Julian Assange makes desperate bid for 15 more minutes of Internet fame

Via the Dissident, who — we'll just see where this goes on any personal comments by him — Julian Assange has launched a criminal complaint against the Nobel Foundation over its awarding the Nobel Peace Prize, or Nobel Piss Prize as I sometimes call it, to Venezuela's María Cortina Machado.

A week ago, the Dissident had a good roundup on her history. For the unknowing, this willing pawn of US Nat-Sec Nutsacks™ was already plotting against her own government when Hugo Chavez was still alive. 

So, she's not deserving.

And? 

As I said at the Dissident's piece, Hank the Knife/Le Duc Tho weren't deserving. Nor was Dear Leader, honored just because he wasn't Shrub Bush.

But, deserving or not? Assange claims it's criminal:

Nobel’s will of 27 November 1895 is binding under Swedish law. It clearly states that each year the peace prize monies shall go to the person who during the proceeding year “...conferred the greatest benefit to humankind...” by doing “...the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” 

Any disbursement contradicting this mandate constitutes misappropriation from the endowment. The pending transfer of 11 million SEK ($1.18 million USD) and existing 10 December 2025 handover of the prize medal to María Corina Machado, in violation of this disbursement restriction, appear to be acts of serious criminality.

OK, there's our bid for a Warholian 15 minutes of fame. 

As for the past history, beyond the above? A list of all winners from 1979 on (choosing that year on purpose) includes, beyond the above:

• Mother Teresa, exploiter of the poor she claimed to represent, per Hitchens' demolition
• Elie Wiesel, Zionist flak 
• Aung Sang Suu Kyi, an eventual sellout to the Burmese military junta 
• Muhammad Yunus/Grameen Bank, a big stretch to call this about peace, and microlending has been shown to be somewhat overrated.
• The European Union, with its becoming more and more the political arm of NATO.

A few detailed thoughts in a few cases?

• Kissinger? Used his prize to lever US adventuresomeness in the rest of Nixon's, and Ford's, presidencies and beyond.
• Dear Leader? Used his to drone-kill at least one American citizen and otherwise expand warmongering, in concert with NATO in Libya (see EU above)
• Wiesel? See Oct. 7, 2023 and events both before and after. 

So, yeah, this is posturing.

Beyond that, while not knowing the details of Norway's version of German, non-Napoleonic, European law, this has zero chance as a criminal complaint. So, why didn't he sue instead? Maybe he knows the criminal complaint is such a sure-fired loser he can spin conspiratorial claims, whereas a civil complaint would also be a sure-fired loser but not a slam dunk. Norway's civil law appears to be very much precedent-based, with little in the way of statutory rules.

As for the reality of Assange?

I've got the whole deal here, in one of my top 10 posts ever, about the reality of who Guccifer 2.0 / Forensicator was (definitely NOT Seth Rich), the shady dealings in trying to hide his identity, Patrick Lawrence's pseudo-journalism on the last piece he ever wrote (or has been allowed to write) at The Nation, how both RNC and DNC were hacked, Duncan Campbell's yeoman work and more. 

I also remind you that Assange is not a journalist. That's despite what Chris Hedges and Ken Klippenstein, among others, say. More here.

As for the Dissident's piece? He doesn't have as much a following as Seymour Hersh, but oy, did Sy bring the nutters out. 

On the deep, dark issue of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory? Even if Yevgeny Prigozhin's Internet Research Agency started it, Assange goosed it. And, his toady, Craig Murray, also lied. That said, when presented with evidence he couldn't deny, Assange said, in essence "THOSE emails were hacked but that's not my source."

So, to all the people talking about Assange's integrity? Fuck off.

Assange's object and focus has always been himself first. Daniel Domscheit-Berg attested this nearly 15 years ago. Wikileaks is probably running low on money and he needs some. Yet Assange give a formal apology to Seth Rich's family and I will sing a different tune.

Assange did good in the past. Chelsea Manning can attest. That said, his formal suborning of Manning's actions is part of why he's not a journalist.

But, he never supported Wikileaks-type projects against less than fully democratic countries, ie, Russia and China. In fact, in the former case, he deliberately turned down options to help. And, this is why I’m a skeptical leftist, for the umpeenth time, and stand outside of political — and other — twosiderism. On this issue, I can call out Western imperialism and its Russian and Chinese forms as well.

Julian Assange is still not a journalist, and likely still is a Seth Rich liar, but he is going free

First, the second half of that header.

Per NBC, and many other news outlets, Assange has reached a plea deal with the US government. He is expected to appear in court at Tuesday evening US time, for the court of US territory Northern Marianas Islands, apparently in person. (AP's story notes that he left Britain earlier today.) He is expected to plea to "conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information." He will be sentenced to 62 months in that plea deal, which equates to "time served" at Belmarsh. Per US government court documents linked by NBC, the charges and the deal involve the Chelsea Manning material. (Waiting for whackjobs to snowflake over the government doc calling her "Chelsea.")

Now, per that first half of that header. (NOTE: The big questions to me, are the “WHY” and the related “WHY NOW.” For thoughts on that, go here.)

He's not a journalist. And, that's not the first time I said that. Yes, five years ago, I thought he was. And I was wrong. First, per various journalism societies, as articulated by former ProPublica editorial head Dick Teufel, while journalist may themselves commit crimes to obtain information — and have done so many times — they do NOT suborn other people to commit crimes on their behalf. And, Assange did that.

Update, June 26: Klippenstein has an "interesting" (but wrong, yes, rare for him) take on this. His angle seems to be that if Nat-Sec Nutsacks™ say Assange isn't a journalist, that automatically makes him one. He also seems to think that not being an American citizen immunized Assange from any espionage charges in a just world. It doesn't. He's not a traitor because he's not an American citizen, but it's laughable to think that any non-citizen of any country could not be tried under that country's espionage charges just because they're not an American citizen.  He is right that if Assange hasn't damaged national security (and I don't think he has to a great extent, at least) then there's the lack of probable cause issue, but that's different.

June 27: Chris Hedges is also wrong on the "he's a journo."

For both of these, as I've said before on the "not a journo" focus pieces, Assange deserves the same civil and legal rights anybody else in his situation would have deserved. But, the clause of the First Amendment that covers freedom of the press doesn't apply to him.

Also, neither Klippenstein nor Hedges cover Assange's ugly side. And, speaking of?

Second? He IS (and presumably still is) a Seth Rich conspiracy theorist. And, full of shit on that. Duncan Campbell busted the ass of the so-called Forensicator, Elizabeth Vos of Russia-stanning and more. His odiousness is almost matched by his odious toady, Craig Murray, who has indicated before that, by the end of 2016, Assange knew the theft provenance of those emails. 

And Jeff St. Clair of Counterpunch noted well the lunacy of "some of the more credulous precincts of the left" for believing Assange's claims. That said, more and more, I don't even consider many of those people "more credulous precincts of the left; I call them pseudoleftists. I'm not sure exactly where to put the likes of Mark Ames and Yasha Levine, who eventually proved to be full of shit with their mocking of "Cozy Bear," etc. But, that link, with the information that the Russians hacked into Republican National Committee as well as Democratic National Committee computers in the run-up to the 2016 election, is one of the key points in refuting all the Seth Rich conspiracy theory bullshit —

AND in showing just how odious Assange is.

And, as for "Russiagate" in general?

On approximate percentages? One-third is clearly false. I challenge any #BlueAnon to show me Donald Trump colluded or conspired with Russia, or that a Michael Flynn did so on Trump's behalf. One-third, contra the pseudoleftists, is true. Russia DID hack the DNC emails (and RNC ones, to the degree they got any). Russia DID do the fake Facebook groups for both Trump and Clinton, and other online bots and trolls. And, like Osama bin Laden with 9/11, got a LOT of bang for the buck. Who's running that show after Yevgeny Prigozhin's death, I don't know. The other one-third is a grayzone, but not Max Blumenthal's. As with details of the coronavirus at Wuhan Institute of Virology, we may never get the details. (And, those Julian Assange pleadings documents make no indication that he's supposed to reveal anything the US national security state doesn't already know.) Also don't forget that Sy Hersh's original Substack post about Nord Stream brought out scads of Seth Rich (and other) nutters.

Related, as #BlueAnon on Twitter talk about him as a "Russian asset"? It actually is possible. Note what I said above about Craig Murray. Note that Assange deliberately avoided helping Russia's version of Wikileaks. (He said nothing when Putin banned Proekt in 2021.) Note him and Edward Snowden. It was Assange who enticed him to go there in the first place.

