Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land.

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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Feb 04, 2018 11:07 am

GET YOUR LESSONS IN HIGHJACKING THREADS RIGHT HERE

why would ANYONE want to do that? :roll:

no need to reply to that we ALL know what is going on here

The Syrian thread is so lonely


Come the fuck on, AD. You're trolling, I get it. But try harder. Going to bat for poorly researched, brazenly mendacious shite like her al-Qaeda helmetchoppers guff just makes you look bad and undermines your already weakened brand. Shitpost harder!

Rory


Takfiri head choppers

Sounder


Projection is a peach isn't it?

Harvey
Last edited by seemslikeadream on Sun Feb 04, 2018 11:26 am, 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: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby dada » Sun Feb 04, 2018 11:25 am

I'm in no position to judge the white helmets.

What I am in a position to judge is the information war about them. My judgement is that the pro-white helmet side is losing. The opposing side has higher quality writing, the appearance of credibility, and an aura of objectivity that the pro-side lacks.

Just my opinion. Doesn't convince me of anything, pro or con.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Feb 04, 2018 11:27 am

TAKE IT TO THE SYRAIN THREAD !!!


128 pages how could anyone forget this thread?

It's not like there is a thread discussing Syria

Never mind no one here forgot about this thread

US troops surround Syria on the eve of invasion?
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=33717&p=647718&hilit=SYRIA#p647718


or should I ask Womby to just change the name of this thread to

Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Syria!
Last edited by seemslikeadream on Sun Feb 04, 2018 11:37 am, 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: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby Jerky » Sun Feb 04, 2018 11:37 am

Projection is a peach isn't it?

Harvey
[/quote]

ROTFLMAOPIMGDP!

It sho nuff is, Harvey... it sho nuff is.

J.
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Feb 04, 2018 11:41 am

seemslikeadream » Fri Nov 24, 2017 8:36 pm wrote:
Morty » Fri Nov 24, 2017 8:15 pm
There was precisely NO COLLABORATION between Trump Jr and Assange. Assange was propositioning Trump, TO NO AVAIL. No tax return "leaks," no posting as Australian ambassador to US.


Barrett Brown DISAGREES with you

As Brown pointed out in another tweet, it was all-caps exasperating that Assange was in this case “complaining about ‘slander’ of being pro-Trump IN THE ACTUAL COURSE OF COLLABORATING WITH TRUMP.”



“Plainly,” he observed with bitterness, “the prospect of a Clinton in the White House was such an unimaginable nightmare scenario that all normal standards of truth and morality became moot and it became necessary to get people like Sebastian Gorka into the White House to establish order.”


YEA SEBASTIAN GORKA A FULL BLOWN NAZI
Image
Sebastian Gorka Made Nazi-Linked Vitezi Rend ‘Proud’ by Wearing Its Medal
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/seba ... ts-n742851


Image

Julian Assange’s Hatred of Hillary Clinton Was No Secret. His Advice to Donald Trump Was.

Robert MackeyNovember 15 2017, 1:09 p.m.
Last Updated: Friday, Nov. 17, 9:55 a.m.

The revelation that WikiLeaks secretly offered help to Donald Trump’s campaign, in a series of private Twitter messages sent to the candidate’s son Donald Trump Jr., gave ammunition to the group’s many detractors and also sparked anger from some longtime supporters of the organization and its founder, Julian Assange.

One of the most high-profile dissenters was journalist Barrett Brown, whose crowdsourced investigations of hacked corporate documents later posted on WikiLeaks led to a prison sentence.

Brown had a visceral reaction to the news, first reported by The Atlantic, that WikiLeaks had been advising the Trump campaign. In a series of tweets and Facebook videos, Brown accused Assange of having compromised “the movement” to expose corporate and government wrongdoing by acting as a covert political operative.

Brown explained that he had defended WikiLeaks for releasing emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee, “because it was an appropriate thing for a transparency org to do.” But, he added, “working with an authoritarian would-be leader to deceive the public is indefensible and disgusting.”

He was particularly outraged by an Oct. 21, 2016 message, in which Assange had appealed to Trump Jr. to let WikiLeaks publish one or more of his father’s tax returns in order to make his group’s attacks on Hillary Clinton seem less biased. “If we publish them it will dramatically improve the perception of our impartiality,” the Assange-controlled @Wikileaks account suggested. “That means that the vast amount of stuff that we are publishing on Clinton will have much higher impact, because it won’t be perceived as coming from a ‘pro-Trump’ ‘pro-Russia’ source, which the Clinton campaign is constantly slandering us with.”


A screenshot of a direct message from the WikiLeaks Twitter account to Donald Trump Jr.

As Brown pointed out in another tweet, it was all-caps exasperating that Assange was in this case “complaining about ‘slander’ of being pro-Trump IN THE ACTUAL COURSE OF COLLABORATING WITH TRUMP.”

The journalist, an Intercept contributor, whose work had been championed by WikiLeaks, also shared a link to a Reddit AMA conducted two days after the election in which WikiLeaks staff, including Assange’s longtime collaborator Sarah Harrison, had denied point-blank that they had collaborated with the Trump campaign.



“The allegations that we have colluded with Trump, or any other candidate for that matter, or with Russia, are just groundless and false,” the staffers wrote then. “We were not publishing with a goal to get any specific candidate elected.”

It is not surprising that Brown felt personally betrayed by Assange, since, as he explained on Facebook Tuesday night, “I went to prison because of my support for WikiLeaks.” Specifically, Brown said, the charges against him were related to his role in “operations to identify and punish members of the government and members of private companies that had been exposed by Anonymous hackers of my acquaintance, via email hacks, as having conspired to go after Assange, to go after WikiLeaks.”

That sort of activism, dedicated to making public secret wrongdoing, Brown argued, is very different from “colluding with an authoritarian presidential campaign backed by actual Nazis while publicly denying it.”


“Plainly,” he observed with bitterness, “the prospect of a Clinton in the White House was such an unimaginable nightmare scenario that all normal standards of truth and morality became moot and it became necessary to get people like Sebastian Gorka into the White House to establish order.”

Before his private messages to Trump Jr. were leaked, Assange himself had categorically denied that he or WikiLeaks had been attacking Hillary Clinton to help elect Donald Trump. “This is not due to a personal desire to influence the outcome of the election,” he wrote in a statement released on November 8 as Americans went to the polls.

Even though Assange had by then transformed the WikiLeaks Twitter feed into a vehicle for smearing Clinton, he insisted that his work was journalistic in nature. “The right to receive and impart true information is the guiding principle of WikiLeaks — an organization that has a staff and organizational mission far beyond myself,” Assange wrote. “Millions of Americans have pored over the leaks and passed on their citations to each other and to us,” he added. “It is an open model of journalism that gatekeepers are uncomfortable with, but which is perfectly harmonious with the First Amendment.”

The same morning, WikiLeaks tweeted an attack on Clinton for not having driven her own car during her decades of public service.



For Brown, and others who have been critical of Assange for using the platform of WikiLeaks to fight his own political and personal battles, his secret communication with the Trump campaign was damning because it revealed that he had been functioning more like a freelance political operative, doling out strategy and advice, than a journalist interested in obtaining and publishing information, concerned only with its accuracy.

James Ball, a former WikiLeaks volunteer who has described the difficulty of working for someone who lies so much, was also appalled by one post-election message to Trump Jr., in which WikiLeaks suggested that, as a form of payback, it would be “helpful for your dad to suggest that Australia appoint Assange ambassador to DC.”


That request for payback, on December 16, 2016, came three weeks after Trump’s father had called on the British government to make his friend Nigel Farage its ambassador. “This should be it, game over, end of it, for anyone who tries to suggest Assange looks out for anyone except himself,” Ball observed on Twitter. “That’s his cause, and plenty of good people have been played, badly.”

There was also criticism from journalists like Chris Hayes of MSNBC, a network Assange accused of being, along with the New York Times, “the most biased source” in one note to Trump Jr. Pointing to a message from WikiLeaks sent on Election Day, advising Trump to refuse to concede and claim the election was rigged, Hayes asked how, exactly, offering that sort of political advice squared with the organization’s mission to promote transparency.


A screenshot of a Nov. 8, 2016 DM to Donald Trump Jr. from WikiLeaks.

Still, many of Assange’s most vocal supporters stuck with him, calling even secret communication with the Trump campaign to undermine Clinton entirely consistent with his vision of WikiLeaks as a sort of opposition research group, dedicated to “crushing bastards” by finding dirt in the servers of powerful individuals or organizations.

