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WikiLeaks Secret Cable: “Overthrow The Syrian Regime, But Play Nice With Russia”

Hours after the overnight US-led missile strikes on Syria, WikiLeaks republished a crucially important diplomatic cable through its official media accounts confirming that Saudi Arabia’s long term strategy in Syria has been to pursue regime change “by all means available.” According to the leaked internal Saudi government document, this is the kingdom’s proposed end-goal even should the United States at any point show “lack of desire” due to the threat of Russian response and possibility of a ‘great power’ confrontation.

With American lawmakers and media pundits already urging President Trump to escalate and sustain attacks against Syria, it must be remembered that close US allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia have long coordinated to create the conditions that might tip the US administration toward full military action resulting in regime change in Damascus. And more recently, fresh off his weeks-long tour of the US, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has both slammed previous proposals of US troop withdrawal in Syria and declared eagerness “to work with allies on any military response in Syria if needed.”

It is also essential to recall that the al-Qaeda linked group which originated the claims of a government orchestrated chemical attack on civilians in the Damascus suburb of Douma, called Jaish al Islam (JAI), is and has always been state sponsored by the Saudi regimeThe Guardian, among others, reported beginning in 2013 that Saudi Arabia founded and trained the group, spending millions. 

Secret Saudi cable produced by WikiLeaks: Saudi Arabia “must seek by all means available and all possible ways to overthrow the current regime in Syria” even should the United States at any point show “lack of desire.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Retrospective Look At The Work WikiLeaks Made Possible As Assange Remains Silenced

After this author and other independent journalists, whistleblowers and friends of Assange took part in a ten-hour vigil to call for the journalist’s freedom of speech to be upheld under the banner #ReconnectJulian, many have continued to publicize the injustice of his inability to speak and have contact with the outside world on top of his ongoing arbitrary confinement.

As this writer previously noted, a topic of discussion during the online vigil centered on the irreplaceable impact WikiLeaks has had through the documentation of evidence of corruption and war-crimes. The consequences of WikiLeaks’ most well-known accomplishments cannot be overstated.

In a 2016 conversation with Democracy Now, Julian Assange described WikiLeaks:

“….WikiLeaks has become the rebel library of Alexandria. It is the single most significant collection of information that doesn’t exist elsewhere, in a searchable, accessible, citable form, about how modern institutions actually behave. And it’s gone on to set people free from prison, where documents have been used in their court cases; hold the CIA accountable for renditions programs; feed into election cycles, which have resulted in the termination of, in some case—or contributed to the termination of governments, in some cases, taken the heads of intelligence agencies, ministers of defense and so on. So, you know, our civilization can only be as good as our knowledge of what our civilization is. We can’t possibly hope to reform that which we do not understand.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and Surveillance Capitalism

Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and Surveillance Capitalism

Whether it creeps into politics, marketing, or simple profiling, the nature of surveillance as totality has been affirmed by certain events this decade.  The Edward Snowden disclosures of 2013 demonstrated the complicity and collusion between Silicon Valley and the technological stewards of the national security state.

It took the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016 to move the issue of social media profiling, sharing and targeting of information, to another level.  Not only could companies such as Facebook monetise their user base; those details could, in turn, be plundered, mined and exploited for political purpose.

As a social phenomenon, Facebook could not help but become a juggernaut inimical to the private sphere it has so comprehensively colonised.  “Facebook in particular,” claimed WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange in May 2011, “is the most appalling spy machine that has ever been invented.” It furnished “the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations, their communications with each other, and their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US intelligence.”

Now, the unsurprising role played by Cambridge Analytica with its Facebook accessory to politicise and monetise data reveals the tenuous ground notions of privacy rest upon.  Outrage and uproar has been registered, much of it to do with a simple fact: data was used to manipulate, massage and deliver a result to Trump – or so goes the presumption.  An instructive lesson here would be to run the counter-factual: had Hillary Clinton won, would this seething discontent be quite so enthusiastic?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Opinion: Fearless Adversarial Journalism Doesn’t Work When You Are Funded By A Billionaire

Disobedient Media previously opined on the dagger-in-the-back publication of a hit piece against Wikileaks’ Julian Assange just one day after a UK magistrate, with blatant conflict of interest in the matter, shot down his legal representatives’ attempt to finally free him from the confines of the Ecuadorian embassy.

What that article did not address was the patently obvious terminal illness suffered by The Intercept. That is, the outlet claims to publish “fearless, adversarial” reporting, while it is funded by a billionaire. Ken Silverstein, formerly employed at The Intercept and by Omidyar’s First Look Media, has described endemic problems at the outlet that have risen directly out of Omidyar’s leadership or lack thereof.

