Current Wikileaks and Assange News & Releases

[Hym]

Of course not, TomKat. Neither of them did it. It was all DS from the states and their global partners. It sure wasn't Al Queda or the Taliban, or some guy on dialysis running it all, hiding in a cave in Tora Bora either.

When the inserted link I added is read, it's clear that I'm doing my best to give the reader a view into the mindset of those who purposely kill innocent civilians for political and financial gain alone. Those who plan and carry out those crimes do not do so without the knowledge, even the tertiary, yet clearly accurate testimonies they hear from others in their same professions, like Gabbard.



Granted, few national political figures have acknowledged the real criminals in their own gov't and military who planned all that happened on that day, with ramifications that now affect the entire world. Either way it is egregious for any politician to lie about who really carried out such a far reaching operation, knowing full well it was the elite in their own country who perpetrated the crimes and their own countrymen, as well as the world, who were and are still the victims of those crimes.

I call it complicity in the crimes when a politician knowingly pays that price to enter the political theater, which few with integrity dare to take on.
If a politician doesn't know who did it, why would anyone choose to vote for someone that ignorant?

The gist of my comments were all about the hypocrisy of Tulsi Gabbard saying that Al Queda did that. It would have been as dishonest to say the Taliban did it. What a load of crap, especially when dealing with Assange, the one who exposed some of that deep state criminality.

I did like what she said about some other things, like helping out Assange, but that pales in comparison to lying about any other group, outside of the military terrorists we train and hire to do what they do all over the world and have done for decades.

Most people know them as their military or ex-military and their inside, technical partners. Home grown and the best trained, national and international military contractors/killers/assassins, scientists, bankers, financiers, investors, media moguls, etc..

I do not compare them for one second with those mostly honest, self-sacrificing service members, who outnumber those specialist, deep inside, well-paid military psychopaths 10,000 to 1. (I know many in the services would dispute that number, with all of the crap, as well as abuse, some take from each other, but we're talking about the hard core killers here.)

Our hard working military members are the ones owed continued care, in all the ways they need. If the country and the corporate controlled politicians really cared about them, they'd prevent all wars and end their use as pawns in dominating the world. Pay them, MORE, to keep the peace, not the killers who get paid way too much.

TG is a refreshing breed of politician who connects on some levels that I agree with, then she completely sells out. Very disappointing if you connect with those issues. And she is nothing like Assange, nor will she likely ever do what he has done in telling the truth. If she does ever tell the truth she knows, and it surely has its limitations knowing her rank, I'll be appreciative.

Like I said, she'd most likely never have the honesty to discuss this with me or anyone else personally. Yeah, she represents the servants of this country, and Yes I'll call her and any other oath taker out when they lie like that.

I highly recommend Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler's "War Is A Racket", to get an insiders view on the complex system of corporate controlled, military criminality that has terrorized the world for years, not unlike those in the west, the east and elsewhere.

Butler was, at one time in the 1930's, offered a large contingent of military personnel by the banking and corporate cartel to overthrow his own government, but being the most honest man of his generation, as well as a two time Congressional Medal of Honor recipient, he refused. He also said he left military service because he was tired of killing for corporations.

[Billy]

Tasmanian senator Whish-Wilson speaks on Assange and his recent extradition hearing in the Australian senate on Wednesday 7th October 2020, calling for his release from prison and return to Australia with his family.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2Xfu7978uow

Peter Whish-Wilson,s video communication is not the best but gets his message over.

[TomKat]

Posted by Hym (here)
Of course not, TomKat. Neither of them did it. It was all DS from the states and their global partners. It sure wasn't Al Queda or the Taliban, or some guy on dialysis running it all, hiding in a cave in Tora Bora either.

When the inserted link I added is read, it's clear that I'm doing my best to give the reader a view into the mindset of those who purposely kill innocent civilians for political and financial gain alone. Those who plan and carry out those crimes do not do so without the knowledge, even the tertiary, yet clearly accurate testimonies they hear from others in their same professions, like Gabbard.



Granted, few national political figures have acknowledged the real criminals in their own gov't and military who planned all that happened on that day, with ramifications that now affect the entire world. Either way it is egregious for any politician to lie about who really carried out such a far reaching operation, knowing full well it was the elite in their own country who perpetrated the crimes and their own countrymen, as well as the world, who were and are still the victims of those crimes.

I call it complicity in the crimes when a politician knowingly pays that price to enter the political theater, which few with integrity dare to take on.
If a politician doesn't know who did it, why would anyone choose to vote for someone that ignorant?

The gist of my comments were all about the hypocrisy of Tulsi Gabbard saying that Al Queda did that. It would have been as dishonest to say the Taliban did it. What a load of crap, especially when dealing with Assange, the one who exposed some of that deep state criminality.

I did like what she said about some other things, like helping out Assange, but that pales in comparison to lying about any other group, outside of the military terrorists we train and hire to do what they do all over the world and have done for decades.

Most people know them as their military or ex-military and their inside, technical partners. Home grown and the best trained, national and international military contractors/killers/assassins, scientists, bankers, financiers, investors, media moguls, etc..

I do not compare them for one second with those mostly honest, self-sacrificing service members, who outnumber those specialist, deep inside, well-paid military psychopaths 10,000 to 1. (I know many in the services would dispute that number, with all of the crap, as well as abuse, some take from each other, but we're talking about the hard core killers here.)

Our hard working military members are the ones owed continued care, in all the ways they need. If the country and the corporate controlled politicians really cared about them, they'd prevent all wars and end their use as pawns in dominating the world. Pay them, MORE, to keep the peace, not the killers who get paid way too much.

TG is a refreshing breed of politician who connects on some levels that I agree with, then she completely sells out. Very disappointing if you connect with those issues. And she is nothing like Assange, nor will she likely ever do what he has done in telling the truth. If she does ever tell the truth she knows, and it surely has its limitations knowing her rank, I'll be appreciative.

Like I said, she'd most likely never have the honesty to discuss this with me or anyone else personally. Yeah, she represents the servants of this country, and Yes I'll call her and any other oath taker out when they lie like that.

I highly recommend Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler's "War Is A Racket", to get an insiders view on the complex system of corporate controlled, military criminality that has terrorized the world for years, not unlike those in the west, the east and elsewhere.

Butler was, at one time in the 1930's, offered a large contingent of military personnel by the banking and corporate cartel to overthrow his own government, but being the most honest man of his generation, as well as a two time Congressional Medal of Honor recipient, he refused. He also said he left military service because he was tired of killing for corporations.

Sounds like the discussion of Tulsi Gabbard is just an excuse for you to ride your hobby horse. You can do that with anyone. Find something they said that does not 100% agree with your beliefs and off you go. Happy trails!

[Hym]

You're welcome TomKat.

[edina]

Posted by Billy (here)
Tulsi Gabbard calls for USA to drop prosecutions of Edward Snowden and Jillian Assange.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=40TYI07tXws

Here's are links to the House Resolutions Tulsi introduced, for people who want to follow-up/track/act on this:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-...ution/845/text
13 Co-sponsors, in House Foreign Affairs

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-...tion/1162/text
Tulsi's co-sponsor is Rep. Gaetz, Matt [R-FL-1], in the House Judiciary and the use Intelligence (Permanent Select)

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-...tion/1175/text
Tulsi's co-sponsor is Rep. Massie, Thomas [R-KY-4], in the House Committee on the Judiciary.

So far these have only been introduced to their respective committees. Now's the time to express your support, call your elected representatives and the members of the related House Committees.

I would also like to see protections extended to contractors/sub-contractors who whistleblow.

If this is something you feel strongly about, help keep the pressure on.

Sending letters/postcards is also helpful.

[onawah]

TRIAL OF JULIAN ASSANGE - Roger Waters, John Pilger, & Ray McGovern DISCUSSION
7,667 views•Streamed live on Oct 15, 2020
Source: Consortium News
8.22K subscribers
Guest Panel:
Roger Waters – Cofounder of Pink Floyd, Songwriter & Musician, Activist
John Pilger – Journalist, Documentary Filmmaker
Ray McGovern – Ex-CIA Presidential Briefer, Writer, Activist

"Recently, U.S. prosecutors indicted WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange on seventeen espionage charges stemming from the disclosure of atrocities committed by the U.S. armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. With global consequences directly affecting the freedom of the press, Assange stands to be extradited from the UK to trial in the U.S. under the Espionage Act.

