WikiLeaks: Assange's internet link 'severed' by state actor

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Re: WikiLeaks: Assange's internet link 'severed' by state ac

Postby Sounder » Tue Oct 18, 2016 5:42 pm

mac wrote...
It pissed me off, (and really did shock me, frankly) to see that at RI, along with the still-completely-unfounded claim that he is a tool of Vladimir Putin.


I just laugh and figure it pretty well reflects the shill to information ratio of RI atm. Irony abounds.

Hillary improved from 48% to $49% between pre vote polling and official results in states with paper trails, in states with machine only results Hillary improved from 56% to 65%

So it's a-ok for Americans to manipulate the vote, we just get upset when furriners think they can mess with our game.

American duplicity, knowing no bounds, still can think of nothing better than to slander others.

The lies are becoming more barefaced by the day.

Fukin western exceptionalism.
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
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Re: WikiLeaks: Assange's internet link 'severed' by state ac

Postby MacCruiskeen » Tue Oct 18, 2016 6:14 pm

Sounder » Tue Oct 18, 2016 4:42 pm wrote:
Hillary improved from 48% to $49% between pre vote polling and official results in states with paper trails, in states with machine only results Hillary improved from 56% to 65%


Ffs. It's shameless. And this is top story at the BBC right now:

US election 2016: Stop whining, Obama tells Donald Trump

US President Barack Obama has told Donald Trump to "stop whining" as he rejected his claim that next month's White House election will be rigged.

He said Mr Trump's attempt to discredit a poll before it has even taken place was "unprecedented" for a US presidential candidate.

[...]

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37697594


("Unprecedented"! God forbid a candidate should say anything unprecedented!)

But I really recommend watching that 90-second BBC clip of Obama responding to Trump's claim that the vote will be rigged. (Can't embed it.) Not only is Obama's response both feeble and dishonest (no mention of the shitloads of evidence for fraud and manuipulation, not one word about any machines being involved in the election process); he is clearly flustered and lost for words. And worried about about making a claim that might be too blatantly or demonstrably untrue. (he is nothing if not a lawyer.)

He is also very obviously listening to his earpiece (in some desperation) and repeating the line he's being fed. That line itself is feeble and evasive. ("Er... Trump should stop whining... ...er, wait a minute.... er, he's not a tough guy like me... er, speak up, ffs.... he's a cissy... and oh yes, Trump loves Vladimir Putin... he wants to be his boyfriend... Next question! Tom, yes?" *

*Words to that effect :lol: - I'm barely exaggerating.
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Re: WikiLeaks: Assange's internet link 'severed' by state ac

Postby MacCruiskeen » Tue Oct 18, 2016 6:23 pm

Re: John Oliver et al:

Doug Henwood
‏@DougHenwood


one could and one should


Adam H. Johnson @adamjohnsonNYC

Between John Oliver RIPPING Stein & Trevor Noah MOCKING Bernie Bros one could accuse comedy TV of indulging in tedious gatekeeper liberalism.


(Thanks to Rory for the link to Doug Henwood's Twitter account, btw. Adam Johnson is another good guy who manages to make good use of that awful platform.)
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Re: WikiLeaks: Assange's internet link 'severed' by state ac

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Oct 18, 2016 6:39 pm

Fox News Loves WikiLeaks. Except When It Doesn’t.

Funny, the distinction seems to be whether the hack hit Hillary Clinton.
10/18/2016 02:56 pm ET | Updated 2 hours ago
JM Rieger

If you’ve been confused by Fox News’ coverage of leaked documents this year, you’re not alone.

Over the last three months, Eric Bolling, co-host of “The Five,” advocated suing outlets that publish leaked documents. At the same time, multiple Fox hosts have slammed the media for not covering hacks enough.

Sean Hannity applauded Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks for releasing hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. Bill O’Reilly praised Donald Trump for calling on Russia to hack into Clinton’s “missing emails” from her days as secretary of state.


But the network sang a different tune in 2010, after WikiLeaks released thousands of classified U.S. military documents.

“I believe we can go after him for espionage,” Megyn Kelly asserted at the time.

“People would like to hear the president get mad about this,” Steve Doocy said.

“That’s what I’d like to see: a little drone hit Assange,” O’Reilly declared.

It’s all very consistent.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/fox ... 54ce3568ae
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Re: WikiLeaks: Assange's internet link 'severed' by state ac

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Oct 18, 2016 11:25 pm

Ecuador says it cut WikiLeaks founder's internet over US election interference

Officials released a statement confirming that the government cut off internet access for Julian Assange following a raft of leaked emails targeting Democrats

Julian Assange’s internet access was cut off on Monday following a raft of leaked emails published by WikiLeaks.

Nicky Woolf in San Francisco

Tuesday 18 October 2016 19.40 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 18 October 2016 22.29 EDT

Ecuador has confirmed

Image

that it cut off internet access to Julian Assange, the founder of the whistleblowing site WikiLeaks, stating it believed he was using it to interfere in the US presidential election.


The move followed a raft of leaked emails published by WikiLeaks, including some from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) released just before the party’s convention in July, and more recently a cache of emails from the account of Hillary Clinton campaign adviser John Podesta.

On Tuesday, officials released a statement saying that the government of Ecuador “respects the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other states” and had cut off the internet access available to Assange because “in recent weeks, WikiLeaks has published a wealth of documents, impacting on the US election campaign”.

The statement also reaffirmed the asylum granted to Assange and reiterated its intention “to safeguard his life and physical integrity until he reaches a safe place”.

Assange’s internet access was cut off on Monday morning. It was not immediately clear who was responsible, though a tweet from the site’s official account claimed it had been “intentionally severed” by a “state party”.


It is not known who perpetrated the hacks that brought the emails to WikiLeaks. Assange’s organization styles itself a whistleblowing outfit and claims not to do or encourage any hacking itself.


Yet cybersecurity experts have linked the hack of the DNC emails to hackers tied to the Russian government, leading many – including Clinton’s campaign manager Robby Mook – to allege that Russia is using both hackers and Assange as tools to help rig the presidential election in favor of Donald Trump.

WikiLeaks was responsible for the release, in collaboration with several news organizations including the Guardian, of an explosive set of documents leaked by US army private Chelsea Manning, including a video titled Collateral Murder that showed a US air crew killing Iraqi civilians.

Assange is wanted for questioning in Sweden for two alleged sexual assaults in 2010 and is under investigation in the US under the Espionage Act. Manning, who leaked the information, is currently in military prison.

Assange has been encamped in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since being granted asylum in 2012.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/ ... net-access



From liberal beacon to a prop for Trump: what has happened to WikiLeaks?
A series of hacked emails appear designed to aid Donald Trump fight back against Hillary Clinton, while raising questions about Russian involvement

David Smith in Washington
Friday 14 October 2016 03.24 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 18 October 2016 11.42 EDT

How did WikiLeaks go from darling of the liberal left and scourge of American imperialism to apparent tool of Donald Trump’s divisive, incendiary presidential campaign?

Thursday brought another WikiLeaks dump of nearly 2,000 emails hacked from the Hillary Clinton campaign, allegedly by Russians. As usual, they were inside-the-beltway gossip rather than game-changing: the campaign tried to push back the Illinois primary, believing it would make life harder for moderate Republicans.

That has not stopped Trump trying to make hay from the leaked emails and deflect attention from allegations of sexual harassment against him. “Very little pick-up by the dishonest media of incredible information provided by WikiLeaks,” he tweeted on Wednesday. “So dishonest! Rigged system!”

Clinton’s speeches to Wall Street banks were apparently revealed in an email dump last Friday, just minutes after the release of a video in which Trump was caught boasting about groping women – timing that many felt was more than just chance. This follows a hack in July designed to embarrass Clinton on the eve of the Democratic National Convention.

