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I just want to briefly document some of the ways I’m seeing the 2015/2016 anti-establishment sentiment of Trump’s base being hijacked and re-routed into supporting some highly conspicuous pro-establishment interests this year.

In 2016 and 2017, much of the anti-establishment sentiment on what passes for America’s political “left” today was co-opted and re-routed into supporting longstanding establishment agendas against WikiLeaks, Russia, and Syria. I watched many Bernie Sanders supporters I’d fought alongside in 2015 and 2016 succumb one by one to the establishment Russiagate mind virus; it felt like watching a zombie apocalypse unfold, infection by infection.

Fearmongering about Trump was used to herd people who support peace into cheering for ancient neoconservative agendas against Russia, making everyone terrified of a country they’d previously never thought much about using still-unproven and plot hole-riddled claims about hacking and election meddling. This in turn was used to create narratives about “Russian propaganda”, which was used to poison the well against anyone who questioned the warmongering establishment Syria narrative. It was also used to turn people against WikiLeaks who had supported it since its publications about Bush administration war crimes, and in the case of Berners even during the 2016 DNC/Podesta email drops.

In exactly the same way, I’ve been watching a lot of Trump supporters herded into supporting longtime neoconservative agendas they would surely have claimed to oppose in 2016. Because of the establishment psyop known as “QAnon” and Trump’s near-total abandonment of the anti-interventionist platform he campaigned on, a good chunk of Trump’s base who in 2016 would never have been on board with attacks on WikiLeaks or another regime change agenda in the Middle East are now fully on board with both of those things.

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Many Trump Supporters Now Cheering For The Deep State Over WikiLeaks And Iran

June 30, 2018

Many Trump Supporters Now Cheering For The Deep State Over WikiLeaks And Iran

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White House: US, Ecuador Coordinating About Future Of Assange Asylum

June 29, 2018

White House: US, Ecuador Coordinating About Future Of Assange Asylum

The agenda of the United States government to extradite WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange is kind of like Israel’s nuclear arsenal: everyone knows it exists, but government officials refuse to openly confirm it. US Attorney General Jeff Sessions has admitted that Assange’s arrest is a priority, President Trump has said he’d support Sessions in taking that action, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has labeled WikiLeaks a “hostile non-state intelligence service,” and the ranking Democrat in the US House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff has stated that he plans on questioning Assange “when he is in US custody.” But so far none have come right out and admitted that there is an extradition request for Assange or what the legal basis for it might be.

Unlike Israel’s nukes, however, you’ll still see empire loyalists pretending that they don’t believe there’s an agenda to extradite Assange. You’ll often see social media accounts patrolling all posts about Julian Assange any time he’s in the news, stating in remarkably uniform language that Assange is free to leave the embassy whenever he wants because there is no extradition agenda. To be clear, these people do not believe what they are saying; nobody actually believes that Assange is choosing to remain in effective solitary confinement because it’s his idea of a fun time. But there are individuals with a vested interest in reinforcing the narrative that the US isn’t the sort of government that would try to imprison a journalist for telling the truth.

It is this false narrative manipulation which makes it essential to document such events as ten Democratic Senators writing a letter to Vice President Mike Pence demanding that he confront Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno about continuing to give political asylum to Assange.

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

Free Assange

June 27, 2018

Free Assange

Last week, rallies in support of Julian Assange were held around the world. We participated in two #AssangeUnity events seeking to #FreeAssange in Washington, DC.

This is the beginning of a new phase of the campaign to stop the persecution of Julian Assange and allow him to leave the Ecuadorian Embassy in London without the threat of being arrested in the UK or facing prosecution by the United States.

The Assange Case is a Linchpin For Freedom of the Press and Freedom of Information in the 21st Century

The threat of prosecution against Julian Assange for his work as editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks will be a key to defining what Freedom of the Press means in the 21st Century. Should people be allowed to know the truth if their government is corrupt, violating the law or committing war crimes? Democracy cannot exist when people are misled by a concentrated corporate media that puts forth a narrative on behalf of the government and big business.

This is not the first time that prosecution of a journalist will define Freedom of the Press. Indeed, the roots of Freedom of the Press in the United States go back to the prosecution of John Peter Zenger, a publisher who was accused of libel in 1734 for publishing articles critical of the British royal governor, William Cosby. Zenger was held in prison for eight months awaiting trial. In the trial, his defense took its case directly to the jury.

For five hundred years, Britan had made it illegal to publish “any slanderous News” that may cause “discord” between the king and his people. Zenger’s defense argued that he had published the truth about Cosby and therefore did not commit a crime. His lawyer “argued that telling the truth did not cause governments to fall. Rather, he argued, ‘abuse of power’ caused governments to fall.” The jury heard the argument, recessed and in ten minutes returned with a not guilty verdict.

