No thread about the new WIKILEAKS United States diplomatic cables leak?

[notyoueither]

Still can't believe you seriously think they're going to be targets.

Tell you what -- I'll bet you $1,000 CDN that none of those medical facilities are targeted up through December 31st, 2015.

All I can say is what I might do if I had a choice of choosing targets.

The easy ones in a soft country that is easy to get to and into would be somewhere on my list. They would go up the list significantly when my enemy told me they were important so long as I could trust that my enemy had fvcked up in telling me. If I were interested in propaganda, they would go near the top of my list.

[Asher]

Al Qaeda isn't going to start hitting military strategic targets. Even if they hit ALL of those facilities in Canada, you know it won't make a lick of difference to the US.

Al Qaeda operates by instilling fear. It does that by attacking targets everyone is intimately familiar with. They bomb landmarks with high strategic value, not just buildings that make vaccines or buildings that make a single component of one of many US missiles in use.

Am I the only one here that understands how terrorism works?

This is why I say repeatedly that they've won. The US lives in a state of fear, so much that they molest children at the airport security gate and take nude photographs of elderly women. If that's not a result of terrorism, I don't know what is.

[notyoueither]

They already have hit economically strategic targets.

Is a vaccine plant economic? Military?

They even bomb the odd bar. Now that's downright uncivil of them.

As for your ideas about AQ, winning, losing, and American society, you may well be correct. You may be right. I may be crazy. But it just might be a lunatic... erm, yeah.

Ahem.

The subject is Assange and whether his project is being run with some modicum of responsibility. He/they were criticised for unredacted information that irresponsibly compromised the safety of sources. They seemed to take heed and cleaned things up for a few days. Then Assange is threatened with arrest and part of his response is 'come and get me copper, and I'll flush these medical technicians down the toilet.'

Exactly how is making a target of a vaccine facility and the people who work there striking a blow against the lies and deceit of Amercian adminsitrations?

[notyoueither]

In short, we don't need Assange to know that Yanquis politicians, and more, are a bunch of ****s.

It would be nice if he could have his moment of fame, collect his bullet, and not cause unneccesary harm to people who don't deserve it.

[Wezil]

It would be nice if he could have his moment of fame, collect his bullet, and not cause unneccesary harm to people who don't deserve it.

The same could be said of Bush and Cheney. How many innocents did their lies kill?

[Asher]

Exactly how is making a target of a vaccine facility and the people who work there striking a blow against the lies and deceit of Amercian adminsitrations?

He didn't make them a target. You still have gaping holes in your logic...

The fact that it's on some list that some half-baked bureaucrat made doesn't mean it's now a target. AQ is going to attack what they were always going to attack -- high profile, high harm landmarks.

Blowing up a vaccine facility just means there's a month gap or so in the supply of vaccine while another facility sets it up. It's clearly not the most effective target.

[Asher]

And as for your *****ing about Assange and his responsibility -- why the **** does it matter?

Talk about responsibility -- the US let some low-level military kid access all of this ****. And it's a LOT of it. They didn't even know about it until after he leaked it AND Wikileaks let everyone know.

If this data was so ****ing vitally valuable for the safety of all of those poor orphans working in the vaccine plants, why the **** was it not better secured?

The failure of responsibility here falls on the US government. If you're going to make a "DO NOT HIT US HERE" lists, at least ****ing keep them properly confidential.

Whether some guy releases them all is incidental after that.

[N35t0r]

Here's the clue.

Threre were a couple thousand military targets, and several thousand more civilian, in Great Britain for the Germans to bomb in 1940.

It is a famous example of the importance (and failure) of military intelligence that the Germans stopped bombing ~20 fighter (? number from memory) bases in Southern England and moved on to cities and other non-critical military targets when they had the RAF within a week or so of defeat.

The importance of targets. Get it?

Which would be relevant if the Germans had switched to bomb civilian targets because they thought those targets were more important. They only did so because Hitler threw a hissy fit when the RAF bombed Berlin.

[Asher]

Poly just ****ing ate one of my replies. I'm not going to post it again.

Suffice to say, it was a smackdown.

[rah]

I have to agree with Asher here. The internet has changed the ballgame. If it had been around in WWII things would have quite different. Now you don't have risk yourself much. Short of super secret military installations, almost everything can be inferred through the internet if you have half a brain. As Asher noted, simple "about our company" and job postings will tell you most of what a company does and where it's located. Simply checking the news for the location of protests will uncover a lot of "secret" things also. There is no shortage of targets whether they want high profile targets or more strategic ones. The fact that a lot of attacks haven't happened is a testimony to their lack of capable resources.