Robert Mackey of The Intercept website wrote in August: “The WikiLeaks Twitter feed has started to look more like the stream of an opposition research firm working mainly to undermine Hillary Clinton than the updates of a non-partisan platform for whistleblowers.”

The seeming alliance between Trump and WikiLeaks is an astonishing role reversal. In 2010 it was lauded by transparency campaigners for releasing, in cooperation with publications including the Guardian, more than a quarter of a million classified cables from US embassies around the world. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange became a hero to many.

At the time, Republican politicians expressed outrage at WikiLeaks, but now some are seizing on its revelations as potential salvation for Trump’s ailing candidacy. Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, took part in a media conference call about an email that purportedly showed Clinton campaign mocking Catholics.

Conversely, liberal activists have expressed dismay at the hack of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s email account and the calculated timing of the release. Neil Sroka, spokesperson for the pressure group Democracy for America, said: “There is a huge difference between risotto recipes in John Podesta’s emails and the Pentagon Papers. The news value of these Podesta emails is fairly limited and the activist value is even less.”

Sroka added: “WikiLeaks is like the internet. It can be a force for good or a force for bad. Right now it is propping up a candidate running the most hateful campaign in modern times.”


'I'm a gentleman': Trump menaces Clinton with imposing presence and brash insults
Read more
Last week US intelligence officials blamed Russia for previous hacks. It is not yet known whether Podesta’s emails were hacked by the Russians, but US officials say the attack fits the same pattern. Russian president Vladimir Putin has denied the allegation.

Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook told reporters on Thursday: “The Department of Homeland Security took the unprecedented step of saying ... beyond any doubt that this hack and then the leaking of the emails was perpetrated by the Russian government for the purpose of intervening in the election and trying to affect the outcome in favor of Donald Trump. This is getting closer and closer to the Trump campaign itself.”

All of which raises the question: do Assange, Putin and Trump form a triangle? Are they in communication with each other or merely exploiting a coincidence of interests?

Trump has praised Putin and numerous links with Russia have emerged this year. But on Wednesday he denied any business interests beyond staging Miss Universe there. He has contradicted earlier statements about knowing Putin.

Assange was asked by Democracy Now earlier this year whether he prefers Clinton or Trump. “You’re asking me, do I prefer cholera or gonorrhea?” he replied. Sarah Harrison, a WikiLeaks editor, has said it would publish documents damaging to Trump if it had them. “It’s not that we’re choosing publications to pick a certain line,” she told Bloomberg.

But some observers argue that Assange’s war on Clinton is personal: she was secretary of state at the time of the diplomatic cables leak. Her perceived secrecy and hawkish foreign policy represents the antithesis of his anti-US imperialist worldview. The capricious, nihilistic, non-ideological Trump might seem like a kindred spirit by comparison.

Alina Polyakova, deputy director of the Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington, said: “My impression of Julian Assange is that he sees US hegemony in the international world order as the biggest problem facing us today. In his attempt to bring ‘transparency’, he ends up siding with the very regimes that deny transparency and human rights. That’s the irony of my enemy’s enemy is my friend.”

She added: “I think the Russian government is in fact using WikiLeaks: the connection seems pretty clear to me. Is the Trump campaign tied to WikiLeaks? That’s hard to say but I would be surprised if there’s no coordination.”

Russia has uncomfortable associations for WikiLeaks. In 2010 its point man there, Israel Shamir, was exposed as an antisemite and Holocaust denier. A website, israelshamir.com, carries numerous articles, one of which comments: “Ms Clinton decided to blame her spectacular lack of success on Putin, as well. If she were honest, she’d admit that she is unpopular, even among her own milieu.”

In an email, Shamir denied that Assange is coordinating with Russia. “The problem is that incredible revelations of emails are totally suppressed by the Clintonesque media,” he wrote. “Instead of discussing Clinton’s hate to ordinary Americans, Clinton’s order to assassinate Assange etc, you discuss whether Russians are involved. Shame!”

Assange remains holed up at the Ecuadorian embassy in London after claiming asylum, where he’s been for four years. Two women in Sweden have accused him of rape and other sexual offences, which he denies, citing a wider conspiracy. Assange has expressed fears that, if extradited to Sweden, he would be in danger of being sent to the US, where he thinks he could face the death penalty.

A former associate of Assange, who did not wish to be named, noted that there will be presidential elections in Ecuador in 2017 and the current leader, Rafael Correa, has stated that he will stand aside after 10 years in office. This could make Assange feel uncertain about his future protection.

“I believe he is basically hoping that Trump will be lenient on him,” the former associate said. “It’s about Julian Assange. I feel he’s just desperate and it’s a shame.”

The site has lost its halo in the eyes of what it used to be its core constituency, the ex-colleague added. “All the lefties were WikiLeaks softies. Now they are getting a different perspective. It’s obvious Julian Assange has lost his ability to be neutral.”

But others who know Assange defend him. Vaughan Smith, a journalist and former army officer who allowed the WikiLeaks founder to stay at his UK home for more than a year, said in a text message: “I don’t believe for a minute that Julian is liaising with Moscow.

“His whole thing is that he’s not supposed to know the identity of his sources, who leave material anonymously to protect themselves. He checks that it’s genuine and puts out as much of it as he can. That’s his compact with whistleblowers. As for Clinton and Trump? He hasn’t expressed a preference to me.”

And some Democratic voters have declined to criticise the leaks, which appear to show how the Clinton campaign worked to defeat Bernie Sanders in the primary elections. Dave Handy, a political organiser and Sanders supporter who will now vote for Clinton, said: “I wouldn’t say I’m glad but they’re doing a necessary thing.

“Even if it’s a ploy, it’s the truth. No one has denied this.”

He added: “The Democratic party and the Clinton campaign have colluded for the last two years to make sure she becomes the nominee and to make sure she becomes president. As someone who will vote for her, we can only pray this is not how she runs her administration.”
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/ ... s-happened
Last edited by seemslikeadream on Tue Oct 18, 2016 11:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: WikiLeaks: Assange's internet link 'severed' by state ac

Postby JackRiddler » Tue Oct 18, 2016 11:58 pm

The presumed Clinton ally, Donald Trump has done an invaluable service to the cause of election manipulation and fraud by diverting attention to the classic right-wing racist narrative of black people being over-counted. He talks about Mexicans and Carlos Slim and "vote fraud" and thus poisons the well. It's no different than his friend Alex Jones making legitimate discussion of 9/11 or anything else toxic by speaking of Obama's smell of sulfur. This fairy tale has been prepared for months, and it's an ancient stand-by for the Republicans. A Trump worker who spoke of "President Trump" parroted the line to me weeks ago that "they" will "steal the election by counting 110 out of 100 percent of the voters in the inner cities." It has absolutely zero to do with voting machines, media hegemony, counting fraud and other ways in which elections actually do get fixed. Keep in mind that he could talk about those matters and claim this is how it will be "stolen" from him, yet he chooses to ignore those and talk up the racist bullshit instead. Why do you think? The ideological rigging is always the most important component of any fraud, the mechanics are secondary, there are always loose ends but they don't matter once the aversion therapy has succeeded.
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Re: WikiLeaks: Assange's internet link 'severed' by state ac

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 19, 2016 12:08 am

brekin » Thu Sep 15, 2016 2:32 pm wrote:Image

Ha, ha! Another one of your American Freedom Fighters is a Russian Spy.

Edward Snowden Walked Right Into A Bizarre Alliance Between Wikileaks And Russia
http://www.businessinsider.com/snowden- ... sia-2013-8

One thing that has become clear as the Edward Snowden saga unfolds is that WikiLeaks and Russia have both been integral to the NSA leaker's arrival and extended stay in Moscow.

