Readaloo

Guards and officials at a prison in northern Mexico allegedly let inmates out, lent them guns and allowed them to use official vehicles to carry out drug-related killings, including the massacre of 17 people last week, prosecutors said Sunday.

After carrying out the killings the inmates would return to their cells, the Attorney General's Office said in a revelation that was shocking even for a country wearied by years of drug violence and corruption.

"According to witnesses, the inmates were allowed to leave with authorization of the prison director ... to carry out instructions for revenge attacks using official vehicles and using guards' weapons for executions," office spokesman Ricardo Najera said at a news conference.

The director of the prison in Gomez Palacio in Durango state and three other officials were placed under a form of house arrest pending further investigation. No charges have yet been filed.

Prosecutors said the prison-based hit squad is suspected in three mass shootings, including the July 18 attack on a party in the city of Torreon, which is near Gomez Palacio. In that incident, gunmen fired indiscriminately into a crowd of mainly young people in a rented hall, killing 17 people, including women.

Police found more than 120 bullet casings at the scene, and Najera said tests matched those casings to four assault rifles assigned to guards at the prison.

Similar ballistics tests linked the guns to earlier killings at two bars in Torreon, the capital of northern Coahuila state, he said. At least 16 people were killed in those attacks on Feb. 1 and May 15, local media reported.

Najera blamed the killings on disputes between rival drug cartels. "Unfortunately, the criminals also carried out cowardly killings of innocent civilians, only to return to their cells," he said.

Coahuila and neighboring Durango are among several northern states that have seen a spike in drug-related violence that authorities attribute to a fight between the Gulf cartel and its former enforcers, known as the Zetas.

Mexico has long had a problem with investigating crimes, catching criminals and convicting people. Reports estimate less than 2 percent of crimes in Mexico result in prison sentences. But Sunday's revelation suggests that even putting cartel gunmen in prison may not prevent them from continuing to commit crimes.

Interior Secretary Francisco Blake said the revelation "can only be seen as a wake-up call for authorities to address, once again, the state of deterioration in many local law enforcement institutions ... we cannot allow this kind of thing to happen again."

Also Sunday, Mexican federal police announced the arrest of an alleged leading member of a drug gang blamed in recent killings and a car-bombing in the violence-ridden border city of Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas.

Police described Luis Vazquez Barragan, 39, as a top member of La Linea gang, the enforcement arm of the Juarez cartel, saying he received orders directly from cartel boss Vicente Carrillo Fuentes.

Vazquez Barragan allegedly organized payments, moved drugs and oversaw a system of safe houses in and around Ciudad Juarez.

Police said he held the same rank as fugitive gang leader Juan Pablo Ledezma, though Vazquez Barragan is not named on reward or most-wanted lists published by the Attorney General's Office, as Ledezma is.

La Linea has been blamed for a car bomb that killed three people July 15 in Ciudad Juarez and for two separate shootings March 13 that killed a U.S. consular employee and two other people connected to the consulate.

Police did not say when they caught Vazquez Barragan, but he was allegedly in possession of about a half-kilogram (pound) of cocaine and two guns.

His arrest led to a raid on a safe house where authorities detained four suspects and freed a kidnap victim.

Also Sunday, the Attorney General's Office said soldiers on patrol in Ciudad Madero in the border state of Tamaulipas seized an arsenal of about three dozen guns, 17 grenades and thousands of bullets in a house.

Elsewhere in Tamaulipas, police and prosecutors raided a lot full of truck-pulled tankers in the border city of Reynosa and seized two loaded with oil of a type sometimes stolen from the pipelines of the state-owned Petroleos Mexicanos. Nore than a dozen other tankers and freight containers were also seized.

Mexican drug cartels have allegedly become involved in increasingly sophisticated thefts of fuel and oil from Mexico's pipelines.

In the Pacific coast state of Guerrero, authorities reported Sunday they had found the bullet-ridden bodies of six men dumped in various locations, including three in or around the resort of Acapulco. Two of the dead men were identified as people kidnapped earlier in the month.

It's practically a daily ritual: Accused drug traffickers and assassins, shackled and bruised from beatings, are paraded before the news media to show that Mexico is winning its drug war. Once the television lights dim, however, about three-quarters of them are let go.

Even as President Felipe Calderon's government touts its arrest record, cases built by prosecutors and police under huge pressure to make swift captures unravel from lack of evidence. Innocent people are tortured into confessing. The guilty are set free, only to be hauled in again for other crimes. Sometimes, the drug cartels decide who gets arrested.

Records obtained by The Associated Press showed that the government arrested 226,667 drug suspects between December 2006 and September 2009, the most recent numbers available. Less than a quarter of that number were charged. Only 15 percent saw a verdict, and the Mexican attorney general's office won't say how many of those were guilty.