Then, there's the people, both #BlueAnon and #NeverTrumper fellow travelers, who cut to the head of the line:

Assange is a traitor https://t.co/qppkD02MB8

— Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇮🇱 (@AdamKinzinger) June 25, 2024

As I told Kinzinger, as part of calling him an even Dummer Fuq than normal, Assange is not an American citizen and therefore, by definition, cannot be a traitor.

Hey, Snowden, how are you feeling now that cooling your heels in Moscow just got a little bit colder?

Finally, and always important? 

WHY?

Is Genocide Joe now Panderer Joe, hoping for votes? Just two months ago, the USofA looked sure to still want to extradite him, offering weasel words about his security. (NPR's story, along with NBC's, notes that the next hearings in this process were set for next month.)

Or, did Biden fear that a Labour landslide under Der Starmer (aka Keir Starmer and think about it) would finish putting this issue on the back burner again?

Or is this part of some backdoor deal for the release of arrested Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich? If so, you heard it here first.

That said, neither of the non-pander "whys" make much sense.

On the Labour issue, Starmer and most the rest of non-Corbynite Labour (why doesn't he join Galloway's Respect?; that said, Corbyn himself ran as an independent this time) probably don't care that much more about Assange that Sunak and the rest of the Tories. (Assange's entire time in Belmarsh has been under Tory governments.) Starmer just cares about beating Sunak by as many seats as possible. (Update: Corbyn won, but Galloway, whose previous win was in a by-election, got buried.)

On the Gershkovich angle? Assange is yesterday's news to Vladimir Putin, who is as "transactional" about such things as Donald Trump.

But, off the top of my head, these are the only three "why" reasons that come to mind. 

Update, July 15: No "insider" has yet proposed an answer.

==

According to the Guardian, the US gummint charged half a million smackers to fly him from London to the Northern Marianas on a military jet. Could be true; could be Assange/Wikileaks bullshit. The story's main source is Kristin Hrafnsson, editor-in-chief of Wikileaks, ie, Assange's top in-house flunky.

Speaking of, I recommend Daniel Domscheit-Berg's "Inside WikiLeaks." I recommend it in part because even though it's not that close to perfect, it pisses off cultists.

That said, the Guardian also has the backdrop to why the Northern Marianas:

A sticking point in the deal had been the insistence from Washington that a US court had to hear Assange’s plea in person, and Assange’s aversion to appearing at a hearing in continental America. That was when the idea was raised of holding a hearing in a district court on Saipan, a former Japanese colony that was administered by the Americans after the war and became part of the US in 1986.

Makes sense.

Julian Assange, the US government and "weasel words"

Per The Guardian's report on the assurances the US government has offered Julian Assange, they could be, in actuality, "weasel words," per his wife Stella. That is, they could be promises broken after he is extradited.

But, I'm going to unpack them at face value. Here we go:

On Tuesday, details emerged of the assurances given by the US, which stated that he “will not be prejudiced by reason of his nationality with respect to which defences he may seek to raise at trial and at sentencing”. 

It referred specifically to him having “the ability to raise and seek to rely upon” the first amendment but also said that its applicability “is exclusively within the purview of the US courts”. The assurances also state: “A sentence of death will neither be sought nor imposed on Assange.”

First, no death penalty is good. That said, Assange, who probably hates on Joe Biden about as much as Bill and Hillary Clinton, should find someone besides Russia's SVR, or Internet Research Agency, to do some pro-Biden fake email leaks. Because, despite Assange's gullibility in 2016, Donald Trump views a relationship with him as purely transactional, and Donald Trump is clearly pro-federal death penalty.

Second, I believe the government's stance on the First Amendment is correct. That's because I don't believe Assange is a journalist. I didn't even before the 2016 leaks. I especially didn't after he goosed the Seth Rich conspiracy theory.

As for her claim that the prosecution says Assange has no First Amendment rights because he's not a US citizen? He generally will have (dependent on exact judicial ruling) access to other clauses of the First Amendment. They also do NOT offer blanket protections against behavior that would be criminal without invoking the First Amendent, and let us remember that Assange would be facing criminal not civil trial. Let us also remember that neither the UK nor Assange's native Australia have anything that close to the First Amendment. And, the Russia to which Assange lured Edward Snowden (he did and shut up) has no such protection at all. And, at Counterpunch on this issue, Binoy Kampmark does some overreading.

Were I the philosopher-president of the USofA, any plea deal with Assange would require him to admit responsibility for his role in the Seth Rich conspiracy theory. Period and end of story. Should he make a non-weasel words confession, and should he, especially per what I said about Snowden above, admit to any direct contacts with the SVR, the FSB et al, I would give Assange the equivalent of deferred adjudication — for 10 years, to keep a Sword of Damocles over his head. That would satisfy Aussie calls for non-prosecution, satisfy the spirit of "he's suffered enough," but also satisfy the spirit of what he's actually done. Speaking of the first clause in the previous sentence, Australia is a member of the "Five Eyes," but I suspect US security agencies have shared little information with it.

Thoughts on Assange's reprieve

Yes, Julian Assange was granted the right to appeal his extradition to the US, which the British court said could still eventually happen if the US offered sufficient guarantees of potential incarceration-related issues and, above all, no death penalty.

And?

The US has lied about this to other countries before. Namely, about whether or not someone would be sent to the infamous Supermax (ADX in Bureau of Prisons lingo) in Florence, Colorado.

One of the longest-running and most revealing lawsuits filed by an ADX prisoner was brought in 2020 by Mostafa Kamel Mostafa, the former imam of London’s Finsbury Park mosque, which was shut down by U.K. authorities in 2003 because of its ties to jihadists. Charged with aiding in terrorist plots, Mostafa fought extradition to the United States for more than eight years. Extradition was finally granted after U.S. officials assured the European Court of Human Rights that he would not be sent to ADX. In fact, his medical conditions and physical disabilities were so severe — Mostafa is missing both of his forearms and is nearly blind, the result of a chemical explosion in 1993 — that the European court concluded “there was no real risk of his spending anything more than a short period of time at ADX.”

But after he was convicted in New York in 2014 and sentenced to life in prison, Mostafa was sent to H Unit in ADX, where he’s been housed ever since, in a cell that offers few concessions to his disabilities.

There you are.

Nope, Julian Assange still isn't a journo

If Andrew Cockburn is going to do a thin update of his Harper’s piece from a year ago that I refuted at that time, then I shall do the same, as we await the likely inevitable result of his Belmarsh hearing.

First, the Committee to Protect Journalists is also right on this issue.

Second, that does not mean that Assange is not entitled to the same protections while incarcerated as any other John/Jane Doe. Of course he is and the CPJ also said that.

Third? The nut graf? Since I wrote before, my thoughts on whether or not Assange is a Russian asset? And, I’m a non-duopoly lefist, not a BlueAnon Democrat screecher, mind you.

I’ll give you 50-50 on that. I had already leaded kind of that way a year ago. I didn’t tie in my 2021 piece on Putin banning Proekt, and no word on that from Assange.

I add this tweet:

In 2012, Assange refused to publish a leak on a 2 billion euro transaction between Assad and a Russian government bank. In 2016, Assange refused to publish a Russian intelligence dump on Russian military and intelligence involvement in Ukraine. We all know who he works for.

More on that here, noting that Assange didn’t always appear to be Putin’s lapdog. (OTOH, he reportedly sought a Russian visa already in 2010.)

That said, Cockburn is not alone in his wrongness. As noted below, tangential to the Seth Rich conspiracy, the likes of Ray McGovern and Patrick Lawrence (don’t even get me started on him) are wrong. John Pilger was wrong, laughably so. So were others that might be mentioned here.

OK, let’s dive in.

Update, May 23, 2019: Julian Assange has now received a superseding indictment on Espionage Act charges. 

Quick thoughts a year ago, still held?
1. Whether this puts a crimp or not on the freedom of the press portion of the First Amendment (and courts have ruled the Espionage Act does not violate the free speech portion of the amendment) is a secondary issue.
2. To me, the main issue is whether or not the Espionage Act is legally applicable to foreign nationals. I argue it is not.
3. Other than the "yes, but ..." below, I still haven't — and can't — come down squarely on "yes, he's a journalist."