The Kremlin and the renegade publisher haven't overtly coordinated moves in regards to Snowden, but they certainly haven't been working against each other.
And the two had a shared history before Snowden arrived on June 23.
Here are a few notable details from a tentative timeline of Edward Snowden and his associates put together by former senior U.S. intelligence analyst Joshua Foust:

November 2, 2010: An official at the Center for Information Security of the FSB, Russia’s secret police, told the independent Russian news website LifeNews “It’s essential to remember that given the will and the relevant orders, [WikiLeaks] can be made inaccessible forever.”
December, 2010: Israel Shamir, a long-standing associate of Wikileaks traveled to Belarus, a close ally of Russia, in December with a cache of Wikileaks files. Belarussian authorities published the cables and cracked down, harshly, on pro-democracy activists.
April 17, 2012: Government-funded Russian TV station RT gives [WikiLeaks founder] Julian Assange his own talk show.
June 23, 2013:Izvestia, a [formerly] state-owned Russian newspaper, writes that Snowden's flight (paid for by WikiLeaks) was agreed coordinated with Russian authorities and intelligence services. (Wikileaks did not mention any Kremlin involvement in Snowden’s departure from Hong Kong in their press statements).

Ever since the 30-year-old ex-Booz Allen contractor got on a flight from Hong Kong to Moscow, Russia and WikiLeaks have been working parallel to each other.

On June 23, after the U.S. voided Snowden's passport while he was in Hong Kong, WikiLeaks tweeted that the organization "assisted Mr. Snowden's political asylum in a democratic country, travel papers ans [sic] safe exit from Hong Kong."
That was followed by the update that "Mr. Snowden is currently over Russian airspace accompanied by WikiLeaks legal advisors."
It turned out that Assange convinced Ecuador's consul in London to provide a travel document requesting that authorities allow Snowden to travel to Ecuador "for the purpose of political asylum." The country's president subsequently said the document was "completely invalid."

When Snowden arrived in Moscow with void travel papers, all signs suggest that Russia's domestic intelligence service (i.e. FSB) took control of him.
That day a radio host in Moscow "saw about 20 Russian officials, supposedly FSB agents, in suits, crowding around somebody in a restricted area of the airport," according to Anna Nemtsova of Foreign Policy.
WikiLeaks, meanwhile, insisted that Snowden was "not being 'debriefed' by the FSB."
Nevertheless, Snowden's FSB-linked Moscow lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, has been speaking for Snowden ever since Snowden accepted all offers for support and asylum on July 12.

On July 11 WikiLeaks had said that Snowden and it had "made sure that he cannot be meaningfully coersed [sic] by either the US or its rivals," even though that cannot be guaranteed when Russian intelligence is in play.
On Thursday Kucherena announced that Russia has granted Snowden temporary asylum — giving him "the same rights and freedoms possessed by [Russian] citizens" — and led him to a car that would take him to a "secure location."
WikiLeaks then announced that Sarah Harrison, Assange's closest advisor, "has remained with Mr. Snowden at all times to protect his safety and security, including during his exit from Hong Kong. They departed from the airport together in a taxi and are headed to a secure, confidential place."

And it tweeted this:

WikiLeaks’ spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson told RT that the "war" is "a war against secrecy ... a war for transparency, [and] a war for government accountability."
All in all, the organization's gratitude for those "who have helped to protect Mr. Snowden" — which primarily includes the FSB and Harrison — raises the question of how much the WikiLeaks and the Kremlin have coordinated during the Snowden saga.

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40019&p=611034&hilit=Israel+Shamir#p611034
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: WikiLeaks: Assange's internet link 'severed' by state ac

Postby 8bitagent » Wed Oct 19, 2016 12:24 am

So people who think Bill Clinton's pal Donald Trump is much beneath Hillary Clinton in terms of content.

Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton use Trumpian language to attack Hispanics :
Hillary in 2008 says we need a barrier to prevent "illegals" from coming in


Hillary says she is "adamantly against illegals", saying "illegals" are hurting American jobs


Bill Clinton in 1995 pretty much sounds like Trump when it comes to paranoia against "illegals"


Oh, and here's Hillary Clinton at once laughing off the very notion of gay rights, while vigorously defending the Bush decision to invade Iraq
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Re: WikiLeaks: Assange's internet link 'severed' by state ac

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 19, 2016 12:25 am

James O'Keefe Loses in Court Again

Image
By BRAD FRIEDMAN on 3/31/2015, 7:49pm PT
Rightwing grifter and convicted federal criminal James O'Keefe --- the guy who we exposed as having faked the infamous ACORN "pimp" hoax --- lost again in court this week.

O'Keefe, of course, is no stranger to being a loser. You'll recall the Republican scam-artist was also forced to pay $100,000 to a San Diego ACORN worker after illegally videotaping him as part of the phony "sting" scheme back in 2009.

This week's latest loss for the pretend "journalist" was in regard to his attempted 2010 wiretap conspiracy in the New Orleans office of then Democratic U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu...


As reported by Mother Jones tonight:

Conservative filmmaker and provocateur James O'Keefe has lost another legal battle: on Monday, a federal court in New Jersey dismissed a libel suit O'Keefe filed against legal news website MainJustice. In August 2013, MainJustice published an article referring to a 2010 incident in which O'Keefe and his associates posed as telephone technicians to gain access to the offices of then–Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.). O'Keefe and three others ultimately pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor charge of entering federal property under false pretenses.
In its original article, MainJustice said that O'Keefe was "apparently trying to bug" Landrieu's offices. After O'Keefe complained, the website changed the sentence to read that O'Keefe and his associates "were trying to tamper with Landrieu's phones." Still, O'Keefe sued, alleging that both characterizations were defamatory because they implied he had committed a felony. MainJustice countered that the language wasn't defamatory because the substance of the article was true, and the site accurately described the legal proceedings triggered by the episode.

The court didn't find O'Keefe's case convincing.
...
Mary Jacoby, editor-in-chief of MainJustice, writes in a statement:

This is an important First Amendment victory. It's a total, resounding defeat of O'Keefe's attempts to intimidate journalists into accepting his spin on the circumstances of his 2010 entry into Sen. Landrieu's offices under false pretenses.

Huh. So, O'Keefe tried to intimidate the journalists at MainJustice because they reported that he was "apparently trying to bug" Landrieu's office, even though they even quickly changed it to read "trying to tamper" with her phone lines after he complained.

Yet, he didn't bother to sue us --- or even complain --- when we wrote a 2010 article headlined "FBI: O'Keefe DID Plan a 'Wiretap Plot' to Secretly Record Employees of U.S. Senator".

http://bradblog.com/?p=11102#more-11102




Published on
Saturday, August 20, 2016
by Huffington Post
Are Donald Trump, Stephen Bannon, Roger Ailes Cooking Up a Post-Election Media Empire?
The frightening possibility of a Trump TV network combining the extremism of Breitbart News and Fox News
byPeter Dreier

For the past year, Stephen Bannon has merged Breitbart News with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, hoping to acquire more and more influence as a frequent Trump advisor and, as of this week, as the campaign’s CEO. (Photo: Reuters)
Before he became the chairman of Breitbart News, Stephen Bannon worked in the Mergers & Acquisitions Department at Goldman Sachs. For the past year, Bannon has merged Breitbart News with Donald Trump's presidential campaign, hoping to acquire more and more influence as a frequent Trump advisor and, as of this week, as the campaign's CEO.