------

EDITOR'S NOTE -- This is one in an occasional series of reports by The Associated Press examining why -- four decades and $1 trillion after Richard Nixon declared war on drugs -- the U.S. and Mexico continue to fight a losing battle.

------

The judicial void is a key reason why Mexican cartels continue to deliver tons of marijuana, methamphetamines, heroin and cocaine onto U.S. streets.

"It in effect gives them impunity," U.S. Ambassador Carlos Pascual told the AP, "and allows them to be able to function in ways that can extend themselves into the United States."

------

Mexico's justice system is carried out largely in secret and has long been viciously corrupt. Add a drug war that Calderon intensified, and the system has been overrun. Nearly 25,000 people have died in the war to date, and the vast majority of their cases remain unsolved.

The AP obtained court documents and prison records restricted from the public and conducted dozens of interviews with suspects' relatives, lawyers, human rights groups and government officials to find out what happened after suspects were publicly paraded in key cartel murder cases.

In Ciudad Juarez, where a war between two cartels over trafficking routes killed a record 2,600 people in 2009, prosecutors filed 93 homicide cases that year and got 19 convictions, the AP found. Only five were for first-degree murder, court records show, and none came under federal statutes with higher penalties designed to prosecute the drug war.

"They never charge anyone with homicide because they don't have the evidence, they don't have proof," said Jorge Gonzalez, president of the public defenders association. "They just show them to the media to give the impression that they're solving cases."

Soldiers in Juarez routinely announce to the public that suspects have confessed to a shocking number of murders.

Hector Armando Alcibar Wong, known as "El Koreano," killed 15, they said. But a year after his August 2009 arrest, authorities don't even know where he is. Chihuahua state officials say they handed him over to federal authorities; the attorney general's office says it never had him.

Soldiers told the media in 2008 that Juan Pablo Castillo Lopez was tied to 23 killings. He was never charged with homicide and was freed from state prison less than a year later. The army quickly arrested him again, saying he killed two more people within three days. Nine months after that, he still doesn't face a homicide charge.

Oswaldo Munoz Gonzalez, known as "El Gonzo," admitted to killing 40 people, according to the joint police-army operation in Ciudad Juarez. His family says he was tortured into that confession. Eight months later, he hasn't been charged with a single homicide either.

Munoz was first detained in 2008 and accused of aggravated robbery but he was released after prosecutors failed to present enough evidence.

Two months after he was released, authorities say they nabbed Munoz during a traffic stop, and found drugs and guns in his truck.

His sister, Petra Munoz Gonzalez, says they're lying -- he was dragged from his home while his wife and two young daughters watched. She says her brother, a taxi driver and occasional bus driver with a third-grade education, does not drink or use drugs.

Munoz's family didn't know where he was until they saw him paraded on television days later, with guns and drugs in front of him.

"He told me, 'I never killed anyone,'" Petra Munoz said. "He said he confessed because he had been tortured. He told me they put a bag over his head so he couldn't breathe and gave him electric shocks down there (on his genitals) and beat him until he fell over in pain. Who would endure that?"

"I just ask that the truth be told," she added. "Why haven't they presented proof, or witnesses, or anything that incriminates him? It's been almost a year."

Chihuahua authorities say they can't discuss open cases. Mexico Attorney General Arturo Chavez declined several AP requests for comment.

The attorney general's records show the same pattern of catch and release in all states where Calderon's government sent federal police and soldiers to crush the cartels.

In Baja California, home to the border city of Tijuana, nearly 33,000 people were arrested but 24,000 were freed. In the northern state of Sinaloa -- the cradle of the powerful cartel by the same name -- more than 9,700 were detained, but 5,606 freed. In Tamaulipas, birthplace of the Gulf cartel, nearly 3,600 were detained while 2,083 were freed.

Calderon first launched his military assault in December 2006 in his home state of Michoacan, deploying thousands of troops shortly after a new cartel called La Familia rolled five severed heads onto a nightclub's dance floor.

Since then, federal forces have arrested more than 3,300 drug suspects. Nearly half have been released.

In 2008, drug traffickers in Michoacan lobbed hand grenades into a crowd celebrating Mexico's independence. Eight revelers died, including a 13-year-old boy, making it one of Mexico's highest-profile murder cases. Police and federal authorities arrested three suspects within 10 days. None of the men had criminal records. All three confessed.

But at least 16 people say the three men weren't even there.

The witnesses -- next-door neighbors, relatives, bar owners, waitresses, a corner store owner and a doctor -- told authorities they saw all three that night in Lazaro Cardenas, more than 300 miles from the colonial square in Morelia where the attacks occurred, according to interviews and statements obtained by the AP.