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

Why Did James Comey Issue “Stand Down” Order On Imminent Deal With Julian Assange?

June 26, 2018

Why Did James Comey Issue “Stand Down” Order On Imminent Deal With Julian Assange?

A “stand down” order given by James Comey to kill an imminent deal between the US Government and Julian Assange preceded the largest leak in CIA history, known as “Vault 7,” reports John Solomon of The Hill. Assange was willing to redact the names of CIA employees, and also offered to provide technical evidence which would rule out “certain parties” (such as Russia) in the DNC email hack.

In short, Comey killed advanced negotiations with the WikiLeaks founder that would have safeguarded the lives of CIA agents who are now at risk, while also providing key evidence in the ongoing Russia investigations. For the longer version, keep reading.

In January of 2017, Julian Assange’s legal team approached Clinton-linked D.C. lobbyist Adam Waldman to reach out and see if anyone in the Trump administration would negotiate with the WikiLeaks founder.

Waldman, who acted as an intermediary from 2009 – 2011 between Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska and the FBI, worked for Assange pro bono. Assange’s bargaining chip was a massive trove of CIA technical documents known as “Vault 7,” which detailed the agency’s massive cyber-warfare arsenal.

After Assange’s team made contact, Waldman reached out to Bruce Ohr – a DOJ official who would later be demoted in December, 2017 for failing to disclose secret meetings with Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson. Bruce’s wife, Nellie Ohr was hired by Fusion GPS as part of an ongoing anti-Trump effort. Fusion also produced the 35-page “Steele Dossier,” written by former MI6 spy Christopher Steele.

[As an aside, Waldman also promised Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) access to Steele in late March of 2017, which fell through weeks later after Steele got cold feet. So Waldman is a “deep-state middleman” of sorts.]

Waldman and Ohr would meet in person on Feb. 3, 2017 in Washington, while Waldman and Assange met three times in London.

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

The Murder of Julian Assange

June 23, 2018

The Murder of Julian Assange

It was a fool’s errand.

On the day Donald Trump was elected his supporters asked him to pardon the founder and frontman of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange. They flooded social media demanding Assange be allowed to leave the Ecuadorian embassy in London without arrest and extradition to the United States.

Stone silence from Trump and his administration.

A few months before the election, WikiLeaks released a searchable archive of over 30,000 emails and attachments taken from Hillary Clinton’s not-so private email server.

Trump held no aversion to exploiting the emails. He called them the Crooked Hillary emails and said they endangered the national security of the United States.

Democrats called foul, said Assange had colluded with Putin and the Russians.

In April, they filed a lawsuit in federal court against the Russian government, the Trump campaign, and WikiLeaks. They argue there was a widespread conspiracy to swing the 2016 election.

They have zero evidence of this. Evidence is no longer required. Accusations alone now serve to take down leaders and destroy careers.

Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are no longer of use to Donald Trump.

He dished out pardons to ex-Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio and neocon leaker Scooter Libby. Trump mulled other pardons, including a posthumous one for Muhammad Ali to wipe out his draft dodging conviction. It was reported in June Trump insiders are pushing to pardon the junk bond king Michael Milken and reverse his conviction on securities fraud. The Milken pardon is being pushed by Goldman Sachs alumnus and current Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Meanwhile, Julian Assange is left to twist in the wind.

Both Trump’s attorney general and his former CIA director, now secretary of state Mike Pompeo want Assange extradited to the United States where he will face trial and possible execution for espionage.

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

Assange and Truth: the Deeper (Harder) Issue

June 21, 2018

Assange and Truth: the Deeper (Harder) Issue

Photo by thierry ehrmann | CC BY 2.0

When Harold Pinter got the Nobel Prize (2005), he described “a vast tapestry of lies upon which we feed”. He asked why “systematic brutality, widespread atrocities, ruthless suppression of independent thought” were well-known when they occurred in the Soviet Union. But the same events in the US, despite copious evidence, “never happened”.

It shouldn’t be a rhetorical question. The answer to Pinter’s question is known in countless cultures. It is not obscure. But it is not discussed much in the North.

John Pilger notes an “eerie silence” about Julian Assange. More than any investigative journalist of our time, Assange has exposed “the imperialism of liberal democracies: the commitment to endless warfare and the division and degradation of ‘unworthy’ lives: from Grenfell Tower to Gaza.”

And yet he’s been imprisoned for six years with no charges against him. There is no outcry.

