Don't worry guys, the DNC said so, so it must be true!
- Mike Pompeo, current CIA director and nominee for Secretary of State
I'm all for skepticism of what people say, especially people in positions like CIA Director, but when a Republican CIA director agrees with the DNC about what happened, it seems not entirely unreasonable to give it some credence. He is in the absolutely perfect position to say otherwise, if he believed otherwise, and is in the perfect position to reevaluate the previous intelligence report. He's the director of the CIA! If he thinks there's evidence backing another narrative, he can just come out and say so.
Supposed I'm biased against you and I report that you hacked into Bob's computer and I have evidence to prove it. I paint that to make you look like some kind of cyber villain and neglect to report the important fact that Bob asked you to do it.
If the reader knows about my bias towards you then they know to take my reporting with a grain of salt because even if it is true, it might not be the whole story.
You are right of course, it is important to know the bias of sources which is why so many fact checking sites popped up after 2016. Before then I would always go wikipedia for unbiased information. Sadly we live in a time where the majority of news papers has a clear and sometimes publicly stated political leaning and bias. Often this can be traced through ownership since many are now owned by the same entity.
If the emails and documents was leaked today then hopefully fact checking sites would be all over it and pulling it apart regardless who originally published them. I do recall a few people were looking at checksum and correlate statements to previously public information, but nothing news worthy came out of that.
In my opinion, having followed WikiLeaks over the years, I think it's safe to say that they have an anti-western intelligence/military bias. That doesn't mean that what they publish is untrue. It just means that I'm skeptical about their motives and sources when they release something and I make it a point to try and find a good counter-balance to their take on the issue. Because they probably only presented a tiny portion of the truth that fit their agenda.
The War documents leak established them in international news, which change wikileaks tactic to more editorial style. This then resulted that they got the cable leak the next year.
After this there were internal fighting, blocking, ddos, economical blockades, volunteers being detained at airports and a lot of intelligence agency taking a lot of interests. The new "editorial" style also meant that they now held on to leaks rather than publishing.
And then we had the Swedish investigation and all that mess. Calls for assassinations, "enemy combatant", drones, diplomatic back channels, all contributed to a very antagonistic/paranoid relation between the US government and Assange personally. At this point there is nothing resembling the original style of wikileaks. I see it less like a "anti-western intelligence/military bias", but rather a anti-Hillary/US government bias.
I can't disagree with that.
Then there are things like the Vault7 leaks, which were stoked by teaser announcements and theatrics. And while they did contain some surveillance tactics that seemed interesting they mostly contained tools and internal communication that was clearly sensitive and generally not information that the public even cared about (their exact code obfuscation algorithms?).
The net effect is that most people didn't care much while anti-western intelligence groups probably had a field day.
And given the sophistication to obtain the data it likely came from a nation state in the first place wishing to accomplish exactly that goal.
There's no way they didn't realize what they were doing. They played part in an attack.
Meanwhile Assange yawns at the Panama papers...
The content here is raw emails from prominent Democrats discussing things like cheating in debates to favor Hillary Clinton, telling each other about how Hillary Clinton has really bad judgment, and an orchestrated campaign with friends in the media to discredit her primary challenger.
There can't really be any "bias" in this kind of primary source information. What would you argue here? That candidate Sanders wanted this to happen? We already know from Donna Brazille's book that this is all true, and there is no other side of this story.
Would you argue that folks like Neera Tanden were emailing wisecracks about Hillary Clinton's poor judgment (while publicly saying the opposite), is somehow mischaracterized? Contrast this with how the RNC treated their frontrunner - they publicly criticized him at every opportunity, and nobody rigged the RNC primary to favor candidate Trump - in fact, they did the complete opposite rather publicly, all but endorsing his opponent.
If equivalent information was in the RNC's emails, it was not brand new information to the public, because they were saying those things in public about their candidate, while the DNC did it in secret.
