A new studyby UCLA professors offers a new way to understand how unfounded conspiracy theories emerge online. The research, which combines sophisticated artificial intelligence and a deep knowledge of how folklore is structured, explains how unrelated facts and false information can connect into a narrative framework that would quickly fall apart if some of those elements are taken out of the mix.

The authors, from theUCLA Collegeand theUCLA Samueli School of Engineering, illustrated the difference in the storytelling elements of a debunked conspiracy theory and those that emerged when journalists covered an actual event in the news media. Their approach could help shed light on how and why other conspiracy theories, including those around COVID-19, spread even in the absence of facts.

The study, published in the journal PLOS One, analyzed the spread of news about the 2013 Bridgegate scandal in New Jersey an actual conspiracy and the spread of misinformation about the 2016 Pizzagate myth, the completely fabricated conspiracy theory that a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant was the center of a child sex-trafficking ring that involved prominent Democratic Party officials, including Hillary Clinton.

The researchers used machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence, to analyze the information that spread online about the Pizzagate story. The AI automatically can tease out all of the people, places, things and organizations in a story spreading online whether the story is true or fabricated and identify how they are related to each other.

Finding the puzzle pieces

In either case whether for a conspiracy theory or an actual news story the narrative framework is established by the relationships among all of the elements of the storyline. And, it turns out, conspiracy theories tend to form around certain elements that act as the adhesive holding the facts and characters together.

Finding narratives hidden in social media forums is like solving a huge jigsaw puzzle, with the added complication of noise, where many of the pieces are just irrelevant, said Vwani Roychowdhury, a UCLA professor of electrical and computer engineering and an expert in machine learning, and a lead author of the paper.

In recent years, researchers have made great strides in developing artificial intelligence tools that can analyze batches of text and identify the pieces to those puzzles. As the AI learns to identify patterns, identities and interactions that are embedded in words and phrases, the narratives begin to make sense. Drawing from the massive amount of data available on social media, and because of improving technology, the systems are increasingly able to teach themselves to read narratives, almostasif they were human.

The visual representations of those story frameworks showed the researchers how false conspiracy theory narratives are held together by threads that connect multiple characters, places and things. But they found that if even one of those threads is cut, the other elements often cant form a coherent story without it.

A conspiracy theory unravels: The researchers found that with Wikileaks relationships removed as the glue for the false narrative, other elements of the Pizzagate myth quickly disconnected from one another.

One of the characteristics of a conspiracy theory narrative framework is that it is easily disconnected, said Timothy Tangherlini, one of the papers lead authors, a professor in the UCLA Scandinavian section whose scholarship focuses on folklore, legend and popular culture. If you take out one of the characters or story elements of a conspiracy theory, the connections between the other elements of the story fall apart.

Which elements stick?

In contrast, he said, the stories around actual conspiracies because theyre true tend to stand up even if any given element of the story is removed from the framework. Consider Bridgegate, for example, in which New Jersey officials closed several lanes of the George Washington Bridge for politically motivated reasons. Even if any number of threads were removed from the news coverage of the scandal, the story would have held together: All of the characters involved had multiple points of connection by way of their roles in New Jersey politics.

They are all within the same domain, in this case New Jersey politics, which will continue to exist irrespective of the deletions, Tangherlini said. Those connections dont require the same glue that a conspiracy theory does.

Tangherlini calls himself a computational folklorist. Over the past several years, he has collaborated regularly with Roychowdhury to better understand the spread of information around hot-button issues like theanti-vaccination movement.

To analyze Pizzagate, in which the conspiracy theory arose from a creative interpretation of hacked emails released in 2016 by Wikileaks, the researchers analyzed nearly 18,000 posts from April 2016 through February 2018 from discussion boards on the websites Reddit and Voat.

When we looked at the layers and structure of the narrative about Pizzagate, we found that if you take out Wikileaks as one of the elements in the story, the rest of the connections dont hold up, Tangherlini said. In this conspiracy, the Wikileaks email dump and how theorists creatively interpreted the content of what was in the emails are the only glue holding the conspiracy together.

The data generated by the AI analysis enabled the researchers to produce a graphic representation of narratives, with layers for major subplots of each story, and lines connecting the key people, places and institutions within and among those layers.

Quick build versus slow burn

Another difference that emerged between real and false narratives concerned the time they take to build. Narrative structures around conspiracy theories tend to build and become stable quickly, while narrative frameworks around actual conspiracies can take years to emerge, Tangherlini said. For example, the narrative framework of Pizzagate stabilized within a month after the Wikileaks dump, and it stayed relatively consistent over the next three years.

The fact that additional information related to an actual conspiracy emerged over a prolonged period of time (here five and half years) might be one of the telltale signs of distinguishing a conspiracy from a conspiracy theory, the authors wrote in the study.

Tangherlini said its becoming increasingly important to understand how conspiracy theories abound, in part because stories like Pizzagate have inspired some to take actions that endanger other people.

The threat narrativesfound in conspiracy theories can imply or present strategies that encourage people to take real-world action, he said. Edgar Welch went to that Washington pizzeria with a gun looking for supposed caves hiding victims of sex trafficking.

The UCLA researchers have also written another paper examining the narrative frameworks surrounding conspiracy theories related to COVID-19. In that study, which hasbeen published on an open-source forum, they track how the conspiracy theories are being layered on to previously circulated conspiracy theories such as those about the perceived danger of vaccines, and, in other cases how the pandemic has given rise to completely new ones, like the idea that 5G cellular networks spread the coronavirus.

Were using the same pipeline on COVID-19 discussions as we did for Pizzagate, Tangherlini said. In Pizzagate, the targets were more limited, and the conspiracy theory stabilized rapidly. With COVID-19, there are many competing conspiracy theories, and we are tracing the alignment of multiple, smaller conspiracy theories into larger ones. But the underlying theory is identical for all conspiracy theories.

Link:
How conspiracy theories emerge and how their storylines fall apart - ScienceBlog.com

Gitmo Files lifted the Pentagons lid on the prison, describing a corrupt system of military detention resting on torture, coerced testimony and intelligence manipulated to justify abuses at the base, writes Patrick Lawrence.

Today we continue our series The Revelations of WikiLeaks less than three months before the extradition hearing for imprisoned WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange resumes in Britain. This is the seventh in a series of articles that is looking back on the major works of the publication that has altered the world since its founding in 2006. The series is an effort to counter mainstream media coverage, which these days largely ignores WikiLeaks work, and instead focuses on Assanges personality. It is WikiLeaks uncovering of governments crimes and corruption that set the U.S. after Assange, ultimately leading to his arrest on April 11 last year and his indictment under the U.S. Espionage Act.

The Anatomy of a Colossal CrimePerpetrated by the U.S. Government

By Patrick LawrenceSpecial to Consortium News

WikiLeaks released a cache of classified documents on April 25, 2011, it called Gitmo Files. They consist of reports the Joint Task Force at Guantnamo Bay sent to the Southern Command in Miami, under which JTFGitmo had imprisoned and interrogated suspected terrorists since January 2002, four months after the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington.

These memoranda, known as Detainee Assessment Briefs, or DABs, were written from 2002 to 2008. They contain JTFGitmos detailed judgments as to whether a prisoner should remain in prison or be released either to his home government or to a third country. Of the 779 prisoners detained at Guantnamo at its postSept. 11 peak, Gitmo Files is comprised of DABs on 765 of them. None had previously been made public. As was WikiLeaks practice, it gave numerous news organizations access to Gitmo Files at the time of publication.

