Busy week, sad week.
Famed Pentagon whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg passed away. He was 92.
We began writing about him some time ago.
Andrew Napolitano reported that there'd been a new ruling in the Assange case. Craig Murray covered it excellently.
What Has Assange Done?
What has Assange done? Not what he's accused of doing, but what has he really done. There are so many who don't seem to understand even to this day.
Julian Assange is not a whistleblower. Nor is he a hacker (at least not now). Julian Assange was able to invite himself into several pre-Web organisations, as outlined in the book Underground which was later turned into a movie starring Anthony LaPaglia.
Julian Assange is mostly known for being a matchmaker. He turned his attention, at the right time, to new emerging technologies and saw how they could be wedded to produce something even greater.
He saw the merits of a Monterey project to produce an anonymous web browser so remote servers couldn't see who was poking about. This project ran at the US Navy lab in California at the behest of the CIA who didn't want to get caught in places they had no business being.
The system's called 'The Onion Router' ('TOR') because the concept is a bit like layers of an onion. As one successively moves closer to contact with the remote server, each intermediary node adds its own layer of encryption and hides further info on where the actual request is coming from.
Conceptually this is a bit like Julian's 'Rubberhose' which was a method of formatting computer diskettes for use on underground railroads - everything on a 'need to know' basis, and most of the time you really don't need to know.
Hidden Services
The Tor 'onion' protocol, as it's called, also includes a feature known as hidden services. These hidden services are usually decorated by infamously convoluted gibberish Web URLs, invariably ending with the file extension 'onion'. Ordinary surfers can't see onion files. Ordinary computers can't access them. They're only accessible if you're connected to the onion network.
The brilliance of this, from the Assange perspective, is that the remote server - let's say it's WikiLeaks in some form or shape - can't know who's calling. The onion network keeps that information hidden. This of course is nothing less than the perfect electronic brown envelope. No one anywhere can ever know who actually sent something.
Case in point: Although it's known that Manning admitted to sending documents to WikiLeaks, it can never be known that it's those self-same documents that WikiLeaks published - especially as it's further known that Manning shared the documents with someone stateside. It could very well have been that 'someone' who uploaded to WL with that copy used.
Julian Assange was also aided by advancements in solid-state storage technology. What used to take city blocks could now be put on a USB thumb and hidden under one's collar - Assange actually did exactly that on a trip from Sweden to Germany.
Sole Golden Rule
Julian Assange's sole golden rule was to publish. Publish whatever came through the anonymous WikiLeaks pipeline. Publish first in, first out (FIFO). As is known today, he violated his FIFO rule in 2010, telling his colleagues in Iceland: 'I'm in a hurry here - I have two wars I have to stop'.
A third part of the Assange magic was his intuitive understanding of how news hounds function. He was able to play them against each other with the greatest of ease, with AJE scrapping to edge out the NYT, for example, in the autumn of 2010.
Finding Julian Assange
Julian Assange had been a sort of subcontractor for years for the British media. He got the stories and they published - his name or the name of his organisation didn't surface that often.
LEAKS.ORG was the original name of the WL website. Even here Julian did his best to stay in the shadows. WIKILEAKS.ORG was first registered to John Shipton, known today to be Julian's biological father. The information at the site intimated it was basically run by a group of Chinese dissidents - likely another smokescreen.
Julian stayed out of the public eye, and things would likely have remained that way had not Alan Rusbridger sent Nick Davies to the European continent to find Julian Assange. Julian wasn't precisely in hiding - but he mostly wasn't making his location known either, running WikiLeaks essentially from a backpack with a rather bulky Apple desktop computer.
(You remember Nick Davies? He's the reporter always seen in that trademark black leather jacket, day and night.)
From Anonymity To Target
Davies somehow convinced Assange to make his profile public, something which resulted in plenty of media stir but which also made Assange a target. As one pundit put it at the time:
'Exposing the head of an organisation increases the risk for decapitation.'
Obama put Assange on an effective 'zap list' - they didn't ask for his assassination at that time, that would come later with Mike Pompeo - but they wanted him hunted down and taken out of commission.
This was at the time of the release of the Afghan War Logs.
War Logs
The Afghan War Logs, released in July 2010 after the bombshell Collateral Murder video which premiered in Washington on 5 April 2010, were the single biggest dump of classified documents ever. No, they weren't 90,000, as malfeasant elements of the media claimed - they were 75,000. What was announced was that the dump was initially to be 90,000 but 15,000 had been withheld for 'harm minimisation'.
From Opt-Out to Opt-In
Nothing like this had ever been done before, anywhere, ever. New computer routines had to be designed and written to address the new exigencies. The original method was a kind of 'opt-out' whereby one could search for names and terms that could conceivably be harmful to innocent people. This method was later improved to a type of 'opt-in' where only words known to be void of potential harm were included - meaning that, at the start of the first run, one could conceivably have come up with completely blank pages.
This method was reportedly used for the October 2010 release of the Iraq War Logs which dwarfed its predecessor in size several times over.
By the time of Cablegate, the embassy dispatch dump even later in 2010, duties and harm minimisation had been relegated to trusted local news organisations, with WikiLeaks taking in that context a supervisory role.
**
That's what Julian Assange has done. No hacking. All he did was make anonymous document submission possible. That's it.
Of course the meathead pundits of the world did not understand - or chose not to understand. There were many bad actors on the Web back then, most of them transparently obvious, but others...
Sean Hannity is a case in point, although there are undoubtedly numerous others that are far worse. Sean was initially hostile towards WikiLeaks, as they made his former colleagues in the GOP look bad. Then as the WikiLeaks organisation began their dump of Hillary Clinton's email, they were back in good graces, and he said so in an apology to Assange at the Ecuadorean embassy in London where he'd been sent to conduct an interview.
What Mr & Mrs Scarborough or others on the children's channel thought of Assange and WikiLeaks isn't known, but it's not hard to guess.
Again: that's all Julian Assange did. The precise terms can be found at the WikiLeaks website. They're self-evident.
Accusations Against Assange
What Julian Assange is accused of is of course another matter entirely. To paraphrase USG directives used to neutralise both Assange and Snowden, 'shoot first and answer questions afterward'. The actual details of the pending case against Assange in the UK are immaterial - read Craig Murray's account to arrive at a clue there, if it still hasn't dawned on you for some inexplicable reason.
Or, to paraphrase Assange himself in a completely different context in California well over ten years ago:
'It's bullshit, it's all bullshit.’
Craig Murray: Julian Assange
Craig Murray penned an extensive screed about this latest judicial charade at his own site and it was picked up by Monthly Review today.
Assange: An unholy masquerade of tyranny disguised as justice
https://mronline.org/2023/06/17/assange-an-unholy-masquerade-of-tyranny-disguised-as-justice/
Every single one of the five national security publications that are the subject of this extradition request exposed US Governmental involvement in crimes of the first order of magnitude.
These disclosures exposed irrefutable evidence of, inter alia, illegal rendition, torture, and black site CIA prisons across Europe as well as aggressive steps taken to maintain impunity and prevent the prosecution of operatives involved in these crimes.
The following represents the unchallenged evidence of the atrocities Mr Assange exposed.
Donald Trump is poised to win the 2024 GOP nomination. Likely with Kari Lake as his running mate.
Kari Lake posed the other week in a 'Free Assange' t-shirt.
Donald Trump claims it was Lindsey Graham who threatened him with impeachment if he pardoned Snowden and Assange.