Tag Archives: Wikileaks

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One Source of Non-Fake News

Cryptome Founder Asks to Be Indicted With Assange

John Young did the same thing Assange did before Assange did it. Assange is looking at a 170-year prison sentence. John Young has never been indicted, but now he’s asking to be indicted. From Joe Lauria at consortiumnews.com:

John Young, the founder of the Cryptome website, has asked the U.S. Justice Department to also indict him as he published un-redacted State Dept. files before WikiLeaks did, reports Joe Lauria.

The founder of a U.S.-based website that earlier published the same un-redacted documents that WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange was later indicted for has invited the U.S. Department of Justice to make him a co-defendant with Assange.

“Cryptome published the decrypted unredacted State Department Cables on September 1, 2011 prior to publication of the cables by WikiLeaks,”  John Young wrote in a Justice Department submission form, which Young posted on Twitter on Tuesday.

“No US official has contacted me about publishing the unredacted cables since cryptome published them,” he wrote. “I respectfully request that the Department of Justice add me as a co-defendant in the prosecution of Mr. Assange under the Espionage Act.”

Assange has been charged with possession and dissemination of classified information, some of the same material that Young possesses and disseminated.

Young founded Cryptome, which he calls a “free public library” in 1996. It was a precursor of WikiLeaks in publishing raw, classified and unclassified government documents on the internet.

Young testified at Assange’s extradition hearing in London in September 2020. His sworn statement says:

“I published on Cryptome.org unredacted diplomatic cables on September 1, 2011 under the URL https://cryptome.org/z/z.7z and that publication remains available at the present. … Since my publication on Cryptome.org of the unredacted diplomatic cables, no US law enforcement authority has notified me that this publication of the cables is illegal, consists or contributes to a crime in any way, nor have they asked for them to be removed.”

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Assange: A Threat to War Itself, by Robert C. Koehler

It makes it a lot easier to wage war if only a small segment of the population knows what you’re doing. That was the lesson the US military and intelligence learned from Vietnam. WikiLeaks’ exposures undermined the secrecy. From Robert C. Koehler at consortiumnews.com:

By pulling the realities of war out of its carefully crafted public context, the WikiLeaks founder became a danger to the country’s political status quo, writes Robert Koehler.

The Pentagon’s offer of “condolence money” to the relatives of the 10 people (seven of them children) who were killed in the final U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan— originally declared righteous and necessary — bears a troubling connection to the government’s ongoing efforts to get its hands on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and punish him for exposing the inconvenient truth of war.

You know, the “classified” stuff — like Apache helicopter crewmen laughing after they killed a bunch of men on a street in Baghdad in 2007 (“Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards”) and then smirked some more after killing the ones who started picking up the bodies, in the process also injuring several children who were in the van they just blasted. This is not stuff the American public needs to know about!

At the time of the release of that particular video, in 2010, then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates decried the fact that the public was seeing a fragment of the war on terror “out of context.”And, indeed, he was right. As I later wrote:

“The Department of Defense is supposed to have total control over context; on the home front, war is 100 percent public relations. The public’s role is to be spectators, consumers of orchestrated news; they can watch smart bombs dropped from on high and be told that this is protecting them from terrorism and spreading democracy. That’s context.”

Assange’s crime was collaborating with whistleblowers to expose hidden data and disrupt that context. Over the course of a decade, WikiLeaks published some 10 million secret documents, more than the rest of the world’s media combined, according to a Progressive International video.

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CIA Plan To Poison Assange Wasn’t Needed. The US Found a ‘Lawful’ Way To Disappear Him, by Jonathan Cook

Not all CIA and US government perpetrated horrors are deep, dark, and secret. Some of their biggest are right out in the open. From Jonathan Cook at antiwar.com:

A Yahoo News’ investigation reveals that, through much of 2017, the CIA weighed up whether to use wholly extrajudicial means to deal with the supposed threat posed by Julian Assange and his whistleblowers’ platform WikiLeaks. The agency plotted either to kidnap or assassinate him.

Shocking as the revelations are – exposing the entirely lawless approach of the main US intelligence agency – the Yahoo investigation nonetheless tends to obscure rather than shine a light on the bigger picture.

Assange has not been deprived of his freedom for more than a decade because of an unimplemented rogue operation by the CIA. Rather, he has been held in various forms of captivity – disappeared – through the collaborations of various national governments and their intelligence agencies, aided by legal systems and the media, that have systematically violated his rights and legal due process.

