Here's How You Know That Assange May Be Telling the Truth About the Pardon Offer

After President Donald Trump was accused on Wednesday of using former GOP Congressman Dana Rohrbacher to offer a pardon to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the White House said Trump "barely knows" Rohrbacher⁠—a claim quickly disproved by past documents showing the two have met.

That is Mafia Don's standard denial: "Hey, it couldn'ta been me, I barely know the guy!" When Trump says that, it's a pretty solid bet that he's lying.

(Earlier post)

Let's See How This Plays Out; Assange v. Trump Ed.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange plans to claim during an extradition hearing that the Trump administration offered him a pardon if he agreed to say Russia was not involved in leaking Democratic National Committee emails during the 2016 U.S. election campaign, a lawyer for Assange said Wednesday.
...
At a preliminary hearing held Wednesday in London, lawyer Edward Fitzgerald said that now-former Republican congressman, Dana Rohrabacher, visited Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in August 2017.

Fitzgerald said a statement from another Assange lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, recounted “Mr. Rohrabacher going to see Mr. Assange and saying, on instructions from the president, he was offering a pardon or some other way out, if Mr. Assange ... said Russia had nothing to do with the DNC leaks.”

Trump's spokesweasel denies this, of course, but given that almost every word that has come out of the Trump administration, whether from his mouth or from his people, have been proven to be lies, it will be interesting to see what is true in this matter.

The First WikiLeaks Revolution?

Foreign Policy magazine is proposing that the unrest in Tunisia is, which is in part grounded in public outrage over massive political corruption by the ruling family, is the first WikiLeaks-based unrest.

As described in the released cable, the presidential in-laws seem to be the worst of the bunch.

For what it's worth, WL has, to date, released about 1% of the cable archive.

UPDATE: The president (and, presumably, his corrupt family) has fled the country.

WikiLeaks Question

What if Assange had been releasing secret documents obtained from China or Russia or Iran?

Would Huckabee and the other Wingnuts be calling for his head? Hell no, they'd be cheering him on. They'd be engaging in rounds of self-congratulation about liberty and a free press and all of those words that the Wingnuts believe in, but only when it doesn't discomfit them.

To the Right, "freedom" means "the freedom to agree with us." Which means that they don't believe in freedom whatsoever.

The Dirty Thugs Along the Thames River

No, not the one in the UK. The one here, in Connecticut. The thuggish behavior was that of Pfizer, which employed dirty tricks in order to pressure the Nigerians to settle a lawsuit against Pfizer for engaging in illegal human trials.

No Shit, That's Just What ARPA Had In MInd

WikiLeaks' long-term survival depends on a number of unknowns, including the fate of its principal founder, Julian Assange, who is being held in Britain while awaiting possible extradition to Sweden related to sexual assault allegations. But the Web site's resilience in the face of repeated attacks has underscored a lesson already absorbed by more repressive governments that have tried to control the Internet: It is nearly impossible to do.

Why is that a surprise to anyone? The Internet, first known as the ARPAnet, was designed to provide resilient communications between mainframe computers that would survive a nuclear attack. Especially when there are a shitload of mirror sites and there are over 1,200 such sites as of three hours ago.

Finally, the Times Notices the Spanish Story

You know, the one about how our government "persuaded" the Spanish government to clamp down on the judge who was looking into the use of torture by Americans? The one that our national press was studiously ignoring?

The New York Times finally mentioned it, but they buried it inside of one of their blogs, where they linked to a story in El País. That took some real courage, guys.

Funny thing. The U.S. claims universal jurisdiction for crimes of torture, but oh, how this Administration and the previous one squealed when the Spaniards tried to do it.

FiOS

Not Verizon's network. Hezbollah's network.

WikiLeaks and Espionage

In the fallout of the WikiLeaks story, I've read crap that suggested that over 800,000 Americans have Top Secret clearances and that if you add in those with a Secret clearance, the number is north of a couple of million.

I don't know how many of them had access to Siprnet, but the number is probably in the hundreds of thousands.

I imagine that believing that not a single one of those people hasn't been turned by the Russians, the Israelis or the Chinese would be kind of like believing in unicorns (or the inherent humanity of Dick Cheney).

But nobody seems to be talking about that.