This week Trump brought the Breitbart News chairman on to head his sputtering campaign despite the fact that Bannon has no experience working on, much less running, a national political campaign.
After Trump loses, don't be surprised to see Bannon join forces with Trump and Roger Ailes (the former Fox News guru deposed for engaging in sexual harassment of employees who recently jumped aboard Trump's sinking ship) to create a new right-wing media conglomerate -- Trump TV or Trump Media -- linking Breitbart News to a new cable network that will almost make Fox News look tame and responsible. Together, Trump, Ailes and Bannon would run their media empire to advance their common goals: gaining political influence, massaging their massive egos, moving the Republican Party further to the right, attacking Democrats and liberal ideas, and promoting a neo-fascist agenda combining xenophobia, racism, sexism, government-bashing, and anti-immigrant nativism.

Earlier this week, Trump hired Bannon as his campaign's chief executive. Bannon took over the right-wing website in 2012 after its founder, Andrew Breitbart, died of a heart attack at age 43. The media have had a difficult time explaining Bannon's operation just as it did when Breitbart ran the show. In its article, "What Is Breitbart News?," posted on Tuesday, the New York Times labeled it a "conservative-leaning news website." TheWashington Post called it "leading organ of the conservative media." Closer to the truth, Bloomberg News termed it a "crusading right-wing site."

Although it has the word "news" in its corporate name, Breitbart News is not a news-gathering enterprise. It does not report the news. It does not investigate the news. It does not comment on the news. It manufactures news.

Lies of omission

It is, as my colleague Christopher Martin and I explained in our 2010 Huffington Post article, "Why Does Anyone Take Andrew Breitbart Seriously?" (pasted below), a propaganda organization. To be even more straightforward, Breitbart News traffics in lies in order to advance its ultra-right wing agenda.

Through a careful analysis of the right-wing media echo chamber, Martin and I identified the key factors that Breitbart News uses to inject its manufactured scandals into the mainstream media. As we explained in our article, some of Breitbart's most famous crusades involved spreading lies about the community organizing group ACORN and lies about Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod, both designed to promote an ultra-conservative agenda and attack liberal institutions.

Under its founder, Breitbart News invented scandals and then fed them to Fox News. Ailes' operation broadcast these fake news stories, which the mainstream media picked up, giving them credibility they didn't deserve. Under Bannon, it has continued this tradition, advancing lies about Planned Parenthood and affiliating itself with various extremist causes.

Under its founder, Breitbart News invented scandals and then fed them to Fox News.
As Stephen Hayes observed, writing in the conservative Weekly Standard, bringing Bannon on board "means that Trump is choosing to end his campaign living in the alternate reality that Breitbart creates for him on a daily basis--where everything he does is the best, where everyone who questions him is an idiot or a traitor, where big rallies portend electoral victories, where House speaker Paul Ryan is the problem with modern conservatism, where polls that find him down are fixed, where elections he loses are rigged, where immigration and trade are the nation's most pressing issues, and where, truly, Trump alone can fix it all."

When Breitbart, who started the site in 2007 after learning the ropes from Matthew Drudge, found the truth inconvenient, he simply made stuff up and packaged it as "news." This included posting videos that were edited in ways that gave viewers a totally misleading view of what actually occurred. These weren't errors or mistakes. They were conscious lies. But the mainstream media never called them lies, but simply referred to these videos as "controversial" or similar words.

Bannon has continued his predecessor's modus operandi of spreading lies and manufacturing news, but taken it a step further, blatantly aligning itself the most extremist right-wing politicians.

Under Bannon, Breitbart News promoted a series of deceptively edited videos, manufactured by David Daleiden and his anti-choice group, the Center for Medical Progress, claiming - wrongly -- that Planned Parenthood profited from donated fetal tissue. This is part of Breitbart's ongoing crusade against Planned Parenthood, designed not only to destroy the pro-choice movement but also to undermine support for pro-choice Democrats, including Hillary Clinton. Breitbart News contributors have compared Planned Parenthood and doctors that perform abortions to Nazis, and claimed that contraceptives make women "unattractive and crazy."

In February, Breitbart News contributor Crystal Wright claimed that Planned Parenthood was engaged in "a sinister pattern of black genocide" by placing some of its clinics - which provide the full spectrum of medical services for women -- in predominately black neighborhoods. Another article in Breitbart News advised women subjected to online harassment to "just log off" and stop "screwing up the internet for men." In June, Breitbart a contributor Austin Ruse wrote a bizarre story fear-mongering that exposure to "contraceptives in drinking water" could be linked to "infertility among those who want to have babies," hoping to jump start a "a legal revolution against the pill."

Bannon worked for Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street investment bank, before embarking on a career as a right-wing propagandist, including producing documentary films lionizing Sarah Palin ("The Undefeated") and attacking the Occupy Wall Street movement ("Occupy Unmasked").

Since taking over the reins at Breitbart News in 2012, he has also tried his hand as a talk show provocateur, hosting the Breitbart News Daily on Sirius XM satellite radio channel, rising to the status of a third-rate Rush Limbaugh.

In 2014, Breitbart News promoted David Brat's successful Republican primary campaign against House majority leader Eric Cantor. Brat had almost no money, no political experience, and no name recognition, but Bannon's operation helped publicize Brat's uphill challenge to Cantor who, despite being a Tea Party favorite, wasn't reactionary enough for Bannon, who was friends with one of Brat's top campaign advisors. Breitbart News published dozens of pro-Brat and anti-Cantor articles that helped the little-known college professor topple the powerful Cantor.

If Bannon truly ran a news operation, he would have come to the defense of his employee, Michelle Fields, when she accused Corey Lewandowski, then Trump's campaign manager, of assaulting her after a news conference in Jupiter, Florida earlier this year.Serving as a virtual Trump surrogate, Bannon's Breitbart News has criticized Trump's Republican opponents and conservative critics, such as Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, whom Breitbart News called a "renegade Jew." (Given its penchant for lies and for anti-semitism, don't be surprised if Breitbart News soon republishes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the early 1900s forgery purporting to describe a Jewish plan for global domination that was a favorite of anti-semites Adolf Hitler and Henry Ford).

If Bannon truly ran a news operation, he would have come to the defense of his employee, Michelle Fields, when she accused Corey Lewandowski, then Trump's campaign manager, of assaulting her after a news conference in Jupiter, Florida earlier this year. Instead, when Trump backed Lewandowski and attacked Fields, Breitbart News published an article questioning Field's account. Not surprisingly, she soon quit, as did other Breitbart employees who, despite their common right-wing views, believed that even Bannon had gone too far.

This week Trump brought the Breitbart News chairman on to head his sputtering campaign despite the fact that Bannon has no experience working on, much less running, a national political campaign. The appointment was generally seen as evidence that Trump was unhappy with efforts by his previous campaign operatives to restrain the impulsive candidate's rants and rages. Bannon will remove the straightjacket (and the Teleprompter) and let the narcissistic Trump be Trump.

Bannon and Trump are a perfect fit, since Trump has consistently demonstrated his willingness to make stuff up if it can rile up his followers at rallies. And with Ailes joining the Trump campaign (helping him prepare for his debates with Hillary Clinton, among other tasks), it is clear that Trump will crawl even lower into the gutter of lies and character assassination to try to revive his faltering presidential run.

In our 2010 analysis, Martin and I looked closely at Breitbart's approach to manufacturing scandals and injecting them into the mainstream media. We can expect that formula -- which Breitbart pioneered, Fox News perfected, and Bannon took even further -- to be reflected in Trump's increasingly bizarre campaign between now and November, and to serve as the template for a new media operation that Trump, Ailes and Bannon may launch soon after Clinton delivers her inaugural address in January.

Why Does Anyone Take Andrew Breitbart Seriously?

By Peter Dreier and Christopher R. Martin

Huffington Post, July 23, 2010

Andrew Breitbart has a job to do and he does it well. Breitbart's job is to lie and distort the truth in order to advance a right-wing agenda, embarrass liberals, and undermine the Obama administration.

