WikiLeaks about to hit the fan

WIKILEAKS' founder Julian Assange will not be prosecuted despite breaking Australian law and identifying an ASIO officer, according to the Attorney General's office.

Under s.92 of the ASIO Act, publicly identifying an ASIO officer other than the Director-General is a crime punishable with imprisonment for one year. There was immediate speculation that Julian Assange could be prosecuted in Australia under the Act.

Why the blanket ban on identifying anyone in ASIO? A prohibition on ASIO officers working undercover would make sense, but the entire organisation, from the senior executive down? It applies even to their media liaison team.

Not even the American intelligence community has such a ban. In the US, only the identification of covert agents (but not other agents) is prohibited under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. But the ban itself only applies to people who have “authorised access to classified material” — that is, people in the intelligence community already, or in senior levels of government. .....

a US State Department spokeswoman declared WikiLeaks was continuing ''its well established pattern of irresponsible, reckless and, frankly, dangerous actions''.

Most concern yesterday centred on people who live under violent regimes who had risked their safety to provide information to US diplomats.

WikiLeaks disclosure reopens Iraqi inquiry into massacre of family

Investigation to look into allegations that US soldiers handcuffed and executed women and children during a raid in 2006


The Iraqi government is to launch a new investigation into one of the most controversial incidents of the Iraq war, after the release of a diplomatic cable alleging that US soldiers handcuffed and executed women and children during a 2006 raid.

The troops were also accused of calling in an air strike to destroy evidence.

An adviser to the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, said on Friday that previous inquiries had stalled but the government would revive its investigation as a result of the new information.

In 2006 there were conflicting accounts of what had happened at Ishaqi village, north of Baghdad; troops said nothing inappropriate had taken place, but villagers suggested the deaths had been a revenge attack for the earlier killing of two soldiers.

A diplomatic cable released this week by WikiLeaks revealed that a United Nations official, Philip Alston, told the US in 2006 he had received information that all the residents of the house had been shot in the head. His intervention was not made public at the time.

The letter has inflamed opinion in Iraq at a sensitive time in US-Iraq relations, amid difficult negotiations over retention of US bases in Iraq after the scheduled departure of US troops in December.

Iraqi officials said the new information was sufficient cause to deny the Americans any bases and demand all troops leave.

"The new report about this crime will have its impact on signing any new agreement," an Iraqi parliamentarian, Aliya Nusayif, told the AP. She said Iraq's parliament would investigate and seek to prosecute any US soldiers who commit crimes in Iraq in the future.

As part of the negotiations over keeping US troops in Iraq, Washington is demanding immunity for all US military personnel. But Maliki's spokesman, Ali al-Moussawi, said: "We will not give up the rights of the Iraqi people, and this subject will be followed."

The leaked state department memo, dated 27 March, 12 days after the incident, says that the US mission in Geneva had received a letter from Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. In his letter, Alston said he had received various reports on the killings, and the dead included Faiz Hratt Khalaf, 28, his wife, three children, his mother, sister, two nieces, a three-year-old and a visiting relative.

"According to the information received, American troops approached Mr Faiz's home in the early hours of 15 March 2006. It would appear that when the MNF [multinational forces] approached the house, shots were fired from it and a confrontation ensued for some 25 minutes. The MNF troops entered the house, handcuffed all residents and executed all of them. After the initial MNF intervention, a US air raid ensued that destroyed the house," Alston wrote. He added: "Iraqi TV stations broadcast from the scene and showed bodies of the victims (ie five children and four women) in the morgue of Tikrit. Autopsies carried out at the Tikrit hospital's morgue revealed that all corpses were shot in the head and handcuffed."

Alston, who is now a professor at New York university, told a reporter for the McClatchy group of newspapers that the US had not responded to his letter – as was "the case with most of the letters in the 2006-2007 period", when sectarian and other violence was at its height. The Iraqi government had not responded either.

