The Wikileaks Question

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Re: The Wikileaks Question

Postby RocketMan » Thu Apr 11, 2019 3:11 pm

liminalOyster » Thu Apr 11, 2019 9:28 pm wrote:I'm really really pissed today. Burn it all down. Motherfuckers.


Me too. :cussing:

By the way, here is a legal expert take on the possibility of further indictments after Assange is render... ahem, extradited to the US. This is of course predicated on the assumption that they would respect precedent and established legal frameworks... which to me is not a given.

Can Julian Assange be charged with additional offences once he has been extradited to the United States? The Guardian’s legal affairs correspondent, Owen Bowcott, has this answer.

Normal practice is that anyone extradited can only be prosecuted in the country that sought them for the offences specified on the extradition indictment. That restriction is known as the Rule of Specialty. But there are two possible but difficult to use exemptions.

The first is that if it could be argued new information had come to light since his extradition, extra charges could conceivably be brought. “That almost never happens,” said Nick Vamos, the former head of extradition at the Crown Prosecution Service who is a partner at the London law firm peters and Peters. “American prosecutors would also have to seek the consent of the UK to bring in further charges.”

The second exemption covers what happens after someone has been extradited, convicted and then chooses to remain in the country. Essentially the extraditing country has to allow the prisoner time to run away after they have served their sentence.

“After a short period, however, usually two months,” Vamos explained, “anyone who remained in the same country would be deemed to be treated like a local citizen and could be charged for other offences.”

Neither conditions are likely to be met in Assange’s case. “The US has only put one charge on the indictment and it carries the maximum term of five years in prison. Assange has the opportunity to assent to it. It’s relatively light sentence by US standards,” said Vamos.
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Re: The Wikileaks Question

Postby liminalOyster » Thu Apr 11, 2019 5:07 pm

Edward Snowden
‏Verified account
@Snowden

Images of Ecuador's ambassador inviting the UK's secret police into the embassy to drag a publisher of--like it or not--award-winning journalism out of the building are going to end up in the history books. Assange's critics may cheer, but this is a dark moment for press freedom.
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Re: The Wikileaks Question

Postby liminalOyster » Thu Apr 11, 2019 5:10 pm

...

The most fierce defenders of Assange come from two seemingly disparate ends of the ideological spectrum.

First are the fans of Donald Trump, who understand that the leaks of Hillary Clinton’s emails were a political neutron bomb that exploded under her campaign in the closing weeks, the ultimate oppo drop.

Joining them are the American Bernie Bros and the Glenn Greenwald demographic of America-can-do-no-good types who look at anything that weakens US influence in the world as a net positive. American political ideology is no longer a line, but a horseshoe, with the extremes looping toward one another in an asymptotic curve of edge-case crazy.

...


From There's a reason why Bernie bros and Trump supporters love Julian Assange equally

The Assange Set:

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Re: The Wikileaks Question

Postby Grizzly » Thu Apr 11, 2019 5:45 pm

For the record I'm sickened, by this news. Record that you fucking spooks! I promise a reckoning is coming...

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Re: The Wikileaks Question

Postby Grizzly » Thu Apr 11, 2019 6:09 pm

“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

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Re: The Wikileaks Question

Postby alloneword » Thu Apr 11, 2019 6:31 pm

Re: 'Insurance files' - some background...

What Happened to Julian Assange’s Dead Man’s Switch for the WikiLeaks Insurance Files?

Now that Julian Assange has been arrested in London after seven years in exile at the Ecuadorian embassy, many are wondering if anything will happen with the “dead man’s switch” that Assange and WikiLeaks have talked about in the past. Read on for more details about the dead man’s switch, its history, and what we know so far about the insurance files...


https://heavy.com/news/2019/04/julian-a ... nce-files/
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Re: The Wikileaks Question

Postby liminalOyster » Thu Apr 11, 2019 11:33 pm

Hillary Clinton says Assange 'has to answer for what he has done'
By Julie Gallagher, CNN

Updated 10:16 PM ET, Thu April 11, 2019

Washington (CNN)

Hillary Clinton said Thursday that Julian Assange -- whose organization, WikiLeaks, played a damaging role in her 2016 electoral defeat -- needs to "answer for what he has done."