Breitbart is part of the "paranoid style" conservative echo chamber that includes Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Mark Levin, and thousands of lesser-known activists who use a combination of talk radio, Fox News, dozens of conservative publications, and the new media (emails, blogs, youtube, facebook) to mobilize support for their right-wing crusade.
Breitbart is not a journalist, researcher, or pundit. He is a propagandist. He operates several websites (BigGovernment, BigJournalism, and BigHollywood), where he and other right-wing bloggers spew their political pornography. The articles that appear on these websites are contemporary versions of what historian Richard Hofstadter called, in a famous 1964 essay, the "paranoid style" of American politics practiced by extreme conservatives.

Breitbart is part of the "paranoid style" conservative echo chamber that includes Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Mark Levin, and thousands of lesser-known activists who use a combination of talk radio, Fox News, dozens of conservative publications, and the new media (emails, blogs, youtube, facebook) to mobilize support for their right-wing crusade. Breitbart was a featured speaker at the Tea Party conference in Nashville in February and is a frequent guest on Fox News and right-wing TV and radio talk shows. His websites are propaganda vehicles for building a political movement. Unlike Fox News, he doesn't even pretend to be "fair and balanced." What much of America learned this week is that Andrew Breitbart is unfair and unbalanced.

What's distressing is not that Breitbart does his job, but that the mainstream media and mainstream politicians, including the Obama Administration, take him seriously. The recent dust-up over the firing of federal Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod, fueled by a doctored video on Breitbart's website, is only the latest example of this.

Since he began his website operation, Breitbart has sought to inject himself and his blogger network into the political debate. Sometimes he succeeds in getting wider attention, outside the right-wing silo, for the manufactured scandals he tries to provoke.

Breitbart's public visibility has peaked twice, according to an analysis of stories on the Lexis/Nexis database.

His first brush with fame occurred in September 2009, after he sponsored two young right-wing video activists -- Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe -- who visited 10 ACORN offices with a hidden video camera, claiming they were a prostitute and her friend, and tried to entrap the group's staff into giving them advice about buying a home to use for their prostitution ring. They recorded their stunt and selectively edited the tapes for release, later splicing in video footage of O'Keefe dressed up in an outlandish pimp costume (hat, sunglasses, fur coat, and walking stick) with racist overtones.

In fact, O'Keefe actually wore a dress shirt and slacks and identified himself as a student or friend of the young woman who was trying to protect her. Although O'Keefe's costume change was exposed months ago, the image has been imprinted in the media's mind. On Thursday, for example, the Associated Press story about Breitbart referred to O'Keefe and Giles as "actors posing as a prostitute and her pimp."

Breitbart not only defended the duo's actions but said that O'Keefe "is already well on his way to being one of the great journalists" and that he deserved a Pulitzer Prize. Breitbart has refused to release the original, unedited videos to any of the organizations investigating the ACORN controversy.

By the second week of September 2009, the ACORN videos became a national story. The videos were posted on Breitbart's website, then quickly became the top story on the Glenn Beck Show, the rest of Fox News, conservative talk radio (including Rush Limbaugh and his local counterparts), and CNN's Lou Dobbs Show. The controversy proved irresistible for the mainstream news media, which reported the story and broadcast clips of the videos many times. These video attacks compounded ACORN's problems, having been the victim of another manufactured scandal before and during the 2008 presidential campaign, when Karl Rove, John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Republican establishment falsely accused ACORN of "voter fraud."

The videos led many of ACORN's supporters to abandon the community organizing group. Soon after the video scandal surfaced in the mainstream media, the U.S. House of Representatives (including many Democrats who had worked with ACORN in the past) voted to de-fund the organization. In reality, less than 10 percent of ACORN's budget came from federal grants. But the symbolism of Congress' action was more important than the money itself. Congress' action provoked ACORN's cautious foundation funders to drop the group like a hot potato.

Within a few months, ACORN had been exonerated of wrongdoing by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the Brooklyn District Attorney's office, the Attorney General of California, and a federal judge, who ruled that the law barring the group's receipt of federal funds was unconstitutional. By then, however, it was too late. In April, ACORN laid off its entire staff and closed its offices in over 100 cities. (Meanwhile, last January O'Keefe was arrested for breaking into Sen. Mary Landrieu's New Orleans office in another "gotcha" attempt, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years of probation, a fine of $1,500 and 100 hours of community service).

(Full disclosure: We were a target of Breitbart's smear tactics after we published a study revealing the distorted media coverage of the manufactured ACORN controversy. That study, "How ACORN Was Framed: Political Controversy and Media Agenda Setting," was published in the September 2010 issue of Perspectives on Politics, a journal sponsored by the American Political Science Association).

Now Breitbart is back in the news as a result of another manufactured controversy, this one regarding Shirley Sherrod. He's gotten even more media attention for this episode than he did for his ACORN shenanigans. But the current firestorm has many of the same elements as the phony ACORN scandal that he cooked up last year.

First, Breitbart posted a highly doctored video on his website that was intended to put its target (both African Americans -- hardly a coincidence) in the worst possible light. Then the right-wing echo chamber -- including Fox News and the conservative blogosphere -- picked up Breitbart's ball and ran with it.

Next, the mainstream media -- the daily newspapers and the TV networks -- took the false accusations at face value and repeated them without bothering to verify and fact-check, acting more like stenographers than reporters. Finally, liberal groups like the NAACP and liberal politicians (in this case, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and the White House), wary of any controversy, jumped the gun and distanced themselves from the target of Breitbart's attacks -- by firing Sherrod before she even had an opportunity to explain or they bothered to investigate the accusations.

Breitbart has not only drawn attention to his manufactured scandals but also to himself.
Unlike the manufactured ACORN controversy, Breitbart's deception in the Sherrod "scandal" was uncovered quickly. A few media outlets, including CNN, dug a bit deeper, interviewed Sherrod, talked to the white farmers that Sherrod helped, reviewed the entire videotape of her speech to the NAACP in Georgia, and disclosed what should have been apparent from the beginning -- that what Sherrod actually said had no relationship to what Breitbart claimed she said. This led the White House, Vilsack, the NAACP and others to offer apologies and led Vilsack to offer Sherrod another job with the Department of Agriculture.

There are thousands of right-wing websites and bloggers, but so far Breitbart is the most successful, having mastered -- indeed, having helped create -- the new rules of political combat made possible by the internet and cable TV.

Breitbart has not only drawn attention to his manufactured scandals but also to himself. Time magazine, the New Yorker, Wired, Slate, and other publications have published profiles of Breitbart. These profiles could hardly be called fawning or even admiring. He comes across as an obnoxious, self-centered bully. But the profiles are nevertheless respectful, in the sense that they recognize his entrepreneurial skill and his take-no-prisoners attitude.

Both the right-wing echo chamber and the mainstream media don't quite know how to categorize Breitbart and what he does. The Philadelphia Daily News called him a "rising conservative media figure." The Washington Post called him a "conservative activist" and an "internet entrepreneur." NPR described him as a "conservative online news entrepreneur." The New York Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution called him a "blogger," while Newsday and the New Republic called him a "conservative blogger." The Las Vegas Review-Journal called him an "online muckraker and journalist." Sean Hannity, the San Francisco Chronicle, and ABC's "Good Morning America" labeled him a "publisher."

Regardless of what he's called, the Sherrod story is a good example of Breitbart's skill at what academics call "agenda-setting" and "framing". A week ago, hardly anyone had ever heard of Shirley Sherrod. Now, she's practically a household name. And many people who might not recognize her name at least know something of the story. In the past few days, almost every major news outlet has published or broadcast something about this story. That's the art of agenda-setting.

