Over the past few decades, several directors of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have openly admitted to doing exactly what U.S. officials are now accusing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of doing: stealing the secrets of other nations.

Lets be blunt about what we do, Tenet said. We steal secrets for a living. . . . I do not know how else to tell people what we do.

As Assange faces extradition to the United States over his role in publishing classified information, U.S. officials are charging him with conspiring to steal classified information, an action that the CIA conducts on a routine basis.

Hell yeah, we steal secrets, Mike Pompeo acknowledged in 2017, when he was the director of the CIA. Thats what we do. Its in our charter.

WikiLeaks denies its own engagement in this practice, saying it does not steal, but reveals. The organization identifies itself as a media organization that specializes in publishing secret information about war and espionage. In recent years, WikiLeaks has partnered with several leading news organizations, including The New York Times, to expose lies, misconduct, and criminal activities by governments around the world.

U.S. officials, on the other hand, repeatedly brag that they steal secrets. They argue that their efforts are noble and legitimate.

We make no apologies for doing so, Pompeo said in 2017. Its hard stuff and we go at it hard.

Some of the confusion over WikiLeaks is attributable to a 2013 documentary film titled We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks. The films title, We Steal Secrets, does not come from WikiLeaks but is actually a quote from General Michael V. Hayden, a former CIA director who boasted in the film about the U.S. governments involvement in espionage.

We steal other nations secrets, Hayden said.

Critics of WikiLeaks have also sown doubts about the organization by accusing it of interfering in the 2016 presidential election. In the months before the election, WikiLeaks repeatedly published damaging information about Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party that was allegedly stolen by hackers.

The U.S. government has indicted a dozen Russian officers for conspiring to hack into the computers of the Democratic National Committee and Clintons presidential campaign, but it has not charged WikiLeaks with stealing those documents. The U.S. governments attempt to prosecute Assange stems from unrelated events that took place several years earlier, such as his effort to help protect Chelsea Manning, another one of his sources.

If Assange is extradited to face charges for practicing journalism and exposing government misconduct, Noam Chomsky and Alice Walker warned in an op-ed last month in the Independent, the consequences for press freedom and the publics right to know will be catastrophic.

Attempts to portray WikiLeaks as an organization that steals secrets are all the more confounding given the long history of CIA directors openly acknowledging that they oversee a vast and sweeping infrastructure to steal the secrets of other nations.

In 1998, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet told the editorial board of Studies in Intelligence that one of the core functions of the CIA is stealing secrets. Lets be blunt about what we do, Tenet said. We steal secrets for a living. . . . I do not know how else to tell people what we do.

Despite such admissions, the official CIA line is that, as CIA Director John Brennan told National Public Radio in 2016, Everything we do is consistent with U.S. law.

Some of the strongest pushback to this claim came from the intelligence community, as a number of former intelligence agents castigated Brennan for misrepresenting their work.

Every aspect of what the CIA does overseas is illegal, John Maguire, a retired CIA officer, told NBC News. We dont solicit secretswe steal them. What does he call breaking into an embassy?

Brennans remarks caused such an uproar in the intelligence community that one of his successors, Mike Pompeo, made it a point to rebut his comments. In several defiant talks and speeches in 2017, Pompeo insisted that the purpose of the CIA is to conduct espionage, which he defined as the art and science of running assets and stealing secrets.

The CIA, to be successful, must be aggressive, vicious, unforgiving, relentlessyou pick the word, Pompeo said.

While CIA officials boast about their mission of stealing secrets, U.S. officials continue tarnishing WikiLeaks. Pompeo has described WikiLeaks as a non-state hostile intelligence service.

Undoubtedly, the CIA has a strong motive for discrediting WikiLeaks. In early 2017, WikiLeaks published a trove of documents that allege to show how the CIA hacks into computers and smartphones. The documents indicate that the CIA employs a vast array of tools to steal secrets from its targets.

Given the hundreds of thousands of additional documents that WikiLeaks has published over the past several years, the organization has clearly been in the work of publishing information, not stealing it. While U.S. officials attempt to discredit Assange by portraying him as a criminal hacker, the Central Intelligence Agency remains at the forefront of stealing secrets, just as multiple former directors have acknowledged.

We lied, we cheated, we stole, Pompeo acknowledged in a talk last year, in reference to his earlier work at the CIA. We had entire training courses.

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Steal This Secret: CIA Does Exactly What it Accuses Julian Assange of Doing - Progressive.org

When asked recently by NBC's Savannah Guthrie to state his feelings about a popular conspiracy theory, President Trump gave an equivocal answer. "I know nothing about QAnon," he said. "I do know they are very much against pedophilia. They fight it very hard."

Trump's response was widely criticized, not least because it gave a very one-sided impression of the theory in question and its proponents, whose delusions it seemed to encourage. I am not entirely sure what else he could have said. If reports like this one are any indication, QAnon is far more important to millions of the president's supporters than, say, his party's attitude toward marginal tax rates. Trump needs QAnon.

A more interesting question is whether QAnon needs Trump. This proposition is, I think, harder to defend, for the very simple reason that the theory is only incidentally related to his bizarre political career. There is every reason to think that it or something like it will outlast him regardless of whether he wins re-election in November.

Both in outline and at the level of individual details (e.g., the involvement of the Clintons) QAnon resembles most of the conspiracy theories that have flourished in right-wing circles in my lifetime. Its most direct ancestor is said to be Pizzagate, which posited the existence of a cult that met under the auspices of the Democratic National Committee and a Washington-area pizza chain for the worship of Satan and the abuse of children, who were kept in basement dungeons, raped, and eaten by John Podesta and others. But Pizzagate was what the political scientist Michael Barkun has described as an "event" conspiracy theory, an attempt to make sense of a discrete situation in this case, the admittedly bizarre reference to "Spirit Cooking" in an email exchange between Podesta and his brother Tony released by WikiLeaks in late 2016.

Whatever else it might be, QAnon is not an attempt to make sense of an event. It is not even a conspiracy theory of the best-known variety, those organized around the notion that a sinister group is attempting to gain control of a country or the world. Fantasies of this kind, which have been commonplace since the publication of the supposed Protocols of the Elders of Zion at the turn of the last century, reached the height of their influence in this country during the 1990s. There are good reasons to think that, in addition to a large number of 20-something Reddit and 8chan users, QAnon is supported by more or less the same people who were talking about the so-called "New World Order" 25 years ago.

What has changed? Has the creature from Jekyll Island retreated to its lair? Have the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations disbanded? Has globalization been reversed? Perhaps the genius of QAnon is that it is what Barkun calls a "superconspiracy" that synthesizes virtually every lunatic proposition beloved of the American far right: It proposes an alliance between pedophiles in Hollywood, Wall Street vampires, DNC occultists, left-wing street militias and the Jewish billionaires who finance them, crypto-Marxist professors, the Chinese military, Big Tech, and goodness knows who else in order to explain what exactly?

This, which ought to be the crucial question about QAnon, seems to me strangely enough the least important one, both for proponents and for those of us trying to make sense of it. QAnon is lived rather than consumed. It cannot be falsified because it provides the basic conceptual technology by means of which its adherents experience reality. In this sense, QAnon is the answer not to David Icke but to the combination of dumbed-down academic postmodernism, MBA-speak, and therapeutic moralism that make up the worldview of our professional managerial class. It is not a theory or a set of beliefs but an entire social ontology.

This is why I think that QAnon is unlikely to disappear. It offers a complete picture of the world and a built-in response to the slow but inexorable financialization and digitalization of the economy, the collapse of the American industrial base, the decline in morality (however understood), the eclipse of religious, national, and other forms of tangible authority above all, the total decentralization of power, which is not concentrated in the hands of a cabal or in the office of the presidency but dispersed among billions of individual participants in the globalized economic order.