3A. Strike that. As of 2022, I come down squarely on "he's not a journalist." I updated a post from 2019 to offer more thought on that before then writing what I linked above.. As we see how odious the Seth Rich conspiracy theory was, along with the increasing likelihood that Assange at some point knew the source of his information, plus the fact that he told Snowden to go to Russia not Latin America? Maybe he was a journalist long ago, but that long ago is long gone.
More thoughts at bottom.

Now, the original post:

I promised in my initial post about Assange's arrest that I would address this further. And here we are.

A simple answer is two words: "Yes, but ..."

And, that's with everything implied by folk psychology tropes by adding "but" after the "yes."

So, I'm going to break that out more, with a nutgraf of sorts kept down at the bottom.

So, here we go ...

Journalists don't just seek out, gather and collate information.

They analyze it.

Then they write about it.

Assange did little of the analysis or writing work even with the initial information he got from Chelsea Manning, when he had much greater degrees of freedom of space, time, and working space than he does now.

Writers, and even more, editors, make judgment calls with information they receive. Some of those judgments are whether the material is true or not. Others are whether it would be harmful to release some of it.

I think Glenn Greenwald, for whatever reasons, has gone overboard on what Edward Snowden information he and Laura Poitras have chosen not to release, but, they have made a judgment call.

Assange? In the past, at a point after his working space freedom started to close up but was not that tight, made decisions to dump information without redactions, and in the case of some Afghanistan material, was rightly criticized for an endangerment factor.

That's just one issue. As Wikipedia's page on Wikileaks notes, it's released Social Security numbers, credit card numbers and more. With basically no effort at redaction.

I also said in my initial piece on the actual "yes," that to the degree it's true, he's actually like a Beltway steno in reverse in some way. He's an opiner, not a news writer, to the degree we consider him a journalist, by what he gathers, and what he solicits. I've already, along with others, criticized him for not seeking and encouraging leakers inside places like Russia and China. I've criticized more his response to that initial criticism. Today, Russia has a home-grown version of something like Wikileaks — no thanks to Assange.

And, when Assange, or Wikileaks as its mouthpiece, has made editorial judgment calls, sometimes they've been off the wall. Like criticizing the leak of the Panama Papers.

Here? I suspect 190-proof red-eyed jealousy at work — as one motive.

Another? I'm still not ready to call him a Russian agent, but the Panama Papers' attacks on Russian businessmen (Mafiyya, let's be honest) is another reason Assange attacked their release, claiming the U.S. government was behind this, which is nonsense. Ken Silverstein had done some work on Mossack Fonseca even before the main Panama Papers leak and I KNOW he's not a government agent. (Actually, him routing Snowden to Russia? Maybe he IS a Russian agent. UPDATE, March 14, 2022. Dick Tofel, why he's not a journalist, references just that, among other things.)

And? Vlad the Impaler Putin himself cited Wikileaks in fighting to defend Russkies with likely government ties. Again, Assange may not be a Russian agent, but he has certainly left himself open to accusations of such.

Worsening the case against Assange here is that, in hosting his own show on RT, per Wiki's page about RT (and yes, selective Wiki-haters when your ox is gored, there's a link at the site), he admitted he RT would be less comfortable with him if he had encouraged anti-Russia leaks or written anti-Russia items.

(Greenwald and others like him — and the likes of Mark Ames and Yasha Levine may partially fall here, though I've not seen anything explicit so far — fall into their own version, that of certain leftists and certain semi-libertarians on US foreign policy — of #twosiderism in lumping legitimate and illegitimate attacks against RT and Sputnik together.)

Jealousy is not a one-off issue with Assange, either. Edward Snowden was among those who criticized Assange for not sufficiently curating and editing leaked materials, a charge he repeats in his memoir as reason why he didn't work through Wikileaks, and Assange claimed Snowden was pandering to Hillary Clinton.

Good journalists also have good ethics. In promoting the totally base and vile Seth Rich conspiracy theory, primarily to try to cover up that the initial DNC emails came from a Russian hack, Assange has shown his lack of ethics and his willingness to outrightly lie. (Given that nobody — not Assange, Patrick Lawrence, Adam Carter or anybody else that I know of — has tried to explicitly claim that the spearphishing attack that got the later emails was not Russian-done, why the lie was engaged in was perplexing, too, and remains so.)

And, related, Silverstein thinks Snowden, if not originally a Russian agent, got compromised at some point, so who knows?

Wikipedia also raises the issue of whether or not Assange is anti-Semitic. First, to the Assange nutbar fanbois, I know well myself the difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, and the use of the latter as a weapon against people calling out the former. As with Russian agent questions, at a minimum, I think Assange has left himself open to anti-Semitism claims.

And, per Andrew Stewart at Washington Babylon, Assange is definitely anti-feminist, which ties back to his troubles in Sweden (which have now been opened legally AGAIN!) He's also, weirdly but openly, anti-atheist, at least on Tweets that Stew collated. And his call for more births in Europe make him come off a bit like an Anders Breivik, or other white nationalists in Europe and America.

Bolded that for Cockburn, who talks about people shedding tears for Navalny. I know his past, too, myself; I’m not shedding.

Per the Intercept in 2016, right after the DNC hack, how Assange chose to frame the hack, as well as claiming they're absolutely not from Russia, which he actually couldn't know if Wikileaks does actually have as robust of source anonymity as Assange claims, means that if he IS doing journalism, it's not news reporting — it's as much or more op-ed only as the Gnu Media, Beltway stenos division.

Assange is also an idiot at times. In the link above, I mentioned his previous issues with lack of password protection. His belief that Trump would give him a pardon or something for all the DNC leaks further shows this idiocy. By the way, to riff on Janice Joplin, schadenfreude is just another word for someone else who arrogantly still has plenty to lose.

Journalism is also a collaborate effort in some way. Even at a small community newspaper, the managing editor will bounce ideas off other staff. A publisher will be a check, if the editor doesn't voluntarily include the publisher in his or her advisors.

Assange was, at the time, managing editor and publisher all in one, with a sycophantic, perhaps even cowering, editorial board, even if Kristinn Hrafnsson is listed as editor in chief.

Whether it is, if not autism, being "on the spectrum" somewhere, as the man hired to ghost Assange's autobiography details in writing about a six-month nightmare, or simple narcissism, or both, Assange simply doesn't play ball except on his terms.

Journalism is an art or a craft, not a science. It will always have a demarcation problem, per philosopher friend Massimo Pigliucci and his writings (in the sciences) on demarcation issues.

==

Sadly, the whataboutism and twosiderism on this issue, beyond the question of "is Assange a journalist" is ramping up.

Should Mueller be faulted if his Internet 12 indictments are based only, as far as computer evidence, on Crowdstrike mirrors of DNC servers? I'd argue yes.

But, that doesn't mean that the case is flimsy, let alone that by default, Seth Rich (or even a non-Seth Richer at DNC) stole the initial set of emails.

Update, Nov. 22, 2019, related to that and Crowdstrike:

Well put on Crowdstrike, & a  I didn't think of before that at least partially refudiates #TrumpTrain riders, #SethRich #conspiracytheory mongers like Ty Clevenger, and their fellow travelers in the VIPS world over #Forensicator. There was/is no single server to "hand over." https://t.co/pOZOehl5ZL

— reallyDonaldTrump  🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) November 22, 2019

Back to the original.

I've covered ALL of this in depth before. I'm sure Consortium News and others are still going to peddle the Patrick Lawrence BS, since Ray McGovern is a chief peddler. AND, the two-siders should stop trying to claim that a burden of proof exists with the VIPS minority plus Ritter et al. Beyond that, I specifically commented on this related to Assange's arrest six weeks ago.

AND, if you're going to criticize Mueller, you need to criticize this Forensicator in spades. Or, Adam Carter, I should say. If you want Mueller to interview someone, toady Craig Murray, it's "interesting" how you want him to interview Bill Binney from VIPS, but not Thomas Drake, the man who said Binney and McGovern found their own "Curveball." Murray claimed early on, with comments here here, that he not only explicitly knew it was not Russians, but without naming Rich, talk about a DNC "insider."

And, sorry ... going down conspiracy theory lane in general?

Some mutes or blocks might be coming up. It's who I am.

The likes of Cockburn on stuff like this is why I continue to call myself a skeptical leftist.

Nope, Julian Assange still ain't a journo

Counterpunch publisher writer (for some reason, I thought he had taken over after Alec died) Andrew Cockburn can make that claim in short form on his Substack, or in long form at Harper's, but it still ain't true.