In this event, author and activist, Miko Peled, speaks with three prominent activists who have persistently advocated for Assange’s release and freedom. Miko and the panel will tackle the following topics:

• Julian Assange and WikiLeaks’ contributions to journalism

• The campaign to prosecute Assange

• Assange’s eviction from the embassy and his corresponding treatment by the British authorities

• The likelihood of Assange’s extradition to the U.S. to face espionage charges

• The lack of journalistic support and solidarity for Assange

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=LNskcUR-L3s

[Billy]

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=IYh_Me6sUbg

[onawah]

THE REVELATIONS OF WIKILEAKS: No. 9—Opening the CIA’s Vault
October 26, 2020
By Patrick Lawrence
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/10/2...he-cias-vault/

"On Feb. 6, 2017, WikiLeaks released documents detailing the Central Intelligence Agency’s espionage program in the months leading up to and following France’s presidential election in 2012.

The agency used spies and cyberweapons to infiltrate and hack into the major political parties with competing candidates — the Socialists, the National Front and the Union for a Popular Movement. Their candidates — respectively François Hollande, Marine Le Pen and incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy — were also spied upon individually, as were many other prominent political figures.

The objectives of the program included ascertaining the contending parties’ political strategies and platforms, their views of the U.S., and their relations with the European Union, with other European nations (Germany, Britain) as well as Israel, Palestine, Libya, Syria, and others. The CIA’s French operation lasted 10 months, beginning in November 2011 and enduring until September 2012, several months after Hollande won the election and formed a Socialist government.

WikiLeaks’ disclosure of the agency’s project bears a special irony: It was just as WikiLeaks published this material in 2017 that the CIA helped propagate unsubstantiated (and later discounted) “intelligence” that Russian hackers and propagandists were interfering with France’s presidential election that year. Similar allegations (similarly lacking in evidence) were floated as the European Union held parliamentary elections in May 2019.

As WikiLeaks reported at the time of the releases on the CIA’s covert activities in France, those revelations were to serve “as context for its forthcoming CIA Vault 7 series.” WikiLeaks’ apparent intent was to display a CIA’s hacking operation in action.

Vault 7, the subject of this latest report on the history of WikiLeaks disclosures, stands as the most extensive publication on record of classified and confidential CIA documents. Never before and not since have the agency’s innumerable programs and capabilities been so thoroughly exposed to public scrutiny.

Biggest Since Snowden
Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder and publisher, described the Vault 7 publications as the most significant since Edward Snowden, the former CIA data analyst, released an unprecedented trove of National Security Agency documents in the summer of 2013.

The Vault 7 series concerns the extraordinarily sophisticated inventory of cyber weapons the CIA has developed to spy on or hack into the communications of any person or entity it targets. Apart from the espionage function, certain of the programs in Vault 7 — this designation is WikiLeaks’, not the CIA’s — can also plant documents and data without being detected as the source — when, for example, the agency wishes to compromise an adversary via a false-flag operation.

The program wherein this capability was developed, called Marble, may have been crucial to creating the orthodox “narrative” that Russia was responsible for the theft of Democratic Party email in 2016 — the cornerstone allegation in the construct we now call Russiagate.

The Vault 7 releases expose the CIA’s hacking activities from 2013 to 2016. The series began on March 7, 2017, with the publication of “Year Zero,” an introductory survey and analysis of the agency’s globally deployed hacking programs. The Vault 7 series ran for six months, concluding on Sept. 7, 2017.

Complete as of that date, the series is comprised of 23 publications, each of which focuses on an individual hacking or cyber-espionage program. Marble is one of these.

The CIA’s development of its hacking capabilities began as a joint effort with the National Security Agency. But the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, begun in 2001 and 2003 respectively, proved a turning point for the agency. It was during this time that the CIA, as WikiLeaks puts it in its introduction to the Vault 7 series, “gained political and budgetary preeminence over the NSA.”

According to former U.S. intelligence sources, the CIA has invested some $175 billion in its vast variety of cyber programs in the post–2001 years. “The agency’s hacking division, WikiLeaks notes, “freed it from having to disclose its often controversial operations to the NSA (its primary bureaucratic rival) in order to draw on the NSA’s hacking capacities.”

A Near Deal to Free Assange
WikiLeaks launched the Vault 7 series at a delicate moment for Assange, who was at the time taking asylum at the Ecuadoran embassy in London.

Shortly after Donald Trump took office in January 2017, Assange’s attorneys approached a lawyer named Adam Waldman, who was noted for his Washington connections.

Assange’s team proposed negotiations that would commit the U.S. to granting Assange limited immunity and safe passage from the Ecuadoran embassy in exchange for his agreement to limit publication of classified CIA documents. The agency knew by this time that WikiLeaks had an extensive inventory of CIA documents it was prepared to publish. These included what WikiLeaks soon named Vault 7.

Crucially, Assange signaled that he was also willing to reveal technical evidence that would shed light on who was not responsible for the theft of email from the Democratic National Committee in mid–2016. This was key: By this time the “narrative” that Russia had hacked the DNC’s computer servers was well-established; the Democratic Party, the intelligence agencies, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the media were heavily invested in it. Assange, while observing the WikiLeaks principle of not revealing sources, had by this time asserted that Russia had nothing to do with the intrusion.

The Justice Department and Assange’s attorneys drafted an immunity deal in the course of the negotiations that both sides agreed to pursue. The attorneys’ initial contact, through Waldman, was a DoJ official named Bruce Ohr. The lead DoJ negotiator was named David Laufman. When WikiLeaks released “Year Zero” on March 7, 2017, these negotiations were still in progress; the release had no apparent impact on the talks.

But at this point the contacts between Assange and the U.S. government took a fateful turn. The only full account of the events summarized below was written by John Solomon, who has followed the Russiagate phenomenon from the first, and was published in The Hill on June 25, 2018.

Shortly after negotiations began, Waldman, the go-between, contacted Mark Warner, the Democratic senator from Virginia, to see if the Senate Intelligence Committee, of which Warner was vice-chairman, wished to contact Assange on its own in connection to matters related to Russia. This proved a miscalculation.

Warner, who had vigorously pressed the Russiagate narrative from the first, soon contacted James Comey, then the FBI director. Comey was also an aggressive Russiagate advocate and had a direct interest in sustaining the official account of events: It was while he ran the FBI that the bureau worked with CrowdStrike, the infamous cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC, to build what is now demonstrated to be an entirely false case to support the Democrats’ assertions of Russian responsibility for the mail intrusion.

Any proof that Russia had no role in the DNC mail theft would have discredited the FBI and Comey and very likely destroyed the career of Comey and numerous others.

Comey, working through Sen. Warner, immediately ordered Waldman to cut off the Assange–DoJ talks. Although negotiations continued a brief while longer, Comey had effectively dealt them a soon-to-be-fatal blow. By this time WikiLeaks had released two other Vault 7 document collections, including what it called the Marble Framework.

The DoJ finally broke off the negotiations on April 7, when WikiLeaks released a fourth set of documents, this one called Grasshopper. Six days later Mike Pompeo, then CIA director, gave a notably aggressive speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Washington think tank, in which he called WikiLeaks “a nonstate hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.”

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=pe3ApagvwNM

With the CSIS speech, Pompeo effectively opened the Trump administration’s rigorously pressed campaign to have Assange extradited from Britain. The WikiLeaks founder appears never to have had another chance to negotiate an agreement providing for his freedom.

Run Amok

The Vault 7 releases continued at a steady pace, roughly four a month, for the next five months. The documents WikiLeaks made public, along with descriptions of the programs WikiLeaks deemed significant, can be found via its “Vault 7: Projects” report. Taken together they describe an expensively funded U.S. government organization that has run frighteningly amok, operates with no regard for U.S. or international law, and stands entirely beyond civilian control. Many of the projects exposed in the Vault 7 releases, and very likely most or all, violate Fourth Amendment rights to privacy and the CIA’s charter, which bars the agency from activity on U.S.