Assange was arrested earlier Thursday by British police at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on a US extradition warrant, bringing his seven-year stint there to a dramatic close. He was arrested on charges that he skipped bail in the UK in 2012 and at the request of US authorities, London's Metropolitan Police said.
Speaking at an event at the Beacon Theater in New York with her husband, former President Bill Clinton, the former secretary of state was asked if she cared to comment because she has "some familiarity with the work of Mr. Assange."

Clinton laughed.
"I do, I do," she said.

During the 2016 campaign, WikiLeaks disseminated the contents of internal communications stolen from the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton presidential campaign. The Justice Department said Thursday that Assange has been indicted on a single charge of conspiring to steal military secrets with Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who supplied thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks.

"I think it is clear from the indictment that came out it's not about punishing journalism, it is about assisting the hacking of a military computer to steal information from the United States government, and look, I'll wait and see what happens with the charges and how it proceeds, but he skipped bail in the UK," Clinton said.
"The bottom line is he has to answer for what he has done, at least as it's been charged," the former secretary of state told the audience.

"I do think it's a little ironic that he may be the only foreigner that this administration would welcome to the United States," Clinton quipped.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/11/politics ... index.html
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Re: The Wikileaks Question

Postby JackRiddler » Fri Apr 12, 2019 1:52 am

.

That is incompetent (and lazy!) coverage of Wikileaks "insurance files" in "Heavy.com," which manages to miss the most important and best-known story related to these, covered in this thread already back on p. 76. In 2010, while gradually publishing selections from the State Department cables received from Manning, Wikileaks released "History Insurance," an encryption of all of the State Department cables. It was downloaded millions of times. The password was "accidentally" published in 2011 by a Guardian reporter in the bad book he co-authored with bad old Luke Harding (this year's author of the Manafort-Assange meeting fabrication). It is hard not to see Leigh's action as malicious. Of course this "irresponsible" opening of all the files without redaction was blamed on Assange. That is easy, true, since no one can even identify the alleged journalist David Leigh.

Plutonia » Wed Aug 31, 2011 11:54 pm wrote:This just up, a (thankfully) more intelligible analysis from Crikey:

Thursday, 1 September 2011 / One comment
It’s done: bruised egos lead to the release of uncensored WikiLeaks cables

by Bernard Keane

The full, unredacted set of WikiLeaks cables is now available online and in readable form, courtesy of a three-way clash of egos between Julian Assange, disgruntled ex-WikiLeaks volunteer Daniel Domscheit-Berg and the Guardian’s senior journalists.

The release places in potentially grave danger US diplomatic sources whose names have been removed from the publicly released cables.

How? A document containing the full set of over a quarter of a million cables was placed online in encrypted form late last year. In what circumstances is unclear — according to different sources, it was done either by Julian Assange himself or, it now seems more likely, posted unwittingly by a WikiLeaks supporter, after material taken by Domscheit-Berg was returned to WikiLeaks. By that time, full unencrypted sets of the cables had already been passed by WikiLeaks to the The Guardian, which passed them to The New York Times against Assange’s wishes.

In any event, the online material at that point was unreadable without a password.

The problem was, the password was made available, by none other than The Guardian’s David Leigh, in his book released in February this year co-written with Luke Harding, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy. An extract from the book, which was published after the encrypted material had gone online:

Eventually, Assange capitulated. Late at night, after a two-hour debate, he started the process on one of his little netbooks that would enable Leigh to download the entire tranche of cables. The Guardian journalist had to set up the PGP encryption system on his laptop at home across the other side of London. Then he could feed in a password. Assange wrote down on a scrap of paper:

CollectionOfHistorySince_1966_ToThe_PresentDay#

“That’s the password,” he said. “But you have to add one extra word when you type it in. You have to put in the word ‘Diplomatic’ before the word ‘History’ Can you remember that?” “I can remember that.” Leigh set off home, and successfully installed the PGP software.

Leigh thus, as part of his effort to cash in on his once-intense but by then-soured relationship with Assange, had revealed the key to decrypting the entire set of cables that had been available online.

However, it has taken an extended period for people to link up the material that is available, with the key. Enter Daniel Domscheit-Berg, whose “Open Leaks” project has flamed out spectacularly in recent weeks. According to Der Spiegel, someone from Domscheit-Berg’s group — which narrows the suspects very rapidly — has in recent days been drawing attention to the connection between the file online — long since mirrored and distributed beyond hope of retrieval — and the password.

