The Wikileaks Question

[liminalOyster]

I'm sorry but have y'all heard the feces-smearing smear? How the fuck is this being "reported" as fact?

PS Chuck Schumer is a pig.

[RocketMan]

After Corbyn and Dianne Abbott forcefully demanded that Britain not extradite Assange, the ever-dependable MODERATES appeared and immediately set about undermining their own party leadership. Disgusting. Abbot was refreshingly blunt in parliament about the true motivations of this arrest.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/ ... tary-urged

More than 70 MPs and peers have written to Javid and the shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, urging them to focus attention on the earlier Swedish investigations that Assange would face should the case be resumed at the alleged victim’s request.

Abbott was criticised on Friday over an interview on the Today programme in which some backbencher Labour MPs said that she downplayed the allegations of sexual assault.
[...]
The parliamentarians’ letter is a pointed counter to Abbott’s comments earlier on Friday when she said Assange’s current detention was not about “the rape charges, serious as they are, it is about WikiLeaks and all of that embarrassing information about the activities of the American military and security services that was made public.”

The Guardian's framing is absurd. This is not a "pointed counter", it's an attempt at bait and switch.

I bet the letter was already written before Assange was arrested. Goddamn scripted charade.

[Grizzly]

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-martyrdom-of-julian-assange/
Chris Hedges

[Cordelia]

Hillary Clinton: Assange "Must Now Answer For What He Has Done"

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-12/hillary-clinton-assange-must-now-answer-what-he-has-done


"Hillary, I know you're lost in the throes of psychopathy, but the people of Libya would like a word..." ...

Hillary "can't we just drone strike Assange?" Clinton.

fwiw...video clip of Hillary sharing a laugh w/Moderator over Assange's arrest while Bill sits mutely.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeDqKxC1rkc


(Not that anyone here needs a reminder of her robust sense of humor.)


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2W8M7G8X68w

[JackRiddler]

.

Here we go, I thought I remembered this password claim was already advanced in 2010. Can anyone dig up a story from then? These things are not easy to search if you don't have specific non-generic terms. Google date range no longer works, by the way. The universe of spam moved into a vast new vacuum: bots now instantly generate copies of current big news stories dated many years in the past, so as to capture those searches as their clicks. Sick.

https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1116336550873317377

Edward Snowden ‏
@Snowden
The weakness of the US charge against Assange is shocking. The allegation he tried (and failed?) to help crack a password during their world-famous reporting has been public for nearly a decade: it is the count Obama's DOJ refused to charge, saying it endangered journalism.

[alloneword]

There was this (via Caitlin Johnstone):

..One revelation at Thursday’s session was that online chat logs found on Manning’s personal computer show he sought advice about cracking passwords from a chat user listed as “Nathaniel Frank,” but whom prosecutors have linked to an e-mail address used by Assange.

The user alleged to be Assange replied that he had access to “rainbow tables,” a type of data set that can be used to convert an encrypted password into plain text.

In the exchange prosecutors showed in the courtroom, Manning appeared to have sent Assange a “hash,” or encrypted, password. Assange said he’d passed it on to members of his team, but the exchange prosecutors showed did not indicate whether WikiLeaks ever actually helped Manning with the password.

That chat could be a critical one for the parallel criminal investigation the Justice Department is pursuing into Assange and WikiLeaks. If Assange gave Manning advice or assistance in breaking into computer systems, that could transform Assange’s role from a mere recipient of secret data to a conspirator in efforts to steal it.

https://www.politico.com/story/2011/12/ ... nate=false

e2a: Plus there's a ton of links (that I don't have time to get into right now) here: https://archive.org/details/2December20 ... it/page/n5

(That 'heavy.com' link upthread was mainly to save G a terabyte of bandwidth, BTW! )

[alloneword]

OK, disregard above link (archive.org only has a jpg image) the original is here (c/w clickable links).

From that there's a Sydney Morning Herald piece from Dec 2011 that states:

Newly released Department of Foreign Affairs documents show that on December 7 last year [2010], the Australian embassy in Washington confirmed the US Justice Department was conducting an ''active and vigorous inquiry into whether Julian Assange can be charged under US law, most likely the 1917 Espionage Act''.

Australian diplomats called on the Assistant Attorney-General for National Security, David Kris, to request ''advance warning of any public announcement of the results of US investigations or proposed actions''. Mr Kris replied he would take that ''reasonable'' request ''up the line''.

In a subsequent detailed assessment, the embassy observed that ''a central theme has been the question of whether WikiLeaks is a media organisation … The general view of expert commentators is that a prosecution could not be successful unless it showed in court that WikiLeaks was not a media organisation since the history of these cases has never seen a media outlet convicted for publication of leaked documents.''

