Friday, October 21, 2016
Even if It's Not Indian Summer in Your Location This Should Bring You Cheer
Julian Assange is without his beloved internet access and there is no one that he can call. The government of Ecuador has decided to suspend his privileges. Ha ha! What a hoot.
I stumbled across this using my own cable modem and later traced the original article to Monday's edition of Wonkette.
Our poor and very dear little baby-faced boy must be so upset. Not much to do all shut up inside in London as he has found himself. The government of Ecuador remains committed to protecting him from political persecution. However, it would seem that they are, at least temporarily, seeking to prevent him from doing any further harm on the behalf of Putin and his puppet, Trump.
Was Julian Assange ever truly an honest broker? Or merely another arrogant opportunist in search of vainglory? Was he truly the champion of revealing hidden secrets to bring government into the open? Or was he merely wielding another axe to grind?
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, shall we talk about the harm he has done! He no longer vets captured documents to protect the lives of innocent people. A database hacked from the Turkish government, for instance, contained the names of every adult woman in the country. A treasure trove for any surveillance state, how many of these women will now be subject to arrest and persecution?
Private conversations and the privacy of citizens — violated. The names of self-identified homosexuals living in Saudi Arabia? They will now be subject to whipping … even stoned to death … under Wahhabi law.
These days, Wikileaks serves as a clearinghouse for email hacked by Russian intelligence. Without conscience or forethought, Assange is now a co-conspirator in Putin’s quest to undermine the EU and destabilize the West.
Meanwhile, we forget the reason why Julian Assange sought protection in the Ecuadorian embassy. To escape extradition for sexual assault charges in Sweden.
Assange was never a moral player from the beginning.
Surely much has changed in the intervening ten years. When Manning leaked such a massive amount of data from our Armed Forces, we can assume that he, (at the time,) was doing so to expose what he considered to be crimes. Both in their horrific violence and injustice, but perhaps also economic crimes in detailing the enormous sums of treasure absolutely squandered by hapless generals. Manning fell on his sword to bring the truth about operations in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as well as to publish names and histories of Gitmo detainees. Thus he replaced vague information and speculation with numbers, facts and reports.
DeleteWho can say what motivated Assange and his closest allies to found Wikileaks? Perhaps it was in some hope of using information as a weapon to singe the toes of the great paper tiger? He quickly became just about the only member of Wikileaks to receive a steady salary.
If what you say is true about Saudi Arabia and Turkey, surely his actions to leak these databases were criminally reprehensible. But today, having lost any semblance of the trendsetting, romantic lifestyle that he had at one time carved out for himself as the Robin Hood of espionage, he seems to be motivated by coarser emotions such as revenge, anger and fear. Like Putin, Assange appears to be willing to take a roll of the dice with the wildcard, Trump.
I wonder if he's dome much to add to the national madness because nobody vets anything and ten thousand new sites have arisen in the last couple of days to assure us that treason was committed by nmentioning a 4 minute response time to a nuclear threat. That's an old number and has been out there a long time and of course they knew it a long time ago.
ReplyDeleteThe demand for Hillary scandals is so great producing them has become a cottage industry. Everybody's doing it and it began when Bill started his first campaign so there's a vast library to choose from. And besides, you can say anthing including that it comes from Wikileaks - nobody checks, nobody cares.
You can bet your bottom dollar he has stirred the hornet's net quite a bit. A trip down memory lane to last Spring reminds us how by June 15th, he had already leaked 30,000 Clinton emails and upon that day promised something that would yield forth a Clinton indictment.
Deletehttp://www.usapoliticstoday.com/breaking-wikileaks-founder-promises-hillary-clinton-arrest-indictment-next-leak/
He has been teasing the right-wing news cycle with the prospect of an October surprise more or less all summer long. Do they buy it? Every little tweet of it.