Al-Qaeda, Wikileaks, and the War on Terror
Many news outlets have commented on the Wikileaks phenomenon, but none to my knowledge have commented on how the official classified State Department cables displayed on Wikileaks will aid al-Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist groups in their war against us, and how, in a bizarre twist of fate, these documents should now be considered a key American counterterrorism resource.
First it is important to put the quality of intelligence in perspective. Intelligence comes in various forms, such as conversations intercepted by human sources, communications intercepted through technical devices, via the reports of a spy, by the revelations of a defector, and on and on.
For all intelligence collectors, however, the Holy Grail is to recruit a source that can provide complete copies of official classified documents. I spent a career recruiting foreign spies who I pushed to provide me with this exact type of documentary intelligence, and this is precisely the kind of intelligence that PFC Bradley Manning provided to Julian Assange and Wikileaks.
To put the volume of intelligence displayed on Wikileaks in perspective, in the war on terror, every time we capture an al-Qaeda lap top computer that contains a couple hundred tactical documents, our officials declare that we’ve uncovered a “treasure trove” of intelligence that will severely impact al-Qaeda and be a boon to our understanding of how the organization operates.
Now compare this to the 260,000 official State Department cables revealing both tactical and strategic policies by documenting specific conversations between foreign leaders and senior American officials such as the president’s national security advisors and military leaders like General David Petraeus, and you get a perspective on this truly massive hemorrhage.
To put the damage into perspective, the leaked cables cover key American policies that span the entire world. If we take a sample, however, of just the cables that address the Middle East, we find an embassy assessment stating that we cannot win against al-Qaeda in Pakistan, the dangers posed by the Muslim Brotherhood, the cooperation between Shia Iran and Sunni terrorist groups, our plans, actions, and intentions to contain Iran, our Middle Eastern regional counterterrorism strategy, our plans to monitor al-Qaeda in Africa, the physical vulnerabilities of crucial energy nodes, and our fears that Pakistani nuclear material will fall into terrorist hands.
Having been an intelligence insider, I can assure you that our key competitors around the world such as Iran, Russia, North Korea, China, and the like, will have their ministries of foreign affairs and ministries of intelligence pore over and analyze these documents for years to come.
There is no doubt that al-Qaeda is already hard at work analyzing these cables, too, and, if it just limits its analysis to cables from the Muslim countries, it will be able to make its operations more secure and largely negate some of our communications interception techniques, it will uncover the physical vulnerabilities of strategic energy nodes, and it will obtain information that will provide content for its propaganda machine to discredit our government and our Middle Eastern partners.
I will guarantee that in the near future you will see some of these secret cables prominently referred to on al-Qaeda videos and displayed in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s new Inspire magazine, and they will be exploited by Salafi-Jihadi mosques and organizations throughout the world for some time to come.
Of course! The elite socialists, those who never had a job, that run our country, are reflexive controllers. They work not only by ‘social engineering’ with over-regulation and nebulous midnight legislation, they also have a Truth Ministry and Memory Holes as in “1984″.
So you still think you have a Constitutional Republic and a Representative Democracy, do you?
This is an excellent observation, concisely put…..”The elite socialists, those who never had a job, that run our country, are reflexive controllers.”
But, it seems that one of our major problems is that these “elite” [..but, are they really so "elite", outside of their own minds?] socialists have absolutely closed minds, and are instinctively unable to accept contrary thought.
This can be observed daily in the smug certitude of the NYT and the Washington Post owned and operated media.
What is needed is more frequent “shellacking”.
We Conservatives must act on this firmly established precedent.
Information is Terrorism, eh?
The OMB memo stated:
Except as authorized by their agencies and pursuant to agency procedures, federal employees or contractors shall not, while using computers or other devices (such as Blackberries or Smart Phones) that access the web on non-classified government systems, access documents that are marked classified (including classified documents publicly available on the WikiLeaks and other websites)…
Another example that “Progressives” almost always make bad policy…
“In an ironic twist, these publicly available classified cables, once considered compartmented information that could only be shared with other American officials on a strict “need to know” basis,”
If that were true it would not have been possible for them to have been leaked. They were leaked because far too many people with no need to know had access to the documents and one of them leaked them.