The history of the CIA, reaching back to Allen Dulles’ tenure as director (1953 to 1961), indicates that from its earliest days it entertained a diabolic desire to accumulate the power to operate with no reference to constraints of any kind, including those imposed by ordinary standards of decency. In this way it was effectively the id of America’s exceptionalist consciousness. What we see in the Vault 7 series is the perversely logical outcome of this culture of limitless impunity and immunity.

By the end of 2016, the hacking division of the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence had more than 1,000 hacking, malware, virus-implanting, remote-control and Trojan-horse programs in its inventory. These comprised more than 700 million lines of computer code.

Former CIA and NSA officials told Consortium News that a line of code costs roughly $25 to produce, putting the cost of the agency’s hacking tools over the years these programs were developed at $175 billion. “The CIA had created its ‘own NSA,’” WikiLeaks noted when it began releasing the Vault 7 publications, “with even less accountability and without publicly answering the question as to whether such a massive budgetary spend on duplicating the capacities of a rival agency could be justified.”
What follows are accounts and summaries of the most significant of the 23 Vault 7 releases. We present these chronologically, the earliest first, to give readers a clear idea of how WikiLeaks organized and presented the Vault 7 project.

Year Zero

March 7, 2017

With the publication of “Year Zero,” it was immediately clear that WikiLeaks had penetrated into or very near the core of the CIA’s cyberoperations. This first Vault 7 release is comprised of 8,761 documents and files obtained from what WikiLeaks describes as “an isolated, high-security network situated inside the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virginia, the agency’s headquarters.As WikiLeaks notes, the agency had “lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal” shortly before it published “Year Zero.” There had been a massive leak, to put this point in simple terms. “The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner,” WikiLeaks reported, “one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.” This occurred at some point in 2016.

“Year Zero” serves as an overview of “the scope and direction of the CIA’s global hacking program” and an introduction to material included in the Vault 7 releases to follow. The agency’s inventory of tools was the purview — and we can assume continues to be so — of the Engineering Development Group (EDG), a technology department under the authority of the Center for Cyber Intelligence.

The EDG also tests and operates its products once they are perfected and added to the agency’s arsenal. The engineering group, Wikileaks reported, has developed some 500 projects, each with its own malware and hacking tools. The EDG’s focus is on penetration, implanting, control and exfiltration. “Year Zero” analyzes the most important of these.

High among the objectives of Vault 7 programs was to achieve the capability of penetrating the manufacturers of cellular telephones and other electronic devices for a variety of operations. Among the products targeted for this purpose were Apple’s iPhone and iPad, Google’s Android operating system, Microsoft Windows and Samsung televisions.

Programs included in the Vault 7 collection were designed to hack these and other commonly used devices and systems remotely so they can corrupt the targets and also send the CIA the owner’s geographic location and all audio and text communications. Other programs were capable of turning on a device’s microphone and camera without the owner’s knowledge. Other attack-and-control programs targeted MAC OS X, Solaris and Linux operating systems.

A number of the CIA’s programs revealed in the Vault 7 releases focus exclusively on one or another of these companies, most commonly Microsoft.“Grasshopper” (April 7, 2017) is a platform for the development of malware designed for attacks on Windows operating systems. “AfterMidnight” (May 12, 2017) and “Brutal Kangaroo” (June 22, 2017) also target the Microsoft Windows platform, while “Weeping Angels” (April 21, 2017) infiltrated Samsung televisions. “Outlaw Country” (June 30, 2017) is designed for attack on computers that use the Linux OS.

“Year Zero” also details the CIA’s use of what the agency calls “zero days.” These are commonly occurring software code imperfections and vulnerabilities in electronic devices that the CIA knows and makes use of but does not disclose to manufacturers or the public.

In some respects, zero days are treated as commodities. While the CIA discovered some zero days on its own, it obtained others from the NSA, GCHQ (the NSA’s British counterpart), or the FBI. It also purchased zero days from private cyber-weapons manufacturers much as the Pentagon would buy a weapons system from a defense contractor.

The CIA’s stockpile of zero days enables it to bypass encryption systems installed in such communications applications as WhatsApp, the widely used long-distance telephone and text service. This makes zero days, which can be used either locally or remotely, especially significant in extending the reach of the agency’s hacking operations. The CIA’s practice of keeping zero days secret — effectively hoarding them, as WikiLeaks notes — is especially cynical and dangerous.

As WikiLeaks explains:

“If the CIA can hack these phones then so can everyone else who has obtained or discovered the vulnerability. As long as the CIA keeps these vulnerabilities concealed from Apple and Google (who make the phones) they will not be fixed, and the phones will remain hackable. The same vulnerabilities exist for the population at large, including the U.S. Cabinet, Congress, top CEOs, system administrators, security officers and engineers. By hiding these security flaws from manufacturers like Apple and Google, the CIA ensures that it can hack everyone– at the expense of leaving everyone hackable.”

Most malware developed by the EDG and related units in the CIA’s organizational structure is designed to remain in implanted devices for considerable lengths of time — in some cases years — after it is installed. So long as it is present it communicates regularly and in two-way fashion with the CIA’s Command and Control systems.

While many programs are implanted remotely, some require a physical presence. This typically means an agent infests a targeted device on site. But in some cases, the CIA covertly intervened into supply chains and delivery services, including postal services, by opening, infecting, and on-sending products without the knowledge of either the manufacturer or the purchaser.

As it began its Vault 7 series with “Year Zero,” WikiLeaks took the occasion to note “an extreme proliferation risk in the development of cyber ‘weapons,’” as Assange put it at the time. He drew a comparison between these weapons and the global arms trade, noting “the inability to contain them, combined with their high market value.”

The source of the Vault 7 trove, who was among the former government hackers and contractors circulating the Vault programs among themselves, shared these and other concerns:

“In a statement to WikiLeaks the source details policy questions that they say urgently need to be debated in public, including whether the CIA’s hacking capabilities exceed its mandated powers and the problem of oversight of the agency. The source wishes to initiate a public debate about the security, creation, use, proliferation, and democratic control of cyber-weapons.”

This is Consortium News’s intent in publishing its report on Vault 7.

Mindful of the risks attached to proliferation, and perhaps of past (and unfounded) charges that its publications compromised U.S. national security and American personnel, WikiLeaks notes that it was careful to avoid distributing what it termed “‘armed’ cyber-weapons” as it published the Vault 7 series.

It also said it redacted “tens of thousands of CIA targets and attack machines throughout Latin America, Europe, and the United States.” In a note in an FAQ section appended to “Year Zero,” WikiLeaks states, “Names, email addresses, and external IP addresses have been redacted in the released pages (70,875 redactions in total) until further analysis is complete.”

Dark Matter
March 23, 2017

Projects developed in the “Dark Matter” program were designed to penetrate Apple Macs and iPhones with what is called firmware — that is, malware that continues to infect the units attacked even if the OS is reinstalled. “Sonic Screwdriver,” a sub-project in this group, allowed attackers to install and activate computer code while users booted up these Apple devices.WikiLeaks’ “Dark Matter” release also included the manual for using the agency’s “Nightskies” program, “a beacon/loader/implant tool” intended for attacks on Apple iPhones. “Nightskies” had been upgraded by the time WikiLeaks received the Vault 7 documents. “Noteworthy is that Nightskies had reached Nightskies 1.2 by 2008,” WikiLeaks observed, “and is expressly designed to be physically installed into factory fresh iPhones, i.e., the CIA has been infecting the iPhone supply chain of its targets since at least 2008.”

Marble Framework
March 31, 2017

The “Marble” program, consisting of 676 source code files, was specifically intended to incapacitate anti-virus software programs and block the work of forensic scientists and investigators attempting to trace the origin of malware, hacking attacks and Trojan horse attacks.

The core function of Marble is what the CIA terms “obfuscation,” that is hiding all traces of an agency intervention from investigators. Marble also has a “deobfuscating” capability. This enables the agency to reverse an obfuscation so that investigators detect what appears to be evidence of an attack’s origin.

It is with this deobfuscating tool that the CIA can mislead investigators by implanting false evidence in the attacked device or program — for example, by leaving signs that the language used in a malware attack was not English but, say, Chinese. In addition to Mandarin, the languages Marble was capable of false-flagging were Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi, Iran’s national language.

