ISI and Pak Army knew of Osama hideout: Stratfor →
It has been widely reported that Wikileaks has begun to release e-mails stolen from Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor) — e.g., Wikileaks publishes confidential emails from Stratfor.
I’ve written about The Stratfor Hack, and I have a personal interest in this because, as a former Stratfor subscriber, my information was stolen as well, and I have been receiving bogus e-mails as a result, purporting to be from Stratfor.
I have mentioned that the media is treating the Stratfor hack almost exclusively in terms of Stratfor’s connections to large corporations and government entities; the very idea that individuals such as myself might be interested enough to pay for this information does not seem to have occurred to many journalists (though I have no doubt that a great many journalists were subscribers — an oddly obvious blindspot).
It is, then, with some interest and amusement that the first story in the media that I have seen generated by the content of the Stratfor e-mails (as contrasted to the fact of their theft and now release) is the above-linked piece from ZeeNews, which has nothing to do with Stratfor’s possibly insalubrious relationships with unsavory individuals or institutions, but is all about what Pakistani and US government intelligence knew about Osama Bin Laden…
…which just goes to show you that you can release someone else’s intelligence with the implicit motive of discrediting them, but you cannot control what others will do with this intelligence once it is in the public sphere.
I have no doubt that the conspiracy theorists will make much of the Stratfor e-mails, but — so far, at least — George Friedman’s credibility is better than theirs.
