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The Trial of Joshua Schulte – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on February 8, 2020

Better to destroy their minds, their sanity and their reputations, and lock them away in Supermax.

…and we may wonder at the strangeness of classification and clearance rules that required the FBI, on behalf of the DoJ, to gather its court evidence about the CIA cyber tools at a Starbuck’s, for the reliable wifi among other things. 

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/02/karen-kwiatkowski/the-trial-of-joshua-schulte/

By

The Vault 7 leaks revealed to Americans an ambitious and venal organization that sees enemies all around it. When the CIA found out about the leak, along with the rest of the world, on March 7th, 2017, it was horrified – in part because the leak had occurred a year earlier unbeknownst to the agency, and in part because of the loss of years and billions of US taxpayer dollars invested in the development of secret malware and spytools.

Cyberscoop has some useful articles on the case, just in case no one saw anything in the mainstream media.

Joshua Schulte’s trial started this week, and the transcript of the first day is interesting. We learn that the quality of federal government expert witnesses can be hysterically low, and that defense lawyer Sabrina Schroff has a gold standard sense of humor.

We may marvel at the loose security in the CIA – as recently as 2016 – and its sexist and racist banter behind vault doors, and we may wonder at the strangeness of classification and clearance rules that required the FBI, on behalf of the DoJ, to gather its court evidence about the CIA cyber tools at a Starbuck’s, for the reliable wifi among other things.

We may tentatively conclude that it is way more fun to be tried for crimes against the state – that you probably did not commit – in the US District Court, Southern District of New York, than it is to be tried by the national security state’s wholly-owned subsidiary, the US District Court, Eastern District of Virginia.

Joshua Schulte has been incarcerated since his arrest in August 2017, on child pornography charges – charges that have since been split out from his current trial.

The US reporting on this case is typical: accusatory Fed-speak and respeak, questionable blogs carrying the torch of righteous patriotism, and a generalized focus on the horrid terribleness of the whole thing from the CIA’s point of view, and my goodness, the nasty man is also nuts, trying to sue the government from prison, claiming he’s innocent, he’s been tortured, and he will work to destroy the US government if he ever gets out of jail.

The situation for Schulte is perilous, whether he is innocent or guilty.  He’s behaving kind of like an innocent guy, in the sense that since his arrest he has consistently denied all the charges, and accused his former employer of planting the porn on his computer as a means of justifying his arrest. The feds clearly don’t have the usable evidence they would actually need to convict Schulte on any of the charges.  I’m sure they will convict, through parallel construction or normal fabrication, but the destruction of Schulte’s reputation and tainting any potential jury is typical.  It’s how the CIA and FBI deals with its enemies on any normal day.  Of course, the federal government would never put illegal software or distasteful material on your computer.

Julian Assange has been at UK’s Belmarsh Prison since last spring, where he has been physically, mentally and chemically tortured by US contractors on US orders. The CIA and its contractors conducted these euphemistically described “interviews” for months, seeking passwords, codes, names and encryption keys that would allow the US DoJ and CIA to track down the donors of material to Wikileaks, and arrest or extradite them.  This work was largely complete by the end of the summer, and a number of arrests have been made throughout European countries. Information tortured out of a stubborn Australian by Americans in Britain – cloaked, ironed, laundered, and dyed – is already being used in a variety of ongoing and upcoming cases. These are kangaroo courts, trials conducted by mad submarine captains obsessed with shirttails and strawberries, proposing an Alice in Wonderland world of evidence, like Lewis Carroll’s unicorn, “…if you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you. Is that a bargain?”

We know that we are cannot know the identities of the five CIA lawyers who repeated advised the magistrate during court proceedings in Assange’s brief public appearance last November.  We know that all ongoing and upcoming trials of suspected Wikileaks’s contributors are being prosecuted using information gained through the chemical and physical interrogation of the famous inmate the Belmarsh staff nicknamed “Prisoner Bootsy,” a play on the UK’s ubiquitous drugstore chain.

We know that the CIA and FBI have to tread carefully in any trials relating to Wikileaks, in part because of what might be revealed of the US Government’s compromise of the tools and methods of potential whistleblowers, like Tor, the maturation of the US surveillance state, and the sophistication of US information warfare against and manipulation of its own citizens. The Democratic wing of the US uniparty is not interested in the Seth Rich leaks to Wikileaks, nor is it interested in discovering if their problematic caucus app is bugged, malwared, and accessible in real-time to certain US government agencies.  The GOP wing of the uniparty is likewise uninterested in bringing its celebrated and massive security and surveillance state to heel, as if that devil dog is even on a leash they hold.

Better to destroy their minds, their sanity and their reputations, and lock them away in Supermax.

While the dystopian plain enjoys the soothing release of a national championship, complete with impossibly fit middle-aged pole dancers, and applaud the Blue and Grey Theater of Impeachment, there is another very different world, where puppetmasters meet to drink and dine, discuss and plot.

Our country is not openly wracked with war, violence and disaster yet.  But like those who live in war zones, hot zones, and dead zones, Americans must tread carefully, trust sparingly, and keep our eyes wide open.