The vast irony of the breach is that for over a year, WikiLeaks has been accused by sections of the media, governments and foreign policy wonks of placing informants and sources in danger by releasing the cables, in contrast to the “responsible” handling of leaked material by the mainstream media — The New York Times’s Bill Keller actually boasted of lengthy meetings with the State Department to agree which cables his paper would release. Now, it turns out, it was the mainstream media itself that was responsible for distributing the magic password that may well place lives at risk.

This has sparked a remarkable round of recriminations. WikiLeaks — presumably Julian Assange, although it’s unsigned —  has launched an extended spray at The Guardian, Leigh and his editor Alan Rusbridger for the breach, and accused The Guardian (again) of breaching the security conditions WikiLeaks placed on the material. WikiLeaks also says it immediately contacted human rights organisations and the State Department to advise of the breach, and to establish whether the State Department’s source notification program — put in place when the cables were first released last year — had contacted everyone identified as being at risk if their identities were revealed (bizarrely, its action of contacting the State Department was misrepresented by diehard WikiLeaks opponent and US apologist Michael Fullilove as WikiLeaks complaining to the Americans that it had been “hacked”). WikiLeaks also says the breach was behind its sudden, dramatic surge in cables release, which has seen thousands of cables released in the last few days.

In response, The Guardian has rejected all responsibility, in a piece by former WikiLeaks employee-turned-critic James Ball. The Guardian itself released a statement:

Our book about WikiLeaks was published last February. It contained a password, but no details of the location of the files, and we were told it was a temporary password which would expire and be deleted in a matter of hours. “It was a meaningless piece of information to anyone except the person(s) who created the database. No concerns were expressed when the book was published and if anyone at WikiLeaks had thought this compromised security they have had seven months to remove the files. That they didn’t do so clearly shows the problem was not caused by the Guardian’s book.”

However, The Guardian seems unaware that it would be impossible to “remove the files” once they had been mirrored and made available as a torrent, as if data could simply be pulled back off the internet by the body first posting it regardless of what others had subsequently done with it.

Shortly before deadline, Wikileaks was conducting a global consultation to determine if it should release the unredacted cables itself, with nearly all opinion favouring release.

The leak is the result of the vast egos involved in the WikiLeaks saga and the deep distrust, not to say visceral loathing, that has replaced once close relationships between the fractious Assange and WikiLeaks staff and external collaborators (however much they would reject the term) such as Leigh and his Guardian colleagues. And the latter appear to have preferred big-noting themselves with “meaningless pieces of information” to protecting potentially grave source material as closely as possible.

Note: Crikey has decided not link to the location of the unredacted cables or identify the file name.

http://www.crikey.com.au/2011/09/01/its ... ks-cables/
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Re: The Wikileaks Question

Postby cptmarginal » Fri Apr 12, 2019 7:57 am

disgruntled ex-WikiLeaks volunteer Daniel Domscheit-Berg


Was there ever any detailed confirmation that Domscheit-Berg worked with (or for) the BND? I've just been taking that as a given for years now. I love how his talking points are trotted out at every opportunity. Naturally, I've yet to see any mention in the past two days about what Manning actually leaked - such as the video of Reuters journalists being murdered alongside numerous civilians. Nor any mention of the confirmation that America was running a Phoenix-style counterinsurgency effort in Iraq. That's how Douglas Valentine himself describes it in his recent book, The CIA as Organized Crime (read it for free at libgen.)

-

Then again, James Ball points out


As an aside: people have been passing one of his Guardian pieces around, as unintentional comedy:

The only barrier to Julian Assange leaving Ecuador’s embassy is pride

(I am not downplaying or overlooking Assange's health problems but what is it supposed to look like when a person is dragged away against their will? Wouldn't an athlete fare about as well?)
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Re: The Wikileaks Question

Postby cptmarginal » Fri Apr 12, 2019 8:19 am

After all was said and done, Crosscheck and various voting machine companies were literally the direct cause of the outcome in particular states that swung the election. And now the guy most responsible for that theft has been in charge of "election integrity" leading up to the next go-around. Sweet dreams!

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Re: The Wikileaks Question

Postby Grizzly » Fri Apr 12, 2019 8:43 am

“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

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Re: The Wikileaks Question

Postby thrulookingglass » Fri Apr 12, 2019 9:01 am

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
― George Orwell

Where is liberty these days? I wondered if anyone captured or knew what Julian uttered as he was accosted by the local constabulary? Rabble rousers must be dealt with!