The fundamental problem facing The Intercept is not ultimately about how or why the outlet published a smear specifically timed to cut support away from Assange, even though that is in and of itself despicable. It’s that doing so acts in support of the very deep state and moneyed, military interests that The Intercept purports to critique “fearlessly.”

Adding to a sense of betrayal of The Intercept’s principals in the wake of the outlet’s hit-piece is the fact that a number of writers at the publication are by all accounts on good terms with Assange, and have worked with mutual supporters including the superb Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi. Maurizi collaborated with Wikileaks on the verification of documents for many years, and worked with Glenn Greenwald on preparation for the disclosure of the Snowden files.

Adding to the years of support Greenwald has shown Assange, the Wikileaks co-founder also sent Wikileaks’ own Sarah Harrison to the aid of Snowden after he was marooned in Hong Kong in 2013, an act which Stefania Maurizi revealed very likely cost the publisher his freedom.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Op-Ed: Et Tu, The Intercept? Smear Of Assange Murderously Timed

Less than 48 hours after a UK judge ruled against Julian Assange’s legal team in their efforts to free him from the Ecuadoran embassy, The Intercept published a disingenuous and sloppy character assassination against the Wikileaks Editor-In-Chief.

The timing of the article’s publication acted to brutally counter growing support for Assange that arose in the wake of a clearly unjust UK ruling. Essentially, the publication of the smear attempted to deflect attention from the revelation of corruption in the ongoing detention of Assange, and to assassinate his character in the process.

The Intercept’s decision to publish the article at such a time unfortunately serves to characterize the outlet as a servant of the same US deep state that The Intercept has gained a reputation for – at least in theory – opposing.

The serious errors contained in The Intercept’s character assassination of the Wikileaks co-founder were quickly dismantled earlier today by independent journalists including Suzie DawsonCaitlin Johnstone, HA Goodman and others. That Micah Lee, who has engaged in continual attacks against Assange on social media, would be allowed to contribute to an article of this kind represents a fundamental conflict of interest in the work, not to mention the factual inaccuracies and assumptions it makes without so much as pausing to take a breath.

The claims made in The Intercept’s hit piece regarding messages sent privately by Wikileaks’ Twitter account were disingenuous on multiple levels, beginning with the  assumption that Assange was the sole author of the texts. The inference is clearly stated in the article, destroying any shred of journalistic integrity that might be expected from a well-respected news outlet.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

WikiLeaks Has Published Leaks On Trump Admin And Russia, And Is Seeking More

WikiLeaks Has Published Leaks On Trump Admin And Russia, And Is Seeking More

WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange recently posted a harsh criticism of what he calls Trump’s “subservience to Saudi Arabia’s military adventurism in Yemen” and the explosion of civilian deaths caused by this administration’s greatly escalated drone assassination program. This received an angry backlash from many of Assange’s Trump-supporting Twitter followers, one of them exclaiming, “Has your account been taken over by the deep state? Seems like you are trying to turn us against Trump. I have lost a lot of faith in you Julian. I thought you were a Trump supporter but this seems to show otherwise. Keep this up and you can kiss that pardon goodbye, sir.”

“My principles are not for sale,” Assange replied.

Over and over and over again you’ll see this exact sort of confusion about Assange and WikiLeaks coming from both sides of America’s illusory partisan divide. Democrats believe that Assange is a Trump-supporting Kremlin asset while Trump supporters believe Assange is a based MAGA hat-wearing ally to their cause, the former because they were told to believe that by CNN and the Washington Post and the latter because they’ve seen him championed by Fox’s Sean Hannity and the elaborate 4chan hoax “QAnon”. Neither could be further from the truth.


The *full* full transparency argument would be: release all tax returns, corporate records, campaign emails, and other documents relevant to Donald Trump’s Russia/WikiLeaksconnections. https://twitter.com/jaketapper/status/959145002852126720 


Today Assange responded to a call for transparency on Trump “tax returns, corporate records, campaign emails, and other documents relevant to Donald Trump’s Russia/WikiLeaks connections” from toxic neocon David Frum with the words “Go for it” and a link to WikiLeaks’ leak submission service.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Assange Keeps Warning Of AI Censorship, And It’s Time We Started List

Assange Keeps Warning Of AI Censorship, And It’s Time We Started Listening 

Throughout the near entirety of human history, a population’s understanding of what’s going on in the world has been controlled by those in power. The men in charge controlled what the people were told about rival populations, the history of their tribe and its leadership, etc. When the written word was invented, men in charge dictated what books were permitted to be written and circulated, what ideas were allowed, what narratives the public would be granted access to.

