Ecuador Will Imminently Withdraw Asylum for Julian Assange and Hand Him Over to the UK. What Comes Next?

 R_P wrote: 




lol I love WikiLeaks. Funny how politicians on both "sides" whatever that is either praise or condemn WikiLeaks depending on whether the information helps or hurts them. Keep on keeping on WikiLeaks!

Trump’s CIA Director Pompeo, Targeting WikiLeaks, Explicitly Threatens Speech and Press Freedoms (Greenwald)

In February, after Donald Trump tweeted that the U.S. media were the “enemy of the people,” the targets of his insult exploded with indignation, devoting wall-to-wall media coverage to what they depicted as a grave assault on press freedoms more befitting of a tyranny. By stark and disturbing contrast, the media reaction yesterday was far more muted, even welcoming, when Trump’s CIA Director, Michael Pompeo, actually and explicitly vowed to target freedoms of speech and press in a blistering, threatening speech he delivered to the D.C. think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies.

What made Pompeo’s overt threats of repression so palatable to many was that they were not directed at CNN, the New York Times or other beloved-in-D.C. outlets, but rather at WikiLeaks, more marginalized publishers of information, and various leakers and whistleblowers, including Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.

Trump’s CIA Director stood up in public and explicitly threatened to target free speech rights and press freedoms, and it was almost impossible to find even a single U.S. mainstream journalist expressing objections or alarm, because the targets Pompeo chose in this instance are ones they dislike – much the way that many are willing to overlook or even sanction free speech repression if the targeted ideas or speakers are sufficiently unpopular.

Decreeing (with no evidence) that WikiLeaks is “a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia”  a belief that has become gospel in establishment Democratic Party circles – Pompeo proclaimed that “we have to recognize that we can no longer allow Assange and his colleagues the latitude to use free speech values against us.” He also argued that while WikiLeaks “pretended that America’s First Amendment freedoms shield them from justice,” but: “they may have believed that, but they are wrong.”

He then issued this remarkable threat: “To give them the space to crush us with misappropriated secrets is a perversion of what our great Constitution stands for. It ends now.” At no point did Pompeo specify what steps the CIA intended to take to ensure that the “space” to publish secrets “ends now.” (...)

 Lazy8 wrote: 

Any defense budget reductions during the Ford years were because of a Democratic Congress. Ford, because of the high inflation rates and unemployment at the time, had proposed non-defense cuts. Then by his 1977 budget much of that previously lower defense spending was being clawed back.

"The initial goodwill toward Ford steadily eroded as the numbers turned sour. Unemployment went from 4.8% in 1972 to 8.0% when he took office; consumer price inflation jumped from 3.4% to 11.0%. Unexpectedly high inflation, fueled by soaring oil prices, made it difficult to plan for the future; cheap imports from Germany and Japan for the first time became a threat to autos and electronics; high unemployment troubled industrial areas. By early 1975 the jobless rate was the worst since the Great Depression. Ford insisted that inflation was the greater problem. He sought to slow it, as Nixon had, by severe restraints on government spending for social programs. He also tried to curb private spending by asking Congress to raise the taxes on personal incomes. But the Democratic majority refused, and in congressional elections in November 1974 Democrats increased their majorities to three-fifths in the Senate and two-thirds in the House. In January 1975 Ford finally yielded to liberals' demands for a program to stop the economic slump and promote hiring. He proposed personal income tax rebates, especially to higher-income people, who might spend extra money on durable goods such as automobiles. Liberals criticized Ford's proposal for offering little relief for the poor, so they pushed through Congress a modified, though modest, tax rebate bill favoring lower-income people. Ford signed it reluctantly. He continued to resist liberal demands for massive public works spending to employ the jobless, and vetoed many bills.

Ford also wanted to make the domestic energy industry more profitable, even at the cost of inflation, in order to encourage more private investment in it and thereby reduce the dependence on oil from abroad. He proposed huge public subsidies for developing new energy sources.

Deregulation - that is, the removal of the old New Deal controls on transportation, communications, finance and other businesses - began under Ford (Nixon was more of a New Dealer who liked federal regulations), ..."

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Gerald_Ford

So we had the typical Republican playbook - Ford's "subsidies" (corporate welfare) to energy companies, corporate deregulation, along with austerity for the working class or lower incomes, advocating raising taxes on personal incomes but income tax rebates for higher incomes, and at the end of his term an increased defense budget.

 LowPhreak wrote:
Vietnam war spending peaked in 1967 and declined for the following 10 years. US involvement in the war (other than evacuating embassies and such) ended in 1973. The 1977 budget represented a rearmament that began in the final year of Ford's term, continued under Carter, and peaked on Reagan's watch.

 aflanigan wrote:

 
Indeed.

