a government wants to keep something secret, the more reason to expose it. No journalist could argue with his essential belief in shining a light on malpractice, but shouldn't governments be entitled to keep some secrets? "Sure," he says when we speak after his talk, "That doesn't mean we and other press organisations should suffer under coercion."

What if publishing a document would threaten national security? "This phrase is so abused. Dick Cheney justified torture with it. Give me an example." What about the movement of US troops? Would he publish a document that jeopardised their safety? "We'd have to think about it." So that's a yes? "It's not a yes. If that fit into our editorial criteria – which it might, if it was an extremely good movement – then we'd have to look at whether that needed a harm minimisation procedure. We'd be totally happy to consider jeopardising the initiation of a war, or the action of war. Absolutely."

He may speak like a robot, and have a politician's knack at ducking straight answers, but in the flesh he could be a forgotten member of Crowded House, all ripped jeans and crumpled jacket, his distinguished white hair framing a youthful face. His grungy look ties in with his outsider status: he has a deep-rooted mistrust of authority. It has been speculated this comes from a youthful brush with the family courts after he divorced the mother of his son, though little is really known about his early life.

His obsession with secrecy, both in others and maintaining his own, lends him the air of a conspiracy theorist. Is he one? "I believe in facts about conspiracies," he says, choosing his words slowly. "Any time people with power plan in secret, they are conducting a conspiracy. So there are conspiracies everywhere. There are also crazed conspiracy theories. It's important not to confuse these two. Generally, when there's enough facts about a conspiracy we simply call this news." What about 9/11? "I'm constantly annoyed that people are distracted by false conspiracies such as 9/11, when all around we provide evidence of real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud.



Does he mean that the various mutually exclusive hypotheses on how the inside job of 911 was done by the US military black ops?
Or maybe he knows that that is the line he must not cross (death threats)

" What about the Bilderberg conference? "That is vaguely conspiratorial, in a networking sense. We have published their meeting notes."



Assange likes to see Wikileaks as a neutral platform for distributing information, and fends off criticism by saying it always follows its openly stated policies. But no news organisation is free from personal input, as he reveals when talking of Bilderberg, a shadowy annual conference of the influential. "I understand the philosophical rationale for having Chatham House rules among people in power, but the corrupting nature, in the case of Bilderberg, probably outweighs the benefits. When powerful people meet together in secret, it tends to corrupt."

Spending time with Assange, it's hard not to start believing that dark forces are at work. According to him, everyone's emails are being read. For that reason, he encourages anyone planning to leak a document to post it the old fashioned way, to his PO Box. It's ironic that an organisation bent on blowing secrets is itself so secretive, but Wikileaks couldn't operate without reliable sources. Except that, amazingly, Wikileaks does not verify them. "We don't verify our sources, we verify the documents. As long as they are bona fide it doesn't matter where they come from. We would rather not know."

After we talk, he is off to a safe house for the night and after that, who knows? He never stays in one place more than two nights. Is that because the CIA wants to kill him? "Is it in the CIA's interest to assassinate me? Maybe. But who would do it?" Isn't he brave to appear in public? "Courage is an intellectual mastery of fear," he says. "It's not that you don't have fear, you just manage your risks intelligently."


Proof of holographic display. see http://u2r2h.blogspot.com/2008/08/nose-out.html 


Wikileaks: How website shines light on world's darkest secrets

Archie Bland investigates Thursday, 8 April 2010


http://www.WIKILEAKS.org the online clearing house for documents whose authors would prefer them to stay private, has posted video on its website which it claims shows the killing of civilians by the US military in Baghdad in 2007.

How does a website run by just five full-time staff generate so many scoops? When the Ministry of Defence first discovered the whistleblower website staffers were stunned.

"There are thousands of things on here, I literally mean thousands," one of them wrote in an internal email in November 2008. "Everything I clicked on to do with MoD was restricted... it is huge."

The website has since been banned from the MoD's internal computers, but it did no good: eventually, that email ended up on Wikileaks. And when a US Army counter-intelligence officer recommended that whistleblowers who leaked to the site be fired, that report ended up on Wikileaks too.

The authorities were right to be worried. If any further proof were needed of the website's extraordinary record in holding the authorities to account, it came this week, in the release of shocking video footage of a gung-ho US helicopter attack in Iraq that killed 12 people, including two unarmed employees of the Reuters news agency.

The US government had resisted Freedom of Information requests from Reuters for years. But when an anonymous whistleblower passed the video on to Wikileaks, all that quickly became futile. An edited version of the tape had received almost 4 million hits on YouTube by last night, and it led news bulletins around the world.

"This might be the story that makes Wikileaks blow up," said Sree Sreenivasan, a digital media professor at New York's Columbia Journalism School. "It's not some huge document with lots of fine print – you can just watch it and you get what it's about immediately. It's a whole new world of how stories get out."

And yet despite Wikileaks' commitment to the freedom of information, there is something curiously shadowy about the organisation itself. Founded, as the group's spokesman Daniel Schmitt (whose surname is a pseudonym) put it, with the intention of becoming "the intelligence agency of the people", the site's operators and volunteers – five full-timers, and another 1,000 on call – are almost all anonymous. Ironically, the only way the group's donors are publicly known is through a leak on Wikileaks itself. The organisation's most prominent figure is Julian Assange, an Australian hacker and journalist who co-founded the site back in 2006. While Assange and his cohorts' intentions are plainly laudable – to "allow whistleblowers and journalists who have been censored to get material out to the public", as he told the BBC earlier this year – some ask who watches the watchmen. "People have to be very careful dealing with this information," says Professor Sreenivasan. "It's part of the culture now, it's out there, but you still need context, you still need analysis, you still need background."

Against all of that criticism, Wikileaks can set a record that carries, as Abu Dhabi's The National put it, "more scoops in its short life than The Washington Post has in the past 30 years". By earning its place as the natural destination for anyone with sensitive information to leak who does not know and trust a particular journalist – so far, despite numerous court actions, not a single source has been outed – Wikileaks has built up a remarkable record.

Yes, it has published an early draft of the script for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and Wesley Snipes' tax returns; but it has also published the "Climategate" emails, an internal Trafigura report on toxic dumping in Ivory Coast, and the standard operating procedures for Guantanamo Bay.

Whatever the gaps in its procedures, there is little doubt that the website is at the forefront of a new information era in which the powerful, corrupt and murderous will have to feel a little more nervous about their behaviour. "There are reasons I do it that have to do with wanting to reform civilisation," Assange said in an interview with salon.com last month. "Of course, there's a personal psychology to it, that I enjoy crushing bastards. I like a good challenge."


US air crew shooting Iraqi civilians

** Warning, the video below is graphic in nature **

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/5rXPrfnU3G0&hl=en_GB&fs=1&


What we wouldn't know without Wikileaks

Trafigura's super-injunction

When commodities giant Trafigura used a super-injunction to suppress the release of an internal report on toxic dumping in the Ivory Coast in newspapers, it quickly appeared on Wikileaks instead. Accepting that the release made suppression futile, Trafigura lifted the injunction.

The BNP membership list

After the site published the BNP's secret membership list in November 2008, newspapers found teachers, priests and police officers among them. Another list was leaked last year. The police has since barred officers from membership.

Sarah Palin's emails

Mrs Palin's Yahoo email account, which was used to bypass US public information laws, was hacked and leaked during the presidential campaign. The hacker left traces of his actions, and could face five years in prison.

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