Marble’s anti-forensics capability made “Marble Framework” among the most significant of the Vault 7 releases, not least due to the timing of its publication, very shortly before the intrusion into the Democratic Party’s email servers. As the DNC, the FBI, and the CIA constructed their case purportedly proving Russia’s responsibility for the theft, they cited malware metadata with extensive script in Cyrillic.

There is no direct evidence that the CIA used its Marble program in the DNC case, but the presence of Cyrillic in the metadata suggests this may have been the case. It is highly unlikely that a Russian intelligence agency would have amateurishly left behind Cyrillic characters as prominently in the metadata as U.S. authorities presented them.

Ellen Nakashima of The Washington Post reported on the Marble program when WikiLeaks released it March 31, 2017. “WikiLeaks’ latest disclosure of CIA cyber-tools reveals a technique used by the agency to hide its digital tracks,” she wrote, “potentially blowing the cover on current and past hacking operations aimed at gathering intelligence on terrorists and other foreign targets.” We note that this remains the only mention of the Marble program in mainstream media.

Weeping Angel
April 21, 2017

The agency’s Embedded Services Branch, tasked with developing programs that worked by way of physically implanted devices, built a program called “Weeping Angel” specifically to compromise Samsung’s F Series line of “smart televisions.”

This program is a measure of the exceptional reach the agency’s hacking division has achieved. When a target TV is infested, the implant gives a “fake off” mode so that the owner is deceived into thinking the TV is off when it is still on and operating as a standard bug to record conversations and send them over the internet to a remote CIA server at Command and Control. In effect, televisions were turned into listening devices capable of surveilling entire offices or households.

“Weeping Angel” was developed jointly with MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence service, and a U.K. intelligence entity called BTSS. The program requires a tool to be physically implanted in targeted televisions. Given it is intended to attack an ordinary consumer product, “Weeping Angel” is likely to count among those tools that were implanted on a mass basis via intrusions into Samsung’s supply chains or delivery services.

Archimedes
May 5, 2017

The CIA’s “Archimedes” program developed the agency’s capability to attack computers connected by a Local Area Network, or LAN. With the Archimedes tool, CIA hackers can compromise the network to divert message traffic from the targeted device or devices by infecting and controlling a computer in the LAN. In addition to message traffic, the targeted devices’ web browsers are also redirected to the covert server while maintaining the appearance of a normal browser for the targeted computer’s user.

Archimedes was effectively a self-expanding tool. It was designed to invade protected environments, as WikiLeaks put it, by attacking one or more computers in a LAN and using those to infect other devices in the network.

CherryBlossom
June 15, 2017

The CIA developed its “CherryBlossom” programs in cooperation with the Stanford Research Institute International, or SRI, a Menlo Park, California, scientific research organization with long-established ties to the CIA, notably in the field of parapsychology research.

CherryBlossom programs are dedicated to penetrating wireless networking devices such as commonly used routers with the intent of monitoring internet activity and implanting targeted devices with malware that enables the agency to execute a variety of operations: With CherryBlossom, CIA hackers can monitor, control and manipulate the internet traffic of those connected to a compromised wireless device; they can also implant malware and malicious content into data streams by taking advantage of “zero day” vulnerabilities in operating systems or computer applications.

The intricacies of the CherryBlossom program are worth noting, as they are typical of the sophistication common to the hacking operations WikiLeaks exposed in its Vault 7 releases. The program’s ability to engage in two-way communication between infected devices and the agency’s Command and Control unit, and control’s ability to assign tasks to the program, are especially to be noted:

“The wireless device itself is compromised by implanting a customized CherryBlossom firmware on it; some devices allow upgrading their firmware over a wireless link, so no physical access to the device is necessary for a successful infection. Once the new firmware on the device is flashed, the router or access point will become a so-called FlyTrap. A FlyTrap will beacon over the Internet to a Command & Control server referred to as the CherryTree. The beaconed information contains device status and security information that the CherryTree logs to a database. In response to this information, the CherryTree sends a Mission with operator-defined tasking. An operator can use CherryWeb, a browser-based user interface to view Flytrap status and security info, plan Mission tasking, view Mission-related data, and perform system administration tasks.”

Many of the programs detailed in the Vault 7 series were designed for deployment via remote hacking operations; products that required physically implanted devices in targeted hardware or software were the responsibility of the agency’s Embedded Services Branch, which focused in part on “the Internet of Things,” or IoT.“Weeping Angels” is an example of an ESB product. Another program of this kind, which WikiLeaks reports was under consideration as of 2014, was conceived to infiltrate the computer systems in motor vehicles and override the driver’s ability to control the vehicle by, for example, causing it to accelerate beyond safe speeds.

“The purpose of such control is not specified,” WikiLeaks notes, “but it would permit the CIA to engage in nearly undetectable assassinations.” WikiLeaks came upon a reference of this project in notes of a Branch Direction Meeting held Oct. 23, 2014. It is not clear if this project has since been completed and gone operational.

Official Reaction: Get Assange

The Trump administration, two months in power when WikiLeaks released “Zero Day” and announced the Vault 7 series, reacted swiftly and vigorously to the news.

Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary at the time, told reporters, “Anybody who leaks classified information will be held to the highest degree of law. We will go after people who leak classified information. We will prosecute them to the full extent of the law.”

It was at this time President Donald Trump announced his determination to extradite and prosecute Assange. But even as the White House reacted with fury, the Justice Department was well along in its negotiations with Assange via Waldman, the go-between attorney Assange’s legal team had contacted after Trump’s inauguration in January. While there is no evidence that the CIA had a role in these talks, it is clear the DoJ was negotiating for the purpose of limiting the damage to the agency’s covert hacking operations. While the CIA was also stunned by WikiLeaks’ penetration of the walls of secrecy erected around its extensive inventory of cyber-weapons, the events of March 7, 2017, may not have landed in Langley by surprise. A news report by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation published a day after the “Year Zero” release indicated that the agency was aware of a significant breach of its Center for Cyber Intelligence by the end of the previous year.

However, the CIA’s WikiLeaks Task Force final report of Oct. 17, 2017, which probed the leak, says the agency was not aware of the breach until it read about it in WikiLeaks on March 7 of that year:

“Because the stolen data resided on a mission system that lacked user activity monitoring and a robust server audit capability, we did not realize the loss had occurred until a year later, when WikiLeaks publicly announced it in March 2017. Had the data been stolen for the benefit of a state adversary and not published, we might still be unaware of the loss—as would be true for the vast majority of data on Agency mission systems.”

The CIA did know by then that over the previous three years it had sustained (along with NSA, other intelligence agencies and contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton) what WikiLeaks described as “an unprecedented series of data exfiltrations by its own workers.” Until Vault 7, the Snowden releases in 2013 were the most prominent such case.

By the time “Year Zero” was published, WikiLeaks noted, “a number of intelligence community members not yet publicly named have been arrested or subject to federal criminal investigations in separate incidents.” WikiLeaks singled out the case of Harold T. Martin III, who, a month before “Year Zero” came out, was indicted by a grand jury on 20 counts of mishandling classified information.

Martin was accused of hacking some 50 terabytes of data from the NSA while working as a contractor for Booz Allen. He was sentenced to nine years in prison in July 2019.

Vault 7 comprises what remain among WikiLeaks’ most extensive publications for their penetration into the CIA’s culture of secrecy. As earlier noted, it was in apparent response to the launch of the Vault 7 series that Director Pompeo signaled the U.S. government’s campaign to extradite Assange from Britain.

This case is now proceeding. If Assange is extradited to the U.S., he faces 18 charges of espionage and conspiracy to intrude into a government computer system with combined maximum sentences of 175 years.

There is a final irony here of the sort typical of the Trump administration. Jennifer Robinson, one of Assange’s attorneys, testified last month at Assange’s extradition hearing in London that Trump offered to pardon Assange in the course of 2017 if he had agreed to reveal the source of the DNC email trove leaked in 2016 that was published on WikiLeaks.

The offer was conveyed at a meeting with Assange by Dana Rohrabacher, the then Republican congressman, and Charles Johnson, an associate of Rohrabacher’s with ties to the Trump administration. Given that confidentiality is WikiLeaks’ most fundamental principle, Assange declined the offer.

