Max Blumenthal
Tag: Wikileaks
Cryptome Founder Says He Should Be Prosecuted with Julian Assange for Publishing Classified Docs
The founder of the website Cryptome.org has written to the U.S. Justice Department with a strange request: He is asking to be indicted for violating the Espionage Act. Cryptome’s founder John Young says he should be added as a co-defendant in the prosecution of WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange because he published the same leaked government documents at the center of the U.S. case against Assange. While Assange faces 175 years in U.S. prison if he is extradited, the U.S. government has never moved to prosecute Young, who says he published the documents two days prior to WikiLeaks. Earlier this week, The New York Times and four international newspapers called on Biden to drop the charges against Assange, saying “publishing is not a crime.”
— source democracynow.org | Dec 01, 2022
The Disappearing Of Julian Assange
The war of outlets exposing the inner workings of power
The Guardian Could Help Assange By Retracting All The Lies It Published About Him
The Guardian has joined The New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País in signing a letter from the five papers which collaborated with WikiLeaks twelve years ago in the publication of the Chelsea Manning leaks to call for the Biden administration to drop all charges against Julian Assange. This sudden jolt of mainstream support comes as news breaks that Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been personally pushing the US government to bring the Assange case to a close.
The Guardian’s participation in this letter is particularly noteworthy, given the leading role that publication has played in manufacturing public support for his persecution in the first place. If The Guardian really wants to help end the persecution of the heroic WikiLeaks founder, the best way to do that would be to retract those many smears, spin jobs and outright lies, and to formally apologize for publishing them.
This is after all the same Guardian which published the transparently ridiculous and completely invalidated 2018 report that Trump lackey Paul Manafort had met secretly with
— source caitlinjohnstone.com | Nov 30, 2022
WikiLeaks website is struggling to stay online
WikiLeaks’ website appears to be coming apart at the seams, with more and more of the organization’s content unavailable without explanation.
WikiLeaks technical issues, which have been ongoing for months, have gotten worse in recent weeks as increasingly larger portions of its website no longer function. Even attempting to visit wikileaks.org is a gamble in itself, often producing a 502 message that indicates an error was detected on the website’s server.
When the website does become available, problems still abound. The main banner on WikiLeaks, which includes the organization’s logo as well as links to subdomains such as the “About” page, has been entirely missing since earlier this month. A similar banner at the bottom of the page, which once showed links to sites for Bitcoin and the Tor Project, is now gone as well.
A search bar that once scoured the site for information also appears to no longer work and instead redirects users to the homepage.
— source dailydot.com | Mikael Thalen | Nov 22, 2022
Political Persecution for Journalism
The Lies Spies Tell About Assange
I attended a panel discussion at the National Press Club on Monday about the fate of WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange. The event happened to be at the National Press Club, but it was actually sponsored by the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and International Security at George Mason University.
Hayden, the notorious former director of both the C.I.A. and the N.S.A., who oversaw the C.I.A.’s torture program during part of the George W. Bush administration, was front and center at the event.
The panel, moderated by Sasha Ingber, a national security correspondent in Newsy’s Washington, D.C., bureau, included Assange’s U.S. lawyer Barry Pollack, one of the finest criminal defense attorneys in America; Gabe Rottman, a senior attorney at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press; the notorious Mark Zaid, who bills himself as a “whistleblower attorney,” but who has probably done more damage to legitimate whistleblowers than any other person in Washington; and Holden Triplett, a former F.B.I. agent and former director for counterintelligence at President Donald Trump’s National Security Council.
While acknowledging my own biases (Pollack is a genius and Zaid is a scoundrel), the one thing that surprised me was how utterly clueless Holden Triplett was. This is a guy who
— source scheerpost.com | John Kiriakou | Dec 9, 2022
Wikileaks Revelations
CIA Sued for Spying on Americans Who Visited Julian Assange
The CIA and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo were sued Monday for spying on U.S. lawyers and journalists who met with Julian Assange while he was living in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he had political asylum. The lawsuit is being filed as Britain prepares to extradite the WikiLeaks founder to the United States, where he faces up to 175 years in prison for violating the Espionage Act by publishing classified documents exposing U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Assange spent nearly seven years inside the embassy, from 2012 ’til April 2019, when Metropolitan Police entered the embassy, arrested him, after Ecuador revoked his political asylum.
The lawsuit filed Monday accuses the Spanish security firm UC Global of spying on Assange and his visitors inside the embassy on behalf of the CIA. UC Global and the company’s director, David Morales, are also named as defendants in the new lawsuit, which comes less than a year after Yahoo News revealed the CIA considered abducting, and possibly assassinating, Assange while he was in the embassy.
— source democracynow.org | Aug 16, 2022