Since I'm Not Going to Be Ever Working for Foggy Bottom....

..I'm happy to link to WikiLeaks.

But if you ever want to work for those folks, you probably shouldn't, as they are clamping down. Major defense contractors are blocking Wikileaks. The White House is telling federal agencies to block WikiLeaks. The Library of Congress has done so. The Army is trying to stop soldiers from even reading news stories about Wikileaks.

Fools, all of them. The data is now out there. As any parent well knows, telling a kid that something is off-limits only makes that something more alluring. The Obama Administration is engaging in full-blown locking and bolting the door shut after the horse has long ago left the barn.

Once information is out there, it is out there forever.

They cannot stop the signal. They are morons to even try to do so, for it makes what WikiLeaks is publishing look even more alluring to reporters around the world.

How Many WikiLeaks Bashers are "Firefly" Fans?

I have to wonder how many of them are fans of the show "Firefly" and the follow-on movie "Serenity"? I wonder how many of them regard themselves as Browncoats.

But here is the inconvenient thing: The plot of the movie Serenity is based on this premise-- River Tam knows government secrets, the government will do anything to keep them secrets, and Malcolm Reynolds, the captain of the Serenity, wants to expose those government secrets to everyone in the Universe.

So when someone who regards himself or herself as a Browncoat and even has Firefly stuff in the sidebar of their blog then starts bashing WikiLeaks, well, I have to wonder about that.

What Do Joe Lieberman, Communist China and Dictatorial Arab Governments All Have in Common?

They all are trying to suppress the Wikileaks story.

Also, to follow up on this earlier post of mine, FDL noted that the American press has ignored the revelations of how our government leaned on Spain to quash their GTMO torture inquiry. I should have commented on that, for I also didn't see a reference to the story in either the NY Times or the WaPo's web sites.

Gentle Reader, you are free to speculate as to why the story about the quashing of the Spanish investigation has been ignored by our "vaunted guardians of freedom in the ourth Estate."

Remember Judge Baltazar Garzón?

He opened an inquiry into the use of torture by the Bush Administration. The Obama Administration pressured the Spanish government into shutting down the inquiry. Soon after, he was the subject of an investigation.

Which is all something to keep in mind when reading about about the case against Wikileaks founder Assange.

Wikileaks-- Do You Believe in Coincidences?

So, a few days after the publication begins of a bunch of U.S. diplomatic cables, Interpol issues a "red notice" for the founder of Wikileaks, based on the same allegations that surfaced and then went away the last time Wikileaks released a bunch of American documents.

Maybe Assange did what the Swedish prosecutor alleges. Men can be pretty brain-dead when they are "dipping their wick". On the other hand, the use of "honeypots" is a well-worn tactic in the spy game, and doing it on ostensibly neutral territory is a nice touch.

Supporters of Terrorism; Takes One to Know One, I Reckon

Rep. Peter King is advocating that Wikileaks be designated as a "terrorist organization".*

That seems like a stretch to me. Wikileaks has taken up arms against nobody. There is not a shred of evidence that they have done anything other than air the dirty laundry of the U.S.

In fact, one can make the argument that much of what Wikileaks has done has been helpful to the U.S. Wikileaks has put out in the open the muttered innuendo about the corruption of the Afghan government. It has laid bare the fact that Pakistan has been supporting the Taliban all along.

Nobody should be surprised to learn that Silvio Burlusconi, the Prime Minister of Italy, is pretty much a clown, or that Russia is a kleptocracy. Anyone who is astonished that the Arab nations despise Iran hasn't been paying much attention. If someone is shocked that one of the functions of diplomats is to gather intelligence, then they need to have a custodial guardian appointed for them. Is it astonishing to anyone that South Korea is doing contingency planning in the event that North Korea implodes? Does anyone not understand that Iran has been in bed with North Korea, or that North Korea will sell anything to anybody for cash?

From what coverage I've read, most of the cables consist of telling people shit that anyone who was paying attention should have already known, such that Robert Mugabe is basically power-mad, paranoid and arguably insane. It's pretty much known that Hugo Chavez is nuts, as well. Some of it is interesting social information, such as attending a wedding in Dagestan.

