Wikileaks, Anonymous and the Jonny English of Spy Networks

A panel of five wikileaks associates, including Julian Assange held a press conference today (27 Feb 2012) in which they began to explain the complex relationship between Stratfor, corporations, and governments. Godman Sachs are implicated in a scandal to manipulate investments using illicit information bought in from the private syping company. Yet another blow for the 'Tower of Babel' that is the chaotic networks of globalisation.

Assange compared Stratfor to a 'helpless' and fairly useless "James Bond". If we are to believe Stratfor are more like Jonny English then perhaps the cache of emails won't be all that revealing. However, the little that has been published already today is intriguing enough. 

I have already blogged on revelations regarding Iran  and the reasons to escalate warmongering being political rather than defensive and on the controversial Mosque at Ground Zero, New York and the web of right-wing backers to the project. 

Assange talks about three types of funding received by Stratfor: bespoke funding to find out particular information; general private meetings to disseminate information; and syndicated newsfeeds. Over 300,000 subscribers to Stratfor, many of whom are influential political figures and organisations makes Stratfor an important organisation to get behind the scenes of. 

One of the biggest revelations of the press conferences was the links between Goldmans Sachs and Stratfor with allegations from Assange that a Director of Goldmans Sachs has used information gained through illicit means to make decisions on huge investments. If this is true then it may be that the director in question may have to face criminal charges. 

Assange has previously described consipiratorial dictatorships using the metaphor of a web of connections leading to a central point. Some of the connections are 'thick' because they are often used others are 'thin' because they are rarely used. 

By exposing those connections to the vulnerability of leaked information those connections become less reliable and so the authoritarian system begins to shut down on itself: unable to trust its own means of communication. If the authoritarian or domination system cannot communicate efficiently, internally, for fear of being overheard it's operations become impossible. 

In the book of Genesis, an inspiration for Jews, Christians, and Muslims around the world, the story of the Tower of Babel illustrates the same. The blood and sweat of slaves are used to build a tower that 'can reach up to God'. God is unimpressed and causes them to become unintelligible to one another, thus rendering the oppressive project impossible and scattering the people. 

Whether the emails leaked today and over the coming days generate news is less important than the future unreliability of Stratfor as a private spying organisation with billions of dollars invested in the current economic domination system. 

Ground Zero Mosque: What's the real story?

In October 2010 one of Stratfor’s staff made this analysis of the pantomime that followed plans to build a mosque in New York, near to ‘Ground Zero’, in a building damaged by the 9/11 blast.

Park 51

Park 51 (was going to be named Cordoba House after the organisation fronting the plans) mosque and cultural centre, not yet completed but operational, won’t be at Ground Zero but close enough to polarise opinion and stir up plenty of anti-Muslim feeling.

Media at the time focussed on the building of a Mosque and the usual anti-Muslim hatred was stirred up at the time, especially by paid-haters like Glenn Beck the Fox News journalist (sic.) who specialises in media bile. And focussed on a tiny Christian Fundamentalist sect and their plans to burn copies of the Qur’an.

But is there more to this plan than meets the eye? According to an email leaked by Wikileaks today there is:

“Bush's favorite Imam, with backing from a funder with connections to the CIA, the Pentagon and the currency trading company that now sponsors rightwing firebrand Glenn Beck, proposes to build a mosque around the corner from the site of the most devastating terrorist attack ever visited on America.” 

The men at the centre of this controversy are a Mr R. Leslie Deak, a key funder of the project and Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf who will manage the project.

Leslie Deak

Deak, a 52-year-old New Yorker with an intriguing religious and political back-story: conversion from Christianity to Judaism then Islam: his father made millions in money laudering, while Deak himself has formal roles in US military intellilegence.

Deak’s father was a professional money launderer for at least one drugs cartel and one of the businesses he was part of back then is Deak may have links to Goldline which funds Glenn Beck’s radio and road shows. 

Furthermore, Leslie Deak worked as a "business consultant" to Patriot Defence Group, LLC, a super-secretive security contractor with ties to the CIA and counterterrorism forces, and in those same three years he also donated nearly $100,000 in seed money to the foundation now advocating the construction of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque.

Deak also sits on the National Defense University Foundation (NDUF)'s board of directors and donated a total of $101,247 to them. The National Defense University is a network of war and strategy colleges and research centers funded by the Pentagon, designed to train specialists in military strategy. 

So a major source of funding for the Mosque comes from a man with connections to national and international military intelligence and to the right wing media that is fuelling anti-Muslim sentiment in the USA.

Imam Rauf

Imam Rauf has previously worked on behalf of the U.S. government-which includes serving as an FBI "consultant" and being recruited as a spokesperson by longtime George W. Bush confidante Karen Hughes. And has received funding from Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, the second-largest shareholder in News Corp., the parent company Fox News, which airs Beck's program.

So a Saudi prince, a consultant from the right of the Republican party, an military funding expert, and a right-wing media organisation help fund a Mosque near Ground Zero.

This is quite a stack of coincidences. Or, as the Stratfor agent puts it, if it is a coincidence: “we can all go back to what we were doing before-either denouncing the Park51 Mosque as an affront to Americans, or championing it as a symbol of our fundamental rights-playing our accustomed roles in a drama that seems too
perfect, somehow, to believe.”