10:48 PM EST And, here are a bunch of emails with Stratfor employees going back and forth about what they think of Anonymous and the war Anonymous supposedly declared on the Mexican drug cartels after a hacker was kidnapped.

10:36 PM EST McClatchy reports on the emails that look at the discontent in the Venezuelan military

10:18 PM EST Jane Hamsher uncovers Stratfor’s “source” inside the FBI: James Casey.

Coincidentally or not coincidentally, he just left the FBI. And, the Florida Times-Union reported that Casey was leaving the FBI just yesterday after working for the FBI for 25 years.

Like Jane says:

Moral of the story:  Bradley Manning gets charged with “aiding the enemy” for potentially leaking information that was available on the SIPRNET to hundreds of thousands of people.   This guy gets a gold watch and no investigation for potentially leaking the existence of a sealed DoJ indictment of Julian Assange that I imagine almost nobody knew about.

8:51 PM EST Here’s the interview I recorded today for FAIR’s “CounterSpin” radio show on the release and the media coverage of the emails thus far: Kevin Gosztola on WikiLeaks and Stratfor

It was an honor to appear on the program. I am very grateful that this media watchdog organization exists, and for the past few years, I have followed what they do very closely. Additionally, I appear on the same episode as Sonali Kolhatkar, who has done great work on Afghanistan.

8:46 PM EST Did Stratfor have someone at Occupy Des Moines spying on them? This email suggests there was somebody.

8:43 PM EST M_Cetera, one of the most prolific tweeters of all things WikiLeaks, has written a post about Stratfor’s blatant hypocrisy toward WikiLeaks

8:09 PM EST These emails are insanely amusing. Okay, as an Anon might say, for the lulz, here’s an email sent by an employee at the security and threat management firm Fortis Protective Services Worldwide, based in Chicago:

Hi Fred & thanks for those books you signed….my father thought that was a great gift.

I was looking into that US Day of Rage movement and specifically asked to connect it to any Saudi or other fundamentalist Islamic movements -

Thus far I have only hear rumors but not gotten any substantial connection.

Do you guys know much about this other than its US Domestic fiscal ideals ? [emphasis added]

Now, the best part is that Fred Burton, VP of Intelligence at Stratfor, takes this seriously and replies, “?” It then takes another employee Anya Alfano to dispel any idea that Occupy is connected with Islamists:

No, we’re not aware of any concrete connections between fundamentalist Islamist movements and the Day of Rage, or the October 2011 movement at this point.

7:49 PM EST More emails on Occupy.

Here’s an email on Deep Green Resistance, an environmental group that was at Occupy Austin’s General Assemblies, “I think the eco-terror group is focused on creating a situation where violent confrontation will be the ultimate outcome.” That’s how a Texas Department of Public Safety agent characterized the threat their presence posed.

Now, depending on how closely you followed the Stratfor hack, you might remember that Anonymous actually released some of the details on Stratfor’s monitoring of Occupy Austin and Deep Green Resistance. Here is a story written about the monitoring by Deep Green Resistance in response to the emails released in the hack.

Noteworthy is the following:

…Between hasty generalizations, the STRATFOR staff get a number of important facts completely wrong. First of all, they confuse members of the DGR action group in Austin (which does exist) with another group they call the “Phoenix commune” (which may or may not exist).

They also allege a conflict between members of the DGR Austin group with Occupy Austin that doesn’t seem to have happened. It’s not clear if this is part of the strategy counterintelligence groups have used in the past to try to provoke conflict between different social movements—the FBI used this very effectively against groups like the Black Panther Party—or whether STRATFOR is simply relying on unreliable or incompetent sources.

Elsewhere STRATFOR displays a perception of radical environmentalism that falls somewhere between muddled and simply wrong. One agent suggests DGR is inspired by Nazism and philosopher Martin Heidegger, while another declares that DGR “is focused on creating a situation where violent confrontation will be the ultimate outcome.” Both of these assertions are just plain false…

6:20 PM EST Majority Report with Sam Seder – Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone was interviewed yesterday. He informed Seder that there are thousands of emails showing Stratfor was monitoring Occupy. He is working on some stories and, when his first one is ready to publish, we can expect more emails on Stratfor’s monitoring to go up on WikiLeaks.