On the third hand, Assange spent time suggesting that the information definitely didn't come from Russia, and suggesting it might have been Seth Rich. But information came out the shows that he was talking with Guccifer 2.0, who was widely suspected (at the time!) to be GRU and if he wasn't, was meant to be a Romanian hacker, not a DNC whistleblower. So there's at least tenuous evidence that Assange was willing to both work with Russian intelligence and rope in an entirely unrelated death to muddy the waters on where the info came from.
Going by my earlier comment - I would coordinate with the Satan to release true information, the source of the information does not necessarily contaminate its truthiness. Publishing true information, as a hypothetical whistleblower organization, is my hypothetical raison d'etre.
This only ever becomes suspect if I am selectively publishing, or if I am aware that I am selectively publishing.
In this case there needs to be evidence of either. Conversations with biased parties are not evidence unless they clearly state that the selective publishing is known.
It's also extremely important to realize what exactly the voters learned from the emails. CAP President Neera Tanden, and a prominent figure in HRC's campaign, expressed sharp criticisms for her favored candidate's judgment. DNC Chair Donna Brazille emailed privately about how the statistical job growth under President Obama was essentially a "technical" win, but had very little impact on people's lives. She also went on to leak debate questions to her favored candidate, exposing one of hundreds of different instances of a party-wide effort to sabotage the primary process.
Contrast this with the RNC primary. Virtually the entire party leadership loathed then-candidate Trump. As opposed to rallying around him, they actively rallied against him. In October there were discussions of replacing him on the ticket. Even at the convention, Ted Cruz reportedly went off-script and asked attendees to vote their conscience, as opposed to voting for candidate Trump. The divisions in the GOP were laid bare for the world to see. The divisions in the DNC stayed hidden from voters. Voters only learned much after the election that Donna Brazille contemplated replacing Hillary Clinton with another candidate after she fainted on 9/11, an event that ironically followed weeks of mainstream media outrage against "right wing conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton's Health", which also included a pickle-jar opening gag on a late night talk show.
What truths would Wikileaks have exposed about the RNC that weren't already publicly known? Is this an empty box containing any convenient allegation?
One of the USA's major political parties sabotaged the primary process, engaged in debate cheating, media manipulation and bird-dogging, all for a candidate whom many of the party's own leadership found wanting in terms of judgment. After all this - the outrage seems fixated on the messenger, Wikileaks, as if their alleged selective leaking somehow absolves the Democrats of these monumentally disgusting actions.
If you look at the election from the perspective of damage done to candidates - the sheer volume of substantiated negative press received by candidate Trump makes it really difficult to argue that voters could have somehow heard something else from the RNC's emails that would changed their minds about him.
What? There's plenty of evidence. Wikileaks consistently published information damaging to Hillary Clinton in the run-up to the election, and published zero information damaging to Trump.
What is a normal reaction to be publicly declared a murderer and enemy combatant (with an implied statement to be droned) for publishing documents from people involved in the US military that wanted to give the public information? In the context of what he perceive she has done against him, what is the likeliest outcome if he comes into contact with damaging information and a request to publish it? "No thank you, only if you provide equally damaging information on her opponent or else it will look bad?".
Can we assume that that list is not empty? Is it not likely that a few stories that the guardian has posted is from US intelligence service, knowingly or unknowing. If so, should we label them also non-state hostile intelligence service? I would bet that this is how other nations would justify blocking unwanted news papers in national firewalls. They are after all not blocking the free press but rather the (non-)state hostile intelligence service.
What would a reasonable definition be of a hostile intelligence service.
They may not be officially part of the Russian intelligence apparatus but they definitely don't seem to act contrary to Russian interests, they actively ignored leaks about the Russian government[4], and their public tweets about the Panama Papers were a lot more consistent with protecting Russian interests rather than the purported belief in exposing secrets[5]. They also didn't ask whether they were being used by sources like Guccifer 2 which was later revealed to be a Russian front.