Neighbor Gloria Ortiz and her daughter, Selene, told the AP they had dinner with one of the men in his cramped living room. Juan Carlos Castro, a mechanic who loves to cook, invited them over for a favorite dish -- stewed pig's feet in chili sauce -- and discussed a menu for Selene's 15th birthday party, which Castro had offered to cater.

Edith Franco, a Lazaro Cardenas doctor, testified under oath that she had dinner with Julio Cesar Mondragon at her mother's taco restaurant that night.

Three days later, Castro's wife, Esperanza Fajardo, was told that gunmen had taken him away in a car. She reported a kidnapping to police.

Three days after that, Mondragon was kidnapped as he washed his car outside his house. His wife said she heard her husband scream for help, but by the time she rushed to the window he was gone.

Alfredo Rosas' girlfriend said he was abducted in a similar way two days later.

The next time the three women saw them, the men were being paraded in front of television cameras in Mexico City by federal police, who identified them as terrorists and members of the Zeta drug cartel.

Castro was cut and bruised. Mondragon's face was black-and-blue. Rosas, who was wearing a hospital robe, had five broken ribs and a black eye.

"At that moment, you cry, you scream. You feel impotent," Fajardo said. "I said, 'How is it possible that they are accusing him of something he didn't do?'"

Castro says he was beaten until he not only confessed, but gave them Mondragon's name as an accomplice.

"They showed me videos in which they were cutting someone's head off, and they told me they would cut me up finger by finger, arm by arm, and my family, too," Castro said in handwritten court testimony obtained by the AP. "I would repeat what they told me to say, and if I made a mistake, they would hit me."

Mondragon said in his court statement that his captors took him blindfolded to a spot where he heard what he thought were the screams of a man being burned alive. "Set him on fire!" Mondragon's captors shouted. He prayed he "would die quickly."

Instead, he said, his captors took him to a house and repeatedly dunked his head into a bucket of water, beat him with a rifle butt and hung him from a tree, singeing his ears with a lighter. Mondragon said he gave them Rosas' name.

Federal police say an anonymous phone tip then led them to a house in the Michoacan town of Apatzingan, a known stronghold for La Familia, where they found the three men tied up, blindfolded and whimpering.

The tip came days after the government accused La Familia of staging the grenade attack, and the cartel responded by hanging a banner claiming its innocence and vowing to find the killers.

Police say the battered men confessed and claimed allegiance to La Familia's biggest rival. They were flown blindfolded to Mexico City, still unaware who their captors were.

"I started to think, 'Could this be the government?'" Mondragon said in his statement. "'What if I tell them the truth, that I didn't do any of the things I've been talking about?' But I didn't say anything. I was afraid."

The attorney general's office had two secret witnesses who claimed Castro and Mondragon smuggled drugs and attacked police, but said nothing about the grenade attack. One witness was killed last year, said Rosas' attorney, Raul Espinoza de Los Monteras Santillan. The other, he said, admitted he never met the defendants.

In February, the prosecution's own expert dismissed as unreliable a blurry surveillance video that supposedly placed two of the suspects at the celebration.

A year after the arrests, an appeals judge dismissed charges of organized crime, terrorism and grenade possession against all three men. The confessions have been retracted, but homicide charges still stand.

The proceedings have been delayed because at least one of the three arresting officers failed to show up at the last eight hearings. The judge recently notified defense attorneys that two of the officers are being tried on federal charges in another state -- though they don't know what charges.

The government says it cannot comment on an ongoing trial.

Castro, Mondragon and Rosas remain in jail.

"I'm really disappointed in the government," witness Franco told the AP. "They didn't look for the culprits. They looked for someone to blame."

------

Even Mexico's president admitted the court system is inept recently as he touted a new judicial system that Mexico has begun to adopt.

"It fosters injustice, impunity and corruption," Calderon wrote on the presidential website. "We need a profound change and that's why we have begun an unprecedented effort to modernize and redesign our legal system."

That effort, with aid from the United States, started under a constitutional amendment passed by the legislature, approved by all 32 states and signed by Calderon in 2008.

Under the old system, defendants are presumed guilty until proven innocent, proceedings are carried out almost entirely in writing, and judges usually rubber-stamp whatever government prosecutors and investigators hand them. Without public scrutiny, mistaken arrests, bungled investigations and false confessions are commonplace.

With the reform, defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty; police must investigate crimes and collect evidence before making arrests; a panel of judges decides whether there is enough evidence for the case to proceed, and trials are argued orally in courts open to the public.

