RENSE: IS WIKILEAKS ENDGAME INTERNET CENSORSHIP?

Is Wikileaks Endgame Internet Censorship?
By F. William Engdahl

12-21-10

 

"A closer look at the details of what has so far been carefully leaked by the most ultra-establishment of international media such as the New York Times reveals a clear agenda. That agenda coincidentally serves to buttress the agenda of US geopolitics around the world from Iran to North Korea. It is almost too perfectly scripted to be true. A discontented 22-year old US Army soldier on duty in Baghdad, Bradley Manning, a low-grade US Army intelligence analyst, described as a loner, a gay in the military, a disgruntled "computer geek," sifts through classified information at Forward Operating Base Hammer. He decides to secretly download US State Department email communications from the entire world over a period of eight months for hours a day, onto his blank CDs while pretending to be listening to Lady Gaga.    In addition to diplomatic cables, Manning is believed to have provided WikiLeaks with helicopter gun camera video of an errant US attack in Baghdad on unarmed journalists, and with war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan. It is almost too perfectly scripted to be true. A discontented 22-year old US Army soldier on duty in Baghdad, Bradley Manning, a low-grade US Army intelligence analyst, described as a loner, a gay in the military, a disgruntled "computer geek," sifts through classified information at Forward Operating Base Hammer. He decides to secretly download US State Department email communications from the entire world over a period of eight months for hours a day, onto his blank CDs while pretending to be listening to Lady Gaga. In addition to diplomatic cables, Manning is believed to have provided WikiLeaks with helicopter gun camera video of an errant US attack in Baghdad on unarmed journalists, and with war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan."   "Manning then is supposed to have tracked down a notorious former US computer hacker to get his 250,000 pages of classified US State Department cables out in the Internet for the whole world to see. He allegedly told the US hacker that the documents he had contained "incredible, awful things that belonged in the public domain and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington, DC." The hacker turned him in to US authorities so the story goes. Manning is now incommunicado since months in US military confinement so we cannot ask him, conveniently. The Pentagon routinely hires the best hackers to design their security systems. [Assange] selects as exclusive newspapers to decide what is to be leaked the New York Times which did such service in promoting faked propaganda against Saddam that led to the Iraqi war, the London Guardian and Der Spiegel. Assange claims he had no time to sift through so many pages so handed them to the trusted editors of the establishment media for them to decide what should be released. Very "anti-establishment" that.    The New York Times even assigned one of its top people, David E. Sanger, to control the release of the Wikileaks material. Sanger is no establishment outsider. He sits as a member of the elite Council on Foreign Relations as well as the Aspen Institute Strategy Group together with the likes of Condi Rice, former Defense Secretary William Perry, former CIA head John Deutch, former State Department Deputy Secretary and now World Bank head Robert Zoellick among others. Indeed a strange choice of media for a person who claims to be anti-establishment. But then Assange also says he believes the US Government version of 9/11 and calls the Bilderberg Group a normal meeting of people, a very establishment view. Most important, the 250,000 cables are not "top secret" as we might have thought.    Between two and three million US Government employees are cleared to see this level of "secret" document, [1] and some 500,000 people around the world have access to the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRnet) where the cables were stored. SIPRnet is not recommended for distribution of top-secret information. Only 6% or 15,000 pages of the documents have been classified as even secret, a level below top-secret. Another 40% were the lowest level, "confidential", while the rest were unclassified. In brief, it was not all that secret. What is emerging from all the sound and Wikileaks fury in Washington is that the entire scandal is serving to advance a long-standing Obama and Bush agenda of policing the until-now free Internet. Already the US Government has shut the Wikileaks server in the United States though no identifiable US law has been broken."   "The process of policing the Web was well underway before the current leaks scandal. In 2009 Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller and Republican Olympia Snowe introduced the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (S.773). It would give the President unlimited power to disconnect private-sector computers from the internet. The bill "would allow the president to 'declare a cyber-security emergency' relating to 'non-governmental' computer networks and do what's necessary to respond to the threat." We can expect that now this controversial piece of legislation will get top priority when a new Republican House and the Senate convene in January. US Department of Homeland Security, an agency created in the political hysteria following 9/11 2001 that has been compared to the Gestapo, has already begun policing the Internet. They are quietly seizing and shutting down internet websites (web domains) without due process or a proper trial. DHS simply seizes web domains that it wants to and posts an ominous "Department of Justice" logo on the web site. See an example at http://torrent-finder.com (My note: Do click on this link. It's worth checking out.)"   