This continued straight on into modern times. Where power is not overtly totalitarian, wealthy elites have bought up all media, first in print, then radio, then television, and used it to advance narratives that are favorable to their interests. Not until humanity gained widespread access to the internet has our species had the ability to freely and easily share ideas and information on a large scale without regulation by the iron-fisted grip of power. This newfound ability arguably had a direct impact on the election for the most powerful elected office in the most powerful government in the world in 2016, as a leak publishing outlet combined with alternative and social media enabled ordinary Americans to tell one another their own stories about what they thought was going on in their country.

This newly democratized narrative-generating power of the masses gave those in power an immense fright, and they’ve been working to restore the old order of power controlling information ever since. And the editor-in-chief of the aforementioned leak publishing outlet, WikiLeaks, has been repeatedly trying to warn us about this coming development.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Washington Post Also Misreported CNN’s False WikiLeaks Story

The Washington Post Also Misreported CNN’s False WikiLeaks Story

I left on holiday just as the news was breaking about multiple mainstream media outlets independently reporting a spectacularly false story about WikiLeaks, Donald Trump and Russiagate, and I was pleased to return to find they’d received their much-deserved beatdown for it. One fact that doesn’t seem to have received any attention however is the fact that the Washington Post, who broke the story about CNN’s journalistic scandal, itself grossly distorted the truth to slander WikiLeaks in its own coverage.

In what The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald called “one of the most embarrassing days for the U.S. media in quite a long time,” a breaking story which was sent into immediate virality by CNN and was then independently (and falsely) corroborated by MSNBC and CBS, reporting that someone had emailed Donald Trump Jr with a decryption key allowing him to preview an impending leak drop from WikiLeaks. By the time all the facts were in it turned out that the real story, in its entirety, was that some random guy had emailed Trump notifying him of a Guccifer 2.0 release (not even WikiLeaks) that had already been published.


678.4 MB of new “DNC documents” from @Guccifer_2https://uploadfiles.io/7dc58 
use 7zip to unpack
password: GuCCif3r_2.0

Uploadfiles.io @UploadFilesFree

NGP VAN.7z @UploadFilesFree

uploadfiles.io


Obviously Donald Trump Jr receiving an innocuous email about a publication already in existence is not a news story by any stretch of the imagination. It was exactly as newsworthy as it would have been if you, dear reader, had once sent an email to Don Jr informing him of Hillary Clinton’s leaked remarksabout Palestinian election rigging.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Weiner Laptop Doc: Assange Warrant Issued 2 Weeks After Swedish Election Leaks Warning

A confidential document found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop reveals that the United States Embassy in Stockholm, Sweden expressed concerns in 2010 that WikiLeaks would release classified US documents related to Sweden ahead of the September 19 Swedish election, tipping the vote towards the Pirate Party. The subject of the cable reads “Wikileaks: The Pirate Party’s White Horse Into Sweden’s Parliament?

On June 29, 2010 a US diplomat met with three members of the Pirate Party – which is described in the cable as a “mixture between communism and libertarianism,” yet whose members are “well-salaried professionals, independent  from the party for income.” Two of the “pirates,” according to the report, were active in the “youth branch of the conservative party currently leading government.”

The Embassy cable notes the “grim electoral outlook for Pirates” – as confirmed by a Pirate party member interviewed by the US diplomat, “Unless WikiLeaks Saves the Day.” 

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Two weeks after the cable was sent, an arrest warrant was issued for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on sexual assault allegations – which was dropped, then re-issued, then revoked again by Swedish authorities in August 2015 when they dropped their case against him.

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Cable found on Anthony Weiner’s Laptop, obtained via Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit

The emergence of this confidential document (found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop and sent while his wife, Huma Abedin, was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Deputy Chief of Staff), is disturbing – as it potentially implicates the Obama administration in a conspiracy to silence Julian Assange while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State – not to mention that it could be the smoking gun in yet another clear case of mishandled information found on imprisoned sexual deviant Anthony Weiner’s laptop the FBI’s Peter Strzok and crew must have somehow overlooked.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

CNN Desperate to Overthrow the US Government

CNN, who claims to be Most Trusted Name in News™, has demonstrated that they are by no means to be trusted nor are they ever impartial. They are never reporting the news, they try so desperately to make the news.