The law calls for the changeover to be completed by 2016. The U.S. Agency for International Development has provided training in forensics, interviewing and courtroom arguments to 550 Mexican prosecutors. Some 5,000 federal police officers have taken basic investigation courses, also with U.S. funding. The Obama administration is requesting $207 million in its 2011 budget for judicial and government reforms in Mexico.

The new system was piloted in Chihuahua state, home to Ciudad Juarez, in 2007 -- just before the Sinaloa and Juarez cartels began their bloody war to control drug routes into the United States. All Chihuahua prosecutors and judges were trained in the new techniques.

But even state prosecutors say the drug war has stymied the new system.

Soldiers, who under Mexican law can't do police work, routinely bring in evidence such as illegally obtained confessions that judges are forced to throw out.

"The numbers of arrests increased tremendously but the numbers of prosecutions virtually didn't change," noted Pascual, the U.S. ambassador.

Since the reform was implemented, 98 officials who had received training -- police investigators, forensic experts, prosecutors -- have been assassinated by gangs, said Carlos Gonzalez, spokesman for the Chihuahua attorney general's office.

Nobody has been arrested in any of those killings

WikiLeaks is currently in the news because its Afghan War logs comprise one of the largest and most controversial intelligence leaks to date. But while WikiLeaks is relatively new to the public, it is actually a product of a long-established culture. That culture has already had a banner-bearer; a quintessential exemplification of its values — The Pirate Bay. WikiLeaks is akin to The Pirate Bay, but for another purpose.
 

WikiLeaks disregards the letter of the law and grants political analysts and citizens new information, then defends that choice with an argument for a higher virtue: Freedom of information and knowledge. The founding figures behind WikiLeaks and The Pirate Bay each claim to place that value above all others — that, and a little bit of anti-establishment zeal.

At this point, its name is merely symbolic — a statement of philosophical association. WikiLeaks is not a wiki, but shares the same culture, along with The Pirate Bay, Linux, and the open-source movement. For decades, the members of this “hacker” community have espoused the free flow of information in a world without borders, where no institution, neither corporation nor government, could hinder independent thought and the democratization of knowledge.

The connections between WikiLeaks and The Pirate Bay are not merely conceptual. There are also more direct correlations. Both WikiLeaks and The Pirate Bay have been hosted by Swedish Internet service provider PRQ, which also hosted the website of insurgents in Chechnya who sought a publishing platform that would not represent any established state. It’s the Swiss bank of Internet providers, and a bastion of 21st century hacker values and individualism.

In The New Yorker’s detailed profile of WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange, it’s clear that he belongs to this tradition. He began his adult life as a computer hacker with no formal education. Though he did eventually attend college, he had nothing good to say of the experience. This was in part because his mother discouraged him from traditional education, fearing it might rob him of his individualism and will to learn. Today, it seems almost as if Assange is trying to live out the radical philosophies of Ayn Rand.

We all know the stories of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs — computer whizzes who dropped out of college because they had technological revolutions to tend to. Assange is in some ways cut from the same cloth, though his choice has not yet earned him dramatic wealth, and his commitment to openness is more radical.

But through his project, the tradition has reached the world stage in a whole new way. Computer hackers with this Internet-born, fundamentalist philosophy of information and individual entrepreneurship are not just dictating the terms of technology and digital entertainment, but of journalism, political discourse and military engagement.

WikiLeaks and The Pirate Bay are also similar in this regard: You can say what you will of the ethics of it all, but you have to admit it’s remarkable.

An advertisement for prepaid funerals stands over a cellphone hut on a residential street in Soweto, South Africa. Brian Bahr/Getty Images

Mobile phone use has exploded, and thanks to the new technology ‘tweet’ is a verb in everything from Swahili to Zulu

“As a result of how Blackberry data is managed and stored, in their current form, certain Blackberry applications allow people to misuse the service, causing serious social, judicial and national security repercussions,” UAE regulator said. Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail

United Arab Emirates, which actively censors websites considered harmful to conservative local values, seeks greater control over smart phone data

The US has condemned as "irresponsible" the leak of 90,000 military records, saying publication could threaten national security.

The documents released by the Wikileaks website include details of killings of Afghan civilians unreported until now.

Three news organisations had advance access to the records, which also show Nato concerns that Pakistan and Iran are helping the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Pakistan has denied claims its intelligence agency backed the group.

The Pakistani presidential spokeswoman, Farahnaz Ispahani, said the leaks might be an attempt to sabotage the new strategic dialogue between the US and Pakistan.

A spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai said he was "shocked" at the scale of the leaks, but thought that "most of this is not new".

Mr Karzai's office later said the documents "clearly support and verify Afghanistan's all-time position that success over terrorism does not come with fighting in Afghan villages, but by targeting its sanctuaries and financial and ideological sources across the borders".