It hasn't been true for some time.

And, I'm far from alone in saying it.

To quote what I posted on his Substack:

I agree with CPJ, and Dick Tofel, formerly of Pro Publica, and others. He's not a journalist.

The CPJ, in saying he's not a journo (I remember reading their piece a couple of years ago, Andrew) explicitly said he's due full legal due process, like any other person. Which, of course, he's not getting. But, his prison treatment is itself independent of the issue of whether or not he's a journo, so raising it with the linkage to the journalism issue is to some degree a red herring. Per the people noted above, and myself?

If he was a journo pre-Seth Rich (Tofel says he wasn't ever since he incited criminal behavior by Manning, and he may be right), he certainly forfeited any claim to be a journalist after goosing the Seth Rich conspiracy theory.

I think linked to one of my blog posts about this issue, the one that's most in depth.

I then, from another blog post of mine, cited words of Cockburn's own managing editor at Counterpunch, Jeff St. Clair, about Seth Rich in 2019:

I think Julian Assange’s lowest moment was his inculcation of the Seth Rich conspiracy in some of the more credulous precincts of the Left. The strangest part of the affair is that if the preposterous Rich conspiracy had proved true, it meant that Assange would have outed his source.

Now, tis true that St. Clair uses the word "source," which is often used in connection with journalism. I don't know his stance on this issue. I do know that Cockburn, by failing to address the big issue in his Harper's piece, is part of those more credulous precincts on this issue. Indeed, Cockburn needs some extended direct quoting on this issue, because he's engaging in extended tap-dancing on the Seth Rich conspiracy theory and Assange goosing it.

This?

The idea that Assange had been acting on behalf of both Putin and Trump inescapably damned him in the eyes of the Democratic establishment. But amid the uproar—as figures on the right tried to pin the leaks on a DNC employee who had been murdered in an apparent street robbery—significant information was withheld from the public by the House Committee on Intelligence. 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.

First of all, note that Cockburn never even mentions Rich's name, as part of his tap-dance, not in that quoted portion of a paragraph, nor in the full article. Second, there was plenty of other investigative water under the bridge in that 2017-2020 period. Third, as admitted by Republican congresscritter Mike McCaul, the RNC was also hacked, the No. 1 counterfactual fact undermining the Seth Rich conspiracy theory.

As for issues Cockburn does cite? The redaction issue? Sure, you can cite early Assange on that, but long before he became a Russian conduit in 2016, he had stopped putting in any effort at redaction.

As for whether or not Assange assisted Manning? People like Tofel have never claimed that, just that he "suborned," or whatever word you'll use, into criminal activity, which the likes of Woodward and Bernstein did NOT do with Mark Felt, as Tofel explicitly notes.

And, 10 minutes after I dropped my comments above on Wednesday, the first respondent popped up, with this:

Assange is absolutely a journalist, and is specifically being persecuted with regard to his journalistic activities in publishing evidence of US war crimes in 2010. It has nothing to do with 2016, or the election. Your grudge has no relevance here.

Furthermore, your arbitrary distinction between Assange's professional label and his imprisonment proves that you simply don't know what you're talking about. As Craig Murray has pointed out, the US has openly admitted in court that it plans to go after journalists with the Espionage Act from here on out.

My response?

Really? I have a grudge? News to me.

Second, I know what Craig Murray and others have said. Related? The Espionage Act can be arbitrarily applied to non-journalists as well as journalists. Therefor, your claim that this is an arbitrary distinction about Assange's professional label, re the Espionage Act, is also a red herring.

As for the 2016 election? I'm a non-duopolist leftist who didn't vote for either Clinton or Trump, so your assumption there is based on facts not in evidence!

Did Trump use, and is Biden using, Espionage Act charges against Assange to attack journalism? It's quite possible, certainly in Trump's case. Still doesn't make Assange himself a journalist. As I told the Thomas Cain person, Espionage Act charges can be levied against anyone, and they have been in the past. In fact, before the 21st century, such charges basically weren't filed against journalists at all.

In addition, re the issue of espionage, as I have blogged before, Craig Murray his own self has indicated Assange knew something of the provenance of the DNC emails by the end of 2016. If it were before the last was released by him, that would be at minimum an espionage complicity issue.

Per the title of the Harper's piece, is it arguable that the media has failed Assange? Certainly. Is it also arguable that Assange has failed the media? Arguably in general and absolutely so in Russia, with Assange basically refusing to do any WikiLeaks type work there or work with anybody there. Cockburn knows that, too. That, too, argues against him being a journalist from where I sit.

I venture that, like Sy Hersh, albeit on a smaller scale, this will draw rats out of the woodwork.

And I was right! Here's Feral Finster:

I had no idea that freedom of speech and the press applied solely to "journalists" or to those who parroted the approved pieties.

Total strawmanning of both me and CPJ, and ignoring my opening comment. Finster subscribes (paid) to Freddie deBoer and Matt Taibbi/flunkey Walter Kirn.

No, Bernie Bros didn't start the Seth Rich conspiracy theory

Sorry, or rather, "sorry," to Jeff St. Clair of Counterpunch, but contra your Tweet

It was launched by the Bernie Bros & amplified by FoxNews and Assange (one of his less honorable moments) ....See Andy Kroll's excellent new book Murder on W Street... https://t.co/ETfAnogvmn

— Jeffrey St. Clair, CounterPunch (@JeffreyStClair3) November 24, 2022

That might be simplistic, and Andy Kroll doesn't seem to say that in his new book. Rather, per Axios, he makes it clear that it was launched by Assange.

• What was the moment the Seth Rich story began to spin out of control? 

I would pinpoint that moment to August of 2016. I would place it very specifically on an interview that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange gave to a Dutch radio station.

I do recall that some Berners had some part in trying to amplify it. Launch might be too harsh, whether Kroll covers that elsewhere in the book or not. (I do intend to get it, whenever my library should have it.)

Note the "some" is in bold, and they're probably no more than 10 percent. And, that's "amplify," not "start." Sorry, Jeff, but in this case you sound like you're amplifying Hillbots' conspiracy theory about all Berners. And, on its effects in the 2016 general election? Contra Hillbots like Amanda Marcotte at Slate, Hillary's PUMAs in 2008 defected from Obama in bigger numbers than Berners did from Clinton in 2016. And, even Marcotte admits that other people than Berners were playing it up at the start.

As I told Jeff, I had done a Google Trends long ago, as noted in my Assange and Guccifer 2.0 longform, and the "takeoff" of the conspiracy theory indeed corresponds with Assange offering a reward for Seth Rich's murderers and framing it in a way to imply the DNC did it.

As far as "starting" it? Michael Isikoff reminds me and St. Clair both that Russia's SVR (Internet Research Agency) "started it." 

This, then, per my "longform" link, leads back to the issue of whether or not Assange was lying back in 2016 when he said the leaked emails didn't come from Russia. I'm at least 90 percent certain he was lying and quite willingly, and thus, contra my original tweet which St. Clair was quote-tweeting, itself a quote tweet of an Assangista, Julian Assange is far less than 100 percent honest.

The book does sound interesting, I will say. At the same time, does it have THAT MUCH new compared to Isikoff's 2019 longform? We'll see.

Former prosecutor Deborah Sines, per Isikoff, confirms my other hunch, that the murder was in all likelihood drug-related. Now, the question there, is, was this totally mistaken identity or similar, or is there something else about Seth Rich that we may never know?

CIA wanted to kidnap or assassinate Assange

Michael Isikoff and two co-authors have some breaking news at Yahoo News.

Under Mike Pompeo's reign, the Trump-era CIA was so infuriated at the Vault 7 leaks by Wikileaks (remember, they didn't directly steal this one, nor was it Russkies) that they talked about either kidnapping Julian Assange from the Ecuadorean embassy in London or else assassinating him.

Meanwhile, they gave high credibility to claims that Ecuador's then-president was looking at giving Assange official diplomatic status and sending him to its ambassadorial mission in Moscow. (That presumes that Assange was willing, or at a minimum would accept this if given a TINA by Ecuador, though a former Ecuadorean first minister in London says that when he learned about it, he refused to accept it.)

So, the CIA discussed either getting in a gun battle with Russian operatives on London streets trying to get to the airport, or else shooting the tires out of any Russian plane believed to be carrying him. At least with the latter, the British agreed to assist. But, they also said "No" on any kidnapping attempt.