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Snowden Warns Targeting of Greenwald and Assange Shows Governments ‘Ready to Stop the Presses—If They Can’ | Common Dreams News

Posted by M. C. on January 30, 2020

” Snowden wrote of Greenwald’s case that “as ridiculous as these charges are, they are also dangerous—and not only to Greenwald: They are a threat to press freedom everywhere. The legal theory used by the Brazilian prosecutors—that journalists who publish leaked documents are engaged in a criminal ‘conspiracy’ with the sources who provide those documents—is virtually identical to the one advanced in the Trump administration’s indictment of [Assange] in a new application of the historically dubious Espionage Act.”

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/01/27/snowden-warns-targeting-greenwald-and-assange-shows-governments-ready-stop-presses

by
Jessica Corbett, staff writer

In an op-ed published Sunday night by the Washington Post, National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden connected Brazilian federal prosecutors’ recent decision to file charges against American investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald to the U.S. government’s efforts to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

“The most essential journalism of every era is precisely that which a government attempts to silence. These prosecutions demonstrate that they are ready to stop the presses—if they can.”
—Edward Snowden, NSA whistleblower

Snowden, board of directors president at Freedom of the Press Foundation, is among those who have spoken out since Greenwald was charged with cybercrime on Jan. 21. Reporters and human rights advocates have denounced the prosecution as “a straightforward attempt to intimidate and retaliate against Greenwald and The Intercept for their critical reporting” on officials in Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s government.

Greenwald, who is also on Freedom of the Press Foundation’s board, is one of the journalists to whom Snowden leaked classified materials in 2013.

As Common Dreams reported last week, the NSA whistleblower, who has lived with asylum protection in Russia for the past several years, is also among the political observers who have pointed out that although even some of Greenwald’s critics have rallied behind him in recent days, Assange has not experienced such solidarity. Assange is being held in a London prison, under conditions that have raised global alarm, while he fights against extradition to the United States.

In his Post op-ed, “Trump Has Created a Global Playbook to Attack Those Revealing Uncomfortable Truths,” Snowden wrote of Greenwald’s case that “as ridiculous as these charges are, they are also dangerous—and not only to Greenwald: They are a threat to press freedom everywhere. The legal theory used by the Brazilian prosecutors—that journalists who publish leaked documents are engaged in a criminal ‘conspiracy’ with the sources who provide those documents—is virtually identical to the one advanced in the Trump administration’s indictment of [Assange] in a new application of the historically dubious Espionage Act.”

Snowden—who said in December that he believes that if he returned to the United States, he’d spend his life in prison for exposing global mass surveillance practices of the U.S. government—explained:

In each case, the charges came as an about-face from an earlier position. The federal police in Brazil stated as recently as December that they had formally considered whether Greenwald could be said to have participated in a crime, and unequivocally found that he had not. That rather extraordinary admission itself followed an order in August 2019 from a Brazilian Supreme Court judge—prompted by displays of public aggression against Greenwald by Bolsonaro and his allies—explicitly barring federal police from investigating Greenwald altogether. The Supreme Court judge declared that doing so would “constitute an unambiguous act of censorship.”

For Assange, the Espionage Act charges arrived years after the same theory had reportedly been considered—and rejected—by the former president Barack Obama’s Justice Department. Though the Obama administration was no fan of WikiLeaks, the former spokesman for Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder later explained. “The problem the department has always had in investigating Julian Assange is there is no way to prosecute him for publishing information without the same theory being applied to journalists,” said the former Justice Department spokesman Matthew Miller. “And if you are not going to prosecute journalists for publishing classified information, which the department is not, then there is no way to prosecute Assange.”

Although Obama’s administration was historically unfriendly to journalists and leakers of classified materials, President Donald Trump’s administration has taken things a step further with its indictment of Assange. “The Trump administration,” he wrote, “with its disdain for press freedom matched only by its ignorance of the law, has respected no such limitations on its ability to prosecute and persecute, and its unprecedented decision to indict a publisher under the Espionage Act has profoundly dangerous implications for national security journalists around the country.”

Highlighting another similarity between the cases of Greenwald and Assange—that “their relentless crusades have rendered them polarizing figures (including, it may be noted, to each other)”—Snowden suggested that perhaps “authorities in both countries believed the public’s fractured opinions of their perceived ideologies would distract the public from the broader danger these prosecutions pose to a free press.” However, he noted, civil liberties groups and publishers have recognized both cases as “efforts to deter the most aggressive investigations by the most fearless journalists, and to open the door to a precedent that could soon still the pens of even the less cantankerous.”

“The most essential journalism of every era is precisely that which a government attempts to silence,” Snowden concluded. “These prosecutions demonstrate that they are ready to stop the presses—if they can.”

Journalists and press freedom advocates have shared Snowden’s op-ed on social media since Sunday night.

Trevor Timm, executive director of Freedom of the Press Foundation, tweeted Monday morning that Snowden’s piece “should be read in tandem” with an op-ed published Sunday in the New York Times by James Risen, a former reporter for the newspaper who is now at The Intercept. Risen also argued that “the case against Mr. Greenwald is eerily similar to the Trump administration’s case against Mr. Assange.”

And, according to Risen, Greenwald concurred:

In an interview with me on Thursday, Mr. Greenwald agreed that there are parallels between his case and Mr. Assange’s, and added that he doesn’t believe that Mr. Bolsonaro would have taken action against an American journalist if he had thought President Trump would oppose it.

“Bolsonaro worships Trump, and the Bolsonaro government is taking the signal from Trump that this kind of behavior is acceptable,” he said.