The silence is eerie, but not surprising. Assange allows us to see with our own eyes the actions of US military in Iraq. We hear them laugh about the “dead bastards” on the ground, who were carrying cameras, not guns.

There are truths, which Wikileaks reveals, but there is also truth abouttruths. One truth is that empirical evidence, seen and believed, does not shake deep-seated expectations. When beliefs are well-established, presupposed in daily life, indeed, part of identity, evidence is explained away.

It’s how we reason. If I release an object that doesn’t fall, you don’t give up belief in gravity. If I show you a thousand times, you don’t waiver. You expectgravity. It is a presupposition of life and thought. If you questioned that belief, you’d have to rethink your relationship to the world. It’s a reason not to question it.

You see with your own eyes. You dismiss what you see. Or, you explain it away, rationally.

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

For Our Rulers, Smearing A Dissident Journalist Is As Good As Killing Him

June 20, 2018

For Our Rulers, Smearing A Dissident Journalist Is As Good As Killing Him

As I write this, demonstrations around the world are taking place in protest of WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange’s arbitrary detention and silencing by the US-centralized power establishment that has been actively pursuing his destruction for over a decade. The demonstrations will be well-attended, but not a fraction as well-attended as they should be. They will receive international attention, but not a fraction as much attention as they should.

This is because the manipulators and smear merchants who have made their careers paving the way for oligarchic agendas have been successful in killing off sympathy for the plight of Assange. As we discussed yesterday, sympathy is key for getting narratives to take hold in public consciousness. This is why western corporate media will circulate pictures of dead children all day long when it’s in the interests of advancing longstanding imperialist agendas, but never when those children were killed by western weapons. If you can tug at someone’s heart strings while telling them a story, the story you tell them will slide right in with minimal scrutiny. And it works the other way, too: if you can prevent someone’s heart strings from being plucked while hearing about a legitimately heartbreaking story, you can prevent that story from taking hold. Kill all sympathy for a dissident journalist and you kill all belief in his side of the story.

And Assange’s side of the story is indeed devastating to the preferred narrative of the US-centralized empire. A journalist (yes, journalist, per definition) who publishes 100 percent authentic documents exposing the inner mechanics of power structures all over the world, who was forced to seek political asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in order to avoid extradition by the same government which brutalized Chelsea Manning, is on its face a highly sympathetic story.

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

DOJ Indicts “Vault 7” Leak Suspect; WikiLeaks Release Was Largest Breach In CIA History

June 19, 2018

DOJ Indicts “Vault 7” Leak Suspect; WikiLeaks Release Was Largest Breach In CIA History

A 29-year-old former CIA computer engineer, Joshua Adam Schulte, was indicted Monday by the Department of Justice on charges of masterminding the largest leak of classified information in the spy agency’s history.

Schulte, who created malware for the U.S. Government to break into adversaries computers, has been sitting in jail since his August 24, 2017 arrest on unrelated charges of posessing and transporting child pornography – which was discovered in a search of his New York apartment after Schulte was named as the prime suspect in the cyber-breach one week after WikiLeaks published the “Vault 7” series of classified files. Schulte was arrested and jailed on the child porn charges while the DOJ ostensibly built their case leading to Monday’s additional charges.

[I]nstead of charging Mr. Schulte in the breach, referred to as the Vault 7 leak, prosecutors charged him last August with possessing child pornography, saying agents had found 10,000 illicit images on a server he created as a business in 2009 while studying at the University of Texas at Austin.

Court papers quote messages from Mr. Schulte that suggest he was aware of the encrypted images of children being molested by adults on his computer, though he advised one user, “Just don’t put anything too illegal on there.” –New York Times

Monday’s DOJ announcement adds new charges related to stealing classified national defense information from the Central Intelligence Agency in 2016 and transmitting it to WikiLeaks (“Organization-1”).

The Vault 7 release – a series of 24 documents which began to publish on March 7, 2017 – reveal that the CIA had a wide variety of tools to use against adversaries, including the ability to “spoof” its malware to appear as though it was created by a foreign intelligence agency, as well as the ability to take control of Samsung Smart TV’s and surveil a target using a “Fake Off” mode in which they appear to be powered down while eavesdropping.

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

The Eerie Silence Surrounding the Assange Case

June 13, 2018

The Eerie Silence Surrounding the Assange Case

In a recent communication between Randy Credico, an Assange supporter, comic and radio producer, and Adam Schiff, the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee, Assange’s fear of arrest and extradition to the US was confirmed by the leader of the Russia-gate frenzy.