Post-Edward Snowden leaks, the CIA pushed Dear Leader Obama to not only officially designate that Assange was not a journalist but rather an "information broker," but to do the same for the likes of Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. The Obama Admin said no, thank doorknob.

I totally agree re actual journalists. However, Snowden has himself said he's not a journalist, and I certainly don't think Assange is. My most recent in-depth thoughts on that here.

And, Assange probably had some degree of sympathy within the Obama Admin until he started publishing the Russia-filched emails of the DNC in 2016. I know he started losing sympathy from me when he became the first real pusher of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory. My thoughts on that here. My thoughts on some alleged leftist media outlets gaslighting readers over that is here with Consortium News (one of several), and here with "Cozy Bear" gaslighting by Mark Ames and Yasha Levine, and here, my big picture piece refuting the Forensicator bullshit first peddled by Patrick Lawence at The Nation. (The Nation eventually had Nathanial Freitas write a new piece to clean up for Lawrence's BS, but has never, AFAIK, ever officially apologized for running it in the first place. Anyway, today's story shows that Consortium, especially, and others who also attacked Isikoff's reporting over Seth Rich and over the fact that Russia's Internet Research Agency stole those DNC emails, owe us all an apology. But, based on past history, they won't. It's part of bigger lying not just by CN, but bigger stooges like Ty Clevenger.)

DOJ rightly thought Pompeo was an unhinged nutter on this and wanted something better.

This led to the sealed charges against Assange, which became unsealed after the change in Ecuadorean governments led to the removal of his asylum, followed by his British arrest. My thoughts on that here.

Anyway, there's lots more. Isikoff talks more about the CIA's self-perceived, self-defined powers under "CIA common law" and other things. Go read it.

John Pilger myth-spins the web of Sweet Julian Assange

John Pilger thinks he knows Julian Assange "has committed no crime" and "is a gentle, intellectual visionary driven by his belief that a democracy is not a democracy unless it is transparent, and accountable." I know no such thing on the first, but rather suspect that's not true. Assange is not a traitor to the US, of course, as he's not an American citizen. But, suborning someone else to commit crime, or possibly engaging in a conspiracy, are themselves crimes. Whether they deserve conviction by a jury (or juryless judge) or not, and what sentence they deserve if the answer is "yes," is a different issue.

Gentle? Hardly. His quasi-dictatorial control of Wikileaks, as documented by Daniel Domscheit-Berg and others, says otherwise.

As for transparent? Assange has said nothing about when he likely learned that Guccifer 2.0 was actually Russia. And, he did. Bet your ass on that, his lies aside.

As for accountable? He's never apologized for being the first major fomenter of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory.

As for the "one million Russian documents"? Tech Crunch rightly notes it may have been a front, given that before that, Assange brushed off criticism that he'd done nothing to help leakers in Russia, or China for that matter. Rather, Proekt, which recently got Putin's ban-hammer, worked on its own. And, in fact, Foreign Policy claims Wikileaks rejected other Russian leaks a year earlier, presumably as it would undercut the DNC hack.

At one time, Assange may have been somewhat different than what he had become by  2016. But, he was never, ever totally what Pilger claims. It was a full decade ago that Assange threatened to sue Domscheit-Berg over his book, after all. He's also kind of a grubby capitalist, something Pilger ignores.

 

I know Pilger has read or heard all the things I just said, and ditto for many other twosiderism folks in the world of Assange, like the allegedly outside the box stenos, Consortium News, etc. Some of the newer folks there, like Elizabeth Lea Vos, are likely flaks for Putin themselves, almost certainly in her case by name, but that's another story entirely. (Pilger writes regularly for CN and this piece is likely cross-posted.) Whether Pilger chooses to accept that is also a different story. But, I don't have to accept his myth-spinning.

Also, no, Hillary Clinton didn't make Assange this way.

First, we are quasi-independent actors with something kind of like free will, even in the face of button pushers.

Second, as Domscheit-Berg's book came out in 2011, some of Assange's bad behavior and bad psyche were evident before Dear Leader Obama was elected and named Clinton his Secretary of State.

Pardon Snowden and/or Assange? ONLY with preconditions

This leftist homey doesn't write blank checks, and this tweet to Greenwald should say it all:

I will support a pardon for Snowden ONLY if .@Snowden answers these questions which you, Glenn Greenwald, never asked him.https://t.co/j2nDpjFaCy
I will support a pardon for Assange ONLY if he tells us what he knew and when he knew it about the source of the SVR-stolen emails

— Your Glenn Greenwald pouty tomato face 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) January 18, 2021

First, Snowden. 

The questions Glenn failed to ask (and Snowden has failed to answer despite being tagged by me on Twitter many times), are from my review of his book.

Short version here. Go to the review for more in-depth versions, with explainers and my tentative answers.

• Question 1: Why didn’t Snowden approach him? 
• Question 2. Snowden talks about cooling his heels in Hong Kong while getting people to bite. What journalists DID he talk to besides Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Barton Gellman and Ewan MacAskill? 
• Question 3: What is he not revealing about his time in Hong Kong before meeting G & P? 
• Question 4 goes straight to Snowden: If he did get other serious nibbles, did they not pan out? Did he cut them out? Why?
• Question 5, or really, a series of related questions: What does he think about Poitras and Greenwald (actually Greenwald, basically) ultimately NOT publishing most of what he gave them? (This is also a question for Glennwald, of course, who lied his ass off when surrendering these jewels to Omidyar.) 
• Question 6: Given Omidyar’s own access to the national security state, did Snowden not think of this possibility in advance? 
• Question 7: Did he not, at this point, rethink going to Wikileaks? 
• Question 8: Had he thought about Greenwald stovepipeing this information? 
• Question 9: Did he really not think that the almighty US Government would find him sooner rather than later? 
• Question 10: How does he reconcile him allegedly having a plan to go to Ecuador with him stating a dozen pages earlier that he chose NOT to originally go to Latin America? (At that point, I think we’ve caught Snowden in an outright lie.) 
• Question 11: How do you explain apparent discrepancies in the passport and the time frame? 
• Question 12: Why does he never mention direct Russian involvement? 
• Question 13: This is unrelated to the spying, but if you were such an idealist, and already at least a bit informed at age 20, why didn’t you oppose the Iraq War?

These were no-brainer questions to me.

As for Assange? Beyond him being the first person to goose the Seth Rich conspiracy theory, his toady-flunky Craig Murray has indicated he knows that Assange knew something about their provenance before the end of 2016, it seems. And, he's never apologized for goosing the conspiracy theory.

Greenwald has been tagged about every time I've tagged Snowden, and has also chosen not to respond.

Beyond wanting to know what Snowden and Assange know, I want to remove the potential veil of martyrdom from them. 

Without that, no pardons.

Time for some Twitter cleanup, maybe another timeout as well as one from Facebook

I have taken several Facebook timeouts of one week or less. But, until earlier this summer, never took a Twitter timeout, as in, like with Facebook, doing an account snooze.

The one I did do with Twitter was more than two weeks.

Here's my take on the two.

Twitter's cesspool, proportionally, is probably worse than Facebook's. But, overall, Twitter does a better job of cleanup. That's the only social media programs I use regularly. I use MeWe semiregularly, ditched Jimmy Wales' site, tried and passed on Mastodon and occasionally used Instagram at previous work sites. I use LinkedIn regularly FOR JOB HUNTING ONLY. You're an idiot if you blog there under your real name, especially about anything not narrowly related to your career field.

That said, back to the header.

There's an old cliché that says "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."

Bullshit.

This is clearly an Idries Shah issue:

First, as I have said here and elsewhere, the enemy of my enemy may simply be an ally of convenience. That's another side right there.

Or, the enemy of my enemy may also be an enemy to me on other issues, or even on the issue at hand, just via a different track.

Politics (what else?) brings this issue to the fore on Twitter.

I get, in a sense ("get" but don't agree with) still butt-hurt Berners who look for takedown tools against Joe Biden. As a Green, Bernie would have been more acceptable, but I was still voting for the Green Party nominee before 2020 started. (Well, at least for eventual actual nominee Howie Hawkins, and at that time, had the door open for Dario Hunter. The other candidates already seemed off the wall, and then, this summer, true Dario revealed himself. But I digress, again.)

That said, using wingnuts who are often attacking Biden because they're Trumpers, or like nutter H.A. Goodman, Bernie → Trump guys, as part of your takedown tools? No. I'm not blocking, or even muting any of you folks, but I am unfollowing several.