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Re: The Wikileaks Question

Postby cptmarginal » Fri Apr 12, 2019 11:45 am

https://apnews.com/072664ed80b34b68bc7ca5b3d2845030

Foreign Minister Jose Valencia said audio recording a few months ago captured a moment when Assange threatened Ambassador Jaime Merchan with pressing some sort of panic button that he said would bring devastating consequences for the embassy in the event of his arrest. Although it wasn’t clear what he meant by the threat, authorities shared their concerns with British authorities and in carrying out the raid Thursday were careful to prevent Assange from returning to his room to execute any possible emergency plans.
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Re: The Wikileaks Question

Postby Grizzly » Fri Apr 12, 2019 1:47 pm

Image

Hillary Clinton: Assange "Must Now Answer For What He Has Done"

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-12/hillary-clinton-assange-must-now-answer-what-he-has-done


"Hillary, I know you're lost in the throes of psychopathy, but the people of Libya would like a word..." ...

Hillary "can't we just drone strike Assange?" Clinton.
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Re: The Wikileaks Question

Postby JackRiddler » Fri Apr 12, 2019 3:56 pm

Updates

...


Daniel Ellsberg On Assange Arrest: The Beginning of the End For Press Freedom
24,389 views
The Real News Network
Published on Apr 11, 2019
"This is the first indictment of a journalist and editor or publisher...And if it's successful it will not be the last."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw8yf6Luwo4


...


Now they're all in: Get his friends! Also, "Russians."
https://gizmodo.com/ecuador-arrests-dig ... 1833993784

gizmodo.com
Ecuador Arrests Digital Privacy Activist and Programmer for 'Collaborating' with WikiLeaks
Matt Novak

Police in Ecuador have arrested Swedish programmer and digital privacy activist Ola Bini for allegedly trying to destabilize the Ecuadorian government by “collaborating” with WikiLeaks. Bini was arrested at Quito Airport in Ecuador on his way to Japan.

Ecuador’s interior minister, Maria Paula Romo, didn’t name Bini when announcing the arrest but said that a person was wanted for “investigative purposes.” Bini’s arrest is likely connected to assertions earlier this month by Ecuador’s president Lenin Moreno that his private messages and photos were leaked to Twitter and Facebook. The leak was allegedly part of a blackmail plot that hasn’t been fully explained by the Ecuadorian government.

“For several years now, one of the key members of this WikiLeaks organization and a person close to Mr. Julian Assange has lived in Ecuador, and we have sufficient evidence that he has been collaborating with the destabilization attempts against the government,” Romo said at a press conference late last night.

Romo alleges that Bini worked with “two Russian hackers” who also live in Ecuador but it’s not clear that anyone else has been apprehended yet in connection to this case. Romo said that their descriptions were being given to prosecutors.

The news of Bini’s arrest comes on the heels of yesterday’s dramatic apprehension of Julian Assange. The WikiLeaks cofounder was physically removed by British police from the Ecuadorian embassy in London after spending nearly seven years there claiming asylum. Assange has been charged by the U.S. Department of Justice with “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion” for allegedly attempting to help whistleblower Chelsea Manning crack the password of a computer controlled by the U.S. Army. That attempt failed.

Bini’s arrest at the Quito Airport is being portrayed in some media circles as an attempt to “flee” to Japan, but his two-week trip had been announced on Bini’s Twitter account earlier this week, well before Assange’s arrest. Bini is a fan of martial arts who was reportedly traveling to Japan to train with the martial arts organization Bunjinkan, according to independent news site the Peoples’ Dispatch.

Bini’s last tweets before being arrested were about Ecuador’s claims that they were looking for Russian hackers in the country.

“Very worrisome news - this seems like a witch hunt to me,” Bini tweeted.

Bini, who has reportedly lived in Ecuador for “several years,” is the author and co-author of several computer programming books about Ruby on Rails. Bini had visited Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London on “several” occasions, at least according to Romo.

“We are not going to allow Ecuador to become a hacking center,” Romo said. “And we cannot allow illegal activities to take place in the country, either to harm Ecuadoran citizens or those from other countries or any government.”

Assange is facing extradition to the United States and has a hearing in London in roughly four weeks. But it’s not clear yet whether Bini will be charged with anything. All we know for sure is that the President Donald Trump has soured on WikiLeaks.

By some counts, President Trump has praised WikiLeaks at least 141 times. But Trump is pretending that he doesn’t know what WikiLeaks is anymore.

