The world seems united behind the idea that Wikileaks hacked
dump of Stratfor emails was uninteresting or an embarrassment, and
I myself have not spend extended time studying the raw stuff out
there. Jack
Shafer thinks the emails “underwhelm” and
Talking Points Memo thinks the main takeaway is
“Stratfor keeps an entertaining glossary of
pseudo-militaristic terminology and disparaging nicknames of its
intelligence sources and competitors. But beyond that, there
haven’t been any major revelations from the documents.” The

Christian Science Monitor says that though

Stratfor says it generates its own intelligence for reports,
though it also relies heavily on open-source data collection. I’ve
read dozens of their reports over the years. I’ve found some wildly
speculative, others accurate but banal, and still others
intriguing. And while I’ve found some Stratfor analysis to be
flat wrong, and so perhaps harmful if conclusions are taken by
policymakers at face value…

Max Fisher at the
Atlantic thinks flat out that “Stratfor is a
joke” in his headline, “which appears to do little more than
combine banal corporate research with media-style freelance
researcher arrangements” and in fact has had its rep as superspies
illegitimately boosted by Wikileaks’ leaks.

Meanwhile, Greg Mills at the Nation has a
good collection of mini-bits and links on what’s there in the
released emails.

I did want to draw attention to a couple of revelations of at
least potential interest:

*The Stratfor folk seemed sure that Osama’s body was not dumped
at sea, as
Business Insider reports:

At 5:26 a.m. on May 2, the morning after Barack Obama announced
the successful raid on bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound,
Stratfor CEO George Friedman sent an email with the subject
“[alpha]
OBL“ that said: 

Reportedly, we took the body with us. Thank
goodness.

Fred Burton, Stratfor’s vice president for
intelligence, followed that up at 5:51 a.m. with an email
titled “[alpha]
Body bound for Dover, DE on CIA plane“ that said:

Than [sic] onward to the Armed
Forces Institute of Pathology in Bethesda.

At 1:36 p.m. Burton
replied to a thread named “Re: OBL’s corpse” with the
message: 

Body is Dover bound, should be here by
now.

That contradicts the official story that bin Laden’s body was
handled in accordance with Islamic tradition and released into the
sea from a U.S. Navy vessel.

*And much more relevant, as Obama gets
serious about war with Iran, some Stratfor folk think that

there is no more Iranian nuclear threat (though if you
read the whole thread, there is much internal debate and doubt on
this point):

On 11/7/11 7:54 AM, Benjamin Preisler wrote:

Code: IL701
Publication: for background
Attribution: none
Source Description – Confirmed Israeli Intelligence Agent
Source reliability: Still testing
Item credibility: untested
Source handler: Fred

Source was asked what he thought of reports that the
Israelis
were preparing a military offensive against Iran. Response:

I think this is a diversion. The Israelis already
destroyed
all the Iranian nuclear infrastructure on the ground weeks
ago. The current “let’s bomb Iran” campaign was ordered by
the
EU leaders to divert the public attention from their at home
financial problems. It plays also well for the US since
Pakistan, Russia and N. Korea are mentioned in the
report. 

The result of this campaign will be massive attacks on
Gaza
and strikes on Hezbollah in both Lebanon and Syria.

It is entirely possible and even probable that the superanalysts
at Stratfor are speculating beyond the evidence as much as any
blogger out there, and that their “confirmed Israeli intelligence
agent” is of no reliability or a fiction, but if one grants they
might have some reason to know what they are talking about, these
are interesting ideas to have in the public record.