Other governments have come to the same conclusion – e.g. here's a German report which alleges British and French agreement:
http://www.focus.de/politik/ausland/merkel-vorgefuehrt-russi...
1. http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/07/25/what_wikil...
2. http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/07/why-did-wikileaks-help-do...
3. https://apnews.com/b70da83fd111496dbdf015acbb7987fb/private-...
4. http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/17/wikileaks-turned-down-le...
5. https://mobile.twitter.com/wikileaks/status/7174580643249643... and https://mobile.twitter.com/wikileaks/status/7176700566505308...
Wikileaks has been openly critical of Russia and its administrators for some time.
Most of what you’re positing is simply your opinion about their (possible) motives, not an issue with their actual actions.
Expecting full editorial capability (eg PII redaction) from someone imprisoned indefinitely without trial (inb4 “but he could walk out and face the same unfair trial and torture that Manning did!”) is complete lunacy.
You don’t personally get to decide who does or does not qualify as a journalist, thankfully. As someone who dislikes the warmongering and totalitarian democratic party exactly as much as the warmongering and totalitarian republican party, I found their releases to be a tremendous public service, as did millions of others.
“These people that I don’t like aren’t releasing enough factual data about the other people I don’t like whilst releasing factual data about these people I do like” is not a condemnation. It is a (relatively unimportant) opinion.
The link you posted to slate relies upon ((( and ))) around people's names being some nefarious anti-jew meaning. When, in reality, this was the actual tweet: "Tribalist symbol for establishment climbers? Most of our critics have 3 (((brackets around their names))) & have black-rim glasses. Bizarre."
Relying upon that sort of cruft just isn't convincing.
* Neo-Nazis invented the "echoes" meme, where when saying the name of a Jewish person in a podcast they would add a sinister echo effect, or in text they would add three parentheses around it.
* Jewish people and others on Twitter reclaimed the parentheses in a positive sense.
* WikiLeaks is referring to the fact that people that complain about them are Jewish, not a random bizarre coincidence about punctuation.
Was it a stupid tweet, prone to misunderstanding? Absolutely. But one vague tweet does not justify labeling a person or organization as anti-Semitic.
Also, did you read the Mueller indictment of a dozen Russian hackers? It goes into some detail on the kinds of information that the IC has about it.
The thing is- the IC makes mistakes. But a single disaster of a conclusion like the WMD debacle cannot be used to discredit every single subsequent conclusion, otherwise we could never prosecute anyone on terror charges ever again. Pointing at the WMD fuckup and using that to disprove every conclusion you don't like means you aren't actually engaging in the substance. If tomorrow they conclude something you agree with and I don't, will you take me seriously when I say "but Iraq tho"? Probably not.
Let's explore that claim:
Mike Pompeo had three general options, regardless of the truth:
1) State that he has no such evidence. In this case he'd draw the ire of the dems, probably the ire of various dem/republican pundits, and certainly the ire of members of the intelligence community who had already stated a clear link exists.
2) Say nothing. This is a decent short term tactic but would open him up to being vulnerable in future hearings since he has no stated position.
3) Claim that evidence exists. This puts him safely in the company of republican/dem pundits, rest of intelligence community, etc.
We don't know the truth because we don't have the evidence. But I don't think we can say with certainty that Mike Pompeo was in the "perfect position" to reveal the truth. It's equally likely he was in the perfect position to go along with a narrative that was both popular and unsupported by factual evidence.
"Triggering the libs" is approximately 30% of the Trump administration's modus operandi. I don't see much evidence that Pompeo is an exception.
If he is, then Trump's goal of draining the swamp has been thwarted by his own appointee. So... why did Trump appoint him to be Secretary of State? He's obviously been coopted by the Dems, blinded to the truth, and willing to go along with Deep State shenanigans. But Trump trusts him to talk to Kim Jong Un. That seems like terrible judgment. The only resolution to this is that Trump himself has been compromised by the Deep State, or is too stupid to realize that his own guys are.
Either that or he's telling the truth as he understands it.