This is the grounds upon which it is most deserving of criticism. Rather than provide the conceptual language for making sense of a world in which Jeff Bezos has roughly as much power to alter the underlying structures of globalized capitalism as an employee at one of Amazon's warehouses, QAnon offers a consoling narrative: the light-bringing Prometheus who will deliver the race of men from bondage, the world-spirit mounted on horseback who will master the world, the promised messiah who will lead the Fremen to victory.

This story is pernicious, not because it invests Trump with qualities he does not possess but because of its mistaken premise that a hero can save us from whatever we imagine are the evils of the age. It is not only false but self-exculpatory, every bit as much as the competing elite narrative of meritocratic know-how and woke ritualism triumphing over the dark forces of reaction. Both worldviews absolve their adherents of complicity and incuriosity.

I, for one, would rather be clear-eyed and despairing.

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Why QAnon will outlive Trump - The Week

CHANDIGARH, PunjabEven as the Shiromani Akali Dal (Badal) has snapped ties with the controversial Hindu right-wing political group BJP, it has not stopped indulging in anti-Panthik activities and working against the sentiments of the Sikhs.

Today, the Akali Dal appointed Farzana Alam, wife of Sikhs butcher Izhar Alam, as general secretary of its women wing Istari Akali Dal which is led by former Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) president Bibi Jagir Kaur.

Jagir Kaur has expanded the organizational structure of the wing and Farzana is among the office-bearers announced today, as per an official communiqu of the SAD (Badal) controlled by Badal family. Once again, the move is inviting criticism of the Sikh masses.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, the former Senior Superintendent of Punjab Police played a major role in oppressing the armed Sikh struggle, in which he is known to have used inhumane methods. He is the architect of the infamous Alam Sena also known as Black Cats responsible for fake encounters, in which thousands of Sikh youths were killed under the pretext of fighting terrorism.

Wikileaks had also highlighted Alams involvement in the violation of human rights in the form of extra-judicial killings in Punjab.

Izhar Alam (center) and Parkash Badal (extremely right) hugging each other in a function. (File Photo)

Former DGP, KP Gill,hadpublicly praised the Alam Sena by stating that the Punjab police could not have functioned without them. There are several human rights cases pending against Alam, and other Punjab Police officers involved in various human rights atrocities that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s.

It is pertinent to mention that during Punjab assembly elections in 2012, Parkash Badal fielded Izhar Alam as SAD candidate from Malerkotla seat. At that time, Sikhs had opposed thisdecision harshly. After facing a backlash, Akalis transferred the party ticket to Alams wife Farzana Alam, changing her name toNissara Khatoon. This was nothing, but a clever attempt made to fill the eyes of Sikhs with dust.

Izhar Alam can be seen sitting next to Harnam Singh Dhumma, President of Sant Samaj.

Even the Sant Samaj led by Damdami Taksal (Mehta) chief Harnam Singh Dhumma campaigned for Mrs. Alam in 2012 assembly elections and a photo of Dhumma with Mr. Alam went viral over social media.

Despite resentment among the Sikhs against the Alam family, the SAD (B) president Sukhbir Badal appointed Mr. Alam as vice-president of the party which claims itself to be the sole representative party of the Sikhs.

The fresh move reveals that the SAD (Badal) leaders are still in association with the forces which played role against the Sikhs.

It is worth mentioning here that the SAD (B) also appointed Sumedh Saini, another such butcher of the Sikhs, as DGP of Punjab. Saini was recently nominated in a case of extra-judicial killing. Besides, he is also an accused in Behbal Kalan firing that killed two Sikhs demonstrating for justice in Bargari sacrilege case.

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SAD (Badal) appoints wife of Sikhs butcher as General Secretary of the women wing - Sikh24 News & Updates

Since 2016, when Russian hackers and WikiLeaks injected stolen emails from the Hillary Clinton campaign into the closing weeks of the presidential race, politicians and pundits have called on tech companies to do more to fight the threat of foreign interference.

On Wednesday, less than a month from another election, we saw what doing more looks like.

Early Wednesday morning, the New York Post published a splashy front-page article about supposedly incriminating photos and emails found on a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, the son of Joseph R. Biden Jr. To many Democrats, the unsubstantiated article which included a bizarre set of details involving a Delaware computer repair shop, the F.B.I. and Rudy Giuliani, the presidents personal lawyer smelled suspiciously like the result of a hack-and-leak operation.

To be clear, there is no evidence tying the Posts report to a foreign disinformation campaign. Many questions remain about how the paper obtained the emails and whether they were authentic. Even so, the social media companies were taking no chances.

Within hours, Twitter banned all links to the Posts article, and locked the accounts of people, including some journalists and the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, who tweeted it. The company said it made the move because the article contained images showing private personal information, and because it viewed the article as a violation of its rules against distributing hacked material.

On Thursday, the company partly backtracked, saying it would no longer remove hacked content unless it was shared directly by hackers or their accomplices.

Facebook took a less nuclear approach. It said that it would reduce the visibility of the article on its service until it could be fact-checked by a third party, a policy it has applied to other sensitive posts. (The move did not seem to damage the articles prospects; by Wednesday night, stories about Hunter Bidens emails were among the most-engaged posts on Facebook.)

Both decisions angered a chorus of Republicans, who called for Facebook and Twitter to be sued, stripped of their legal protections, or forced to account for their choices. Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, called in a tweet for Twitter and Facebook to be subpoenaed by Congress to testify about censorship, accusing them of trying to hijack American democracy by censoring the news & controlling the expression of Americans.

Keep up with Election 2020

A few caveats: There is still a lot we still dont know about the Post article. We dont know if the emails it describes are authentic, fake or some combination of both, or if the events they purport to describe actually happened. Mr. Bidens campaign denied the central claims in the article, and a Biden campaign surrogate lashed out against the Post on Wednesday, calling the article Russian disinformation.

Even if the emails are authentic, we dont know how they were obtained, or how they ended up in the possession of Rudy Giuliani, the presidents lawyer, who has been spearheading efforts to paint Mr. Biden and his family as corrupt. The owner of the Delaware computer shop who reportedly turned over the laptop to investigators gave several conflicting accounts to reporters about the laptops chain of custody on Wednesday.

Critics on all sides can quibble with the decisions these companies made, or how they communicated them. Even Jack Dorsey, Twitters chief executive, said the company had mishandled the original explanation for the ban.

But the truth is less salacious than a Silicon Valley election-rigging attempt. Since 2016, lawmakers, researchers and journalists have pressured these companies to take more and faster action to prevent false or misleading information from spreading on their services. The companies have also created new policies governing the distribution of hacked material, in order to prevent a repeat of 2016s debacle.

Its true that banning links to a story published by a 200-year-old American newspaper albeit one that is now a Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid is a more dramatic step than cutting off WikiLeaks or some lesser-known misinformation purveyor. Still, its clear that what Facebook and Twitter were actually trying to prevent was not free expression, but a bad actor using their services as a conduit for a damaging cyberattack or misinformation.

These decisions get made quickly, in the heat of the moment, and its possible that more contemplation and debate would produce more satisfying choices. But time is a luxury these platforms dont always have. In the past, they have been slow to label or remove dangerous misinformation about Covid-19, mail-in voting and more, and have only taken action after the bad posts have gone viral, defeating the purpose.

Oct. 19, 2020, 1:20 a.m. ET

That left the companies with three options, none of them great. Option A: They could treat the Posts article as part of a hack-and-leak operation, and risk a backlash if it turned out to be more innocent. Option B: They could limit the articles reach, allowing it to stay up but choosing not to amplify it until more facts emerged. Or, Option C: They could do nothing, and risk getting played again by a foreign actor seeking to disrupt an American election.

Twitter chose Option A. Facebook chose Option B. Given the pressures they have been under for the last four years, its no surprise that neither company chose Option C. (Although YouTube, which made no public statement about the Posts story, seems to be keeping its head down and hoping the controversy passes.)