The huge cache of classified papers - posted by Wikileaks as the Afghan War Diary - is one of the biggest leaks in US history. It was also given in advance to the New York Times, the Guardian and the German news magazine, Der Spiegel.

The founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, said he had no reason to doubt the reliability of the reports.

"When we publish material, what we say is: the document as we describe it is true," he said at a news conference in London.

"We publish CIA reports all the time. They are legitimate reports, but they don't mean the CIA is telling the truth."

Mr Assange said there was no one overarching revelation to come out of the cache.

"The real story of this material is that it's war - it's one damn thing after another," he said.

"It is the continuous small events, the continuous deaths of children, insurgents, allied forces, the maimed people. Search for the word 'amputation' in this material, or 'amputee', and there are dozens and dozens of references."

He compared the impact of the released material to the opening of the archives of the East German secret police, the Stasi.

Taliban-ISI meetings?

In a statement, US National Security Adviser Gen James Jones said such classified information "could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk".

He said the documents covered the period from January 2004 to December 2009, before President Barack Obama "announced a new strategy with a substantial increase in resources for Afghanistan".

But Mr Assange was sceptical, saying: "A new policy by Obama doesn't mean new practice by the US military."

He also said Wikileaks had "tried hard to make sure that this material does not put innocents at harm".

"All the material is over seven months old so is of no current operational consequence, even though it may be of very significant investigative consequence."

After being asked repeatedly by reporters whether he believed some of the incidents described in the documents constituted war crimes, Mr Assange said: "It is up to a court to decide, clearly, whether something is, in the end, a crime."

"That said, prima facie, there does appear to be evidence of war crimes in this material," he added.

He cited as an example an attack in June 2007 by a secret US special forces unit, Task Force 373, which used a Himars (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) to begin a raid on a compound where a senior al-Qaeda leader, Abu-Laith al-Libi, was thought to be hiding. Seven children died.

The Nato-led International Security Assistance Force acknowledged the deaths of the children at the time, but stated that coalition troops had attacked because of "nefarious activity" there.

The US said the leaks could put the lives of Nato and Afghan service personnel at risk

It did not mention they had targeted al-Libi nor used a Himars before any shots had been fired at them, and has not commented on the details included in the Wikileaks papers.

Pakistan's government, meanwhile, denied claims its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency backed the Taliban in the war in Afghanistan.

One of the leaked documents refers to an alleged meeting in December 2006 between insurgents and the former ISI chief, Lt Gen Hamid Gul, during which he claimed to have dispatched three men to Kabul to carry out attacks.

He dismissed the Wikileaks material as "pure fiction which is being sold as intelligence".

"It's not intelligence," Gen Gul, who ran the agency from 1987 to 1989, told the BBC. "It may have a financial angle to it but more than that it is not hardcore [intelligence]. I'm an old veteran. I know."

"It is all wrong. It's precisely as their intelligence regarding Saddam Hussein keeping weapons of mass destruction in his closet," he added. "This is all based on falsehood. That is why they are not winning, because they have no cause."

Pakistani officials have denied that Gen Gul still works for the ISI.

The reports also suggest:

• The Taliban has had access to portable heat-seeking missiles to shoot at aircraft
• A secret US special forces unit, Task Force 273, has been engaged on missions to "capture or kill" top insurgents listed on a Joint Priority Effects List (JPEL)
• Many civilian casualties - caused by Taliban roadside bombs and Nato missions that went wrong - have gone unreported
• Iran is engaged in an extensive covert campaign to arm, finance and equip the Taliban and Afghan warlords allied to al-Qaeda

'Civilian deaths'

The head of the Foreign Relations Committee in the US Senate said the leak came at a "critical stage" for US policy in the region.

"However illegally these documents came to light, they raise serious questions about the reality of America's policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan," Democratic Senator John Kerry said.

UK Foreign Secretary William Hague said he did not think the leaks would damage the international effort in Afghanistan.

Wikileaks says it delayed the release of about 15,000 reports from the archive as part of a "harm minimisation process demanded by our source".

The Guardian and the New York Times say they had no contact with the original source of the leak, but spent weeks cross-checking the information.

Earlier this year, Wikileaks posted a video on its website which it said showed the killings of civilians by a US military helicopter in Baghdad in 2007.

A US army intelligence analyst, Specialist Bradley Manning, is awaiting trial on charges including releasing classified information.

A former hacker, Adrian Lamo, said Spc Manning boasted to him about handing over military videos and 260,000 classified US embassy messages to Wikileaks.

Wikileaks has refused to identify its source for the video or the US military documents.