As Raffi Khatchadourian explained in a New Yorker profile of the WikiLeaks founder in 2010, “Assange, despite his claims to scientific journalism, emphasized to me that his mission is to expose injustice, not to provide an even-handed record of events.” To Assange, Khatchadourian wrote, “Leaks were an instrument of information warfare.”

One steadfast Assange ally was Kim Dotcom, founder of the shuttered file-sharing site MegaUpload, who helped fuel a conspiracy theory that the DNC emails had not been hacked by Russia, but provided to WikiLeaks by a young Democratic staffer named Seth Rich, who was subsequently murdered. Alluding to another entirely unsubstantiated allegation — that Clinton had once suggested killing Assange in a drone strike — Dotcom said that the WikiLeaks founder was merely part of a crowdsourced political operation that had successfully defeated the greater evil.



As it happens, one of the anti-Clinton rumors that WikiLeaks had urged Trump Jr. to “push” in an October 3, 2016 message was a tweet linking to that unsubstantiated allegation in an unsigned blog post citing anonymous sources. The blog post includes no documentation of the allegation, but the WikiLeaks tweet linking to it, which Trump Jr. told Assange he did share, included an excerpt from the blog post in which the type was styled to look like a leaked document.



As Jesse Singal reported for New York magazine the day after that tweet was posted, and quickly went viral, there was no reason to believe that anonymous blogger had any source at all for the claim. The post does reference one email sent to Clinton, which was not leaked but archived by the State Department, in which one of her advisers said that a memo had been prepared of “possible legal and nonlegal strategies re wikileaks.” But, as Singal explained: “‘non-legal’ doesn’t mean the same thing as ‘illegal’ — rather, it’s a fairly common term in government, and it can refer to basically anything that doesn’t directly involve the legal system. If you run Google searches over the websites of the White House or the State or Justice Departments, for example, those searches will yield a handful of hits in which the U.S. government speaks openly of ‘nonlegal’ this or that, none of which are open admissions of lawbreaking.”

Earlier in the campaign, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed had also shared video from 2010 of a Fox News pundit, Bob Beckel, calling for Assange’s assassination, with a caption that incorrectly identified him as a “Hillary Clinton strategist.”



Beckel did not work for Clinton. He served in the State Department during the Carter administration, three decades before Clinton was secretary of state, and then ran Walter Mondale’s failed campaign for the presidency in 1984.

While WikiLeaks has undoubtedly facilitated the release of information that is both true and important, it is Assange’s Trump-like willingness to traffic in such unsubstantiated rumors, conspiracy theories, and innuendo not supported by evidence that undermines his claim to be a disinterested publisher, not a political operative.

This willingness to traffic in false or misleading information was very much in evidence during his work on behalf of Trump, and it is a consistent feature of Assange’s advocacy for other people and causes.

During the final week of the Brexit campaign last year, Assange tried to undermine the credibility of a witness to the savage murder of a pro-European Union member of parliament, Jo Cox. In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, Brexit supporters like Assange were concerned that a wave of sympathy for the murdered MP could sway the vote. So they set out to contest evidence that the killing had been politically motivated.

To that end, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed drew attention to the fact that one witness to the killing — who said he had heard the attacker shout “Britain First!” — might have belonged to a racist political group, the British National Party, whose membership rolls WikiLeaks had obtained. Within hours of the murder, WikiLeaks also shared a link to a conspiratorial post from the pro-Brexit Breitbart U.K., which speculated that the witness might have lied about what he heard as part of a feud among far-right racist groups.



The next day, British police confirmed that the attacker told the arresting officers he was a “political activist” and had indeed shouted pro-Brexit phrases, including “Britain First,” during the murder.

More recently, during the separatist protests in Catalonia he supported, Assange was forced to delete several fake or misleading images he had shared on Twitter — including one photograph he mistakenly said showed the head of Spanish military police kissing a flag at a demonstration, and another of Spanish police officers struggling with Catalans, which had been digitally altered to insert a Catalan independence flag.




A screenshot of a fake image Julian Assange shared and later deleted.

In the final months of the 2016 presidential election, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed promoted not just its new publications, but also frequently referred to tabloid rumors — like old chestnuts about Hillary Clinton’s supposed “role in the death of White House counsel Vince Foster” — and wild conspiracy theories about her campaign chair taking part in bloody satanic rituals.





We know now that, from late September on, Assange was also privately using that account to urge the candidate’s son to hype the mostly anodyne emails stolen from the account of campaign chair, John Podesta, as crucial evidence of Clinton’s unfitness for office. And it certainly looks like the campaign took his advice.

On October 12, 2016, just 15 minutes after Assange told Trump Jr. that a new batch of Podesta emails had been released, with “many great stories the press are missing,” his father tweeted a complaint accusing “the dishonest media” of ignoring “incredible information provided by WikiLeaks.”



In the same message, Assange urged Trump Jr. to share a link he provided to the email database — wlsearch.tk — so “you guys can get all your followers digging through the content.” Two days later, Trump Jr. shared that link.



Despite the constant claims from Assange and the Trumps that the emails stolen from Democrats implicated Clinton in scandal and corruption, it is important to keep in mind that the WikiLeaks method of encouraging Trump supporters and Reddit trolls to scour the documents for evidence of malfeasance did not, in fact, uncover any such evidence.

Instead, the hacked emails were used to reverse-engineer preposterous conspiracy theories, like the imaginary pedophilia scandal called Pizzagate, which WikiLeaks was still treating as real two months after the election.



This is the real tragedy and menace of the public and private collaboration of WikiLeaks with Trump. An organization with a sterling reputation for providing the public with accurate information about secret government and corporate activities was used to launder conspiracy theories that helped elect a racist, sexual predator president of the United States.

That might be a terrific result for people like Julian Assange, who see a dysfunctional, discredited White House as a way to undermine what they see as the real evil empire. For Americans condemned to live under Trump, particularly the most marginalized who, as Noam Chomsky has observed, will suffer the most from his cruelty, it is a far more troubling outcome.

Update: Nov. 16, 2017, 8:55 a.m.

Some supporters of Julian Assange have argued that the October 21 direct message that so infuriated Barrett Brown — in which Assange argued that it would be good for the Trump campaign to allow WikiLeaks to publish one or more of Donald Trump’s tax returns — merely showed the publisher trying to obtain private material of public interest. It is important to keep in mind, however, that the proposal, explicitly presented as a way for WikiLeaks to seem to be less “pro-Trump,” would have compromised the organization’s principles, by disguising material released by a political campaign as a leak obtained from a whistleblower.

It is also important to remember what was happening in the news at that time. Three weeks before WikiLeaks solicited Trump’s tax information, an anonymous source mailed three pages from Trump’s 1995 tax return to The New York Times, which published an analysis showing that Trump had used entirely legal means to avoid paying federal taxes. Had the Trump campaign provided WikiLeaks with another old return, it is possible that the organization could have published tax information that would not have damaged Trump politically, but would have misled its readers into believing that the organization was working to undermine Trump as well as Clinton.

After Trump took office, a page from his 2005 tax return, showing that he had paid millions in taxes that year, was mailed anonymously to David Cay Johnston. The reporter speculated that the source could have been Trump himself, seeking to undercut the widespread assumption that there is embarrassing information contained in the more recent tax returns he broke with precedent to keep secret. “Donald,” Johnston told Rachel Maddow, “has a long history of leaking material about himself when he thinks it’s in his interest.”

It is also worth noting that this offer to help Trump came less than two weeks after The Washington Post had thrown the campaign into crisis, by revealing that the candidate had boasted of sexual assault in comments recorded during the taping of an “Access Hollywood” episode in 2005. The recording caught Trump saying that, “when you’re a star,” you can “do anything” to women, even “grab them by the pussy.” WikiLeaks released its first batch of emails hacked from Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, less than an hour after that report was published.
https://theintercept.com/2017/11/15/wik ... y-clinton/



[/quote]
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: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby dada » Sun Feb 04, 2018 1:47 pm

seemslikeadream » Sun Feb 04, 2018 10:27 am wrote:TAKE IT TO THE SYRAIN THREAD !!!