Americans not only know who Sherrod is, they already have an opinion about her, because they've been told that she's a black federal employee who used her position to discriminate against whites. That's the art of framing. Within a matter of hours, that frame burned through the media like prairie fire.

This process is easily verified by an examination of Lexis-Nexis. Among daily newspapers, the conservativeWashington Times has been the most likely to report Breitbart's propaganda over the past few years, followed by the Wall Street Journal. Among magazines, the conservative National Review, followed by the right-wingAmerican Spectator, have given Breitbart a megaphone. Among TV networks, Fox News has been Breitbart's best customer, followed by CNN.

Only after his smears are reported in the right-wing echo chamber do the mainstream media outlets pick it up, where it reaches a much wider audience. The mainstream media are mesmerized by the Tea Party and controversies that it and its political allies have stoked. In bending over backwards to cover the right wing -- and downplay comparable activities by liberal and progressive activists -- the reporters and editors have lost sight of the journalists' responsibilities not only to fact-check and verify, but also to provide context.

By now it is clear what Breitbart is selling. But the real question is why the mainstream media and Democratic politicians bought it. Breitbart is a con artist, but con artists succeed if consumers don't know they are being conned -- or don't care.

Given Breitbart's track record, why does anyone -- reporters and editors, foundations, advocacy groups, and elected officials -- take him seriously? Or why not at least treat him like an arm of the Tea Party, as a political activist, and a propagandist, not as a source of credible information?

Of course, Breitbart has offered no apology and is still trying to defend and justify his actions. Perhaps this most recent brouhaha will destroy Breitbart's credibility with the mainstream media and even with his right-wing colleagues at Fox News and elsewhere, who were embarrassed by the Sherrod mishap.

But it isn't only the mainstream media that needs to do some soul-searching. It is also the Obama Administration and, more broadly, liberal Democrats and liberal advocacy groups and foundations, who were too quick to distance themselves from ACORN and now Sherrod.

Clearly the Obama administration over-reacted, fearful, as a high-level official put it, of having the Sherrod story show up on Glenn Beck's Fox News show. Why they are so intimidated by Beck and his ilk is a mystery. Their followers, and those who identify with the Tea Party, represent no more than 15 percent of all voters. Moreover, very few of Beck's (or Limbaugh's) devotees would even consider voting for a Democrat. After all, they think Obama is a Marxist, a Muslim, and a foreigner. This is not a constituency that Obama and the Democrats are going to win over by appearing to be bipartisan or middle-of-the-road.

And if Obama and his inner circle are worried that Breitbart's and Beck's poison will spread from their base among right-wing zealots and start influencing "independent" and "swing" voters -- and thus help sway close elections toward Republican candidates -- then the best way to prevent that from happening is to fight back, and challenge their lies and distortions, not run away and hide, or capitulate, as they did by firing Van Jones, abandoning ACORN, and firing Shirley Sherrod.

Breitbart's credibility may or may not survive the Sherrod controversy. But what's important is whether responsible journalists -- as well as the Obama administration, the Democrats, and liberals and progressives -- learn some lessons from this episode.
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/ ... dia-empire
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Re: WikiLeaks: Assange's internet link 'severed' by state ac

Postby 8bitagent » Wed Oct 19, 2016 12:32 am

So if idiot George Zimmerman or Martin Skhreli happened to be at a hotel, and somehow filmed actual video of Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheney laughing over drinks how they plan
to launch world war 3....(and it was actual undoctored video/audio) I guess the Hillary shills would bring up who filmed it instead of what the video showed.

I love how the Hillary folks don't deny what's on the Project Veritas DNC exposed tape, nor Wikileaks hacks...they just attack the messenger.
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Re: WikiLeaks: Assange's internet link 'severed' by state ac

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 19, 2016 12:44 am

Project Veritas' Election 2016 'Rigging' Videos

James O'Keefe's Project Veritas released four 2016 election-related videos supposedly depicting rampant election fraud and misconduct on the part of Democrats.
Kim LaCapria

Oct 18, 2016

In October 2016, Project Veritas released a series of videos that they alleged demonstrated misconduct, impropriety, and vote "rigging" on the part of Hillary Clinton's campaign staff or other Democrats.

Project Veritas' YouTube channel displayed four "undercover" videos released in October 2016. The first video involved a surreptitiously recorded conversation between a covert operative for Project Veritas and Manhattan Board of Elections Commissioner Alan Schulkin at a December 2015 Christmas party. In the clip, Schulkin surmised voter ID would prevent voter fraud and discussed the possibility of "bussing" voters to polling places:


The second video purportedly evidenced a culture of ambient misogyny at a Clinton field office, framed as a response to concurrent controversy over lewd remarks by Donald Trump captured on tape in 2005:


The third video involved a hidden recording of Democratic candidate Russ Feingold opining that Hillary Clinton "might issue an executive order" pertaining to guns:


The fourth and most controversial video purportedly depicted evidence that the Clinton campaign's field offices were tampering with Republican voter registrations and conspiring to incite violence at Trump rallies:


The videos are, as is typical of O'Keefe's, work somewhat of a gish gallop, comprising a constellation of allegations and assertions that is virtually impossible to fact check without complete clips of the involved conversations. Nearly all the videos used stitched-together, out-of-context remarks with no indication of what occurred or what was discussed just before and after the included portions.

The framing and style of videos created by James O'Keefe is well known due to his 2009 "sting" in which he and accomplice Hannah Giles visited ACORN offices and pretended to be seeking advice on how to run an illegal business that included the use of underage girls in the sex trade. The resulting videos — which were edited to create the impression that O'Keefe and Giles had spoken to ACORN representatives while dressed as a pimp and prostitute — dealt that organization a mortal blow before reports publicizing the deception in O'Keefe's videos came to light:

How quickly things seem to fall apart when James O’Keefe is the person who put them together.

O’Keefe’s incriminating ACORN video was shown to have been heavily edited — neither he nor Hannah Giles were actually in pimp and prostitute get-up when they spoke to ACORN employees, for example — and no criminal prosecutions of ACORN followed. While not letting ACORN off the hook for showing “terrible judgment” in the video, California’s then-attorney general Jerry Brown noted after an investigation into the tapes and the organization that “sometimes a fuller truth is found on the cutting room floor.”

Those same words now seem applicable to the latest O’Keefe sting, which further tarnished NPR’s reputation and took down its CEO. As we noted, Glenn Beck’s conservative website, The Blaze, was first to report on discrepancies between the first edited eleven-and-a-half minute video released on the Project Veritas website and a later, unedited two-hour version ... NPR media reporter David Folkenflik addressed the dubious editing on Morning Edition and in a written report for NPR’s website. Folkenflik reviewed the two tapes himself, along with some NPR colleagues and outsiders like The Blaze’s editor-in-chief Scott Baker and Poynter’s Al Tompkins. They home in on many of the same problems The Blaze pointed out. And they basically come to the same conclusion: the tape is still a problem, but the impression it leaves is different.

“I tell my children there are two ways to lie,” Tompkins said. “One is to tell me something that didn’t happen, and the other is not to tell me something that did happen. I think they employed both techniques in this.”

Columbia Journalism Review reiterated assessments and warnings about O'Keefe's methods in a 2011 piece targeting NPR. That article noted that the time-consuming nature of fact-checking (particularly when source material is obscured) has led to Project Veritas efforts skating past cursory review:

From where might we have learned such a lesson? From video scandals past. Think ACORN and think Shirley Sherrod: job- and organization-crippling scandals in which the media blindly aided and abetted. Note too that O’Keefe is a political point-scorer, and here he is scoring from a soft-target.