Notably, Risen added, “the State Department has not issued any statement of concern about Brazil’s case against Mr. Greenwald, which in past administrations would have been common practice.”

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Snowden and Greenwald

American whistleblower Edward Snowden in a Hong Kong hotel room with journalist Glenn Greenwald in a scene from Laura Poitras’ documentary film Citizenfour. (Photo: Citizenfour/screenshot)

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BREAKING EXCLUSIVE: Christopher Wray’s FBI Caught in Another LIE and Cover Up – FBI EMAILS ON SETH RICH UNCOVERED

Posted by M. C. on January 28, 2020

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/01/breaking-exclusive-christopher-wrays-fbi-caught-in-another-lie-and-cover-up-fbi-emails-on-seth-rich-uncovered/

Joe Hoft by Joe Hoft

Christopher Wray’s FBI lied again.  His FBI claimed that Seth Rich’s DNC computer and emails were investigated upon his death but then his FBI backtracked and claimed no related docs were available in a FOIA request.

Now we know it was just another Deep State lie!

We reported on September 19th…

that Texas businessman Ed Butowsky filed a lawsuit where he outed reporter Ellen Ratner as his source for information on Seth Rich. The DNC operative [Rich] was murdered in the summer of 2016 in Washington DC. His murder was never solved. According to Butowsky’s lawsuit, Seth Rich provided WikiLeaks the DNC emails before the 2016 election, not Russia.

This totally destroys the FBI and Mueller’s claims that Russians hacked the DNC to obtain these emails.

Butowsky claims in his lawsuit:

Ms. Rattner said Mr. Assange told her that Seth Rich and his brother, Aaron, were responsible for releasing the DNC emails to Wikileaks. Ms. Rattner said Mr. Assange wanted the information relayed to Seth’s parents, as it might explain the motive for Seth’s murder.

On November 9, 2016 Ellen Ratner admitted publicly that she met with Julian Assange for three hours the Saturday before the 2016 election. According to Ratner, Julian Assange told her the leaks were not from the Russians, they were from an internal source from the Hillary Campaign.

We later reported that Butowsky and his attorney, Ty Clevenger, requested and obtained documents from the FBI related to their case which we were able to analyze.

According to the duo, they obtained the transcript from former FBI Chief of Staff James Rybicki where he states that the Obama White House was the entity that was pushing the Russia conspiracy as early as October 2016 –

Rybicki was corrupt cop James Comey’s Chief of staff –

 

Clevenger stated in a post online that –

Newly released documents from the FBI suggest that the Obama White House pushed intelligence agencies to publicly blame the Russians for email leaks from the Democratic National Committee to Wikileaks.

This afternoon I received an undated (and heavily redacted) transcript of an interview of James Rybicki, former chief of staff to former FBI Director James Comey, that includes this excerpt: “So we understand that at some point in October of 2016, there was, I guess, a desire by the White House to make some kind of statement about Russia’s…” and then the next page is omitted.

Roger Stone’s Indictment

Trump friend Roger Stone was indicted after being charged by the Mueller gang based on this key question – who provided the DNC and Podesta emails to WikiLeaks?

The corrupt FBI and Mueller team claim the emails were hacked but neither entity inspected the DNC server which was supposedly hacked. They have provided no proof of this. Read the rest of this entry »

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Will alleged CIA misbehavior set Julian Assange free?

Posted by M. C. on January 13, 2020

There is Hope!

https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/477939-will-cia-misbehavior-set-julian-assange-free

By James C. Goodale,

A few days before Christmas, Julian Assange testified to a Spanish court that a Spanish security company, UC Global S.L., acting in coordination with the CIA, illegally recorded all his actions and conversations, including with his lawyers, and streamed them back in real time to the CIA. He will, at the end of February, make a similar complaint to a British extradition court about the CIA’s alleged misbehavior.

Will such misbehavior, if proven, set Assange free?

The Daniel Ellsberg case may be instructive. You may recall that after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the “Pentagon Papers” case, Ellsberg was indicted under the Espionage Act for leaking Pentagon documents to the New York Times and the Washington Post.

After the trial commenced in San Francisco, it was brought to the judge’s attention that the “White House plumbers” broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. Based on that information and other complaints of government misbehavior, including the FBI’s interception of Ellsberg’s telephone conversations with a government official, Judge William Matthew Byrne decided that the case should be dismissed with prejudice because the government acted outrageously.

For similar reasons, the case against Assange should be dismissed, if it reaches the U.S. courts.

The “plumbers” were a covert group formed by the Nixon White House to stop leaks of information from the government, such as the Pentagon Papers. They are notorious for their burglary at the Watergate Complex, which led to President Richard Nixon’s downfall. Approximately nine months before the Watergate break-in, the plumbers, led by former CIA agent E. Howard Hunt, burglarized a psychiatrist’s office to find information that could discredit Ellsberg.

The CIA also was involved with the break-in. It prepared a psychiatric profile of Ellsberg as well as an ID kit for the plumbers, including drivers’ licenses, Social Security cards, and disguises consisting of red wigs, glasses and speech alteration devices.

Additionally, the CIA allowed Hunt and his sidekick, G. Gordon Liddy, to use two CIA safe houses in the D.C. area for meetings and storage purposes. Clearly, the CIA knew the plumbers were up to no good. It is unclear whether the CIA knew Ellsberg was the target, but it would not have taken much to figure it out.

