Pentagon Gears Up For War on WikiLeaks

120 spooks dedicated to job

By James Nixon
Thinq.co.uk | 13 September, 2010

Sources inside the Pentagon have revealed that a rapidly-expanding team is working night and day to win the US Defense Department's propaganda war against whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks.

Defence chiefs officially admitted the existence of the team - officially dubbed the 'Information Review Task Force', but known to insiders as the "WikiLeaks war room" - based in suburban Virginia, a stone's throw from the Pentagon.

Since that official announcement, the war room's staff has swelled by 50 per cent to nearly 120 members.

The crack team of military propagandists has been assembled to undermine WikiLeaks' operations, and is led by the formidable Brigadier General Robert A Carr of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Brigadier General Robert A Carr

"I wouldn't want to go up against General Carr... Very smart guy," one Pentagon official told investigative reporter Philip Shenon in an interview US news site The Daily Beast.

In addition to its day-to-day agenda of disruption, the team is bent on gathering evidence that could be used to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and others under the US 1917 Espionage Act.

Assange has claimed that the ongoing criminal investigation being carried out into allegations of rape made against him in Sweden, where WikiLeaks is based, have been orchestrated by US intelligence sources in an attempt to discredit the site's planned disclosure of 15,000 further files from its Afghan War Dossier.

The site is currently conducting a "harm minimisation" exercise to redact details in the documents that could be used to identify innocent civilians and others.

Senior Pentagon spokesman, Marine Colonel David Lapan, told The Daily Beast: "We believe we probably know what's in those. And we believe, again, that they will pose some risk to our forces in Afghanistan and to others."

The Pentagon has so far refused publicly to co-operate with WikiLeaks, accusing the organisation of having "blood on its hands", having allegedly exposed civilians and serviceman to danger via its earlier publication.

According to Pentagon sources, there is no evidence so far that civilians have been harmed as a result of information revealed by WikiLeaks.

http://www.thinq.co.uk/2010/9/13/pentagon-ramps-war-wikileaks/