[Infowarrior] - Stratfor Is a Joke and So Is Wikileaks for Taking It Seriously

[Richard Forno]

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/02/stratfor-is-a-joke-and-so-is-wikileaks-for-taking-them-seriously/253681/

Stratfor Is a Joke and So Is Wikileaks for Taking It Seriously
By Max Fisher

The corporate research firm has branded itself as a CIA-like "global intelligence" firm, but only Julian Assange and some over-paying clients are fooled.

On June 2, 2009, Anya Alfano of Stratfor, which describes itself as a private "global intelligence company," sent an email to a colleague requesting some global intelligence on a certain trans-national civilian group on behalf of a powerful international client. That email has now been released to the world, along with five million others like it, by global transparency group Wikileaks, thus revealing Stratfor's shadowy scheme. 

According to Anya Alfano's email, Stratfor's target was PETA, the animal rights group, and its client Coca-Cola. Their top secret mission was to find out "How many PETA supporters are there in Canada?" and other tantalizing global secrets that could only be secured through such top-secret means as calling PETA's press office or Googling it. Alfano concluded her chilling email, "I need all the information our talented interns can dig up by COB tomorrow."

"Stratfor is just The Economist a week later and several hundred times more expensive."

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The group has spent over a decade trying to convince the world that it is a for-hire, cutting-edge intel firm with tentacles everywhere. Before their marketing campaign fooled Anonymous, it fooled wealthy clients; before it fooled clients, it hooked a couple of reporters. A breathless October 15, 2001, Barron's cover story called Stratfor "a private quasi-CIA," the evidence for which appears to be this quote from Stratfor chief George Friedman: "The CIA has to spend thousands of dollars a month to have an agent in, say, Teheran or Peshawar to monitor local newspapers or political developments that we can find on the Internet within a few hours." In other words, they have Google. But Stratfor's first big break had come in 1999 with a spate of glowing articles such as this January piece in Time, which reported Stratfor's "striking" theory that the U.S. bombing of Iraq in December 1998 was "actually designed to mask a failed U.S.-backed coup." That theory, like so much of Stratfor's "intelligence," was discredited long ago.
This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/02/stratfor-is-a-joke-and-so-is-wikileaks-for-taking-it-seriously/253681/

Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.



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Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it.