There is an important missing detail. The Swedes agreed to interview Assange about the rape allegations in London but the British Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) put pressure on the Swedes not to. The CPS deleted the emails they sent to the Swedes and we only know of their existence because of a FOI request on the Swedish side. Why were the supposedly politically independent CPS so keen to get Assange extradited to Sweden? FWIW, the CPS was led at the time by Keir Starmer, current leader of the opposition.
The entire "had sex with a broken condom" saga is ridiculous and built up to be an Assange smear campaign. Neither women went to the police to report a rape, they only wanted him to get tested for STDs, neither wanted charges pressed against Assange, and they both later retracted their stories.
If Assange did what was alleged, then that's awful and horrible and abusive and those women are victims. However the entirety of the reporting around this is wildly biased and dishonest and clearly manufactured to get him extradited, which worked.
This is fairly meaningless. It’s just some random people at GHCQ saying that they think it looks like a fit up, on the basis of the same publicly available information that everyone else had at the time.
Not sure what your point is. It’s clear from what’s quoted in the emails that some GHCQ employees are simply speculating based on the timing of the rape allegations. That’s something that a bunch of people outside GHCQ were also doing at the time.
The emails were handed over because they weren’t considered to be classified information. So it’s quite unlikely that they reveal discussions among people who had any inside knowledge about the Assange case.
> The records were revealed by Assange himself in a Sunday night interview with Spanish television programme Salvados in which he explained that an official request for information gave him access to instant messages that remained unclassified by GCHQ.
I don’t know anything about the internal workings of GCHQ, but one would hope that information is shared on a need to know basis. Assuming this to be the case, the vast majority of GHCQ employees would know no more about Assange than you or me.
Information inside agencies like GCHQ is strictly compartmentalised, with only the most senior staff having broad cross-programme understanding and access.
In fact, people can be even more cut off from information if they're at a low enough level inside an agency like that because they're forbidden from viewing leaked information to avoid jeopardising their clearances.
A GHCQ staffer working on, say, satellite signals intelligence for one of the regional desks is almost certainly not going to have any useful inside information on the case of someone like Assange.
What a sorry, shameful saga. I found this story linked to on rms' home page:
> Our next rally for Julian Assange is Saturday, March 4 at 11:30 to 12:30pm. We will gather at Park St. Station on the Boston Common to speak out for Assange and gather signatures on our petition to our senators.
(See how the media failed Julian Assange at Harper's Magazine.)
There's authoritarianism, where government knows what's best for everyone and keeps secrets to "protect" its citizens. Then there's democracy, where the government is open and honest so the people can make informed decisions on how best to run their government.
In my opinion, one of the best ways of identifying an authoritarian is to ask them their opinions on Snowden or Assange.
Putin has done much worse things to people who did less than what Snowden, Manning or Assange did. Regarding Snowden, Putin is just being opportunistic.
It's two diametrically opposed political ideals, with most people (and governments) falling somewhere in between the two extremes. That's the framework that already exists, not something I've constructed to divide people.
If you truly support democracy, then you accept that even the authoritarians should be given a voice, and you just pray they're not in the majority. That's very different than the "with us or against us" paradigm that's popular among authoritarians.
> one of the best ways of identifying an authoritarian is to ask them their opinions on Snowden or Assange
These are complex situations. If you’re basing your binary judgement of an even-more complex political spectrum (it isn’t really a spectrum) on these cases, your model is mis-tuned. I’m sure, for example, Putin would find both exemplary figures. That doesn’t make him a Solon.
>In my opinion, one of the best ways of identifying an authoritarian is to ask them their opinions on Snowden or Assange.
As far as Assange goes I think he is a liar.
The primary piece of evidence I use to support this is that he claims that his media firm, Sunshine Press was a non-profit when its documents of incorporation list it as a private limited company.
A second piece of evidence is that the original release of Collateral Murder was edited to remove the armed men accompanying the journalists who were killed and the unedited version was only released after public outcry. The presence of armed men escorting the journalists may have been used to justify the attack, which occurred just a couple hundred meters from an active firefight, so the context was deleted in the initial release.
A third piece of evidence is that Assange lied to John Young, a highly-respected member of the "leaking" community to get him to register the original Wikileaks domain waaaay back in the day and then the Wikileaks community turned on John when he dared speak out.
Finally, a fourth piece of evidence is that they used Wau Holland (Chaos Computer Club) as an initial fundraising arm to funnel money to Sunshine Press, and Wau Holland promised an audit of the substantial sums of money being directed to Sunshine Press, but they only ended up publishing three bare-bones "transparency reports" after millions had been spent and their tax-free status had been revoked for funding a for-profit enterprise. Once it became impossible to funnel donations tax-free to the for-profit business through Wau Holland donations slowed, communications stopped, and the association between the two ended. Please note that none of the banking shenanigans going on at the time impacted Wau Holland.
It's pretty clear what happened. People started to view the reporting of Wikileaks as evil or fake as soon as it negatively impacted $theirpoliticalside. Once these perceptions fell into place it was easy to disregard all the good, villify him personally, and ignore the authoritarian and illegal actions taken against him.
From the start, wikileaks was a partisan project masquerading as a righteous cause. Those of us old enough to remember their original releases (like “Collateral Murder”) remember that wikileaks was always about building a narrative rather than exposing the truth.
Suggesting that people started thinking negatively about wikileaks once it came for “their side” is painfully revisionist. Many people believe wikileaks is a net good but despise Assange. Assange failed wikileaks, the media did not fail Assange.
The truth is a narrative. Not all narratives are true, but calling something a narrative doesn't in any way disprove it.
Would you like to actually call out anything in Collateral Murder that you think wasn't exposing the truth?
I'm old enough to remember Collateral Murder. I'm old enough to remember it's video footage. Of members of the US military murdering people, and laughing about it. You can't dismiss that as "just a narrative", it's also the truth, and it's a fucked up truth that the public deserves to know about.
I make no claim that collateral murder did not represent a war crime, I make no claim that the release of collateral murder was a bad thing, rather, I am claiming that Julian Assange was never a noble person releasing leaked footage to expose the truth, he was a political performer, creating the narrative that he wanted to create, using leaks as props. Julian Assange had no loyalty to the truth (as has been shown in the years since) and cares only for the “truth” when it’s favourable to whatever agenda he has at the point in time.
You can be glad that collateral murder was released while also being deeply unhappy with Julian Assange’s motives and actions.
> I make no claim that collateral murder did not represent a war crime
Well, that's quite a change from: "Those of us old enough to remember their original releases (like “Collateral Murder”) remember that wikileaks was always about building a narrative rather than exposing the truth."
So you admit leaking Collateral Murder was about exposing the truth? A truth which was a war crime? It seems like maybe you made a vague accusation you couldn't back up specifically there.
> Julian Assange had no loyalty to the truth (as has been shown in the years since) and cares only for the “truth” when it’s favourable to whatever agenda he has at the point in time.
Make a real accusation instead of being vague. If Assange's lack of loyalty to the truth has been shown, I haven't seen it, so please, tell us what evidence you have. Otherwise, this is just another vague accusation that you'll shift away from when confronted for specifics.
If you're going to claim Assange is dishonest, I'd like to see a) evidence he knowingly leaked false information, or b) evidence he knowingly withheld true information. Be specific, stop this vague handwaving.
Everyone has an agenda, even if that agenda is only that they want to think of themselves as a moral person. What matters is whether the person's actions are good or bad.
> Julian Assange had no loyalty to the truth (as has been shown in the years since) and cares only for the “truth” when it’s favourable to whatever agenda he has at the point in time.
He published the truth and spent over a decade in confinement for it. Isn't that enough?
Ok, let's open some new positions for totally noble poeple to expose the truth. Anything less than noble should be put in prison regardless of the truth exposed. Any takers? Meanwhile let's see what b.s mainstream media is pushing. They are not less than noble and deserve the whole attention.
Its a straw man argument. The thugs dropping bombs on innocent people every twenty minutes aren't good enough or honest enough, either. You only have to be marginally better than them - a very low bar - in order to effect change.
Which means, if you aren't interested in effecting change in the form of real justice for these war crimes and crimes against humanity, you're not one nanometer taller, in terms of moral authority, than the criminals dropping bombs on peoples heads - in your name.
So you'll only accept evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and then take action about it within the context of your own democratic processes, if you get that evidence from a good and/or honest person?
Because honestly, this just keeps the door open for more crimes. Rarely is anyone ever good enough or honest enough - and neither of those conditions are required for addressing our heinous crimes against humanity, frankly. You just have to be good enough to know that war crimes and crimes against humanity are heinous, and honest enough to produce workable evidence that can be used to produce justice.
Assange is good enough and honest enough for that case, really - and if a person doesn't agree, they're a bootlicker thug. The WAR CRIMES have to stop. The CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY have to stop. It doesn't matter one iota what sort of person reports the evidence - the evidence is real. The crimes are real.
Assange's honesty doesn't change the enormous magnitude of the victims digging their loved ones out of the rubble, one bit.
War crimes are a serious problem, of course. But it's also quite possible that Assange's distribution of Russian propaganda affected elections in multiple countries and allowed for Russian human rights violations in Africa and Syria.
So you'll only accept evidence of war crimes if they are committed by the US?
And yes, I know you didn't write that but it's just as fair of a characterization as the one you provided.
Intelligence analysis (at least those reported in US Senate investigations) show Russian-linked code and Russian language in the Wikileaks leak of the hacked DNC emails. Assange either lied (lies) about not receiving that content from Russian sources or is being disingenuous by sticking to a distinction that maybe there is a middle man in between the FSB/hackers and the individual(s) that uploaded the data/documents.
Completely ruins his credibility, no? That's not honest by any definition.
I am not a fan of US foreign policy, but also, have you noticed that, from the beginning (2011?), nearly every major Wikileaks release is US government or 5 eyes? Funny that.
Also, maybe look in to Assanges friend (and Russian antisemite) Israel Shamir. And look at Wikileaks activities (through Shamir) in Belarus.
Look, if Assange came out and said "I get a lot of my info from Russian intelligence sources and I want to further their agenda" he would be not necessarily a "good" person. But maybe an "honest" one.
What's the revisionism? The collateral murder video was actually especially popular and impactful to the demographic (democrat young white liberal) that is now almost comically against Assange.
Also, there's literally no difference in the way they did "narrative building" with Collateral Murder than , say, the NYT does in covering war crimes in Ukraine. I mean to be honest it's a bit hard to understand why you would even highlight the narrative building by the exposing party, when the actual events involved a cover up of war crimes from the Pentagon and an insane amount of damage control and PR. It just doesn't register for me, it's like saying you lost confidence in the NYT for covering war crimes in a way that highlighted that war crimes are actually... bad.