Prior to the WikiLeaks release, very little was known about the prison operation at the U.S. naval base on the southeastern coast of Cuba. In 2006, in response to a Freedom of Information suit filed by The Associated Press four years earlier, the Pentagon made public transcripts of military court hearings held at Guantnamo Bay. While these revealed the identities of some detainees for the first time, they contained little detail of how those imprisoned were treated, interrogated, and then judged.

Gitmo Files thus lifted the lid on a Defense Department operation that had been shrouded in secrecy for the previous nine years. They describe a profoundly corrupt system of military detention and interrogation that rested on torture, coerced testimony, and intelligence manipulated to justify the militarys practices at the Guantnamo base.

Most of these documents reveal accounts of incompetence familiar to those who have studied Guantnamo closely, wrote Andy Worthington, a WikiLeaks associate who managed the publishers analysis of the documents, with innocent men detained by mistake (or because the U.S. was offering substantial bounties to its allies for alQaeda or Taliban suspects), and numerous insignificant Taliban conscripts from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Worthington called the 765 documents WikiLeaks published the anatomy of a colossal crime perpetrated by the U.S. government.

Obamas First Term

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama during the inaugural parade, Washington, D.C., Jan. 20, 2009. (DoD, Chad J. McNeeley)

Barack Obama had begun his first term as president slightly more than two years before WikiLeaks published Gitmo Files. During his political campaign he had promised to close the facility within a year of assuming office; at that time 241 prisoners were still in detention. An interagency Guantnamo Review Task Force Obama appointed to review these cases concluded that only 36 could be prosecuted.

But Obama succumbed to the politics of fear in Congress, as Worthington puts it. There were still 171 prisoners when Gitmo Files was published; 40 now remain some cleared and awaiting release, some charged and awaiting military trial, some convicted, and others, 26 of the total, under indefinite detention.

The Documents

The memoranda collected in Gitmo Files shine a revealing light into the U.S. militarys system of arrest, detention, and interrogation of terror suspects after the Sept. 11 tragedies. The files include the DABs covering the first 201 prisoners released from Guantnamo, between 2002 and 2004. Nothing had previously been known about these detainees. The military briefs on these cases recount the histories of innocent Afghans, Pakistanis, and others a baker, a mechanic, former students, kitchen workers who should never have been detained in the first place.

Exercise area in Guantnamo Bay, Cuba, December 2002. (U.S. government, Wikimedia Commons)

These early-release detainees were among the easiest to identify as posing low or no security risks. Their stories reflect the indiscriminate method of arrests U.S. forces used immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks. Gitmo Files terms these detainees The Unknown Prisoners of Guantnamo because no record of their presence at Gitmo had been made public prior to the April 2011 release.

They were effectively disappeared unacknowledged detainees apparently because their patent innocence was an embarrassment for the Pentagon and, especially, those operating the Guantnamo prison.

Azizullah Asekzai was one of these early-release detainees. He was a family farmer in his early twenties when the Taliban conscripted him to fight its cause in Afghanistan. After one day of training on an AK47, Asekzai attempted to escape to Kabul, but a local militia ambushed the vehicle he was traveling in and Asekzai was captured. He was subsequently turned over to U.S. forces; he was transferred to Guantnamo in June 2002.

Asekzais DAB explains his transfer thus:

The detainee was arrested and transported to Bamian, where he was imprisoned for almost five months before being transferred to U.S. forces. Detainee was subsequently transported to Guantnamo Bay Naval Base because of his knowledge of a Taliban draftee holding area in Konduz and of Mullah Mir Hamza, a Taliban official, in Gereshk District of Helmand Province. Joint Task Force Guantnamo considers the information obtained from him and about him as neither valuable nor tactically exploitable. [Italics added.]

Asekzais DAB is dated March 2003, and he was released the following July. While his time at Guantnamo was relatively brief, his story is important because of the light it sheds on how those writing DABs manipulated the facts in case after case to mask what amounted to a dragnet method of arrests in Afghanistan. In Asekzais case, as in many others, this meant making up the militarys motives to obscure the groundless basis for his detention and transfer to Guantnamo.

Here is an explanatory comment Wikileaks included with its Unknown Prisoners files:

The Reasons for Transfer included in the documents, which have been repeatedly cited by media outlets as an explanation of why the prisoners were transferred to Guantnamo, are, in fact, lies that were grafted onto the prisoners files after their arrival at Guantnamo. This is because, contrary to the impression given in the files, no significant screening process took place before the prisoners transfer[s]. Every prisoner who ended up in U.S. custody had to be sent to Guantnamo, even though the majority were not even seized by U.S. forces, but were seized by their Afghan and Pakistani allies at a time when substantial bounty payments for alQaeda and Taliban suspects were widespread.

These bounty payments were not limited to small-time Afghan or Pakistani bounty hunters. In his 2006 memoir, In the Line of Fire, Pervez Musharrif, Pakistans former president, acknowledges that in handing over 369 terror suspects to the U.S., the Pakistani government earned bounty payments totaling millions of dollars.

Gitmo Files also includes a section on the 22 children also detained at Guantnamo after it opened. Three were still in detention at the time of the WikiLeaks release. In addition, the documents detail the cases of the 399 prisoners released from 2004 to the day Gitmo Files was published. They also give the background of the seven men who had died at Guantnamo by April 2011.

Some of the original detainees jailed at the Guantanamo Bay prison, Jan. 11, 2002. (Defense Department, Shane T. McCoy, U.S. Navy)

Each DAB is signed by the Guantnamo commander at the time of the report. While they included JTFGitmos assessment and recommendation for each prisoner, the disposition of each case was determined at a higher level. In addition to the judgments of JTFGitmo, the DABs also reflect the work of the Criminal Investigation Task Force, the postSept. 11 Pentagon agency created to conduct interrogations, and the behavior science teams, or BSCTs.

These were the now-infamous psychologists who participated in the exploitation of prisoners during interrogations in many cases condoning the use of waterboarding and other forms of torture.

JTFGitmos standard practice was to present each DAB in nine sections. These begin with a detainees identity and personal background and run to his health, the detainees account of events, an evaluation of this account, and the JTFGitmo assessment and recommendation of each case. Worthington has scrutinized each of these sections in the DABs to unearth information that might otherwise remain obscured. On the section covering the health of detainees, for instance, he writes, Many are judged to be in good health, but there are some shocking examples of prisoners with severe mental and/or physical problems.

Capture Information

Joint Task Force Guantanamo seal. (Wikimedia Commons)

In the sections labeled capture information, the DABs report how and where each prisoner was apprehended, the date of his transfer to Guantnamo, and the above-noted reasons for transfer. Worthington terms these last accounts spurious, offering this explanation: The reason that this is unconvincing is because the U.S. high command, based in Camp Doha, Kuwait, stipulated that every prisoner who ended up in U.S. custody had to be transferred to Guantnamo and that there were no exceptions.

This is why those writing DABs found it necessary to doctor the reasons for transfer, as an attempt to justify the largely random rounding-up of prisoners, as Worthington puts it.

The last section of a DAB is called EC status and explains whether or not a detainee is still considered an enemy combatant. These judgments are based on military tribunals held at Guantnamo in 200405. Worthington writes, Out of 558 cases, just 38 prisoners were assessed as being no longer enemy combatants, and in some cases, when the result went in the prisoners favor, the military convened new panels until it got the desired result.

Worthingtons work on Gitmo Files is key to an adequate understanding of the 765 DABs covered in the WikiLeaks release. Read on their own, the militarys briefs appear to be routine bureaucratic accounts of the processing of each prisoner. But as Worthington explains, these documents are essentially whitewashes that often obscure more than they reveal. As noted, explanations of the intelligence used to justify the prisoners detention were often concocted and inserted into a prisoners record after he was arrested and sent to Guantnamo.