No, that's alright. That was all I had to say.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Feb 04, 2018 1:53 pm

I wasn't really talking to you dada ....although it is not alright to turn this into the Syrian thread .... I was addressing the real serial highjacking abusers

back on topic again


David Carroll

Verified account

@profcarroll
Jan 17
More
Yesterday, Trey Gowdy showed Bannon Cambridge Analytica emails about seeking stolen data from Assange and asked of it was “treasonous” (and by “closely affiliated” @axios means board member, equity/debt holder of Cambridge Analytica LLC per WH disclosure) https://www.axios.com/steve-bannon-cong ... 882e9.html
Image


And “somebody close to him” either refers to Rebekah Mercer, Bannon’s former patron, and/or Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica and SCL Elections Ltd (the registered data controller that processed American voter data in London)
GOP megadonor requested Trump's data firm organize hacked Clinton emails
http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/27/politics/ ... index.html

Prior to yesterday, we’ve observed Democrats probing Cambridge Analytica’s role, especially Feinstein, Warner, Schiff, Conyers, Cummings but now that Gowdy is asking questions, the inquiry is notably more bipartisan. Why it matters:


Renato Mariotti‏Verified account

THREAD: Why does it matter that the head of Trump’s data analytics firm reached out to Julian Assange about Hillary Clinton’s emails?
7:36 AM - 25 Oct 2017

1/ Today @woodruffbets of @thedailybeast reported Trump data guru Alexander Nix emailed Assange about the emails.

2/ Nix told others he reached out to Assange about distributing some Clinton emails, specifically emails that were not given to the FBI.

3/ Nix’s words to others would be admissible in a criminal trial in which he was a defendant. It’s an exception to the rule against hearsay.

4/ So would his outreach to Assange be a crime? To start, it is a crime to agree to help a person or group with a hacking operation.

5/ If he really reached out to Assange, the legal question would be whether they actually agreed to do something to further his efforts.

6/ An agreement to distribute emails obtained via hacking would carry forward those efforts. That would be enough if Nix knew about hacking.

7/ Also, it is a federal crime to knowingly receive stolen material worth at least $5,000 or to take a substantial step towards doing so.

8/ The email alone wouldn’t be enough, but if they made arrangements for Nix to receive emails, that could be sufficient.

9/ Obviously Mueller would look for other evidence. Foolish people falsely brag about committing crimes, so more evidence is needed.

10/ But Nix’s comments are powerful evidence that suggest an interest in aiding an international hacking operation. /end


In case you missed it, Trey Gowdy’s newfound interest in interrogating Bannon about Cambridge Analytica’s role in seeking stolen data is an extremely significant development. Keep in mind that Mueller requested emails from the company last fall.
Mueller Sought Emails of Trump Campaign Data Firm
https://www.wsj.com/articles/mueller-so ... 1513296899

Republicans Gowdy and King reported to be angry at Bannon, ready to hold him in contempt. Bannon has significant exposure from Cambridge Analytica and despite denials of wrongdoing by Nix, I can tell you from my legal dealings, it is not a normal company.
House Republicans seethe at tight-lipped Bannon
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/ ... obe-345483

When Bannon had to disclose his various Mercer-backed roles on his White House disclosure forms, he was supposed to sell his stake in Cambridge Analytica LLC but there are no reports he ever did. http://politi.co/2BVCuLM
Image

Beyond Cambridge Analytica, Bannon and the Mercers discovered Trump’s dirty ties to organized crime in the US and Russia thru their Government Accountability Institute in newly reported oppo research dossier but continue to back Dirty Donald regardless. https://nyti.ms/2EX50PP
Image

Speculation: If the White House wasn’t telling Bannon to refuse to answer questions during his interview, then it’s conceivable that he’s cooperating with Mueller to keep Congress (dodgy Republicans) and the White House out-of-the-loop on purpose.

In addition to seeking stolen data from Wikileaks, Cambridge Analytica processed Americans voter data in London. Any US voter can obtain proof by requesting their data under UK law, giving us standing for a pending lawsuit in British court. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... p-secrets/
Image
Interesting to revisit this report on Nadler/Cummings requests to Cambridge Analytica that were denied by Gowdy/Goodlatte because they didn’t want to interfere with Mueller…until now? Also notable that Parscale and CA/SCL didn’t deny foreign contacts.

In response to the Nunes memo, here’s Trey Gowdy on @FaceTheNation saying that there’s a Russia probe even without the dossier because of an email from Cambridge Analytica, among other reasons.
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: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby Elvis » Sun Feb 04, 2018 5:19 pm

American Dream wrote:Olivia Solon's narrative is much more compelling


I respectfully and completely disagree. There is nothing compelling about Olivia Solon's "narrative.

a claim that’s been debunked by Snopes and Channel 4 News


:roll: We've been down the Channel 4 and Snopes road. It leads only to obfuscation. If Snopes was ever reliable, it hasn't been anything like authoritative for awhile now. The Guardian, alas, has been slipping.


The Russian strategy has been very successful at shaping the online conversation about the White Helmets.


OMG the Russians? Of course this means that all of the evidence against the White Helmets is bogus! Because Russians! How could I not have guessed that the Russians would be behind this?!


And now that I know that a a computer scientist in Indiana has examined some tweets and stuff, I can just ignore Beeley and Bartlett's on the ground reporting.


The rescue group filmed themselves in a staged rescue and shared the video on social media with the hashtag #MannequinChallenge.


The weak excuse for the "MannequinChallenge" video, a video that looks just like all their other rescue videos. Posting that video was indeed a "stupid thing to do" for them.


I'm really surprised at the willfull blindness to this obvious propaganda operation. And of course AD additionally implies that anyone who can see the charade is an "Assad supporter"—which in turn implies that they 'love' evil dictators (among which I think Assad—in reality—ranks quite low; in reality he's the twice-elected president of Syria).


I agree to move this "conversation" to a Syria thread, but I wanted to reply to Olivia Solon's "narrative"
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Feb 06, 2018 11:26 am

Julian Assange arrest warrant still stands, court rules
18 minutes ago

The WikiLeaks founder has been living at the Ecuadorean embassy for more than five years
A UK arrest warrant against Julian Assange is still valid, Westminster Magistrates' Court has ruled.
Lawyers for the WikiLeaks founder asked the court to withdraw the warrant, saying it had "lost its purpose".
It was issued in 2012 after he allegedly breached bail conditions by seeking asylum in Ecuador's London embassy, where he has remained.
He had been facing extradition to Sweden to answer sex assault claims but these have since been dropped.
In her ruling, senior district judge and chief magistrate Emma Arbuthnot said having considered the arguments, she was "not persuaded that the warrant should be withdrawn".
She told the court that not surrendering to bail was a standalone offence under the Bail Act and Mr Assange must explain why he failed to do so.
The offence carries a maximum penalty of one year in prison.

Earlier this month the UK government refused to grant Mr Assange diplomatic status and called on him to leave the embassy to "face justice".
He has long feared that if he leaves the embassy he could be sent to the US to face trial over the leaking of hundreds of thousands of secret US military and diplomatic documents.
In April 2017, US attorney general Jeff Sessions said arresting him was a "priority", and the UK has refused to guarantee that he will not be extradited.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-42964699?ns_ ... ws_central
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: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 14, 2018 5:22 pm

The Intercept has obtained DMs from a private Twitter group with @WikiLeaks and its most loyal supporters. It includes:

- A desire for GOP to win the 2016 election
- Trolling
- Anti-semitism
- Rampant misogyny, sexist attacks on feminists
- Transphobia




In Leaked Chats, WikiLeaks Discusses Preference for GOP Over Clinton, Russia, Trolling, and Feminists They Don’t Like

February 14 2018, 1:04 p.m.

On a Thursday afternoon in November 2015, a light snow was falling outside the windows of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, despite the relatively warm weather, and Julian Assange was inside, sitting at his computer and pondering the upcoming 2016 presidential election in the United States.

In little more than a year, WikiLeaks would be engulfed in a scandal over how it came to publish internal emails that damaged Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, and the extent to which it worked with Russian hackers or Donald Trump’s campaign to do so. But in the fall of 2015, Trump was polling at less than 30 percent among Republican voters, neck-and-neck with neurosurgeon Ben Carson, and Assange spoke freely about why WikiLeaks wanted Clinton and the Democrats to lose the election.

“We believe it would be much better for GOP to win,” he typed into a private Twitter direct message group to an assortment of WikiLeaks’ most loyal supporters on Twitter. “Dems+Media+liberals woudl then form a block to reign in their worst qualities,” he wrote. “With Hillary in charge, GOP will be pushing for her worst qualities., dems+media+neoliberals will be mute.” He paused for two minutes before adding, “She’s a bright, well connected, sadistic sociopath.”