The reality of Assange’s years of persecution is far worse even than the picture of a thuggish, vengeful, power-mad CIA painted by Yahoo’s reporting.

More than 30 former senior officials, who either served in the US foreign intelligence agency or the Trump administration, helped to piece together for Yahoo the various components of the CIA’s plan. They show that the agency considered two main options for dealing with Assange in addition to then secret moves laying the groundwork for prosecuting the WikiLeaks founder in the US courts.

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In Leaked Audio, Julian Assange Warns Clinton State Department Lawyer About Cables Stolen From WikiLeaks, by Julian Assange

So much for the endlessly repeated assertion that Julian Assange was indifferent to the fate of people in sensitive positions who might be revealed in Wikileaks disclosures. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Leaked audio obtained by Project Veritas reveals that in 2011, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange warned the Hillary Clinton-led State Department that a rogue employee had stolen a trove of classified cables from the whistleblower organization and was about to release it.

Assange told State Department attorney Cliff Johnson that WikiLeaks had planned to release the cables with sensitive information redacted, and expressed concern over endangering people by what he believed to be a reckless release.

Yes, so the situation is that we have intelligence that the State Department Database Archive of 250,000 diplomatic cables including declassified cables is being spread around and is to the degree that we believe that within the next few days it will become public,” said Assange, adding “We’re not sure but the timing could be imminently or within the next few days to a week and there may be some possibility to stop it.”

State Department attorney Cliff Johnson: “Who would be releasing these cables? Is
this WikiLeaks?”

Julian Assange: “No, we would not be releasing them–this is Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a previous employee that we suspended last August.”

Johnson: “And he apparently has access to the material that Wikileaks also has?”

Assange: “Yes. That’s correct.”

Johnson: “And he has access to everything you have is that right?”

Assange: “That’s correct.”

Johnson: “OK. And that includes classified as well as the unclassified cables.”

Assange: “That’s correct.”

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A Long-Forgotten CIA Document From WikiLeaks Sheds Critical Light on Today’s U.S. Politics and Wars, by Glenn Greenwald

Barack Obama was a great salesman for the warfare state and perpetual wars. From Glenn Greenwald at greenwald.substack.com:

The Agency knew that their best asset for selling their wars was Barack Obama — the same reason so many in the security state were eager to get rid of Donald Trump.

(Photo Illustration by Omar Marques/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

The first time I ever wrote about WikiLeaks was back in early 2010, when the group was still largely unknown. What prompted my attention was a small article in The New York Times which began this way:

To the list of the enemies threatening the security of the United States, the Pentagon has added WikiLeaks.org, a tiny online source of information and documents that governments and corporations around the world would prefer to keep secret.

The NYT explained that the Pentagon had prepared a secret 2008 plan in which they plotted how to destroy WikiLeaks, including by purposely leaking to it false documents with the hope that the group would publish the fakes and forever obliterate their credibility — a dastardly scheme which was ironically leaked to WikiLeaks, which promptly posted the document on its website.

Any group that the U.S. security state includes on its “list of enemies” by virtue of publishing its secrets is one that is going to attract my interest, and likely my support. As a result — months before they made international headlines with publication of the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs and diplomatic cables from Hillary Clinton’s State Department — I immediately investigated everything I could about the group’s founding and mission; interviewed its founder Julian Assange; and urged readers to help support the fledging group, concluding that “one of the last avenues to uncover government and other elite secrets are whistle blowers and organizations that enable them. WikiLeaks is one of the world’s most effective such groups, and it’s thus no surprise that they’re under such sustained attacks.”

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Election Day “Shocker”: Mueller Went After WikiLeaks & Roger Stone For DNC Hacks But Found ‘Lack Of Evidence’, by Tyler Durden

Nothing at all suspicious about news like this being released on election day, when most people might well have other things on their minds. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Much belatedly and amazingly a mere hours before election day Buzzfeed News published a bombshell report late Monday night based on the DOJ newly declassifying previously secret portions of the Mueller report (following a successful FOIA lawsuit to obtain them). It’s yet more smoking gun evidence proving long after the fact that core aspects of now deflated ‘Russiagate’ that American media spent years devoting wall-to-wall coverage to were deliberate manufactured falsehoods (shocker!), specifically as regards claims of early collaboration and “collusion” between Trump staffers, WikiLeaks, and the Russian government.