Credico received the following response from Schiff after meeting the the Congressman’s staff, in which Credico was trying to connect Assange with Schiff: “Our committee would be willing to interview Assange when he is in U.S. Custody and not before.”

Dennis Bernstein spoke with John Pilger, a close friend and supporter of Assange on May 29. The interview began with the statement Bernstein delivered for Pilger at the Left Forum last weekend in New York on a panel devoted to Assange entitled, “Russia-gate and WikiLeaks”.

Pilger’s Statement

“There is a silence among many who call themselves left. The silence is Julian Assange. As every false accusation has fallen away, every bogus smear shown to be the work of political enemies, Julian stands vindicated as one who has exposed a system that threatens humanity. The Collateral Damage video, the war logs of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Cablegate revelations, the Venezuela revelations, the Podesta email revelations … these are just a few of the storms of raw truth that have blown through the capitals of rapacious power. The fakery of Russia-gate, the collusion of a corrupt media and the shame of a legal system that pursues truth-tellers have not been able to hold back the raw truth of WikiLeaks revelations. They have not won, not yet, and they have not destroyed the man.

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

Ecuador Continues Playing Hardball With Assange

June 8, 2018

Ecuador Continues Playing Hardball With Assange

A day after she was elected president of the UN General Assembly, the Ecuadorian foreign minister said Julian Assange would remain incommunicado in Ecuador’s London embassy, as James Cogan explains.

On Monday Ecuadorian Foreign Minister María Fernanda Espinosa was elected to a one-year term as president of the United Nations General Assembly. On Tuesday she declared that her government would continue blocking WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange from all communications and deny him any personal visitors. On Wednesday it became 10 weeks since Ecuador’s government deprived Assange of his rights, which it is obliged to honor after granting him political asylum in its London embassy in 2012.

The General Assembly vote in support of Espinosa was a substantial: 128 votes for 62 votes for the other nominee, Honduras’s UN ambassador, Mary Elizabeth Flores Flake. There were two abstentions. Washington was believed to favor Honduras because its right-wing government supported the provocative relocation of the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. After the vote, Espinosa again hinted that Ecuador is working to force Assange out of the embassy into the clutches of waiting police and the prospect of extradition to the United States on charges of espionage. She stated she was in discussion with both British authorities and Assange’s lawyers. “I think all parties are interested in finding an outlet, a solution, to this complex situation,” she declared.

Ecuadorian President Lenín Moreno last year slandered Assange as a “hacker” and described the granting of political asylum to him by the previous president as an “inherited problem.”

Washington is demanding Assange’s head. Then CIA director Mike Pompeo, now U.S. secretary of state, asserted last year that WikiLeaks was a “non-state hostile intelligence agency,” due to its publication of documents exposing the operations of U.S. intelligence.

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

The Real Revolution Has Nothing To Do With Donald Trump

May 31, 2018

The Real Revolution Has Nothing To Do With Donald Trump

It’s been a weird last couple of days. I wrote an article about WikiLeaks’ dismissal of “QAnon”, the anonymous 8chan poster that hundreds of thousands of conspiracy newbies believe is sharing secret, coded information about Donald Trump’s heroic war against the US deep state.

Ever since I hit publish I’ve been getting a bunch of angry Q enthusiasts in my social media notifications accusing me of being a shill for the establishment. Because I don’t believe someone who says that we should all trust the President of the United States. Blind faith in the executive branch of the US government is anti-establishment now.

As bizarre as these interactions have been, they are still vastly more pleasant than my typical interactions with the faction I see as QAnon’s mirror image, the Russiagaters. Though enthusiasts of the Russiagate conspiracy theory are far more nasty and vituperative than the Q crowd, there are many similarities. Like QAnon, Russiagate is fueled by about ten percent information and ninety percent desperate need to believe. Like QAnon, Russiagate is so thinly substantiated it doesn’t begin to look legitimate until you’ve spent weeks crawling down the rabbit holes of its bulletproof echo chambers and squinting just right at everything you see until it feels true. Like QAnon, the evangelists of Russiagate center their revolutionary sentiment around President Donald Trump. Like QAnon, they shouldn’t.

Trump campaigned on a non-interventionist policy. Thus far what that looks like is increasing US military presence in Syria and Afghanistan, edging toward direct confrontation with Russia, and pushing regime change in Iran. But it’s all 4-D chess against the deep state, right?