Image
Assange’s thinking appeared to be rooted not in ideological agreement with the right wing in the U.S., but in the tactical idea that a Republican president would face more resistance to an aggressive military posture than an interventionist President Hillary Clinton would.
Image

A few more months into the primary season, after Super Tuesday, Assange decried the idea of Clinton in the “whitehouse with her bloodlutt and amitions of empire with hawkish liberal-interventionist appointees like [Anne-Marie] Slaughter and digital expansionists such as Google integrated into the power structure. Then the republicans and trump in opposition constantly saying she’s weak and not invading enough.”

WikiLeaks has not made a secret of its opposition to Clinton. Assange had raised the possibility of her resigning as secretary of state in 2010, after WikiLeaks released its cache of U.S. diplomatic cables, and had also harshly criticized Clinton’s support for military action in Libya and the Middle East.

Still, Twitter messages obtained by The Intercept provide an unfiltered window into WikiLeaks’ political goals before it dove into the white-hot center of the presidential election. The messages also reveal a running theme of sexism and misogyny, contain hints of anti-Semitism, and underline Assange’s well-documented obsession with his public image.

The chats are from a direct message group between WikiLeaks and about 10 of its online boosters, described as a “low security channel for some very long term and reliable supporters who are on twitter.” Perhaps because of the “low security” designation, the chats do not shed much light on the most sensitive questions surrounding WikiLeaks and the 2016 election. They don’t reveal anything new about WikiLeaks’ relationship with the Trump campaign, although they are consistent with the group’s public statements casting doubt on claims by former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone that he had advanced knowledge of the group’s anti-Clinton leaks. The chats don’t illuminate any connections with the Russian government or tell us anything about the identity of the source who provided WikiLeaks with emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.

The archive spans from May 2015 through November 2017 and includes over 11,000 messages, more than 10 percent of them written from the WikiLeaks account. With this article, The Intercept is publishing newsworthy excerpts from the leaked messages.

A former supporter of and volunteer for WikiLeaks, who goes by the name “Hazelpress” (The Intercept does not know the person’s real name), set up the direct message group in mid-2015 and later decided to leak its contents to the media after news broke that WikiLeaks had secretly corresponded with Donald Trump Jr. during the election, urging candidate Trump to reject the results as rigged if he lost and requesting that the president-elect use his connections to get Assange an Australian ambassadorship. “At this point, considering the power exercised by WikiLeaks, [disclosing] literally anything Assange says is in the public interest,” Hazelpress told The Intercept, including Assange’s political position during the 2016 selection, since “WikiLeaks purports to be a neutral transparency organization.”

One of the authors of this article verified the authenticity of the Twitter group messages by logging in using Hazelpress’s credentials. Throughout this article, The Intercept assumes that the WikiLeaks account is controlled by Julian Assange himself, as is widely understood, and that he is the author of the messages, referring to himself in the third person majestic plural, as he often does. The Intercept has also preserved typographical errors in quoted material.

WikiLeaks did not respond to a request for comment, sent several days before publication.

Disclosure: One of the authors of this article, Micah Lee, along with The Intercept’s co-founding editors Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, is a member of Freedom of the Press Foundation’s board of directors. For years, Freedom of the Press Foundation processed payments on behalf of WikiLeaks to bypass the financial censorship that the organization was facing. The foundation ceased doing so in December, stating that a blockade by credit card companies and PayPal had ended, but that the group still “strongly opposes any prosecution of WikiLeaks or Assange for their publishing activities.”Assange called the move “politically induced financial censorship” and alleged it was propelled by personal animosity from Lee, with whom he has clashed on Twitter.

The 2016 Election

Beyond the statement that Clinton was a “sadistic sociopath” and the explanation for why “it would be much better for GOP to win,” Assange surfaced other opinions on Clinton in the Twitter group:

After Super Tuesday, when Trump was leading in the Republican primary and Bernie Sanders suffered big losses to Clinton in the Democratic primary, Assange posted, “Perhaps Hillary will have a stroke.”
Assange believed that Clinton’s “role in the war in Libya is what should bring her down, however, the GOP is too close to others who have benefited to exploit this, itseems. That Hillary helped to sew the foundation for ISIS against pentagon generals advice seems huge. But the GOP resolutely ignores it. Hillary has so muc hslime on her shirt it is now hard to make dirt stick.” (Any ability by the Republican Party to leverage Libya against Clinton would have weakened further after Trump, who supported the Libya intervention, became the nominee.)
Some of the messages on Clinton are threaded with crass sexual allusions. In a publicly released State Department email that WikiLeaks re-published, Hillary Clinton asked her Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, “What does ‘fubar’ mean?” Mills replied, “Fubar is unprintable on civil email.” (It stands for “fucked up beyond all recognition.”) Assange found this amusing. “WikiLeaks took Hillary’s FUBAR virginity,” the WikiLeaks account posted. “LOL. A well-deserved taking,” a Twitter interlocutor replied.
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In the final months of the 2016 election, Stone repeatedly claimed that he had insider knowledge about WikiLeaks’ upcoming release of hacked emails. In early August 2016, Stone told a Florida Republican Party group, “I actually have communicated with Assange, including tweeting that ‘it will soon the [sic] Podesta’s time in the barrel’ before WikiLeaks published its cache of Podesta emails.” In the private Twitter group, WikiLeaks dismissed Stone’s claims, just as it had publicly. “Stone is a bullshitter,” Assange posted. “Trying to a) imply that he knows anything b) that he contributed to our hard work.”

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In the following months, Stone continued to publicly claim he had “backchannel communications” with Assange.

Perspective on Russia

In June 2015, Assange emphasized the weakness of Russia’s geopolitical position relative to the United States. He told the Twitter group that the Kremlin is paranoid about foreign-funded NGOs because they push “invading ‘western’ cultural practices like gays and the internet,” which in turn pushes Russia to become more authoritarian. Russia was “on the defensive and terrified as the the US produces its next generation weapons and enroaches inexorably.” He further stated that all of Russia’s foreign military bases were under threat, and that “the U.S. hacks the hell out of it, and attempts to foment an orange revolution in an explicitly stated policy of regime change.”

Meanwhile, Assange maintained, Russia had only “minor imperialistic goals in its near abroad.”

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“Be the Troll You Want to See in the World”

A major focus of the private Twitter group was strategizing online attack campaigns, including creating false identities, something that Assange explicitly encouraged.

Assange philosophized on how to approach such activities in conversation with a WikiLeaks supporter who told the group that Scottish Member of Parliament Paul Monaghan had retweeted her. The supporter added that others in the group should tweet at Monaghan as well to try for more retweets. Assange responded, “Exactly what we were hoping for. Be the troll you want to see in the world.”

Discussing another British politician, Assange suggested that the supporter change her account avatar to a “pretty blonde,” or a “dead actress if you want plausible deniability,” or to just create a new sock puppet account for trolling.

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In another instance, Assange asked the group to “please troll this BBC idiot,” referring to journalist Chris Cook, who had been tweeting caustic messages about Assange that day. “Our interest is in having inflamitory tweets from him about JA/WL that we can use in legal cases to show that a toxic climate exists the UK (in the UK),” the next messages read.

“I don’t really remember his people causing me any issues,” Cook told The Intercept when asked about the messages.

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“But He’s Jewish”

The direct messages from Assange also include an attack with anti-Semitic undertones against an Associated Press journalist.

In August 2016, AP reporter Raphael Satter tweeted a story he helped write about the harm caused when WikiLeaks publishes private information about individuals. “He’s always ben a rat,” Assange posted in the Twitter group in response. “But he’s jewish and engaged with the ((()))) issue.”
https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploa ... 631410.jpg

The parentheses refer to a neo-Nazi meme called “echoes,” which identifies Jews online by surrounding their names with three parentheses. In response to the meme, many Jewish people and some allies began to bracket their names on Twitter in a show of solidarity.

Satter continued to post negative tweets about WikiLeaks after promoting his story. “Bog him down. Get him to show statements of his bias,” Assange wrote, encouraging his supporters to start trolling. (Satter declined to comment for this article.)

WikiLeaks has faced charges of anti-Semitism before. In 2013, former WikiLeaks volunteer James Ball explained that he left the group over what he said was Assange’s close relationship with the Holocaust denier Israel Shamir; among other things, Ball alleged that Assange gave Shamir early access to the cache of U.S. State Department cables. Former WikiLeaks spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg raised similar concerns about Shamir. Assange has downplayed WikiLeaks’ relationship with Shamir and denied giving him cable access.

In July 2016, a month before calling Satter a rat in the private Twitter group, WikiLeaks was criticized for posting a tweet suggesting that its critics were Jewish, again making use of the “echoes.”