We knew all of this, and yet few of us slowed down. Including the NPR brass.

It is telling that The Blaze was the first to point out O’Keefe’s context-stripping editing and that its report came out two days after O’Keefe’s video release. (And, yes, we at CJR should have been doing just as The Blaze did, searching for the discrepancies they found.) It’s telling because, as The Blaze showed, it takes time to vet a source.

We can only hope that, next time, the order in which this scandal and others like it have unfolded — headlines and drama first; reporting and vetting later — is reversed. Given the pattern that just repeated itself, we’re not optimistic.

The Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) organization also regularly covered O'Keefe's efforts in 2011 and 2012, lamenting how often the details of the purported stings are misreported before being thoroughly investigated:

USA Today has a long piece by Martha Moore about video hoax artist James O’Keefe’s NPR project. The article does a pretty good job of running down the deceptions in O’Keefe’s video. That’s good. This, however, is not:

... The sting’s impact was magnified by the quick dissemination-without-scrutiny that is a hallmark of Internet-driven media.

O’Keefe’s video has nothing to do with muckraking. And please don’t blame the Internet for the fact that journalists apparently can’t be bothered to care whether a source is reliable.

From NBC Nightly News, courtesy of reporter Lisa Myers:

We last saw O’Keefe wearing a fur coat and playing a pimp when he managed to take down the liberal group ACORN.

No we didn’t ... As should be well-known by now, O’Keefe used footage of himself wearing a “pimp” costume in his ACORN videos — but didn’t wear the ridiculous costume during his “undercover stings.” Media accounts acted as though he did, though — it took a lot of effort to get the New York Times to finally admit its errors on this count.

If reporters don’t know these facts, they’re bound to get fooled by O’Keefe again.

After his fraudulent ACORN videos, the lesson media should have learned about right-wing “citizen journalist” James O’Keefe is not to trust him. But they didn’t, so here we are with his NPR stunt, which allegedly shows NPR fundraiser Ron Schiller saying mean things about the Tea Party in a meeting with phony Muslim Brotherhood-connected donors.

But it appears that, once again, O’Keefe’s videos are not be what they seem. The first serious questions about them were raised on (I swear!) The Blaze, a Glenn Beck-affiliated website. Over there, Scott Baker pointed to a few problems. In one part of the video, NPR‘s Schiller seems to laugh about the phony Muslim group’s position on Sharia law. Baker says it’s out of context.

NPR has done at least two reports on the video. It’s not quite a Shirley Sherrod moment — where the right-wing video was edited to totally turn her message around — but it’s clear that things aren’t exactly what they first seemed. O’Keefe’s history should give media outlets serious reservations about taking him at face value on anything ... which goes to show you that the argument that the media is tilted to the left remains totally unconvincing.

As Exhibit A, look at James O’Keefe, who famously and proudly passed off his partner as a prostitute while secretly videotaping ACORN staffers. Who in the debate over O’Keefe’s work took the position that because the colleague was not actually a prostitute, the entire project was unethical and therefore all of his videotapes should be ignored? The actual objection to O’Keefe’s work was that he deceived the public — misleadingly editing his footage to create false impressions, including the popular delusion that O’Keefe had gone into ACORN offices wearing an outlandish Superfly costume. Nevertheless, he got overwhelmingly positive coverage from right-wing and centrist news outlets alike, with the result that his mendacious reporting had the successful result of helping to bring ACORN down.

In a 2011 op-ed, a Washington Post writer laid out the reasons why videos released by Project Veritas should initially sound numerous ethical alarms:

It is now clear that O’Keefe’s editing of the raw video from his interview with NPR’s top fundraiser, Ron Schiller, was selective and deceptive. The full extent of this distortion was exposed by a rising conservative Web site, the Blaze. O’Keefe’s final product excludes explanatory context, exaggerates Schiller’s tolerance for Islamist radicalism and attributes sentiments to Schiller that are actually quotes by others — all the hallmarks of a hit piece ... In this case, O’Keefe did not merely leave a false impression; he manufactured an elaborate, alluring lie.

Interest in the four current Project Veritas videos has run high on social media. Politico addressed them from the perspective of legality, such as whether Project Veritas violated the law in Florida by ostensibly not adhering to the state's wiretapping laws. The article also included a statement from Florida State Democratic Party spokesman Max Steele regarding the allegations about voter registrations:

According to Max Steele, a spokesman for the state Democratic Party, Mao or anyone else would lose their jobs for destroying voter-registration forms.

"Sexual assault and harassment, and destruction of voter registration forms, are serious offenses,” Steele said in a written statement. “There is no question that a staff member who engaged in this kind of behavior would be immediately terminated, and we are investigating the claims. Remarks like these do not represent the Florida Democratic Party and are completely inappropriate."

The video neither shows nor alleges that anyone affiliated with Clinton’s campaign actually destroyed any forms. Florida Democrats are surpassing Republicans in signing up voters. The state party has submitted 503,000 voter registration forms for this election; the state Republican Party only 60,000. The Florida Democratic Party said it trains volunteers on proper handling of the registration forms and tracks the documents to make sure none is destroyed in violation of state law.

Under state law, a “person may not knowingly destroy, mutilate, or deface a voter registration form or election ballot or obstruct or delay the delivery of a voter registration form or election ballot.” The third-degree felony carries a maximum five-year-prison term and $5,000 fine.

However, the video itself could constitute a third-degree felony on the part of Project Veritas because of Florida’s law that requires consent before someone is recorded. A person must give explicit consent or give “implied consent” by continuing to talk after being told he or she is being recorded.

As the piece noted, the "rigging" clip and claims of voter registration form destruction did not stem from activity surreptitiously recorded by Project Veritas. Instead, the viral video simply depicts an operative of the organization attempting to bait campaign workers into "admitting" they would tolerate such behavior. And as with the video involving Manhattan Board of Elections Commissioner Alan Schulkin, what Project Veritas' targets appeared to be doing was going along with leading questions rather than disputing them.

Schulkin himself provided comment to that effect, telling the New York Post that he had played along with a young woman he described as a "nuisance":

The videographer asked point-blank, “You think they should have voter ID in New York?”

Schulkin responded, “Voters? Yeah, they should ask for your ID. I think there is a lot of voter fraud.”

Schulkin defended his videotaped remarks, with slight revisions.

“I should have said ‘potential fraud’ instead of ‘fraud,’” he said.

But he reiterated his support for a voter ID requirement.

He recalled a woman asking him a lot of questions the night he was recorded.

“She was like a nuisance. I was just trying to placate her,” he said.

The October 2016 releases weren't Project Veritas' first foray into the 2016 elections and the political climate of the day. In March 2016, O'Keefe infamously bungled an attempted "investigation" by failing to hang up his phone after calling a target (thereby exposing his plot to those whom he was trying to fool). A May 2016 New Yorker article about that aborted sting examined the forces behind Project Veritas and the diminishing impact of deceptive videos:

Many O’Keefe operations, however, have fallen flat, including his repeated efforts to prove that voter-identity fraud is pervasive. “It seems like most of the fraud O’Keefe uncovers he commits himself,” Richard Hasen, a professor of election law at the University of California, Irvine, says. A sting aimed at Hillary Clinton was considered especially feeble. Veritas operatives persuaded a staffer at a rally to accept a Canadian citizen’s money in exchange for a Hillary T-shirt — a petty violation of the ban on foreign political contributions. Brian Fallon, the communications director for the Clinton campaign, says, “Project Veritas has been repeatedly caught trying to commit fraud, falsify identities, and break campaign-finance law. It is not surprising, given that their founder has already been convicted for efforts like this.”

