If Wikileaks were a movie would it be Wag the dog…or Idiocracy?

This article was originally published on December 5 2010 on the now deceased American Chronicle, then it was published on Examiner.com and eventually Examiner was closed. Then I published it on  this blog but it just disappeared now I am republishing it with the hope that is here to stay or we hope so. 

In 2012 Oklahoma University Researcher Rebecca Pop reported an excerpt of this article on her study "A Theoretical Model for the Wikileaks Phenomenon" which she presented at the International Communication Association in Phoenix, AZ on May 24 2012. 

This article was also translated and published in Spanish by the Argentinian news media Diario El Peso 

Is Wikileaks just the usual American propaganda or a new form of Communication?

Are world’s media just a flock of sheeps who love being sodomized by America’s propaganda? Or is Wikileaks really an authentic news-leak media ?

Beyond all these questions what’s really flabbergasting is the fact that every news media in the world today is publishing Wikileaks documents taking them as the commandment tablets brought down by Moses from Mount Sinai. As a general rule, if you are a professional journalist, before printing something out you always should pose yourself a question: “Is this damn Wikileaks a credible source?” Indeed the real matter here about this Wikileaks story is all about credibility.

In other words, the question is: who gave Wikileaks the title of “credible source?”

Let’s put the case that a given journalist today would question his boss on Wikileaks credibility. This could be a hypothetical newsroom dialogue:

Journalist: “who gave wikileaks the title of “credible source?”

Boss “What? What you're talking about? That’s Wikileaks! the most credible source on the planet!”

Journalist:”Who told you that?”

Boss “Are you blind? Don’t you see everybody is printing Wikileaks documents?”

Journalist: “Well, ok but who told everybody Wikileaks is a credible source?”

Boss “The Pentagon and the State Department, Hillary Clinton and CNN and these are all credible sources! don’t you think copy-boy? Then there’s that Manning guy, down in Kuwait...he’s in the military hence he’s definitely credible.”

Journalist “Yes but nobody has ever seen him right?”

Boss “Are you saying you don’t trust the department of defense? Now go back to work and never pose such stupid questions again!”

Journalist:”Alright boss I won’t ask it ever again”

So Wikileaks has an infinite credibility by divine right, without being credited by history, experience, or any former result, other than releasing thousands of pseudo-classified documents. Wikileaks credibility comes just from the fact that major American institutions like the Pentagon and the State Department are taking it as gospel….I mean basically it´s their creature, because Wikileaks does exist thanks to some pentagon documents Wikileaks received from a still "undisclosed source".

Yes because the “source” who apparently stole and then leaked all these documents to Wikileaks is Private First Class Bradley E. Manning, which in practice is just a name on a paper as nobody has ever seen him and obviously he´s not available for comments as at the moment he´s confined to a military base in Kuwait.

If these facts weren´t real, probably it would have been the perfect plot for a Robert Ludlum´s novel, or better if it were a movie was definitely Wag the dog, as this Private Manning sounds very much like Sergeant William “Old Shoe” Schumann. Actually Private Manning could resemble also to Cpl. Joe Bauers, a.k.a. “Not Sure”, the protagonist of the movie “Idiocracy” by Mike Judge.

So Wikileaks releases hundreds of thousands of documents and immediately takes the spotlight with top credibility. Wow.

Dr. Steven Greer, the head of Disclosure Project has been working on the Disclosure Project for more than 15 years. On May 9th 2001 Dr. Greer gathered more than 400 high ranking former Intelligence, military personnel, politicians and scientists at the Washington Press club and have them testify under oath about extraterrestrial existence from their direct work experience. These witnesses basically were government employees who had direct contact with ET classified material because of their job.

Despite the hot topic, the credibility of the witnesses and the burden of evidence, the event received not a single headline in the news. Except for some feature story that probably lasted less than two minutes in a news show for just one day. Although according to Dr. Greer there is more evidence on the extraterrestrial subject than there was for Monicagate….

These Wikileaks people came out of the blue with all this toilet paper and are able to catch the limelight and stay on forever…How is that? That's the moment I thought:"There’s certainly something fishy here….". In the mainstream media, we all know how it works: something goes on and something doesn’t. it’s all about editorial choices. Somebody picks up Wikileaks as today’s news story and there we go.