Ghost Prisoners

Detainees being moved to new living quarters, February 2003. (U.S. Navy, John F. Williams)

Another significant flaw Worthington identifies is the JTFGitmos repeated use of the same witnesses to testify against numerous prisoners in the case of one witness, 60 of them. Worthington identifies many of these repeat witnesses as high-value detainees, or ghost prisoners, in Guantnamo parlance, and details their histories in confinement.

As he explains,

The documents draw on the testimony of witnessesin most cases, the prisoners fellow prisonerswhose words are unreliable, either because they were subjected to torture or other forms of coercion (sometimes not in Guantnamo, but in secret prisons run by the CIA), or because they provided false statements to secure better treatment in Guantnamo.

Equally important, in many of the DABs perhaps most of them it is difficult to detect the prisoners true histories, which in the majority of cases reveal their innocence and the injustice of their imprisonment. This is why Worthingtons work on Gitmo Files was an essential part of WikiLeaks method. He spent long months analyzing the documents; in some cases, Worthington found and interviewed released detainees to get their accurate accounts of events on the record. He then wrote a lengthy series of articles explaining his findings.

These voluminous writings are featured prominently on the Gitmo Files website. They are effectively a gateway into the inventory of the DABs that comprise Gitmo Files. Worthingtons Unknown Prisoners report comprises a 10part series of articles. Worthingtons work, including his book, The Guantnamo Files, is noted in his introductory essays for each of the categories he uses to classify Guantnamo detainees.

Another of these categories, titled Abandoned in Guantnamo, concerns the 89 Yemenis still in detention at Guantnamo when Gitmo Files was publishedmore than half of those remaining. President Obamas Guantnamo Review Task Force, named in 2009, recommended that 36 Yemenis be released immediately and 30 others be held in conditional detention until Yemens security situation improved.

As Worthington notes, most of the Yemenis remained in prison at the time he wrote. Of those Yemenis still in detention, 28 had already been cleared for release. Of them, six had been approved for transfer, as the task force put it, as early as 2004, three more in 2006, and 10 in 2007.

Gitmo Files details the cases of 19 Yemenis still detained in 2011. Most of these were assessed as low-ranking Taliban or Al Qaeda infantry soldiers of no intelligence value. Saeed Hatim (known in his DAB as Said Muhammad Salih Hatim), was among these 19. Born in 1976, Hatim began studying law in Sanaa in 1998. After two years he dropped out to care for his ailing father. Here is a portion of Hatims own account as written into his DAB:

Detainee was concerned by Russias war in Chechnya after he witnessed the oppression [of the Muslims] on television. Detainee was outraged about what the Russians were doing to the Chechens, and decided to travel to Chechnya to fight jihad alongside his Muslim brothers. Detainee informed his family of his decision to travel to Chechnya and they refused to provide financial assistance. Detainee then spoke with several of his friends and members of his mosque, who agreed to help detainee raise money for the trip. Detainee left for Afghanistan in approximately March 2001.

Hatims DAB says he admitted that Al Qaeda recruited him after his time in Chechnya. He purportedly fought U.S. forces in a major battle in the Afghan mountains at the end of 2001. JTFGitmo assessed Hatim as a medium risk, but it classified him as a low threat from a detention perspective and of low intelligence value.

Hatim was first recommended for release in January 2007. He was similarly recommended a year later; a habeas corpus petition his attorney subsequently filed was granted in 2009. That judgment was vacated shortly before Gitmo Files was released in 2011.

Here is the relevant portion of Worthingtons report and analysis of the Hatim case:

In Saeed Hatims case Judge Ricardo Urbina ruled out self-incriminating statements made by Hatim himself, accepting that he made them while being mistreated and threatened with torture in Kandahar after his capture, and also that he repeated them at Guantnamo because he feared that he would be punished if he changed his story.

Judge Urbina also ruled out the governments major claim against Hatim that he had taken part in a showdown between Al Qaeda and U.S. forces in Afghanistans Tora Bora mountains in December 2001 because the only source for that claim was one of the notoriously unreliable witnesses identified in the WikiLeaks documents, who, in Judge Urbinas words, has exhibited an ongoing pattern of severe psychological problems while detained at Gitmo.

Quoting an interrogator, the judge also noted that hospital records at Guantnamo said the witness against Hatim had vague auditory hallucinations and that his symptoms were consistent with a depressive disorder, psychosis, post-traumatic stress, and a severe personality disorder. The interrogator concluded by refus[ing] to credit what is arguably the governments most serious allegation in this case based solely on one statement, made years after the events in question, by an individual whose grasp on reality appears to have been tenuous at best.

US Officials React

Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell Morrell in 2005. (Cherie Cullen, U.S. Armed Forces, Wikimedia Commons)

Official reactions to the release of Gitmo Files were by and large predictable. The Obama administrations statement, released by Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, and Daniel Fried, Obamas special envoy on detainee issues, asserted, It is unfortunate that several news organizations have made the decision to publish numerous documents obtained illegally by WikiLeaks concerning the Guantnamo detention facility.

Referring to Obama and George W. Bush, his predecessor, Morrell and Fried also said, Both administrations have made the protection of American citizens the top priority and we are concerned that the disclosure of these documents could be damaging to those efforts.

Significantly, there is no record of the presidents response to the release.

The Pentagon came under special criticism with the Gitmo releases revelation of the detention of 22 children at Guantnamo. As Worthington explains, in May 2008 the Pentagon had reported to the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child that it had held only eight juveniles (those under 18 when their alleged transgressions took place) since Guantnamo began receiving detainees in 2002.

Worthington took the occasion to elaborate on the Gitmo Files disclosure. In his commentary he wrote: My new research coincides with a new report by the UC Davis Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas, Guantnamos Children: The WikiLeaked Testimonies, drawing on the release, by WikiLeaks, of classified military documents shedding new light on the prisoners, identifying 15 juveniles, and suggesting that six others, born in 1984 or 1985, and arriving at Guantnamo in 2002 or 2003, may have been under 18, depending on when exactly they were born (which is unknown, as it is in the cases of numerous Guantnamo prisoners).

In total, Worthington asserted, the number of children imprisoned at Guantnamo may have been as many as 28.

Like the president, the Pentagon remained silent on this question after Gitmo Files was published. There is no record of a Defense Department response to the WikiLeaks disclosures concerning children and Worthingtons analysis of them.

In April 2019 eight years after Gitmo Files was published military courts continued to grapple with the record of events, specifically the use of torture, during the postSept. 11 war on terror.

In a report datelined April 5, 2019 The New York Times explained,

Seventeen-and-a-half years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, and a decade after President Barack Obama ordered the C.I.A. to dismantle any remnants of its global prison network, the military commission system is still wrestling with how to handle evidence of what the United States did to the Qaeda suspects it held at C.I.A. black sites. While the topic of torture can now be discussed in open court, there is still a dispute about how evidence of it can be gathered and used in the proceedings at Guantnamo Bay, Cuba.

This week the Justice Department filed a new indictment against Assange, superseding that filed in May 2019 and broadening the charges lodged against him last year. This is the most recent official reaction to Gitmo Files. This latest indictment, presented in the Eastern Virginia District Court and dated June 24, alleges that Chelsea Manning produced Gitmo Files at Assanges urging between November 2009 and May 2010. In keeping withWikiLeaks most fundamental principle, it has never disclosed the source of Gitmo Files. Neither has Manning stated that she was the source, although this has been widely considered as likely.

Proving that Assange actively solicited the documents Manning passed to WikiLeaksCollateral Murder, Afghan War Diary, Iraq War Logs, and now, allegedly, Gitmo Filesis key to the U.S. case against Assange under the Espionage Act.