It may be that the shock value of such exposés is diminishing. A recent series of sting videos against Planned Parenthood, created by a group called the Center for Medical Progress, involved deceptions so devious — including an attempt by undercover operatives to buy fetal tissue — that the campaign backfired. Pro-choice activists united in anger at the sting’s perpetrators, and a Texas grand jury cleared Planned Parenthood of wrongdoing and indicted the C.M.P.

Project Veritas' October 2016 election-related sting videos (embedded above) reveal tidbits of selectively and (likely deceptively edited) footage
absent of any context in which to evaluate them. Unless his organization releases the footage in full, undertaking a fair assessment of their veracity is all but impossible.

http://www.snopes.com/2016/10/18/projec ... on-videos/
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Re: WikiLeaks: Assange's internet link 'severed' by state ac

Postby Jerky » Wed Oct 19, 2016 1:03 am

I try to make some sense out of the swirl of revelations coming out about Wikileaks, Julian Assange, and Trump's former dirty trickster Roger Stone making thinly veiled threats to spill the beans on his former boss in order to save his own skin with this blog post, in which I honestly assess things as I see them as an outside (living in Canada, not voting in this election) observer.

http://dailydirtdiaspora.blogspot.ca/20 ... s-rat.html

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Re: WikiLeaks: Assange's internet link 'severed' by state ac

Postby 8bitagent » Wed Oct 19, 2016 3:49 am

SLAD, I absolutely hated what O'keefe did with ACORN. I think ACORN did a lot of good work for people.
And I have exhaustively for almost a decade written about the endless Putin horror show.

But just because I don't like O'keefe or Russia's government doesn't mean that the undercover Democratic operative video nor the Wikileaks revelations are fake.

In fact by attacking the messengers, it's almost an admission of their guilt.
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Re: WikiLeaks: Assange's internet link 'severed' by state ac

Postby RocketMan » Wed Oct 19, 2016 3:58 am

seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 19, 2016 7:08 am wrote:
brekin » Thu Sep 15, 2016 2:32 pm wrote:Image

Ha, ha! Another one of your American Freedom Fighters is a Russian Spy.

Edward Snowden Walked Right Into A Bizarre Alliance Between Wikileaks And Russia
http://www.businessinsider.com/snowden- ... sia-2013-8

One thing that has become clear as the Edward Snowden saga unfolds is that WikiLeaks and Russia have both been integral to the NSA leaker's arrival and extended stay in Moscow.

The Kremlin and the renegade publisher haven't overtly coordinated moves in regards to Snowden, but they certainly haven't been working against each other.
And the two had a shared history before Snowden arrived on June 23.
Here are a few notable details from a tentative timeline of Edward Snowden and his associates put together by former senior U.S. intelligence analyst Joshua Foust:

November 2, 2010: An official at the Center for Information Security of the FSB, Russia’s secret police, told the independent Russian news website LifeNews “It’s essential to remember that given the will and the relevant orders, [WikiLeaks] can be made inaccessible forever.”
December, 2010: Israel Shamir, a long-standing associate of Wikileaks traveled to Belarus, a close ally of Russia, in December with a cache of Wikileaks files. Belarussian authorities published the cables and cracked down, harshly, on pro-democracy activists.
April 17, 2012: Government-funded Russian TV station RT gives [WikiLeaks founder] Julian Assange his own talk show.
June 23, 2013:Izvestia, a [formerly] state-owned Russian newspaper, writes that Snowden's flight (paid for by WikiLeaks) was agreed coordinated with Russian authorities and intelligence services. (Wikileaks did not mention any Kremlin involvement in Snowden’s departure from Hong Kong in their press statements).

Ever since the 30-year-old ex-Booz Allen contractor got on a flight from Hong Kong to Moscow, Russia and WikiLeaks have been working parallel to each other.

On June 23, after the U.S. voided Snowden's passport while he was in Hong Kong, WikiLeaks tweeted that the organization "assisted Mr. Snowden's political asylum in a democratic country, travel papers ans [sic] safe exit from Hong Kong."
That was followed by the update that "Mr. Snowden is currently over Russian airspace accompanied by WikiLeaks legal advisors."
It turned out that Assange convinced Ecuador's consul in London to provide a travel document requesting that authorities allow Snowden to travel to Ecuador "for the purpose of political asylum." The country's president subsequently said the document was "completely invalid."

When Snowden arrived in Moscow with void travel papers, all signs suggest that Russia's domestic intelligence service (i.e. FSB) took control of him.
That day a radio host in Moscow "saw about 20 Russian officials, supposedly FSB agents, in suits, crowding around somebody in a restricted area of the airport," according to Anna Nemtsova of Foreign Policy.
WikiLeaks, meanwhile, insisted that Snowden was "not being 'debriefed' by the FSB."
Nevertheless, Snowden's FSB-linked Moscow lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, has been speaking for Snowden ever since Snowden accepted all offers for support and asylum on July 12.

On July 11 WikiLeaks had said that Snowden and it had "made sure that he cannot be meaningfully coersed [sic] by either the US or its rivals," even though that cannot be guaranteed when Russian intelligence is in play.
On Thursday Kucherena announced that Russia has granted Snowden temporary asylum — giving him "the same rights and freedoms possessed by [Russian] citizens" — and led him to a car that would take him to a "secure location."
WikiLeaks then announced that Sarah Harrison, Assange's closest advisor, "has remained with Mr. Snowden at all times to protect his safety and security, including during his exit from Hong Kong. They departed from the airport together in a taxi and are headed to a secure, confidential place."

And it tweeted this:

WikiLeaks’ spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson told RT that the "war" is "a war against secrecy ... a war for transparency, [and] a war for government accountability."
All in all, the organization's gratitude for those "who have helped to protect Mr. Snowden" — which primarily includes the FSB and Harrison — raises the question of how much the WikiLeaks and the Kremlin have coordinated during the Snowden saga.

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40019&p=611034&hilit=Israel+Shamir#p611034


The Kremlin and the renegade publisher haven't overtly coordinated moves in regards to Snowden, but they certainly haven't been working against each other.

Yup, that's the gist of it. :uncertain:

But go Hillary, whatever.

And we're treating Business Insider as a bona fide source now...? Ookay.
-I don't like hoodlums.
-That's just a word, Marlowe. We have that kind of world. Two wars gave it to us and we are going to keep it.
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Re: WikiLeaks: Assange's internet link 'severed' by state ac

Postby 8bitagent » Wed Oct 19, 2016 3:59 am

Jerky » Wed Oct 19, 2016 12:03 am wrote:I try to make some sense out of the swirl of revelations coming out about Wikileaks, Julian Assange, and Trump's former dirty trickster Roger Stone making thinly veiled threats to spill the beans on his former boss in order to save his own skin with this blog post, in which I honestly assess things as I see them as an outside (living in Canada, not voting in this election) observer.

http://dailydirtdiaspora.blogspot.ca/20 ... s-rat.html

Jerky


That link is broken, correct link revised here:
http://dailydirtdiaspora.blogspot.ca/20 ... ndons.html

I enjoyed the article, and I encourage everyone here to blog. I'm glad you praise Manning, I feel she has gotten rail roaded by a lot of the Democratic machine and some of the (corporate) left.
But I still don't agree that Manning is not worthy of praise. I mean how is Snowden somehow more worthy of praise? Snowden has by and large had free movement(protected by the same Russia the Democrats are now denouncing as behind the Wikileaks of Clinton) Chelsea Manning has no future, and is being driven to literal suicide by the Obama regime.

Seeing a lot of the Bernie left now falling for the Hillary kool aid, I'm glad Assange is still out there. The footage of US military murdering families and journalists still stands as one of the best chess moves
the anti war movement has made in modern history.
"Do you know who I am? I am the arm, and I sound like this..."-man from another place, twin peaks fire walk with me
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