In the past recent history there´s another event very similar to this Wikileaks story, it´s the story of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon papers. Same historical background: America was involved in a war in Vietnam and this Ellsberg dude who disclosed these “pentagon papers” to the public.

Just history repeating? The story details are so similar: Ellsberg was a military analyst and a former marine, like this Manning dude, he´s a military analyst….at this point we should analyse every single public revelation involving the military in recent history.

For example we are used to think the Watergate scandal was turned out by those two journalists at the Washington Post: Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. Although Woodward was a former Naval Intelligence officer who worked at the ONI the Office of Naval Intelligence (their motto: once ONI always ONI). While in the Navy Bob Woodward was the briefing officer for Admiral Moorer, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who just by chance was the man who had authorized his subordinates to spy on the White House´s National Security Council during the whole Watergate investigation. Woodward was fed by the FBI through Deep Throat, aka FBI Associate Director Mark Felt.
While at the Washington Post, Woodward’s supervisor was Ben Bradlee, a former CIA propaganda officer. During his service Bradlee joined the staff of the Office of U.S. Information and Educational Exchange (USIE), the embassy’s propaganda unit. USIE produced films, magazines, research, speeches, and news items for use by the CIA throughout Europe. USIE (later known as USIA) also controlled the Voice of America, a means of disseminating pro-American “cultural information” worldwide….do I have to go on?

In practice the Watergate was a news show run by the United States Intelligence community.
Related Story: The Watergate was an Intelligence operation to get rid of Richard Nixon

Let’s make an hypothesis: the same thing is happening now with this Wikileaks files. Same method it just with different actors, but the story is just the same: Wikileaks does not exist at all. It’s just a false flag trick to deliver a message from an unofficial source that presenting itself as an hostile entity towards governments it has acquired top credibility. In addition by acquiring the role of mainstream leakers, real leakers like the Disclosure Project immediately vanish. 

In the end, if this would be the case, it would mean America is a nation run by Intelligence on a need-to-know basis? If yes this Wikileaks story would make much more sense. That´s why thinking of the possibility that a massive amount of leaks may occur, it’s not just out of question, it´s  impossible.

The Wikileaks documents reveal what the US government think of the world but the US government cannot officially state. Why they can’t say it?  Simply because America’s interests are only America’s interests, that’s why its opinion cannot be popular and shared by the rest of the world. America holds the unique position of world’s controller, how can its opinion be shared by somebody outside of its role?

So basically Wikileaks serves as America’s opinion outsourcer to the rest of the world. Period. Wikileaks is like a puppet handled by America when they need to prop up a scenario which is strategic for their political objectives. In addition by labelling Wikileaks as "official leakers" because they fill the whole mainstream media, real leakers would stay off the radar. That’s what Wikileaks was made for. Basically this is a heritage of the Kissinger doctrine applied to today’s media battlefield: "Linking America´s interests to the world´s interests". In other words: “our problems are the world´s problems”.

We used the Kissinger doctrine for the Vietnam war, we adopted it in the Gulf war and we apply it in the war on terror. In practice the Kissinger doctrine can be summarized with one sentence: “the linking of the whole world for self interests”

If you want something to be believed by the audience it's better if it's somebody else who does it, like a well known leaker (Wikileaks) who “steals” the information and then release it. Why? Because to the man of the street it would sound more authentic.

There’s nothing wrong in it, it’s actually a good way to let the world know what the boss (America) thinks of its co-workers (Allies) and competitors (enemies) and if you are the world’s cop that’s absolutely understandable. The only thing I complain about is the way you run the show, in my opinion this Wikileaks thing is really badly organized and the show is all you’ve got. That’s why you have to set it up right and in my opinion this Wikileaks show wasn’t.

But let’s see the real deal: from the Wikileaks documents released these days we have been informed that we cannot trust Pakistan, we should not trust the Saudis, China, Russia, or North Korea. (Obviously the “we” is from the United States of America’s POV.)

But we all have to trust the United States of America. A perfect show should have been better made especially in order to be absolutely credible you have to rely less on perfectionism. On the contrary, according to Glenn Beck “the documents are helping to foster anarchy and chaos around the globe” by disclosing personal profiles and details of world leaders redacted by US diplomats. In practice these documents are just gossips on world leaders like Berlusconi, Putin, Sarkozy and their little circus of big con artists. etc.