The Spanish newspaper El Pais broke the story that UC Global invaded Assange’s privacy at the Ecuadorian embassy and shared its surveillance with the CIA. It demonstrated step-by-step, document-by-document, UC Global’s actions and its contacts with the CIA. UC Global reportedly installed cameras throughout Assange’s space in the embassy — including his bathroom — and captured Assange’s every word and apparently live-streamed it, giving the CIA a free TV show of Assange’s daily life.

After reading El Pais’s series, you would have to be a dunce not to believe the CIA didn’t monitor Assange’s every move at the Ecuadorian embassy, including trips to the bathroom.

Ecuador granted Assange asylum in their embassy for seven years, after he jumped bail in London to avoid extradition to Sweden for allegedly raping two Swedish women. (Those charges are now dismissed.) If you can believe it, Ecuador had hired UC Global to protect the Ecuadorian embassy and Assange. Not surprisingly, the CIA later made UC Global its spy to surveil Assange.

When there was a change of administration in Ecuador, Assange’s asylum was withdrawn, and he was immediately arrested by British police at the request of U.S. officials. The United States subsequently indicted him for violating the Espionage Act, for publishing the very same information published roughly contemporaneously by the New York Times, the Guardian, El Pais, Le Monde and Der Spiegel. (Assange already was subject to a sealed indictment in the United States for computer hacking.)

The behavior of UC Global and the CIA seems indistinguishable from the government’s behavior in the Ellsberg case, which a federal judge found to have “offended a sense of justice” and “incurably infected the prosecution” of the case. Accordingly, he concluded that the only remedy to ensure due process and the fair administration of justice was to dismiss Ellsberg’s case “with prejudice,” meaning that Ellsberg could not be retried…

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Will alleged CIA misbehavior set Julian Assange free?

 

 

 

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Media Elites to Assange: Fight for Your Own Hide

Posted by M. C. on December 28, 2019

Who is betraying who?

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/media-elites-to-assange-fight-for-your-own-hide/

The Committee to Protect Journalists mimics the government and drops the jailed Wikileaks founder like a hot potato.

Ted Galen Carpenter

 

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange languishes in a British prison awaiting probable extradition to the United States to stand trial for violating the Espionage Act of 1917. Ironically, he is serving jail time for jumping bail on trumped-up sex crime charges in Sweden that even the Swedish government has now abandoned. Most Western, especially American, mainstream journalists, though, have expressed at most tepid opposition to the persecution of Assange, even as reports mount that his health has deteriorated to an alarming extent.

This is shameful and jeopardizes the news media’s own long-term interests.

The worst thing about such conduct is that so many reporters have bought into the Justice Department’s insistence that Assange is not a “legitimate” journalist. John Demers, the DOJ’s assistant attorney general for national security, bluntly stated the government’s thesis earlier this year. “Julian Assange,” Demers said, “is no journalist,” since he engaged in “explicit solicitation of classified information.”…

Government prosecutors are going after Assange because he is an especially controversial figure and therefore a more vulnerable target. But prosecuting him and WikiLeaks for espionage poses a mortal threat to a free and independent press in the United States. It is extraordinarily dangerous to the health of the First Amendment to allow the government to decide who is or is not a “legitimate” journalist. Only legacy publications friendly to the national security bureaucracy could then count on restraint—and, as the Rosen and Risen cases indicate, even that expectation would be quite fragile. The CPJ and other media institutions that choose to abandon Assange are playing the role of the government’s useful idiots and imperiling their own best interests.

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?u=https1.bp.blogspot.com-21je6qbGpuYWbP_oknTIQIAAAAAAAApsg37eDfz-Vh8oZXOSlTzcqR2lMNJLWUs_RwCLcBGAss1600Uncle-Sam-in-Control-Sans.jpg&f=1&nofb=1

 

 

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‘Absolutely unaware’ Assange testifies in trial of Spanish company that spied on WikiLeaks founder inside embassy — RT World News

Posted by M. C. on December 23, 2019

The proceedings were closed to the press on the grounds of “national security.”

It is OK for “spies” and governments to know, but not US.

https://www.rt.com/news/476529-assange-testify-spanish-spying/

RT

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange briefly stepped out of maximum security prison in the UK to testify via video-link in a Spanish case against a company that spied on him inside the Ecuadorian embassy, allegedly on the US’ behalf.

Assange, who is being held at Belmarsh prison in southern London pending his hearing on extradition to the US, was driven over to the Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Friday, where a video-link was set up for him to speak with a judge in Madrid. The proceedings were closed to the press on the grounds of “national security.”

RT

Protesters supporting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange gather in London ahead of his testimony before the Spanish High Court via videolink, December 20, 2019. ©  REUTERS/Henry Nicholls

The High Court in Madrid is hearing Assange’s case against Undercover Global Ltd, a Spanish security company that allegedly bugged him during his stay at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Undercover Global was contracted to provide embassy security between 2015 and 2018, and in that capacity secretly recorded Assange’s every move via hidden cameras, microphones and electronic surveillance, the lawsuit says.

Assange told the court “he was absolutely unaware that the cameras recorded audio, that hidden microphones had been introduced” into the fire extinguisher mounts inside the embassy, his attorney Aitor Martinez told reporters in Madrid after the testimony.

Assange was “an absolutely passive subject of an illegitimate interference that would have been eventually coordinated by the United States,” Martinez added.