The June 24 court document indicates that the Justice Department has no hard evidence of this charge. Manning continues to assert, as she has since her arrest in May 2010, that she acted of her own volition in gathering and dispatching the documentsWikiLeakspublished. The indictment alleges only that Manning, in assembling what became Gitmo Files, used certain search phrasesdetainee+abuse, for examplethat the indictment identifies with WikiLeaks categorization of documentsan allegation far short of accepted standards of proof.

Press Reaction

On the Gitmo Files home page, WikiLeaks names 10 partners with which it worked in making the documents public. Worthington is listed as one, though his work puts him in a category of his own. The others include The Washington Post, The Telegraph, La Repubblica, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel. These news outlets were given copies of Gitmo Files in advance to allow them time to review and analyze the documents and plan their coverage prior to the April 25, 2011, release.

Conspicuously missing from this WikiLeaks list, and reflecting a prior dispute they had with Julian Assange, are The New York Times and The Guardian. Both newspapers obtained the documents from a source other than WikiLeaks, presumably one of the news outlets on the WikiLeaks list of partners. To its credit, The Times now maintains a web site, The Guantnamo Docket giving the name and legal status of each detainee still in custody at Guantnamo.

The noteworthy aspect of the media coverage of the Gitmo Files release was the marked difference in the way U.S. and nonAmerican news outlets shaped their stories: U.S. media tended to emphasize the dangers and threats presented by those in captivity at Guantnamo; other media reported correctly that among the important revelations in Gitmo Files was the innocence of most of those seized and detained.

Noting this pattern, WikiLeaks urged readers and viewers to compare the lead paragraphs in the main BBC and CNN stories:

The BBC, under the headline, WikiLeaks: Many at Guantnamo not dangerous, reported, Files obtained by the website WikiLeaks have revealed that the U.S. believed many of those held at Guantnamo Bay were innocent or only low-level operatives.

CNNs report appeared under the headline, Military documents reveal details about Guantnamo detainees, alQaeda, and began, Nearly 800 classified U.S. military documents obtained by WikiLeaks reveal extraordinary details about the alleged terrorist activities of alQaeda operatives captured and housed at the U.S. Navys detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Among the others to note this disparity were Glenn Greenwald, then the foreign affairs columnist at Salon, and Laura Flanders at The Nation. Greenwalds piece on the news coverage of Gitmo Files appeared under the headline, Newly Leaked Documents Show the Ongoing Travesty of Guantnamo but is no longer available in the Salon archives.

Flanders detected the same bias in the coverage published by The Washington Post, National Public Radio, and the Times. The latter two use the cop-out term harsh interrogation techniques, she noted, to avoid mention of the word torture.

So the takeaway in the United States, Flanders wrote, will remain dangerous terrorists! and Guantnamo will most likely remain open three years after the president vowed to close it, while overseas the rest of the world will continue to wonder why the country that claims to love freedom so much is continuing to imprison and torture innocent people.

In one of the essays WikiLeaks published with Gitmo Files, Worthington analyzed the broader significance of the tilt in American coverage. He wrote:

The release of the documents prompted international interest for a week, until it was arranged by President Obama (whether coincidentally or not) for U.S. Special Forces to fly into Pakistan to assassinate Osama bin Laden. At this point an unprincipled narrative emerged in the mainstream media in the U.S., in which, for sales and ratings if nothing else, unindicted criminals from the Bush administration and their vociferous supporters in Congress, in newspaper columns, and on the airwaves were allowed to suggest that the use of torture had led to locating bin Laden (it hadnt, although some information had apparently come from high-value detainees held in secret CIA prisons, but not as a result of torture), and that the existence of Guantnamo had also proved invaluable in tracking down the al-Qaeda chief.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for theInternational Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century (Yale). Follow him on Twitter@thefloutist.His web site isPatrickLawrence. Support his work viahis Patreon site.

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THE REVELATIONS OF WIKILEAKS: No. 7 Crimes Revealed at Guantnamo Bay - Consortium News

Newswise A new studyby UCLA professors offers a new way to understand how unfounded conspiracy theories emerge online. The research, which combines sophisticated artificial intelligence and a deep knowledge of how folklore is structured, explains how unrelated facts and false information can connect into a narrative framework that would quickly fall apart if some of those elements are taken out of the mix.

The authors, from the UCLA College and the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, illustrated the difference in the storytelling elements of a debunked conspiracy theory and those that emerged when journalists covered an actual event in the news media. Their approach could help shed light on how and why other conspiracy theories, including those around COVID-19, spread -- even in the absence of facts.

The study, published in the journalPLOS ONE, analyzed the spread of news about the 2013 "Bridgegate" scandal in New Jersey -- an actual conspiracy -- and the spread of misinformation about the 2016 "Pizzagate" myth, the completely fabricated conspiracy theory that a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant was the center of a child sex-trafficking ring that involved prominent Democratic Party officials, including Hillary Clinton.

The researchers used machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence, to analyze the information that spread online about the Pizzagate story. The AI automatically can tease out all of the people, places, things and organizations in a story spreading online -- whether the story is true or fabricated -- and identify how they are related to each other.

Finding the puzzle pieces

In either case -- whether for a conspiracy theory or an actual news story -- the narrative framework is established by the relationships among all of the elements of the storyline. And, it turns out, conspiracy theories tend to form around certain elements that act as the adhesive holding the facts and characters together.

"Finding narratives hidden in social media forums is like solving a huge jigsaw puzzle, with the added complication of noise, where many of the pieces are just irrelevant," said Vwani Roychowdhury, a UCLA professor of electrical and computer engineering and an expert in machine learning, and a lead author of the paper.

In recent years, researchers have made great strides in developing artificial intelligence tools that can analyze batches of text and identify the pieces to those puzzles. As the AI learns to identify patterns, identities and interactions that are embedded in words and phrases, the narratives begin to make "sense." Drawing from the massive amount of data available on social media, and because of improving technology, the systems are increasingly able to teach themselves to "read" narratives, almost as if they were human.

The visual representations of those story frameworks showed the researchers how false conspiracy theory narratives are held together by threads that connect multiple characters, places and things. But they found that if even one of those threads is cut, the other elements often can't form a coherent story without it.

"One of the characteristics of a conspiracy theory narrative framework is that it is easily 'disconnected,'" said Timothy Tangherlini, one of the paper's lead authors, a professor in the UCLA Scandinavian section whose scholarship focuses on folklore, legend and popular culture. "If you take out one of the characters or story elements of a conspiracy theory, the connections between the other elements of the story fall apart."

Which elements stick?

In contrast, he said, the stories around actual conspiracies -- because they're true -- tend to stand up even if any given element of the story is removed from the framework. Consider Bridgegate, for example, in which New Jersey officials closed several lanes of the George Washington Bridge for politically motivated reasons. Even if any number of threads were removed from the news coverage of the scandal, the story would have held together: All of the characters involved had multiple points of connection by way of their roles in New Jersey politics.

"They are all within the same domain, in this case New Jersey politics, which will continue to exist irrespective of the deletions," Tangherlini said. "Those connections don't require the same 'glue' that a conspiracy theory does."

Tangherlini calls himself a "computational folklorist." Over the past several years, he has collaborated regularly with Roychowdhury to better understand the spread of information around hot-button issues like the anti-vaccination movement.

To analyze Pizzagate, in which the conspiracy theory arose from a creative interpretation of hacked emails released in 2016 by Wikileaks, the researchers analyzed nearly 18,000 posts from April 2016 through February 2018 from discussion boards on the websites Reddit and Voat.

"When we looked at the layers and structure of the narrative about Pizzagate, we found that if you take out Wikileaks as one of the elements in the story, the rest of the connections don't hold up," Tangherlini said. "In this conspiracy, the Wikileaks email dump and how theorists creatively interpreted the content of what was in the emails are the only glue holding the conspiracy together."