I disagree with your characterisation, there was a lot of criticism of Collateral Murder from young white liberals! Assange and wikileaks, at the time, were presented as apolitical truth-seekers, not as journalists. Journalism is very different from what Wikileaks claimed to be, and Collateral Murder was not presented as a piece of journalism, it was presented as a leak. You cannot conceivably compare what Wikileaks claimed to be at the time, to what the New York Times claimed to be at the time.
Go back in time to when Assange was first accused of sexual misconduct and you’ll find that a lot of people disliked him: it’s revisionist to claim that he was perceived a noble hero by the left until he was accused of sexual misconduct or until he started his crusade against Hilary Clinton (as if any young white liberal liked Hilary Clinton…)
To me, there is no real difference. Or at least not enough to warrant any criticism of wikileaks (w.r.t how they handled Collateral Murder, not in general of course).
Whatever they did was much more effective than american journalists were doing at the time. It was less so to push a narrative than to expose an event that would've been swept under the rug, just like many many other "oopsies" the americans ignored at the time.
As to liberals being pro-hillary, I don't disagree that it wasn't true in 2008. But those liberals almost certainly grew to avidly support her in 2016.
I guess I'm biaised since I have been exposed to the "other side" of the iraq war and the war on terror, as a practicing muslim in a pretty political family. But to me it still amounts to complaining or criticizing from a position of pure privilege (I'm referring to the criticism at the time of the video's publication, not your comments!), as Americans basically found it "yucky" to be exposed to the results of their own imperialist policies. In that context, I think WL would've been criticized no matter what because the actual issue wasn't that they were pushing a narrative, but more so that they were making some Americans uncomfortable.
Imho, if WikiLeaks had focused on being the Craigslist of information, without attempting to market themselves, they would have gotten a lot more public support.
You can't transparently publish information and have an opinion.
> Imho, if WikiLeaks had focused on being the Craigslist of information, without attempting to market themselves, they would have gotten a lot more public support.
Turns out history has gifted you with a test case. :)
What you are describing was literally the early version of Wikileaks[1]!
The ostensible problem was that it generated little to no public awareness[1].
Wasn't that the whole idea behind Wikileaks? To not only be a platform to upload and publish random documents, and instead to provide context and work with writers to make it understandable for a wider audience? That's how I understood it at the time, that Assange was unhappy with the limited audience existing platforms were reaching.
/e: I see my reply was less targeted towards your comment but the one above.
> Those of us old enough to remember their original releases (like “Collateral Murder”)
That was very very far from being "their original releases". wikileaks used to be a real "wiki of leaks". it was quite glorious, a real goldmine for journalists to work through
His publications were inconvenient for one party, and then they were inconvenient for the other. He exposed all parties which helped us all become a little more independently minded, but the partisans were in power and exacted revenge.
How could they be partisan when "both sides" have accused them repeatedly of being against them? Case in point, Collateral Murder was celebrated by Democrats and then when they leaked the Hillary emails now all of a sudden Democrats thought Wikileaks was evil. The information was true, the only thing that changed is they didn't like the what it showed.
That's not Wikileaks fault, maybe we should hold those in power accountable regardless of how we feel about their stances on other issues.
The failure of WL is that rather than focus on doing journalistic work, it became the Julian Assange show with Julian Assange about Julian Assange. And then it becomes much more questionable that WL was only publishing information that might harm the Clinton's campaign while he was simultaneously in talks with her opponent's campaign about obtaining a pardon from Trump.
When you start operating like that, you lose any and all credibility and protection you might have some sort of journalistic organisation. At best, WL can be described as activists, at worst as useful idiots.
> The failure of WL is that rather than focus on doing journalistic work, it became the Julian Assange show with Julian Assange about Julian Assange.
This not a failure of WL, this is the American establishment and elites who were doing everything possible to smear Assange, even to the point of nothing-burger stories about how he was a bad house guest and didn't clean his cat's liter box enough. They were really grasping at straws.
My pet theory is that the true effect of "cancel culture" isn't really on rich/popular people. But the public cancelling means on an individual level social groups eventually become homogeneous in their views.
The result is you must eject any idea, person or news source which doesn't 100% align with the current group values.
The outcome is that entities which don't take sides are the real victims of cancel culture. Why is does CNN always come to the same conclusions and cover the same things? Why does Fox? It's because if they stray they are goners.
WikiLeaks was truly neutral dumping all info it got. That was in no one's interest other than the diminishing open minded groups.
By far the biggest piece is that WikiLeaks’ relevance has declined over the past several years. When Assange was first summoned to appear in Sweden I think there was an enormous spotlight on him. This might not have saved him from being convicted for the crime he was accused of, but it might have been enough to dissuade the Obama administration from seeking to extradite him. That administration had already expressed concern about the impact a prosecution might have on journalistic freedom, and (at the time) extraditing him on arrival in Sweden would have made both governments look like that were colluding to use a sexual assault accusation as a pretext for political retribution. I’m not saying they wouldn’t have done it: I am saying it would had massive repercussions for the US administration, Sweden, etc.
Instead of facing the charges head on, Assange chose to lock himself in his own prison. Years went by and the public’s interest in him waned. A new administration came to power that had no specific concerns about the press, and saw Assange as nothing more than a criminal. Finally, he decided to intervene in politics in a way that many saw as an intentional effort to affect the election, which damaged the case that he was simply a publisher. Ultimately I think you’re right that this damaged his sympathy with the people who would have been the most vigorous defenders, but the thing is: outside of those people he seems to have no base of support at all anymore.
That doesn't make it OK. The degenerate groupists in human society are the ones responsible for oppression and mass slaughter(war) whereas individual free thinking people are not.
A similar thing happened when Alexander Solzhenitsyn defected to the US from the USSR. As long as he was blasting the Soviets everybody listened, but when he started critiquing the US as well…his speaking invitations dried up.
It's really this simple. Shows that it was never about the fact that he provided information but about the fact that he provided information that could be used by $mypoliticalside.
I don't really think you can lay the blame here on people or perceptions and I'm not sure how you drew that conclusion from the article. He was targeted by people in power and they laid an effective smoke screen and got rid of him.
I thought the disillusionment around here with wikileaks had more to do with the way they had changed from careful curation, removing the personal information of those not involved, to just bulk dumps. Less that Hillary's emails were leaked and more that the personal information of lesser figures in and donors to the DNC were also released in mass. They had changed in perception from journalism to personal revenge against Hillary for her pursuing Assange as Secretary of State. The fact that the RNC had been hacked but emails not released helped in this perception...
> removing the personal information of those not involved, to just bulk dumps.
This is often repeated anti-WL propaganda that isn't true. There is a vast amount of effort that goes into censoring leaks and it's by far the most time consuming part of the process. They spend literally months on it. Just because they chose not to censor something that you would have preferred for them to censor doesn't mean a tremendous amount of time and thought didn't go into that decision.
> The fact that the RNC had been hacked but emails not released helped in this perception...
This is also not true. Why would WL refuse to publish something if the source could go to literally thousands of other journalists? It wouldn't serve them at all to refuse.
As opposed to your pro-WL propaganda that is blatantly false? Yes, what you describe is how I and I think many others generally viewed wikileaks up to 2016. With the DNC email leak, that changed:
As to the RNC hack, I never said wikileaks had anything but the RNC was hacked and whatever was found was never released by the hacking organization. Whether this is intentional or just because what was found was not interesting or too old to matter, just the story circulating added to the perception wikileaks had changed.
Because WikiLeaks had become the Julian Assange show and published releases based on his whims. The DNC e-mails hurt his "enemies" while RNC e-mails did not.
There was no need for villification. For whatever good Wikileaks did for "the truth" or people's curiousity, it was a danger to US troops and their allies from the first moments.
That's got nothing to do with political views. And the charges against him are still perfectly legal. An "authoritarian" system would go about this completely differently.
In context of limiting the amount of war upon the rest of world, it is hard for me to disagree. Although the foreign policy is not much different between the party sides, the Democratic party is historically and continues to be the more war party. Look at the votes for sending $117B to Ukraine. The Democrats voted unanimously for it.
Then why has Biden never had any talks with Putin to help broker peace talks, and why did the US and UK block the agreement brokered by former Israeli PM Bennet between Russia and Ukraine?
As we've seen since 2014, Russian "peace" overtures are "give us everything and you get nothing". They've also repeatedly proven that they won't honor agreements. They unilaterally broke the Minsk accords just last year with their invasion of Ukraine.
There's no utility in "peace" talks with a dishonest party. All it does is provide the dishonest party with ammunition for propaganda. When the other side balls at their ridiculous demands they run to the press with "look how unreasonable the other side is being!"
The Ukrainian state has been breaking the Minsk accords for almost as long as they’ve each been in place, most blatantly by bombing the Donbas. Not that this would justify invasion of Ukraine proper, but let’s not pretend this has ever been one-sided.
Wars end through peace agreements. Deliberately preventing them is what war mongers do.
> Wars end through peace agreements. Deliberately preventing them is what war mongers do.
What agreement could Ukraine possibly make with Russia? Previously Russia demanded Ukraine, a sovereign nation, be constrained by what treaties they could make or how they govern themselves. They've also been meddling in their internal affairs for decades culminating with the annexation of Crimea when Ukrainians decided to vote out the Russian supported/friendly president.
Russia can make peace any time they want by withdrawing from Ukraine. Ukraine didn't invade Russia or make war on them. The war monger in this whole affair is a short guy that lives in Moscow.
> Wars end through peace agreements. Deliberately preventing them is what war mongers do.
How can you make a peace agreement with a country that doesn't follow its own agreements?.
Russia already promised decades ago to never violate the territorial integrity of Ukraine way before 2014 and that ended up not being worth the paper it was written on.
If you are referring to the Minsk agreement, the Kiev government was supposed to stop attacking the Donbas and allow them to be independent within Ukraine. The western Ukrainians continued to shell them and killed over 14,000 citizens. So it was Ukraine who broke the agreement.
> If you are referring to the Minsk agreement, the Kiev government was supposed to stop attacking the Donbas and allow them to be independent within Ukraine. The western Ukrainians continued to shell them and killed over 14,000 citizens. So it was Ukraine who broke the agreement.
Im referring to the Budapest memorandum, where Ukraine gave up thousands of nuclear weapons and their long range strike capability in exchange for security guarantees from multiple states (including Russia). These guarantees were the following.
> Respect the signatory's independence and sovereignty in the existing borders.[7]
> Refrain from the threat or the use of force against the signatory.
> Refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by the signatory of the rights inherent in its sovereignty and thus to secure advantages of any kind.
> Seek immediate Security Council action to provide assistance to the signatory if they "should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used".
> Refrain from the use of nuclear arms against the signatory.
>Consult with one another if questions arise regarding those commitments.[8][9]
This all happened in 1994, Russia violated this agreement when they initially invaded Ukraine in 2014.
So I once again ask, why should Ukraine believe any agreement with Russia will last, when they already had one that had them giving up their nuclear deterrence and Russia just decided one day that it didn't matter?.
Something else happened first in 2014: a coup to replace the elected president with a NATO-friendly one that talked about NATO nukes.
It was also largely led by fascists which were later absorbed into the official state army, most famously the Azov Battalion. It also involved the murder of trade unionists in Odesa and the beginning of the cleansing of ethnic Russians in Ukraine.
There are no good states involved in any of this. None of them care about the majority of people in any of the involved territories, who would benefit only from peace.
> There are no good states involved in any of this. None of them care about the majority of people in any of the involved territories, who would benefit only from peace.
I think the state that invaded is the bad one, after all, they are the ones who solely took action that has resulted in many thousands of Ukrainian civilians, including children dying.
But honestly? your response is just more evidence that peace cannot be had with an agreement, you just unilaterally ignored that Russia promised they would not invade.
So why again should Ukraine trust anything Russia puts in agreement they will throw out whenever its convenient again?.
Asking for NATO nukes and killing ethnic Russians is breaching the same agreement later breached by invasion. Why would anyone trust the Ukrainian state either?
And yet states that don’t trust each either enough to be at war still manage to negotiate peace, historically. The US preventing negotiation just prolongs this war that benefits the US.
> Somehow you end up arguing for more Ukrainians and Russians to die.
Your lack of a response to any of my points makes me thing you have no answers.
Why did you spew blatantly false information and not even bother to try and back it up?.
For what its worth im all for less Ukrainians and Russians dying Unfortunately for now the Russian government is insistent that only happens by more Russians temporarily dying.
Imagine the amount of documents they reviewed from the cable leaks to the emails and more. If anybody had the most information from which to judge how dangerous a leader would be, it was probably Julian. He did want to impede the war machine by sharing truth to the world, but the volume of data could not be absorbed by most.
WikiLeaks arguably helped people to do that quite effectively. They've never really claimed to be neutral but especially around 2016 they were either getting played by or explicitly choosing to aid the trump campaign via the Russian state (at best as a messenger). III.B.3 of the Mueller report
I don't know if they are evil but I find it very hard to view them as anything other than selectively truthful at best.
> They've never really claimed to be neutral but especially around 2016 they were either getting played by or explicitly choosing to aid the trump campaign via the Russian state (at best as a messenger).
Assange has a 100% truthful track record in matters of Wikileaks and was extremely explicit that the source of the Hillary leaks was not Russian in origin. This is more propaganda that people keep spreading and is exhausting. It's also exhausting that the narrative continues to be about Assange instead of Hillary for actually doing illegal and fucked up things.
That is part of the false narrative you and many were fed and believed. Assange repeatedly explained that documents you are referring to were leaked from someone inside and alluded without exposing that the source could have been Seth Rich who was shot in the street.
That is part of the false narrative you and many were fed and believed. Investigations, reporting from many parties, and the vicitm's own family weigh against this drivel.
The intelligence agencies and a paid contractor came up with the other story full of holes. Julian Assange has never lied to the public or published untrue information that I know of. So it is a matter of who do you trust: the government who constantly lies, or Julian Assange.
The 'Russian collusion case' has been thoroughly discredited so why do you bring it up here, other than to muddle the issue?
If you want to have a clear case of meddling with presidential elections I'd point at the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee funding of the Steele dossier. Should that be brought up here as well? The 'dossier' was also discredited but it was used in the same way the data from Wikileaks was used to target Clinton. The difference here was that the data on Clinton was true while the 'Steele dossier' was fictitious.
> The 'Russian collusion case' has been thoroughly discredited
No, "collusion" doesn't exist as a crime. It wasn't discredited it just doesn't exist as a criminal thing.
And it turns out that "conspiracy" is something that requires the participants to understand that they're doing something wrong, and Mueller couldn't find any evidence of that. When you're rich and committing white collar crimes then the defense of "I didn't know it was illegal" apparently works, unlike us plebs when we get pulled over by the traffic cops.
There was plenty of evidence of coordination between the Trump campaign, Wikileaks and the Russians. Just none of it was considered crimes by the Muller investigation. Wikileaks was actively lending support to the Trump campaign in order to attempt to get Trump elected and defeat Hillary. So were the Russians. That is on solid factual ground. But Mueller didn't find anything there that the DOJ could charge him over.
It is also pretty clear that Mueller thought that the revelations would be shocking enough that Congress would impeach and remove Trump for what he had done and that "high crimes and misdemeanors" (which really has no legal definition) would cover it, but he didn't expect Congress to abdicate its responsibility in favor of partisan politics.
This is the same President that bragged he could "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody" and get away with it, and that is precisely what the Republican led Congress allowed him to do.
> And it turns out that “conspiracy” is something that requires the participants to understand that they’re doing something wrong,
Another problem was that the investigation was obstructed (in the broad sense, including crimes like obstruction of justice, witness tampering, etc.), both by people who were charged for that (some convicted and some remaining beyond the reach of US justice), and by Trump, who could not be charged under Justice Department policy which, regardless of its legal correctness, Mueller was bound by.
(And charging Trump after he left office for crimes related to the 2016 campaign would, given the general 5 year statute of limitations for federal crimes, have been difficult – it might be possible to argue that OLC memo on Presidents being beyond federal prosecution was correct and that the same logic tolled statutes of limitations, but that’s a dicey argument to make; obstruction would have been less problematic, but the Trump pardons and other things would also complicate that.)
The evidence is that Assange emphatically said it wasn't Russia, flatly said it was someone internal to the DNC, and he's never been shown to be wrong or dishonest about Wikileaks business.
Additionally, Assange has implied it was Seth Rich as strongly as he can without actually confirming he was the source, because he's bound by journalistic ethics and his agreement with his source to not reveal them.
Lastly, the Mueller report tries to discredit this and states as fact that Seth Rich was not the source. But it provides absolutely zero reasoning or evidence for this, and there is literally no way they could know this for sure. It claims it as fact regardless, and so does the entire establishment corporate media.
> The evidence is that Assange emphatically said it wasn't Russia,
That isn't evidence.
Find some factual evidence that Seth Rich ever touched the e-mails or had access to them.
Best evidence I think that its clearly the Russian GRU that gave it to Wikileaks is Assange trying to blame it on Seth Rich. Because of what he's done to Seth Rich's family I'm quite happy to see him rotting in a jail cell. In an ideal world, everyone pushing that story should be in there with him.
Ok, so an independent, world renowned, reputable journalist with a flawless track record reporting something isn't evidence. If that's your bar then I don't know what to tell you. I guess just keep believing whatever corporate media tells you to believe. It's never been dishonest and biased before.
> they were either getting played by or explicitly choosing to aid the trump campaign via the Russian state
The article addresses this belief and fairly well debunks it's origins.
Outraged the Clinton campaign swiftly ascribed the leaks to Vladimir Putin's intelligence apparatus as part of an operation to secure Trump's victory. The accusation was fueled by forensic analysis from the DNC's cybersecurity consultants, from CrowdStrike, detailing the potential links between the leaks and the Russian government.
Testifying under oath in a closed-door session before the committee in 2017, CrowdStrike’s chief security officer Shawn Henry admitted that he had no “concrete evidence” that the Russians had stolen the emails, or indeed that anyone had hacked the DNC’s system.
This crucial interview remained locked away until 2020. The press did little to acknowledge it; the testimony failed to attract even a passing mention in the New York Times, the Guardian, or any other mainstream outlet that had previously charted the Russian hacking story.
Something I personally observed (after 2006 and before 2020) is that we had 4 cybersecurity companies that frequently served as mouthpieces for US NatSec agencies - Mandiant, Fireeye, Crowdstrike and Cylance. They'd be called in to assist in some cybersecurity event and would unfailing parrot that agency's FUD, without ever providing any meaningful evidence. During these same events, non-gov cybersecurity experts were commonly casting doubts on US Gov's official narrative.
The above event seems like Crowdstrike acting is it's usual capacity as a Gov-adjacent mouthpiece - that is until the House committee compelled the CSO to supply evidence of Crowdstrike's parroted claim.
I may be missing context here, but you're referring to the fact that they leaked the Russian-state-hacked DNC emails, right? Could you elaborate on why you think it's "selective" to have leaked those?
Otherwise, it seems like you're saying "they're bad [via an unsupported claim like 'selectively truthful'] because they hurt my $politicalside"
If you are smart, and Assange isn't an idiot, then you should not allow yourself to become a tool of a foreign government. Having an open pro-information stance is all well and good, but when it is obvious that the people sending you information are doing so according to their own timetable, you have to take a higher stance. This is where journalistic ethics come into play. You must ask your source, why today? If you had this why did you not give it to me months ago? A good journalist isn't a mouthpiece for one government as it attacks another.
The US was a foreign government to him. So why does it matter? Again, this is sort of weird blue-ultra-patriotism post 2016 is just extremely weird coming from the democratic voter base. It's almost as repulsive as GWB era "you're either with us or with the terrorists". A foreigner has absolutely no allegiance to the US government. In fact, he is much much more threatened by the American government. In huge part because he exposed a series of crimes and war crimes that were committed by said government. So why in the hell would you expect him to spare any kind of "courtoisie" to such a government?
I think the higher stance is to report as a journalist and not exercise your own bias into when you choose to publish. And regardless, if you choose to delay it, your source will simply go to someone who won't. There's never an instance where it makes sense to delay, and it never makes sense to decline to write on reputable information, since it's not like wikileaks has a monopoly on journalism
> Having an open pro-information stance is all well and good, but when it is obvious that the people sending you information are doing so according to their own timetable, you have to take a higher stance. This is where journalistic ethics come into play
I think this is a well-articulated representation of a specific (and much more common) journalistic ethos, but he quite explicitly holds a different ethos that is much more radical about transparency.
Plus, this answers the opposite of my question: I asked how GP comment supports his claim that Assange's is "selectively truthful", and you responded by saying that he's not selective enough!
GP could have made an argument like the one you made, disputing the very foundations of Assange's open-information philosophy. What piqued my curiosity was his novel claim of unprincipled selectivity, and I charitably wanted to avoid the assumption that his comment was simply word-salad covering up a politically-motivated dislike of WL.