Anyway, the cleanup has happened, but not for the reasons above.

Trump talked over the weekend about considering a pardon for Snowden. That then brought the Assange-stanners, especially not the halfway sane ones but, natch, the Seth Rich conspiracy theorists, to the fore. I unfollowed several people who had been following both Suzi 3D and Kim Dotcom, and then eventually kicked both of them full to the curb. On her? Yes, she's right about the "Five Eyes." So are many other people who don't lie about Seth Rich, don't stovepipe Assange, don't claim persecution and haven't "magically" ended up in Moscow. Her tale sounds less credible than it once did, which is part of why I think I had been following her.

The need for a new Facebook timeout is for other reasons. I've been reporting more and more posts there by wingnuts as fake news, and Twitter, sadly, still doesn't have a "false news" report line.

That said, I had already thought weeks ago that Twitter, even though it has the deeper cesspool, does a better job of policing.

That then became confirmed in spades with news that Facebook fired an engineer after he discovered information that wingnut activist groups were getting preferential treatment in getting false news flags removed. And, given that individual wingnuts' false news posts often involve sharing items from these orgs, I've just been playing kabuki theater. Well, no reason to do that deliberately.

Plus, while Facebook does have a "false news" report, the results of it are definitely a "nothingburger" most the time. A screen over the post that says "Facebook has found this partially false/false." No takedowns.

New Facebook, which is being forced upon us, sux donkey dongs worse than New Twitter. And, it sux in another way. It's burying the "most recent" button for chronological post feed, and instead forcing the algorithms on us. And, it says, in New Facebook help, that you can hit the "most recent" feed, but that posts will eventually revert to Hucksterman's definition of "most popular." I smell another Facebook timeout coming up.

Alternatives? Ello long ago became the British MySpace. Mastodon is clunky. I tried some other alternative to Twitter that interested me even less than Mastodon.

But, there is MeWe. Formed out of remnants of Google Plus after Google pulled the plug on it (after screwing the pooch in several ways), it's not bad. I just need to make an effort on developing some contacts there. On the other, or third, or whatever hand or side, I had a Trumper regularly trolling the Green Party group there. And on the fourth hand, friend Brett Welch said several of his groups have "dried up" recently, including some migrating (back?) to Hucksterville.

Assange, Seth Rich, Russian election meddling and other whataboutism gap, part 2

I'm sure that, even with the Mueller collapse before Congress, some of the usual whataboutism folks on Seth Rich in particular and Assange's connections with Russia, more broadly, and Russian general interference in 2016 elections, most broadly, will bray from the rooftops that this is all a fake.

That would be, per Jeff St. Clair of Counterpunch, the "more credulous precincts of the Left."

To which, I quoted from the Tweeting of Jeff St. Clair I had done earlier in the day, starting with the background of and link to what St. Clair said:

For the Seth Rich conspiracy theorists who vote left of center? Jeff St. Clair of Counterpunch also thinks you're fucking nuts AND that Assange's spreading of this was one of his lowest points. https://t.co/3YaguDwARg

— reallyDonaldTrump  🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) July 15, 2019

Followed by this quote, which I later sent to the "more credulous precincts of the Left":

.@JSCCounterPunch nails it on Seth Rich conspiracy theorists:

"I think Julian Assange’s lowest moment was his inculcation of the Seth Rich conspiracy in some of the more credulous precincts of the Left." 1/2

— reallyDonaldTrump  🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) July 15, 2019

Followed by the other half of the quote:

.@JSCCounterPunch nails it on Seth Rich conspiracy theorists 2/3:
"The strangest part of the affair is that if the preposterous Rich conspiracy had proved true, it meant that Assange would have outed his source."

— reallyDonaldTrump  🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) July 15, 2019

There you go.

 

(Sadly, St. Clair, along with managing editor Joshua Frank, have crappy editorial control in general over free[lance] submissions that they publish, as he's let his own site fuel this bullshit.)

The "more credulous precincts" of the left is delusional indeed if they're citing Ty Clevenger, and saying that Isikoff was trying to get out in front of him. But they are:

So...this happened. Guess this is why Michael Isikoff wrote that staggeringly transparent piece of fiction last week. Had to get out in front of this. h/t @nashville_brook for hipping me.@Grimerica @TinFoilHatCast @AndrewZigmund @nikoCSFB https://t.co/GWrxrjHtlQ

— SlowNewsDay (@SlowNewsDayShow) July 15, 2019

And, if just 1/10th of this CNN exclusive about Assange in the Ecuadorean embassy is true, even though it doesn't mention Seth Rich, the "more credulous precincts" will have to double or triple down on that.

First, the timetable issues. Assange receiving new computer equipment shortly before the original, early 2016 hacks from the DNC.

Second, the fact the embassy gave Assange power to censor names from visit logs would explain why at least one visitor wore a bag over his head.

I have noticed that more credulous precincts of the left haven't talked much about the CNN piece, at least not on my Twitter.

Is there anything illegal with wearing a bag over one's head to visit the embassy? Of course not. But in London, the world's capital of government surveillance video, it's surely being done for a reason.

And, as I have said before, the RNC reported a mix of successful and unsuccessful hacks against its computers in 2016. GOP Congresscritter Michael McCaul publicly admitted it until the RNC hauled him on the carpet. Comey publicly discussed it. The Seth Rich conspiracy theorists, and the Assange whatabouters who try to avoid going explicitly down that road, generally maintain tight radio silence on this issue. (And, by this point? Ignorance is no excuse. Others besides me have mentioned this, too.

IF (and this is a big if), Assange had ties to Russian intelligence, when did they start? IF 1/10th of the information at the CNN piece is true, how much did it connect to the Assange indictment? Was that behind the pending indictment six months ago on initial leak?

Removing 100 hard drives, with the help of persons who Assange had gotten the Embassy to guarantee could not be searched, doesn't look good either.

If 1/10th of this is true ...

As for claims (yes, affecting the case, but legally unsubstantiated one way or the other) that the Internet Research Agency isn't directly connected to Russia? Aaron Mate waved this like a flag.

And Big Fucking Deal. China's Red Army makes the same claim all the time about its hackers. Do you believe that, too, Aaron? If you really do, I've got beachfront property in Wyoming to sell you.

And, are you also pretending that Russia's extended cyberwar against Estonia a decade didn't happen? Or are you going to claim Russia didn't do that?

The one possible alternative that I would accept as credible is that the IRA is connected to Russian organized crime, not the government, per Sy Hersh's theory on the Skripal poisonings.

==

Meanwhile, it appears that a high percentage of Seth Rich conspiracy theorists are also TulsiTwerkers.

Update, Dec. 9, 2020: The fact that RNC computers as well as DNC ones were hacked undercuts the Seth Rich leaker thing right there. Unfortunately, for a while, I listened too much to bullshit artists like Aaron Maté (you ARE, on this, Aaron, shut up!) who said "cloud computing" and "mirrors" etc. were no substitute for the real thing. Well, when you use cloud servers, Aaron, that IS the real thing. If you're that much of a gasligher, you too can go fuck yourself along with Clevenger. If you're that much of an idiot, again, shut up. Ditto for anybody else repeating that nonsense.

Assange and the whataboutism credibility gap

Not that that many people are listening, as the twosiderism and whataboutism related to Julian Assange has ramped up since his new indictment.

But, I'm still typing.

Should Mueller be faulted if his Internet 12 indictments are based only, as far as computer evidence, on Crowdstrike mirrors of DNC servers? I'd argue yes.

Update, Nov. 22, 2019, related to that and Crowdstrike:

Well put on Crowdstrike, & a  I didn't think of before that at least partially refudiates #TrumpTrain riders, #SethRich #conspiracytheory mongers like Ty Clevenger, and their fellow travelers in the VIPS world over #Forensicator. There was/is no single server to "hand over." https://t.co/pOZOehl5ZL

— reallyDonaldTrump  🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) November 22, 2019

Back to the original.

 

Update, Dec. 9, 2020:

 

The fact that RNC computers as well as DNC ones were hacked undercuts the Seth Rich leaker thing right there. Unfortunately, for a while, I listened too much to bullshit artists like Aaron Maté (you ARE, on this, Aaron, shut up!) who said "cloud computing" and "mirrors" etc. were no substitute for the real thing. Well, when you use cloud servers, Aaron, that IS the real thing. If you're that much of a gasligher, you too can go fuck yourself along with Clevenger. If you're that much of an idiot, again, shut up. Ditto for anybody else repeating that nonsense.