Noting reports that the Justice Department was investigating alleged technical assistance provided to Private Manning, the embassy said: ''Evidence of such a conspiracy could assist prosecutors rebut claims that WikiLeaks was acting merely as a media organisation.''

There's also a Dec 2013 piece from Wired about the very 'Jabber' chat logs that (I'm assuming) are the subject of the indictment - leaked and now memory-holed?

That all demonstrates that this is not 'new' info.

WRT the DOJ decision not to charge, a WP piece from Nov 2013 states:

The Justice Department has all but concluded it will not bring charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing classified documents because government lawyers said they could not do so without also prosecuting U.S. news organizations and journalists, according to U.S. officials.

The officials stressed that a formal decision has not been made, and a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks remains impaneled, but they said there is little possibility of bringing a case against Assange, unless he is implicated in criminal activity other than releasing online top-secret military and diplomatic documents.

That last line is significant.

e2a: Aw, crap. All of this was in Greenwald's Intercept piece from a couple of days ago - if I'd read that first I'd have save some digging.

[alloneword]

As regards the chat transcripts, it's all here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... -E/pubhtml & http://usvmanning.org/

The specific one the 'new' indictment is based on ('curious eyes' / password cracking) is here: https://assets.documentcloud.org/docume ... pe-123.pdf (pages 5 & 6), as linked by 'Wired' - "a log of a chat that an Army forensics expert recovered from the unallocated space on Manning's computer".

-

Greenwald makes a key point:

The indictment deceitfully seeks to cast Assange’s efforts to help Manning maintain her anonymity as some sort of sinister hacking attack.

The Defense Department computer that Manning used to download the documents which she then furnished to WikiLeaks was likely running the Windows operating system. It had multiple user accounts on it, including an account to which Manning had legitimate access. Each account is protected by a password, and Windows computers store a file that contains a list of usernames and password “hashes,” or scrambled versions of the passwords. Only accounts designated as “administrator,” a designation Manning’s account lacked, have permission to access this file.

The indictment suggests that Manning, in order to access this password file, powered off her computer and then powered it back on, this time booting to a CD running the Linux operating system. From within Linux, she allegedly accessed this file full of password hashes. The indictment alleges that Assange agreed to try to crack one of these password hashes, which, if successful, would recover the original password. With the original password, Manning would be able to log directly into that other user’s account, which — as the indictment puts it — “would have made it more difficult for investigators to identify Manning as the source of disclosures of classified information.”

Assange appears to have been unsuccessful in cracking the password. The indictment alleges that “Assange indicated that he had been trying to crack the password by stating that he had ‘no luck so far.’”

Thus, even if one accepts all of the indictment’s claims as true, Assange was not trying to hack into new document files to which Manning had no access, but rather trying to help Manning avoid detection as a source. For that reason, the precedent that this case would set would be a devastating blow to investigative journalists and press freedom everywhere.

Greenwald also stated in that Intercept piece:

There are only two new events that explain today’s indictment of Assange: 1) The Trump administration from the start included authoritarian extremists such as Sessions and Pompeo who do not care in the slightest about press freedom and were determined to criminalize journalism against the U.S., and 2) With Ecuador about to withdraw its asylum protection, the U.S. government needed an excuse to prevent Assange from walking free.

William M. Arkin picks up on that point(1), highlighting a possible (probable?) motive behind the push... worth a read in full:

The core of my reporting – and my argument – is that WikiLeaks’ publishing of the so-called “Vault 7” trove of the CIA is what propelled the United States government to feel like it needed to take action against the organization. If you are not familiar with Vault 7, don’t feel bad. Most in the national security field aren’t either.

Up until the Vault 7 leaks, which were published by WikiLeaks in March 2017, the national security lawyers within the U.S. government had been hesitant to take on a journalistic entity, even one like WikiLeaks that looked so very different than The New York Times or NBC News. But then with WikiLeaks seeming cooperation (or at least servitude) to the Russian government in 2016, that very American mainstream media became more hostile to its now separated brethren, and the general view shifted within the intelligence community and the Justice Department that the organization was more vulnerable.

With Vault 7, WikiLeaks published almost 10,000 classified documents from the Center for Cyber Intelligence of the CIA, the covert hacking organization of the U.S. government. For a number of reasons – a new president in office, WikiLeaks’ prominence in the ongoing Trump collusion circus, and the obscureness of the very material WikiLeaks was publishing, Vault 7 received scant attention. But coming on the heels of massive leaks by Edward Snowden and a group called the Shadow Brokers just months earlier, and given the notoriety WikiLeaks had earned, Vault 7 was the straw that broke the governmental back. Not only was it an unprecedented penetration of the CIA, an organization that had evaded any breach of this type since the 1970’s, but it showed that all of the efforts of the U.S. government after Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden had failed to either deter or catch “millennial leakers.”

https://williamaarkin.wordpress.com/201 ... ustration/

[stickdog99]

...

