UPDATE: For a media chronology of how the Pentagon disseminated the lie that the WikiLeaks document release endangered people who had worked with the US occupation in Afghanistan, consider reading this article by Glenn Greenwald.

INITIAL POST: Remember this from August?

Want a good, shorthand way to determine if an NGO is collaborating with the occupation in Afghanistan? Look and see if they are scrambling to climb aboard the US public relations campaign against wikileaks. So far, we have Amnesty International, CIVIC, the Open Society Institute, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and the the Kabul office of International Crisis Group, and, now, Reporters Without Borders:

The Pentagon has a task force of about 100 people reading the leaked documents to assess the damage done and working, for instance, to alert Afghans who might be identified by name and now could be in danger.

Taliban spokesmen have said they would use the material to try to hunt down people who've been cooperating with what the Taliban considers a foreign invader. That has aroused the concern of several human rights group operating in Afghanistan — as well as Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, which on Thursday accused Wikileaks of recklessness.

Jean-Francois Julliard, the group's secretary-general, said that WikiLeaks showed incredible irresponsibility when posting the documents online.

The presence of the Open Society Institute, an organization funded by George Soros, is an interesting one. Perhaps, it is to be expected that an NGO funded by a currency speculator is, at the end of the day, supportive of the violent modernization project underway in Afghanistan. Indeed, don't all of these organizations rely upon such an endeavor for their very existence?

Well, here's the update:

With a new round of document leaks from the whistleblower organization WikiLeaks expected on Monday, a separate leak of a letter related to a previous leak suggests administration claims regarding the risks to intelligence sources were, as with so many statements beforehand, a lie.

The August letter, from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to Senate Armed Services Committee chair Sen. Carl Levin (D – MI), conceded that the WikiLeaks documents related to the Afghan War did not expose any sensitive intelligence sources. He insisted the documents were still a threat to national security.

The private letter was released at roughly the same time that Secretary Gates and other Pentagon officials were making public proclamations about the number of people WikiLeaks had potentially killed in releasing the information.

No doubt all five of the organizations that rushed to the microphone to malign WikiLeaks have been rewarded handsomely for their participation in this recent PSYOPS campaign.

Labels: Afghanistan, American Empire, NGOs, US Military