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An account in the London Review of Books by the would-be ghostwriter of Assange’s autobiography, Andrew O’Hagan, said that, amid preparations for the book in 2011, Assange had “uttered, late at night … many sexist or anti-Semitic remarks,” of which O’Hagan retained transcripts.

“The Accusation Industry Is Highly Profitable”

For years, Sweden had tried to extradite Assange from the United Kingdom in order to question him about allegations of rape and molestation. As of May 2017, Sweden is no longer seeking his extradition, and, according to emails obtained by The Guardian, tried to drop extradition proceedings against him beginning in 2013, but were discouraged from doing so by prosecutors in the United Kingdom — where, nine months after Sweden’s extradition request was formally dropped, Assange still has an active arrest warrant.

Assange and his lawyers framed the sexual assault allegations as politically motivated, believing that if he were extradited, Sweden would send him to the United States, where he would face espionage charges related to his WikiLeaks work. This U.S. threat is the reason Ecuador has granted him asylum.

The Twitter group was intently focused on Assange’s sexual assault case, discussing how to discredit lawyers representing Assange’s accusers and journalists who covered the case in a manner unfavorable to Assange.

For instance, the group went after Elisabeth Fritz, a lawyer representing one of the women who has accused Assange of sexual assault. “Check out the sort of creature Fritz is,” Assange posted, linking to her firm’s website, which featured this photo.

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Photo from Fritz’s website at the time WikiLeaks was discussing it.

Assange theorized that Swedish policies encouraged lawyers to take on rape cases for easy money and “public relations.”

“So the accusation industry is highly profitable,” he concluded. “Almost nothing to do other than bill the state for advertising your own law firm.”
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Assange went on to accuse Fritz of working closely with Marianne Ny, Sweden’s chief prosecutor, to “tag-team the accused.”

Several hours later, the group was still angry about the courtroom photograph on Fritz’s website. “Money, influence, glamour for women helping women imprison men,” Assange wrote. “It may not be your type of feminism, but they don’t cae.”
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Fritz told The Intercept that “WikiLeaks and Assange have, and continue to, deliberately spread false information in an attempt to turn public opinion against the women accusing Assange of sexual offenses, cast doubt on the accusations, and to discredit myself and the Swedish legal system.” She went on to say, “The leaked messages clearly show the level of contempt for women and disregard for the rule of law that WikiLeaks have.” (Ny declined to comment.)

Other women who crossed WikiLeaks came in for similarly gendered treatment: British blogger Laurie Penny was dismissed by Assange as a “fake leftist, and a manipulative, predatory exhibitionist” and called a member of the “cliterati.” The group also spent weeks in 2015 trying to preempt a Guardian article from Jessica Valenti about one of Assange’s accusers.

Asked to comment, Penny said in an email, “We don’t require Wikileaks to be the arbiter of what our feminist politics should be. I really cannot overemphasize how little I care what Julian Assange thinks about anything I do.”

Valenti wrote, “These messages speak for themselves: This is a powerful organization strategizing to discredit me and a brave woman who simply wanted to share her story.”

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“Revenge Porn Against Jake”

The Twitter group also engaged in heated discussions of Laura Poitras’s documentary about WikiLeaks called “Risk.” Poitras had screened an early version of her film in the spring of 2016. In the Twitter group, Assange instructed supporters to add “nasty/damaging review quotes” to a collaborative document to argue for “edits of misleading material” before the film was released to the general public. “Risk” turned a critical eye on Assange’s attitudes toward his alleged sexual assault victims in Sweden. Assange, meanwhile, asserted that Poitras had broken various agreements she had made in order to gain access to WikiLeaks, a claim that Poitras has denied.

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“Risk” also featured Jacob Appelbaum, a WikiLeaks volunteer and former employee of the nonprofit that publishes the Tor anonymity software. Beginning in June 2016, members of the Tor community came forward with accusations of rape and sexual assault against Appelbaum. The Tor Project confirmed that the sexual misconduct allegations were credible, and Appelbaum resigned, though he has denied all of the allegations and no criminal charges have been filed.

Poitras re-edited her film to address the charges and include references to WikiLeaks’ role in the 2016 election. The final version of “Risk” was released in May 2017. In it, Poitras discloses that she and Appelbaum had “been involved briefly in 2014” and that after they ended their relationship, “he was abusive to someone close to me.”

Amid the controversy, Assange accused Poitras of seeking profit and going after an ex. As the early media coverage of the final release of “Risk” started to appear, Assange wrote that it “seems to have transformed into some kind of revenge porn against jake.”

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In the Twitter group, Assange never seems to entertain the idea that Poitras actually believed the women who accused Appelbaum; instead he stated that she was motivated by money and Oscar ambitions. “Profit matrix changed due to DNC and jakegate,” Assange wrote. “She’d have been exposed as sleeping with her subjects and making them appear positive after jakegate, so she had to attack them instead of defend against accusations of crossing the line.”

“Misogyny, self-pity, and calculated lies from Assange? That’s no surprise after our dealings with him and his lawyers on ‘Risk,'” Brenda Coughlin, producer of “Risk,” told The Intercept. “They repeatedly sought to censor the film to get us to remove Assange’s own sexist comments.”

In another exchange, Assange casts doubt on the charges against Appelbaum in the course of slamming the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Executive Director Cindy Cohn as a “stupid bay area neo-liberal” and “part of the anti-Jacob persecutrixity.” (Cohn declined to comment.)

Chelsea Manning and Gender

Some discussions in the Twitter group revolve around Chelsea Manning, formerly known as Bradley Manning, once WikiLeaks’ most significant source. Manning served seven years of a 35-year sentence for leaking hundreds of thousands of military and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, along with the widely seen “Collateral Murder” video, as a U.S. Army private in Iraq.

Assange has supported Manning’s case for years and, in at least one discussion in the Twitter group, defends the idea that she should be called by her chosen name. Assange railed against “gender essentialism,” which he called “regressive,” and argued that Manning’s plight as an imprisoned whistleblower matters more than her gender.

At times, he seemed to put political goals above questions of gender identity. An artist building a statue of Manning for an art project that would tour across Europe, Assange wrote, should not be expected to make the statue appear female because “Manning does have a Y chromosome and male genitalia.” Assange added that if the statue were brought to conservative areas, “it makes sense to not draw attention to the sex issue.” Depicting Manning as a female “would have turned off audiences in most countries,” the account said.

Assange also made comments about Manning’s friend Isis Lovecruft, a cryptographer and Tor developer, as well as a WikiLeaks critic. After another user pointed out that Manning and Lovecruft appear to be friends, the Assange posted, “That’s not good. Apparently ISIS ihas XY chromosomes.” Other members of the group wondered what Lovecruft’s real name is. “Bruce Anders,” Assange joked, presumably because it’s a masculine-sounding name.

“Blatant transmisogyny aside, it’s bizarre that Julian is starting rumors that I have XY chromosomes,” Lovecruft told The Intercept. “I’ve never had any genetic tests, so even I have no idea what my chromosomes are. It’s pretty hilarious that, all in one thread, these idiots can’t seem to figure out what my name or pronouns are, and yet they simultaneously purport to have a copy of my nonexistent 23andMe report.”

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Manning declined to comment on the leaked messages. When asked in a recent interview with The Guardian for her opinion of WikiLeaks, she noted that she had first tried to contact the Washington Post and New York Times before going to the group. “I ran out of time, and that was the decision I made. I can’t change that,” she said, adding that she has had no contact with Assange since 2010.

Top photo: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange leaves after speaking to the media from the balcony of the Embassy of Ecuador in London, on May 19, 2017.
https://theintercept.com/2018/02/14/jul ... ton-trump/


former WikiLeaks volunteer @jamesrbuk, and former WikiLeaks spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg, both raised concerns about Assange's relationship with Holocaust denier Israel Shamir, alleging that Assange gave Shamir early access to US diplomatic cables
https://www.thedailybeast.com/exclusive ... an-assange
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seemslikeadream » Mon Jan 09, 2017 7:14 am wrote:
The WikiLeaks-Russia connection started way before the 2016 election
Updated by Zack Beauchamp@zackbeauchampzack@vox.com Jan 6, 2017, 9:10am EST

Julian Assange insists, against all evidence, that the hacked Democratic emails WikiLeaks published didn't come from Russian intelligence services. “Our source is not the Russian government,” he said in a Tuesday interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity.