The data generated by the AI analysis enabled the researchers to produce a graphic representation of narratives, with layers for major subplots of each story, and lines connecting the key people, places and institutions within and among those layers.

Quick build versus slow burn

Another difference that emerged between real and false narratives concerned the time they take to build. Narrative structures around conspiracy theories tend to build and become stable quickly, while narrative frameworks around actual conspiracies can take years to emerge, Tangherlini said. For example, the narrative framework of Pizzagate stabilized within a month after the Wikileaks dump, and it stayed relatively consistent over the next three years.

"The fact that additional information related to an actual conspiracy emerged over a prolonged period of time (here five and half years) might be one of the telltale signs of distinguishing a conspiracy from a conspiracy theory," the authors wrote in the study.

Tangherlini said it's becoming increasingly important to understand how conspiracy theories abound, in part because stories like Pizzagate have inspired some to take actions that endanger other people.

"The threat narratives found in conspiracy theories can imply or present strategies that encourage people to take real-world action," he said. "Edgar Welch went to that Washington pizzeria with a gun looking for supposed caves hiding victims of sex trafficking."

The UCLA researchers have also written another paper examining the narrative frameworks surrounding conspiracy theories related to COVID-19. In that study, which has been published on an open-source forum, they track how the conspiracy theories are being layered on to previously circulated conspiracy theories such as those about the perceived danger of vaccines, and, in other cases how the pandemic has given rise to completely new ones, like the idea that 5G cellular networks spread the coronavirus.

"We're using the same pipeline on COVID-19 discussions as we did for Pizzagate," Tangherlini said. "In Pizzagate, the targets were more limited, and the conspiracy theory stabilized rapidly. With COVID-19, there are many competing conspiracy theories, and we are tracing the alignment of multiple, smaller conspiracy theories into larger ones. But the underlying theory is identical for all conspiracy theories."

###

More:
How conspiracy theories emerge -- and how their storylines fall apart - Newswise

Twitter has permanently banned DDoSecrets, a Wikileaks-style publisher that linked to a trove of hacked police files dubbed "BlueLeaks" this week.

The leaked files were not classified but were previously unpublished, and showed police departments and the FBI exchanging information about the names, appearances, and Twitter handles of George Floyd protesters. DDoSecrets did not carry out the hack that leaked the police files instead, similar to Wikileaks, the group merely hosts files that hackers pass along.

But it's unclear why DDoSecrets was banned for republishing hacked material while Wikileaks has been doing the same for years while retaining its Twitter account. Dozens of news outlets, including Business Insider, also published stories that included material from the BlueLeaks hacks. Twitter did not answer Business Insider's questions about what makes DDoSecrets' case different from those other outlets.

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DDoSecrets editor-in-chief Lorax B. Horne also drew attention to Twitter's uneven enforcement, listing more than two dozen news outlets that have published stories that include data from DDoSecrets.

See original here:
Twitter has permanently banned the group that published the 'BlueLeaks' police files obtained by hackers - Business Insider India

Roger Stone, departs following a status hearing in the criminal case against him brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller at U.S. District Court in Washington, U.S., March 14, 2019.

Joshua Roberts | Reuters

A prosecutor who helped win the conviction of President Donald Trump's friend Roger Stone told Congress on Wednesday that the "highest levels" of the Department of Justice pressured officials "to cut Stone a break."

Aaron Zelinsky, one of four prosecutors who withdrew from the case after the department stepped in to lower Stone's recommended prison sentence, testified before the Democrat-led House Judiciary Committee in a hearing on politicization of the DOJ under Attorney General William Barr.

The panel's 12 p.m. ET hearing came as Barr has faced heavy criticism for his handling of high-profile cases involving matters directly related to Trump. Critics have accused Barr of undermining the independence of the Justice Department by acting in ways that benefit Trump politically.

Barr was not attending Wednesday's hearing. But Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec tweeted later Wednesday that the attorney general has accepted an invitation to appear before the House panel for a "general oversight hearing" on July 28.

Shortly before the start of the hearing, afederal appeals court ordered a lower-court judge to dismiss the criminal case against Michael Flynn, who briefly served as Trump's first national security advisor. The Justice Department had filed a motion seeking to dismiss the case, and Flynn's lawyers argued thatJudge Emmet Sullivan did not promptly grant the request.

Inhis prepared opening statement,Zelinsky said he personally saw the department "exerting significant pressure" on prosecutors "to water down and in some cases outright distort" the events of Stone's trial and his criminal conduct.

"What I heard repeatedly was that Roger Stone was being treated differently from any other defendant because of his relationship to the president," Zelinsky said.

Stone, 67, was convicted last November of lying to Congress about his contacts with WikiLeaks during the 2016 presidential election and for pressuring an associate, Randy Credico, to endorse his lies. During the campaign, WikiLeaks released emails stolen by Russian agents from the chief of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton's campaign and from the Democratic National Committee.

In February, the attorneys prosecuting Stone's case recommended a severe sentence of up to nine years in prison for Stone, a self-described political trickster and longtime confidant of Trump.

The president had weighed in on Twitter shortly after the recommendation, calling it "disgraceful!"

Prosecutors said at the time that their proposed sentence was in line with federal sentencing guidelines, which are calculated according to a formula that takes into account the severity of the crime, the type of conduct involved, and a defendant's prior criminal history.

A day after the original proposed sentence was filed, Timothy Shea the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia requested a substantially lower prison term.Zelinsky said he was told that Shea "was receiving heavy pressure from the highest levels of the Department of Justice to cut Stone a break."

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson sentenced Stone on Feb. 20 to 40 months in prison. In April, Jackson denied Stone's request for a new trial. Stone appealed his conviction and sentence, and has asked a federal court to delay his June 30 prison surrender date, citing concerns for his health due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Zelinsky said in his opening statement that he "was explicitly told" that the pressure to change Stone's sentencing was coming "because the U.S. attorney was 'afraid of the president.'"

"When I learned that the department was going to issue a new sentencing memo, I made the difficult decision to resign from the case and my temporary appointment in the U.S. Attorney's Office in D.C. rather than be associated with the Department of Justice's actions at sentencing," Zelinsky said. "I returned to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Maryland, where I work today."

Excerpt from:
Ex-Roger Stone prosecutor tells Congress of pressure from 'highest levels' to give Trump ally 'a break' - CNBC

The Washington Post is reporting on an internal CIA report about its Vault 7 security breach:

The breach allegedly committed by a CIA employee was discovered a year after it happened, when the information was published by WikiLeaks, in March 2017. The anti-secrecy group dubbed the release Vault 7, and U.S. officials have said it was the biggest unauthorized disclosure of classified information in the CIAs history, causing the agency to shut down some intelligence operations and alerting foreign adversaries to the spy agencys techniques.

The October 2017 report by the CIAs WikiLeaks Task Force, several pages of which were missing or redacted, portrays an agency more concerned with bulking up its cyber arsenal than keeping those tools secure. Security procedures were woefully lax within the special unit that designed and built the tools, the report said.

Without the WikiLeaks disclosure, the CIA might never have known the tools had been stolen, according to the report. Had the data been stolen for the benefit of a state adversary and not published, we might still be unaware of the loss, the task force concluded.

The task force report was provided to The Washington Post by the office of Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who has pressed for stronger cybersecurity in the intelligence community. He obtained the redacted, incomplete copy from the Justice Department.

Its all still up on WikiLeaks.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Schneier on Security authored by Bruce Schneier. Read the original post at: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/06/theft_of_cias_v.html

Read more here:
Theft of CIAs "Vault Seven" Hacking Tools Due to Its Own Lousy Security - Security Boulevard

June 23, 2020

The update on FOIA resources, successes, and obstacles.

