Wikileaks, the propaganda machine that helped the State Department in transforming boring-to-death daily reports and irrelevant war-logs into sensational front page news of unprecedented interest is not going to go off the radar any soon.
The Wikileaks comedy is now entering into the Saga gender mode, like Star Wars or Harry Potter.
Certainly it has passed its initial narrative structure à la "Wag the Dog" by Barry Levinson, despite the plot being exactly the same.
Bradley Manning, aka Chelsea Elizabeth Manning aka Wag the Dog Private "Old Shoe" Schumann, decided to change his sexual gender and she's now a woman.
Like Sergeant William "Old Shoe"Schumann in Barry Levinson's conspiratorial movie "Wag the Dog" nobody on this planet has ever had the chance of seeing Bradley Manning in real life, nor talking to him with the exception of an Internet chat with hacker turned FBI informant Adrian Lamo, who was the only connection between Manning and the rest of the world. Although that thin line of connection was able to change the world as we know it.
The man/woman (transgender?) who was the main and only source of the whole Wikileaks phenomenon, a creature who changed the lives of millions, has never been seen by anyone and he's now going to go off the scenes under a new identity. Hollywood at its best!
In Barry Levinson's Wag the Dog, Sergeant "Old Shoe" Schumann dies heroically under the fire of his rape victim's father while in our hyper-reality show, Old Shoe becomes a woman. A different final but same story. In both cases both characters vanished from the screen.
It seems that 2014 is not going to stop the Information Disclosure flow, after Wikileaks, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, who knows what the Propaganda Machine is preparing to put on stage next for the delight of our infotainment?
To increase and to consolidate the interest and the credibility of this giant vaudeville, a series of movies about Wikileaks, Manning, Snowden and the happy company are going to hit the screen next fall so that the world's attention on this giant comedy show won't get any lesser soon!
In the meanwhile, the real Disclosure goes always more unnoticed and hidden under this massive noise of leaks, leakers and clowns.
On September 28, 2010 six USAF retired officers including a former base commander, stated they had UFO encounters that possibly have completely compromised in more than one occasion the national nuclear defence systems of both US and UK.
Although, despite the unprecedented relevance, this news never reached the mainstream media with the same impact of the Wikileaks comedy show.
It took almost 15 years of enormous work to Disclosure Project Director Dr. Steven Greer to gather more than 800 alive witnesses among former NASA employees, Military Intelligence, Armed Forces, former Government officials and scientists. Every government witness signed an affidavit that they are ready to testify under oath before Congress of their direct knowledge of Life in the Universe. Their knowledge was based on direct work experience on the matter but what they received from the mainstream media was just complete indifference: they were left alone with their knowledge like trash in a dumpster.
Despite the hot topic, the credibility of the witnesses and the solid evidence, the Press Conference held at the Washington Press Building back in 2001 did not receive a single headline in the news media, just some short feature story that included contradicting debunking versions by assumed "ufologists" hired for the occasion by tv networks who were given the exact same amount of time to express their completely divergent opinion on the matter and who completely derided and ridiculed 15 years of meticulous work.
On the contrary when Wikileaks released 400.000 boring-to-death State Department cables and war-logs, the mainstream media and government officials were absolutely delighted to find out how daily reports of absolutely no relevance in terms of secrecy were so interesting and life-changing.
The cables released by Wikileaks were State Department cables, that means they were communications between the US Embassies around the globe and the Headquarters of the US foreign policy. Usually these communications between embassies and the State Department describe 1) the local political situation as seen by US officials 2) the US interests to promote in the area and the embassy goals 3) the strategy to reach those goals.
Obviously, the description of the local situation redacted by State Department officials, represents the very subjective point of view of the redacting officer, so it does not represent the real state of things but a very creative interpretation of the local reality related to the US interests.
What Wikileaks managed to do, with the complicity of the world's most important newspapers like The Guardian, The New York Times, Der Spiegel, El Pais and Le Monde, was to launch the biggest advertising campaign of the State Department's agenda on the world's situation and feed it to the the world's audience as if it was the new Gospel or the revelation of the millennium.
In practice in the past few years the world's mainstream media became the biggest megaphone of the State Department vision over world's politics.