Calling their release a "criminal act", a Pentagon spokesman said the latest documents appeared to be classified as "secret" but not "top secret", and that a review would take "days if not weeks".

"We will be looking at them to try to determine the potential damage to lives of our service members and our coalition partners, whether they reveal sources and methods and any potential damage to national security," Col Dave Lapan said.

Meanwhile, Nato said it was investigating reports that as many as 45 civilians died in an air strike in Helmand province on Friday. The BBC spoke to villagers in Regey who said they witnessed the incident.

A Nato spokesman said international forces went to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties.

WikiLeaks just published secret documents related to the war between the U.S. and the Taliban in Afghanistan. The documents detail deals, armed conflicts, strategies, politics, intelligence operations and some casualties from 2004 and 2010, painting the most complete, publicly available picture of the Afghan War yet.

The event is in some ways comparable to the leak of the Pentagon Papers, a set of documents that provided a behind-the-scenes look at the American war in Vietnam. Those papers reached the public via major media outlets in 1971. At more than 90,000 reports, WikiLeaks’s Afghan War Diary is even more substantial. By some measures it is the biggest intelligence leak to date.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assage told UK newspaper The Guardian that the size of the leak is only one dimension of its significance:

This situation is different in that it’s not just more material and being pushed to a bigger audience and much sooner … but rather that people can give back. So people around the world who are reading this are able to comment on it and put it in context and understand the full situation. That is not something that has previously occurred. And that is something that can only be brought about as a result of the Internet.

Two months ago, mashable put WikiLeaks first in a list of innovative websites that could reshape the news. The site accepts submissions of confidential political or corporate documents, reviews them to make sure they’re accurate, then publishes them on the web for anyone to see. WikiLeaks has previously leaked e-mails from vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and a video of U.S. soldiers killing civilians.

Assage was careful to point out that the Afghan War Diary is comprised of old reports, not future military plans, so its usefulness to NATO’s enemies in the battlefield should be limited. The people able to make the most informed decisions about whether or not the release of information can endanger American interests or lives are those working inside the Pentagon, but those are the very people WikiLeaks is trying to keep accountable. The controversy of values is clear.

WikiLeaks is able to solicit submissions from all over the world while avoiding jurisdiction by operating in several countries at once — or none at all, depending on your interpretation of the situation. This wasn’t possible before the web. Now it is, and the implications for society are significant.

How the Leak Happened

The Afghan War Diary was simultaneously given to reporters from The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel several weeks in advance so those reporters could study the documents and provide context with their public release. It was also given to those three publications so that no one national government could censor it.

WikiLeaks removed data that could implicate its sources, but the U.S. military already has an alleged WikiLeaks source in custody: 22-year-old intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, who The Guardian says is suspected as the source of the video that depicted U.S. soldiers killing civilians. So far we’ve seen no evidence for or against any connection between the Afghan War Diary and Manning.

Politico reports that the White House released a critical statement in response to the leak, saying the U.S. “strongly condemns” the disclosure. The statement criticized WikiLeaks for not approaching the White House for comment or verification, and claimed that the bleak logs record events that took place before the Obama administration’s change in strategy.

What the Leak Includes

The three publications given early access to the reports have made a few similar observations about what they say. Foremost is that the situation in Afghanistan is bleaker than any of the governments involved would have you believe, particularly when it comes to collaboration between the U.S. and Pakistan.

Several reports either directly or indirectly implicate the ISI, a Pakistani intelligence agency, in aiding Taliban fighters. There are some suggestions in the reports that current or former members of the ISI have actually met with Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders to collaboratively organize attacks on American troops.

However, The New York Times notes that some of the reports on that subject come from Afghanistan intelligence, which has a negative relationship with Pakistan and a potential interest in damaging its reputation. Other reports detail NATO-ordered civilian killings, specifics as to why NATO progress has been slow at best, and other bleak pictures of the activities in the war.

Apart from the WikiLeaks website, you can find report specifics in an interactive map The Guardian produced to highlight 300 critical reports found in the leak.

Cocoa beans are dried in South Sulawesi, Indonesia. A London firm has bought up so much cocoa that candy makers are nervous.

To some, he is a real-life Willy Wonka. To others, he is a Bond-style villain bent on taking over the world’s supply of chocolate.

In a stroke, a hedge fund manager here named Anthony Ward has all but cornered the market in cocoa. By one estimate, he has bought enough to make more than five billion chocolate bars.

Chocolate lovers here are crying into their Cadbury wrappers — and rival traders are crying foul, saying Mr. Ward is stockpiling cocoa in a bid to drive up already high prices so he can sell later at a big profit. His activities have helped drive cocoa prices on the London market to a 30-year high.