Often references are made to guard against the military-industrial complex, but many of those who cite to that admonition from Ike are conspicuously silent when the Trump administration proposes big increases in defense spending while proposing massive cuts for other programs.       

 LowPhreak wrote: 
Context is everything, eh?

 kurtster wrote: 

The term "big government" is so nebulous as to be meaningless. It's mostly used by those on the right to justify cutting of social and public works, while they rarely include excessive military & security spending or corporate welfare schemes and tax giveaways in their "big government" complaints.

For example, since Vietnam was largely over by the time he was installed in the White House, did Gerry Ford ever cut the defense budget as he should have advocated for? Not that I'm aware of.

"..the President has submitted a defense budget for 1977 which provides a real increase of $7.4 billion in total obligational authority in defense spending..."

Let's remember too that he had uber-hawks (and career ne'er-do-wells) like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney shoved so far up his ass he couldn't see straight. So, Ford should be the last one to rattle on about "big government taking everything you have."

 LowPhreak wrote: 
Yep.  Its foolish to think that you can trust the government; its your friend and does not have the capabilities that you can imagine.  You can't, it isn't and does have the toys.  If you can imagine some kind of snooping technology, some one has more than likely already made it reality.  Problem is, that most of the things this stuff is designed to corrupt and infiltrate is not being used by the bad guys.  They mostly use old style burner dumb phones (yeah, San Bernardino, but ...) and are unlikely to have a smart TV or appliance hooked up to the net to watch their latest shows or to tell Alexa what to do.  But the good guys, us, do.  This stuff is designed to watch us under the pretense that they are watching "them", those bad guys.

The CIA was already caught once doing domestic spying in my lifetime.  This is the second time.  Once was one time too many.

Once again its time to trot this old one out ...

A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.
Gerald Ford, 38th POTUS.
 

 black321 wrote: 
 
Not to worry, our true enemies (whomever they may be...real or imagined) already know that this is how the CIA and other Western intel agencies operate. Don't kid yourself with the establishment bullshit story; this Wikileak reveal is informative for the general public mainly and that's what the gov't hates the most here, not that they're somehow giving away state secrets to so-called enemies.

The creation of the deep state, and its staggering breadth and scope, is hardly news.

Given the massive potential for abuse, it is good that we have reporters doing what they can to keep tabs on it. Sunshine can be a powerful check on abuse.

However, given Assange's obvious political bias and apparent sycophantic relationship with Russia, I would take things coming from Wiki Leeks with a grain or two of salt.

 miamizsun wrote: 
Here's what happens when you bring this level of opinion/analysis...into a political discussion.  It's like if you were to interject between two baseball fans, a yankee fan and red sox, fan arguing over which is the better team, and exclaim, neither team is "better" because they both cheat.  Both teams players juice up, the managers take bribes from vegas odds makers, and the refs are paid off too.  What's left to argue over?   

 miamizsun wrote: 
Though generally appalled at what is revealed in these "leaks," at the same time I am increasingly concerned about the level of information that is being so easily funneled to our true enemies.  It would seem there should be a less threatening means of "leaking" this type of information, rather than through wholesale disclosure. 

 miamizsun wrote: 
I went to the link you put up in the Trump thread.  I am now so fucking depressed.  Its no surprise regarding the CIA's 'new found' capabilities.  Its silly to assume that they don't have the capabilities.  Its just that its officially out there now.

Changes nothing in my mind.  The question is will it change anyone else's and what will they do about it ?

 

oh my, from the bowels of the innernets...the mother lode of confirmation bias/evidence 

wiki via zero hedge

Wikileaks Unveils 'Vault 7': "The Largest Ever Publication Of Confidential CIA Documents"; Another Snowden Emerges

WikiLeaks has published what it claims is the largest ever release of confidential documents on the CIA. It includes more than 8,000 documents as part of ‘Vault 7’, a series of leaks on the agency, which have allegedly emerged from the CIA's Center For Cyber Intelligence in Langley, and which can be seen on the org chart below, which Wikileaks also released:

A total of 8,761 documents have been published as part of ‘Year Zero’, the first in a series of leaks the whistleblower organization has dubbed ‘Vault 7.’ WikiLeaks said that ‘Year Zero’ revealed details of the CIA’s “global covert hacking program,” including “weaponized exploits” used against company products including “Apple's iPhone, Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.”

WikiLeaks tweeted the leak, which it claims came from a network inside the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virginia.

Among the more notable disclosures which, if confirmed, "would rock the technology world", the CIA had managed to bypass encryption on popular phone and messaging services such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram. According to the statement from WikiLeaks, government hackers can penetrate Android phones and collect “audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.”