This weeks roundup features free training on using public records to understand the countrys COVID-19 response, updates to the federal FOIA, and a way to contribute to police transparency. See something we missed? Let us know.

COVID Public Info is a new non-profit news collaboration between Outlier Media, the MuckRock Foundation, Matt Kiefer and Garance Burke, and it is made possible through the support of the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University.

Join us for the first of these sessions Friday at 3:00 pm Eastern, during which well discuss basic requesting strategies to uncover important stories in your community. Register for this newsletter to get updates on upcoming trainings and resources.

Interested in getting more involved and helping dig through local data that tie into larger investigations with a national network of peers? Get in touch.

After Gov. Andrew Cuomo approved a bill to repeal 50-a protections of police and correctional officer records earlier this month, MuckRock began to submit hundreds of records requests for each police departments backlog of disciplinary records. On June 18, we received our first response containing disciplinary action reports from a New York police department, Allegany Village Police Department.

Multiple police departments, including the New York Police Department, have announced that they will be releasing disciplinary information publicly online.

Other elected officials are beginning to take a different approach. New York State Sen. George Borrello, after he learned that the Cuba Police Department had received a request from MuckRock, issued a press release questioning the purpose of releasing the information.

At the time, MuckRock had not yet received an acknowledgment letter from the police department. You can follow the Cuba PD request here by selecting Follow at the top of the page (you need to be logged in). Check out all of our New York requests on the project page.

The Office of Government Information Services recently reviewed 305 federal FOIA websites and found that 62.6 percent of them did not alert requesters to changes in agency FOIA processing caused by the shift to full-time teleworking. (OGIS FOIA Ombudsman)

Previously-redacted portions of the Mueller report have been released, revealing more details of conversations Roger Stone and President Trump had about WikiLeaks releases of Hillary Clintons emails. Jason Leopold, Ken Bensinger, and Anthony Cormier at BuzzFeed report.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said last week that his agency would not be providing details on who has received funding under the federal governments Paycheck Protection Program. But following backlash from lawmakers and the public, the Small Business Administration and the Treasury Department announced Friday that they would now disclose entities receiving more than $150,000 in loans, as reported by Mark Niquette for Bloomberg. More than $550 billion in spending has been approved under the PPP, and the majority of loans are not large enough to reach the current disclosure threshold.

Conan, the canine famous for its involvement in the raid on Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is now the subject of a lawsuit to determine which pronouns to use for the patriot and how injuries sustained in the mission were treated, as Freddy Martinez writes for Motherboard).

Michael Scott Davidson, writing for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, reports that beginning July 1, Las Vegas police will charge $280 for each hour of body camera footage requested by the public, regardless of actual redaction or search time.

Despite efforts by the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled 6-1 on Thursday that complaints and other records, even those older than five years, must remain accessible to the public, as Jeremy Gorner, John Byrne, and Dan Hinkel report for the Chicago Tribune. The contractual rights that were in our collective bargaining agreement for the better part of four decades were set in stone, said Fraternal Order of Police President John Catanzara. The police union is considering additional challenges to the ruling.

See something we should include in our next update? Please let us know.

Image by CSPAN via Steven Mnuchins Twitter account.

Originally posted here:
FOIA Roundup: Avenues to accountability in the age of COVID-19 - MuckRock

US prosecutors have failed to include one of WikiLeaks most shocking video revelations in the indictment against Julian Assange, a move that has brought accusations the US doesnt want its war crimes exposed in public.

Assange, an Australian citizen, is remanded and in ill health in Londons Belmarsh prison while the US tries to extradite him to face 18 charges 17 under its Espionage Act for conspiracy to receive, obtain and disclose classified information.

The charges relate largely to the US conduct of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including Assanges publication of the US rules of engagement in Iraq.

The prosecution case alleges Assange risked American lives by releasing hundreds of thousands of US intelligence documents.

One of the most famous of the WikiLeaks releases was a video filmed from a US Apache helicopter, Crazy Horse 1-8, as it mowed down 11 people on 12 July 2007 in Iraq. The video starkly highlights the lax rules of engagement that allowed the killing of men who were neither engaged with nor threatening US forces.

Two of those Crazy Horse 1-8 killed in east Baghdad that day were the Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and a driver/fixer, Saeed Chmagh, 40.

Their Baghdad bureau chief at the time, Dean Yates, said the US military had repeatedly lied to him and the world about what happened, and it was only when Assange released the video (which WikiLeaks posted with the title Collateral Murder) in April 2010 that the full brutal truth of the killings was exposed.

What he did was 100% an act of truth-telling, exposing to the world what the war in Iraq looks like and how the US military lied The US knows how embarrassing Collateral Murder is, how shameful it is to the military they know that theres potential war crimes on that tape, Yates said.

The Australian barrister Greg Barns is legal adviser to the Australian Assange Campaign, which works closely with Assanges UK representatives, including his legal team. The campaign lobbies Australias federal government to both press its closest ally, the US, to withdraw the charges and to push Britain to ensure Assanges safety.

He said while the US indictment against Assange did not explicitly mention Collateral Murder it is very much part of the broader prosecution case [because of what it illustrates about the US rules of engagement] and it is one of the many reasons to oppose what is happening to Assange.

Collateral Murder shows unlawful killing by Australias closest ally, Barns said.It is something we deserve to know about.Its publication was, and remains, clearly in the public interest.

The Tasmanian Greens senator Peter Whish Wilson, a founding member of the multi-party Parliamentary Friends of the Bring Julian Assange Home Group, said: The omission of the leaked Collateral Murder footage from the indictment surprised me, but on reflection of course its not in the US Governments interests to highlight their own injustices, deceit and war crimes.

The US prosecutions case is focused on indicting and extraditing Julian for putting US or Coalition lives at risk, but what about the many lives they put at risk through their supposed rules of engagement?

Collateral Murder exposed the loss of innocent lives at the hands of the US military, and the coverups, lies and deceit that refused to acknowledge this fact.

See the original post here:
Julian Assange indictment fails to mention WikiLeaks video that exposed US 'war crimes' in Iraq - The Guardian

For all the countless words from the United States military about its killing of the Iraqi Reuters journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh, their colleague Dean Yates has two of his own: All lies.

The former Reuters Baghdad bureau chief has also inked some on his arm a permanent declaration of how those lies fucked me up, while he blamed first Namir unfairly and then himself for the killings.

The tattoo on his left shoulder features a looped green ribbon bearing the words Iraq, Bali and Aceh. At opposite points of the ribbon is etched PTSD and Fight Back, Moral injury and July 12 2007.

Yatess experiences covering the 2002 Bali bombings and the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 seeded his post-traumatic stress, but 12 July 2007 is the day that changed his life irrevocably while violently ending Namirs and Saeeds. Its also the day that linked him by a thread of truth to the WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange, who would, three years later, become the worlds most infamous hacker-publisher-activist with his release of thousands of classified US military secrets.

They included a video WikiLeaks titled Collateral Murder, filmed from a US military Apache helicopter as it blasted to pieces Namir, 22, and Saeed, 40, and nine other men, while seriously wounding two children.

The US continues its legal efforts to extradite Assange from a British prison, where he is remanded in failing health, to face espionage allegations. Instructively, the detailed, 37-page US indictment against him makes no mention of Collateral Murder the video that caused the US government and military more reputational damage than all the other secret documents combined, and that launched WikiLeaks and Assange as the foremost global enemy of state secrecy.

Is the US concerned that referring to the video will give rise to war crimes charges against the military personnel involved in the attack? Certainly, bringing the video into the prosecution case against Assange could only vindicate his role in exposing the US militarys lies about the ghastly killings.