Mr. Ward, 50, is not some rabid chocoholic, former employees say. He simply has a head for cocoa. And, through his private investment firm, Armajaro, he now controls a cache equal to 7 percent of annual cocoa production worldwide, a big enough chunk to sway prices.

“Globally, he is unmatched in his knowledge of cocoa,” said Tim Spencer, a former Armajaro executive.

Armajaro maintains offices in West Africa, helping Mr. Ward keep tabs on major cocoa crops. “We even have our own weather stations — our very own that no one else has in some parts of the world,” Mr. Ward, soft-spoken and tan, said in a video interview this year with a financial news service.

Now, traders here are buzzing that Mr. Ward has placed an audacious $1 billion bet in the London market for cocoa futures. This month, he bought 241,100 metric tons of beans, they say.

His play has some people up in arms. While some see it as a simple bet that cocoa prices will rise on falling supply, others say Mr. Ward has created a shortage of cocoa simply to drive up the price himself.

The German Cocoa Trade Association and others wrote an angry letter to the London exchange on which cocoa is traded, demanding that it take action against what the association characterized as a “manipulation.”

The British news media has christened Mr. Ward “Chocolate Finger,” a nod to the Bond villain Auric Goldfinger. And on Facebook, someone has created a “Choc Finger” page featuring Mr. Ward’s face superimposed on a pig that is bellying up to the trough.

The fear is that Mr. Ward will become the go-to source until the annual cocoa harvest, which starts in October. With candy makers starting to stock up for the holiday season, they may be forced to pay him ever-higher prices — and cocoa has already jumped 150 percent since 2008.

“The squeeze was really timed perfectly,” said Eugen Weinberg, an analyst at Commerzbank in Frankfurt.

Mr. Ward and his firm, which has not acknowledged buying the cocoa contracts, declined to comment for this article.

Attempts to corner a particular market come and go in the rough-and-tumble world of commodities trading. During the 1970s, Nelson Hunt and his brother, William, tried but failed to corner the world market in silver.

While Mr. Ward lords over the world of cocoa, he is a bit of a mystery outside of that universe. Former employees, acquaintances and peers say that, in person, he does not fit his villainous nickname, and characterize him as friendly and intelligent.

Despite rattling the markets with large investments, Mr. Ward prefers to keep a low profile.

After working as a motorcycle courier, Mr. Ward was introduced to commodities in 1979, when he became a trainee for the tea, rice, cocoa and rubber operations at the conglomerate Sime Darby.

He first made his mark in cocoa with a big bet in the mid-1990s, when he was at Phibro, then the commodity trading arm of Salomon Smith Barney.

Mr. Ward opened his own firm in 1998 with another founder, Richard Gower. Its name, Armajaro, is a mixture of their four children’s names.

Mr. Ward’s appetite for risk extends beyond the cocoa market. He is also an avid rally racer who once drove a red 1947 Allard sports car thousands of miles in a race from London to Cape Town. He plans to race in a similar rally in January in a 1971 Ford Escort.

His fellow driver will be Mark Solloway, who was badly injured in a crash involving Mr. Ward in 2002 in Poland. When Mr. Solloway ended up in a local hospital, a distraught Mr. Ward, who had been driving their car, arranged for a private jet to fly him to London for treatment.

“He’s the greatest and most generous person,” Mr. Solloway said.

Mr. Ward lives with his wife and two sons in a four-story red-brick town house in the upscale Mayfair district of London. A brisk, 15-minute walk away are Armajaro’s offices, housed in a Georgian mansion with marble floors, soaring ceilings and a courtyard.

At first, Armajaro focused solely on cocoa. Later, it started trading coffee and then other agricultural commodities.

Today, Armajaro manages more than $1.5 billion in assets, mostly in hedge funds. But through another business, it remains one of the world’s largest suppliers of cocoa. It has buying operations in the Ivory Coast, Indonesia and Ecuador.

By most accounts, Mr. Ward profited handsomely by orchestrating a similar cocoa squeeze in 2002. That move, which earned him his chocolate-themed nicknames, caught the attention of financial regulators here, but their findings were never made public.

This time, seeing an even bigger investment, some cocoa organizations complained to the exchange, threatening to take their trades elsewhere. In a letter, the exchange said its investigations had turned up “no evidence of abusive behavior.” A spokesman for the exchange declined to comment further.

In any case, chocolate lovers should not worry too much, analysts said. Cocoa accounts for only about 10 percent of the price of most ordinary chocolate bars.

The situation could change, however, if the next cocoa harvest falls short of expectations — or if Mr. Ward keeps buying.