Since the companies made those decisions, Republican officials began using the actions as an example of Silicon Valley censorship run amok. On Wednesday, several prominent Republicans, including Mr. Trump, repeated their calls for Congress to repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a law that shields tech platforms from many lawsuits over user-generated content.

That leaves the companies in a precarious spot. They are criticized when they allow misinformation to spread. They are also criticized when they try to prevent it.

Perhaps the strangest idea to emerge in the past couple of days, though, is that these services are only now beginning to exert control over what we see. Representative Doug Collins, Republican of Georgia, made this point in a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, in which he derided the social network for using its monopoly to control what news Americans have access to.

The truth, of course, is that tech platforms have been controlling our information diets for years, whether we realized it or not. Their decisions were often buried in obscure community standards updates, or hidden in tweaks to the black-box algorithms that govern which posts users see. But make no mistake: These apps have never been neutral, hands-off conduits for news and information. Their leaders have always been editors masquerading as engineers.

Whats happening now is simply that, as these companies move to rid their platforms of bad behavior, their influence is being made more visible. Rather than letting their algorithms run amok (which is an editorial choice in itself), theyre making high-stakes decisions about flammable political misinformation in full public view, with human decision makers who can be debated and held accountable for their choices. Thats a positive step for transparency and accountability, even if it feels like censorship to those who are used to getting their way.

After years of inaction, Facebook and Twitter are finally starting to clean up their messes. And in the process, theyre enraging the powerful people who have thrived under the old system.

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Facebook and Twitter Dodge a 2016 Repeat, and Ignite a 2020 Firestorm - The New York Times

To the editor:

(re: Case closed in Russia collusion, Aug. 29, 2019)

The news blackout concerning new revelations about the Russian collusion hoax should not come as a surprise to anybody that read my letter last year in this newspaper concerning the topic.

The motive behind this political hoax was an attempt at damage control in the event that Hillary Clintons illegal email server had been hacked by the Russians. Despite being massively ahead in the polls, both Mrs. Clinton and the Democratic National Committee knew that if her 30,000 private deleted emails were leaked to Wikileaks, it would be a disaster for their party.

The setup of 27-year-old George Papadopoulos in a London wine bar by Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, his intel officer Erika Thompson, and Israeli diplomat Christian Cantor, was to grill him about the conversation he had with the mysterious Joseph Mifsud. It was Mr. Mifsud who stated that the Russians had hacked Mrs. Clintons email server, collecting all 60,000 emails.

If this information proved to be true, the plan was to divert spotlight the publics attention from this sensitive information being leaked from her illegal email server to an evil plot by Trump and Putin to undermine her campaign for the presidency. And even if it didnt turn out to be true, it could be used to cast suspicion about Donald Trump by creating a dirty personal attack against his character.

Proof of my statement comes from the fact that the elected presidents first news conference was marred by reporters working for BuzzFeed, MSNBC and CNN quoting from the unsubstantiated Christopher Steele dossier. Clinton and the DNC would later hire Mark Elias of the Perkins Coie law firm to mastermind this hideous plot. They, in turn, employed Glen Simpson of GPS Fusion, who contracted retired MI6 agent Christopher Steele, owner of Orbis Business Intelligence.

Fact checking reveals Mr. Steele only lived as a diplomat in Russia between 1990 and 1993, and having retired from the agency in 2007, had been out of the intelligence gathering loop for nine years before he created his dossier.

I found it hard to believe that a person with such a profile could have any really important or reliable contacts in his contacts list after so much time.

At the same time these events were taking place, retired British diplomat Sir Andrew Wood was attending a conference in Halifax, Canada. It was he who informed Sen. John McCain about the Steele dossier, which would be picked up by David Kramer in London, and later given to FBI director James Comey, and later leaked by the DNC and news media.

And so was born the biggest, longest, most expensive political hoax played on the American people in our nations history. As a very close intelligence friend once said to me, the truth eventually comes out, even if it takes a long time.

But the biggest new twist in this passion play is the fact that Christopher Steeles main informative (operative) was Ukrainian-born Igor Danchenko, a lawyer who was connected to Russian intelligence. A fact that both the FBI and Special Counsel Robert Mueller knew in December 2016 even before his investigation had even started.

I believe that U.S. Attorney John Durham will have even more questions and revelations about this political chicanery within the next couple months.

Lou Deholczer

Original post:

Hoax that was Steele dossier - The Riverdale Press

President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at Carson City Airport, Sunday, Oct. 18, 2020, in Carson City, Nev.

President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at Carson City Airport, Sunday, Oct. 18, 2020, in Carson City, Nev.

President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at Carson City Airport, Sunday, Oct. 18, 2020, in Carson City, Nev.

President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at Carson City Airport, Sunday, Oct. 18, 2020, in Carson City, Nev.

2016 sequel? Trump's old attacks failing to land on Biden

WASHINGTON (AP) President Donald Trump stood before a crowd in a state that had once been firmly in his grasp. There were fewer than three weeks left in the campaign, one reshaped by a virus that has killed more than 215,000 Americans, and he was running out of time to change the trajectory of the race.

He posed a question.

Did you hear the news? the president asked the hopeful crowd. Bruce Ohr is finally out of the Department of Justice.

There were scattered cheers in the crowd as the president then detailed the fate of a mostly forgotten, minor figure in the Russia probe that feels like a lifetime of news cycles ago.

That moment Wednesday in Iowa, a state Trump won comfortably four years ago but is now seen as competitive, underscored a fundamental challenge facing his reelection campaign: Its not 2016.

The presidents attempts to recycle attacks he used on Hillary Clinton that year have so far failed to effectively damage Democrat Joe Biden. And Trump has found himself dwelling more and more in the conservative media echo chamber, talking to an increasingly smaller portion of the electorate.

Fueled by personal grievance, the president has tried to amplify stories that diehard Fox News viewers know by heart but have not broken through to a broader public consumed with the sole issue that has defined the campaign: the president's management of the pandemic. Though firing up his base to turn out in huge numbers is a vital part of his campaigns strategy, Trumps insistence on fighting the last war has sounded alarms within the Republican party.

Theres probably no reason to change in his mind when he surrounds himself in an echo chamber where everyone always tells him hes doing great and hes always in front of adoring crowds who are cheering for him, said Brendan Buck, a former top adviser to Republican House Speakers Paul Ryan and John Boehner. Theyre running a campaign that tries to recreate the energy from before and there are many other factors that make that a fraught path to reelection.

In recent days, Trump's campaign has tried to weaponize potentially hacked emails about Biden. Trumps inner circle has been largely whittled down to the familiar faces of four years ago. A fundraising email sent late Friday was entitled Lock her up, the rallying cry against Clinton.

Oftentimes, it feels as though Trump is simply recycling old material.

Bidens repeatedly surrendered your jobs to China and other countries, Trump said last month in North Carolina.

Four years ago in Florida, the line was: Its one more way the Clintons have surrendered American prosperity to China and so many other countries.

And Sunday night in Nevada, he recounted again which states he won on Election Night in 2016.

Of course, Trump came from behind in the final stages of that campaign to win the White House. Four years later, his campaign expresses confidence that that attacking Bidens nearly five decades in Washington, along with unproven allegations of family corruption, can work again.

The presidents message is clear: he has accomplished more for America in 47 months than Joe Biden has in 47 years, said Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh. This boils down to a choice between a political outsider who has shaken up Washington and a failed career politician.

The Trump campaign believes it has a viable, if narrow path to victory. It has tried to repair his standing among seniors and suburban voters and believes the president can find his way to 270 Electoral College votes again by winning the Sun Belt battlegrounds - Florida, North Carolina, Arizona - while making a huge push in perhaps the most contested state on the map, Pennsylvania.