Lots of private companies (there's a list on Wikipedia) performed their own analysis and came to the conclusion that Guccifer 2.0 was/is Russian, what says you?
FireEye's Mandiant - CEO at the time was Kevin Mandia, who's a known associate of Hillary Clinton and also publicly a democratic financial supporter.
SecureWorks - owned by Michael Dell, a known donator to the Clinton Foundation
ThreatConnect - not much info, but also explicitly only said "likely"
Trend Micro - Hillary and DNC are customers of Trend Micro, and they also did not actually say anything at all about a connection to Russia.
Additionally, the reports don't say it was Russian. They say the tools are ones that Russians have been thought to use, with no context into whether everyone uses these tools, to what confidence level they believe that Russians actually use these tools, no context as to whether someone would deliberately use these tools to make it look Russian, or virtually anything at all that substantiates this argument. They also almost universally use phrases like "likely" or "points to". Trying to characterize this situation as confirmed is just outright wrong.
Anyway, this is exhausting. Hyperbole becomes fact and I'm tired of having to disprove hyperbole.
Put yourself in Wikileaks' shoes for a second: you have information, you might even know that the source is malicious, but you also know the information is true. Your mandate as an organization is to release truths. Are they really supposed to not release the truth because it hurts the Democrats?
I'm not a Trump supporter by any means, but the truth is the truth. If we only care about the truth when it favors us, I don't see how we're better than liars.
Agreed. Corruption was exposed. How did we ever let the exposed corrupt people control the narrative? They unsurprisingly would rather talk about (and malign) the source of the info, rather than answer to the charges. RE the source, whoever that hero whistleblower is, they deserve thanks, even if it were Russia, which it wasn't. MOVING ON, torpedoing the Sanders campaign for example is a prime example of perverting and undermining democracy in a completely boring and plausible way that doesn't involve exotic foreign bogeymen and deserves way more attention from the justice and legislative systems.
Release the information when you get it and say, “do with this what you will.” Not at all what they did. They released in batches, for maximum effect, right up until the election. They knew exactly what they were doing.
The first of the batched releases being on the eve of the Democratic National Convention and proceeding daily if I remember correctly right up until shortly before the election. Get real.
That is more or less what the New York Post did with the information on the "Hunter Biden Laptop". It did not work out very well for the New York Post, nor for what is now finally being admitted as "the truth" - this being that the device was his, that the material on the device was his, that the material was not "obtained by hacking". It did work out quite well for Hunter Biden and his family which seems to have been the intended result.
Had Wikileaks done the same they would have met with the same fate: they would have been accused of being in bed with whatever enemy-du-jour could be concocted and the material would have been buried under miles of accusations.
> I find it very hard to view them as anything other than selectively truthful at best.
Is that a purely partisan view or do you know of some true information they had and refused to publish?
I suspect what happened is simply that the Clinton campaign had no use for Wikileaks because most of the media was working with them, so only Trump supporters sent info to Wikileaks.
Why would the Russian state want to help Trump? How did that ever make sense? "Bwahaha, let's connive to get a patriot into the White House rather than a bought-sold-and-enslaved traitor!" Unless they thought someone with an "America first" attitude would be less likely to start WWIII, it's a ridiculous conspiracy theory.
Trump is, at minimum, lukewarm on NATO. If you think that’s good policy that’s your business, but surely it’s not hard to see what the appeal to Russia could be.
Especially because Trump was objectively pretty anti-Russia, and did a lot of things that pissed off Russia. But there is too much hysteria around "OMG RUSSIA AND TRUMP" and general FUD propaganda for anyone to see the forest for the trees of "orange man bad"
Their main objectives for the 2016 election was to prevent Clinton from being elected and to maximize internal division in the US; Trump was the main recipient of their support, but they also used their influence operations to support candidates to Clinton’s left (with varying responses from the candidates themselves) including Sanders (who publicly addressed it after being briefed on it, telling Russia to get out of US elections).
> How did that ever make sense?
Weakening NATO and Western unity alone was a pretty good benefit; its hardly the only place in the West where Russia, around the same time, backed nationalist political movements to disrupt internal or international unity in the West.
they do and they inarguably are. there is not any evidence at all that they have received reputable and material information and declined to report on it
It was well before the Trump election. Colbert told him that the authorities would come after him in his 2007 appearance on the Colbert Report.
The minute he published Collateral Murder, a video maximizing publicity on a fatal error in America's war effort, that was it for Assange and Wikileaks.
And notice how these fatal errors are still occurring. The moment you question the proxy war in Ukraine, you are immediately labelled a Putin apologist. No calls for diplomacy. Meanwhile, 200,000 Ukrainians have been led to their deaths.
The US is regularly engaged in diplomacy with Russia. Our secretary of defense and chairman of the joint chiefs just met with their Russian counterparts.
Diplomacy is happening. That doesn't mean peace can be negotiated yet. Unless the commenter thinks Ukraine should surrender, it is unlikely peace is going to be realistic anytime soon.
They had the basis for peace talks to begin. Biden Administration decided to use it as a cheap way to damage Russia militarily with no American deaths. But massive Ukrainian deaths they find acceptable.
Yet you refuse to cite any sources at all, credible or otherwise. Interesting.
As for peace talks, here's Putin's take on that: "I'm going to rob your house tonight. I'd like to take 25% of your stuff, but if you'll agree to leave the door unlocked, we can probably get that figure down to 20%. If you agree not to call the police, I might even go as low as 15%. Sound fair?
"I mean, it's not like you have no culpability here. You're the one who threatened to join the neighborhood watch, after all. What am I supposed to do, mind my own business and stay on my side of the fence?"
Ok, I re-read it. It was just as violently stupid the second time around.
"Diplomacy" doesn't mean "I break into your house and agree to take only 10% of your stuff if you don't fight back." And when the cops show up, that's not a "proxy war."
It's not due to "questioning" what's going on in Ukraine, but rather repeating Kremlin talking points.
Dragging it into the "both sides" empire-vs-empire context is exactly what Russia wants, as it justifies their naked imperialism while making it so their goal of Ukraine ceasing to exist could be some diplomatic middleground rather than the maximalist goal that it is.
In reality Ukraine wants to be part of the West, as it's a whole lot nicer than the Russian empire that seems to still be running on the playbook from the 1940's. So talking about this as if it's two empires divvying up a country is nonsensical - rather it's the cold truth that world powers exist, and to defend a war against one you have to align yourself with a different one.
And just so we're clear here, I say this as someone who wholeheartedly opposed invading Iraq.
Because calls for diplomacy benefit only Russia. Instead, issue calls for Russia to leave Ukraine.
> Meanwhile, 200,000 Ukrainians have been led to their deaths.
Leaving aside your dubious stat, here "Meanwhile, Russia killed x Ukrainian civilians and soldiers in an illegal invasion of a sovereign nation." There. Fixed it for you.
Your passive voice there betrays your pro-Russian sympathies, your protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. In other words, pro-Putin statements gets you labeled pro-Putin apologist. Stop doing that, and the problem goes away.
Wait what do you mean - the first fatal error was American soldiers murdering people - the second equivalent fatal error in the Russian invasion of Ukraine is?
He's going to launch into his rote "Euromaidan was a coup" BS talking point. Again (1). Sorry, some trolls are just boring and predictable.
1) The last (but not only) time was here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34977835 While it is amusing to read the rhetorical beating that they took repeatedly in response, this does not stop them from trying it another time. If they're not well paid, then someone is getting value for money.
The revolution was not "on their border", it was in another independent country. Trying to deny Ukranian agency and sovereignty is usual Russian propaganda talking point. You are basically saying "Those pesky Ukrainians started a revolution without asking glorious Russian president Putin first while also being at Russian border! That was definitively an act of war!" which is laughable. And just for you to note - I have been living all my life in walking distance from Independence square, so I don't need smug Fox news fans to lecture me on internet about "coups" and Nuland "distributing billions, weapons and oranges infused with battle drugs to Ukrainian nazis on Maidan!!1".
I never said the "totally not a coup revolution" was an act of war, I said of course Russia would respond to it just like we would if the same thing happened in Mexico since it would go against our national interest. We almost went to war with the Soviets just for getting too close to us in Cuba and still sanction Cuba to this day because of it.
Large powers take great interest in their enemies being on their border - more news at 11.
Meanwhile, it is interesting that you don't support the Crimeans voting to be part of Russia in 2014, but fully support the overthrowing of the democratically elected government in 2014. Is that logically consistent in your mind?
> I never said the "totally not a coup revolution" was an act of war
So what did you imply by (snarky) question "When do you think the war started?" followed by "Do you remember what happened right before he annexed Crimea?"? It seems we are in agreement that first act of war was occupation and annexation of Crimea?
Also, why are people like you are so hung up on this "coup vs revolution" thing? What exactly are you trying to achieve by playing with words here?
BTW you might want to consider listening to observers and insiders who actually experienced events directly. Like, you have actual Ukranian who was living nearby to Independence square during both 2004 and 2014 events and yet instead of changing your opinions based on my input you double down on lecturing _me_ about events I have first hand experience with. This makes you look like either a shill or just a person with poorly developed critical thinking.
> why are people like you are so hung up on this "coup vs revolution" thing? What exactly are you trying to achieve by playing with words here?
The reason the "coup vs revolution thing" matters so much is precisely what determines when the war started. If the CIA/State Dept hadn't been involved then and wasn't now treating this as a proxy war, then you would be right to think it all started when Putin rolled tanks into Crimea with no provocation. But we know that isn't what happened and we know the US was involved back then and is funding and arming Ukraine now in a proxy fight against Russia, and since we know all this we can't just blithely claim the war started the day Putin rolled into Crimea.
Putin didn't just decide one day to invade, whether you call it a revolution or a coup, the fact is the democratically elected government of Ukraine had just been overthrown, destabilizing the region and putting millions of Russians in harms way.
Now if you want to make the case that was a shitty justification for an invasion, ok - but that is a different conversation. I would argue it was at least as justified as our invasion of Iraq, Syria etc.
> It seems we are in agreement that first act of war was occupation and annexation of Crimea?
Crimeans voted to become part of Russia after they saw their democratically elected government overthrown in 2014 though, you keep ignoring that part. You ask me why I don't just take your word for it since you were there, but what about the opinions of countless Crimeans who voted to break away from what they saw as a newly installed western-backed puppet government? Their position matters less than yours? And that's to say nothing about the people on Donetsk and Luhansk who also wanted nothing to do with what they saw as an illegitimate government that had just overthrown a democratically elected one, and they've had to deal with periodic shelling since then and the government trying to outlaw anything related to their heritage such as their language, their church their media outlets etc.