Another profound revelation is that the CIA can engage in "false flag" cyberattacks which portray Russia as the assailant. Discussing the CIA's Remote Devices Branch's UMBRAGE group, Wikileaks' source notes that it "collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques 'stolen' from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation.

 

 

"With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the "fingerprints" of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from. UMBRAGE components cover keyloggers, password collection, webcam capture, data destruction, persistence, privilege escalation, stealth, anti-virus (PSP) avoidance and survey techniques."

As Kim Dotcom summarizes this finding, "CIA uses techniques to make cyber attacks look like they originated from enemy state. It turns DNC/Russia hack allegation by CIA into a JOKE"

CIA uses techniques to make cyber attacks look like they originated from enemy state. It turns DNC/Russia hack allegation by CIA into a JOKE

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) March 7, 2017

Glenn Greenwald on Wikileaks, Russian Hacking, and Distrusting Legacy Media and U.S. Intel (Reason Podcast)

The co-founder of The Intercept doesn't like Donald Trump but thinks the new president may just wake liberals up to reining in the government.

Listen or download here

about 43 minutes and worth your time

i especially paid attention @ the 30 min mark

regards

 

The New Dirty War for Africa's uranium and mineral rights

Assange: What Wikileaks Teaches Us About How the U.S. Operates
The secret documents made public by Wikileaks offer a rare insight into how U.S. foreign policy really works.

(...) The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to U.S. Empire (Verso, 2015) begins to address the need for scholarly analysis of what the millions of documents published by WikiLeaks say about international geopolitics. The chapters use a constellation approach to these documents to reveal how the United States deals with various regional and international power dynamics.

It is impossible to cover the wealth of material or relationships in this first volume, but I hope that this work will stimulate long- form journalists and academics to eclipse it.

Chapter 1 reflects on America's status as an "empire," and considers what this means, seeking to characterize US economic, military, administrative and diplomatic power with reference to the long sweep of global history over the last century.

The chapter establishes the "imperialism of free trade" framework that the rest of Part II then develops—a framework wherein American military might is used not for territorial expansion but to perpetuate American economic preeminence. Both themes are considered in more detail in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3. Chapter 1 also situates WikiLeaks in the context of an unprecedented growth in American official secrecy, and the evolution of US power following the commencement of the "war on terror."

Chapter 2 examines the WikiLeaks materials on the so-called "war on terror." Besides providing a keen summary of the war crimes and human rights abuses documented in WikiLeaks publications, along with a detailed historical overview of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq and the consequent unfolding disaster there, the chapter also draws conclusions about the ideological and conceptual substructure of America's "war on terror," and investigates how an aspect of the imperial prerogative of the United States is to exercise decisive power to ensure that terms like "just war," "torture," "terrorism" and "civilian" are defined in its own favor.

The argument adduces evidence from the full range of WikiLeaks publications, along with other sources, such as the recent CIA torture report. In the process, the chapter also examines the double standards and problems arising from the misuse of these concepts (including the attempt to delegitimize and marginalize WikiLeaks itself).

Chapter 3 embarks on a thoroughgoing discussion of the "empire of free trade"—the relationship of the American form of empire with the worldwide promotion of neoliberal economic reform, providing American corporations with access to "global markets."

The chapter draws on State Department cables published by WikiLeaks, as well as WikiLeaks publications dating back to 2007 concerning the "private sector," including material on banks and global multilateral treaty negotiations. The chapter provides luminous examples of how the drive toward economic integration buttresses the position of the United States as an arms-length empire, and provides the underlying rationale for the patterns of intervention, military or otherwise, pursued in Latin America and beyond.

Chapter 4 is a do-it-yourself guide on how to use Wiki- Leaks' Public Library of US Diplomacy (PlusD), written by investigations editor Sarah Harrison. At the time of writing, PlusD contains 2,325,961 cables and other diplomatic records. The State Department uses its own logic to create, transmit and index these records, the totality of which form its primary institutional memory.

Harrison explains how to get started searching, reading and interpreting cable metadata and content, from the infamous CHEROKEE restriction to the use of State Department euphemisms such as "opposing resource nationalism."

The history of US policy regarding the International Criminal Court (ICC) is a rich case study in the use of diplomacy in a concerted effort to undermine an international institution.

In Chapter 5, Linda Pearson documents what the cables reveal about the efforts of successive US administrations to limit the ICC's jurisdiction. These include the use of both bribes and threats by the George W. Bush administration to corral states signed up to the ICC into providing immunity from war crimes prosecutions for US persons—and, under the Obama administration, more subtle efforts to shape the ICC into an adjunct of US foreign policy.