But some Trump allies and aides believe the campaigns inability to define Biden, while just resuscitating old talking points, is a failure, one exacerbated by a president who cant stay on message, according to four campaign officials and Republicans close to the White House not authorized to publicly discuss private discussions.

It also points to a campaign that has been unable to adjust to an election year unlike any in a century.

From the start of the pandemic, Trump sought to downplay the threat of the virus. His scattershot management threatened his standing among seniors, who are a key to his bases. His approach also squandered what is often a normal American instinct during a crisis: to rally around the flag and the president.

President George W. Bush campaigned for the White House in 2000 as a compassionate conservative. Like Trump, he lost the popular vote in his first race. But after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks reshaped his presidency, Bush pivoted to an emphasis on national security and ultimately won a majority of votes and another term.

When a crisis hits, and a leader grabs hold of the crisis, throws himself into it and as seen as the personification of how to get through it, crisis rebounds to the benefit of that person, said Ari Fleischer, who was Bushs press secretary. President Trump downplayed the crisis enough when he was then viewed as not handling COVID well and has reaped no reward.

Instead, Trump and his advisers leaned on their fog machine again, amplified by conservative media as it did during the Russia probe and the impeachment investigation. He pushed the Department of Justice to investigate members of the Obama administration and the federal bureaucracy for the investigation into the Trump campaigns possible collusion with Russia.

But a probe into unmasking, a common request by a government official for an intelligence agency to identify someone in contact with a foreigner under surveillance, ended with a whimper. And Attorney General William Barr has said John Durhams probe in short, an investigation into the investigators would not be completed before the election, which drew Trumps ire.

Last week, allegations about corruption by Bidens son, Hunter, were met with skepticism, in large part because of questions about the authenticity of an email at the center of the story.

The FBI began investigating whether the emails published by The New York Post related to the younger Biden are connected to a possible Russian influence operation to spread disinformation.

None of the efforts had the impact of Trumps claims four years ago that Clintons use of a private email server as secretary of state endangered national security and alleged she used her government connections to enrich her family. Nor have the Biden emails gained the traction of those hacked from the Clinton campaign and distributed by WikiLeaks.

The one place where the allegations have taken hold is in the conservative media.

Fox News and other outlets have, with regularity, amplified the presidents attacks on the Deep State and ran with unproven allegations against the Obama administration and the Biden family. That, some Republicans believe, creates an echo chamber with Trump, an avid cable news consumer, and convinces him that the storylines are more broadly meaningful than they are.

"Hes in the Fox bubble, hes not being effective against Biden, hes throwing stuff up against the wall, its not going to work, said Bill Kristol, former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle and director of Republican Voters Against Trump. But hes also an incumbent who is underwater because hes done a terrible job. No campaign is going to take change that.

And that bubble, some aides fear, has impacted Trumps message.

In 2016, Trump stuck to key broad themes on immigration, trade, corruption and political correctness and channeled his supporters grievances. This year, hes asking them to share his own.

This is a fatal flaw for Trump. He needs to speak to what the people care about, said Tobe Berkovitz, professor of communications and advertising at Boston University. Yes, its COVID, but all the issues spinning around the COVID, like the economy, like can my kids go to school, can I afford cable so the kids can be in on Zoom. That matters. Not this.

___

Lemire reported from New York.

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2016 sequel? Trump's old attacks failing to land on Biden - Thehour.com

Journalist John Pilger has spent the last three weeks watching Julian Assanges extradition trial at Londons Old Bailey. He spoke with Arena Onlines editor, Timothy Erik Strm and the result was first published in Arena (arena.org.au) in October 2020.

Q: Having watched Julian Assanges trial firsthand, can you describe the prevailing atmosphere in the court?

A: The prevailing atmosphere has been shocking. I say that without hesitation; I have sat in many courts and seldom known such a corruption of due process; this is due revenge. Putting aside the ritual associated with British justice, at times it has been evocative of a Stalinist show trial. One difference is that in the show trials, the defendant stood in the court proper. In the Assange trial, the defendant was caged behind thick glass, and had to crawl on his knees to a slit in the glass, overseen by his guard, to make contact with his lawyers. His message, whispered barely audibly through face masks, was then passed by post-it the length of the court to where his barristers were arguing the case against his extradition to an American hellhole.

Consider this daily routine of Julian Assange, an Australian on trial for truth-telling journalism. He was woken at five oclock in his cell at Belmarsh prison in the bleak southern sprawl of London. The first time I saw Julian in Belmarsh, having passed through half an hour of security checks, including a dogs snout in my rear, I found a painfully thin figure sitting alone wearing a yellow armband. He had lost more than 10 kilos in a matter of months; his arms had no muscle. His first words were: I think I am losing my mind.

I tried to assure him he wasnt. His resilience and courage are formidable, but there is a limit.That was more than a year ago. In the past three weeks, in the pre-dawn, he was strip-searched, shackled, and prepared for transport to the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, in a truck that his partner, Stella Moris, described as an upended coffin. It had one small window; he had to stand precariously to look out. The truck and its guards were operated by Serco, one of many politically connected companies that run much of Boris Johnsons Britain.

The journey to the Old Bailey took at least an hour and a half. Thats a minimum of three hours being jolted through snail-like traffic every day. He was led into his narrow cage at the back of the court, then looked up, blinking, trying to make out faces in the public gallery through the reflection of the glass. He saw the courtly figure of his dad, John Shipton, and me, and our fists went up. Through the glass, he reached out to touch fingers with Stella, who is a lawyer and seated in the body of the court.

We were here for the ultimate of what the philosopher Guy Debord called The Society of the Spectacle: a man fighting for his life. Yet his crime is to have performed an epic public service: revealing that which we have a right to know: the lies of our governments and the crimes they commit in our name. His creation of WikiLeaks and its failsafe protection of sources revolutionised journalism, restoring it to the vision of its idealists. Edmund Burkes notion of free journalism as a fourth estate is now a fifth estate that shines a light on those who diminish the very meaning of democracy with their criminal secrecy. Thats why his punishment is so extreme.

The sheer bias in the courts I have sat in this year and last year, with Julian in the dock, blight any notion of British justice. When thuggish police dragged him from his asylum in the Ecuadorean embassylook closely at the photo and youll see he is clutching a Gore Vidal book; Assange has a political humour similar to Vidalsa judge gave him an outrageous50-week sentence in a maximum-security prison for mere bail infringement.

For months, he was denied exercise and held in solitary confinement disguised as heath care. He once told me he strode the length of his cell, back and forth, back and forth, for his own half-marathon. In the next cell, the occupant screamed through the night. At first he was denied his reading glasses, left behind in the embassy brutality. He was denied the legal documents with which to prepare his case, and access to the prison library and the use of a basic laptop. Books sent to him by a friend, the journalist Charles Glass, himself a survivor of hostage-taking in Beirut, were returned. He could not call his American lawyers. He has been constantly medicated by the prison authorities. When I asked him what they were giving him, he couldnt say. The governor of Belmarsh has been awarded the Order of the British Empire.

At the Old Bailey, one of the expert medical witnesses, Dr. Kate Humphrey, a clinical neuropsychologist at Imperial College, London, described the damage: Julians intellect had gone from in the superior, or more likely very superior range to significantly below this optimal level, to the point where he was struggling to absorb information and perform in the low average range.

This is what the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Professor Nils Melzer, calls psychological torture, the result of a gang-like mobbing by governments and their media shills. Some of the expert medical evidence is so shocking I have no intention of repeating it here. Suffice to say that Assange is diagnosed with autism and Aspergers syndrome and, according to Professor Michael Kopelman, one of the worlds leading neuropsychiatrists, he suffers from suicidal preoccupations and is likely to find a way to take his life if he is extradited to America.

James Lewis, QC, Americas British prosecutor, spent the best part of his cross-examination of Professor Kopelman dismissing mental illness and its dangers as malingering. I have never heard in a modern setting such a primitive view of human frailty and vulnerability.