> If the CIA/State Dept hadn't been involved then and wasn't now treating this as a proxy war, then you would be right to think it all started when Putin rolled tanks into Crimea with no provocation. But we know that isn't what happened and we know the US was involved back then and is funding and arming Ukraine now in a proxy fight against Russia, and since we know all this we can't just blithely claim the war started the day Putin rolled into Crimea.
Who are "we"? Links, please! All I know that bunch of my well-off middle class friends, coworkers, acquaintances participated. They are still waiting for CIA to send them the paychecks BTW. So, to me it looked very much like a _revolution_, but obviously random Fox news fan from US knows better...
> Putin didn't just decide one day to invade, whether you call it a revolution or a coup, the fact is the democratically elected government of Ukraine had just been overthrown, destabilizing the region and putting millions of Russians in harms way.
Harms way? Oh, I was waiting for those bloodthirsty russian-killing Ukrainian nazis to come in! (I'm a _russian-speaking Ukrainian_ BTW)
> Now if you want to make the case that was a shitty justification for an invasion, ok - but that is a different conversation. I would argue it was at least as justified as our invasion of Iraq, Syria etc.
So not justified at all?!
> Crimeans voted to become part of Russia after they saw their democratically elected government overthrown in 2014 though, you keep ignoring that part. You ask me why I don't just take your word for it since you were there, but what about the opinions of countless Crimeans who voted to break away from what they saw as a newly installed western-backed puppet government?
What about them? Crimea was de facto part of Russia for almost 8 years before Russia (re)invaded and it didn't look like the situation was going to change any time soon.
> And that's to say nothing about the people on Donetsk and Luhansk who also wanted nothing to do with what they saw as an illegitimate government that had just overthrown a democratically elected one, and they've had to deal with periodic shelling since then and the government trying to outlaw anything related to their heritage such as their language, their church their media outlets etc.
Outlaw my heritage? Excuse me? Part of my family is from Donetsk and I spent a lot of time there during my childhood so please spare me your Russian propaganda bullshit about bloodthirsty Ukrainian nazis that were going to brutalize tHeM RuSsiAn sPeaKiNg PeOplez oF DonBaSS until glorious President Putin intervened, thank you very much!
You're very emotionally attached to your positions and it's therefore pretty clear you are not open to discussion. Considering how strongly you feel, have you considered going back and fighting the good fight?
Or notice how those that are pissed off when they are called Putinists call the Russian invasion of Ukraine a “proxy war” and blame the death of all those Ukrainian people on anybody except the culprit, I.e. Putin
Not what I said. You can blame Putin AND recognize this thing could have been avoided. The prime minister of Israel said they had a deal but the US said no.
I think its pretty obvious this is a proxy war. Many legislators (both republican and democrat) are openly admitting it. See Dan Crenshaw-TX openly claim the benefits to the Ukraine war being able to fight a major geopolitical rival (Russia) with no American casualties by supplying weapons to Ukraine. That is a proxy war by definition. Looks at comments from Victoria Nuland (state dept officials from both parties) being glad the Nordstream pipeline being blown up.
I had thought there was some merit to the term "proxy war" here. But actually no, it's just another bit of specious nonsense. Thank you for making me look it up!
Wikipedia: A proxy war is an armed conflict between two states or non-state actors, one or both of which act at the instigation or on behalf of other parties that are not directly involved in the hostilities
Calling this a proxy war ignores the part of the defintion about motivation. The only instigator here is Russia, and Ukraine is mainly fighting for its own interest of not being liquidated by Russia. Supplying allies does not make a country a combatant, nor does it make the supplied party a "proxy".
Its a proxy war because US is using Ukraine as an convenient excuse to take Russia down a few pegs militarily. US Rep. Dan Crenshaw-TX admitted it, saying that its a way to fight Russia on the cheap with no American casualties. Of course, that compeletely minimizes the Ukrainian casualties that it would take. Its not being done in the interest of Ukraine so much as the interest of fighting Russia. Ukraine is being used here, and they are likely to lose anyway. And even if they do win, and Russia is defeated, they will be so ravaged it, it will be little better than a pyrrhic victory. But BlackRock will have a great place to invest. Too bad for those who died.
The motivations of the US are independent of the motivations of Ukraine. Ukraine is not fighting to benefit the US by taking down Russia, but rather to preserve their own independence. This is why it is not a "proxy war" - the US acting to help its own interests does not make it into one. Otherwise every single war would be a "proxy war", making the term useless.
You continue to conflate the actions of Ukraine with the actions of its allies, by using the passive voice to remove Ukraine's agency. This is directly in line with the Russian imperial propaganda narrative that wants to brush aside the idea that Ukraine is an independent country.
Also, appealing to the tyrannical nature of the US-led financial system is fallacious here, as being economically oppressed is much nicer than being militarily oppressed. You keep throwing out these "deaths" as if they've only occurred due to Ukraine not surrendering, while Russia's liquidations in the occupied areas demonstrate that Ukrainians are actually fighting for their own lives.
Strange how you automatically feel the need to support one side and can't see the horrible outcome this has been for all parties. This could have been resolved through diplomacy. You never see the term even mentioned anymore.
that's not how the world works. Peace deals can happen, but everyone has to put everything on the table. When people dig in and are stubborn, that's when we get hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Such as when you decide to announce a rushed annexation of your enemy's lands after your army suffers the biggest rout of the 21st century? While claiming that this war isn't about trying to annex your enemy's lands, after all...
Quite a few. I try to listen to what everyone is saying. It always makes me nervous when the media seem to march in lockstep.
Looks into what David Sacks has been saying. He got into it on the ALL-in podcast a couple of weeks ago, but you can find him on Twitter. He says the corruption in Ukraine right now is off the charts. Higher than anything in any corrupt Latin American country. Its difficult to decipher what is going on in Ukraine right now, because there's so much propaganda from all sides.
Is that your top 3, your "listen to everyone" ? One guy. That does not even answer the "top 3" question meaningfully.
One guy: David Sacks; a Paypal and Thiel aligned guy, who unironically calls Russia's invasion "Woke War III" ? Not a geopolitics guy, just a a rich "culture war" guy? This has less than zero credibility to me.
While I am sorry that your information diet is so poor, both in quality and in variety; but I have no interest in you recommending the same to me. Sort yourself out first.
> No idea what a random forwards is.
Do you follow the youtube algorithm then? That would explain this amateur hour.
This is a more complex than that. I don't like the invasion, but its not like Russia has no vital interests in the area that is right on their border. And they have occupied Crimea in the past going back to 1776. I'm just saying they have as much national interest as the West does. Israel Prime Minister claims they had a deal that was agreed to but Biden administration turned it down.
It's also the responsible thing to do to look at the prospects of forcing a war though, when the Urkainians are so heavily outgunned. 200,000 Ukrainians have died in this fight. Maybe 50,000 Russians have died (its hard to find out specifics). The US wants to fight this war on the cheap with the Ukrainians taking all the casualties so that Americans won't have to. That is pretty deplorable to me.
The sources are all over the place, but they all seem to be horrific. There are estimates that Ukrainian deaths so far could be anywhere from 100K to 200K.
Russians have lost a lot too. But the only thing we know is that they are depressingly high.
Of course Russia has vital interests all around it: everyone does. But it doesn't follow that "therefore Russia should be allowed to annex everything around it".
Again, we know that playbook, it has played out before in Europe. Today it's Ukraine, tomorrow it's Poland, and your arguments will still be exactly the same: Russia has vital interests in Poland, Russia has occupied Poland before, Poland is outgunned, and why would we care about Poland, really?
And then it's Germany, at which point, again, nothing has changed. Britain and France might use their nuclear deterrence when it's their turn, but if they listened to you, they'd probably say "do we want to end humanity just because we don't like Russia to rule over us? Surely not, humanity is too important to be destroyed over Russia's vital interest to annex whatever is next to Russia" and roll over.
It would end only when Russia invades the US or China, because neither will allow it if their nuclear weapons are still available by then.
You've posted dozens of flamewar comments to this thread and broke the site guidelines egregiously. That's abusive, regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are or how right you are or you feel they are. We ban accounts that do this. I'm not going to ban you because everyone goes on tilt sometimes, but if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd appreciate it.
That hasn't been true since HIMARS arrived last summer. Now there's parity, and Russian war correspondents report that in some sectors Ukraine even exceeds Russian capabilities. In coming months, we'll see how the "hopelessly outgunned" army will do with more modern weapons in the upcoming spring counteroffensive. All we know right now is that the Russian winter offensive was a spectacular failure: worst casuality figures since the war began and nothing to show for it. Let's hope that Ukraine makes good progress and ends the war soon.
Please don't talk anything like this in future on HN, thanks, regardless of what the other person says. You wrote similar things several other times on this page.
You're making assumptions about me based on your projections. They're wrong.
I don't profit from any weapon sales, and it's the Ukrainians who want to fight. I'm certain especially Western Europe would've been much happier if Ukraine hadn't resisted and Russia could've swallowed them (your preferred option), because it would've meant no annoying break with your main provider of gas and oil.
But here we are, and some people are still claiming that Russia has the right to terrorize its neighbors because hurr durr Red Army strong.
> The moment you question the proxy war in Ukraine, you are immediately labelled a Putin apologist.
Because the insistence of calling it a proxy war to make the war appear larger than it is comes from Kremlin's PR canon. They can't bring themselves to admit that they are losing to Ukraine and hence emphasise how they are "acktshually fighting against the whole NATO". Allies have given a lot of support, but mainly in the form of obsolete military surplus equipment and equipment alone doesn't fight; see Afghanistan.
> Because the insistence of calling it a proxy war to make the war appear larger than it is comes from Kremlin's PR canon.
The point of calling it a proxy war by the Kremlin is not to make it seem larger than it, as the largest post-WW2 European war, is. It is to invert the responsibility for aggression. (Secondarily, it’s to deny Ukrainian agency and make its existence and sovereignty an irrelevancy in discussing a war where that is the entire issue.)
There is a sense in which calling it now a proxy war between NATO and some other affiliated states on one side and, say, Iran, China, and North Korea on the other, is not entirely inaccurate. (Russia prefers to look to external sponsors of the direct belligerents only on one side though.) But, even to the extent that’s accurate it doesn’t change that the war (which started in 2014) was initiated by Russian aggression, and the 2022 escalation was a major upswing in Russian aggression, and the outside assistance (whether or not it also has ulterior geopolitical motives) for the other side is in line with the right of collective self-defense enshrined in the UN Charter.
> The point of calling it a proxy war by the Kremlin is not to make it seem larger than it, as the largest post-WW2 European war, is. It is to invert the responsibility fot aggression. (Secondarily, it’s to deny Ukrainian agency and make the existence and sovereignty an irrelevancy in discussing a war where that is the entire issue.)