It was like if the State Department's daily press releases went directly on the front page of the largest media outlets on the planet, and once on these media, the State Department's opinions on the world's politics became the opinion of those media too and consequently the world's opinion on the world itself.
If George Orwell would have lived in today's world he would be simply horrified, because today's reality went far beyond the nightmare he created on his "1984".
What is really unbelievable is the largest media outlets on the planet fell into this dumb trap like lambs in a hole. How it could have possibly happened? Were the media aware of what they were doing? The thing is in both cases, we will never know, because after such a debacle, those media's reputation is going to sink like the Titanic.
Also they will never admit they were aware of what they were doing because it would mean they were willingly cooperating in a propaganda (PSYOP) campaign to deceive the world's audience. On the other hand, if they admit they were fooled by a disturbed character like Julian Assange they would reveal their total naiveness (which I don't believe it for a second).
The Wikileaks scheme was also a government test that clearly showed how much the public opinion can be easily manipulated and millions of people can be deceived by governments with the complicity of mass media.
The question is, what's the purpose of the government? why it needs to set up such a giant complex scheme to share its foreign policy agenda?
The answer is in one word: Credibility.
If the State Department would have released those cables through their Media Relations office or its Spokesperson, nobody would never ever bought it nor had ever printed a word of it. Those cables and war logs were absolutely of no interest for anyone.
Then there was the credibility problem: First of all they came out from the State Department. So the information would have been considered as total propaganda but before even considering such a thing, being war logs and diplomatic cables confidential material, they could have not released such material into the form of a press kit!
They needed an unexpected third party for doing the job.Someone who was on the other side of the barricade.
Indeed when those cables were "leaked" to a group of independent hackers, they magically gained instant credibility and the top newsworthiness.
Kudos for the magics.
Why the US government has a credibility problem? Why they need a bunch of hackers to grab the audience attention for their material to become credible?
Well, just think to the fact the British Parliament last week rejected the military intervention in Syria proposed by the USA. They rejected it because the last time the British Parliament approved a similar motion, they eventually found out that the evidence upon which the motion was based, it resulted to be a complete fraud as Iraq had no chemical or nuclear weapons whatsoever.
The world has no trust in the American government because in many occasions a veil of mystery and secrecy was shred over American history key issues.
From the Roswell incident to the killing of JFK, to the Watergate Scandal, until the 9/11 attacks, for some reasons the US government is perceived by the general audience to be the most secretive and conspiratorial machine on earth and consequently not very credible.
The world doesn't trust the government but they are ready to kill to defend Wikileaks, the biggest communication branch the State Department ever had the chance to have.
Wikileaks was the perfect tool to solve the US government's credibility problem. How? well because it had all the requirements to be considered credible in today's distrusted world.
First of all Wikileaks was "a third party", and an "independent" group of activists whose statement is to crack government's secrets and publish them on their website.
The main assumption is the fact that after the Iraq's lack of Weapons of Mass destruction, the government credibility was like zero. So who can we absolutely trust? the opponents of the government itself: The Leakers! It sounds like a Rock band. The Leakers!
So what the government did was actually very simple: as the world's audience started to distrust the government and believe the leakers and whistleblowers, they did what the best American business tradition does: they hired the best leakers on the market: Wikileaks!
It was just perfect!
In practice the State Department exploited Wikileaks like any other Intelligence asset on the Information Operation field. They exploited Assange's narcissistic personality, whose desire of fame was simply the perfect match for their communication goals.
According to what CNBC journalist Eamon Javers reports in his book "Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy" every Intelligence agency manual describes as the best asset to recruit as "a male in his 30's who is somewhat bored, has a propensity to party hard, needs cash, enjoys risk, likes women, is disrespectful of his managers, fiddles his expenses but is patriotic." This personality profile perfectly matched the one of Julian Assange, with the addition that according to what David Leigh told in the Documentary "Wikileaks, War, lies and videotape" he's also a pathological paranoid, which increases his credibility to an unexpected level of trust by the unaware audience.
You could not have wished any better.
However I am not saying here what Wikileaks has done was morally or politically despicable, in fact I am deeply convinced being the State Department megaphone, it helped to change certain political situations that had to change. For example it helped starting the movement that led to the Arab Spring in North Africa that has been the US Foreign policy main objective since the Bush Presidency, and that's something we are ready to acknowledge. Indeed Wikileaks managed to reach a goal that the Bush administration wasn't able to reach by itself.