My own view is that if Assange is freed, he is likely to recover a substantial part of his life. He has a loving partner, devoted friends and allies and the innate strength of a principled political prisoner. He also has a wicked sense of humour.

But that is a long way off. The moments of collusion between the judgeor magistrate, a Gothic-looking Vanessa Baraitser, about whom little is knownand the prosecution acting for the Trump regime have been brazen. Until the last few days, defence arguments have been routinely dismissed. The lead prosecutor, James Lewis QC, ex SAS and currently Chief Justice of the Falklands, by and large gets what he wants, notably up to four hours to denigrate expert witnesses, while the defences examination is guillotined at half an hour. I have no doubt, had there been a jury, his freedom would be assured.

How shaming it all is. A decade ago, the Guardian exploited Assanges work, claimed its profit and prizes as well as a lucrative Hollywood deal, then turned on him with venom. Throughout the Old Bailey trial, two names have been cited by the prosecution, the Guardians David Leigh, now retired as investigations editor and Luke Harding, the Russiaphobe and author of a fictional Guardian scoop that claimed Trump adviser Paul Manafort and a group of Russians visited Assange in the Ecuadorean embassy. This never happened, and the Guardian has yet to apologise. The Harding and Leigh book on Assangewritten behind their subjects backdisclosed a secret password to a WikiLeaks file that Assange had entrusted to Leigh during the Guardians partnership. Why the defence has not called this pair is difficult to understand.

Assange is quoted in their book declaring during a dinner at a London restaurant that he didnt care if informants named in the leaks were harmed. Neither Harding nor Leigh was at the dinner. John Goetz, an investigations reporter with Der Spiegel, was at the dinner and testified that Assange said nothing of the kind. Incredibly, Judge Baraitser stopped Goetz actually saying this in court.

However, the defence has succeeded in demonstrating the extent to which Assange sought to protect and redact names in the files released by WikiLeaks and that no credible evidence existed of individuals harmed by the leaks. The great whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg said that Assange had personally redacted 15,000 files. The renowned New Zealand investigative journalist Nicky Hager, who worked with Assange on the Afghanistan and Iraq war leaks, described how Assange took extraordinary precautions in redacting names of informants.

Q: What are the implications of this trials verdict for journalism more broadly is it an omen of things to come?

A: The Assange effect is already being felt across the world. If they displease the regime in Washington, investigative journalists are liable to prosecution under the 1917 US Espionage Act; the precedent is stark. It doesnt matter where you are. For Washington, other peoples nationality and sovereignty rarely mattered; now it does not exist. Britain has effectively surrendered its jurisdiction to Trumps corrupt Department of Justice. In Australia, a National Security Information Act promises Kafkaesque trials for transgressors. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has been raided by police and journalists computers taken away. The government has given unprecedented powers to intelligence officials, making journalistic whistle-blowing almost impossible. Prime Minister Scott Morrison says Assange must face the music. The perfidious cruelty of his statement is reinforced by its banality.

Evil, wrote Hannah Arendt, comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.

Q: Having followed the story of WikiLeaks closely for a decade, how has this eyewitness experience shifted your understanding of whats at stake with Assanges trial?

A: I have long been a critic of journalism as an echo of unaccountable power and a champion of those who are beacons. So, for me, the arrival of WikiLeaks was exciting; I admired the way Assange regarded the public with respect, that he was prepared to share his work with the mainstream but not join their collusive club. This, and naked jealousy, made him enemies among the overpaid and undertalented, insecure in their pretensions of independence and impartiality.

I admired the moral dimension to WikiLeaks. Assange was rarely asked about this, yet much of his remarkable energy comes from a powerful moral sense that governments and other vested interests should not operate behind walls of secrecy. He is a democrat. He explained this in one of our first interviews at my home in 2010.

What is at stake for the rest of us has long been at stake: freedom to call authority to account, freedom to challenge, to call out hypocrisy, to dissent. The difference today is that the worlds imperial power, the United States, has never been as unsure of its metastatic authority as it is today. Like a flailing rogue, it is spinning us towards a world war if we allow it. Little of this menace is reflected in the media.

WikiLeaks, on the other hand, has allowed us to glimpse a rampant imperial march through whole societiesthink of the carnage in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, to name a few, the dispossession of 37 million people and the deaths of 12 million men, women and children in the war on terrormost of it behind a faade of deception.

Julian Assange is a threat to these recurring horrorsthats why he is being persecuted, why a court of law has become an instrument of oppression, why he ought to be our collective conscience: why we all should be the threat.

The judges decision will be known on January 4.

John Pilger, journalist, author and film director, has won many distinctions for his work, including Britains highest award for journalism twice, an American Emmy, and a British Academy Award. His complete archive is held at the British Library. He lives in London and Sydney.

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Eyewitness to the agony of Julian Assange - Common Ground.ca

Roger Stone reacts outside his Fort Lauderdale, Fla., home after President Trump commuted his federal prison sentence. Photo credit: REUTERS/Joe Skipper.

QUEENS, NY Roger Stones trial was a Stone-cold case of abuse of justice and due process at a time when Americans are crying out for justice. Now, after his federal prison sentence was commuted by the president, thefeds are coming after him again. They never stop abusing justice to attack President Trump and his loyal Republican allies, in their failed attempts to undo what they couldnt do at the ballot box in 2016 and now in 2020, as voter enthusiasm mounts for our president.

Roger Stone, senior campaign advisor to Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Trump, gave us a taste of some Stone Cold Truth askeynote speaker at one of the past Lincoln Dinnersof the Queens Village Republican Club. It was his personal account of the political establishments attempt to remove President Trump after he was elected in 2016 in the largest case of political espionage that makes Watergate look like small potatoes.

Stone, the loyal defender of our president, was prosecuted as a victim of a political witch hunt. He was arrested and a trial ensued for his crimes of standing up for President Trump and not caving in to the threats of his inquisitors of theMueller investigationaimed at sending him to die in the Gulag. This was a Stalinist show trial.

How do they justify the pre-dawn raid with more than 20 FBI agents armed with automatic weapons, with CNN, the American Pravda, filming the spectacle on nationwide TV, to arrest Roger Stone as the #1 enemy of the State? They dont even send 20 FBI agents to arrest a murderer. Without evidence of a crime, presumed guilty before the trial, which was fixed, the prosecution, fixed, the court, the judges, the jury, the media all of which were fixed, in an effort to get Stone to turn on the president, to lie, in order to collect evidence for Muellers Russia collusion witch hunt. They will do anything to overturn the legitimate election of Trump.

The special court of Salem Massachusetts convened the infamous Salem witch trials, where you could be accused, prosecuted, and hanged for practicing witchcraft whether there was evidence or not. An accusation of being a witch was enough criminal evidence. Accusations of being a communist in the McCarthy era could ruin your reputation and send you to prison. People have no rights in high government commissions and are judged guilty before the trial begins.

Stones alleged crimes were prosecuted in a fake government court replete withliberal activist JudgeAmy Berman Jackson,Obama and Hillary Clinton operativesacting as prosecutors, and a partisan jury.It was a bogus government investigation of a political prisoner, in a kangaroo court that found Stone guilty before the trial without evidence of a crime, where he had to prove his innocence by squealing on Trump.

The show trialwas based on the false premises that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is a Russian asset, that Wikileaks is a Russian front organization, and Stone collaborated with WikiLeaks. This was the core of the failed narrative that the Trump campaign was in collusion with Russia to meddle in the 2016 presidential election,all of which is 100% rubbish. WikiLeaks is a big thorn in the side of our government by publishing deep secrets they dont want American voters to know. Its a key part of our governments ongoing political war against our president, who poses a great threat to the Washington deep state, the globalists, the lobbyists, the special interests, and the Democrat party itself. They dont care about America, they dont care about you, they dont care about our Constitution, they dont care about justice. All they want is to preserve business as usual to maintain their own power and control.

