Popular Intelligence Agency

A newly leaked CIA report prepared earlier this month analyzes how
the U.S. Government can best manipulate public opinion in Germany and
France -- in order to ensure that those countries continue to fight in
Afghanistan. The Report celebrates the fact that the governments of those
two nations continue to fight the war in defiance of overwhelming public
opinion which opposes it -- so much for all the recent veneration of
"consent of the governed" -- and it notes that this is possible due to lack
of interest among their citizenry: "Public Apathy Enables Leaders to
Ignore Voters," proclaims the title of one section

But the Report also cites the "fall of the Dutch Government over its troop
commitment to Afghanistan" and worries that -- particularly if the "bloody
summer in Afghanistan" that many predict takes place -- what happened to the
Dutch will become spread as a result of the "fragility of European support"
for the war. As the truly creepy Report title puts it, the CIA's concern
is: "Why Counting on Apathy May Not Be Enough":

The Report seeks to provide a back-up plan for "counting on apathy," and
provides ways that the U.S. Government can manipulate public opinion in
these foreign countries. It explains that French sympathy for Afghan
refugees means that exploting Afghan women as pro-war messengers would be
effective, while Germans would be more vulnerable to a fear-mongering
campaign (failure in Afghanistan means the Terrorists will get you). The
Report highlights the unique ability of Barack Obama to sell war to the
European population:

It's both interesting and revealing that the CIA sees Obama as a valuable
asset in putting a pretty face on our wars in the eyes of foreign
populations. It is odious though, of course, completely unsurprising that
the CIA plots ways to manipulate public opinion in foreign countries in
order to sustain support for our wars. Now that this is a Democratic
administration doing this and a Democratic war at issue, I doubt many people
will object to any of this. But what is worth noting is how and why this
classified Report was made publicly available: because it was leaked to and
then posted by WikiLeaks.org, the site run by the non-profit group Sunshine
Press that is devoted to exposing suppressed government and corporate
corruption by publicizing their most closely guarded secrets.

* * * * *

I spoke this morning at length with Julian Assange, the Australian citizen
who is WikiLeaks' Editor, regarding the increasingly aggressive war being
waged against WikiLeaks by numerous government agencies, including the
Pentagon. Over the past several years, WikiLeaks -- which aptly calls
itself "the intelligence agency of the people" -- has obtained and then
published a wide array of secret, incriminating documents (similar to this
CIA Report) that expose the activities of numerous governments and
corporations. Among many others, they posted the Standard Operating Manual
for Guantanamo, documents showing how corrupt offshore loans precipitated
the economic collapse in Iceland, the notorious emails between climate
scientists, documents showing toxic dumping off the coast of Africa, and
many others. They have recently come into possession of classified videos
relating to civilian causalities under the command of Gen. David Petraeus,
as well as documentation relating to civilian-slaughtering airstrikes in
Afghanistan which the U.S. military had agreed to release, only to change
their mind.

All of this has made WikiLeaks an increasingly hated target of numerous
government and economic elites around the world, including the U.S.
Government. As The New York Times put it last week: "To the list of the
enemies threatening the security of the United States, the Pentagon has
added WikiLeaks.org, a tiny online source of information and documents that
governments and corporations around the world would prefer to keep secret."
In 2008, the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Center prepared a secret
report -- obtained and posted by WikiLeaks -- devoted to this wesbite and
detailing, in a section entitled "Is it Free Speech or Illegal Speech?",
ways it would seek to destroy the organization. It discusses the
possibility that, for some governments, not merely contributing to
WikiLeaks, but "even accessing the website itself is a crime," and outlines
its proposal for WikiLeaks' destruction as follows (click on images to
enlarge):

As the Pentagon report put it: "the governments of China, Israel, North
Korea, Russia, Vietnam and Zimbabwe" have all sought to block access to or
impede the operations of WikiLeaks or similar sites, and the U.S. now joins
those illustrious, open countries in doing so.

It's not difficult to understand why the Pentagon wants to destroy
WikiLeaks. Here's how the Pentagon's report describes some of the
disclosures for which they are responsible:

The Pentagon report also claims that WikiLeaks has disclosed documents that
could expose U.S. military plans in Afghanistan and Iraq and endanger the
military mission, though its discussion is purely hypothetical and no
specifics are provided. Instead, the bulk of the Pentagon report focuses on
documents which embarrass the U.S. Government: information which, as they
put it, "could be manipulated to provide biased news reports or be used for
conducting propaganda, disinformation, misinformation, perception
management, or influence operations against the U.S. Army by a variety of
domestic and foreign actors." In other words, the Pentagon is furious that
this exposing of its secrets might enable others to engage in exactly the
type of "perception management" which the aforementioned CIA Report proposes
the U.S. do with regard to the citizenry of our allied countries.

It's the same rationale invoked by President Obama and the Democratic
Congress when they re-wrote the Freedom of Information Act last year in
order to suppress America's torture photos. It's the same rationale used by
all governments to conceal evidence of their wrongdoing: we need to
suppress our activities for your own good. WikiLeaks is devoted to
subverting that mentality and, relatively speaking, has been quite
successful in doings so. For that reason, numerous governments and private
groups would like to see them destroyed. In addition to this 2008 Pentagon
report, WikiLeaks has acquired, though not yet posted, other U.S. Government
classified reports on its activities, including a U.S. Marine Intelligence
Report and an analysis prepared by the U.S. military base in Germany, both
of which speak of WikiLeaks as a threat. Moreover, the FBI has refused to
provide any information about its investigation of WikiLeaks, citing, in
response to FOIA requests, that national security and other excuses.