"The tragedy," he said, "is that this elaborate system of communications is in place but the (UN) human rights council does nothing to follow up when states ignore issues raised with them."

The Pentagon claims the civilians were killed in the air raid but the villagers say the air raid came after the killings. Three months after the attack, the Pentagon said it had conducted its own investigation and the allegations of the execution were absolutely false and there had been no cover-up.

Lieutenant-Colonel James Gregory, a Pentagon spokesman, responding to the Alston letter and the Iraqi government announcement that it is to revive its inquiry, said on Friday: "The incident was properly investigated at the time and no new information has surfaced."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/02/wikileaks-iraq-massacre-inquiry

failures art wrote:

Information is certainly powerful. We've witnessed this firsthand. Using that power, without knowing it's full depth is irresponsible. Now that WL has lost control of the cables, there can be no real hope of controlling how the information is used. It cannot be said that the information can only be used for good.

governments should have recognized the danger and considered how to manage things at least a decade ago.

The U. S. government never had control of the cables. I consider it sheer stupidity that they didn't take security more seriously to begin with. It is not as if it was a surprise to anyone involved with information forensics that this was a possibility.

The idea that the information was being hidden for a good reason or with good intentions is also baffling.

failures art wrote:

WL upon gaining access to said cables recognized the potential for harm.

too bad the U.S. government hadn't figure that out before the information was put into the cables.

Quote:

that they would redact information to protect innocent people.

Then WL should be lauded for their attempts. But US, as always, is using this tired old meme in complete hypocrisy. The US doesn't, has never given a rat's ass about innocents. They have murdered millions of innocents. With absolutely zero sense of shame.

I suspect that if you were in Julian Assange's place when receiving the cables, you would come to the same conclusion. You may be very pleased with the information you got, but you also would respect the inherited responsibility for the additional information that came with it.

The truth about No Gun Ri

Feb 17, 2000

Finding out what happened in a corner of South Korea 50 years ago will help America to clear its mind about the rules of future wars

Yeah, right, as if this has ever made the slightest bit of difference.


It is painful for Americans to think of American soldiers committing war crimes,

"painful" ; well, they sure are good at either making lame ass excuses or putting it out of sight, out of mind.

not least because the allegation about No Gun Ri comes at a time when an attempt is being made to set up an international system of war-crimes tribunals that might one day point a finger at the American troops to whom much of the world looks for its security.

Hey, this blue ribbon investigation sure did wonders for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, didn't it?

At first, American army officials had shrugged off the No Gun Ri accusation.

No way, American army officials would never do that!

But, once the AP had published its story, the government moved smartly. William Cohen, the secretary of defence, ordered Louis Caldera, the army secretary, to lead that team of investigators. A patently independent-minded bunch, these include a former Washington Post reporter, Don Oberdorfer, and a Harvard history professor, Ernest May, as well as General Robert Ricassi, a former commander of American forces in Korea.

Read the rest of the apology for US war crimes at,

http://www.economist.com/node/329553

If you are so afraid of admitting that because it will wrinkle the fabric of the flag you're burning, you're out of touch.

You're the one who continues to claim the sky has already fallen on the US.

You lack historical perspective as well as reality in today's economic and political world.

No, you're not; you are an extremist who continues to belittle whatever the US does.

There are limits to the cost to Americans from what our government does; it doesn't excuse them, nor are all Americans at fault. You just don't know the difference.

If the U.S. government (among others) hadn't felt the need to hide things, there would have been no need for a Wikileaks.

Wikileaks mishandling things <shrug> is small potatoes in comparison to what was done when the cables were originally determined to be something that the government thought they would hide.

I've had no ability to identify any upside to hidden government correspondence since Lockerbie.

failures art wrote:

I suspect that if you were in Julian Assange's place when receiving the cables, you would come to the same conclusion. You may be very pleased with the information you got, but you also would respect the inherited responsibility for the additional information that came with it.

you couldn't be more wrong about the conclusion I'd have come to in that situation