My sense of it is that this latest data dump will be more of a flash in the pan than anything else. Which won't stop the blowhards in our government from hyperventilating about it, just as they did for the previous two data dumps, where they predicted all sorts of Bad Things Will Happen, none of which did.

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* But maybe we should look at Mr. King's argument. After all, he was a supporter of the Irish Republican Army during the Troubles, when the IRA was engaged in planting bombs and killing civilians. He had no difficulty with allying himself with a terrorist group back then.

The WikiLeaks Data Dump

I'll refrain, for the time being, from commenting on the substance of the latest data dump from WikiLeaks.

But nobody seems to be asking this: Assuming that there has been one source for the material, PFC Bradley Manning, how the fuck is it that a single Army E-3 had access to all of this shit?

Why did an Army anybody have access to State Department cables going back over 30 years? What the hell ever happened to compartmentalizing classified material?

Back in the day (my day), you had to have two things in order to see classified documents: The proper security clearance and the need to know. If a radioman with a top secret clearance walked up to Sonar Control and had asked for a book on the acoustic signatures of Soviet submarines, he'd have been thrown out on his ear and then reported up the chain of command. I had some pretty goddamned high level security clearances and there was no frakking way that I could have seen State Department cables because I didn't have (let's say it all together, class) a need to know.

But no, now that there are computerized databases, it seems that once you're in, you can see anything and everything that you feel like looking at.

Which, from a security perspective, is pretty fucked up. And that doesn't even address the point that this dude was able to downloads hundreds of thousands of documents without setting off some kind of alarm somewhere.

I imagine that is going to be fixed, maybe.

But I'm not betting heavily on it.

The No-Surprise Data Dump

Another huge document dump has been made by WikiLeaks. They seem to pretty much confirm what everyone, other than the loyal Bush defenders, have known for years.

For instance, the security contractors in Iraq were a trigger-happy undisciplined lot of goons.

WikiLeaks' Latest

You'll probably see something about WikiLeaks releasing a CIA memorandum about US exporting terrorism.

I just read it. It is here, in PDF format. About all I can say is: "Big Whoop." It's a "what-if, then" document. As in the "if your momma had wheels, she'd be a wagon" kind.

Anyone who thinks that this is some big expose of the CIA or anything along those lines is probably a Sarah-Palin-level retard.

Something Smells Spoiled in Sweden

This has a funny smell to it:

Julian Assange, the founder of the Web site WikiLeaks who has been embroiled in a fight with the Pentagon over the recent release of classified Afghan war documents, became the focus of new attention on Saturday when Swedish prosecutors sought him for questioning on allegations of rape and molestation — and then withdrew the rape allegation.

Sort of like the wafting foul stench of a dirty tricks operation.

Leaking the Obvious

The folks at Stratfor are pretty much saying the same thing as everyone else: Other than the point that the Taliban has used MANPADS, what is in the WikiLeaks document dump is a lot of detailed data that confirms what everyone who has been paying attention to the Afghan War already knows:

The WikiLeaks portray a war in which the United States has a vastly insufficient force on the ground that is fighting a capable and dedicated enemy who isn’t going anywhere. The Taliban know that they win just by not being defeated, and they know that they won’t be defeated. The Americans are leaving, meaning the Taliban need only wait and prepare.

The article is worth reading, though, because it lays out why Pakistan has maintained relations with the Taliban and why it is in the national interest of both Pakistan and the U.S. to not obsess over that point.[1]

The U.S. cannot win this war, not with the level of involvement that the American people will tolerate. The GOP will fight any taxes to help pay for an expanded war.[2] We cannot get enough troops into Afghanistan without a draft (and without greatly expanding basic training to make it into a weight reduction clinic).

What remains to be discusses is how and when we are going to leave.

We were at this point in 1968 during the Vietnam War. Roughly 50% of the Americans killed in that war died as the Nixon Administration dithered and floundered for an exit.

We should try to do better this time around.

[1]The NY Times has an editorial today that calls on Pakistan to end its "double game". That the editorial writers in the Times even think that the Taliban will be crushed demonstrates the Times's editorial board's usual lack of grounding in reality.
[2] The deficit hawks in the GOP have closed their eyes to the fact that both of the Bush Wars have been paid for entirely by deficit spending. For the first time since the Revolution, the Federal government has made not even a fig leaf of levying any form of war taxation.