Kabul War Diary

wikileaks, Raw Intel, and the Rise of the Taliban. Soldiers from the 1st Battalion, 32nd Infantry Regiment in Konar province, Afghanistan, Aug. 14, 2009 What a week its been for us document hounds!! The dust is still settling from the wikileaks dump of over 70,000 raw, uncensored US military intelligence reports from Afghanistan. According to first hand accounts, the Afghan police and army are incompetent and corrupt.The Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agents routinely supported (support?) And all that is just from a tiny snippet of the documents. Julian Assange of wikileaks. And then there’s the National Security Archive versus wikileaks angle.” The final critique I’d like to touch on is the much-reported fact that the wikileaks documents were “only” field reports and raw intelligence, not higher-level, vetted, analyzed intelligence. An image of Mullah Mohammad Omar, probably. The cable correctly identified Mullah Mohammad Omar as the Taliban’s leader. Map showing Spin Boldak. And who was funding this formidable force? Like this:

Who watches WikiLeaks? | Media It has proclaimed itself the "intelligence service of the people", and plans to have more agents than the CIA. They will be you and me. WikiLeaks is a long way from that goal, but this week it staked its claim to be the dead drop of choice for whistleblowers after releasing video the Pentagon claimed to have lost of US helicopter crews excitedly killing Iraqis on a Baghdad street in 2007. The dead included two Reuters news agency staff. The release of the shocking footage prompted an unusual degree of hand-wringing in a country weary of the Iraq war, and garnered WikiLeaks more than $150,000 in donations to keep its cash-starved operation on the road. It also drew fresh attention to a largely anonymous group that has outpaced the competition in just a few short years by releasing to the world more than a million confidential documents from highly classified military secrets to Sarah Palin's hacked emails. WikiLeaks has promised to change the world by abolishing official secrecy.

Mormon Church Handbook of Instructions, 2006 From WikiLeaks Unless otherwise specified, the document described here: Was first publicly revealed by WikiLeaks working with our source.Was classified, confidential, censored or otherwise withheld from the public before release.Is of political, diplomatic, ethical or historical significance. Any questions about this document's veracity are noted. The summary is approved by the editorial board. See here for a detailed explanation of the information on this page. If you have similar or updated material, see our submission instructions. Release date January 3, 2009 The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS, or "Mormon") Handbook of Instructions, Book 1, 2006 (see Mormon Church Handbook of Instructions, full, 2006 for a higher resolution color edition). The confidentiality of these basic administrative and doctrinal laws has the effect of disenfranchising the majority of Mormon men and essentially all Mormon women from their system of governance. See also: File | Torrent | Magnet Context

Knight Foundation Hands Out Grants to 12 Groups, but Not WikiLea The Knight Foundation announced on Wednesday 12 winners of its News Challenge grants, projects costing a total of $2.74 million that will use new technology to spread information in local areas. The winners included a platform for collaborating to report local news and a plan to spread virtual town halls across Vermont. Among the 2,400 proposals passed over was one from the whistleblower Web site WikiLeaks, which was asking for more than a half-million dollars to be spent over two years to bring its anonymous method of leaking documents to local newspapers. WikiLeaks was largely a fringe Web site when it made its submission last year to the Knight Foundation – focusing, as the foundation insists, on improving local reporting. Twitter lately has been WikiLeak’s main way of communicating and they sent out a couple of them early Thursday about the grants. First: “Knight grants $2.74Mio to ’12 Grantees who will impact future of news’ — but not WikiLeaks. Mr.

National Security Directive on Space Exploration Policy (2004) | A newly disclosed National Security Presidential Directive on space exploration (pdf) illustrates the broad topical scope of such directives, as well as their practical limitations. The Bush Administration directive, issued in 2004, ambitiously called for “a sustained and affordable human and robotic program to explore the solar system and beyond” and even a “human presence across the solar system.” The document has not been formally released to the public, and multiple requests for its disclosure have been rebuffed by the National Security Council. It was obtained and released by Wikileaks.org, a website that publishes confidential documents. See “U.S. The National Security Presidential Directive largely replicates the contents of the Bush Administration’s Vision for Space Exploration, which was announced on the same day the Directive was signed. For one thing, it has nothing at all to do with national security as the term is commonly understood.

Intelligence Policy on Unauthorized Disclosures (2002) | Secrecy “Intentional leaks of intelligence are a violation of law, may result in irrevocable damage to national security, and will not be tolerated,” according to a 2002 directive from the Director of Central Intelligence (pdf) that was itself leaked. The directive largely reiterates longstanding policy, though perhaps with increased vigor. It states twice that leaks will not be “tolerated” and twice more that intelligence agencies will take “aggressive” measures to combat leaks. The document notably advises intelligence officials not to prepare a damage assessment of a leak whenever there is a prospect of criminal prosecution against the leaker, implicitly suggesting that an accurate damage assessment might not always favor the prosecution. The unclassified directive was obtained and published last week by Wikileaks.org, a website that publishes confidential and controlled documents of various types.

Wikileaks Fails “Due Diligence” Review In the past week, both the Washington Post and the New York Times have referred to WikiLeaks.org, the web site that publishes confidential records, as a “whistleblower” site. This conforms to WikiLeaks’ own instructions to journalists that “WikiLeaks should be described, depending on context, as the ‘open government group’, ‘anti-corruption group’, ‘transparency group’ or ‘whistleblower’s site’.” But calling WikiLeaks a whistleblower site does not accurately reflect the character of the project. It also does not explain why others who are engaged in open government, anti-corruption and whistleblower protection activities are wary of WikiLeaks or disdainful of it. And it does not provide any clue why the Knight Foundation, the preeminent foundation funder of innovative First Amendment and free press initiatives, might have rejected WikiLeaks’ request for financial support, as it recently did. On occasion, WikiLeaks has engaged in overtly unethical behavior.