If the illegal surveillance targeted Assange’s legal team and violated his attorney-client privilege, that has ramifications on the proceedings against him in both the UK and the US, his lawyers have argued.

David Morales, owner of Undercover Global, was briefly arrested in September and then released on bail. In June, he told the Spanish daily El Pais that his company “simply did a job” and that all the information it gathered is “confidential and it belongs to the government of Ecuador.”

Assange sought asylum from Ecuador in 2012, facing an investigation of sexual assault in Sweden and fearing it was a pretext to have him extradited to the US. He ended up spending almost seven years trapped inside the Latin American country’s embassy in London, because UK authorities denied him permission to leave. The new government in Quito withdrew his asylum in April, and he was dragged out of the building by UK police.

Within days of his arrest, the US would confirm Assange’s suspicions by unsealing the indictment charging him with violating the Espionage Act, over publishing the Iraq and Afghanistan war documents in 2010. If extradited and convicted, he faces 175 years in prison. British authorities sentenced him to 50 weeks in prison for bail violation, and then kept him locked up at Belmarsh after he served that sentence, pending extradition hearings. Sweden formally dropped an investigation against Assange last month.

Editor’s note: The article has been updated to clarify that Assange faced ‘allegations’, not ‘charges’, of sexual assault in Sweden.

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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been BLOCKED from seeing key evidence from US authorities who want to extradite him for ‘leaking sensitive military data’, court hears

Posted by M. C. on December 13, 2019

Belmarsh=British Guantanamo? Maybe.

UK = US sock puppet? Definitely.

Julian is dead. We just don’t know it yet.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7788673/WikiLeaks-founder-Julian-Assange-BLOCKED-seeing-key-evidence-authorities.html

By Terri-ann Williams For Mailonline

 

  • Julian Assange faces accusations of leaking United States’ military material
  • The 48-year-old appeared at Westminster Magistrates’ Court over video-link
  • Currently being held at HMP Belmarsh, one of the UK’s most notorious prisons

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is yet to be shown key evidence in the case brought against him by the American authorities, his extradition hearing was told today.

The 48-year-old, faces accusations of leaking sensitive United States’ military material between January and May 2010.

The Australian national appeared at Westminster Magistrates’ Court over video-link from HMP Belmarsh white haired and clean shaven with a grey jumper and spoke to confirm his identity.

The Americans want to extradite him to US soil so he can be prosecuted for conspiring with army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning for leaking classified documents…

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Julian Assange pictured as he is led out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in handcuffs following his sensational arrest by British police earlier this year

 

 

 

 

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Who Spied on Julian Assange? There are many possible suspects

Posted by M. C. on December 11, 2019

http://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/who-spied-on-julian-assange/

…Aware that he might be monitored by the British government as well as by other interested parties, Assange would often meet his legal team using a white noise machine or in women’s bathrooms with the water running, but the firm, UC Global, anticipated that and planted devices capable of defeating the countermeasures. It planted microphones in the embassy fire extinguishing system as well as in numerous other places in the building. The recordings were reportedly streamed, undoubtedly encrypted, to another nearby location, referred to in the trade as a listening post. The streamed material was also reportedly transcribed and copied at the UC Global offices in Andalusia, but hard copies of the material were made as well on CDs and DVDs to be turned over directly to the client.

The Spanish newspaper El Pais, which has seen much of the evidence in the case, also mentioned how UC Global fixed the windows in the rooms actually being used by Assange so they would not vibrate, making it possible to use laser microphones from a nearby line of sight building to record what was being said. Presumably the listening post also served as the line-of-sight surveillance point…

According to employees of UC Global, details of the Ecuadorean Embassy operation were tightly held inside the company. Morales would make secret trips to the United States once or twice every month and it was assumed that he was carrying material relating to the recordings, but UC Global staff were advised never to mention his travels to the Ecuadorean staff in the embassy.

The obvious candidate for spying on Assange would be, as both the Spanish government and the New York Times speculate, the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.), as Washington intends to try Assange prior to locking him away for the rest of his life. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, while director of C.I.A., once referred to Assange and WikiLeaks as a “hostile intelligence service,” so one should have no illusions about what will be done to him if he ever arrives in the U.S…

That means that anything going through Adelson will wind up in Israel, which suggests that if Adelson is actually involved the whole exercise just might be an Israeli false flag operation pretending to be the C.I.A. Israel does not hate Assange with the fervor of the U.S. government but it certainly would consider him an enemy as he has had a tendency to expose sensitive material that governments would not like to make public. Israel would be particularly vulnerable to having its war crimes exposed, as was the case when WikiLeaks published the material revealing American crimes in Iraq provided by Chelsea Manning.

So, there is a choice when it comes to considering who might have commissioned the spying on Julian Assange, or it might even have been a combination of players. The sad part of the story is that even if David Morales is convicted in a Spanish court, sources in Britain believe the violation of Assange’s rights will have no impact on the move to extradite him to the United States. That will be decided narrowly based on the charge against him, which is exposing classified information, a violation of the Espionage Act of 1917. As the Espionage Act is infinitely elastic and as the preferred U.S. Court for the Eastern District of Virginia has a very high conviction rate, there is little doubt that Julian Assange will soon be on his way to the United States where he will undoubtedly be sentenced to life in prison.

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Why Do Western Governments Favor Immigrant-invaders Over Law-abiding Citizens?