On the political front, I agree with Engdahl's assessment of Assange's leaked government cables. In the cables I have seen discussed in various newspaper articles thus far, there is nothing more than the occasional embarrassing quote, nothing top-secret, and nothing remotely damaging to any US allies revealed in any of these supposedly top-secret government cables. And regarding Assange's threat of leaking thousands of confidential documents contained in a 5 gigabyte drive regarding a big US bank believed to be Bank of America as an "anti-establishment" act, I'm not buying it. According to a Forbes interview, Assange stated that his leak would "give a true and representative insight into how banks behave at the executive level in a way that will stimulate investigations and reforms, I presume." I say, so what if this big leak Assange is in possession of pertains to Bank of America and if it reveals documents that result in the demise of BofA? If this is how this drama plays out, this event would ultimately be more pro-establishment and pro-elite than anti-establishment. The demise of BofA would only mean that JP Morgan, as they have already done with Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual, would have yet another opportunity to stamp out their competition, swoop in like vultures, and pick up BofA's carcass for pennies on the dollar. Or perhaps Goldman Sachs will be given this carcass to pick clean.  Either way, if this happens, it consolidates power for the elites at the top and could not have worked out any better if Assange was a paid employee of Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan. Remember that BofA bought up Merrill Lynch when Merrill Lynch failed, so an acquisition of BofA would translate into a delayed acquisition of Merrill Lynch.   In the book, "The Great Depression of the XXI Century," Tanya Cariina Hsu wrote:   "In 1907, J.P. Morgan, a private New York banker, published a rumor that a competing unnamed large bank was about to fail. It was a false charge but customers nonetheless raced to their banks to withdraw their money, in case it was their bank. As they pulled out their funds, the banks lost their cash deposits and were forced to call in their loans. People therefore had to pay back their mortgages to fill the banks with income, going bankrupt in the process. The 1907 panic resulted in a crash that prompted the creation of the Federal Reserve, a private banking cartel with the veneer of an independent government organization. Effectively, it was a coup by elite bankers in order to control the industry."   "When signed into law in 1913, the Federal Reserve would loan and supply the nation's money, but with interest. The more money it was able to print, the more "income" it generated for itself. By its very nature, the Federal Reserve would forever keep producing debt to stay alive. It was able to print America's monetary supply at will, regulating its value. To control valuation, however, inflation had to be kept in check. The Federal Reserve then doubled America's money supply within five years, and in 1920, it called in a mass percentage of loans. Over five thousand banks collapsed overnight. One year later, the Federal Reserve again increased the money supply by 62 percent, but in 1929, it again called the loans back in, en masse. This time, the crash of 1929 caused over sixteen thousand banks to fail and an 89 percent plunge on the stock market. The private and well-protected banks within the Federal Reserve system were able to snap up the failed banks at pennies on the dollar."   If this sounds familiar, it should.  This seems to be the blueprint by today's banking elites for today's banking industry as well. During the Bank Panic of 1907 and the Great Depression, JP Morgan was one of the biggest beneficiaries of a panic that many historians claimed they, along with the Federal Reserve, helped to manufacture (JP Morgan is alleged to have helped engineer both the Panic of 1907 and the Great Depression while the Federal Reserve helped engineer the Great Depression). If the future scenario regarding Wikileaks's release of incriminating big bank documents plays out anywhere close to the one I presented above, Julian Assange would, in essence, be performing a massive favor for the most favored private banks of the Federal Reserve system. One must remember that during this manufactured global monetary crisis, not all banks are created equal and a handful of banks are hand picked for survival and prosperity at the expense of hundreds of others. Just because Wikileaks threatens to release incriminating documents on a big bank that could make it look bad, this should not be naively or blindly interpreted as an anti-establishment act.   Admittedly, like millions of others, I was fooled by Wikileaks's intent in the beginning. But the more and more I research them, the more it seems as though Wikileaks is cooperating with governments and banks rather than serving as their adversary or as their watchdog to increase transparency. Now, if Mr. Assange releases cables that expose detailed correspondences between the US Federal Reserve and JP Morgan regarding silver price suppression schemes or how Goldman Sachs deliberately releases misinformation about gold prices, or if he releases diplomatic cables exposing secrets between the US and Israel that have been concealed from the public, I might start once again believing that the goal of Wikileaks is to provide greater transparency about government and banker actions. One thing I have learned over the years about the shadowy world of banking and politics is that if something appears to be a great coincidence, it usually is not, and that things rarely are what they seem to be on the surface.    http://www.rense.com/general92/wikkkd.htm