So they went after Stone to confess to his alleged crimes, and tell his inquisitors what they wanted to hear, that Trump put him up to this. Smear Trump and youre off the hook. But Roger Stone is an American Patriot, and he would not lie to save his own skin. So they punished him severely.They sentenced a 67-year-old with underlying respiratory problems, to rot in a federal prison with coronavirus outbreaks, for 40 months which would have been a certain death sentence.

Cop killer Steven Chirsewas recently granted early release from prison due to the coronavirus epidemic.Criminals are being released in drovesin crime-ridden Democrat run cities. Murderers are being released. But Stone, with no prior record, is treated worse than a murderer. They wanted to send him to prison to die, like a political prisoner in Stalins Russia. Like the Soviet court system, criminals are let out, and if you dont fit their narrative, they send you to the Gulag. Theyre all Stalinists the Mueller Special Counsel investigation, the judge, the courts, FBI, CIA, the media they got rid of the rule of law and people who dont fit their narrative, to give the state absolute power.

They wanted to destroy a human life to get to Trump. You wouldnt want your worst enemy to go to jail with Covid. But where is the uproar from the silent majority? Why arent more good people demanding justice for Roger Stone, as the DOJ inspector general is now re-investigating his sentencing? Why werent more people screaming that the punishment doesnt fit the crime? Where are all the social justice lawyers, hypocrites that they are? Paging Clarence Darrow who famously said: You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other mans freedom?

Where are the good people of this country standing up for a person, whom they may not like, but still deserves equal justice, because it could be you next. Stone was framed and they sent him out to die. Stone received no justice, but the greatest threat is coming to all of us. You will not receive justice under the new Stalinist Democrat regime. We must all stand up for Roger Stone and true justice, and vote in the most important election of our lifetime.

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Op Ed: Submission: The Stalinist Show Trial of Roger Stone - The Published Reporter

The Wikileaks disclosures brought to light criminal behaviour the US government wanted concealed from its citizens the revelation of which is probably the most important function of a free press. However, this government has done everything possible, at the cost of tens of millions of pounds, to punish Mr Assange to please its US ally. Anyone following reports on the recent proceedings would be utterly shocked at the show-trial nature of the hearings.

There are arguably more important press failings, for example, the feeble media challenges to the governments deceits around Covid-19 reporting, or the fiascos and corruption over PPE, test and trace and the amazingly crass transfer of the elderly from hospitals to care homes. Also, of course, on the selling of lethal weaponry to the Saudis that the UN claims are being used for war crimes in Yemen. (The government was outraged by the alleged use of Novichok in Britain, yet its weapons are being used to kill thousands of civilians abroad the hypocrisy is breathtaking.)

An informed public is vital for any meaningful democracy and it is their right, except where secrecy is necessary for national security, to know what it is being done in their name. If the bulk of the media, as it appears in the Assange case, collude with the government on silencing whistleblowers, they are doing the country no favours. The silence of the national press, and the BBC in particular, on the Julian Assange hearings is a disgrace.

Were all stuffed this Christmas

Nicola Sturgeons warning about the need for people to curtail their customary festivities at Christmas this year because of coronavirus reminded me of the time Harold Macmillans chancellor of the exchequer, Selwyn Lloyd, introduced in 1961 various measures of what we would now call austerity, including a pay pause.

One wit described it thus: Selwyn Lloyd is doing well/ No beer, no fags, no cash, Noel

Workers need to learn new skills

This mornings news that UK job losses rose at the fastest rate since records began, coupled with the biggest rise in unemployment in over a decade, show the devastating effects the pandemic has had on jobs and businesses. With further restrictions likely to be imposed over the winter months, we must brace ourselves for further disruption.

In April, a survey suggested that a fifth of firms did not have enough cash to survive even the next four weeks. Our own research certainly confirmed that firms top lines have taken a knock during the pandemic with revenue for SMEs down 6.6 per cent on average over the last six months. Many continue to anticipate challenges, with a third of SMEs expecting to make some employees redundant in the next three months.

Yet there is cause for optimism. SMEs have also been prompt to adapt and quickly tailored their business and operating models to the new, rapidly changing business environment, with 37 per cent of businesses asking their employees to take on new responsibilities and expand their skillset. In the face of the biggest economic hurdle in decades, having the right skills isnt just a nice to have for businesses it is essential for survival.

If we are to get the economy back on its feet, remain competitive on the global scene and sustain growth, we need to better support all workers to reskill and upskill throughout their careers and encourage them to start adapting their skillsets to the post-pandemic ways of working. This includes changing the apprenticeship levy to an apprenticeship and skills levy for all workers to ensure businesses have the talent they need now and in the future; continuing to invest towards higher level apprenticeships to raise the skill levels of the UK workforce; and introducing a rebuttable right to retrain to empower workers to request further training and development.

Andrew Harding, chief executive management accounting, The Chartered Institute of Management Accountants

No penalties for footballers

While the population is subjected to restrictions on travel and socialising, leaving industries facing closure, it seems the same does not apply to sport. With the national, Champions and Europa leagues, coupled with the European Nations Cup, hundreds of clubs with their players and entourage are flying backwards and forwards across the country and Europe, as far as Kazakhstan, to play matches.

They use aircraft, do not socially distance and then return to their own clubs, using aircraft, trains or cars. The risk of infection somewhere must be huge, yet it is permitted demonstrating total hypocrisy.

Beethovens Bonn

I was born and raised in Bonn and remember meeting my friends at the citys favourite meeting place, the Beethoven statue on Bonns central square. In Bonn, you encounter Beethoven everywhere streets, squares, concert halls and schools are named after him. During this years carnival, the whole city sold out of Beethoven wigs as many chose to dress up as the citys prodigious son.

However, the reason why Bonn became capital was not because it was the last one standing, as you portray it. Rather, Germanys first chancellor Konrad Adenauer made the case for Bonn. Not only was Bonn close to home for him (he was from Cologne), it deliberately was a small placeholder for Berlin. For him, choosing Frankfurt, the runner up to become capital, would have been paramount to accepting Western Germany as the new Germany. However, he was keen to make clear that Western Germany with Bonn as a capital was a provisional state, waiting for reunification.

And, as if to close the circle, Beethoven provided the soundtrack for reunification itself. The first concert after the fall of the Berlin Wall was Beethovens 7th symphony, conducted by Daniel Barenboim. And in December 1989, during the Berlin Celebration Concerts, Bernstein directed an orchestra of English, French, American, Russian, East and West German musicians performing Beethovens 9th symphony, with one change. Instead of the Ode to Joy Bernstein had rewritten the text to Ode to Freedom. Nobody could have scored this joyful moment in German history better than Beethoven himself.

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The silence of the press on the Julian Assange hearings is a disgrace - The Independent

Editors note: Fidel Narvez served as Ecuadors consul in the UK from 2010 until July 2018. He helped get Julian Assange political asylum, and regularly communicated with the WikiLeaks publisher when he was trapped in the London embassy. In a previous article for The Grayzone, Narvez debunked 40 media lies and distortions about Assange. In this piece, he summarizes the key points from the British extradition hearings against Assange in September 2020.

At the end of the hearings that seek to extradite journalist Julian Assange to the United States, on October 1, his defense team should have felt triumphant. Because with more than 30 witnesses and testimonies, throughout the whole month of September, they gave a beating to the prosecution representing the U.S.

If the case in London were decided solely on justice, as it should in a state based on law, this battle would have been won by Assange.

However, this trial of the century is, above all, a political trial, and there remains the feeling that the ruling was made beforehand, regardless of the law.

The court kicked off on September 7 with hundreds of protesters outside, in contrast with the restrictions that the court imposed inside in what is the most important case against the freedom of expression in an entire generation.