Early on 12 July 2007 Yates sat in the slot desk in the Reuters office in Baghdads red zone. He was ready for the usual: a car bomb attack while Iraqis headed to work, a militant strike on a market, the police or the Iraqi military. It was quieter than usual.

Yates recalls: Loud wailing broke out near the back of our office I still remember the anguished face of the Iraqi colleague who burst through the door. Another colleague translated: Namir and Saeed have been killed.

Reuters staff drove to the al-Amin neighbourhood where Namir had told colleagues he was going to check out a possible US dawn airstrike. Witnesses said Namir, a photographer, and Saeed, a driver/fixer, had been killed by US forces, possibly in an airstrike during a clash with militants.

Yates emailed the US military spokesman in Iraq and telephoned a senior Reuters editor to tell him the news.

While the bureau was in a crisis of anger and mourning, Yates still had to write the early stories about the two men killed on his watch. He initially wrote that they had died in what Iraqi police called American military action.

Yates says: Pictures taken by our photographers and camera operators showed a minivan at the scene, its front mangled by a powerful concussive force There was much we didnt know. US soldiers had seized Namirs two cameras, so we couldnt check what hed been photographing.

By early evening the military spokesman still had not replied. Yates pressed him for a response and for the return of Namirs cameras. Just after midnight, the US military released a statement headlined: Firefight in New Baghdad. US, Iraqi forces kill 9 insurgents, detain 13.

It quoted a US lieutenant as saying: Nine insurgents were killed in the ensuing firefight. One insurgent was wounded and two civilians were killed during the firefight. The two civilians were reported as employees for the Reuters news service. There is no question that Coalition Forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force.

Yates, shaking his head, says: The US assertions that Namir and Saeed were killed during a firefight was all lies. But I didnt know that at the time, so I updated my story to take in the US militarys statement.

It was a shocking time for locally engaged staff of foreign news organisations in Baghdad. On 13 July, the day of Namir and Saeeds funerals, Khalid Hassan, a New York Times reporter/translator, was shot dead.

After the funerals Yates pressed the US military for Namirs cameras and for access to cameras and air-to-ground recordings involving the Apache that killed his colleagues.

On 14 July, Yates learned that militants had murdered a Reuters Iraqi text translator.

In an effort to save employees lives, he began collaborating with other foreign news organisation managers to engage with the US military to better understand its rules of engagement.

We dealt with them in good faith, he says. What a joke that turned out to be.

On 15 July the US military returned Namirs cameras. Namir had photographed the aftermath of an earlier shooting and, a few minutes later (just before his death), US military Humvees at a nearby crossroads. There were no frames of insurgent gunmen or clashes with US forces. Date and time stamps show that three hours after Namir died his camera photographed a US soldier in a barrack or tent. The troops who mopped up the killing scene evidentlymessed around with his cameras afterwards.

Reuters staff had by now spoken to 14 witnesses in al-Amin. All of them said they were unaware of any firefight that might have prompted the helicopter strike.

Yates recalls: The words that kept forming on my lips were cold-blooded murder.

The Iraqi staff at Reuters, meanwhile, were concerned that the bureau was too soft on the US military. But I could only write what we could establish and the US military was insisting Saeed and Namir were killed during a clash, Yates says.

The meeting that put him on a path of destructive, paralysing eventually suicidal guilt and blame that basically fucked me up for the next 10 years, leaving him in a state of moral injury, happened at US military headquarters in the Green Zone on 25 July.

Yates and a Reuters colleague met the two US generals who had overseen the investigation into the killings of Namir and Saeed.

It was a long, off-the-record meeting. The generals revealed a mass of detail, telling them a US battalion had been seeking militias responsible for roadside bombs. They had called in helicopter support after coming under fire. One Apache had the call sign Crazy Horse 1-8.

They described a group of men spotted by this Apache, Yates says. Some appeared to be armed and Crazy Horse 1-8 had requested permission to fire because we were told these men were military-aged males and they appeared to have weapons and they were acting suspiciously. So, we were told those men on the ground were then engaged.

The generals showed them photographs of what was collected after the shooting, including a couple of AK-47s [assault rifles], an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] launcher and two cameras.

I have wondered for many years how much of that meeting was carefully choreographed so we would go away with a certain impression of what happened. Well, for a time it worked, Yates says.

There was some discussion about what permitted Crazy Horse 1-8 to open fire if there was no firefight. One of the generals insisted the dead were of military age and, because apparently armed, were therefore expressing hostile intent.

Yates says: Then they said, OK, we are just going to show you a little bit of footage from the camera of Crazy Horse 1-8.

The generals showed them about three minutes of video, beginning with a group including Saeed and Namir on the street.

We heard the pilot seek permission from the ground to attack. After the pilot receives permission, the men are obscured. The chopper circles for a clear aim.

Yates says: When the chopper circled around, Namir can be seen going to a corner and crouching down holding something his long-lens camera and is taking photographs of Humvees. One of the crew says, Hes got an RPG Hes clearly agitated. And then another 15, 20 seconds the crew gets a clear line of sight Im watching Namir crouching down with his camera which the pilot thinks is an RPG and theyre about to open fire. I then see a man I believe to be Saeed walking away, talking on the phone. Then cannon fire hits them. Ive got my head in my hands The generals stop the tape.

The generals downplayed a slightly later incident when they said a van had pulled up and Crazy Horse 1-8 assessed it as aiding the insurgents, removing their bodies and weapons.

At some point after watching that footage it became burnt into my mind that the reason the helicopter opened fire was because Namir was peering around the corner. I came to blame Namir for that attack, thinking that the helicopter fired because he made himself look suspicious and it just erased from my memory the fact that the order to open fire had already been given. They were going to open fire anyway. And the one person who picked this up was Assange. On the day that he released the tape [5 April 2010] he said that helicopter opened fire because it sought permission and was given permission. And he said something like, If thats based on the rules of engagement then the rules of engagement are wrong.

Reuters asked for the entire video. The general refused, saying Reuters had to seek it under freedom of information laws.The agency did so, but its requests were denied.

During the next year, Yates checked when it might be released. All the while he and other executives from foreign news organisations continued their good faith meetings with various US generals to enhance the safety of their Baghdad staff.

On the anniversary of Namirs and Saeeds killings, Yates wanted to break the off-the-record agreement with the generals. He argued that enough time had passed for the Pentagon to give Reuters the tape. His superiors insisted the agreement be honoured. A passage in the article he wrote for the anniversary read: Video from two US Apache helicopters and photographs taken of the scene were shown to Reuters editors in Baghdad on July 25, 2007 in an off-the-record briefing.

Yates stayed in Baghdad until October 2008. He did not get the full video. Reuters continued to ask for it. Yates was reassigned to Singapore. He displayed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, including noise aversion and emotional numbness. He avoided anything to do with Iraq and had trouble sleeping.

On 5 April 2010, when Wikileaks released Collateral Murder at the National Press Club in Washington, rendering himself and WikiLeaks household names (and exposing how the US prosecuted the Iraq war on the ground), Yates was off the grid,walking in Cradle Mountain national park on a Tasmanian holiday with his wife, Mary, and their children.

Namir and Saeed would have remained forgotten statistics in a war that killed countless Iraqi combatants, hundreds of thousands of civilians and 4,400-plus US soldiers had it not been for Chelsea Manning, a US military intelligence analyst in Baghdad. In February 2010 Manning, then 23, discovered the Crazy Horse 1-8 video and leaked it to WikiLeaks. The previous month Manning had leaked 700,000 classified US military documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to WikiLeaks. Assange unveiled the Crazy Horse 1-8 footage (a 17-minute edited version and the full 38-minute version remain on WikiLeaks Collateral Murder site). The video was picked up by thousands of news organisations worldwide, sparking global outrage and condemnation of US military tactics in Iraq and launching WikiLeaks as a controversial truth-teller, publisher and critical enemy of state secrecy. WikiLeaks later made public the cache of 700,000 documents.