What people still struggle to understand is the fact that today's foreign policy as well as any political or social change you want to convey, they all take place in one single battlefield: The media. From Social Media to traditional media, what goes on the media is what's perceived by the audience as REAL.
What happens in the media it happened for real, even if it's completely staged or it's a manipulation of the real scenario.It doesn't matter.Wag the dog docet!
"The whole war is based on deception" said Chinese general Sun Tzu. America made of Sun Tzu philosophy its main attitude, without making a distinction between war or peace time. Deception is absolutely crucial for the survival of the American dream. The problem is with today's increased complexity of the media landscape the government propaganda (or PSYOP) has to stage always more and more complex virtual reality to deceive its enemies. Even if the Wikileaks comedy was kind of simplistic trick.
According to the JP 1-02 DOD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms:
Psychological operations (PSYOPs) or, officially since 2010, Military Information Support Operations (MISO) are planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals. The purpose of United States psychological operations is to induce or reinforce behavior favorable to US objectives. If we change the words MISO or PSYOP with Wikileaks, the description even make more sense.
The problem with this discipline is the fact that living in a world of global media, if you want to deceive your enemies, you cannot create a different reality segment specifically for those people you want to target, because every single bit of information today is shared instantly with the whole world. This means that any deception strategy focused on a certain specific region of the world or group of people it has to go global anyway and the people who got deceived are even those who are not included as the main target. I call it Collateral Mind Damages.
Wikileaks cables and war logs were supposed to help the US Foreign Policy in restoring a political balance in the Middle East region, by helping or causing a regime change in some hostile Arab governments that did not want to cooperate with the State Department. Like Tunisia for example.
One of the U.S. government cables released by WikiLeaks exposed the corruption of Tunisia's President's Ben Ali's family, its reach into business in the country, and ability to transcend the rule of law. The Wikileaks cable about Tunisia was like a spark in a storage of black powder. Indeed in the three years before the Tunisian spring, the US Mission in Tunis tried to offer greater cooperation to the Tunisians and they said they wanted it, but not shied from making plain the need for change. The US mission has been blocked by the Foreign Ministry that managed to control all its contacts in the government and many other organizations. Although when the Wikileaks cable on Tunisian President Ben Ali went public, everything changed: the Arab Spring started and for the US Embassy in Tunis was like a dream coming true.
That's absolutely legitimate and the US government has being conducting propaganda operations on a massive scale since World War II when they used flyers, radio broadcasting and other means to convince the Germans that Hitler would have been defeated.
I am not disputing the good intentions of the US foreign policy nor the trick of using a narcissistic asset to become the knight of modern freedom in the public imagery. The problem is that Wikileaks has been elected by the unaware masses to the example of democratic virtue and the landmark of freedom. While in reality was just an asset exploited to do the dirty job for the Middle East PSYOP campaign.
The glorification of Wikileaks could be compared to the exaltation of propaganda as a way to freedom and that's certainly not a good thing, because the government or other outlets could be able to exploit Wikileaks credibility for other purposes which go against the interests of the American government or of its allies.
In practice I think it's time to terminate the Wikileaks asset. Should we hire Joubert for the job?
In addition there are a number of other practical problems which are related to these new generation of staged government leakers like Assange or Snowden. And it's represented by the fact that people tend to investigate in depth what they're being told, more than in any other era. Sooner or later someone will find out these leakers are just poor people being exploited for government's purpose and this will definitely end the trust of the very same concept of government and traditional media.
At the end of the day, being secretive in 2013 means being not trusted. Indeed if you claim to be the greatest democracy on earth, secrecy finds no place. In today's world, made of social media, people throughout the world are able to communicate each other, exchange ideas and opinions in real time and by doing so they are forming a global single consciousness.
In such a world, secrecy is completely out of place and if you keep trying to deceive people by using the new technology, you create more distrust because, in a world of social media, truth will always out. No question about it.
The government must become more aware that the world has changed and the deception era is over.
When the world's audience will learn what Wikileaks was really meant for, they would realize they cannot trust any communication that somehow involves the government or the media. At that point, the game would be completely over.
E Pluribus Unum
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