There was a short-lived flurry of excitement yesterday when WikiLeaks began publishing emails that appear to have been hacked from the servers of Stratfor, a Texas-based "global intelligence" company.

"What we have discovered is a company that is a private intelligence Enron," WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange announced, claiming that the emails provide "a treasure trove of nasty details".

While it's quite possible that there may be evidence of some dodgy practices somewhere among the 5.5 million emails, I'm not gasping to find out. Along with many others who write about the Middle East, I have always regarded Stratfor as a bit of a joke. Its "intelligence" gathering is nothing special – much of it comes from published sources – and its analysis is often flaky. 

Max Fisher, writing for The Atlantic, draws a similar conclusion:

As a former recipient of their "INTEL REPORTS" (I assume someone at Stratfor signed me up for a trial subscription, which appeared in my inbox unsolicited), what I found was typically some combination of publicly available information and bland "analysis" that had already appeared in the previous day's New York Times. A friend who works in intelligence once joked that Stratfor is just The Economist a week later and several hundred times more expensive. As of 2001, a Stratfor subscription could cost up to $40,000 per year.

Whatever you think of its output, though, Stratfor (short for "strategic forecasting") is clearly very good at marketing itself. It claims to have 300,000 subscribers and many of these are large corporate clients that have either bought into its mystique or simply can't be bothered to search Google for themselves.

Unfortunately, WikiLeaks seems to have swallowed the mystique too, imagining that it's a privatised version of the CIA – which it is not.

The reality becomes clearer when you learn from Twitter that a non-Arabic-speaking Stratfor "agent" was spotted in Cairo asking the way to Tahrir Square.

Stratfor's man in Cairo speaks no Arabic, had never been to Egypt before, had to ask for directions to Tahrir Square. #wikileaks #gifiles

— rcrsv (@rcrsv) February 28, 2012

In one of the leaked emails, a major in Israel's military intelligence is found informing Stratfor that "Yemen will be completely out of water in eight years". Asked if this is Israel's own assessement of the situation, the major replies that he read it on Wikipedia but then, on reflection, suggests that it can be attributed to published "studies".

In another email, Coca-Cola wants to know about PETA, the animal rights group, in case it takes action against sponsors of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. Coca-Cola has asked Stratfor a few basic questions, such as how many members PETA has in Canada and how many attacks it has carried out there. Stratfor's reponse is to put interns on the case. "I need all the information our talented interns can dig up by COB [close of business] tomorrow," an internal memo says.

Last December, Strafor published a report on Syria which made the contentious assertion:

"Most of the opposition's more serious claims have turned out to be grossly exaggerated or simply untrue ..."

This was eagerly latched onto by sympathisers of the Assad regime and was later cited in an article by Aisling Byrne (which I critiqued at the time). But the credibility of Stratfor's report was somewhat dented by the elementary mistake of describing two senior figures in the Assad regime as Sunni Muslims. A correction has since been posted at the end of the report saying that they are in fact Alawites.