CNN, along with MSNBC and CBS, have shown the entire world that the American Mainstream Media is nothing but ranting propaganda. The spectacle before the entire world came last Friday. CNN  devoted 12 straight minutes to declare they had the exclusive bombshell that would get rid of Trump once and for all. They reported that they had an email which proved that WikiLeaks had secretly offered the Trump campaign, even to Donald Trump himself, special access to the Democratic National Committee emails BEFORE they were published on the internet. CNN reported that this would prove a conspiracy between the Trump family and WikiLeaks. Of course, they have also declared that WikiLeaks was an “arm of Russian intelligence,” and therefore Trump had a direct personal link to Putin.

They based everything on an email sent by someone named “Michael J. Erickson” who nobody had heard of. CNN was not able to even identify who this person was. The email was addressed to Donald Trump Jr., which had offered a decryption key and access to DNC emails that WikiLeaks had “uploaded.”

CNN was so excited out of its mind for they would get rid of Trump for Hillary.  They told the world the email was dated September 4th, which was 10 days BEFORE WikiLeaks began promoting access to the emails online. They declared this was the smoking-gun clearly establishing that the Trump was being offered special advanced access to the DNC archive, which they said was really from the Kremlin via Wikileaks.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Russia-gate’s Litany of Corrections

Russia-gate’s Litany of Corrections

Exclusive: As much as the U.S. mainstream media insists that the Russia-gate scandal is growing, what is undeniably growing is the list of major corrections that news outlets have been forced to issue, reports Robert Parry.


The U.S. mainstream media’s year-long hysteria over Russia’s alleged role in the election of Donald Trump has obliterated normal reporting standards leading to a rash of journalistic embarrassments that have both disgraced the profession and energized Trump’s backers over new grievances about the MSM’s “fake news.”

Misguided groupthink is always a danger when key elements of the Washington establishment and the major news media share the same belief – whether that is Iraq’s supposed possession of WMD or the need to bring down some foreign or domestic leader unpopular with the elites.

Yet, we have rarely witnessed such a cascading collapse of journalistic principles as has occurred around the Russia-gate “scandal.” It is hard to keep track of all the corrections or to take note of all the dead ends that the investigation keeps finding.

But anyone who dares note the errors, the inconsistencies or the illogical claims is either dismissed as a “Kremlin stooge” or a “Trump enabler.” The national Democrats and the mainstream media seem determined to keep hurtling down the Russia-gate roadway assuming that the evidentiary barriers ahead will magically disappear at some point and the path to Trump’s impeachment will be clear.

On Friday, the rush to finally prove the Russia-gate narrative led CNN — and then CBS News and MSNBC — to trumpet an email supposedly sent from someone named Michael J. Erickson on Sept. 4, 2016, to Donald Trump Jr. that involved WikiLeaks offering the Trump campaign pre-publication access to purloined Democratic National Committee emails that WikiLeaks published on Sept. 13, nine days later.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Russia-gate’s Reach into Journalism

Russia-gate’s Reach into Journalism

The investigation to somehow blame Russia for Donald Trump’s election has now merged with another establishment goal of isolating and intimidating whistleblowers and other dissidents, as Dennis J Bernstein describes.


The Russia-gate investigation has reached into the ranks of journalism with the House Intelligence Committee’s subpoena of Randy Credico, who produced a series about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for Pacifica Radio and apparently is suspected of having passed on early word about leaked Democratic emails to Donald Trump’s supporter Roger Stone.

Journalist-activist-satirist Randy Credico

The Credico subpoena, after he declined a request for a “voluntary” interview, underscores how the investigation is moving into areas of “guilt by association” and further isolating whistleblowers who defy the powers-that-be through unauthorized release of information to the public, a point made by National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake in an interview.

Drake knows well what it means to blow the whistle on government misconduct and get prosecuted for it. A former senior NSA executive, Drake complained about a multi-billion-dollar fraud, waste, and widespread violation of the rights of civilians through secret mass surveillance programs. As a result, the Obama administration indicted Drake in 2010, “as the first whistleblower since Daniel Ellsberg charged with espionage,” according to the Institute for Public Accuracy.

In 2011, the government’s case against him, which carried a potential 35 years in prison, collapsed. Drake went free in a plea deal and was awarded the 2011 Ridenhour Truth Telling Prize.

