VonHelman wrote:Osama Bin Laden is on the CIA payroll

If they really wanted him they would have him, they are using him to further their agenda and to wage wars in the world where their secret friends in Saudi will also benefit

The fact the CIA tries to sell the world on the fact they cant find Osama clearly goes to show how gullible the people really are.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange breaks cover but will avoid America US desperate to ask hacker what he knows of classified messages about Iraq and Afghanistan wars..

The elusive founder of WikiLeaks, who is at the centre of a potential US national security sensation, has surfaced from almost a month in hiding to tell the Guardian he does not fear for his safety but is on permanent alert.

Julian Assange, a renowned Australian hacker who founded the electronic whistleblowers' platform WikiLeaks, vanished when a young US intelligence analyst in Baghdad was arrested.

The analyst, Bradley Manning, had bragged he had sent 260,000 incendiary US state department cables on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to WikiLeaks.

The prospect of the cache of classified intelligence on the US conduct of the two wars being put online is a nightmare for Washington. The sensitivity of the information has generated media reports that Assange is the target of a US manhunt.

The motive behind whistle-blower prosecutions
By Glenn Greenwald

*

(updated below)

One of the more flamboyant aspects of the Bradley Manning arrest was the claim that he had leaked to WikiLeaks 250,000 pages of "diplomatic cables." Those were the documents which anonymous government officials pointed to when telling The Daily Beast's Philip Shenon that the leaks "could do serious damage to national security." Most commentary on the Manning case has tacitly assumed that the leaking of "diplomatic cables" would jeopardize national security secrets. But a new BBC article today contains this quote from former UK intelligence analyst Crispin Black:

Diplomatic cables don't usually contain huge secrets but they do contain the unvarnished truth so in a sense they can be even more embarrassing than secrets.

As usual, government concern over leaks is about avoiding embarrassment and other accountability; national security harm is but the fear-mongering excuse. Similarly, a new Washington Post article today details the Obama DOJ's prosecution of NSA whistle blower Thomas Drake, whose disclosures resulted in no claimed national security harm, but rather, was evidence of "waste, mismanagement and a willingness to compromise Americans' privacy without enhancing security" (leaked only after his use of the official channels resulted in nothing, as usual). As is true for virtually every whistle blower prosecution or threatened prosecution, there is no actual national security harm identified from that leak. Other than when a covert agent's identity is blown (as happened to Valerie Plame), has anyone ever heard of any actual, concrete national security harm from any of the high-profile leak cases, whether it be the illegal NSA eavesdropping program, the network of CIA black sites, the release of the Apache helicopter attack video, or the corruption and privacy infringements revealed by Drake?

The Post today quotes Obama DOJ spokesman Matthew Miller's justification for the administration's escalated war on whistle blowers as follows: "We have consistently said that leaks and mishandling of classified information are matters that we take extremely seriously." There's no doubt that they take such acts "extremely seriously," but what's the reason for it? There's been no identified harm to national security from any of these leaks.