[Asher]

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-12-07/wikileaks-assange-denied-bail-in-u-k-extradition.html

WikiLeaks’ Assange Denied Bail in U.K. Extradition

Dec. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Julian Assange, founder of the WikiLeaks website that leaked thousands of secret U.S. military and State Department documents, was denied bail by a U.K. judge at an extradition hearing over rape allegations in Sweden.

Assange, 39, will remain in custody until his next hearing on Dec. 14, Judge Howard Riddle ruled today at City of Westminster Magistrate’s Court. Assange told the court he will fight the extradition.

“These are serious sexual offenses,” Riddle said at the hearing. He said that the case is not about WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks drew condemnation for posting thousands of classified documents on its website, including U.S. embassy communications and a military video of a July 2007 helicopter attack in Iraq that killed a Reuters television cameraman and his driver. Created in 2006, WikiLeaks receives confidential material and posts it on the Internet “so readers and historians alike can see evidence of the truth,” the organization says on its website.

Assange was arrested “by appointment” today at 9:30 a.m. after Swedish police issued an international arrest warrant. His surrender to police followed a European warrant on one count of unlawful coercion, two counts of sexual molestation and one count of rape allegedly committed in August 2010, the police’s extradition unit said in an e-mailed statement.

Nomadic Lifestyle

Gemma Lindfield, a lawyer for the U.K. government, argued at the hearing that Assange should be denied bail due to his “nomadic lifestyle.”

“This is somebody who is unable to provide an address that he will stay at for the proceedings,” Lindfield said at the hearing. “He is simply not cooperative in these proceedings, save for” today’s appointment at the police station, she said.

John Pilger, a journalist and documentary filmmaker, had joined Jemima Khan and other celebrities offering to guarantee Assange’s bail.

“I have a very high regard for him,” Pilger told Riddle. “I’m here today because the charges against him in Sweden are absurd, and were judged as absurd by the chief prosecutor” until a “senior political figure intervened.”

The alleged crimes took place in Stockholm and Enkoeping while Assange was in Sweden lecturing about publishing classified U.S. military documents related to the war in Afghanistan.

Assange, born in Townsville, Australia, began as a computer hacker in his native country and pleaded guilty in 1996 to 24 counts of violating the Crimes Act by accessing and inserting information into computers, including those of Nortel Networks Corp. He received a fine and three years probation.

[Nikolai]

Senior Turkey official says Israel behind WikiLeaks release

Deputy leader of Turkish PM Erdogan's AKP party hints that Israel engineered the release of U.S. diplomatic cables as a plot to pressure Turkey, the daily Hurriyet reports.
By Haaretz Service

A senior Turkish official blamed Israel for the WikiLeaks release, Turkish daily Hurriyet reported on Wednesday.

Addressing reporters, Huseyin Celik, deputy leader of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's AKP party, hinted that Israel engineered the leak of hundreds of thousands of United States diplomatic cables as a plot to pressure the Turkish government.

“One has to look at which countries are pleased with these," Celik was quoted as saying. "Israel is very pleased. Israel has been making statements for days, even before the release of these documents.”

“Documents were released and they immediately said, ‘Israel will not suffer from this.’ How did they know that?” Celik asked.

Turkish officials suspect that "the main cause of these leaks was to weaken the Turkish government”, Hurriyet reported.

On Tuesday, Turkish President Abdullah Gul said that the leak appeared to be "a result of a systematic work with some purpose behind it" but Gul did not mention Israel.

According to Hurriyet report, around 8,000 documents from the U.S. Embassy in Ankara have been released by WikiLeaks.

Israeli-Turkish relations have cooled in recent years and reached a low point last May when nine Turkish citizens were killed as Israeli naval commandos boarded a Gaza-bound aid flotilla.

Talk about being self-important.

Sounds like a pack of children: "Israel did this just to hurt us! Us! Us! The others were only collateral damage..."

[Guynemer]

I have to agree with Asher here. The internet has changed the ballgame. If it had been around in WWII things would have quite different. Now you don't have risk yourself much. Short of super secret military installations, almost everything can be inferred through the internet if you have half a brain. As Asher noted, simple "about our company" and job postings will tell you most of what a company does and where it's located. Simply checking the news for the location of protests will uncover a lot of "secret" things also. There is no shortage of targets whether they want high profile targets or more strategic ones. The fact that a lot of attacks haven't happened is a testimony to their lack of capable resources.

The fact that they are an extremely-loosely (if at all) connected band of generally poorly-educated, impoverished, religious wackadoos, targeting the most powerful nation that has ever existed in the history of humankind, with a citizenry armed to the teeth, that in the past two weeks has had more people hunting deer in four Midwestern states than the size of the world's next largest standing army... I think that has more to do with it than their lack of capable resources. But I agree with your point.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

deer discrimination

[Asher]

I don't think they're as uneducated as you may think.

Some of the arrested members were engineers, etc.

The folks they arrested in Canada included an MD...