Posted by M. C. on December 7, 2019

In once Great Britain criminal jihadists are released early from prison because a “compassionate” justice system doesn’t want to marginalize the immigrant-invaders. It is only guiltless Julian Assange who is kept in prison.

Swedish women are afraid to leave their homes. According to some reports only 7% of immigrant-invader rapists are convicted. Conviction would make the poor dears feel unwanted and unappreciated. The idiot Swedish government actually works to attract gang-rapists into Sweden by advertising the benefits available to immigrant-invaders.

The presstitute media doesn’t report these stories out of fear of being labeled “white supremacist” or out of fear of validating “white supremacists’ concerns.”

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/12/05/why-do-western-governments-favor-immigrant-invaders-over-law-abiding-citizens/

Paul Craig Roberts

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has never represented Germans. She represents Washington, the CIA, and immigrant-invaders. Recently she gave a speech in the German parliament in which she put the right of immigrant-invaders not to be offended above the free speech of Germans. In Merkel’s sick mind, for German citizens to complain about the cost of supporting immigrant-invaders and the rape of German women by immigrant-invaders is offensive to the immigrant-invaders. She calls this spreading hatred and violating the dignity of immigrant-invaders. The violated dignity of raped German women is not her concern. Neither are the raped budgets of the German taxpayers. https://voiceofeurope.com/2019/12/merkel-claims-freedom-of-speech-must-be-limited-to-maintain-a-free-society/

In once Great Britain criminal jihadists are released early from prison because a “compassionate” justice system doesn’t want to marginalize the immigrant-invaders. It is only guiltless Julian Assange who is kept in prison.
https://www.rt.com/uk/474743-london-
bridge-suspect-released-early/

The hapless Swedish population are the Europeans who are the worst afflicted by the importation of diversity. Swedish women are afraid to leave their homes. According to some reports only 7% of immigrant-invader rapists are convicted. Conviction would make the poor dears feel unwanted and unappreciated. The idiot Swedish government actually works to attract gang-rapists into Sweden by advertising the benefits available to immigrant-invaders. Little doubt that the absence of punishment for rape ranks up there with free housing and food.

The advocates of immigrant-invaders say the high numbers of Swedish rapes are the result of Swedish husbands raping their Swedish wives. The official position is that only racists and white supremacists complain about immigrant-invader rapists. https://voiceofeurope.com/2019/10/swedish-dystopia-nearly-one-in-four-women-are-afraid-to-leave-their-homes-at-night/

Swedish “justice” lets rapists of 11-year old girl go free:
https://voiceofeurope.com/2018/11/11-year-old-girl-gang-raped-in-sweden-perpetrators-walk-free-and-laugh-in-her-face/

When the rare and light punishment of migrant-invaders for rape is compared to the destruction of white Julian Assange who was never even accused of rape, it is clear that justice in Sweden is race-based. I know of no statistics to consult, but I bet white ethnic Swedes who rape are punished more severely than immigrant-invaders.

When migrant-invaders gain citizenship, they feel freer to rape:
https://voiceofeurope.com/2018/10/migrant-celebrates-swedish-citizenship-by-raping-woman-and-tells-her-now-i-can-do-what-i-want/

https://www.hannenabintuherland.com/europa/a-turn-for-the-worse-for-the-rape-capital-of-the-west-feminist-sweden/

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5195/sweden-rape

12 year old undergoes endless rape by immigrant-invaders in UK:
https://voiceofeurope.com/2019/12/uk-12-year-old-girl-passed-around-like-a-piece-of-meat-by-middle-eastern-rape-gang/

South Africa now very dangerous for white population:
https://voiceofeurope.com/2018/10/straight-a-student-21-kidnapped-raped-and-murdered-by-south-african-gang/

The presstitute media doesn’t report these stories out of fear of being labeled “white supremacist” or out of fear of validating “white supremacists’ concerns.” Little doubt “white supremacist” will now be added to my collection of libelous labels bestowed on me by those determined to control their false explanations.

The Obama regime made sure Americans also experienced the joys of multiculturalism by importing large numbers of immigrant-invaders and dumping them on the taxpayers of American communities. There is suspicion that Obama used immigrant-invaders to build Democratic Party constituencies. Minnesota got a lot of Somalis, as did Maine. The presstitute media tell lies about how well it is going for everyone and how the immigrants are restoring and rebuilding declining America. Occasionally a bit of truth gets out: https://mainefirstmedia.com/2018/05/gang-of-somali-kids-attack-park-goers-in-lewiston/

The strength of a country is in the unity of the people, not in their division. It is extraordinary that as Washington becomes more aggressive abroad, it supports division at home. With Identity Politics teaching hatred, how is America’s multicultural military going to function? Try to imagine an Arab army consisting of Sunnis and Shiites. The soldiers would be too busy fighting one another to attend to the opposing army. A divided army is what Identity Politics will create for America.

Assimilation is required if a country of diverse ethnicities is not to become a Tower of Babel. In the US an English population was able to assimilate Irish, Italians, and Polish peoples by having periods of no immigration. Moreover, all were from a Christian European culture. Today the situation is much more challenging. Somalis and Muslims are culturally different from Western populations, and assimilation is considered racist white superiority. The result is separate populations with the recent arrivals claiming to be victims of the white population. It is a sign of insanity that everywhere in the Western world governments are trying to marry unassimilable ethnicities, many of whom are victims of the West’s bombing and invasion of their home countries, with Identity Politics. This is a recipe for the destruction of Western countries.