Media ReactsBy the time WikiLeaks began the Vault 7 series, U.S. media in particular, and Western media altogether, had followed the U.S. government’s lead and turned decisively against the publisher with which they had previously collaborated. Press and broadcast coverage of Vault 7 releases reflected this. Reporting of the Vault 7 series was minimal and avoided any examination of the profound political and legal questions Vault 7 raised.

The New York Times and The Washington Post reported the release of “Year Zero” as a spot news story. Both papers reviewed in broad-brush fashion a few of the programs contained in the first Vault 7 release, as for example, in these paragraphs from the Times story :

“The documents amount to a detailed, highly technical catalog of tools. They include instructions for compromising a wide range of common computer tools for use in spying: the online calling service Skype; Wi-Fi networks; documents in PDF format; and even commercial antivirus programs of the kind used by millions of people to protect their computers. A program called Wrecking Crew explains how to crash a targeted computer, and another tells how to steal passwords using the autocomplete function on Internet Explorer. Other programs were called CrunchyLimeSkies, ElderPiggy, AngerQuake and McNugget.”

This quick-gloss treatment was typical of U.S. press coverage. Without exception, it was arms-length, incurious, minimally dutiful, and at bottom unserious. No major news outlet published a news analysis or addressed questions related to the CIA’s Fourth Amendment abuses, its compromises of individuals and private and publicly listed corporations, or its breach of its charter.

None quoted transparency or anti-secrecy advocates, public policy analysts, or defenders of individual privacy. Consumer Reports published a “what consumers need to know” piece.

“There is no evidence that the C.I.A. hacking tools have been used against Americans,” the Times reported in contradiction to the list of devices and services the agency’s tools were designed to attack. The paper went on to quote an analyst at CSIS, where Pompeo was shortly afterward to speak forcefully against Assange, suggesting “that a foreign state, most likely Russia, stole the documents by hacking or other means and delivered them to WIkiLeaks.” This ignored WikiLeaks forthright account of the source of the documents — which the Timesquoted earlier in its story.

The U.S. press effectively dropped the Vault 7 story after “Year Zero” was published. There was very little reporting on any of the other releases. As noted, the Post’s Nakashima was the only reporter to put out a story on the highly significant “Marble” program.

This year Nakashima was also among the few journalists to report on an internal CIA report concluding that the leak of the documents collected as Vault 7 “was the result of a workplace culture in which the agency’s elite computer hackers ‘prioritized building cyber weapons at the expense of securing their own systems.”

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century (Yale). Follow him on Twitter @thefloutist. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.

[Franny]

At the end the writer, Ron Paul, states that reporting the truth should not be a crime and Assange should be pardoned immediately. I tend to think that Assange has not committed any crimes by reporting the truth and should be exonerated and released immediately.

However, deep state guy Mike we-lied-we-cheated-we-stole Pompeo and Trump seem determined to see him in a US prison if he survives his stay in a British prison.

What message does Assange's treatment by the US send to journalists about this administration's policy on the First Amendment and truthful journalists reporting facts uncomfortable to government entities.


https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitic...emains-treason

'Iraq War Diaries' At Ten Years: Truth Remains Treason
Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

The purpose of journalism is to uncover truth – especially uncomfortable truth – and to publish it for the benefit of society. In a free society, we must be informed of the criminal acts carried out by governments in the name of the people. Throughout history, journalists have uncovered the many ways governments lie, cheat, and steal – and the great lengths they will go to keep the people from finding out.

Great journalists like Seymour Hersh, who reported to us the tragedy of the Mai Lai Massacre and the horrors that took place at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, are essential.

Ten years ago last week, Julian Assange’s Wikileaks organization published an exposé of US government wrongdoing on par with the above Hersh bombshell stories.

Publication of the "Iraq War Diaries" showed us all the brutality of the US attack on Iraq. It told us the truth about the US invasion and occupation of that country. This was no war of defense against a nation threatening us with weapons of mass destruction. This was no liberation of the country. We were not “bringing democracy” to Iraq.

No, the release of nearly 400,000 classified US Army field reports showed us in dirty detail that the US attack was a war of aggression, based on lies, where hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed and injured.

We learned that the US military classified anyone they killed in Iraq as “enemy combatants.”

We learned that more than 700 Iraqi civilians were killed for “driving too close” to one of the hundreds of US military checkpoints – including pregnant mothers-to-be rushing to the hospital.

We learned that US military personnel routinely handed “detainees” over to Iraqi security forces where they would be tortured and often killed.

Ten years after Assange’s brave act of journalism changed the world and exposed one of the crimes of the century, he sits alone in solitary confinement in a UK prison. He sits literally fighting for his life, as if he is successfully extradited to the United States he faces 175 years in a “supermax” prison for committing “espionage” against a country of which he is not a citizen.

On the Iraq war we have punished the truth-tellers and rewarded the criminals. People who knowingly lied us into the war like Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, the Beltway neocon “experts,” and most of the media, faced neither punishment nor professional shaming for their acts. In fact, they got off scot free and many even prospered.

Julian Assange explained that he published the Iraq War Diaries because he “hoped to correct some of the attack on truth that occurred before the war, and that continued on since that war officially ended.” We used to praise brave journalists not afraid to take on the “bad guys.” Now we torture and imprison them.

President Trump has made a point of singling out the US attack on Iraq as one of the “stupid wars” that he was committed to ending. But we wouldn’t know half of just how stupid – and evil – it was were it not for the brave actions of Julian Assange and whistleblower Chelsea Manning. Journalism should not be a crime and President Trump should pardon Assange immediately.

[onawah]

One big reason why I've never felt that Trump is truly a hero, and not more than merely the lesser of two evils.
His stance on Assange speaks volumes; why else except that he is a member of a Deep State faction?

Posted by Franny (here)
However, deep state guy Mike we-lied-we-cheated-we-stole Pompeo and Trump seem determined to see him in a US prison if he survives his stay in a British prison.

[Tintin]

Some very encouraging news which is tempered only as a result of waiting on whichever administration assumes power in the US and who, if any, may decide to exonerate Julian. It has been suggested that this is something Donald Trump could do as a revenge strike on the Democratic machine should he not retain the presidency.

I wouldn't hold my breath on that; if their is one stain on the Trump administration's tenure it is their complicity, or at least perceived complicity, in the appalling and shameful treatment of Julian, along with their bosses within the UK branch of the (same) deep state. I may be being a little too generous here but there may well be reasons that none of us are yet aware as to why Trump was unable to intervene. He may have had his hands tied inexorably, for whatever reason.

Anyway, the news from Australia:

[Tintin]

"The closing argument asserts, “It is highly significant that the Department of Justice under the Obama administration recognized that it would be both wrong and impolitic to prosecute Julian Assange.”

“It is equally significant that the DOJ under the Trump administration, for blatantly political reasons, was pressured into reversing the approach of the Obama administration and prosecuting Julian Assange despite the implications of the prosecution for the constitutional protection of the First Amendment, and despite the nature of the revelations.”"

_____________________________

Assange Legal Team Submits Closing Argument Against Extradition To United States


In submission to magistrates' court in London, attorneys detail the "politically motivated" case the Trump administration pursued against the WikiLeaks founder.

Kevin Gosztola | November 9 2020

Source: The Dissenter



WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s legal team submitted their closing argument to a British magistrates’ court. They argue, “It is politically motivated, it is an abuse of the process of this court, and it is a clear violation of the Anglo-U.S. treaty that governs this extradition.”

The closing argument relies on evidence presented by witnesses, who testified during a trial in September, and details how President Barack Obama’s administration declined to prosecute Assange. President Donald Trump’s administration reversed this “principled” position because of the nature of Assange’s “disclosures to the world and the nature of his political opinions, which inevitably attracted the hostility of the Trump administration and the CIA.”

Prosecutors will submit their closing argument on November 20, and Judge Vanessa Baraitser is expected to rule on the extradition request on January 4.

While Trump’s campaign for re-election failed, the outcome of the U.S. presidential election is not expected to impact the decision. (In fact, the submission contains zero references to President-elect Joe Biden.)

Assange was charged by the United States Justice Department with 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act and one count of conspiracy to commit a computer intrusion that contains elements of an Espionage Act offense.