Yes, that's what I meant. The purpose of this talking point is to diminish Ukrainian achievements by leaving an impression that Russia is under attack and fighting the whole "collective West" (as they call it) and that the war is much larger in scope than it actually is: Russia vs Ukraine.
Foreign military aid to Ukraine has so far barely sustained defense and I wouldn't call aiding countries belligerents in this war.
Many us legislators are openly admitting it is a proxy war. See Rep. Dan Crenshaw-TX comments on Ukrain support. He calls it a good deal that we get to fight a major geo-political adversary without any American deaths by just supplying Ukraine with weapons. He is not the only one. That is by definition a proxy war. Fighting a war on the cheap that isn't designed to ultimately win anything, meanwhile sending 200,000 of those Ukrainians to their deaths is despicable in my opinion.
I am not on Putin's side on this, but this is not 1945. Russia does have some vital national interests in the reason, since its right on their border and they have a long historical relationship with Crimea. The prime minister of Israel claims they had a deal worked out, but the Biden administration nixed it. This is a result of strategic planning within the State Dept. to have this fight.
Yeah, noticed "walks back". He just said he is now "unsure". Why did he say it in the first place? Sounds like the US put the squeeze on him, so he "walked it back". Nevertheless, there was SOMETHING on the table that could have been the basis for talks. They ruled it out of hand.
His words were initially taken out of context; he meant that allies stopped pressuring Ukraine into a peace deal after mass graves were uncovered in Bucha. That's the only source for this conspiracy theory.
It goes against your whole narrative of how the US is forcing Ukraine into a war.
There was still a basis on which talks could have been opened up. The fact they were entirely nixed shows they are not interested.
200,000 Ukrainian deaths when they can't even define what victory looks like beyond slogans. They are trying to fight a war on the cheap so long as no American casualties happen, but they are perfectly fine so long as they are Ukrainian casualties. At least, they could at least define what victory looks like and provide the means to do so.
> There was still a basis on which talks could have been opened up. The fact they were entirely nixed shows they are not interested.
It is important to note that the party least interested in a workable peace deal at this point is Russia. After all, they annexed last October a large swath of Ukrainian territory in such a rushed manner they couldn't even properly explain what they annexed. Given that Russia seems uninterested in any peace deal which does not include Russian annexation of at least some portions of Ukraine, any argument that what Russia really cared about was NATO enlargement is laughably incorrect.
There's nothing to negotiate at this point. Either Russia moves its guns and tanks and soldiers out of the whole Ukraine like they retreated from around Kharkiv, or Russia gets defeated on the battlefield. Anything else would leave Ukrainians in occupied territories to be wiped out by Russians. Russian hopes of a favorable peace deal is nothing but a coping mechanism, just like top Nazis hoped to reach a peace deal in 1945. Better prepare your cyanide pill.
And that completely ignores how the world really works. You are perfectly content to risk WWIII. It is not 1945 anymore. You are risking a nuclear conflict that would be absolutely horrific.
What difference would a nuclear strike make anymore, several Ukranian cities have already been hit with more TNT equivalent than Hiroshima and Nagasaki and wiped from the earth: https://twitter.com/OstapYarysh/status/1632282407578611712
Britain has historical roots to the US territory, going back to centuries ago. According to your logic, a British invasion and occupation of US would be justified.
> And their have been hostilities between the two since 2014 when the US formented a revolution there.
This is just another conspiracy theory. In 2014, a pro-Russian president of Ukraine backed down from a very favourable trade deal with the EU at the last minute due to Russian pressure, people came to streets to protest, he ordered snipers to shoot unarmed protestors, after which the unrest only grew, he fled the country in panic and Russia used the unrest as a cover to invade Ukraine.
The Association Agreement also included sections on political and security cooperation. More importantly, Ukraine was pretty evenly split on Maidan and the signing of the Association Agreement. [0] This split, also seen in elections was largely geographic. [1] Unsurprisingly, toppling the (democratically elected) president tore the country apart, and independent on which government you personally prefer, I think it is really hard to argue that Ukraine wasn't the victim of Big Power politics in this case.
The manipulations within the state dept. by Victoria Nuland are well known. She was literally caught on the phone planning who was going to be pushed as the next leader. By labelling it a conspiracy, you are simply trying to disparage a very valid possibility. Conspiracies are nothing more than multiple people collaborating to make something happen. It does happen, and they should not be dismissed out of hand.
> Ukraine is right on the russia's border. Their economies and cultures are intertwined
So, according to your logic, a British invasion and occupation of USA would not be justified, but a British invasion and occupation of The Republic of Ireland would be?
The Bulwark is a neocon publication by Bill Kristol. He still refuses to apologize for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is part of the war machine that is perfectly happy to see perpetual war.
He was a solid republican, but he was all too happy to ditch everything he said he believed in to embrace the cultural issues of the left. The only thing he kept the same was his hawkish views on foreign policy. That shows a lot about him right there. He is an untrustworthy source for anything.
I already know who Bill Kristol is, and the people (plural) behind The Bulwark are, thanks. It's not hidden, it's here https://www.thebulwark.com/about-us/
I'm not a fan of their political project, my point is that even they don't buy this "coup" nonsense.
I do not think either that he "ditched everything he said he believed in" when their political party changed and they did not, that's rather a specific framing from an extremist faction of that party.
Huh? Dan Crenshaw has been all in on this war in Ukraine. He even openly admitted that it was a golden opportunity because we could fight a major geopolitical adversary on the cheap by just sending weapons with no American casualties - completely minimizing any Ukrainian casualties.
That's the point. The people behind The Bulwark don't believe "this coup nonsense" because they are pushing for war there. All the writers there are always pushing for military solutions to everything.
> The Bulwark don't believe "this coup nonsense" because they are pushing for war there.
It could be that. Or maybe, they don't believe it because the facts don't support it, and they believe in truth as a thing that is worthwhile regardless of if it personally benefits them or not.
You have a very transactional view of truth. And frankly that says more about you than anything else.
As a Ukrainian I find your comments in this thread insulting. You should educate yourself a little about history of Ukraine before you start spewing such nonsense. I would suggest you to start with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJczLlwp-d8&list=PLh9mgdi4rN...
Now, I will assume you are just a misguided westerner who watches too much Fox news and indulge you:
> Ukraine is right on the russia's border.
So? How about US invading Mexico, occupying and annexing its lands, killing bunch of civilians while simultaneously demanding Mexico to "respect" US "sphere of influence", speak English, stop "threatening" it by committing to neutrality, etc.
> Their economies and cultures are intertwined.
Let them rape and indiscriminately kill bunch of civilians in some Bucha or other towns because of similar languages and economical ties? How does that make any sense to you? Also, claiming that Ukraine doesn't have its own historical roots and cultural identity is one of the Russian propaganda talking points.
> And their have been hostilities between the two
"Hostilities"? Excuse me? Russia occupied and annexed parts of Ukraine repeatedly but you dubbing it "hostilities" make it sound like some kind of a border skirmish where both parties are culpable which couldn't be further from the truth.
> since 2014 when the US formented a revolution there
Another Russian propaganda talking point. People were fed up with Yanukovich and decided to remove him from power. Support from US was inconsequential.
> I am not shilling for Russia
Yes you are! Openly and brazenly.
> peace agreement requires all parties to put everything on the table and deal openly
Well, yes, Russia would love Ukraine to put its lands "on the table", commit to neutrality, make Russian language the second national language and a lot more. And what exactly are the offering in return? To maybe stop attacking Ukraine for some time? Am I missing something?
> This could have happened.
It still can. Ukraine has been offering to solve the conflict through diplomacy as soon as Russia withdraw its forces. It is not like Ukraine is going to push into Russian territory to occupy Moscow and kill Putin. You understand that, do you?
Look, if you just prefer US to stop spending money on Ukraine you could just say so. Yes, this will lead to bunch of Ukrainians killed, raped or tortured in concentration (excuse me, "filtration"!) camps and you will feel somewhat bad for saying that, but at least it would be truthful. No need to play Tucker Carlson here with "border skirmishes" and "hostilities".
Thank you so much for this comment. Until I read it, I was regretting having submitted this story, after seeing it marred by starkd's sickening 27-comment barrage of Russian propaganda and insults.
> How about US invading Mexico, occupying and annexing its lands
I know. It seems US and Mexico have been having hostilities and border disputes for some time now, so annexing some more of Mexico's lands would seem like reasonable and expected course of action.
I will also note that the cash burn rate for this war in Ukraine is now exceeding that of Afghanistan in the early years. It is more money after nothing, because they won't even define what victory means. Just more war slogans.
Is it really a mystery why people turned on assange?
In his later years his work became similar to that of breitbart, James okeef, and tucker Carlson. Regardless of what one thinks of those, There’s no question that their publications and intentions are extremely slanted.
Hard to put out useful info on Trump when the Democrats already had the Steele Dossier, Russian pee tapes and other fake things out in the news cycle, to go along with the Access Hollywood tapes which were real and quite sensational as well. If you read about the info Wikileaks had on Trump it just wasn't sensational enough for anybody to care.
All the good stuff on Trump (along with some good dirt on down ballot Republicans and Democrats) was leaked through DC Leaks.
The sad reality is the people who hate Assange most now are the ones who loved him for Collateral Murder, because it was damaging to their enemies. Once he released information that was just as accurate, but damaging to their political allies, all bets were off.
I don’t even know what the “collateral murder” video was until googling it just now, so… err those facts mentions are “alternative facts”. A lot of Millennials (many of whom are disgusted by assanges selective war against democrats) were occupied with college and less tuned into politics other than being anti Iraq war and disliking bush. But facts smacks!
There are some signs new Australian PM Albanese has been quietly working to secure the release of Assange, but he is now a broken man after a decade of effective imprisonment and the last few years of torture. The deterrent effect against any would-be whistleblowers has been achieved.
Framing this as they do continues to “fail” him! It wasn’t bad journalism that “failed” Assange, it was a concerted effort to assassinate his character and distract from his reporting.
Julian Assange has not been charged with exposing secrets or being inconvenient for the powers that be. He has been charged on the quite plausible accusation of helping Chelsea Manning illegally acquire these secrets. There are lines journalists (and you can debate if he is a journalist) are not supposed to cross, this is one of them.
Most of the negative consequences in his life stem from him running from this accusation, and from the rape charges in Sweden. He'd like to frame it in a different light, understandably...
The timeline is actually a bit different. The US espionage charges came into the light after Ecuador revoked his asylum and Assange was arrested by the UK police. He was hiding on the suspicion that Sweden would extradite him to the US and everyone made fun of him and called him paranoid for 7 years.
