Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange
harpers.org
harpers.org
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.
Did they? Just a few 2-3 years ago there was a documentary in Sweden and one of the women was interviewed extensivley.
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.
https://amp.theguardian.com/media/2013/may/20/julian-assange...
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.
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.
> 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.)
In my opinion, one of the best ways of identifying an authoritarian is to ask them their opinions on Snowden or Assange.
In your "opinion", what fraction of the documents that Edward Snowden stole were directly related to spying on American citizens?
Yeah, right. Switzerland, where contracts with private companies are censored so the public does not see how much money they lose.
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.
Heh Heh Heh
That sounds like you just did the "with us or against us" thing the commenter above you just pointed out.
Very ironic. ;)
And a popular tool among the so called "democracies".
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.
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.
https://www.facebook.com/WikiLeaks.SunshinePress
>Official Facebook Page-- The Sunshine Press (Wikileaks), is an international non-profit organization
(That's all I've got as its website is dead now)
Incorporation document: https://www.scribd.com/doc/47601520/SUNSHINE-PRESS-PRODUCTIO...
Definition of EHF: https://island.is/en/limited-liability-companies
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.
https://cryptome.org/wikileaks/wikileaks-leak.htm
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.
https://wauland.de/en/projects/enduring-freedom-of-informati...
Does any of the above make me an authoritarian?
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.
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.
You can be glad that collateral murder was released while also being deeply unhappy with Julian Assange’s motives and actions.
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.
> 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?
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.
People in government positions in the US and UK abused their power.
Julian Assange is not a good, 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.
Good is subjective.
Honest, on the other hand is not, and if you're going to say he's not honest I'd like to see your evidence for that.
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.
To what end are these agendas?
Being personally relevant? Paid? If one of these, how is he benefitting from those now?
Surely he'd be expecting his demise,given his knowledge of the organization(s) he shone light on.
We're talking about an ex-hacker type turned political leaker, not a talk news pundit.
There are no shared assumptions about these agendas, besides the narratives he and WL have provided. If you have some assumptions, share them?
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.
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…)
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.
You can't transparently publish information and have an opinion.
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].
/e: I see my reply was less targeted towards your comment but the one above.
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
That's not Wikileaks fault, maybe we should hold those in power accountable regardless of how we feel about their stances on other issues.
Which party were the Collateral Murder footages meant to benefit? (Is "partisan" the right word here?)
> Suggesting that people started thinking negatively about wikileaks once it came for “their side” is painfully revisionist
This is 100% true, though. Trying to say it isn't without any substance doesn't really help your case at all.
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.
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.
Except that the reason they fabricated the Sweden case was precisely to make him an easy target for US.
> The result is you must eject any idea, person or news source which doesn't 100% align with the current group values.
That’s essentially human society.
We organize ourselves in races, countries, cultures, religions, sports teams, etc.
We are constantly excluding others and trying to belong to certain groups.
The issue is when it becomes extreme and a group decides that all other groups should be exterminated.
In which given enough time all groups come to that last same conclusion. No group is safe once the extreme amass too much power.
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.
Not exactly a good comparison, the only similarity is the reaction of the US press.
Make of it what you will but it's apparently an undisputed fact.
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.
https://www.theregister.com/2016/07/22/wikileaks_keep_fighti...
One example news story of many...
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.
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.
> “We believe it would be much better for GOP to win.”
https://theintercept.com/2018/02/14/julian-assange-wikileaks...
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!"
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.
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.
Both US parties are neoliberal war hawks, sadly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
There is zero reputable evidence of this
Where is the evidence that it was Seth Rich for example? Alex Jones?
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.
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.
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.
Otherwise, it seems like you're saying "they're bad [via an unsupported claim like 'selectively truthful'] because they hurt my $politicalside"
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
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.
They weren't Russian state hacked, this is propaganda.
CrowdStrike - paid for by the DNC
Fidelis Cybersecurity - paid for by the DNC
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.
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.
There is absolutely no way to know the intent here, and there are plenty of rational reasons to release things in batches.
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.
There is no way to publish damaging information about the Clintons without being attacked for it.
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.
Those boring leaks probably came from the inside.
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"
Believing Putin over his own intel agencies -- and publicly proclaiming as much -- is actively pro-Russia.
If Trump didn't want people to think he was a Russian asset, he might have tried not acting like one.
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
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.
They're laughing at his implied admission of guilt and the idea that Putin's unjustified wars are in George Bush's shadow.
They’re not the victims who died by thousands.
What is there to negotiate?
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.
"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."
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.
> He literally started the war.
When do _you_ think the war started? Annexation of Crimea was ordered by Putin.
I don't know why you question the Putin apologist moniker, the alternatives are way worse. At least own 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".
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 that it’s only in the interests of that side that people call for this.
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...
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.
name a top three then, or can we assume that this is "random forwards on FaceBook or twitter" ?
Yes, by giving Ukraine to Russia.
We know how it works if you try to appease fascists, come on.
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.
What about the Eastern European countries' interests whose combined economies eclipses Russia?
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.
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.
> No calls for diplomacy.
April 1945 was too late for peace offerings.
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.
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.
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.
No he doesn't. https://www.businessinsider.com/israel-bennett-walks-back-cl...
Business Insider is a rag, not credible.
It goes against your whole narrative of how the US is forcing Ukraine into a war.
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.
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.
No surprise most of the country dislikes him
> “We do have some information about the Republican campaign,”
And then they never actually released it.
https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/2934...
All the good stuff on Trump (along with some good dirt on down ballot Republicans and Democrats) was leaked through DC Leaks.
Those are the facts.
https://michaelwest.com.au/documents-show-no-sign-albanese-g...
Please prove me wrong and show me these signs.
Albo's no different to the last 6 who had the job.
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...
"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.
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"."
Yes, a deliberate smear campaign exists, but also these are institutions with complex histories. You cannot simply call anyone critical of them "gullible".
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?"
Should whistleblowers be supported or vilified?
I don't like the guy, but I also don't like arguments based on political narratives.
Is the evidence Assange released factual?
I mean, if Wikileaks did (I wish they did, political bias ruins everything) release both troves, would your thoughts on the current situation change?
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.
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).
Are they? What's the "evil" you're accusing them of? If you're going to accuse people of things, don't be vague.
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
Rot in prison, Julian.
What evil things, specifically?
He got stiffed in that respect, but he did achieve his specific goal of tanking Clinton's campaign.
Old interview of him talking about it: https://www.democracynow.org/2016/7/25/exclusive_wikileaks_j...
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.
How this affects a legal precedent is infuriating beyond text, and it is incumbent on good people to defend him now.
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?
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.
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.
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.)
1. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/dec/18/john-podes...
2. https://theintercept.com/2016/08/06/accusing-wikileaks-bias-...
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?
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 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.
His preferences in specific political outcomes are well known:
https://theintercept.com/2018/02/14/julian-assange-wikileaks...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
So, who do you think it should be instead? (genuine question)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.