The most fierce defenders of Assange come from two seemingly disparate ends of the ideological spectrum.

First are the fans of Donald Trump, who understand that the leaks of Hillary Clinton’s emails were a political neutron bomb that exploded under her campaign in the closing weeks, the ultimate oppo drop.

Joining them are the American Bernie Bros and the Glenn Greenwald demographic of America-can-do-no-good types who look at anything that weakens US influence in the world as a net positive. American political ideology is no longer a line, but a horseshoe, with the extremes looping toward one another in an asymptotic curve of edge-case crazy.

...

From There's a reason why Bernie bros and Trump supporters love Julian Assange equally

The Assange Set:

LOL. Can I play the same game?

The most fierce detractors of Assange come from two perfectly overlapping parts of the ideological spectrum.

First are the fans of Hillary Clinton, who have against all rationality been duped into believing that the leaks of Hillary Clinton’s emails were a political neutron bomb that exploded under her campaign in the closing weeks, the ultimate oppo drop.

Joining them are the centrist demographic of America-can-do-no-wrong types who believe that the dissemination of any true information with any potential to serve as a check on the most shocking excesses of US imperialism should be punishable by death. American centrist political ideology is no longer a line, but a line through the First Amendment.

[stickdog99]

Thanks, Jack....

Since no one replied to my post in the other JA thread, I'll repost here:



The psychological campaign against Julian Assange, its origins & Maintenance: Dr Lissa Johnson

Please donate to the Chelsea Manning defence fund - https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising... Please donate to the Julian Assange /Wikileaks defence fund - https://www.gofundme.com/julian-assan.... Joe Lauria, Editor in Chief at Consortium News (https://consortiumnews.com/) & Elizabeth Lea Vos Elizabeth Lea Vos, Journalist and Co-host and Co-founder of #Unity4J - https://twitter.com/ElizabethleaVos Dr Lissa Johnson, a clinical psychologist qualified in Media Studies, with a major in Sociology, and a member of the Australian Psychological Society Public Interest Advisory Group, has a longstanding interest in the impact of psychology and social issues. In 'The New Matilda', Dr Lissa Johnson has written five articles on 'The Psychology of Getting Julian Assange'. https://newmatilda.com/author/lissa-j... https://twitter.com/LissaKJohnson To read the whole Assange series: PART 1: The Psychology Of Getting Julian Assange: What’s Torture Got To Do With It? https://newmatilda.com/2019/02/19/psy... PART 2: The Psychology Of Getting Julian Assange: The Court Of Public Opinion And The Blood-Curdling Untold Story https://newmatilda.com/2019/02/25/psy... PART 3: The Psychology of Getting Julian Assange – Wikileaks and Russiagate: Trust Us, We’re The CIA https://newmatilda.com/2019/03/02/psy... PART 4: The Psychology Of Getting Julian Assange: Why Even Some Lefties Want To See Him Hang https://newmatilda.com/2019/03/15/the... PART 5: The Psychology Of Getting Julian Assange: War Propaganda 101 https://newmatilda.com/2019/03/25/the... Tim Canova, a Democrat running for Congress in California, opposite Debbie Wasserman Schulz - https://timcanova.com/ Peter B Collins, radio host and writer provides analysis on important national and international issues, and interviews political leaders, journalists, authors. https://www.peterbcollins.com/ Source video: #Unity4J 22.0 Online Vigil in support of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9zze...

Also, https://valtin2006.blogspot.com/ had been all over the torture game from the beginning (and I'll say with great humility) my help. HE FINALLY TOLD DAILYKOS TO GO FUCK THEMSELVES BECAUSE OF THE ENABLERS OF TORTURE AT DAYILYKOS .

Any idea why valtin seems to have closed up his entire blog?

[Belligerent Savant]

.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/ ... alism.html

Julian Assange Is Guilty Only of Revealing the Evil Soul of US Imperialism

Julian Assange was bundled away by British police after Lenin Moreno, the president of Ecuador, gave the green light for the expulsion of the Wikileaks publisher from the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Assange's arrest represents an abuse of power, highlighting not only how true journalism has now been banished in the West, but also how politicians, journalists, news agencies and think-tanks collude with each other to silence people like Julian Assange and his Wikileaks foundation who are a nuisance to US imperialism.

Assange is “guilty” of two “cardinal sins”: revealing US war crimes committed in Iraq and committing the unpardonable sin of publishing the emails of Clinton, Podesta and the Democratic National Committee, thereby revealing such chicanery in US domestic politics as the fraud committed against Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primaries.