The leftwing thinks that this is a good thing. Just as libertarians think that people in government are evil but people in private business are good, the leftwing thinks that white people are evil, but people of color are good. For libertarians getting rid of government is the solution. For the leftwing getting rid of white people is the solution. We see, especially in Sweden and Germany, white governments favoring immigrants over the native ethnic Swedish and German populations.

I am sure that white ethnicities have much to answer for. For example, as soon as the war criminal Union generals Sherman and Sheridan destroyed the South, they turned on the native Plains Indians. To become acquainted with the crimes of the Union Army against America’s native populations, read The Long Death: The Last Days of the Plains Indians by Ralph K. Andrist. https://www.amazon.com/Long-Death-Last-Plains-Indians/dp/0806133082/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2VKQOC72YMBDI&keywords=the+long+death+the+last+days+of+the+plains+indians&qid=1575508971&s=books&sprefix=the+long+death%2Caps%2C366&sr=1-1

But blacks and Muslims also have much to answer for. In the 1994 Rwanda Genocide, the black Hutus killed one million black Tutsis. The religious divide between Sunni and Shiite has led to numerous deaths, and the lack of Arab unity has permitted Western and Israeli colonizers to dominate Muslim lands. The disunity of Arabs makes them impotent.

Identity Politics has invented the fake news of a “white race.” There is no more a white race than there is a black race. There are numerous white ethnicities, most of whom have been at war with one another for centuries. The same for blacks. The international black slave market was the creation of the black King of Dahomey’s slave wars. He sold his surplus first to Arabs and then to Europeans. Yet in Identity Politics, it is the nonexistent “white race” that is responsible for slavery.

Very few interest groups are served by truth. But many are served by lies. As interest groups control the media and the Internet, lies take precedence over truth. Truth-tellers are excoriated. Once they are labeled, usually falsely, “holocaust deniers,” their friends abandon them in order to survive. When former President Jimmy Carter’s book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid https://www.amazon.com/Palestine-Peace-Apartheid-Jimmy-Carter/dp/0743285034/ref=sr_1_5?keywords=Jimmy+Carter&qid=1575576459&s=books&sr=1-5 , was published, all the Jews on the Carter Center’s board resigned. The Israel Lobby branded Jimmy Carter an anti-semite.

It seems to me that Israel creates its own enemies by branding those who give Israel good advice “anti-semites” and “holocaust deniers.” Jimmy Carter gave Israel good advice, and the Israel Lobby demonized him.

According to world polls, the two most despised countries in the world are Israel and the United States. The rest of the world has reduced the “axis of evil” to Israel and America. Yet both governments advertise themselves as the “chosen people” who are above both their own law and international law. Both governments expect the rest of the world to submit to them.

One can understand the self-satisfaction of Israel. Of all the countries in the world, only the Israeli government has enough sense to prevent non-Jewish immigration. Israel is a land for Jews only. The Palestinian citizens of Israel are being prepared to be cast out of their citizenship or any effective utilization of such.

In terms of the values of today, one has to admire the steadfastness of the Israeli Zionists. They have conquered a land and built a country for Jews during the years that the European ethnicities have destroyed their own countries by making them “multi-cultural.” There is no such thing as multi-cultural Israel.

As a person accused of anti-semitism and being a holocaust denier despite my many Jewish friends and supporters and despite that I have never investigated The Holocaust, I attest to my admiration for Israel, a tiny state with a tiny population that is able to control the foreign and in many respects the domestic policy of the entirety of the Western world, most of the Arab world, and also parts of the foreign policy of the Russian government.

It is impossible not to admire Israel’s ability to dominate. Unlike former great empires, only Israel has been able to conquer the entirety of the Western world and also parts of the Russian government.

For such a tiny percentage of the world population to achieve such domination over the world suggests that they are indeed God’s Chosen People. By comparison, Americans are nothing. Americans don’t even count in the importance of things.

Be seeing you

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Attacking The Source: The Establishment Loyalist’s Favorite Online Tactic – Caitlin Johnstone

Posted by M. C. on December 4, 2019

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/11/28/attacking-the-source-the-establishment-loyalists-favorite-online-tactic/

author: Caitlin Johnstone

If you’re skeptical of western power structures and you’ve ever engaged in online political debate for any length of time, the following has definitely happened to you.

You find yourself going back and forth with one of those high-confidence, low-information establishment types who’s promulgating a dubious mainstream narrative, whether that be about politics, war, Julian Assange, or whatever. At some point they make an assertion which you know to be false–publicly available information invalidates the claim they’re making.

“I’ve got them now!” you think to yourself, if you’re new to this sort of thing. Then you share a link to an article or video which makes a well-sourced, independently verifiable case for the point you are trying to make.

Then, the inevitable happens.

“LMAO! That outlet!” they scoff in response. “That outlet is propaganda/fake news/conspiracy theory trash!”

Or something to that effect. You’ll encounter this tactic over and over and over again if you continually engage in online political discourse with people who don’t agree with you. It doesn’t matter if you’re literally just linking to an interview featuring some public figure saying a thing you’d claimed they said. It doesn’t matter if you’re linking to a WikiLeaks publication of a verified authentic document. Unless you’re linking to CNN/Fox News (whichever fits the preferred ideology of the establishment loyalist you’re debating), they’ll bleat “fake news!” or “propaganda!” or “Russia!” as though that in and of itself magically invalidates the point you’re trying to make.