“I know nothing about WikiLeaks,” Trump said in the White House yesterday. “It’s not my thing.”

[BBC]

Update, 2:25pm: The National Police of Ecuador just tweeted photos that presumably show Bini, though his face has been obscured. The images also show the “evidence” they’ve obtained, which appears to be some computers, hard drives, books, and other things that you’d expect anyone who works in software to have:

Formal charges against Bini still haven’t been made, as far as we can tell. It’s also still unclear if he’s had any access to a lawyer or consular assistance as a citizen of Sweden.



...


https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/ ... xtradition

Diane Abbott urges PM to block Julian Assange extradition
Shadow home secretary says May should intervene as in the case of hacker Gary McKinnon


Matthew Weaver

Fri 12 Apr 2019 08.59 BST Last modified on Fri 12 Apr 2019 09.14 BST

Signs and placards outside the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
Photograph: SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

The shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, has urged Theresa May to block the extradition of Julian Assange to the US in the same way she intervened in the case of the computer hacker Gary McKinnon.

In 2012, as home secretary, May halted McKinnon’s extradition on human rights grounds after doctors warned he was at risk of suicide if sent to face trial in the US. Abbott said similar grounds should be used to block Assange’s extradition.

Julian Assange's charges are a direct assault on press freedom, experts warn

On Thursday, the Wikileaks founder was arrested on behalf of the US authorities, who have charged him with involvement in a computer hacking conspiracy.

The 47-year-old faces up to 12 months in a British prison after he was found guilty of breaching his bail conditions. The US charge could attract a maximum jail sentence of five years, according to the US Department of Justice.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Friday, Abbott said: “If you remember the Gary McKinnon case, the Americans insisted on extraditing him. He had done this massive computer hack, but his real crime was to have embarrassed the American military and security service.

[...]



While resolutely being against a US extradition, Abbott left a Swedish loophole: if they should revive the charges.

...


To show they're balanced, RT's Rick Sanchez (he replaced Ed Schultz replacement as their main US anchor, and is unfortunately not the smartest man in the multiverse who travels at will between timelines and overthrows the Galactic Government) puts Blumenthal against an obvious propaganda man. If they're talking about Assange being such a dick in person, or how he smells, or the supposed smearing of feces on the embassy wall, etc. ... and NOT talking about Wikileaks, Manning, 2010 events, etc. ... even to be critical ... they are performing a propaganda function. Tools.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPH23BuWAqM

...


Found this, better said than I just did:

Dan B. Underhill wrote: I am a Bernie supporter and I just wrote this to my local public radio station:

I have been hearing your guest's portrayal of the current Julian Assange story and find that it matches exactly with the smear campaign that my government is (with my tax money) promoting. I heard the part about what a bad guest he was, which is the sort of accusation that is pretty impossible to defend against, with no mention that nobody found him to be a bad guest under the president that granted him asylum but only after that president was replaced by the current right wing regime. Also, the raid that removed Assange from the embassy coincides with a 4.2 billion dollar fund being set aside by the IMF for Equador. I'm guessing that it ain't a coincidence. I wasn't near the radio long enough to hear the whole show but the rest of the smear campaign that every stooge in the mainstream media is smearing him with is the 'sexual assault' charge from Sweden where pretty much all of the media that is talking about it fails to mention that the alleged 'victim' said there was no sexual assault and the idea that there was one came from another woman whose statements and actions lead me to believe she was an agent with an agenda before she arrived on the scene. What this is really about is a clear message to journalists everywhere that telling lies for Fox or CNN is just fine but present documented truth that goes against the official narrative and they will destroy you. It bothers me that NPR would participate in such a smear as it bothered me that they joined the rest of main stream media for the Bernie blackout of 2016. There are still sources for real news but there is no telling how long that will last.


Yup, always the "bad guest" stuff. Never anything about the goddamn invasion that murdered a million Iraqis. And always "the smell." The smell thing they never, ever, ever, ever do to suited politicians of America, although it's a biological certainty that a certain proportion smell really bad much of the time no matter how hygienic they are, as happens with any human group.

And the Swedish stuff.

We have whatever documentation there is on the Swedish allegations and how they ended way back on page xx of this thread, how will I dig it out? Damn it, I don't want to go page by page through this thing...

I notice the last day there has been a great deal of treatment of the Swedish stuff online, I mean not by media pros but apparent just folks, as though the case is still alive.