7:00 PM – May 29, 2018

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

WikiLeaks Calls QAnon A Likely ‘Pied Piper’ Operation

May 30, 2018

WikiLeaks Calls QAnon A Likely ‘Pied Piper’ Operation

A few months back I started having bizarre interactions on social media of a kind I’d never experienced previously. Suddenly, whenever I’d write about President Trump’s nonstop warmongering and capitulations to longstanding neoconservative agendas like implementing aggressive new cold war escalations against Russia along multiple fronts, the illegal occupation of Syria with the stated goal of effecting regime change, increasing troop presence in Afghanistan, unprecedented civilian deaths in drone strikes, facilitating the slaughter of civilians in Yemen, or the administration’s open regime change policy against Iran, I’d get all these weird accounts telling me things like “Trust the plan” and “This is the Art of the Deal, Trump is playing 4-D chess”, and saying I should research something called “QAnon” or “Q”.

It happens literally every time I write anything critical of this administration; a deluge of commenters telling me in effect, “Shush. Calm down. This is nothing. What looks like Trump facilitating longtime establishment agendas just like his predecessors is actually brilliant strategic maneuvering.” Every single time, without a single solitary exception.

It got particularly frustrating when I’d try to talk about Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ statement that arresting WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange is a high priority for this administration, a statement Trump personally supported. These Q people told me they had great news for me: Assange is no longer languishing in London’s Ecuadorian embassy. No, some clever researchers had deciphered some cryptic statements from an anonymous poster on 8chan, and it turns out that Assange is now walking free and enjoying a full presidential pardon. Some even say it to Assange’s own mother.

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

I Am Julian Assange

May 17, 2018

I Am Julian Assange

Carl Spitzweg The raven 1845

Julian Assange appears to be painfully close to being unceremoniously thrown out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London. If that happens, the consequences for journalism, for freedom of speech, and for press freedom, will resound around the world for a very long time. It is very unwise for anyone who values truth and freedom to underestimate the repercussions of this.

In essence, Assange is not different from any journalist working for a major paper or news channel. The difference is he published what they will not because they want to stay in power. The Washington Post today would never do an investigation such as Watergate, and that’s where WikiLeaks came in.

It filled a void left by the media that betrayed their own history and their own field. Betrayed the countless journalists throughout history, and today, who risked their lives and limbs, and far too often lost them, to tell the truth about what powers that be do when they think nobody’s looking or listening.

Julian is not wanted because he’s a spy, or even because he published a number of documents whose publication was inconvenient for certain people. He is wanted because he is so damn smart, which makes him very good and terribly effective at what he does. He’s on a most wanted list not for what he’s already published, but for what he might yet publish in the future.

He built up WikiLeaks into an organization that acquired the ultimate trust of many people who had access to documents they felt should be made public. They knew he would never betray their trust. WikiLeaks has to date never published any documents that were later found out to be false. It never gave up a source. No documents were ever changed or manipulated for purposes other than protecting sources and other individuals.

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

“Russian Talking Points” Look An Awful Lot Like Well-Documented Facts

May 3, 2018

“Russian Talking Points” Look An Awful Lot Like Well-Documented Facts

Things aren’t looking great for the Democratic establishment, which recently admitted that it stacks its primaries against progressive candidates and is currently engaged in a desperate, hail Mary lawsuit against WikiLeaks for its factual publications about the party. So of course you know what that means.

That’s right! It’s time for Democratic pundits to begin down-punching Jill Stein.

✔

Jill Stein is on @NewDay right now repeating Russian talking points on its interference in the 2016 election and on US foreign policy.

8:24 AM – May 1, 2018

✔

WATCH: Jill Stein refuses to condemn Russian election interference in babbling CNN interview https://www.rawstory.com/2018/05/jill-stein-refuses-condemn-russian-election-interference-babbling-cnn-interview/ …

9:26 AM – May 1, 2018

Jill Stein refuses to condemn Russian election interference in babbling CNN interview

Appearing on CNN’s New Day, former Green Party candidate Jill Stein refused to condemn Russian meddling in the 2016 election, while telling host Chris Cuomo that she is refusing to turn over some…

rawstory.com

“Jill Stein is on @NewDay right now repeating Russian talking points on its interference in the 2016 election and on US foreign policy,” tweeted CNN Chief National Security Correspondent Jim Sciutto today, without shame or self-reflection.

Sciutto was referring to comments Stein made on a CNN interview today about America’s undeniable, entirely factual and well-documented history of meddling in other countries’ elections, including a citation of an ex-CIA Director’s recent admission that the US has interfered in foreign electoral processes and continues to do so to this day.

Because that’s what constitutes a “Russian talking point” these days: raw, easily verifiable facts.

Stein’s interviewer, Chris “It’s illegal to read WikiLeaks” Cuomo, echoed a similar sentiment in response to her points, in essence arguing that only Russians should be stating these blatantly obvious and extremely relevant facts.

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

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