Amy Goodman: Stratfor, WikiLeaks and the Obama administration's war against truth
Stratfor, WikiLeaks and the Obama administration's war against truth
Thanks to WikiLeaks and its media partners, we have a disturbingly vivid picture of the intelligence-industrial complex
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange attends a press conference in London, 27 February 2012, about the release of more than 5m emails from private intelligence firm Stratfor. Photograph: Kerim Okten/EPA
WikiLeaks, the whistleblower website, has again published a massive trove of documents, this time from a private intelligence firm known as Stratfor. The source of the leak was the hacker group Anonymous, which took credit for obtaining more than 5m emails from Stratfor's servers. Anonymous obtained the material on 24 December 2011, and provided it to WikiLeaks, which, in turn, partnered with 25 media organizations globally to analyze the emails and publish them.
Among the emails was a short one-liner that suggested the US government has produced, through a secret grand jury, a sealed indictment against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. In addition to painting a picture of Stratfor as a runaway, rogue private intelligence firm with close ties to government-intelligence agencies serving both corporate and US military clients, the emails support the growing awareness that the Obama administration, far from diverging from the secrecy of the Bush/Cheney era, is obsessed with secrecy, and is aggressively opposed to transparency.
I travelled to London last Independence Day weekend to interview Assange. When I asked him about the grand jury investigation, he responded:
"There is no judge, there is no defense counsel, and there are four prosecutors. So, that is why people that are familiar with grand-jury inquiries in the United States say that a grand jury would not only indict a ham sandwich, it would indict the ham and the sandwich."
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/mar/01/stratfor-wikileaks-obama-administration
girl gone mad
(20,634 posts)xchrom
(108,903 posts)fasttense
(17,301 posts)millions of our media, while real journalists are indicted.