* * * * *

In my interview this morning with Assange, he described multiple incidents
that clearly signal an recent escalation of surveillance and other forms of
harassment directed at WikiLeaks. Many of those events are detailed in an
Editorial they just published, which, he explained, was part of an effort to
publicize what is being done to them in order to provide some safety and
buffer. A good summary of those events is provided by Gawker. As but one
disturbing incident: a volunteer, a minor, who works with WikiLeaks was
detained in Iceland last week and questioned extensively about an
incriminating video WikiLeaks possesses relating to the actions of the U.S.
military. During the course of the interrogation, the WikiLeaks volunteer
was not only asked questions about the video based on non-public knowledge
about its contents, but was also shown surveillance photos of Assange
exiting a recent WikiLeaks meeting regarding the imminent posting of
documents concerning the Pentagon.

That WikiLeaks is being targeted by the U.S. Government for surveillance and
disruption is beyond doubt. And it underscores how vital their work is and
why it's such a threat.

* * * * *

WikiLeaks editors, including Assagne, have spent substantial time of late in
Iceland because there is a pending bill in that country's Parliament that
would provide meaningful whistelblower protection for what they do, far
greater than exists anywhere else. Why is Iceland a leading candidate to do
that? Because, last year, that nation suffered full-scale economic
collapse. It was then revealed that numerous nefarious causes (corrupt
loans, off-shore transactions, concealed warning signs) were hidden
completely from the public and even from policy-makers, preventing detection
and avoidance. Worse, most of Iceland's institutions -- from its media to
its legislative and regulatory bodies -- completely failed to penetrate this
wall of secrecy, allowing this corruption to fester until it brought about
full-scale financial ruin. As a result, Iceland has become very receptive
to the fact that the type of investigative exposure provided by WikiLeaks is
a vital national good, and there is real political will to provide it with
substantial protections.

If that doesn't sound familiar to Americans, it should. At exactly the time
when U.S. government secrecy is at an all-time high, the institutions
ostensibly responsible for investigation and exposure have failed. The
American media is largely co-opted, and its few remaining vestiges of real
investigative journalism are crippled by financial constraints. The U.S.
Congress is almost entirely impotent at providing meaningful oversight and
is, in any event, controlled by the factions that maintain virtually
complete secrecy. As I've documented before, some alternative means of
investigative journalism have arisen -- such as the ACLU's tenacious FOIA
litigations to pry documents showing "War on Terror" abuses and the reams of
bloggers who sort through, analyze and publicize them -- but that's no match
for the vast secrecy powers of the government and private corporations.

The need for independent leaks and whistle-blowing exposures is particularly
acute because, at exactly the same time that investigative journalism has
collapsed, public and private efforts to manipulate public opinion has
proliferated. This is exemplified by the type proposed by the above-report
CIA, the Pentagon's TV propaganda program exposed last year, or the ways in
which private interests covertly pay and control supposedly "independent
political commentators" to participate in our public debates and shape
public opinion.

Last month, I was on a panel at the New School's Conference on how
information is controlled in a democracy, and also on the panel were Daniel
Ellsberg, who risked his liberty to leak the Pentagon Papers, and The New
York Times' David Barstow, who won the Pulitzer Prize for exposing the
Pentagon's propaganda program. Ellsberg described how massive is the
apparatus of secrecy in the National Security State, and Barstow made the
vital point -- which I summarized in the clip below when speaking later that
day at NYU Law School -- that the means of manipulating public opinion are
rapidly increasing at exactly the same time that checks on secrecy (such as
investigative journalism) are vanishing:

Aside from the handful of organizations (the ACLU, the NYT) with the
resources and will to engage in protracted FOIA litigations against the
government, one of the last avenues to uncover government and other elite
secrets are whistle blowers and organizations that enable them. WikiLeaks
is one of the world's most effective such groups, and it's thus no surprise
that they're under such sustained attacks.

This is how Assange put it to me this morning in explaining why he believes
his organization's activities are so vital and why he's willing to make
himself a target in order to do it:

This information has reform potential. And the information which is
concealed or suppressed is concealed or suppressed because the people who
know it best understand that it has the ability to reform. So they engage
in work to prevent that reform . . . .

There are reasons I do it that have to do with wanting to reform
civilization, and selectively targeting information will do that --
understanding that quality information is what every decision is based on,
and all the decisions taken together is what "civilization" is, so if you
want to improve civilization, you have to remove some of the basic
constraints, which is the quality of information that civilization has at
its disposal to make decisions. Of course, there's a personal psychology to
it, that I enjoy crushing bastards, I like a good challenge, so do a lot of
the other peole involved in WikiLeaks. We like the challenge.

The public and private organizations most eager to maintain complete secrecy
around what they do -- including numerous U.S. military and intelligence
agencies -- are obviously threatened by WikiLeaks' activities, which is why
they seek to harass and cripple them. There are numerous ways one can
support WikLeaks -- donations, volunteer work, research and technical
assistance -- and that can be done through their site. There aren't many
groups more besieged, or doing more important work, than them.