At this point we obviously take for granted that the Pentagon and the State Department gave those documents on purpose to those wikileaks folks. If this weren’t the case Julian Assange was already buried under the 20 yard line at the Giant Stadium, Wikileaks office were blown up and no media would have reported a single “leak”.

Although America is apparently doing its best to fight against Wikileaks: Senator Joe Lieberman even proposed a law against those who would publish intelligence reports, totally ignoring (or forgetting?) there’s already a law providing such a case…
Then there’s the search warrant in 188 countries…wow..(wasn’t the same proclamation made also for Osama Bin Laden?) But Assange is still at large, (isn’t he?) he’s actually in England, and everybody knows it. He’s releasing interviews to The Guardian, without apparently being worried that a black op squad could jump upon him while sipping his martini….Then they say they're shutting down the Wikileaks website, but strangely it’s still up there…they just changed its IP address (probably to have more space for commercials) just the usual fluffy smoke…that makes the phenomenon always more famous and well kept under the spotlight. Indeed U.S. officials at the Pentagon and State Department denied Friday December 3, knowing of any efforts to take down the WikiLeaks website or asking companies to do so.......

The only question that’s still on is just one: why? These profiles have been made by US diplomats, so basically Wikileaks is just a strategy of foreign policy. The question is: was this made just to weaken the position of our allies and enemies? Because this could be the ultimate goal…The Arab spring was made by Wikileaks but it served American interests because it sparked chaos in the whole region and we perfectly know that "in chaos we rule", is America's first motto.

Indeed I firmly believe that if you let somebody know what you think of him/her, by publicly exposing what his weakness is, he might try to change his behavior for good, in order to improve his/her public image to the world. Or not?

Has the State Department just become a sort of global political shrink? Although this could be a revolutionary working system to improve US foreign policy and relations….certainly we know that this show is run by the State Department because it’s not the US foreign policy under trial here, even if some of the documents concerned human rights violations made by the US.

Indeed we already knew about the Guantanamo tortures and human rights violations both in Iraq and Afghanistan…and that’s nothing new, just a bone to the dogs, so it’s not the US policy under scrutiny here, but the rest of the world’s ethics and trustiness.

Basically those diplomatic cables all together make a world’s portrait as seen by the State Department. In terms of journalism it could be considered as a State Department Op.Ed.

Although we still have a question: cui prodest? That means who is going to take advantage of it? Well, usually diplomats do not shout their personal opinions to their colleagues face, as it would kill the concept of diplomacy itself. Even if you do it through the triangular diplomacy of Wikileaks.

Although maybe this could be a way to bring diplomatic communication to a new level: the one of true sincerity as a new system of communication among world leaders. If this is the case, we have a new international relations era waiting ahead of us because America would be leading the world into a new level of communication by teaching self-awareness to every single citizen on this planet.

This would be like to be run by enlightened leaders, I would say like almost extra-terrestrials……Indeed in my opinion there’s nothing better than the truth to bring justice, peace and prosperity to the world.

Let’s hope this is the real deal and Wikileaks’ ultimate goal.

Is Wikileaks the new Pentagon P.R. office?

This article was originally published on November 22 2010 on the now deceased American Chronicle, then it was published on Examiner.com and eventually Examiner was closed. Then I published it on yahoo news and yahoo news shut down. Eventually I have published it on this blog but it just disappeared. Now I am republishing it with the hope that is here to stay or we hope so. 

The last September 28, 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. 

Strangely, after such explosive statements, the reactions from both mainstream media, the US government and the British government were absolutely non-existent. 

Vice versa the following week, once Wikileaks published those "pentagon papers" on the Iraq and Afghanistan war on their website, the reactions from mainstream media and governments were enormous in volumes and indignation. These papers had various content from the human rights violation by the coalition forces, (that has been given to the public as a bone to give Wikileaks the title of "credible source") to the fact that the US army finally found the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (but strangely they did not advertise such a petty discovery!).

Another leak was that the Italian secret serviceman Nicola Calipari got killed at the US checkpoint because his car had its lights switched off (!) confirming the Pentagon´s official statement on this hot issue. Another major leak from Wikileaks is Iran supplying new forms of suicide vests for al-Qaida. Another big revelation is the revolutionary guard's al Quds force training Iraqi Shia militants on Iranian soil (please consider that this "leak" could lead to more and tougher sanctions against Iran). Sugar on top was the one that claims: "Pakistan's spy agency collaborated with the Talibans". What is this garbage? These facts reported by Wikileaks sound like those typical daily field intelligence reports produced in the order of the thousands. These are just boring to death reports that nobody want to read and no tv network would  ever mention on their news headlines neither if you would pay them for. 