These revelations among the many (Vault 7, Torture, Diplomatic cablograms), by Assange’s Wikileaks, these transgressions in the eyes of the US ruling elite, struck at the very foundations on which the edifice of “American exceptionalism” is built, namely, the democracy that is meant to be a light unto the world, and the “just wars” that flow from a missionary zeal to make the world safe for democracy. The media and politicians accordingly crow about the “beautiful missiles” and other high-tech weaponry that will be employed in the ensuing humanitarian interventions, while omitting to mention that the military-industrial complex that benefits so much from endless wars may be the very donors who fund the warmongering politicians into office, and that the warmongering editorial line of newspapers may be influenced by share portfolios of the editors themselves.

Releasing footage of US military personal laughing as they slaughter dozens of clearly unarmed Iraqis civilians from the distant safety of an Apache helicopter is one of the strongest ways of showing how false, artificial and propagandistic the concept of “humanitarian war” and “responsibility to protect” (R2P) is.

In today’s communication age, that footage, those images, that laughter, are a very powerful antidote against the lies we are daily fed by our media corporations.

The mainstream media will never tell us that the reason why Washington has been at war for half of the last two centuries is because of US imperialism. They will never tell us that the ceaseless interventions are driven by an insatiable greed for resources, or often enough by the simple desire to plunge a country into chaos if its recalcitrant leaders refuse to genuflect appropriately and show due respect.

That footage straightforwardly debunked all the thousands of accumulated hours of media propaganda that had been built up to convince us that Washington beneficently bombs countries in order to bring democracy and free the oppressed.

In the same way, by pulling back the curtain to show how the Democratic primaries were a farce, Wikileaks revealed how the concept of democracy in the United States is worn out and in fact now non-existent. The political parties are fed and controlled by donor money, and the accompanying media coverage can be bought, allowing for tens of millions of Americans to be fed on a steady diet of false news, lies and promises that will never be kept.

It becomes clear, reading the revelations published over the years by Wikileaks, that terms such as democracy and R2P are nothing more than excuses and justifications for the US to bomb whomever it wishes. The moneyed interests ensure the election into office of those who can be relied upon to look after the interests of the 1% at the expense of the 99%, all the while giving moral lectures to the rest of the world while ignoring the inherent double standards.

The mainstream media are tasked by the powers that be with marketing war in order to advance US foreign-policy objectives. Without the moral justification for war, it becomes more difficult to convince Americans and Europeans to send their sons to die thousands of miles away from home. It is straightforward Brainwashing 101: repeat a lie long enough, and people will start to believe it.

The only way the US sees to fix the problem is to silence the source and ignoring the consequences, even when we are talking about a journalist of international fame who has sought asylum in an embassy and has been confined there for seven years.

More at link.

[liminalOyster]

Did anyone else catch this episode?

Xeni Jardin
‏Verified account
@xeni
Follow Follow @xeni
More
That time I asked Glenn Greenwald on that board meeting conference call if Wikileaks’ Julian Assange was getting his money from Vladimir Putin with his help, and no one said anything and I never got a reply.

7:09 AM - 27 Feb 2019

with reply by Glenn:

Glenn Greenwald
‏
Verified account

@ggreenwald
Feb 28
More
Everyone on the Board - including DAN ELLSBERG - has said @Xeni has completely fabricated this. It never happened. People like @Thomas_Drake1 & @MalcolmNance re-tweeted it because they don't have the slightest concern for whether the accusations they spread are true or false.

and:

Rainey Reitman
‏@RaineyReitman
Feb 27
More
Replying to @xeni
I remember the last board meeting before you stepped back. I have no memory of you accusing Glenn of anything, and none of us would have sat silently if you had. In fact, the board pretty much never sits silently on anything.

and:

Trevor Timm
‏
Verified account

@trevortimm
Feb 27
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Xeni, I was there too. This did not happen. I’ve asked, and no one else remembers it either. Naturally, everyone would have spoken up immediately if you asked that, and Glenn would have—of course—forcefully denied it. Your tweet is just plain false and I hope you retract it.

[liminalOyster]

Julian Assange ‘was kicked out of Ecuador embassy for sharing photo of president eating a lobster in bed’ claim supporters
Assange is accused of leaking a picture of Ecuadorian premier Lenin Moreno dining on lobster in a luxury hotel room

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/8860603/j ... ent-photo/


Also

[liminalOyster]

Rafael Correa
✔
@MashiRafael
The greatest traitor in Ecuadorian and Latin American history, Lenin Moreno, allowed the British police to enter our embassy in London to arrest Assange.
Moreno is a corrupt man, but what he has done is a crime that humanity will never forget.

[cptmarginal]

I think it speaks volumes that when you type in "the intercept" on Google, the top suggestions include "the intercept bias" and "the intercept snopes"

Not to say that I agree with everything on that site, but they do remain pretty consistently in opposition to warmongering and surveillance. I have been reading Greenwald since 2004 and Scahill since he published the Blackwater book more than a decade ago.