And of course it doesn’t. What they are doing is called attacking the source, also known as an ad hominem, and it’s a very basic logical fallacy.

Most people are familiar with the term “ad hominem”, but they usually think about it in terms of merely hurling verbal insults at people. What it actually means is attacking the source of the argument rather than attacking the argument itself in a way that avoids dealing with the question of whether or not the argument itself is true. It’s a logical fallacy because it’s used to deliberately obfuscate the goal of a logical conclusion to the debate.

“An ad hominem is more than just an insult,” explains David Ferrer for The Quad. “It’s an insult used as if it were an argument or evidence in support of a conclusion. Verbally attacking people proves nothing about the truth or falsity of their claims.”

This can take the form of saying “Claim X is false because the person making it is an idiot.” But it can also take the form of “Claim X is false because the person making it is a propagandist,” or “Claim X is false because the person making it is a conspiracy theorist.”

Someone being an idiot, a propagandist or a conspiracy theorist is irrelevant to the question of whether or not what they’re saying is true. In my last article debunking a spin job on the OPCW scandal by the narrative management firm Bellingcat, I pointed out that Bellingcat is funded by imperialist regime change operations like the National Endowment for Democracy, which was worth highlighting because it shows the readers where that organization is coming from. But if I’d left my argument there it would still be an ad hominem attack, because it wouldn’t address whether or not what Bellingcat wrote about the OPCW scandal is true. It would be a logical fallacy; proving that they are propagandists doesn’t prove that what they are saying in this particular instance is false.

What I had to do in order to actually refute Bellingcat’s spin job was show that they were making a bad argument using bad logic, which I did by highlighting the way they used pedantic wordplay to make it seem as though the explosive leaks which have been emerging from the OPCW’s investigation of an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria were insignificant. I had to show how Bellingcat actually never came anywhere close to addressing the actual concerns about a leaked internal OPCW email, such as extremely low chlorinated organic chemical levels on the scene and patients’ symptoms not matching up with chlorine gas poisoning, as well as the fact that the OPCW investigators plainly don’t feel as though their concerns were met since they’re blowing the whistle on the organisation now.

And, for the record, Bellingcat’s lead trainer/researcher guy responded to my arguments by saying I’m a conspiracy theorist. I personally count that as a win.

The correct response to someone who attacks the outlet or individual you’re citing instead of attacking the actual argument being made is, “You’re attacking the source instead of the argument. That’s a logical fallacy, and it’s only ever employed by people who can’t attack the argument.”

The demand that you only ever use mainstream establishment media when arguing against establishment narratives is itself an inherently contradictory position, because establishment media by their very nature do not report facts against the establishment. It’s saying “You’re only allowed to criticise establishment power using outlets which never criticize establishment power.”

Good luck finding a compilation of Trump’s dangerous escalations against Moscow like the one I wrote the other day anywhere in the mainstream media, for example. Neither mainstream liberals nor mainstream conservatives are interested in promoting that narrative, so it simply doesn’t exist in the mainstream information bubble. Every item I listed in that article is independently verifiable and sourced from separate mainstream media reports, yet if you share that article in a debate with an establishment loyalist and they know who I am, nine times out of ten they’ll say something like “LOL Caitlin Johnstone?? She’s nuts!” With “nuts” of course meaning “Says things my TV doesn’t say”.

It’s possible to just click on all the hyperlinks in my article and share them separately to make your point, but you can also simply point out that they are committing a logical fallacy, and that they are doing so because they can’t actually attack the argument.

This will make them very upset, because for the last few years establishment loyalists have been told that it is perfectly normal and acceptable to attack the source instead of the argument. The mass hysteria about “fake news” and “Russian propaganda” has left consumers of mainstream media with the unquestioned assumption that if they ever so much as glance at an RT article their faces will begin to melt like that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. They’ve been trained to believe that it’s perfectly logical and acceptable to simply shriek “propaganda!” at a rational argument or well-sourced article which invalidates their position, or even to proactively go around calling people Russian agents who dissent from mainstream western power-serving narratives.

But it isn’t logical, and it isn’t acceptable. The best way to oppose their favorite logically fallacious tactic is to call it like it is, and let them deal with the cognitive dissonance that that brings up for them.

Of course some nuance is needed here. Remember that alternative media is just like anything else: there’s good and bad, even within the same outlet, so make sure what you’re sharing is solid and not just some schmuck making a baseless claim. You can’t just post a link to some Youtuber making an unsubstantiated assertion and then accuse the person you’re debating of attacking the source when they dismiss it. That which has been presented without evidence may be dismissed without evidence, and if the link you’re citing consists of nothing other than unproven assertions by someone they’ve got no reason to take at their word, they can rightly dismiss it.

If however the claims in the link you’re citing are logically coherent arguments or well-documented facts presented in a way that people can independently fact-check, it doesn’t matter if you’re citing CNN or Sputnik. The only advantage to using CNN when possible would be that it allows you to skip the part where they perform the online equivalent of putting their fingers in their ears and humming.

Don’t allow those who are still sleeping bully those who are not into silence. Insist on facts, evidence, and intellectually honest arguments, and if they refuse to provide them call it what it is: an admission that they have lost the debate.

__________________________

Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following me on Steemit, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

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