It only permitted the entry of five people on the list of family members, and five people from the public, who were put in an adjacent room, where they were barely able to follow the video transmission.

The judge Vanessa Baraitser, who is overseeing the case, without a convincing reason cut the access to the video stream that had previously been authorized to nearly 40 human rights organizations and international observers, including Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders, and PEN International.

Each day, starting at 5 am, selfless activists stood in line so that observers like Reporters Without Borders, for example, could enter and take one of the five available seats. Thanks to them, and to family members of Assange, I was able to be in court to attend the majority of the hearings.

Julian himself was also woken up, every day, at 5 am and, naked and handcuffed, subjected to humiliating inspections and x-ray scans, before being put into a police car and crossing through London traffic for more than an hour and a half.

At 10 am, when court was finally in session, Julian had already endured five hours of insult, before being put in a glass cage for the rest of the day.

To communicate with his lawyers, Julian had to get on his knees to talk to them through a slit in the cage, just a few meters away from the ears of the prosecutions attorneys something that clearly violates due process.

The defense began by requesting deferment of the hearings, in light of the fact that the U.S. had filed a new extradition request at the last minute, with new accusations that not Assange himself was able to look over.

In the previous six months, Julian had practically no access to his lawyers. The judge, however, rejected any deferment.

The defense had based its strategy on proving that the legal process was being abused in many interrelated ways. In this extensive summary, allow me to explain 10 reasons that I identified as important factors against the extradition.

For this exercise I have relied, furthermore, on the reporting of American journalist Kevin Gosztola and that of the former British diplomat Craig Murray, next to whom I shared a seat in the court.

Julian Assange would be prosecuted under the Espionage Act of the United States for a political crime, which is excluded from the extradition agreements between the United Kingdom and U.S.

The U.S. attorney generals office has furthermore said that Assange, as a foreigner, would not be able to exercise the right of the First Amendment. That is to say, punishments apply to foreigners in the U.S., but not legal protections.

The director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, Trevor Timm, told the court that the extradition of Assange would be the end of national security journalism because it would criminalize all reporters who receive secret documents.

He criticized the accusation that having a SecureDrop is a crime, as The Guardian, Washington Post, New York Times, and more than 80 other news organization, including the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, also currently use SecureDrop.

Timm said the Department of Justice has a political orientation, that the prosecution cannot decide who is a journalist and who is not, and that the charges against Assange would radically rewrite the First Amendment.

This was also affirmed in the written testimony by the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, Jameel Jaffer, who insisted that the accusation against Assange is meant to discourage journalism that is essential for democracy, and represents a grave threat to the freedom of the press.

The professor of journalism and former investigative reporter Mark Feldstein testified that leaks are a vital element of journalism, that the collection of classified information is a standard operating procedure for journalists, and that WikiLeaks publications are constitutionally protected.

The US lawyer Eric Lewis, a former law professor at Georgetown University, noted that the Obama administration had finally decided not to try Assange Assange because of what is known as the New York Times problem that is to say, there was not a way to prosecute him for publishing classified information without the same principle applying to many other journalists.

Lewis testified that the Trump administration had put pressure on prosecutors from the Eastern District of Virginia, and cited a New York Times article that referenced Matthew Miller, the former Justice Department spokesman under Obama, who warned the case could establish a precedent that threatens all journalists.

This same concern was expressed before the court by the lawyer Thomas A. Durkin, a former assistant United States attorney and professor of law, who warned that the Trump administration ordering the reopening of the case was clearly a political decision.

Both Durkin and Lewis affirmed that Assange would be condemned for life, given that the sentences for spying in the U.S. are generally life in prison, and the most lenient are from 20 to 30 years.

The lawyer Carey Shenkman, who wrote a book about the history and use of the Espionage Act, testified that the law is extraordinarily broad and one of the most divisive laws of the United States. Never, in the history of the Espionage Act, has there been an accusation against an American editor and neither has there been an extraterritorial accusation against a non-American editor.

The prosecution, for its part, in what was one of the most terrifying admissions heard in the court, recognized that, while the Espionage Act had never been used against a journalist, its extensive scope would allow them to use it in this occasion.

The lawyer Jennifer Robinson, a member of Assanges legal team, submitted to the court a written testimony detailing an offer of a pardon by President Trump, in exchange for Assange identifying the source of the leaks that WikiLeaks published from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 2016.

The offer was made through the US Representative Dana Rohrabacher during a visit to the embassy of Ecuador. The congressman had explained that the information from Assange about the source of the leaks would be interest, value, and assistance for the president, and would resolve the ongoing speculation about Russian involvement.

The offer from the White House demonstrated the politicized nature of the case, given that the charges were made after Assange refused to provide any information.

The award-winning journalist Patrick Cockburn, who has written for The Independent for more than 30 years, submitted written testimony in which he said that Assange is being persecuted because he exposed the way the US, as the worlds sole superpower, really conducted its wars something that the military and political establishments saw as a blow to their credibility and legitimacy.

For his part, the journalist Ian Cobain, who worked for The Guardian during the publication of WikiLeaks materials in 2010, said in written testimony that Assange is being persecuted because, There is always the understanding one that is so clear that it needs not be spoken that anyone who has knowledge of state crimes, and who comes forward to corroborate allegations about those crimes, may face prosecution.

The renowned professor Noam Chomsky told the court in written testimony that Assange has performed an enormous service to all the people in the world who treasure the values of freedom and democracy and who therefore demand the right to know what their elected representatives are doing. His actions in turn have led him to be pursued in a cruel and intolerable manner.

Yet, if there remain doubts about the political nature of the case, there was also the Judge Baraitser herself, who in the court said her original intention was to have the verdict before the U.S. presidential elections, and who asked the defense and the prosecution what implications a ruling would have had after said elections.

Why is a British judge, who is supposed to impart justice solely based on facts and evidence, waiting for a purely political event in another country to reveal her verdict?

The legendary leaker of the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, told that court that he totally disagrees with the good Ellsberg / bad Assange theory. He said Julian did everything possible to redact and withhold damaging information, working with media outlets in the redaction process.

The Pentagon Papers were top secret, but WikiLeaks documents were not classified as restricted and hence, by definition, there should be nothing that is truly sensitive.

Ellsberg said that Assange withheld 15,000 files from the Afghan War Diary to protect names, and also requested help from the State Department and Defense Department to redact names, but the U.S. government refused to help, despite the fact that it is standard journalistic practice to consult with officials to minimize damage.

In the court-martial of Chelsea Manning, Ellsberg noted, the Defense Department admitted that it could not identify a single death caused by WikiLeaks publications.

The co-founder of the organization Iraq Body Count (IBC), John Sloboda, whose work has been recognized by the United Nations and European Union, testified that he worked with WikiLeaks and media outlets to prepare the Iraq War Logs before their publication. Sloboda recounted that Assange demanded and directed a very strict redaction process to prevent possible harm.

WikiLeaks used a software that was able to edit thousands of documents, identifying each word that was not in the English-language dictionary and automatically removing it, such as Arab names for example. Then, the files were scanned again to remove occupations, such as doctor or driver, in order to better protect identities.

This editing took weeks and was a meticulous process, Sloboda recounted. There was considerable pressure on WikiLeaks because other media outlets wanted to push it to publish more quickly, but the position of Assange and WikiLeaks was to be excessively cautious.

John Goetz, the current director of investigations for German public television NDR, confirmed that when he worked with Assange in 2010, representing Der Spiegel, WikiLeaks had a rigorous redaction process, and that Assange was obsessed with keeping classified documents secure and preventing harmful disclosures.

I remember being very irritated by Assanges constant and endless reminders that we needed to be safe, and that WikiLeaks ended up removing more things than even the Defense Department, Goetz said. Assange frequently discussed how to find confidential names so that we can redact them and take measures to make sure that nobody is at risk.