NOW back to the original.

But, that doesn't mean that the case is flimsy, let alone that by default, Seth Rich (or even a non-Seth Richer at DNC) stole the initial set of emails.

(Breaking update, July 9: A new Yahoo News bombshell says Russian intelligence, specifically its foreign intelligence agency, the SVR, was behind the Seth Rich conspiracy theories.

The piece is by Michael Isikoff, who's had a fairly deep dive into Russiagate stuff, I know. But, as I've seen elsewhere, the timelines align with Google Trends information on when Seth Rich information started trending.

But, twosiderism folks of the absolute DNC establishment hater wing, I can accept the likely reality of this while continuing to reject the idea that Vladimir Putin directly colluded with Donald Trump to elect Trump president. Ditto for wingnut twosiderism delvers. AND, ditto for Russiagate twosiders. This proves nothing about collusion.)

Update, July 15: The delusional wing "more credulous precincts" of the left is delusional indeed if they're citing Ty Clevenger, and saying that Isikoff was trying to get out in front of him. But they are:

So...this happened. Guess this is why Michael Isikoff wrote that staggeringly transparent piece of fiction last week. Had to get out in front of this. h/t @nashville_brook for hipping me.@Grimerica @TinFoilHatCast @AndrewZigmund @nikoCSFB https://t.co/GWrxrjHtlQ

— SlowNewsDay (@SlowNewsDayShow) July 15, 2019

To which, I quoted from the Tweeting of Jeff St. Clair I had done earlier in the day, starting with the background of and link to what St. Clair said:

For the Seth Rich conspiracy theorists who vote left of center? Jeff St. Clair of Counterpunch also thinks you're fucking nuts AND that Assange's spreading of this was one of his lowest points. https://t.co/3YaguDwARg

— reallyDonaldTrump  🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) July 15, 2019

Followed by this quote, which I later sent to the "more credulous precincts of the Left":

.@JSCCounterPunch nails it on Seth Rich conspiracy theorists:

"I think Julian Assange’s lowest moment was his inculcation of the Seth Rich conspiracy in some of the more credulous precincts of the Left." 1/2

— reallyDonaldTrump  🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) July 15, 2019

Followed by the other half of the quote:

.@JSCCounterPunch nails it on Seth Rich conspiracy theorists 2/3:
"The strangest part of the affair is that if the preposterous Rich conspiracy had proved true, it meant that Assange would have outed his source."

— reallyDonaldTrump  🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) July 15, 2019

There you go.

 

(Sadly, St. Clair, along with managing editor Joshua Frank, have crappy editorial control in general over free[lance] submissions that they publish, as he's let his own site fuel this bullshit.)

And, if just 1/10th of this CNN exclusive about Assange in the Ecuadorean embassy is true, even though it doesn't mention Seth Rich, the "more credulous precincts" will have to double or triple down on that.

In fact, this needs to be unpacked a BUNCH more.

Just because Mueller may only have looked at mirrors to talk to a grand jury does not mean that's all the evidence he had on the IRA 12. That is like claiming the Steele dossier was the only basis for other parts of his investigation.

Second, it's a moot point because anybody with brains knows the IRA 12 will never actually be tried. Were they to face a US court, a defense attorney with any skill would of course insist that mirrors aren't evidence, nor are they a constitutionally confrontable witness. Presumably Mueller would be ready at that point by looking at mirrors.

But, that's small beer.

The big guns are the twosiderism and whataboutism behind this. And, that starts with the Internet Research Agency.

Refuting both Trump Train smokescreen spreaders AND certain strains of left-liberals and leftists, with different types of "whataboutism" from both, Symantec reports that the Internet Research Agency's work was more painstaking and more hands-on (in terms of human intervention on many social media accounts that weren't totally "bots") than previously believed.

Let's say Mueller has nothing but Crowdstrike's mirrors of the DNC servers AND those mirrors are wrong, or even tampered with.

Does that mean that ergo and ipso facto, Seth Rich did it?

No, no, and NO.

That's a Logic 101 logical fallacy of a false dichotomy.

Other options are:
The IRA 12 did it, even though Mueller doesn't have all the goods.
Other Russkies did it
Non-Russkies not at the DNC did it
Dems not named Seth Rich did it.

It ignores the counterevidence that the RNC, as well as the DNC, said Russkies attempted a hack, to boot. Circumstantial evidence, yes, but evidence.

I've covered ALL of this in depth before. I'm sure Consortium News and others are still going to peddle the Patrick Lawrence BS, since Ray McGovern is a chief peddler. AND, the two-siders should stop trying to claim that a burden of proof exists with the VIPS minority plus Ritter et al. Beyond that, I specifically commented on this related to Assange's arrest six weeks ago.

AND, if you're going to criticize Mueller, you need to criticize this Forensicator in spades. Or, Adam Carter, I should say. If you want Mueller to interview someone, toady Craig Murray, it's "interesting" how you want him to interview Bill Binney from VIPS, but not Thomas Drake, the man who said Binney and McGovern found their own "Curveball." (And, I think that of plenty of other people who believe the DNC emails were leaked not hacked, whether or not they believe in Seth Rich conspiracy theories — they went looking for a "Curveball" and so they found one.)

Toady Craig Murray has said he's OK with that, in response to a Tweet by me. In my response to him, I said that, even if Mueller had incomplete evidence, or worse, re Crowdstrike and the IRA 12, that in no way meant "Seth Rich did it." And, I specifically mentioned about half of what I did above above false dichotomies.

Murray's response?

Crickets.

And, sorry ... going down conspiracy theory lane in general?

Some mutes or blocks might be coming up. It's who I am.

And, that's as I shake my head at a growing list of generally intelligent people known online, and in a few cases, IRL, who accept conspiracy theories without any real evidence, let alone good evidence.

As for why Crowdstrike resists people who might know what to look at getting to look at the actual DNC servers?

Follow the dollars, not the conspiracy theories.

Such peaks would show even more of its ineptitude and thus dry up its business.

Let's forget the issue goes beyond Crowdstrike. Remember the Bernie staffer who was able to get into the DNC donor files? Remember how everybody then pointed at the lax security of NGP-VAN, but how it continued in this role because of its DNC connections?

Follow the dollars, not the conspiracy theories.

Beyond the dollars?

The fact that the Russians attempted to hack, but with a few exceptions, failed to hack, GOP computers is good indirect support for the idea that the Democratic emails Assange had before the Russian spearphishing were hacked, not leaked. It's good evidence that wingnuts on the right and a motley crew of left-liberal and leftist wingnuts on the other side both don't like to talk about.

The paper Reality Winner leaked is good indirect evidence of Russia's overall plan for meddling. Unfortunately, as one of those #TheResistance types, Winner misread Russian general meddling into Putin-Trump collusion.

It's why I continue to call myself a skeptical leftist.

And, it's not the only reason.

Leftist and left-liberal attempted justification of anti-First Amendment violence is enough to make me think about adding "cynical" to "skeptical" in the header. I'll never weird out like Justin Raimondo's strange political shifts, but, per a piece the Morning Snooze had about 15 years ago, a "where are they now" on Dallas-local 1960s civil rights activists, there's always the possibility of dropping more and more out of organized politics in general.

Is Julian Assange a journalist? Updated with Espionage Act superseding indictment

Update, May 23, 2019: Julian Assange has now received a superseding indictment on Espionage Act charges. 

Quick thoughts for now?

1. Whether this puts a crimp or not on the freedom of the press portion of the First Amendment (and courts have ruled the Espionage Act does not violate the free speech portion of the amendment) is a secondary issue.

2. To me, the main issue is whether or not the Espionage Act is legally applicable to foreign nationals. I argue it is not.

3. Other than the "yes, but ..." below, I still haven't — and can't — come down squarely on "yes, he's a journalist."

3A. Strike that. As of 2022, I come down squarely on "he's not a journalist." As we see how odious the Seth Rich conspiracy theory was, along with the increasing likelihood that Assange at some point knew the source of his information, plus the fact that he told Snowden to go to Russia not Latin America? Maybe he was a journalist long ago, but that long ago is long gone.

More thoughts at bottom.

Now, the original post:

I promised in my initial post about Assange's arrest that I would address this further. And here we are.

A simple answer is two words: "Yes, but ..."

And, that's with everything implied by folk psychology tropes by adding "but" after the "yes."