“That really scares us. That he would double up the bet and buy more September contracts,” said a London cocoa trader who asked that his name not be used because he might want to do business with Armajaro in the future. Still, the trader seemed in awe of Mr. Ward’s play, adding: “If I had the guts and money, I would do that, too.”

BurstNET shuts down 70,000 blogs over terrorism scare. A hosting company shut down a platform, Blogetery, that had over 70,000 blogs. First it maintained the FBI had told it to, then admitted the agency had only asked for information on its owner, Alexander Yusupov. One of the blogs had allegedly contained Al-Qaeda-oriented terrorism information. The company said the terrorism issue was the last straw as the owner had broken to the TOS regarding copyright.

China now plans to "deanonymize" cell phone users. China is attempting to destroy all anonymity on the Internet. Week after week of this, I don't even know what more to say. The Chinese government is just wall-to-wall creeps.

The United States plans to "deanonymize" the Internet. Really? Really? Are you people doing this just to embarrass me? Saying "there's no difference between the U.S. and China" is stupid. But saying, "It looks like there's less and less difference" is, unfortunately, not.

Saudi arrested on the most ridiculous charge yet. My hand to G-d I thought I had seen every knuckle-headed "charge" a person could be brought up on. But the Saudis, bless their black little hearts, have raised the bar. For criticism of religious and political leaders in his country, Sheikh Mekhlef bin Dahham al-Shammari has been arrested on the charge of "annoying others." I swear to you I am not making that up. Just click the link. I mean, are the KSA's torture squads even trying anymore?

Turkish citizens hit the bricks to protest online censorship. Thank you, my Turkish brothers and sisters, for allowing me to end on a note of hope. Though the increasingly autocratic Turkish government is cinching down more and more on its people, those people aren't taking it lying down. Thousands of people took to the street. Down with Law #5651!

Recently, the (IRQR), received several new reports of arrests of queer Iranians in the city of Shiraz, Iran.

On Sunday, July 11, 2010, a private party in a suburb called Podonak was raided. The police lead the raid, accompanied by the volunteer moral militia (Basij) and revolutionary guard (Sepah). Reports vary, but we understand that between 17 and 19 people have been arrested and taken to the local intelligent service’s detention centre on Modares Boulevard

Their police files are labeled “Gang of Faggots in Shiraz” and their homes have been raided and personal belongings confiscated by the police. They are to be tried today, in both the Revolutionary and the General Courts, Shiraz.

Since the raid, we have been able to confirm the names of nine people who have been arrested and labeled as a “Gang of Faggots in Shiraz” and we do not have information about the rest of them.

We understand that the police are going to entrap more queers in Shiraz, Esfahan and Mashhad, and fear that more arrests might take place in the coming days. We advise Iranian queers to be extremely careful with their safety, and to be aware that phones in Iran can and are being tapped. Most queers in Shiraz have deleted their Yahoo IDs, profiles, facebook accounts and other cyber communication. We have heard rumors that a party has been raided in Esfahan, but have not yet confirmed this.

The Iranian authorities have a long record of arresting and torturing LGBTQ Iranians.

For example, in September 2003, in Shiraz, a group of men were arrested at a private party in one of the men’s houses. They were held in detention for several days, where, according to one of the men, police tortured them to obtain a confession. They were tried for “participation in a corrupt gathering” and fined.

In June 2004, also in Shiraz, police arranged meetings with men through internet chat rooms. Once arrested, the men were repeatedly beaten and tortured, and sentenced to 175 lashes, 100 administered immediately. Since their arrest, police have subjected the men to regular surveillance and periodic arrests.

On May 10, 2007, eighty-seven men were arrested and beaten by the police at a birthday party in Esfahan. The police turned off the lights, shot blanks from their guns, forced everyone to lie on the ground, then walked over to them and began beating them. The police then covered the guests’ heads with bags or blouses, forced them out into the street and pushed them with batons into a military transport. The people who witnessed the event on the street reported that the clothes of the arrested men were torn and that their faces were bleeding.

On July 8, 2010, Mohammad Mostafai, an Iranian lawyer announced that three of his four clients were cleared of sodomy charges, but one, an eighteen year old youth named Ebrahim Hamidi, was sentenced to be executed.

Also on June 18, 2010 we received reports from Iran regarding three more possible death sentences for homosexuality, one man receiving 74 lashes for his homosexual act and the murder of a 23 year old bisexual man by the Iranian security forces.

These many incidents are just some of the many examples that reveal the extent to which the walls of private homes in Iran are transparent and the halls of justice opaque. It also reveals that the authorities and Islamic government's respect for privacy and personal dignity is nonexistent in Iran.

We at IRQR call on the Iranian government to end these arrests of LGBQ Iranians and to respect the basic human rights of its citizens.