201–210 of 577 posts
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How exactly do you know he isn't working directly for Russian intelligence?
Good question. I don't. But it's much more unlikely that he'd be an actual Russian intelligence employee since they're usually Russian I think. The more simple answer is that he's just being run by them through money, blackmail, extortion, or some other leverage. Why employ someone when you can just get them to do what you want with simple threats?
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Wikileaks believed at the time that Clinton was ready to send a drone to get rid of Assange. Between due process and a drone attack, I take due process any day.
That's an obviously absurd belief given he's in an embassy. The USA has done a lot of insane shit but that would be a ridiculous line to cross to eliminate a single "criminal."
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No metadata had been altered for any WikiLeaks releases.
Do you have any source for that? I'm not saying it's a fact that the data had been altered but I'm saying reasonable minds can draw that conclusion based on the information we have available.[1] You're oddly defensive of Assange and don't seem to have come to this thread with any interest in discussion. [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/gucci...
By doing this the US is coming to the aid of the many dictators and despots whose crimes Assange has helped reveal. Also, by ignoring the crimes revealed by the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, the US makes it very clear that war-making cronies rule both parties and would never hold each other accountable for anything. To be clear, the war logs revealed that the US classified information solely because it revealed that…
While some of the things that were exposed were certainly illegal and should be handled as such, it's hard to feel any empathy for a guy who is essentially a Russian asset. If you think of him as an extension of Russian military intelligence conducting propaganda wars against its adversaries then it becomes a lot easier to understand why prosecuting him is a genuinely good thing. Russia airing the dirty laundry of ot…
This is a bit of a stretch in my opinion. Obviously a platform like Wikileaks can be "weaponized" by any party against another party.
I think it's a question of what is the most relevant aspect of the leak overall, not who leaked it or why. For instance, suppose someone had leaked detailed information about the misconduct of Jerry Sandusky several years before it became widely known. Would it matter if the leaker had been affiliated with a rival football program?
What I think is so ingenious about Wikileaks is that by releasing the full documents and data sets, it is very easy to take the leaked information simply at face value without worrying about what may have been selectively leaked and why.
In the case of the HRC emails, there were a few concerning themes regarding campaign finance and the Foundation, but those items could easily have been diffused if HRC had owned up to it and offered to have various experts dig deeper into the financials to show that nothing unusual was going on. For some reason the campaign chose a strategy of claiming the emails were fake, which was soon revealed as a lie by the DKIM/DomainKeys signatures on the emails themselves.
So unfortunately in the case of the HRC emails, the campaign chose a bad strategy and then got caught in a lie, all of which was much more consequential than the few bits of information that were potentially worthy of a deeper dive.
Also, one has to believe that WL would not have published damning information about Trump if it had been available. There is no evidence to support that claim either.
My take all along has been that all that is required for WL to be a force of good is for there to be no selective releasing or editorially driven redaction, and for there to be no evidence that WL sat on important information to suppress it. Neither of these have been the case.
WL did maximize the PR value of the HRC/Podesta emails, but I view that as being (especially in hindsight) more of a fundraising/bootstrapping decision than an editorial one. There wasn't anything "smoking gun"-like in the latter emails, they were all apparently released at random to much fanfare.
So anyway, I think the point is in the laundry itself, and that intent matters much less than it would with more narrowly focused leaks, such as those that traditional journalists typically use/abuse.
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I apologize if I missed something in the thread and misinterpreted it. I did read the link, can you please enlighten me with your interpretation?
Whataboutism is when an argument is presented with a counterargument of hypocrisy, ie literally what the person replying to me was doing. The argument was "the US leaders are protecting themselves by extraditing Assange, who uncovered their crimes", and the reply was "but Assange is a Russian asset, so he's not so great either". Asset or not, the crimes were still committed, and the people who committed them are stil…
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Ahh, so you're just going to ignore the evidence when presented after you asked for it and attack the people who said it to the country. Got it.
Again, what actual evidence? You literally just posted purely speculative link that wasn't backed up at all by the document it purports to be it's source. And do I need to track down the lies CIA directors have told congress for you, or Pompeo specifically?
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Good question. I don't. But it's much more unlikely that he'd be an actual Russian intelligence employee since they're usually Russian I think. The more simple answer is that he's just being run by them through money, blackmail, extortion, or some other leverage. Why employ someone when you can just get them to do what you want with simple threats?
Seth Rich was a Russian spy too.
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> Would you though? Well, yes. The ever-increasing, horrible drone campaigns conducted from the Obama years onward as a tool of destabilization are one thing, but that doesn't make it reasonable to expect that they'd use them to assassinate high profile political agitators in first world countries or that they actually have the ability to do such a thing. The contexts are totally different, however the narrative IS i…
> doesn't make it reasonable to expect that they'd assassinate high profile political agitators in first world countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassinations_in_Euro...
By doing this the US is coming to the aid of the many dictators and despots whose crimes Assange has helped reveal. Also, by ignoring the crimes revealed by the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, the US makes it very clear that war-making cronies rule both parties and would never hold each other accountable for anything. To be clear, the war logs revealed that the US classified information solely because it revealed that…
Being a journalist (and I'm using that term rather loosely here) does not give you blanket immunity to the law. You don't get to rob banks and cry that your freedom of speech is being violated when you get thrown in jail for it. Let's see what the charges are before crying about the infringement of free speech.
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Good question. I don't. But it's much more unlikely that he'd be an actual Russian intelligence employee since they're usually Russian I think. The more simple answer is that he's just being run by them through money, blackmail, extortion, or some other leverage. Why employ someone when you can just get them to do what you want with simple threats?
Seth Rich was a Russian spy too.