The charges criminalize the act of merely receiving classified information, as well as the publication of state secrets from the U.S. government. It targets common practices in newsgathering, which is why the case is widely opposed by press freedom organizations throughout the world.

All of the charges relate to the documents Pfc. Chelsea Manning provided to WikiLeaks in 2010.

Assange’s defense refers to the “political agenda” of the Trump administration and their “obvious hostility” to Assange’s “exposure and condemnation of U.S. war crimes and human rights abuses.”

“Trump’s ‘America First’ policy supporting immunity for U.S. crimes, denouncing the investigations by the ICC [International Criminal Court] of U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan, occurred in harmony with the CIA’s motivation for targeting Julian Assange,” the submission declares.

Beginning in 2017, Trump officials publicly condemned Assange. Charges were “ratcheted up” between December 2017 and June 2020, and “breaches of the rule of law” allegedly occurred, as Assange was targeted by a U.S. intelligence-backed surveillance operation while he lived under political asylum in the Ecuador embassy in London.

What unfolded was an “unprecedented prosecution for the receipt and publication of documents, where the international publications were plainly in the public interest,” the legal team contends.

“To this end, the U.S. prosecution has sought to distort the facts in order to present what is plainly a prosecution for political offenses into a prosecution for ‘ordinary’ crimes.”

CIA Seeks Revenge After WikiLeaks Publishes ‘Vault 7’ Materials

The Washington Post reported on May 24, 2019, that the decision to indict Assange under the Espionage Act led to protest and the resignation of career prosecutors in the Justice Department.

Back in 2013, former Justice Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told the Post, “If you are not going to prosecute journalists for publishing classified information, which the department is not, then there is no way to prosecute Assange.” Miller later said Assange acted as a publisher and not a hacker. So, the Obama administration never charged Assange.

In February 2017—Trump’s first month in office—WikiLeaks published “CIA espionage orders” that called attention to how major political parties in France were “targeted for infiltration” in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election.

[Document: https://wikileaks.org//cia-france-el...E-ELECTION.pdf ]

About a month later, WikiLeaks brought further scrutiny to the CIA when they published the “Vault 7” material, which they described as the “largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency.”

The files exposed the CIA’s “fleet of hackers,” who targeted smartphones and computers. They called attention to a program called “Weeping Angel” that made it possible for the CIA to attack Samsung F8000 TVs and convert them into spying devices.

As CNBC reported, the CIA had 14 “zero-day exploits,” which were “software vulnerabilities” that had no fix yet. The agency used them to “hack Apple’s iOS devices such as iPads and iPhones.” Documents showed the “exploits were shared with other organizations including the National Security Agency (NSA) and GCHQ, another U.K. spy agency. The CIA did not tell Apple about these vulnerabilities.”

WikiLeaks additionally revealed that the CIA targeted Microsoft Windows users, as well as Signal and WhatsApp users, with malware.

Mike Pompeo, who was the CIA director, responded to the publication on April 13, 2017. “The false narratives that increasingly define our public discourse cannot be ignored. There are fictions out there that demean and distort the work and achievements of CIA and of the broader intelligence community.”

“And in the absence of a vocal rebuttal, these voices—ones that proclaim treason to be public advocacy—gain a gravity they do not deserve. It is time to call these voices out. The men and women of CIA deserve a real defense.”

“That is one of the many reasons why we at CIA find the celebration of entities like WikiLeaks to be both perplexing and deeply troubling.”

Stunningly, in Pompeo’s first public remarks as CIA director, and with zero evidence, he labeled WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.”

Pompeo said Assange had “no First Amendment freedoms” because “he is not a U.S. citizen,” which to Assange’s legal team was a preview of the legal theory top administration officials later “devised” to justify pursuing charges.

“We’ve had administrations before that have been squeamish about going after these folks under some concept of this right-to-publish,” Pompeo also declared.

A Target Of Espionage And Lawfare
Unlike the Obama administration, Pompeo would not let principles of freedom of the press under the Constitution stop the CIA from seeking revenge—through espionage and lawfare.

Lawyers for Assange maintain the case “coincided with the grant of diplomatic status by the Ecuadorian government” in December 2017. “That grant of diplomatic status was of course well-known to the U.S. authorities because US intelligence agencies had access to recordings in the embassy” collected by UC Global.

“By then, prosecution had become a political imperative, and they wished to counteract the potential effects of the granting of diplomatic status by Ecuador.”

Extralegal measures were taken that involved making attorneys representing Assange priority targets for surveillance. Legally privileged papers were seized by Ecuador authorities so they could be handed over to the FBI’s office in the United Kingdom.

Furthermore, the legal team for Assange sees a connection between this prosecution and the Trump administration’s retaliation against the ICC. They sanctioned ICC officials in June after the body asserted the authority to investigate war crimes by U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

Pompeo and Attorney General Bill Barr stated, “Those who assist the ICC’s politically motivated investigation of American service members and intelligence officers without the United States’ consent will suffer serious consequences. The Department of Justice fully supports these measures and will vigorously enforce the sanctions imposed today under the executive order to the fullest extent of the law.”

***

Assange and WikiLeaks revealed war crimes and exposed the U.S. agenda to obstruct international bodies and foreign governments from holding the U.S. government accountable for human rights violations.

Numerous examples were raised by witnesses at the extradition trial and mentioned in the closing argument submitted to the court.

The CIA and U.S. forces were involved in extrajudicial assassinations in Pakistan. Civilians were killed.

European countries were pressured by U.S. officials to not investigate torture. This included efforts to ensure the German government did not prosecute CIA personnel involved in the abduction, rendition, and torture of German citizen Khaled el-Masri, who submitted testimony in defense of Assange.

According to diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks, the Yemeni government held their own citizens in prison for the U.S. government, even though they had “no evidence they were involved in terrorist acts.”

The CIA enlisted U.S. officials to spy on the UN Secretary-General, UN Security Council members and foreign diplomats at the UN in New York in violation of international law. Officials were encouraged to collect “DNA samples, iris scans, and computer passwords” of foreign government officials.

Measures were put in place to limit the scope of the “Chilcot Inquiry,” which was established to examine the British government’s involvement in the Iraq War.

U.S. war crimes in Iraq were exposed, including a 2006 raid by U.S. troops, where an elderly woman and her five-month old child were killed. An airstrike was called in to wipe out evidence of the killing. (This revelation eventually led to the withdrawal of U.S. troops because the Iraqi government refused to grant soldiers immunity for war crimes.)

The closing argument asserts, “It is highly significant that the Department of Justice under the Obama administration recognized that it would be both wrong and impolitic to prosecute Julian Assange.”

“It is equally significant that the DOJ under the Trump administration, for blatantly political reasons, was pressured into reversing the approach of the Obama administration and prosecuting Julian Assange despite the implications of the prosecution for the constitutional protection of the First Amendment, and despite the nature of the revelations.”

“Indeed,” as attorneys conclude, “the prosecution was part of a political drive to punish leakers, intimidate journalists, and assert worldwide U.S. impunity for war crimes, rendition, and torture.”

[onawah]

COVID outbreak in Belmarsh & Possibility of a Pardon
13,034 views•Nov 27, 2020
acTVism Munich
87.3K subscribers

"In this video, we provide the latest update on the Julian Assange case. Following a COVID-19 outbreak in Belmarsh prison, Assange chose not to attend his latest hearing for fear of contracting the virus. Belmarsh prison is on a strict lockdown due to a recent increase in positive cases. As a result, RSF and Doctors 4 Assange have called for Assange’s immediate release from prison. In addition, we examine the possibility of President Trump issuing a preemptive pardon to Julian Assange following a heartfelt plea from his fiance Stella Moris on social media."

To view all of our previous updates & reports on this case:
https://bit.ly/2MZhjAh
To read the transcript of this video:
https://bit.ly/3q8WV23

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=eIqVtioiAs8

[iota]

Posted by onawah (here)
One big reason why I've never felt that Trump is truly a hero, and not more than merely the lesser of two evils.
His stance on Assange speaks volumes; why else except that he is a member of a Deep State faction?