So, I'm going to break that out more, with a nutgraf of sorts kept down at the bottom.

So, here we go ...

Journalists don't just seek out, gather and collate information.

They analyze it.

Then they write about it.

Assange did little of the analysis or writing work even with the initial information he got from Chelsea Manning, when he had much greater degrees of freedom of space, time, and working space than he does now.

Writers, and even more, editors, make judgment calls with information they receive. Some of those judgments are whether the material is true or not. Others are whether it would be harmful to release some of it.

I think Glenn Greenwald, for whatever reasons, has gone overboard on what Edward Snowden information he and Laura Poitras have chosen not to release, but, they have made a judgment call.

Assange? In the past, at a point after his working space freedom started to close up but was not that tight, made decisions to dump information without redactions, and in the case of some Afghanistan material, was rightly criticized for an endangerment factor.

That's just one issue. As Wikipedia's page on Wikileaks notes, it's released Social Security numbers, credit card numbers and more. With basically no effort at redaction.

I also said in my initial piece on the actual "yes," that to the degree it's true, he's actually like a Beltway steno in reverse in some way. He's an opiner, not a news writer, to the degree we consider him a journalist, by what he gathers, and what he solicits. I've already, along with others, criticized him for not seeking and encouraging leakers inside places like Russia and China. I've criticized more his response to that initial criticism. Today, Russia has a home-grown version of something like Wikileaks — no thanks to Assange.

And, when Assange, or Wikileaks as its mouthpiece, has made editorial judgment calls, sometimes they've been off the wall. Like criticizing the leak of the Panama Papers.

Here? I suspect 190-proof red-eyed jealousy at work — as one motive.

Another? I'm still not ready to call him a Russian agent, but the Panama Papers' attacks on Russian businessmen (Mafiyya, let's be honest) is another reason Assange attacked their release, claiming the U.S. government was behind this, which is nonsense. Ken Silverstein had done some work on Mossack Fonseca even before the main Panama Papers leak and I KNOW he's not a government agent. (Actually, him routing Snowden to Russia? Maybe he IS a Russian agent. UPDATE, March 14, 2022. Dick Tofel, why he's not a journalist, references just that, among other things.)

And? Vlad the Impaler Putin himself cited Wikileaks in fighting to defend Russkies with likely government ties. Again, Assange may not be a Russian agent, but he has certainly left himself open to accusations of such.

Worsening the case against Assange here is that, in hosting his own show on RT, per Wiki's page about RT (and yes, selective Wiki-haters when your ox is gored, there's a link at the site), he admitted he RT would be less comfortable with him if he had encouraged anti-Russia leaks or written anti-Russia items.

(Greenwald and others like him — and the likes of Mark Ames and Yasha Levine may partially fall here, though I've not seen anything explicit so far — fall into their own version, that of certain leftists and certain semi-libertarians on US foreign policy — of #twosiderism in lumping legitimate and illegitimate attacks against RT and Sputnik together.)

Jealousy is not a one-off issue with Assange, either. Edward Snowden was among those who criticized Assange for not sufficiently curating and editing leaked materials, a charge he repeats in his memoir as reason why he didn't work through Wikileaks, and Assange claimed Snowden was pandering to Hillary Clinton.

Good journalists also have good ethics. In promoting the totally base and vile Seth Rich conspiracy theory, primarily to try to cover up that the initial DNC emails came from a Russian hack, Assange has shown his lack of ethics and his willingness to outrightly lie. (Given that nobody — not Assange, Patrick Lawrence, Adam Carter or anybody else that I know of — has tried to explicitly claim that the spearphishing attack that got the later emails was not Russian-done, why the lie was engaged in was perplexing, too, and remains so.)

And, related, Silverstein thinks Snowden, if not originally a Russian agent, got compromised at some point, so who knows?

Wikipedia also raises the issue of whether or not Assange is anti-Semitic. First, to the Assange nutbar fanbois, I know well myself the difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, and the use of the latter as a weapon against people calling out the former. As with Russian agent questions, at a minimum, I think Assange has left himself open to anti-Semitism claims.

And, per Andrew Stewart at Washington Babylon, Assange is definitely anti-feminist, which ties back to his troubles in Sweden (which have now been opened legally AGAIN!) He's also, weirdly but openly, anti-atheist, at least on Tweets that Stew collated. And his call for more births in Europe make him come off a bit like an Anders Breivik, or other white nationalists in Europe and America.

Per the Intercept in 2016, right after the DNC hack, how Assange chose to frame the hack, as well as claiming they're absolutely not from Russia, which he actually couldn't know if Wikileaks does actually have as robust of source anonymity as Assange claims, means that if he IS doing journalism, it's not news reporting — it's as much or more op-ed only as the Gnu Media, Beltway stenos division.

Assange is also an idiot at times. In the link above, I mentioned his previous issues with lack of password protection. His belief that Trump would give him a pardon or something for all the DNC leaks further shows this idiocy. By the way, to riff on Janice Joplin, schadenfreude is just another word for someone else who arrogantly still has plenty to lose.

Journalism is also a collaborate effort in some way. Even at a small community newspaper, the managing editor will bounce ideas off other staff. A publisher will be a check, if the editor doesn't voluntarily include the publisher in his or her advisors.

Assange is managing editor and publisher all in one, with a sycophantic, perhaps even cowering, editorial board, even if Kristinn Hrafnsson is listed as editor in chief.

Whether it is, if not autism, being "on the spectrum" somewhere, as the man hired to ghost Assange's autobiography details in writing about a six-month nightmare, or simple narcissism, or both, Assange simply doesn't play ball except on his terms.

Journalism is an art or a craft, not a science. It will always have a demarcation problem, per philosopher friend Massimo Pigliucci and his writings (in the sciences) on demarcation issues.

I wouldn't put Assange outside the bounds of journalism. But I would put him in the borderlands.

And I'm comfortable with saying that.

And if we stopped calling him a journalist, I'd be OK with that, too. We don't call Snowden one, nor has he ever presented himself as one. We didn't call Daniel Ellsberg one 40 years ago, and he doesn't call himself one, today, either. And, that's that buried nutgraf.

So, why IS Assange a journalist, if he is one, and Snowden is not? Is it anything other than Assange having an organized backing behind him and Snowden not? Is it Assange-generated PR related to that?

Here's option three — we call Wikileaks a journalistic organization but don't call Assange a journalist. For my personal value, this has the petard-hoisting factor of, on paper, forcing Hrafnsson and others to defend Wikileaks separately from defending Assange. Judging by Hrafnsson's comments — and many others — this ain't happening.

==

Sadly, the whataboutism and twosiderism on this issue, beyond the question of "is Assange a journalist" is ramping up.

Should Mueller be faulted if his Internet 12 indictments are based only, as far as computer evidence, on Crowdstrike mirrors of DNC servers? I'd argue yes.

But, that doesn't mean that the case is flimsy, let alone that by default, Seth Rich (or even a non-Seth Richer at DNC) stole the initial set of emails.

Update, Nov. 22, 2019, related to that and Crowdstrike:

Well put on Crowdstrike, & a  I didn't think of before that at least partially refudiates #TrumpTrain riders, #SethRich #conspiracytheory mongers like Ty Clevenger, and their fellow travelers in the VIPS world over #Forensicator. There was/is no single server to "hand over." https://t.co/pOZOehl5ZL

— reallyDonaldTrump  🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) November 22, 2019

Back to the original.

I've covered ALL of this in depth before. I'm sure Consortium News and others are still going to peddle the Patrick Lawrence BS, since Ray McGovern is a chief peddler. AND, the two-siders should stop trying to claim that a burden of proof exists with the VIPS minority plus Ritter et al. Beyond that, I specifically commented on this related to Assange's arrest six weeks ago.

AND, if you're going to criticize Mueller, you need to criticize this Forensicator in spades. Or, Adam Carter, I should say. If you want Mueller to interview someone, toady Craig Murray, it's "interesting" how you want him to interview Bill Binney from VIPS, but not Thomas Drake, the man who said Binney and McGovern found their own "Curveball." Murray claimed early on, with comments here here, that he not only explicitly knew it was not Russians, but without naming Rich, talk about a DNC "insider."

And, sorry ... going down conspiracy theory lane in general?

Some mutes or blocks might be coming up. It's who I am.

It's why I continue to call myself a skeptical leftist.

==

UPDATE, March 14, 2022. Dick Tofel, why he's not a journalist. I agree.