6:19 PM EST Jane Hamsher on Stratfor’s source, a “shady” Bulgarian billionaire named Vinny.

3:24 PM EST Insightful editorial from the Baltimore Sun on the release. Rachel Marsden characterizes the new “stash” as a “frightening view of government intelligence.” She describes how most in a private intelligence company would “rather pimp for a paycheck than stand on ethics, and often lack the sophisticated knowledge, wisdom and foresight to realize the implications of their actions and decisions.”

Marsden also gets into what most bothers her about an organization like Stratfor:

Apparently the entities charged with keeping us safe now require full-blown lessons from the private sector in how to do their jobs. According to leaked email written by Stratfor’s CEO, George Friedman: “We have also been asked to help the United States Marine Corps and other government intelligence organizations to teach them how Stratfor does what it does, and train them in becoming government Stratfors. We are beginning this project by preparing a three-year forecast for the Commandant of the Corps. This is a double honor for us.”

Double honor for you; double horror for us! The fact that the commandant of the Marine Corps “and other government intelligence organizations” might require your expertise in learning how to do what they’ve historically been entrusted by the public to do does nothing for my sense of security.

Except for the fact that it is not true that WikiLeaks “hacked into Stratfor’s system to obtain millions of private emails,” this is a good editorial. No trite judgments are made about the release or the organization. Marsden does not try to tell us if the release is a good release or not.

It gets better. Read the bottom. She’s a former Fox News host. That makes the editorial even better.

1:22 PM EST The questions, which the emails released by WikiLeaks, raise about the five-day Russia-Georgia conflict in 2008

12:49 PM EST This looks to be the first full report from McClatchy, one of WikiLeaks’ two US-based media partners, on the Stratfor release. The news outlet focuses on the lack of web security within the intelligence company. It also examines how credible or not credible the organization was and why many are not taking the release of the emails seriously.

Here is one of the more interesting sections, which looks at how Stratfor was profitable, notes what companies made payments to the company in 2011:

The largest was Chevron Latin America, which paid Stratfor $81,700. A 10th client was added in September — according to an email from Friedman to his staff that month — the Turkish Industry and Business Association. It was billed $75,000 in October, according to a note that accompanied the financial statement.

Another client, Dallas-based Hunt Oil, renewed its subscription to Stratfor’s research for $42,394. According to the emails, Stratfor monitors events in Iraq, Peru and Yemen for Hunt, which has oil interests in those countries, and along the U.S.-Mexican border, where Hunt controls the electrical transmission lines between Mexico and Texas.

12:37 PM EST The private intelligence company considered establishing standards for encrypting emails. Not sure that they were followed. Some very personal details and sensitive information was still exchanged between employees after 2010 (it seems).

12:32 PM EST Nawaat reports that there are 5000 emails on Tunisia. They are sifting through them now.

12:30 PM EST Look at the timeline of the emails. It appears Burton might be saying one thing and then saying another. There may be emails missing in this exchange that WikiLeaks has not published. He seems to concede in one email that OBL is now with the fish. In others, he is convincingly reporting that the body is moving to the contiguous United States.

10:44 AM EST Only thirty or so emails released in the latest batch. And, for clarity purposes, the only evidence in the emails suggesting that the Pentagon didn’t bury Bin Laden’s body at sea is what Burton himself reported in the emails. It could be true. If we think it is true he knew the US government had a “sealed indictment” against Julian Assange, why wouldn’t what he was reporting on the transport of OBL’s body be true?

At this point, all we have is questions. They are important, however, because the Pentagon did tell the world he was buried at sea.

10:41 AM EST On “dissent” within the ranks of the military against Venezuela President Hugo Chavez. Stratfor claimed to have a source that knew what was up with all the rumors about the military becoming more disloyal toward Chavez. The disloyalty was possibly due to his cancer.

10:30 AM EST Interview with Assange in the Italian newspaper L’Espresso:

The organization has a list of very powerful groups that are unhappy with the exposure that we have given to them in the past two years and those groups have set in motion various attempts to take us down, they are in the legal process through political mechanisms, through the media, through a financial blockade. All those need to be individually addressed. It is a lot of work. So far we are winning in the sense that our ability to publish the majority of our material has been unbroken, our promise to our sources to publish the most significant material in relation to the US government have been kept, but that said the attacks are serious and ongoing

9:37 AM EST Here is some context for the emails containing details on Bin Laden’s body allegedly being transported to Maryland. First off, someone was giving Burton this information. Details on where his body was going and what was really happening with his body was probably classified.