Posted by Franny (here)
However, deep state guy Mike we-lied-we-cheated-we-stole Pompeo and Trump seem determined to see him in a US prison if he survives his stay in a British prison.

i DO have to agree with this assessment Onawah and the reasoning behind it

i had already been deceived by Obama when he turned out to be .... oh don't even want to discuss it ....

so despite being convinced that hell would arrive with a Hillary timeline (Bill provided some details in that dept to corroborate my personal views/feelings) and actually crying the night he got elected, i was keeping guarded watch on Trump

there were two points that would be determining factors for me as to his true status, i stated:

1.) Epstein

2.) Assange

and here we are

one thing .. and i want to bring this up in your other thread ...

the man who gave the fantastically inspirational speech, without hesitation, with confidence, not needing a script .. speaking from his heart

where is he?

that voice and those traits are not there now .. and i'm not sure i want to know the answer to that question

at the moment we're in battle .. but after? the question begs an answer

this is the video that inspired me:

[onawah]

I'm willing to give Trump more the benefit of the doubt these days, especially given his work on exposing the fraudulent election tactics of the Dems.
Pardoning Assange might actually have resulted in even worse treatment of him in the UK.
If Assange is extradited, he would probably have a better chance of surviving in a US prison, at least until he was pardoned, or even if he wasn't.
I'm just speculating here--I'm not familiar enough with the logistics to know.
As for Trump's current lackluster quality, I imagine that like all POTUS's at the end of 4 years in office, he is probably a lot more tired and world-weary than when he started out.
As for Obama and HRC--I hear you!!

Posted by iota (here)

Posted by onawah (here)
One big reason why I've never felt that Trump is truly a hero, and not more than merely the lesser of two evils.
His stance on Assange speaks volumes; why else except that he is a member of a Deep State faction?

i DO have to agree with this assessment Onawah and the reasoning behind it

the man who gave the fantastically inspirational speech, without hesitation, with confidence, not needing a script .. speaking from his heart

where is he?

that voice and those traits are not there now .. and i'm not sure i want to know the answer to that question

[iota]

Posted by onawah (here)
I'm willing to give Trump more the benefit of the doubt these days, especially given his work on exposing the fraudulent election tactics of the Dems.
Pardoning Assange might actually have resulted in even worse treatment of him in the UK.
If Assange is extradited, he would probably have a better chance of surviving in a US prison, at least until he was pardoned, or even if he wasn't.
I'm just speculating here--I'm not familiar enough with the logistics to know.
As for Trump's current lackluster quality, I imagine that like all POTUS's at the end of 4 years in office, he is probably a lot more tired and world-weary than when he started out.
As for Obama and HRC--I hear you!!

Posted by iota (here)

Posted by onawah (here)
One big reason why I've never felt that Trump is truly a hero, and not more than merely the lesser of two evils.
His stance on Assange speaks volumes; why else except that he is a member of a Deep State faction?

i DO have to agree with this assessment Onawah and the reasoning behind it

the man who gave the fantastically inspirational speech, without hesitation, with confidence, not needing a script .. speaking from his heart

where is he?

that voice and those traits are not there now .. and i'm not sure i want to know the answer to that question

I really and truly hope that is ALL that it is, logic suggests it, my inner senses picking up on it indicates something else ... i've actually been meaning to ask Arcturian108 what her take on this might be ...

just in case, i think i'll send him lots of positive energy a few times a day ...
because i kinda am really concerned ....
as well as Julian who is and will always be a personal hero
to whom ( i believe) the world is indebted

thanks for the input, you know i value it!
always a pleasure Onawah!

[Tintin]

Nils Melzer today makes another plea for Julian's immediate release:

United Kingdom: UN expert calls for immediate release of Assange after 10 years of arbitrary detention

GENEVA (8 December 2020) – The UN Special Rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, today appealed to British authorities to immediately release Julian Assange from prison or to place him under guarded house arrest during US extradition proceedings.

He made the urgent call 10 years after Mr. Assange's first arrest on 7 December 2010, amid an outbreak of COVID-19 at Belmarsh prison. Reports say 65 of approximately 160 inmates, including a number in the wing where Mr. Assange is being held, have tested positive.

In an opinion rendered in December 2015, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found that since his arrest on 7 December 2010, Mr. Assange had been subjected to various forms of arbitrary deprivation of liberty, including 10 days of detention in London's Wandsworth prison; 550 days of house arrest, and the continuation of the deprivation of liberty in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London which lasted almost seven years. Since 11 April 2019, Mr. Assange has been held in near total isolation at Belmarsh.

"The British authorities initially detained Mr. Assange on the basis of an arrest warrant issued by Sweden in connection with allegations of sexual misconduct that have since been formally dropped due to lack of evidence. Today, he is detained for exclusively preventative purposes, to ensure his presence during the ongoing US extradition trial, a proceeding which may well last several years," said Melzer.

"Mr. Assange is not a criminal convict and poses no threat to anyone, so his prolonged solitary confinement in a high security prison is neither necessary nor proportionate and clearly lacks any legal basis."

The progressively severe suffering inflicted on Mr. Assange, as a result of his prolonged solitary confinement, amounts not only to arbitrary detention, but also to torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, Melzer said.

He expressed particular concern about Mr. Assange's exposure to COVID-19 given his pre-existing medical condition. "Prison decongestion measures seen around the world in response to COVID-19 should be extended to all inmates whose imprisonment is not absolutely necessary," the expert said. "First and foremost, alternative non-custodial measures should be extended to those with specific vulnerabilities such as Mr. Assange who suffers from a pre-existing respiratory health condition."

Due to the significant risks associated with Mr. Assange's continued imprisonment, in conjunction with the broader concerns that have been repeatedly expressed concerning his treatment and conditions of detention, the expert reiterated previous appeals for Mr. Assange to be immediately released or placed under guarded house arrest.

"Mr. Assange's rights have been severely violated for more than a decade. He must now be allowed to live a normal family, social and professional life, to recover his health and to adequately prepare his defence against the US extradition request pending against him," he said.

In light of the expected first instance decision on his extradition on 4 January 2021, the expert also reiterated his call to the British authorities not to extradite Mr. Assange to the US due to serious human rights concerns.

ENDS

*The expert: Mr. Nils Melzer, Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment

The Special Rapporteurs, Independent Experts and Working Groups are part of what is known as the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council. Special Procedures, the largest body of independent experts in the UN Human Rights system, is the general name of the Council's independent fact-finding and monitoring mechanisms that address either specific country situations or thematic issues in all parts of the world. Special Procedures' experts work on a voluntary basis; they are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work. They are independent from any government or organization and serve in their individual capacity.

UN Human Rights, Country Page – United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

For more information and media requests, please contact: Koat Aleer (+41 22 917 9194 / kaleer@ohchr.org).

For media enquiries regarding other UN independent experts, please contact Renato de Souza (+41 22 928 9855 / rrosariodesouza@ohchr.org), Jeremy Laurence (+ 41 22 917 7578 / jlaurence@ohchr.org) and Kitty McKinsey (kmckinsey@ohchr.org)

[onawah]

HUGE: After 4 Years of Stonewalling Corrupt FBI Finally Admits They’re Holding Seth Rich’s Laptop
By Larry Johnson
Published December 9, 2020
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/202...-richs-laptop/

"A stunning development on the legal front that directly impacts the so-called conspiracy theory that the death of Seth Rich was something more than routine street crime. The FBI now admits it has Seth Rich’s laptop. This information has just been posted on Lawflog.com courtesy of Ty Clevenger: https://lawflog.com/?p=2410
According to an email posted at Lawflog.com and sent to attorney Ty Clevenger, the attorney for the FBI now admits that the FBI has completed the initial search identifying approximately 50 cross-reference serials, with attachments totaling over 20,000 pages, in which Seth Rich is mentioned. FBI has also located leads that indicate additional potential records that require further searching. . . . FBI is also currently working on getting the files from Seth Rich’s personal laptop into a format to be reviewed. As you can imagine, there are thousands of files of many types. The goal right now is to describe, generally, the types of files/personal information contained in this computer.