This is a touch hard to believe. Publicly available evidence, including unique code and Russian writing in the hacked documents themselves, links the document theft to Russian state-sponsored hacks. Every US intelligence agency that has investigated the issue has concluded Russia is, in fact, responsible. Leaks from their analyses, reported by CNN and the Washington Post, indicate that the US has identified the go-betweens used by Russia to hand documents to WikiLeaks. Assange is either lying or willfully blind to the facts.

Indeed, when it comes to Russia, Assange doesn’t have a ton of credibility.

Throughout WikiLeaks’ existence, the allegedly pro-transparency group has had strange, shadowy, but very well-documented connections to the Russian state. The connections range from sharing purloined documents with a pro-Russian dictator to Assange receiving money for appearing on Russian state TV to WikiLeaks’ key involvement in NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden ending up in Russia.

These incidents don’t prove, as some have alleged, that Assange is some kind of paid Russian agent, or that WikiLeaks is a Russian front organization. But they do show that WikiLeaks, an organization purportedly devoted to transparency, is at a minimum okay with helping out the world’s most aggressively authoritarian leader.

The Kremlin is just as friendly. Russian officials, up to and including Putin himself, have defended Assange and WikiLeaks — with one Russian official even suggesting Assange deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. It’s a strange relationship: a secretive quasi-dictator lining up alongside a group that says it's dedicated to revealing state secrets. But it's the relationship Putin appears to have turned to when he was looking for a trusted ally to leak the emails hacked from Clinton’s circle.

“I don’t necessarily think he’s some sort of paid agent for the Russians,” says Chris Zappone, an editor at the Age newspaper in Assange’s native Australia who has covered Assange’s Russian ties extensively. “But I do think he’s being manipulated by the Russians.”

The curious case of Israel Shamir

Israel Shamir. (A.Savin)
WikiLeaks first came to international attention in 2010, when it published secret US government footage showing American helicopters in Iraq firing at journalists. By the end of the year, it had also published tranches of US military documents on the Afghan War as well as State Department diplomatic cables.

These disclosures established what would become a clear pattern: WikiLeaks disclosures would, disproportionately, reveal secrets about the United States and its allies. They also established the group as a major player on the international stage, bringing it in for a level of scrutiny it had never received before.

One of the things reporters uncovered was the strange past of one WikiLeaks employee: a professional anti-Semite named Israel Shamir.

Shamir, who has gone by six names over the course of his life, was born Izrail Schmerler, in Russia. He converted from Judaism to the Greek Orthodox Church later in life, and turned viciously on his former co-religionists. He has denied the Holocaust, called Jews “a virus in human form,” and, in 2010, published a book titled Breaking the Conspiracy of the Elders of Zion.

Shamir was also a longtime friend of Julian Assange, who tasked him with helping to disseminate WikiLeaks documents in his native Russia in early 2010.

“Shamir has a years-long friendship with Assange, and was privy to the contents of tens of thousands of US diplomatic cables months before WikiLeaks made public the full cache,” James Ball, a former WikiLeaks staffer, wrote at the Guardian the next year. “Shamir aroused the suspicion of several WikiLeaks staffers — myself included — when he asked for access to all cable material concerning ‘the Jews,’ a request which was refused.”

The first thing Shamir did with the documents was hand some off to Russian Reporter magazine, a Kremlin-friendly newsweekly. He then offered to sell access to them to the highest bidder, David Leigh and Luke Harding write in the book Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy.

But what he did next was exceptionally curious. Shamir traveled to Belarus, a country ruled by dictator Alexander Lukashenko and perhaps Putin’s staunchest ally in Europe. Shamir was a fan of Lukashenko; in a 2010 piece, he called Belarus “the Shangri-la of the post-Soviet development.”

In Belarus, Shamir shared State Department cables pertaining to the country with government officials — in unredacted, unedited form.

In January 2011, Belarusian state-run media began publishing what it said were US diplomatic cables from Shamir’s cache, alleging that Lukashenko’s opponents were funded abroad. According to several Belarusian dissidents who spoke to Tablet, the names in the cables were also used to identify lower-level dissidents.

“The extent to which WikiLeaks and Israel Shamir have endangered the lives of pro-democracy activists in Belarus will become chillingly clear as innocent men and women continue to disappear,” Kapil Komireddi, author of the Tablet piece, writes.

WikiLeaks issued a weak public disavowal of Shamir’s Belarusian caper in February 2011, saying “obviously it is not approved.” But according to Ball, the internal discourse on Shamir was somewhat different.

“Assange shamefully refused to investigate [the Belarus incident],” Ball recalled in his Guardian piece. “The two [Shamir and Assange] remain close.”

This isn’t a direct link between Assange and the Kremlin, per se. But it established what would soon become a clear pattern: Assange and WikiLeaks providing cover to authoritarians, especially those allied with Putin.

Assange claims to be a radical opponent of authoritarianism and state oppression. But he allowed Shamir to hand off documents to a pro-Kremlin publication, exclusively, and then use his documents to aid a state-sponsored crackdown on dissidents. Assange showed no meaningful remorse afterward.

Assange was literally paid by the Russian government

As all this was going on, Russian officials began praising Assange and WikiLeaks at an increasingly loud volume. It was becoming clear that Assange’s disclosures targeted and embarrassed the United States far more than any other power — music to the Kremlin’s ears.

In December 2010, shortly after Shamir handed off cables to Belarus, an anonymous Kremlin official suggested that Assange should be given the Nobel Peace Prize. The next day, Vladimir Putin personally defended Assange against charges, filed in Sweden, that he had raped two women. According to Putin, the allegations were politically motivated and not credible. (Swedish courts disagree.)

"If it is full democracy, then why have they hidden Mr. Assange in prison? That's what, democracy?" the Russian leader said at a press conference. The next month, the Russian government offered Assange a visa — an opportunity to live in a country that would not likely extradite him to Sweden.

In April 2012, the relationship between Assange and Russia became direct for the first time. Specifically, Assange became a star on Russia Today (RT), Russia’s state-funded English-language propaganda outlet.

“With WikiLeaks’ funding drying up — under American pressure, Visa and MasterCard had stopped accepting donations — Russia Today began broadcasting a show called ‘The World Tomorrow’ with Mr. Assange as the host,” the New York Times reported in a 2016 piece on Assange’s Russian ties.

The exact nature of the arrangement between RT and Assange has never been very clear. Assange and WikiLeaks insist that Assange was never employed by RT, and that RT was only one of many broadcasters that bought rights to air Assange’s show. Either way, though, Assange was paid by the Kremlin. According to the Times, the amount of money he received has never been disclosed.

The World Tomorrow had a decidedly anti-American bent, in keeping with much of RT’s programming and Assange’s own writing. Its first episode was a polite interview with Hassan Nasrallah, the head of the Iranian-backed Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah. In the interview, Assange refers to Nasrallah as a “freedom fighter,” telling him “you have fought against a hegemony of the United States.”

That this was serving an ideological purpose could have been lost on Assange. RT is designed to be the voice of the Russian state in the English-speaking world, particularly America. It’s part of a broad-based Russian propaganda effort aimed at whitewashing Putin’s government, using attacks on alleged US misdeeds as a key strategy.

It’s an old tactic used by Soviet apologists, called “whataboutism.” Whenever an American criticized the Soviet Union, the Soviet apologist would say, “What about the bad things America does?” This wasn’t a genuine moral criticism of the United States, which was often quite deserved, so much as a debating tactic aimed at deflecting a moral critique of Soviet policy.

Assange eagerly participated in an extended campaign of whataboutism. Not just that, in fact: He was paid by an authoritarian government, one that kills and arrests dissenters, for doing so. His principles as a transparency activist seem not to have gotten in the way.

From Snowden to Trump
UN Panel Rules That Wikileaks Founder Is Arbitrarily Detained
(Carl Court/Getty Images)
After Assange’s brief stint on RT — The World Tomorrow only lasted 12 episodes — links between Assange and Russia kept cropping up. A few notable examples:

Assange claims to have inspired Snowden to flee to Russia: “I thought, and in fact advised Edward Snowden, that he would be safest in Moscow,” he told Democracy Now. A WikiLeaks employee, Sarah Harrison, literally flew with Snowden from Hong Kong (where he had been living) to Moscow.
In order to avoid extradition to Sweden, Assange holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. According to the Ecuadorian publication Focus Ecuador, Assange asked for control over the selection of his bodyguards, and insisted that they be Russian.
Assange used the WikiLeaks Twitter account to attack the 2016 Panama Papers leaks, which disclosed a $2 billion overseas account of Vladimir Putin’s. Assange labeled the leak a US-sponsored plot to undermine Putin and Russia.
Again, none of these even hint that Assange is a Russian agent. What they do show, when put together, is that Assange doesn’t see Russia as an enemy or a target. He instead seems to see them as something akin to “the enemy of my enemy” — the “enemy,” in this case, being the US and its allies. As a result, he is more than happy to work with them in situations where their interests align.