I interviewed Drake about the significance of Credico’s subpoena, which Credico believes resulted from his journalism about the persecution of Julian Assange for releasing information that powerful people would prefer kept hidden from the public. (I had a small role in Credico’s 14-part radio series, Julian Assange: Countdown to Freedom. It was broadcast first as part of his Live on the Fly Series, over WBAI and later on KPFA and across the country on community radio.)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Hillary Clinton Just Told Five Blatant Lies About WikiLeaks

Hillary Clinton Just Told Five Blatant Lies About WikiLeaks 

As part of her ongoing “Thank God You Didn’t Elect Me” tour, Hillary Clinton made her debut on Australian television last night in an interview with the ABC’s Sarah Ferguson. Though she didn’t repeat her infamous “17 intelligence agencies” lie, which she’d continued to regurgitate long after that claim had been conclusively debunked, there were still plenty of whoppers to be heard.

From her ridiculous claim that the aggressively protested DNC convention was “very positive” to her completely baseless assertion that Bernie Sanders “couldn’t explain his programs” during the primaries, Clinton did a fine job of reminding us all why the average American finds her about as trustworthy as a hungry crocodile. But while she has blamed her loss on James Comey and Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders and self-hating women and the media and uninformed voters and voter suppression and her campaign staff and the DNC and campaign finance laws and Jill Stein and the Electoral College and Anthony Weiner and sexism and Vladimir Putin, Hillary Clinton reserved the lion’s share of her deceit for the organization she hates most of all: WikiLeaks.

Here are five lies that Clinton told about the outlet during her ABC interview:

Full video

Lie 1: Claims WikiLeaks never publishes anything about Russia


View image on TwitterView image on Twitter

“And if he’s such a, you know, martyr of free speech, why doesn’t WikiLeaks ever publish anything coming out of Russia?” Clinton asks of WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange, mere weeks after WikiLeaks published a massive leak drop on Russian domestic surveillance.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why Everyone Should Do What WikiLeaks Did

Why Everyone Should Do What WikiLeaks Did

By far the best thing about the WikiLeaks-Don Jr. controversy has been watching the talking heads on CNN and MSNBC who spent a year and a half priming everyone for President Hillary now saying, “Ha! WikiLeaks claims they’re a legitimate news organization, and yet here they are, advancing an agenda!”

WikiLeaks has an agenda. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t exist. I have an agenda, too. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t write. And I’ll tell you right now that if I had the ear of the US president’s son, I would most certainly use it to advance my agenda.

I can’t speak for WikiLeaks, but anyone who’s been paying them any attention at all is aware that it is not, as mainstream pundits have been falsely contending, a completely neutral and agendaless “radical transparency” outlet. Any casual glance at Julian Assange’s Twitter page makes it abundantly clear that he is a fiercely opinionated man with a very clear idea of where power structures exist in the world, and he spends much of his time openly and unapologetically trying to sabotage the interests of those power structures. I can say exactly the same things about myself.

It is clear that Julian Assange is trying to attack the unelected power establishment which has loosely centralized itself in the United States, and he’s throwing every weapon at it that he has available to him. When attacking a structure that is dependent on government opacity this will necessarily include publishing leaks, and it will also include directing public attention to the mechanisms of that power structure.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

‘The Atlantic’ Commits Malpractice, Selectively Edits To Smear WikiLeaks

‘The Atlantic’ Commits Malpractice, Selectively Edits To Smear WikiLeaks

Everyone was buzzing about the shocking, bombshell new report by The Atlantic yesterday, which revealed that Donald Trump Jr. and the WikiLeaks Twitter account had engaged in a “largely one-sided” conversation in private messages over the course of several months.

Don Jr. actually comes off looking fairly normal in the report, while WikiLeaks comes off looking weird and sleazy in a way that will likely damage its reputation even further than the mainstream media campaign to smear the outlet already has. WikiLeaks is seen asking for favors Trump never fulfilled, making recommendations Trump Jr. didn’t act upon, and asking for leaks Trump Jr. never gave them, which when you step back and think about it are actually fairly normal things for a leak outlet to do, all things considered. But the following passage from the Atlantic report makes the whole thing look far darker:

It is the third reason, though, Wikileaks wrote, that “is the real kicker.” “If we publish them it will dramatically improve the perception of our impartiality,” Wikileaks explained. “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.”

See that full stop at the end of the last sentence there? That’s journalistic malpractice. We learned this when Donald Trump Jr. published the entirety of his private messages with WikiLeaks in response to the Atlantic article:


SCOOP: Turns out Donald Trump, Jr. corresponded with Wikileaks during the 2016 presidential campaign. My latest. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the-secret-correspondence-between-donald-trump-jr-and-wikileaks/545738/ 

The Secret Correspondence Between Donald Trump Jr. and Wikileaks

The transparency organization asked the president’s son for his cooperation—in sharing its work, in contesting the results of the election, and in arranging for Julian Assange to be Australia’s…

theatlantic.com


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