Japan and South Korea have been epicenters of US influence within East Asia for decades. The cables document nearly a decade of US efforts to affect domestic political outcomes within these two countries in line with its own long-term interests.

In Chapter 14, investigative journalist Tim Shorrock examines the geopolitical triangle created by US relations with both countries, including its attempts to play one off against the other, as part of long- term efforts to undermine left-wing governments and policies within the region.

Of global GDP growth over the last decade, over 50 percent has been in Southeast Asia. This understanding has led to an explicit reassignment of military, diplomatic and surveillance assets to Southeast Asia, epitomized by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as a strategy of "forward deployed diplomacy." In Chapter 15, Richard Heydarian examines the cables on Southeast Asia and situates his findings within a broader historical critique of US influence in the region.

The critique of Western imperialism is most contentious in regions of the world that have historically been US protectorates, such as western Europe. So indoctrinated are European liberals in modern imperialist ideology that even the idea that the United States might be administering a global empire is routinely dismissed with references to concepts like "right to protect," demonstrating a willful deafness not only to the structure of US power around the world, but also to how it increasingly talks about itself as an "empire."

In Chapter 6, Michael Busch examines the broad patterns of influence and subversion pursued by the global superpower on the political systems of Europe and its member states. Themes include European government collusion with the CIA's rendition and torture programs, the subversion of European criminal justice and judicial systems to rescue alleged US government torturers from prosecution and the use of US diplomacy to open up European markets to US aerospace companies, or to invasive, monopolistic technologies and patents, such as Monsanto's genetically modified organisms.

In Chapter 13, Phyllis Bennis opts for a broad overview of WikiLeaks' publications on Afghanistan—including not just the State Department cables, but also the Significant Action Reports (SIGACTs) published by WikiLeaks as the Afghan War Diary, and Congressional Research Reports and other documents on Afghanistan published by WikiLeaks prior to 2010.

What emerges is a stark assessment of the folly of US military involvement in Afghanistan since 2001 and its cost in terms of human life and societal well-being.

Geopolitics is complicated, and all the more so in relation to a country like Israel. Israel's military dominance in the Middle East; its diplomatic relations with other regional players such as Egypt, Syria, Iran, Lebanon and Turkey; its role as an avatar for US imperial policy within the area; its wayward exploitation of its protected status in pursuing its own genocidal policies toward the Palestinian people—all of these themes are brought to the fore in Chapter 9, by Peter Certo and Stephen Zunes, which carefully interrogates the relevant State Department cables.

In Chapter 11, on Iran, Gareth Porter provides an excellent companion to the chapter on Israel, choosing to focus on what the cables reveal about the tripartite geopolitical standoff between the US, Israel and Iran, and the shadow this structure casts on the rest of the Middle East.

In particular, Porter focuses on the P5+1 talks about Iran's nuclear enrichment program, on US efforts to misrepresent intelligence in order to tip the international consensus against Iran, and on the role of Israel as both a catalyst for and an agent of US policy in the Middle East.

The conflict in Iraq is the focus of Chapter 12, by journalist Dahr Jamail, which draws on a wide range of WikiLeaks materials to argue that the United States had a deliberate policy of exacerbating sectarian divisions in Iraq following its invasion and occupation, in the belief that the country would be easier to dominate in such circumstances.

The consequent devastation is documented in painstaking detail using WikiLeaks materials, including US cables, Congressional Research Reports dating between 2005 and 2008 and the Iraq War Logs from 2010.

Jamail pays specific attention to the "Sahwa" movement— the US-sponsored program of counter-insurgency that was implemented to respond to the growing influence of al-Qaeda affiliates among Sunni Iraqis disaffected by the Shia-dominated US-client government of Nouri al-Maliki.

The United States paid large numbers of Iraqis to defect from the Sunni insurgency and instead fight against al-Qaeda, on the promise of receiving regular employment through integration into the Iraqi military. As Jamail argues, the failure of the Maliki government to honor this promise saw huge numbers of US-trained, US-armed and US-financed—but now unemployed—Sunni militants return to the insurgency, eventually swelling the ranks of the former al- Qaeda affiliate in Iraq, which in 2014 became known as ISIS, or the "Islamic State."

Across Iraq's northeastern border, in Syria, the cables also describe how the scene was set for the emergence of ISIS. Since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011, warmongers in the media have demanded the Western military pounding of Syria to depose Bashar Al-Assad—presented, in typical liberal-interventionist fashion, as a "new Hitler."