Burton’s information on the body being moved to Delaware and then on to Bethesda, Maryland,  if true, would mean the Pentagon lied about Bin Laden being buried at sea.

This is the story the Pentagon told the press:

A senior U.S. defense official said the religious rites aboard the ship lasted about 50 minutes. He said bin Laden’s body was washed, wrapped in a white sheet and then placed in a weighted bag. A military officer read “religious remarks,” which were translated into Arabic by a native speaker. “After the words were complete, the body was placed on a prepared flat board, tipped up, whereupon the deceased’s body eased into the sea,” the official told reporters. He spoke on the condition of anonymity, in accordance with Pentagon procedures.

It would seem the CIA moved the body. And, it was taken for forensic testing or perhaps an autopsy.

The whole idea of a sea burial was to avoid any outrage from Americans or people in other countries, who might not want him buried in their soil. But, what if a Dover mortuary that had been disposing of US troops‘ remains for years handled his body? What if he ended up in a Virginia landfill?

9:18 AM EST Email on how Malaysia will become a focal point for conflict between China and the United States.

9:16 AM EST Julian Assange’s legal advisor, Jennifer Robinson, is interviewed by MTR, which is a radio station based in Australia.

9:04 AM EST The emails show Fred Burton was given updates after Osama bin Laden was killed until his body allegedly arrived in Dover, Delaware.

Vice President of Intelligence Fred Burton wrote in an email, “Body is Dover bound, should be here by now.” This came after he wrote in another email:

If body dumped at sea, which I doubt, the touch is very Adolph Eichman like. The Tribe did the same thing with the Nazi’s ashes.

We would want to photograph, DNA, fingerprint, etc.

His body is a crime scene and I don’t see the FBI nor DOJ letting that happen.

On May 5, 2011, he reported the body is “airborne to CONUS.” CONUS is a Defense Department term for the contiguous United States. He even shared the exact location where the body was going saying that same day it was going “onward to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Bethesda.” Bethesda is in Maryland just outside of Washington, DC.

Though it was not really secret information, Burton’s source in the FBI told him there was a likelihood of “retaliation attacks in CONUS.”

Also, Burton shared this perspective on why photos needed to be made public:

Although I don’t really give a rats ass, it seems to methat by dropping the corpse in the ocean, the body will come back to haunt us….gotta be violating some sort of obscure heathen religious rule that will inflame islam? I was sleeping thru that class at Langley.

The US Govt needs to make body pics available like the MX’s do, with OBL’s pants pulled down, to shout down the lunatics like Alex Jones and Glenn Beck.

Original Post

WikiLeaks and twenty-five or so media partners have begun to release and publish the “Global Intelligence Files,” over five million emails from the Texas-headquartered “global intelligence company known as Stratfor. The leaks organization describes the emails as documents that show “Stratfor’s web of informers, pay-off structure, payment-laundering techniques and psychological methods.”

The organization’s press release further explains the emails show the “inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal’s Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defense Intelligence Agency.”

Here at The Dissenter the release has been receiving full coverage. And, these are some highlights from Day 3 of the release:

—A tech-savvy Stratfor employee figured out the world will not access files inside the WikiLeaks insurance file until WikiLeaks releases a password. Marc Lanthermann, a watch officer, said in an email conversation, “FYI, talked to some of my CS/hacker-savvy friends. The file is encrypted using a 256 bit AES encryption, which is what the US government uses for classified documentation. There are no known weaknesses to this encryption and it would take longer than the lifetime of the sun to brute-force the code using all the supercomputers currently in existence. You’d need a super secret quantum computer or the biggest breakthrough in cryptoanalysis ever.”

—Former Pakistani spy chief Hamid Gul was a “complimentary member” of Stratfor. The head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), General Hamid Gul, who is believed to have helped plan IED attacks on international forces in Afghanistan in 2006 (according to US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks), was given a complimentary membership by Stratfor.