Which brings us to the 2016 election hack and Assange’s denial of Russian involvement.

Assange’s history shows that he is not an impartial arbiter when it comes to Russia and the United States. He is more than willing to carry water for the Russian state, as evidenced by his stint on RT. In the absence of public evidence supporting them, his denials should be given very little weight — he is merely repeating the line set out by his friends in the Kremlin.

Now, this could be because Assange is actively lying. My own suspicion is a little different: that he’s in something more like willful denial. The Russian go-between that handed him the documents likely posed as anonymous, and Assange probably didn’t ask too many questions (as is standard practice at WikiLeaks).

It would be inconvenient for him to admit that the evidence shows Russia gave him the documents. He’d be conceding far more brazen collaboration between WikiLeaks and an authoritarian power than we’ve seen in the past, which would further damage the group’s already fraying credibility. It also would embarrass said authoritarian state, perhaps WikiLeaks’ most reliable partner on the world stage, for Assange to contradict its public line.

But I can’t prove it either — Assange didn’t respond to an interview request for this piece. The thing I am quite sure of, however, is that Julian Assange has proven, beyond a reasonable doubt, to be very much less than clear-eyed when Russia is involved.
http://www.vox.com/world/2017/1/6/14179 ... ussia-ties




Assange's Extremist Employees
Why is WikiLeaks employing a well-known Holocaust denier and his disgraced son?
Michael C. Moynihan | December 14, 2010

Last week, I wrote that the widely-linked article positing that the CIA was behind a Swedish woman’s accusation of rape against Julian Assange was authored by a Russian-born, Swedish-domiciled, multi-aliased anti-Semite and Holocaust denier currently writing under the name “Israel Shamir,” a.k.a. Adam Ermash or Jöran Jermas. The broader point had little to do with the efficacy or morality of WikiLeaks—there are plenty of debates available on the narrower issue of government transparency; this isn’t intended to be one of them—but was concerned with how ideology and confirmation bias (WikiLeaks is a good thing, therefore Assange must be defended, and the CIA has done bad stuff in the past so—cui bono?—Assange’s accuser must be a Langley asset) can lead mainstream media figures into the fever swamps of Internet conspiracy theory.

It is worrying enough when journalists, either by accident or design, consort with vulgar figures like Shamir. But it has now been revealed that Israel Shamir, when he is not accusing Assange’s accusers of setting CIA honey traps, works with WikiLeaks in an official capacity.

According to reports in the Swedish and Russian media, the broad strokes of which have been confirmed by a WikiLeaks spokesman, Shamir serves as the group’s content aggregator in Russia, the man who “selects and distributes” the cables to Russian news organizations, according to an investigation by Swedish public radio. In the newspaper Expressen, Magnus Ljunggren, an emeritus professor of Russian literature at Gothenburg University, outlined Shamir’s close ties to WikiLeaks and his position “spreading the documents in Russia.” (The article is illustrated with a picture of Assange and Shamir in an unidentified office.)

During an appearance on Echo Moskvy radio, Yulia Latynina, a reporter at the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, wondered “What does it mean that Assange is allowing himself to be represented by an extremist?” Latynina also found that the Kremlin-friendly paper working with Shamir to promote the WikiLeaks material had already published “outright lies” Shamir claimed were supported by leaks. According to Latynina, Shamir faked a cable related to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech to the United Nations, which supposedly showed collusion amongst those who walked out of the talk in protest. That he would invent such a cable is perhaps unsurprising, considering Shamir has previously written an encomium to the “brave and charismatic leader” of Iran.

So let us quickly recap the foulness of Shamir’s political views. As I noted last week, he has called the Auschwitz concentration camp “an internment facility, attended by the Red Cross (as opposed to the US internment centre in Guantanamo),” not a place of extermination. He told a Swedish journalist (and fellow Holocaust denier) that “it’s every Muslim and Christian’s duty to deny the Holocaust.” The Jews, he says, are a “virus in human form” and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is real.

But wait, there’s more!

The Swedish media has identified Shamir’s son, a disgraced journalist named Johannes Wahlström, himself accused of anti-Semitism and falsifying quotes, as a WikiLeaks spokesman in Sweden. Indeed, Wahlström has authored stories based on the WikiLeaks material for the newspaper Aftonbladet and is credited as a producer on a recent Swedish public television documentary about the group.

But while being the son of a famous Holocaust denier is perhaps only suggestive—Wahlström is surely not responsible for his father’s many sins—his celebrations of his father’s work in print and his contributions to Shamir’s website suggest ideological affinity.* Indeed, in 2005 Wahlström wrote a story for the leftist magazine Ordfront arguing that Swedish media, not known for being friendly to the Jewish state, was in fact being manipulated by Jewish interests on behalf of the Israeli government.

Three of the journalists interviewed for the story—Cecilia Uddén, Lotta Schüllerqvist, and Peter Löfgren—claimed that Wahlström falsified quotes, leading the magazine to withdraw the story and issue an apology. Heléne Lööw, a historian of fascism and European neo-Nazism, commented that the Wahlström story contained all the “elements that one would find in a classic anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.”

A member of Ordfront’s editorial board, writing in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, lamented that the piece was ever published, citing Wahlström’s “close working relationship with Israel Shamir,” without pointing out just how close the two were.

Wahlström and Shamir, father and son, are the WikiLeaks representatives for two rather large geographic areas. According to Swedish Radio’s investigation, Wahlström is the gatekeeper of the cables in Scandinavia, and “has the power to decide” which newspapers are provided access and what leaks they are allowed to see. (At the time of filing, Wahlström had yet to respond to an email request for comment.)

In Russia, the magazine Russian Reporter says that it has “privileged access” to the material through Shamir, who told a Moscow newspaper that he was “accredited” to work on behalf of WikiLeaks in Russia. But Shamir has a rather large credibility problem, so Swedish Radio put the question directly to WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson.

Swedish Radio: Israel Shamir…Are you aware of him? Do you know him?

Kristinn Hrafnsson, Wikileaks spokesman: Yes. Yes, he is associated with us.

SR: So what is his role?

Hrafnsson: Well, I mean, we have a lot of journalists that are working with us all around the world. And they have different roles in working on this project. I won’t go into specifics into what each and everybody’s role is.

SR: Are you aware of how controversial Israel Shamir is in an international context?

Hrafnsson: There are a lot of controversial people around the world that are associated with us. I don’t really see the point of the question.

SR: Are you aware of the allegations that he is an anti-Semite?

Hrafnsson: I have heard those allegations…yes, yes. [Pause] What is the question really there?

SR: The question is, do you that that would [sic] be a problem?

Hrafnsson: No, I’m not going to comment on that.

Strip away the caginess and the obfuscation—remember, no one is allowed secrets but WikiLeaks—and Hrafnsson, who took over spokesman duties when Assange was jailed last week, confirms that WikiLeaks chose Shamir to work with their Russian media partners. After its investigation, the Swedish Radio program Medierna concluded flatly that "Israel Shamir represents WikiLeaks in Russia."

The forthcoming splinter group, OpenLeaks, led by WikiLeaks veterans tired of Assange's dictatorial style and obsession with being the organization's public face, claims to not be motivated by a particular set of political beliefs and promises to be transparent about its own operations and finances, something which WikiLeaks has been consistently—and credibly—attacked over. For those who think that leaking is, generally speaking, a positive thing, they should welcome an organization divorced from the ridiculous and amateur figure of Assange.

It's necessary for an organization like WikiLeaks, which claims to be creating new types of journalism (we do "scientific journalism," Assange declared triumphantly), to adhere to the basic principles of journalism. When asked about Shamir, Hrafnsson ducks and weaves, pretending that he is, like Assange, just a “controversial” figure, not an anti-Semite and semi-literate Holocaust denier with ties to both the extreme right and left and a well-documented penchant for lying.

So let’s treat the WikiLeaks organization like the journalists they insist they are, and ask the question put forward by Novaya Gazeta reporter Yulia Latynina: Out of all the competent journalists who are sympathetic to the WikiLeaks mission, why have Wahlström and Shamir—one a disgraced journalist, the other an extreme racist—been trusted with the largest intelligence leak in history?