The emergence of the Islamic State, to which the Assad government is the only viable counterweight within Syria, has thrown this propagandistic consensus into disarray. But US government designs on Syrian regime change, and its devotion to regional instability, long pre-date the Syrian civil war, as is demonstrated in the cables.

Chapter 10, by Robert Naiman, offers a careful reading of the Damascus cables, pointing out important historical presentiments of the current situation in Syria, and unpicking the benign-sounding human rights constructions of US diplomats to bring into focus the imperialist inflection of US foreign policy and rhetoric toward Syria—including concrete efforts within the country to undermine the government and bring about the chaos of recent months during the entire decade preceding 2011.

Clichés abound about Turkey being a "bridge between East and West," but it cannot be denied that this country of some seventy-five million people occupies an important position— both as a regional player within Middle Eastern geopolitics and as a large and economically powerful nominal democracy on the fringes of Europe.

As Conn Hallinan argues in Chapter 8, State Department cables illustrate US efforts to exploit the rich geopolitical significance of Turkey. Hallinan uses the cables as a pretext to provide a tour of Turkey's regional alliances, strategic concerns and internal affairs. Among the topics he covers are the complex strategic energy calculations that necessitate Turkey's delicate relations with Iran and Russia, even as it cultivates the United States, Europe and Israel in its efforts to gain access to Western markets.

The chapter also examines Turkey's bargaining power, demonstrated in its use of a veto against the election of former Danish prime minister Anders Rasmussen as the head of NATO, in order to force the United States to pressure the Danish government into suppressing a Denmark-based Kurdish television channel.

The essay also deals with Turkey's internal issues, such as government policy toward Kurdish separatist groups, and the extraordinary underground political conflict and intrigue between Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the expatriate political figure Fethullah Gülen.

Since the end of the Cold War, and especially during the so- called "war on terror," US diplomacy has leaned toward South, Central and East Asia. Except in the case of one or two flare-ups, US-Russian relations receded from the popular consciousness as the main geopolitical dynamic.

This of course has changed as a result of the conflict in the Ukraine. But popular consciousness is not reality. As Russ Wellen shows in Chapter 7, in the decade following the century's turn the US has pursued a policy of aggressive NATO expansion, challenging Russia's regional hegemony within Eastern Europe and the former Soviet area and seeking to subvert nuclear treaties to maintain its strategic advantage.

As the cables show, these efforts have not gone unnoticed by Russia, and are recurring points of conflict in US-Russian diplomatic relations, even during the most cordial of periods. The chapter provides the necessary context for recent East-West tensions centering around Syria, Ukraine and the granting of asylum to Edward Snowden, and yields critical insight into a geopolitical relationship that, if mishandled, threatens the survival of our civilization and even of our species.

Perhaps no region of the world demonstrates the full spectrum of US imperial interference as vividly as Latin America. Since the 1950s, US policy in Central and South America has popularized the concept of the CIA coup d'état, deposing democratically elected left-wing governments and installing US-friendly right- wing dictatorships; inaugurating legacies of brutal civil war, death squads, torture and disappearances; and immiserating millions to the benefit of the American ruling class.

As Alexander Main, Jake Johnston, and Dan Beeton note in the first of their chapters on Latin America, Chapter 17, the English-speaking press saw no evil in the State Department cables, concluding that they did not fit "the stereotype of America plotting coups and caring only about business interests and consorting with only the right wing."

The exact opposite is true: the cables demonstrate a smooth continuity between the brutal US policy in Latin America during the Cold War and the more sophisticated plays at toppling governments that have taken place in recent years.

Chapter 17 offers a broad overview of the use of USAID and "civil society" astroturfing, as well as other, more direct methods of pursuing "regime change" in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador and Haiti.

Chapter 18, by the same authors, focuses on Venezuela, the socialist enemy of the day, and specifically on US efforts to undermine the country as a regional left-wing bulwark in the wake of the failed US-backed coup against the Chávez government in 2002.

The response of the United States to the release of the WikiLeaks materials betrays a belief that its power resides in a disparity of information: ever more knowledge for the empire, ever less for its subjects.

In 1969, Daniel Ellsberg—later famous for leaking the Pentagon Papers—had a top-secret security clearance. Henry Kissinger had applied for his own top-secret clearance. Ellsberg warned him of its dangers:

"t will ... become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn't have these clearances. Because you'll be thinking as you listen to them: "What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?" You will deal with a person who doesn't have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you'll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You'll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you'll become something like a moron. You'll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours."

Freed from their classified seals, the WikiLeaks materials bridge the gulf between the "morons" with security clearances and nothing to learn, and us, their readers.

Julian Assange: the Untold Story of an Epic Struggle for Justice - John Pilger