As I said, he was hiding from rape and espionage/computer hacking charges. There's nothing fishy about either of those, conspiracy theories not withstanding.
"Everyone made fun of him" is a large overstatement. He didn't want to face any of the three or four justice systems he was dealing with (Uk, Sweden, US and Australia) so he opted to go into Asylum in that embassy. He could have been convicted (or acquitted) of those charges and gotten pardoned by now.
You're rewriting history. When he asked for asylum Assange was only seeking refuge from being questioned on Swedish soil about the rape allegations from 2010. When he was granted asylum however, he breached the bail conditions from the UK and there were indeed two governments after him. But, I repeat, no espionage/computer charges were known until 2018.
He assumed, and rightly so, that the US government was after him. Otherwise he wouldn't have stayed in the embassy past the charges in Sweden getting dropped. It is immaterial if the indictments were known or even already existed.
For me there's a slight nuance difference between being a fugitive from "official prosecution" by the US and being a fugitive because "he feared" prosecution. The US government had official communication when he entered the embassy that he is not on their wanted list.
Oh come the heck on, it’s a standard British Category A prison. Any comparison to Gitmo are prima facie ludicrous and makes the rest of the article suspect
"Between 2001 and 2002, Belmarsh Prison was used to detain a number of people indefinitely without charge or trial under the provisions of the Part 4 of the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, leading it to be called the "British version of Guantanamo Bay"."
Perhaps there should be a time limit when people should forget that their government imprisoned people without trial or charges, however I suggest it should be greater than 21 years.
The efforts to discredit Assange are a primary example of a successful smear campaign. It's not surprising that people are gullible to make such campaigns easy, character assassination always works when large government agencies are behind it for many years. I was actually surprised how long it took.
Here's the thing, though, Assange and WikiLeaks are complicated figures who have done good and evil things. They are fair targets for criticism, and it's genuinely ok for someone to draw the conclusion that, "given the criticism, I cannot support them".
Yes, a deliberate smear campaign exists, but also these are institutions with complex histories. You cannot simply call anyone critical of them "gullible".
I think that's why people need to look past the character and heresays and look at the facts and processes.
Ignore Assange's character, make him an anonymous person instead and think "is the process X person has gone through for Y actions reasonable/legal/supportable?"
Ignore Assange's character, focus on leaks of dubious, probably state actor origin, precisely timed in their release. Focus on which state propaganda network hosted his show, whom he met with in the embassy, etc.
If (1) you have acquired documents on both the DNC and the RNC, (2) they are both damaging and (3) you choose to only leak the ones about the DNC... well then it's not as clear cut and ethical as leaking both troves. Even if what you do leak is factually true.
> What's that got to do with the government's reaction and pursuit since, based on what was released?
Nothing - but that moral judgment has a lot to do with some people deciding the cause is not worth supporting after realizing what the cause truly is about.
The Nazis spent a lot of time acquiring factual information about the Katyn massacre, it's worth knowing the motives.
Assange has certainly played with outright lies e.g. Seth Rich.
Most of WikiLeaks output as far as I'm aware is mostly truthful to what was given to them, with the caveat that they are telling a story (e.g. bellingcat have no issues finding dirt on Russians, WikiLeaks don't).
They are also very happy to cause collateral damage of their own, IIRC they're very happy to leak personal details & CC numbers of people associated with those they dislike (iirc it was democratic donors in some US state, the data was leaked unredacted).
a) Alleged sexual assault of staffers (which again, alleged, but could be considered evil)
b) Leaking of personal information that is of no public interest, e.g. unredacted SSNs
c) Leaking private medical records of otherwise ordinary individuals, including e.g. medical records of teenagers who were raped
d) Leaking the names of people who are LGBTQ+ in dictatorial countries where that's illegal, putting their lives in danger
e) Timing the release of DNC hack is arguable, but I could see how someone might consider the timing of that release to be evil
f) There's some antisemitic stuff happening with Assange/Wikileaks. There's nothing like, glaringly out of line, but there's a whooole lot of stuff that's just over the line. (e.g. use of (((name))), calling his opponents "Jewish" media, employing holocaust denier and denying it, etc)
g) Assange himself is quoted as saying, "[We might] have blood on our hands" due to their editorial policy of publishing everything, unredacted, about potentially vulnerable people
“Rep. Dana Rohrabacher told Assange “on instructions from the president, he was offering a pardon or some other way out, if Mr. Assange ... said Russia had nothing to do with the DNC [Democratic National Committee] leaks,” The Daily Beast reported.
He got stiffed in that respect, but he did achieve his specific goal of tanking Clinton's campaign.
I'm aware, I'm just curious what the OP specifically finds "evil" in these or other actions. Most journalists preferred Hillary, Assange likely did not, and his journalism hindered her campaign. OK, where is the "evil" specifically?
I can't speak for op and evil is subjective - If I have to take a stab at their thoughts, it would be along the lines that he was being a useful idiot for an entity whose goal was to harm a society. You can debate those points; what questions he should have asked, if what the Mueller report says about his sources is true, if he had any actual malice - evil is too strong a word for my taste, as I use it for sadism. He certainly went for retribution however. I don't think we'll know his motivations for sure while he still has legal exposure.
Retribution for what? I'm just not sure what relevance any of this has anyway.
The only questions that are relevant for journalism are, "is the information correct?", and "is the information of interest to the public?".
Every source has their own motives, as does every journalist, and no story is so detailed as to paint the full picture. These questions are ultimately all irrelevant.
Hosting things like the snowden and manning leaks caused a lot of fallout for him, iirc. He was rightly pissed off at the administration. The information he had in 2016 was of interest to and was used against the public - those weren't mutually exclusive.
How this affects a legal precedent is infuriating beyond text, and it is incumbent on good people to defend him now.
Okay, so the "evil" he did is having a preference you don't like?
I mean, I don't like that preference either, but the documents he leaked were real. It's true that the documents were one-sided, but do we know that Wikileaks had documents it could have published on Trump and didn't? Can we agree that maybe Clinton shares some of the blame for, you know, breaking the law? Or the Democrats for even choosing her as a candidate?
What did wikileaks reveal that showed Clinton broke the law?
They revealed the DNC was trying to tip the scales towards her in their primary which was unsavory but I don’t recall wikileaks having anything to do with the classified emails…
although the main purpose of their release timing was to bury, drown, and distract from a certain other piece of info that had come out - bye bye claim to like transparency lol.
And the email server in hindsight also seems quaint - a scandal from a time of innocence and naivety. At the time it seemed overblown too, but now it’s downright quaint. Non stop private email and encrypted messenger app use followed that, and then we all know how classified docs have gone lately.
> although the main purpose of their release timing was to bury, drown, and distract from a certain other piece of info that had come out - bye bye claim to like transparency lol.
This is a conspiracy theory intended to discredit Assange and link him to Trump. There is zero evidence that the leak was timed to distract from anything, or that he and anyone close to Trump were in contact. In fact, Assange had announced an imminent release of information before that "other piece of info" had come out, so if you want to make a causal claim, it would make more sense that that info was timed to distract from Assange's release.
When I’m wrong I correct myself, I was wrong it wasn’t the dnc emails it was the podesta dump that came immediately after the billy bush tape.(1.)
The emails that turned out to be all hot air but hey use what you got when you’ve declared war like assange had on the Clintons. That’s not me saying he’d declare war on her it’s the Intercept publishing that fact (2.)
> he did achieve his specific goal of tanking Clinton's campaign.
I read thru that interview and wasn't able to suss out where Assange asserted he had a goal of tanking the Clinton campaign. Could you repost those lines here for us?
There is no confession if that is what you are asking for. His credibility relies on that not being his goal. Thanks for the polity - the undertone of your question implies he has to confess that word for word for that to be his intent.
> There is no confession if that is what you are asking for.
Your parent said:
but he did achieve his specific goal of tanking Clinton's campaign [here is an] Old interview of him talking about it: (link)
That seems to clearly imply that Assange would talk about his specific goal of tanking Clinton's campaign.
>Thanks for the polity - the undertone of your question implies he has to confess that word for word for that to be his intent.
The article fairly well debunks the source for those narratives (that Assange tanked the DNC on behalf of Russia). Here is the relevant quote.
Outraged the Clinton campaign swiftly ascribed the leaks to Vladimir Putin's intelligence apparatus as part of an operation to secure Trump's victory. The accusation was fueled by forensic analysis from the DNC's cybersecurity consultants, from CrowdStrike, detailing the potential links between the leaks and the Russian government.
Testifying under oath in a closed-door session before the committee in 2017, CrowdStrike’s chief security officer Shawn Henry admitted that he had no “concrete evidence” that the Russians had stolen the emails, or indeed that anyone had hacked the DNC’s system.
This crucial interview remained locked away until 2020. The press did little to acknowledge it; the testimony failed to attract even a passing mention in the New York Times, the Guardian, or any other mainstream outlet that had previously charted the Russian hacking story.
Do I think Assange targeted the DNC? Perhaps in the larger context of targeting powerful entities who hide details that directly affect the non-powerful. As to claims that Assange was directly working for the Russians, I strongly recommend reading the article all the way through.
sidebar: I like the work polity, btw. I can't recall coming across it before.
I re-read the article, and they have a single sentence about the Mueller report - which claimed that they know the IP address of the specific GRU network which hacked the DNC, iirc. Crowd strike is a private company, I wouldn't expect them to have Pwned the GRU. Think that is how the Mueller report was able to say they have an IP? You should at best find a proxy IP when looking from the DNC's servers right? The article mocks this, putting exfiltrated in quotes. Sources and methods won't be publicized to be verified, so we are left with the fricken intelligence community's word (I'm assuming). Crowd strike is hilarious, in that they were so useful for creating political narratives, in more than one way.
I am curious if he thought he was targeting the DNC, because his public presence was disproportionately about things related to them. Notably, Daniel hale chose not to leak to them.
So yes, that would be why $politicalside doesn't like him, because he aligned with a very specific, pro-fascist $politicalside (whether or not he is actually a fascist).
downmod away folks but that's why $politicalside doesnt like Assange. He is extremely biased which makes the "journalist" angle look pretty weak. there's your answer
Having a preference you don't like is pretty different from "doing evil".
I mean, I don't like that preference either, but the documents leaked were real, and I haven't heard that Wikileaks/Assange had equivalent dirt on Trump they could have leaked and didn't.
well a lot of us think Trump was pretty much the definition of evil, i mean, extorted an entire country with the threat of illegally withholding US military aid unless they made up political campaign propaganda for him, sometimes you have to just draw a line, like when it's blindingly obvious Assange preferred helping to install a corrupt grifter to run the US government into the dirt. He hates the US government. A lot of us USians think "try to wreck the US government by installing a mobster as president" is evil.