* - Soon after this piece was published, Wahlström told Swedish public radio that his "father is what I would call the Swedish equivalent to Salman Rushdie," noting that he is a "very polemical" person, which must contain both the most profane comparison and biggest understatement of the year.
http://reason.com/archives/2010/12/14/t ... -employees
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Wed Feb 14, 2018 5:45 pm

I'm sure any day now, WikiLeaks will release a huge trove of Trump-related documents. Seriously, any day now.

I was going to cross-post this in America's Garden of Dicks, but that wouldn't be correct. Honestly, Assange is such a colossal dick, Trump should give him citizenship!
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 14, 2018 6:30 pm

Micah Lee
3h3 hours ago

In Aug 2017, DanaRohrabacher met with Assange in the embassy to help arrange a deal with Trump

Guess who introduced the two? Neo-Nazi Chuck Johnson. This is the same alt-right Holocaust denier who attended Trump's SOTU address


EXCLUSIVE: Republican Congressman Meets With WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange

U.S. Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-Ca) gestures as his U.S. Congressional delegation arrives to meet Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the Prime Minister's official residence in Tokyo September 2, 2013. REUTERS/Shuji Kajiyama/Pool.
Republican California Rep. Dana Rohrabacher met with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange Wednesday at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, The Daily Caller has learned.

Charles Johnson, a conservative journalist, told TheDC that he arranged the meeting for Assange because the WikiLeaks chief wants to strike a deal with the U.S. so he can stop living in asylum.

Rohrabacher’s spokesman Ken Grubbs told TheDC, “I can confirm that the meeting happened” and said that Johnson was in the meeting.

Johnson said that he arranged for the meeting to happen and that Rohrabacher would be the envoy in charge of bringing back a deal to the Trump White House. Assange has taken asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy since August 2012 after facing sexual assault charges in Sweden.

After TheDC broke the news of the meeting, Rohrabacher put out a statement in which he said Assange “emphatically stated that the Russians were not involved in the hacking or disclosure of those emails.” The three met for three hours and Rohrabacher is the first congressman to have visited the WikiLeaks founder.

A press release from the California congressman’s office stated that Rohrabacher “plans to divulge more of what he found directly to President Trump.”

CNN reported in April that the Justice Department wants to press charges against Assange for helping Edward Snowden, a former NSA analyst, release thousands of classified documents.
http://dailycaller.com/2017/08/16/exclu ... n-assange/


Republican congressman invited notorious Holocaust denier who is banned from Twitter to SOTU
Rep. Matt Gaetz said he gave Charles Johnson a ticket because his dad got bronchitis.
AARON RUPAR
JAN 31, 2018, 2:14 PM

Image
GAETZ AND TRUMP POST FOR A SELFIE FOLLOWING THE STATE OF THE UNION SPEECH ON TUESDAY. (CREDIT: TOM WILLIAMS/CQ ROLL CALL)

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) invited notorious right-wing internet troll and Holocaust denier Charles Johnson to be his guest at President Trump’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday night, according to a Daily Beast report.

Gaetz and Johnson provided the publication with conflicting accounts of how Johnson came to be Gaetz’s guest. The Florida congressman, who has played a leading role in pushing the conspiracy theory that the “deep state” is out to undermine Trump, told the publication that he doesn’t know Johnson. Gaetz said Johnson used one of his SOTU tickets only after his father fell ill and couldn’t go.


Gaetz told The Daily Beast that he and Johnson had no pre-existing relationship and that he provided him with a ticket to the speech after Johnson “showed up at my office” the day of the speech. The congressman said he had an extra ticket after his father came down with bronchitis and couldn’t make it. Johnson just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

But Johnson told the Daily Beast that he and Gaetz were introduced by another members of Congress, and that he “took Gaetz’s invitation” because “he’s into stuff on the issues that I care about.”


Johnson was permanently banned from Twitter in after he posted a tweet in 2015 soliciting donations from people to “take out” activist DeRay McKesson, who at the time was in the news because of his support for Black Lives Matter.

A 2017 Jezebel piece provides more background on Johnson.

His site, GotNews, is known for stories that make wild, often provably false allegations. Johnson has claimed that both President Obama and Emmanuel Macron are gay, wrongly identified the woman he thought was “Jackie” of the UVA scandal, and has, overall, demonstrated what Forbes called a “disregard for facts.” Gawker once called him “the web’s worst journalist.”

[…]

On GotNews, he’s referred to an alleged mob of Hispanic men protesting a Trump rally as “savages,”has repeatedly referred to Black Live Matter supporters as “thugs” and posted numerous stories alleging criminal acts by people he claims were affiliated with BLM. He’s also appeared on a podcast hosted by The Right Stuff, a proudly and profoundly anti-Semitic show hosted by white nationalist Mike Enoch.

On Reddit, Johnson once argued that the number of Jews in the Holocaust was much less than the accepted number of six million. He also questioned the existence of gas chambers, writing, “I agree with David Cole about Auschwitz and the gas chambers not being real. Why were their swimming pools there if it was a death camp?”


Nonetheless, Johnson was remains a well-connected figure in Republican politics. Last April, he discussed the Trump administration’s plans for a border wall on the phone with Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. And in October, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) brought Johnson along to a meeting he had with Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) about Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Politico reported that during the early days of Trump’s presidency, he was occasionally given printed out stories from Johnson’s website to read.

It’s not surprising that Johnson’s fondness for conspiracy theories wouldn’t bother Gaetz. Earlier this week, Gaetz joined the show of America’s foremost conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones, to tout a conspiracy theory about purported “deep state” efforts to undermine President Trump.


At one point, Gaetz complained to Jones that he’s called a conspiracy theorist.

“We’re called conspiracy theorists because we see this cabal right in front of us. We’re able to aggregate these data points and show what was really going on,” Gaetz said to Jones, who once argued that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax.

CREDIT: SCREENGRAB
Rep. Matt Gaetz takes his conspiracy theories to InfoWars

The credibility of Rep. Gaetz's attempt to discredit the FBI can be judged by the platform he used to disseminate it.

Gaetz told the Daily Beast that he’s open to staying in touch with Johnson.

“He has my number,” he said.
https://thinkprogress.org/matt-gaetz-ch ... 02b4cee6f/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Don’t forget that.
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby Elvis » Thu Feb 15, 2018 2:59 pm

Reason.com? Really? I guess because they're carrying a lot of articles critical of Trump, Reason is A-OK now. :shrug:
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Thu Feb 15, 2018 4:47 pm

Elvis » Thu Feb 15, 2018 1:59 pm wrote:Reason.com? Really? I guess because they're carrying a lot of articles critical of Trump, Reason is A-OK now. :shrug:


Never really noticed them before. How would you rate them next to antiwar.com, which, conversely, was quoted by a lot of people in these parts when Justin Raimondo was supporting Trump? Seems like both are right of center:

RIGHT-CENTER BIAS

These media sources are slightly to moderately conservative in bias. They often publish factual information that utilizes loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes) to favor conservative causes. These sources are generally trustworthy for information, but may require further investigation. See all Right-Center sources.

Factual Reporting: HIGH

Notes: Reason is an American libertarian monthly magazine published by the Reason Foundation. The magazine has a circulation of around 50,000 and was named one of the 50 best magazines in 2003 and 2004 by the Chicago Tribune. Overall, they are factual and sourced properly with a right-center reporting bias. (7/16/2016)


RIGHT-CENTER BIAS

These media sources are slightly to moderately conservative in bias. They often publish factual information that utilizes loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes) to favor conservative causes. These sources are generally trustworthy for information, but may require further investigation. See all Right-Center sources.

Factual Reporting: MIXED

Notes: Antiwar.com is a libertarian website which describes itself as devoted to “non-interventionism” and as opposing imperialism and war. It is a project of the Randolph Bourne Institute. Although the website has a right leaning bias in reporting it does feature many writers from across the political spectrum, including conservatives such as Pat Buchanan, libertarians such as Ron Paul, and leftists such as Noam Chomsky and Juan Cole. (8/9/2016)
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
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Re: Assange Amazing Adventures of Captain Neo in Blonde Land

Postby Jerky » Thu Feb 15, 2018 6:38 pm

There was ONE LINK to reason in a veritable ROILING SEA of damning information about Wikileaks and that shit-head Assange. Elvis's "response" would be hilarious if it wasn't so tragic and predictable.

Thanks, SLAD, for bringing all these disparate strands to our attention. I for one consider your efforts here to be of vital importance, and I am relying on your work for my own.

Jerky
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