After more than four years of repeated denials from the FBI that they had searched their files and had no information on Seth Rich, we now know that was a blatant lie. It was David Hardy, a FBI Senior official, who put that denial in writing in September 2017. Hardy was the Section Chief of the Record/Information Dissemination Section (“RIDS”), Information Management Division (“IMD”),1 Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), in Winchester, Virginia. He stated under oath that the FBI had no records on Seth Rich:

(19) CRS Search and Results. In response to Plaintiff’s request dated September 1, 2017, RIDS conducted an index search of the CRS for responsive main and reference file records employing the UNI application of ACS. The FBI searched the subject’s name, “Seth Conrad Rich,” in order to identify files responsive to Plaintiff’s request and subject to the FOIA. The FBI’s searches included a three-way phonetic breakdown5 of the subject’s name. These searches located no main or reference records responsive to Plaintiff’s FOIA request.(9) By letter executed on November 9, 2017, OIP advised Plaintiff it affirmed the FBI’s determination. OIP further advised Plaintiff that to the extent his request sought access to records that would either confirm or deny an individual’s placement on any government watch list, the FBI properly refused to confirm or deny the existence of any such records because their existence is protected from disclosure pursuant to 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(7)(E). In his 2018 declaration, Mr. Hardy also testified under oath that the Metropolitan Police Department in D.C. was solely responsible for investigating Mr. Rich’s murder.

Now we learn that not only does the FBI have more than 20,000 pages relevant to the search term, “Seth Rich,” the FBI still has Seth Rich’s laptop computer. This does not compute. If Seth Rich truly was a victim of a senseless street crime in the middle of the night in Northeast DC, why would the FBI have his laptop? The FBI is not a computer repair shop. The FBI is not a computer storage facility. The FBI collects and retains evidence of federal crimes. It also has responsibility for counterintelligence matters. I can understand the FBI collecting Seth Rich’s computer as possible evidence after he was murdered. It would have been entirely appropriate to investigate whether or not Rich was in contact with Wikileaks. The FBI only retains evidence on an active, open case.

But the FBI has insisted for more than four years that it was never involved actively in the investigation of Seth Rich’s murder and that it never opened a case. That lie is now exposed. What is even more troubling is the fact that the FBI still holds Seth Rich’s computer. If their investigation turned up nothing then the computer would have been returned to the Rich family. The laptop is still with the FBI. It is now clear that the FBI did open a case regarding the murder of Seth Rich and whether he was a source for the DNC dump to Wikileaks. And that case remains open. Today’s disclosure from the FBI supports the claim of renowned investigative journalist, who testified in a recent deposition:that one of his sources had received information from an FBI report stating that Seth Rich had leaked emails to Wikileaks, requested payment and made copies of the emails as a precautionary measure.

After four years of stonewalling, the FBI is now starting to come clean and admit to its previous lies. Why now? If the FBI was confident that Joe Biden and friends would take over in January, they could have continued to lie. Today’s revelation means the FBI is now trying to get ahead of revelations to come. The importance of this development extends beyond the case of Seth Rich and his alleged role in the leaking of DNC emails."

[onawah]

After Years of Stonewalling FBI Finally Comes Clean on Seth Rich FOIA with Guest Ty Clevenger
2,762 views•Streamed live 62 minutes ago 12/10/20
Jason Goodman
119K subscribers

"Attorney Ty Clevenger joins me to discuss the latest explosive development in the Seth Rich murder case as the FBI fesses up to having the laptop everyone has been looking for."

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=UR3slLGR6eE

[onawah]

FBI Has Files From Laptop of Slain DNC Staffer Seth Rich
BY ZACHARY STIEBER December 11, 2020
https://www.theepochtimes.com/fbi-ha...g-2020-12-11-2

"The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has files from the laptop computer belonging to Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee (DNC) employee who was killed in 2016, according to a new email.

The bureau also has tens of thousands of documents mentioning Rich.

The FBI “has completed the initial search identifying approximately 50 cross-reference serials, with attachments totaling over 20,000 pages, in which Seth Rich is mentioned,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrea Parker wrote in the message to attorney Ty Clevenger, who is representing a plaintiff in Huddleston v. Federal Bureau of Investigation, a case dealing with a Freedom of Information Act request to the bureau.

“FBI has also located leads that indicate additional potential records that require further searching,” Parker added.

The Epoch Times confirmed the email is legitimate.

Parker, who is representing the FBI in the case, didn’t respond to an email or return a voicemail.

The bureau also confirmed it has files from Rich’s laptop and suggested it still has the computer in its possession.

The bureau is “currently working on getting the files from Seth Rich’s personal laptop into a format to be reviewed,” Parker said in the email. She also said the FBI plans on undertaking some level of review of the computer.

The disclosure came as part of a case brought in federal court by Texas resident Brian Huddleston, who filed a Freedom of Information Act request in April asking the FBI to produce all data, documents, records, or communications that reference Seth Rich or his brother, Aaron Rich.

The FBI told the plaintiff in June that it would take 8 to 10 months to provide a final response to the request, prompting the filing of the case in the U.S District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.

Rich was working for the DNC when he was shot and killed in Washington on July 10, 2016. The murder remains unsolved.

The new email bolsters a key charge in Huddleston’s filing: that David Hardy, the FBI’s records chief, was wrong when he said in two affidavits that the FBI searched for records pertaining to Rich but could not find any.



The first sign that the testimony was erroneous came earlier this year when the nonprofit watchdog Judicial Watch received emails exchanged between FBI agent Peter Strzok and Department of Justice lawyer Lisa Page. The production included several emails mentioning Rich.

Another sign came in March, when former Assistant U.S. Attorney Deborah Sines was deposed in a separate case, Ed Butowsky v. David Folkenflik et. al.

Sines testified that the FBI conducted an investigation into possible hacking attempts on Seth Rich’s electronic accounts following his murder. She said FBI agents examined Rich’s laptop as part of the probe and that a search should uncover emails between her and FBI personnel. She also said she met with a prosecutor and an FBI agent assigned to special counsel Robert Mueller’s team.

The FBI declined to comment, citing a policy of not commenting on pending litigation.

The judge overseeing the Huddleston case in October ordered the defense to produce documents and an index.

In the new email, the government lawyer said the FBI has made “significant progress” in searching for documents mentioning Rich, but still has much work left, including processing the approximately 50 cross-references, undertaking some level of review of the laptop, and completing all remaining services.

The efforts are hampered by the FBI’s Freedom of Information Act office being at 50 percent of its normal workforce due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The government is proposing an amended schedule that would give it three more months to produce the records.

Clevenger, Huddleston’s lawyer, told The Epoch Times via email that his client is hoping to find out why the FBI was involved in the case, and why it originally denied involvement.

“We suspect the FBI may be right that the Metropolitan Police Dept. in D.C. was responsible for investigating Seth’s murder, so that leaves a couple of likely explanations for the FBI’s role: it was investigating a counterintelligence matter or a computer crime. Either scenario would be consistent with Seth transmitting DNC emails to Wikileaks,” he added, referencing a theory about the source of emails from inside the DNC that were later published by Wikileaks.

The theory was the core of a story Fox News published in 2017. It later retracted the report but was sued by Rich’s family.

Fox settled with Rich’s family last month.

A federal judge overseeing the case had earlier this year requested testimony from Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange.

Rich was killed less than two weeks before WikiLeaks “released a collection of thousands of internal emails and documents taken from the DNC servers,” according to a court filing. One month after Rich’s murder, Assange referenced the DNC staffer in an interview with a Dutch television reporter when discussing the dangers faced by WikiLeaks sources. On Aug. 9, 2016, WikiLeaks offered $20,000 for information about Rich’s murder. The website increased the reward to $130,000 in January 2017.

The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) several weeks after Rich was shot dead offered a reward for information. A spokeswoman told The Epoch Times via email that the case “remains under active investigation.”

The spokeswoman declined to answer whether the FBI assisted police with its probe. “MPD remains the lead investigative agency over this homicide,” she said.

A firm investigating the DNC situation, Crowdstrike, alleged that the committee’s servers were hacked by Russian actors, but a transcript declassified in May showed the firm had no direct evidence of that claim.

Clevenger said he thinks the timing of the email from Parker, the assistant U.S. attorney, is significant.

“Some of my colleagues suspect the Trump Administration has pushed the release, but I doubt that,” he wrote. “With the purported election of Joe Biden, the FBI brass probably think they are in the clear, and nothing will ever happen to them, so they no longer have any reason to hide what they did.”

Ivan Pentchoukov contributed to this report."