In defense of the aforementioned regulations, the computers in our offices are there because our work requires them; any non-official use of a computer has to be at no cost to the government & without any detrimental effect on our official duties.
Also, if some classified document that I’m not authorized to read or possess is found on my work computer, investigators don’t want to go through the hassle of determining if it is from a WikiLeaks dump — that is, a public channel — or if I had obtained it illegally in some other manner. Since my work doesn’t require me to view secret diplomatic cables (I work at the VA), my superiors are entirely in their rights to ban me from accessing them.
It’s rather annoying, but I can see why they went this route.
Where the stupid bit begins is that the filter the VA put in place on our computers simply bans us from accessing (among other things) any Web site with the word “wikileaks” in the URL; this means that I can’t read any news story or blog post about the whole thing. If I really want to read such an item, I must E-mail the URL to my home account & read it after work on my own computer/Internet connection.
Thanks, but no irony in all this; merely another extended demonstration of the fruits of self-deception, costing more than 35B$ per day.
Two lessons stand clear:
He that trusts no-one cannot be trusted.
A government that must protect itself first has nothing left with which to do anything else.
Come on,Dexter60…
….your last two sentences are way, way too simplistic.
It does no good to point out these restrictions without determining who in the government is responsible on top for sending out these prohibitions. While it may have been someone much lower in the organization that is difficult to determine, point out the person further up obviously responsible.
We have a whole history of people in the Federal Government who were agents of an anti-American persuasion, such as Communism, that have been instrumental in perverting American interests and promoting foreign interests, beginning even before the Second World War.
A great deal of effort needs to be make to pin those actions that perverted American interests, onto the specific people in charge. The same is true of any similar actions going on today, such as those described in this article. Don’t blame it on the President, find the real top decision maker responsible, even if they are innocent of intent, but allowed Anti-American decisions to go forward. That is how to promote change for the future.
Thanking in advance all who attempt to point out the problem along with the top person that allowed the problem to propagate.
The fact that we have Wikileaks is testimony that things are not as the should be. I understand the need of privacy especially in business dealings and negotiations. But there is considerable indication that we, the citizens, have been kept in the dark when we should have been informed. A security clearance should not be needed to know when to stay silent.
The fact that these documents have been dumped on the internet tells us what is available to the rest of the world so we need not guess what they know that we do not know. I monitored Cryptome several years ago which was a site dedicated to revealing some of the things done in the dark by various governments, including their intelligence systems scratching each other’s backs doing chores for them that their laws prevented them from doing. Was quite informative. Now, who leaked the leaks? What I have heard does not wash. If one person in one position could do all this then what could our sophisticated foreign intelligence do? We would have no security. If this is the Lord’s doing then it can’t be stopped and, in my opinion, that is a definite possibility.
The official reaction to these leaks makes me wonder whose side we are on, who is in the dark and why are they in the dark? Somehow is seems my interests are not being served.
Notwithstanding the reputation of our intelligence and counter-intelligence apparatus as almost totally useless, it seems completely beyond that, not only were so many almost anonymous people with access to these documents, but that such access also included the ability to download the documents en masse.
Could it be that these leaks were deliberate ? That this mass of documents, which has apparently only caused embarrassment so far, is a cover to leak SPECIFIC DOCUMENTS with a SPECIFIC PURPOSE ? Let’s hope that it is – else we should fire our entire security apparatchik.
As for Al Queda having access to all the documents, that’s not my understanding though it may be so. From what I read, only about 2200 documents have been made available online at Wikileaks. Assange has also sent almost the entire dump to a few big media outlets who publish per their own conscience – and fear of American reprisals.
If this leak is as it appears on the surface, surely it’s just another sign of the decline of American hegemony.