Unfortunately, like with the latest news that put the final nail in the coffin of the Steele dossier hoax, this too will fast be memory-holed given it’s now election day. We learn 18-months after the initial report’s redacted release that despite putting one of the most hyped central allegations facing Trump’s team and his past campaign adviser Roger Stone under a microscope, Mueller’s team of hundreds of FBI agents simply “did not have sufficient evidence” and thus never pursued charges, as the Buzzfeed report begins:

Prosecutors investigated Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, and Roger Stone for the hacking of Democratic National Committee servers as well as for possible campaign finance violations, but ultimately chose not to charge them, newly released portions of the Mueller Report reveal.

Although WikiLeaks published emails stolen from the DNC in July and October 2016 and Stone — a close associate to Donald Trump — appeared to know in advance the materials were coming, investigators “did not have sufficient evidence” to prove active participation in the hacks or knowledge that the electronic thefts were continuing. In addition, federal prosecutors could not establish that the hacked emails amounted to campaign contributions benefitting Trump’s election chances and furthermore felt their publication might have been protected by the First Amendment, making a successful prosecution tenuous.

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‘Iraq War Diaries’ At Ten Years: Truth is Treason, by Ron Paul

Ten years after Julian Assange and Wikileaks published the Iraq War Diaries about the US government and military’s misdeeds in Iraq—the veracity of which has never been challenged—Julian Assange sits in a British prison, awaiting probably extradition to the US to face charges that could result in up to 170 years in a US prison. From Ron Paul at ronpaulinstitute.org:

The purpose of journalism is to uncover truth – especially uncomfortable truth – and to publish it for the benefit of society. In a free society, we must be informed of the criminal acts carried out by governments in the name of the people. Throughout history, journalists have uncovered the many ways governments lie, cheat, and steal – and the great lengths they will go to keep the people from finding out.

Great journalists like Seymour Hersh, who reported to us the tragedy of the Mai Lai Massacre and the horrors that took place at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, are essential.

Ten years ago last week, Julian Assange’s Wikileaks organization published an exposé of US government wrongdoing on par with the above Hersh bombshell stories. Publication of the “Iraq War Diaries” showed us all the brutality of the US attack on Iraq. It told us the truth about the US invasion and occupation of that country. This was no war of defense against a nation threatening us with weapons of mass destruction. This was no liberation of the country. We were not “bringing democracy” to Iraq.

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“Collusion against Trump” timeline, by Sharyl Attkisson

For all those who’ve followed this story since before Trump took office, here’s a comprehensive timeline of the entire sordid effort to depose Trump. From Sharyl Attkisson at sharylattkisson.com:

It’s easy to find timelines that detail Trump-Russia collusion developments. Here are links to two of them I recommend:

Politifact Russia-Trump timeline

Washington Post Russia-Trump timeline

On the other side, evidence has emerged that makes it clear there were organized efforts to collude against candidate Donald Trump–and then President Trump. For example:

  • Anti-Russian Ukrainians allegedly helped coordinate and execute a campaign against Trump in partnership with the Democratic National Committee and news reporters.
  • A Yemen-born ex-British spy reportedly delivered political opposition research against Trump to reporters, Sen. John McCain, and the FBI; the latter of which used the material–in part–to obtain wiretaps against one or more Trump-related associates.
  • There were orchestrated leaks of anti-Trump information and allegations to the press, including by ex-FBI Director James Comey.
  • The U.S. intel community allegedly engaged in questionable surveillance practices and politially-motivated “unmaskings” of U.S. citizens, including Trump officials.
  • Alleged conflicts of interests have surfaced regarding FBI officials who cleared Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information and who investigated Trump’s alleged Russia ties.

But it’s not so easy to find a timeline pertinent to the investigations into these events.

Related: Obama Era Surveillance Timeline

Here’s a work in progress.

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HUGE DEVELOPMENT: Following Last Week’s Release Attorney Clevenger Alleges Office of DNI Has Communications Between Seth Rich and WikiLeaks – Russia Collusion a Lie! by Joe Hoft

Seth Rich’s murder and his interactions with WikiLeaks need a thorough investigation. From Joe Hoft at thegatewaypundit.com:

Wow!