Although these "leaks" were able to provoke an outrageous reaction from almost any institution while saturating the media news headlines. It's like if Wikileaks is a giant recycler of trashy standard field intelligence reports that otherwise won´t find their way to the audience as they´re so boring nobody would ever read it even while you re in the john.

First of all these field reports are all totally fragmented: no names, no location coordinates, nor military personnel data disclosed. This means that the information cannot be considered "sensitive" neither in tactical defence terms and definitely not strategically helpful for the enemy. It´s like if a little hand erased the real sensitive information before passing them to the jerk´s hands (read Assange). State Department spokesman P.J Crowley said:"Some of the documents talked about a conflict that was under resourced and that was a fundamental element of the strategy review overseen by the president." 

These are basically the usual budget complaints in the Washington ballet. "Most of it is old news," said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). "The emerging picture from this leak adds up to little more than what we knew already -- that the war in Afghanistan was deteriorating over the past several years and that we were not winning." In general these Wikileaks pentagon papers look and sound more like just Pentagon-leaks that only favors the Pentagon as most of these "leaks" are perfectly coincident with the DOD´s vision on the war situation. Actually most of these leaks seem indeed to aim at resuscitating some dead buried complaints against DOD´s allies or enemies, like Iran, Italy, France, Pakistan. Like the story of Nicola Calipari for example, that fires back to the Italian agent´s procedure the responsibility for his own death. 

After all these revelations were made you should hang on a second and ask yourself this question:  "Who this damn wikileaks works for?". Also, all documents not related to the Iraq war files have been removed from WikiLeaks.org, and no submissions are currently accepted. And instead of continuing the Wiki-based approach that allows "the entire global community" to participate, WikiLeaks has given exclusive to a handful of mainstream media organizations and no longer allows the public to comment on documents. Except for Daniel Ellsberg whose video interview is posted on Wikileaks home page. What a coincidence! After forty years Dan Ellsbergs is back on the world stage with brand new "pentagon papers". Don´t you find it strange? In the end these Wikileaks papers reveal very little if any – information which incriminates the Presidency or damages the public´s perception of the government´s integrity quiet the contrary. 

Secondly, the documents do not provide anything new; they just confirm rumoured claims already in the public knowledge: that the war in Afghanistan is going badly and this could lead to send more troops there and buy more weapons and more war. As you certainly know the motto here is "no war no business".  The leaks then reveal that Coalition forces have been using Special Operations teams to conduct kills or capture missions against the Taliban leadership; and, most importantly, that the Pakistani intelligence agency (ISI) has been duplicitous in its cooperation with American forces 

I am not saying that Mr. Assange is a Public Relations expert who has been hired by the Pentagon or the US government as we do not have any evidence of it. More probably he might just be a jerk looking for a job being completely unaware he's helping just the forces of darkness who take him around. 

The major evidence is however to be found on the reactions from media and institutions, because in any media campaign what really matters is the reaction you provoke from your action. Here is the main and most important: "Wikileaks put the soldiers lives in great danger". And this is the main objective of all this huge propagandistic operation: to recall the audience that there´s a war going on somewhere and our poor soldiers are risking their lives and that these risks have been increased by the irresponsible behaviour of Wikileaks….so what we would need is more resources to the war abroad.

I just feel so sorry for the thousands of soldiers who are completely unaware of being part of a stupid media game that is fought just to gain more consent on their deployment and to tell the public the war is going badly from an apparent objective source.  

History repeating for those who know history. Do you remember Daniel Ellsberg and the pentagon papers back in 1971? This Ellsberg pretended to be an anti-war dude while he was a former marine and a military analyst who would never ever do something without being ordered from somebody above himself in the hierarchy. So let´s say he was ordered to disclose those toilet papers…

Indeed he was not fired nor condemned or even blamed because of this Pentagon papers leak (...) Richard Nixon himself affirmed (from his Oval Office tapes) that Ellsberg´s papers were almost "innocuous"… The truth is Wikileaks is more a typical public relations campaign that just sells propaganda to the dumbs. 

My suggestion to these people is next time you need a public relations strategy ask a real pro, not rookies like that Assange dude.