Responses like this are just so bizarre to me. Do you think other Presidents didn't extort other countries for various concessions, even selfish ones that help their political ambitions? Do you think other Presidents were not grifters? Perhaps you should look into Obama's and the Clinton's net worth before and after their presidency.
What really broke people's brains about Trump is that he was openly rude and obnoxious and unapologetic about it, and so didn't hide the self-serving behind a polite facade that preserved the collective fiction that politicians were looking out for the people and not themselves. That's what people both love and hate about him.
> Do you think other Presidents didn't extort other countries for various concessions, even selfish ones that help their political ambitions?
illegally withheld US military aid unless the country fabricated a story to help the candidate's campaign? No Democratic president in modern times has done such a thing. Obama had a fully Republican congress for 6 years and they would have impeached him for such a thing. But that didn't happen. Nor for Clinton, who was of course impeached, but not for extorting another country; just for lying about sexual favors. that's the best they could come up with. If either president had some something 1% as evil as what Trump did in just that one incident, we of *course* would have been hearing about it for years.
I agree it shouldn't be normal, but it unfortunately already is to various degrees, though often in slightly more "subtle" ways, eg. nation building, defense contracts, insider trading, the revolving door of Washington leading to cushy lobbying gigs, speaking tours, etc.
Obama, Cheney and Bush are war criminals under international law and Trump isn't, but boy when Trump is rude to someone, there's no end to the condemnations that he's the worst person ever, despite being the only president of the past 30 or so years who didn't start a war. Even crazier, those war criminals are now all darlings of the Democrats because they trash talked Trump.
Trump and the way the media played on his craziness for ratings really broke people's brains. I wouldn't want that buffoon as president either, but really, get some perspective. He wouldn't be nearly as appealing if politicians weren't almost universally awful and self-serving, but because that's normal and they're "polite" about screwing you over, well that's just fine and dandy.
I appreciate you expanding on your point of view. In response to “get some perspective”, I have to say I think I have plenty and that I find a difference of degrees to be a difference all the same.
Which is to say, while I take your point about the relative morality of large scale leadership, having lived through all the folks you mentioned and more, that Trump’s naked pursuit of personal scores with public resources was unprecedented in my lifetime. Society is a shared illusion, presentation matters, and boy did his coarsening of that conversation have far-reaching consequences.
Even if he did have dirt on Trump and didn't publish it, I'm not sure why that's evil. Discussion of the Hunter Biden laptop was held back before the last election and most journalists still think that was perfectly justified. Either both are evil, or neither are, we should not apply double standards.
They did thing an and thing a was considered to be okay when one political party benefitted from a. The exact same thing a was then considered to be bad when it didn't benefit that party anymore. It's quite simple. If you didn't criticize me when he first started doing a and even cheered him on and then turn around when the exact same things don't benefit you anymore, don't claim that you were ever cheering him on for the action itself.
The media did not fail Assange, failure is unintentional. The media actively colluded with interested parties in order to smear him, because he created a problem for them.
The era of alternative facts were kind of started with Julian Assange. The video "Collateral Murder" was heavily edited by Mr. Assange. It was damning enough without his edits, he didn't need to add his personal soundtrack and audio edits to the video. How Mr. Assange has become the poster boy of "leakers against the government" with his outrageous egotistical and dickish behavior is beyond me. Leakers should give "the facts" and "the truth" untarnished and free of modification.
Edward Snowden would be the closest to what I have, but before anyone starts pointing out his shortcomings, we can't assume that the perfect poster boy exists already. Maybe they don't, yet.
I like the "John Doe" from the Panama Papers. Remained anonymous, spread his message, didn't add anything unnecessary and remained out of public spectacle.
Do you believe it’s acceptable to revoke journalist’s protection for the reasons you’ve listed and jail them for the reasons you’ve listed?
Are there any journalists you might agree with, that don’t share any of the traits of your rant, that are going to suffer downstream from you being okay with revoking journalistic protections on these conditions?
You, like so many, are focusing on the ad hominem rather than the merits of the evidence and exposure. Why are we talking so much about Assange being in jail or not instead of those the information implicates?
It's not who the media failed, but who the media protected.
It's the same page from the same playbook...repeat X enough times - regardless of accuracy - and perception becomes reality.
Nearly every major news organization practices this, shamelessly. It's a biz model based on eye-ball not journalism standards. It's a biz model that protects the few and the expense of properly informing the many.
The impact Assange and Wikileaks have had in exposing nefarious government secrets shouldn’t be forgotten. But, the damage that they’ve suffered to their reputation is entirely deserved. I don’t believe for a second that they didn’t know what they were doing when they partnered with Russia in 2016 to help draw as much attention as possible to the DNC emails—that is, engaging in an asymmetric political operation. That’s confirmed by the way they released the information—spaced out for maximum effect right up until the election. At that point, any claim they had on being simply a force for transparency was given up.
To be fair to WikiLeaks there is very little evidence that Russia had anything to do with the DNC hacks. The FBI never had access to the servers and the the whole Russia hacking narrative relies on the DNC's claim of "trust us when we said this is what happened".
Similarly the recent Twitter revelations on Hamilton68 showed that the Russian bots on manipulating social media was more or less BS.
Who know what really happened, but what may have happened was that the hacking was blamed on Russia instead of say China, or [insert foreign adversary] because the FBI panicked when trump was elected after using the Steele dossier to spy on his campaign and needed a narrative to justify their actions.
> Who know what really happened, but what may have happened was that the hacking was blamed on Russia instead of say China
Or it could have been leaked by someone who liked Bernie, or by some other naive fantasist with a pipe dream that the Democratic Party could hypothetically one day run a fair primary again.
People are encouraged by the media to simply forget about the subjects of these leaks, and focus on the leaker. That's a tactic.
> To be fair to WikiLeaks there is very little evidence that Russia had anything to do with the DNC hacks. The FBI never had access to the servers and the the whole Russia hacking narrative relies on the DNC's claim of "trust us when we said this is what happened".
This is just not true. The Senate Intelligence Committee had multiple sources of information to conclude with little doubt that it was Russia and that Putin personally authorized the operation. They cited an investigation which found data had been exfiltrated to US based servers known to have been leased in connection with the GRU.
And I get it, people that would typically frequent hn including myself want to see the specifics of that investigation and how that connection was made to the GRU. Obviously that would involve revealing intelligence sources, which isn’t going to happen. So yeah, of course you can choose to believe that everyone is lying about everything and that the Republican led committee chose to pass up an opportunity to embarrass and discredit the DCCC and DNC by telling the truth, but that seems a bit unlikely to me.
Yeah, they have numerous exposed war crimes, cover ups and mass surveillance schemes. Which inherently meant that they took their info wherever they could get it from. But that's not enough to make up for harming the candidate you were backing in an election 7 years ago. They could've made sure to not embarass our side, that's the redline where they got too political!
Take a breath. Who said anything about whether one thing “makes up” for another?
Despite the harm that I believe they had a hand in doing to the US electoral process in 2016, I’d still accept that their contributions have been net positive over their history. It’s just a shame to expose war crimes then go out of your way to help elect a guy who gleefully pardons war criminals.
You didn't, you are right. Sorry for implying that. It's just a sentiment that I actually encounter very often online. I guess I'm also biaised, as a muslim, to care way more about the iraq war than the US electoral process. So for me it's just such a non-issue (especially since the documents weren't forged or fake) but I guess everyone cares more about their own backyard ;)
No worries. I do understand the point that the information wasn’t faked. Believe me, if we had a Wikileaks like organization going after the dirty little secrets of both parties, I’d be enthusiastically onboard.
> I don’t believe for a second that they didn’t know what they were doing when they partnered with Russia in 2016 to help draw as much attention as possible to the DNC emails
I don't know why you would talk like this. This is just a big lie wrapped in a sarcastic and condescending tone substituting for evidence. What you believe is not interesting to people, they care why you believe it because you may have an argument they haven't thought of.
The only thing that you're explaining to us is that you accept every anti-Assange argument proffered by the Democratic Party, and that the fact that the release was damaging is enough information to "confirm" for you that they are all true. If the release weren't damaging, there'd be no reason to talk about it, therefore you're citing the reasons you're having a discussion of Assange's guilt as evidence of Assange's guilt. It's weaker than circumstantial, even; you've simply decided that the DNC emails were released optimally for mysterious Russian interests, and are making a secular intelligent design argument.
I can't be read as anything but a public statement that you'll accept any charge against anyone accused of damaging your party, and over the subject of the safety of a journalist exposing government corruption no less. The scariest part of the whole thing is that the DNC emails exposed corruption. We should be celebrating their release because they exposed as true what was only suspected before. The Democratic Party fired people over it. But the current zeitgeist is about suppressing information from enemies and boosting information from friends, and Assange is a designated enemy. If the Democratic Party weren't so horrifically undemocratic internally, it would be celebrating the exposure of corruption in its own ranks, but instead it mourns the financial losses of the insiders who missed out on a H. Clinton presidency.
I will never get over Democrats supporting Trump in his prosecution of Assange because they decided that Assange supported Trump. Convincing people to support Trump prosecuting a journalist in order to avenge H. Clinton's loss to Trump is a real knot of a thought process to be twisted into.
> That’s confirmed by the way they released the information—spaced out for maximum effect right up until the election.
Did you miss this part where I gave a reason for why I don’t believe it?
As far the rest of your personal diatribe—maybe consider for a second the possibility that you might not be able to reliably deduce the subtleties of person’s politics by reading between the lines of a single comment on hn? Jeez, get over yourself.
Assange is not charged only for doing journalism, such as revealing secret information. Assange is also charged for conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, and conspiring to do so.
Journalists rightfully defend Assange only in the the first type of charges, but not in the second type. He should go to US and face charges. Assange stopped being journalist at some point and started actively participating in crimes not covered by journalist ethics.
>Assange is also charged for conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, and conspiring to do so.
But if you read all the detailed reporting from Wired (and others) at the time, including interviews with the rat (Adrian Lamo, https://www.wired.com/2010/06/leak/ , https://www.wired.com/2010/05/lamo/) who made up that claim to save his own butt, it's clear that that charge is false as well. Assange never commited computer intrusion himself and he also never encouraged others to do so. That was a lie the FBI forced Lamo into during the case against Manning.
Okay, so he can make his case in court then. Honestly he has a pretty good chance of being found not-guilty. I hate the guy, but he is certainly incredibly charismatic and will an have all star legal defense.
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