A lot of people seem to think it's related to the US charges, or it's the reason for the UK arrest, or that it's why Assange stayed in the embassy even though the case closed in 2017. And people just say that, never seeming to know the key details, probably because they haven't followed jack-shit about the story except maybe since 2016:

Assange was in Sweden for days after the investigation was made known to him, and offered to go in to speak with the authorities. They refused him, and he left the country exactly at the time he was scheduled to leave. Later they issued the Interpol warrant that got him arrested in UK. Swedish charges were never brought. It was always supposed to be about an interrogation, an "interview." Ecuador offered to allow it at the embassy; the Swedes refused.

Eventually they dropped it, because a new prosecutor thought it was bullshit -- not because of statute of limitations, because that's not how statute of limitations works. Nothing stopped them from filing charges officially within the period, after which it's a live case forever until resolution. But they didn't, because it was a dud.

I'm of the camp who know 97% of sexual assault accusations are real and so believe the women. The great exception in this comes with politicians, especially executives. Politicians who can be taken down by the opposition by sex charges -- meaning that the stakes can be changes in a government and billions of dollars changing hands -- are vulnerable to fakes. Though no one's going to convince me that's what happened to the famously hump-happy tyrant Dominique Strauss-Kahn. (Figures comparable to presidents, I would claim, are those special leaders and activists who make themselves into the center of attention in a struggle against empire and promise to deliver more damage to the empire and thus get the world's biggest target painted on their back.)

Who am I getting my repugnant idea from? Among others, Hillary Clinton, of course. The original sin of Clintonism was that all these women came forward with accusations against William, and the corporate feminists and even NOW (which was a much broader spectrum at the time) stuck with Clinton, and pointed out -- probably correctly in several of the cases, but just as probably not in all of them -- that right-wing outfits were paying women like Paula Jones to perform PR hit jobs and topple Bill, and therefore all of it had to be completely made up. Besides, as representatives of women's interests on a national scale, sure, they know a lot more damage would happen if for example Roe v. Wade is overturned or Republicans roll back equality legislation of various kinds.

So you gotta play the game?

So I'm supposed to believe big money arranging for faked charges is what happened with Clinton, because of the high stakes. At least, I was supposed to believe that until #metoo, after which I revise that and say I was wrong.

But I'm not supposed to believe the CIA or one of its tentacles wouldn't play the oldest spy game and set up a honeypot trap for Assange, whom they have designated their worst enemy in the world? Even though all the circumstances of the Swedish case fit that?

Returning to Clinton, there's a goddamn limit to the right-wing ops excuse however, and I'm not just capitulating to a lot of repetition. Unlike with Assange and his one-night stands with "false pretense" sex, Clinton accusers kept coming forward, the pattern one expects with such cases. The Juanita Broderick case is highly credible, so is Kathleen (?) Wiley, so is, emerging long after the Clinton presidency... the EPSTEIN matter, which also potentially grabs Trump by his pussy.

The thing is, Clinton should have never been there in the first place. For the function he played, in recent decades he was the most replaceable oaf ever to hold the despcicable office. (Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe some other good-ole boy poser wouldn't have been as effective in erasing the New Deal legacy and neoliberalizing-neoconnizing the Democratic Party and serving a big plate of deregulation to Wall Street and making sure there will never be a "peace dividend.")

Anyway, so it's true when it's said that HRC gets hit with awesome levels of disgusting misogyny. It's the de rigeur move, we've been watching it for 25 years at least. It's pretty much the majority of Trump's repertoire before he discovered that open racism really works with his fans. Probably Assange has done this at points I've forgotten, and he's bad for that. It's politically very effective, I would argue, but you can also discount its political impact in any given election because the "never a woman in charge" vote was secured for the Republicans long ago, and it works equally well against a male Democrat, and has. (Also, the day may yet come when the GOP puts up a very holy down-home woman for prez, and congratulate themselves, and say it forever proves they were being defamed as sexist all the time, and most of their supporters go with it.)

Problem is, HRC compromised herself by deploying it herself, back then. The bimbos, she said! She didn't have to play it that way. The world didn't need her, and did she really need to play el suprema? She could have gone back to lawyering and be plenty rich today. She wasn't indispensable, any more than he was. She was a continuous disaster from the most important vote for the Iraq war to the Honduras coup to leading the charge in the next war of aggression on Libya to somehow, magically, finding the very narrow path to lose to Trump in 2016.

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We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
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