Collateral Murder is distressing viewing. The carnage wrought by the 30mm cannon fire from the Apache helicopter is devastating. The video shows the gunner tracking Namir as he stumbles and tries to hide behind garbage before his body explodes as the rounds strike home.

The words of the crew are sickening.

There is this, after Namir and others are blown apart:

Look at those dead bastards.

Nice.

And this:

Good shootn.

Thank you.

Saeed survives the first shots. The chopper circles, Saeed in its sights, as he crawls, badly injured and desperate to live.

Come on buddy all you got to do is pick up a weapon, the gunner says, eager to finish Saeed off.

A van pulls up. Two men, including the driver (whose children are in the back), help the dying Saeed get in.

There is more urgent banter in the air about engaging the van. Crazy Horse 1-8 promptly attacks it.

Oh yeah, look at that. Right through the windshield.

Two days after Assange released the video, Yates emerged from Cradle Mountain. It was hours before he turned on his phone and checked emails, finally learning of Collateral Murder in a local newspaper.

I thought, No, this cant be the same attack that leads on to all this other stuff that we never knew about This was the full horror Saeed had been trying to get up for roughly three minutes when this good Samaritan pulls over in this minivan and the Apache just opens fire again and just obliterates them it was totally traumatising.

Yates immediately thought: They [the US military] fucked us. They just fucked us. They lied to us. It was all lies.

The day Collateral Murder was released, a spokesman for US Central Command said an investigation of the incident shortly after it occurred found that US forces were not aware of the presence of the news staffers and thought they were engaging armed insurgents.

We regret the loss of innocent life, but this incident was promptly investigated and there was never any attempt to cover up any aspect of this engagement.

Edited into the story Reuters published about Collateral Murder was that line from Yatess first anniversary article: Video from two US Apache helicopters and photographs taken of the scene were shown to Reuters editors in Baghdad on July 25, 2007 in an off-the-record briefing.

Reuters outraged Iraqi staff were under the misapprehension Yates had seen the whole video.

I hate to admit it, but this was my chance to set the record straight and I didnt do it, Yates says. I just, I dont know, didnt have the courage to do it I shouldve picked up the phone and said to [Reuters] we cannot let this go and we have to say what we knew.

In one email to a senior editor that night, Yates wrote: I think we need to push the issue of transparency strongly with the US military When I think back to that meeting with two generals in Baghdad I feel cheated they were not being honest We met afterwards with the military several times to work on improving safety for reporters in Iraq.

The editor replied: I appreciate how awful this is for you. Take good care; rest assured that were not letting this drop.

Then Yates let it go.

How shameful it is to the military they know that theres potential war crimes on that tape

He moved to Tasmania, endured PTSD and eventually, after three inpatient stays at Austin Healths Ward 17 in Melbourne (a specialist unit for PTSD) grappled with his emotional pain the moral injury now articulated in his shoulder tattoo over the deaths of Namir and Saeed. Reuters paid for his treatment in Ward 17 and agreed to create the role of head of mental health and wellbeing strategy for him when he could no longer work as a journalist (he has now left the company).

It was in Ward 17, in 2016 and 2017, that he came to understand the moral injury he was enduring by unfairly blaming Namir for making Crazy Horse 1-8 open fire. The other element of his moral injury related to his shame at failing to protect his staff by uncovering the lax rules of engagement in the US military before they were shot and for not disclosing earlier his understanding of the extent to which the US had lied. Yates made peace with Namir and Saeed and himself.

Assange, he says, brought the truth of the killings to the world and exposed the lie that he and others had not.

What he did was 100% an act of truth-telling, exposing to the world what the war in Iraq looks like and how the US military lied.

Of the US indictment against Assange, Yates says: The US knows how embarrassing Collateral Murder is, how shameful it is to the military they know that theres potential war crimes on that tape, especially when it comes to the shooting up of the van They know that the banter between the pilots echoes the sort of language that kids would use on video games.

Fight Back, read the words inked on to Yatess left shoulder.

Amid the continuing attempt to extradite Assange to the US, many more words are likely to be spoken about the events of 12 July 2007, the lies of the US military and their exposure through Collateral Murder.

Original post:
'All lies': how the US military covered up gunning down two journalists in Iraq - The Guardian

NewsPoliticsA Sky documentary that investigates some of the most mind-boggling conspiracy theories of recent years has shone a new light on some of the most baffling fake news stories to come out of the US

Tuesday, 16th June 2020, 8:27 am

After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News aired in early June, and surveys the effects of disinformation campaigns on social media and the impacts of well known conspiracy theories.

One of those theories is that of Pizzagate, and the film follows the growth of the story on forums like Reddit and 4chan, how it was fomented by the alt-right and Alex Jones, and then translated into a real-life dangerous situation.

Heres everything you need to know:

Pizzagate was a widely discredited news story which linked Hilary Clintons presidential campaign with a fictional human trafficking ring.

Its so-called because the alleged headquarters of the operation was the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, D.C, which according to the conspiracy was also a meeting ground for Satanic ritual abuse.

It all began in March 2016, when the personal email account of John Podesta, Clinton's campaign manager, was hacked.

WikiLeaks published the emails later that year; conspiracy theorists claimed the emails contained coded messages that alluded to human trafficking and a child sex ring.

The emails contained multiple references to pizza and pizza restaurants, but there is no evidence that they are code or refer to anything else.

Had the claims been true, it would have implicated a number of high-ranking Democratic Party officials.

How was the story debunked?

The story has been widely debunked by a number of fact checking a news organisations from across the political spectrum even Fox News has said the story is completely false.

Theorists claimed that similarities between Comet Ping Pongs logo contained symbols linked to Satanism and paedophilia; the New York Times noted these similarities could be found in the logos of completely unrelated companies, if you looked hard enough.

Claims of a secret underground network beneath Comet Ping Pong were disproven by the fact the establishment has no basement, and evidence that John Podesta played a part in the kidnapping of Madeleine McCann were simply sketches of a suspect taken from the descriptions of two eyewitnesses.

No alleged victims have come forward and no physical evidence has been found.

Despite the theory having zero evidence to support it, that didnt stop those who opposed Hilary Clinton believing the story wholesale.

That included gunman Edgar Maddison Welch, who travelled down from South Carolina to confront the owners of Comet Ping Pong.

He entered the pizza restaurant in Washington D.C. packed with families on a Sunday afternoon and fired an automatic rifle.

Thankfully, no one was injured in the disturbance; Mr Welch told police he had driven from South Carolina to investigate the restaurant after reading online reports.

Why is Comet Ping Pong back in the news?

Though its been four years since the height of the Pizzagate story, the owners still have to deal with death threats and abuse.

As employees continue to search for a new rhythm [during the coronavirus pandemic], say the Washington Post, they still field calls from Pizzagate obsessors.

A few weeks ago, someone jammed the phone line for an entire day, frustrating customers who struggled to place orders. [Comet] has received almost 70 Pizzagate messages in recent weeks.

There also seems to be a renewed interest in the false story in the wake of news that US prosecutors want a face-to-face interview with Prince Andrew over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

The story has been trending on Twitter again, despite remaining completely untrue, with theorists linking Epsteins private jet the Lolita Express and his private Epstein Island with the restaurant.

There is no evidence to suggest any of it is true.

See original here:
What is Pizzagate? The fake news scandal involving Wikileaks and Hilary Clinton explained - and why its trending amid Epstein inquiry - The Scotsman