The journalist Nicky Hager, author of the book Other Peoples Wars: New Zealand in Afghanistan, Iraq and the war on terror, testified that one of his jobs was to identify any cable that should not be released for reasons like the personal security of people mentioned, and that WikiLeaks personnel were committed to a careful and responsible process.

He was shocked to see the level of care that they were taking to redact information that could hurt third parties. People were working in silence for hours and hours reviewing documents, he recalled.

The veteran Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi, whose persistent reporting showed how British prosecutors pressured their Swedish counterparts to not interrogate Assange in London, said in her written testimony:

I myself was given access to 4,189 cables I sat down with Mr Assange and went through the cables as systematically as possible Everything was done with the utmost responsibility and attention That was the first time I had ever worked in any publishing enterprise involving strict procedures of that kind. Even experienced international colleagues found the procedures burdensome, involving protections considerably beyond those which any of them were accustomed to exercising Not even the work done by close colleagues about the Italian mafia required such extreme precaution and security, it never rose to those levels.

The British-American lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, the founder of the human rights organization Reprieve, testified that WikiLeaks shined a light on torture of detainees in Guantnamo, and revealed that many were not terrorists, but rather had been arrested in Afghanistan in a bounty system. The worst accusations had been staged against prisoners, who were sometimes forced to admit to them under torture.

Stafford Smith explained that it was thanks to WikiLeaks that the use of these torture techniques are known, such as the pulley, or hanging someone by their wrists until their shoulders are dislocated, and cited as an example Binyam Mohamed, a UK citizen whose genitals were on a daily basis cut with a shaving razor.

The lawsuits against the United States drone assassination program in Pakistan would have been impossible without WikiLeaks, Stafford Smith said.

John Sloboda of Iraq Body Count said that the Iraq War Logs constitute the greatest contribution to public knowledge about civilian casualties in Iraq, revealing around 15,000 deaths that had previously been unknown.

Patrick Cockburn, of The Independent, insisted, Wikileaks did what all journalists should do, which is to make important information available to the public, enabling people to make evidence-based judgments about the world around them and, in particular, about the actions of their governments.

The files published by WikiLeaks convey the reality of war far better than even the most well-informed journalistic accounts, Cockburn added, showing how the dead were automatically identified as terrorists caught in the act, regardless or evidence to the contrary.

The former journalist Dean Yates, who was chief of Reuters Baghdad bureau in 2007 and 2008, said in his written declaration that it was not until 2010, when WikiLeaks published the famous Collateral Murder video, that he knew the truth about the death of his journalist colleagues Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh.

Yates recounted the attempts by the United States to cover up the truth, and that the military only showed him part of the video. The only person who told the truth was Assange.

Had it not been for Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, the truth of what happened to Namir and Saeed, the truth of what happened on that street in Baghdad on July 12, 2007, would not have been brought to the world, Yates said. What Assange did was 100% an act of truth-telling, exposing to the world what the war in Iraq in fact was and how the US military behaved and lied.

On this point, Judge Baraitser interrupted Yates testimony, due to repeated pressure by the prosecution. It is ironic that a court would seek to criminalize journalism, while refusing to hear about the crimes exposed by journalism.

That is what happened in the much-anticipated testimony by the German-Lebanese citizen Khaled el-Masri, who was kidnapped and tortured by the CIA and who for technical problems with the online transmission was not able to testify in person.

The judge stopped listening to him, also under pressure by the prosecution. This is what provoked an indignant reaction from Julian Assange, who shouted, I will not censor the testimony of a torture victim before this tribunal I will not accept it!

The prosecution, finally, allowed the summary of the written statement to be read: El-Masri was brought to a CIA black site in Afghanistan, where he was beaten, strip searched, sodomized, force-fed with a tube through his nose, and subject to total sensory deprivation and other cruel forms of inhumane treatment for six months.

Finally, when the torturers realized that they had the wrong man, El-Masri was abandoned with his eyes blindfolded on a remote road in Albania. When he returned to Germany, his house was empty and his wife and kids had gone.

The journalist John Goetz, on German public television, demonstrated that El-Masris story was true, and tracked down the CIA agents who were involved. German prosecutors sent out orders for the arrest of the kidnappers, but they were never executed.

WikiLeaks publications proved that the United States put pressure on the German government to block a legal investigation into the crime.

The European Court of Human Rights, using the WikiLeaks cables, agreed with El-Masri, who wrote to the court:

WikiLeaks publications have been essential to accept the truth of the crime and the cover-up without dedicated and brave exposure of the state secrets in question, what happened to me would never have been acknowledged and understood.

Three of the 18 charges against Assange accuse him specifically of publishing US diplomatic cables without redactions. But the defense and its witnesses showed that WikiLeaks was not the first media outlet to publish these files, and those who did it were not prosecuted. WikiLeaks was careful to encrypt the archive, but actions out of Assanges control led to its publication.

The German computer science professor Christian Grothoff testified about an investigation into the chronology of the events of 2011. Grothoff reviewed the timeline: In the summer of 2010, WikiLeaks shared the cables with The Guardian journalist David Leigh, through a file on a temporary website protected with a very strong encryption password. Assange only wrote part of the password on paper. WikiLeaks and its media partners began to publish the edited cables in November 2010.

WikiLeaks suffered constant attacks on its servers and mirror copies of its archive were created around the world to protect the information. Those copies were not accessible without a secure code. In February 2011, The Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding published a book in which the title of a chapter was the complete password for the unredacted cables. When the book published the key, WikiLeaks no longer had the ability to delete the mirror archives or change the encryption.

On August 25, 2011, the German newspaper Der Freitag published an article in which it explained that the password revealed by Leigh and Harding could be used, and in a few days the complete archive, without redaction or editing, appeared on Cryptome.org, a page created in the United States. The websites MRKVA and Pirate Bay also published copies of the archive. On September 1, the U.S. government accessed the unredacted cache for the first time, through Pirate Bay.

Professor Grothoff testified that he had not been able to find a single example of the code published online before The Guardian journalists published it in their book.

Assange and his WikiLeaks colleague Sarah Harrison called the U.S. State Department to warn that the unredacted cables were online, but their warnings were ignored. The journalist Stefania Maurizi recounted in her testimony that she was meeting with WikiLeaks the same day that she found out that the cables had been published, out of Assanges control.

I remember that when I arrived there were fierce discussions as to what to do. Julian was clearly acutely troubled by the situation with which Wikileaks was faced, she recalled. For more than a year, he had been taking all of the possible measures to prevent this. Assange was himself making urgent attempts to inform the (US) State Department the information was circulating out of Wikileaks control.

WikiLeaks had to release the cables on September 2, 2010, and published an editorial note indicating that A Guardian journalist has negligently disclosed top secret WikiLeaks decryption passwords to hundreds of thousands of unredacted unpublished US diplomatic cables.

The journalist Glenn Greenwald, who won the Pulitzer Prize for the Edward Snowden revelations, wrote that day:

Once WikiLeaks realized what had happened, they notified the State Department, but faced a quandary: virtually every governments intelligence agencies would have had access to these documents as a result of these events, but the rest of the world including journalists, whistleblowers and activists identified in the documents did not. At that point, WikiLeaks decided quite reasonably that the best and safest course was to release all the cables in full, so that not only the worlds intelligence agencies but everyone had them, so that steps could be taken to protect the sources.

The journalist Jakob Augstein, editor of Der Freitag, confirmed in his written testimony that, in August 2010, his media outlet published an article titled Leak at WikiLeaks, about the about the release of the password by The Guardian journalists. Assange called him and requested that he not publish anything that could reveal where the archive could be found, worried about the security of the informants of the U.S. government.

Finally, John Young, the representative of Cryptome.org, confirmed in his written testimony that his U.S.-based website first published the unredacted diplomatic cables, before WikiLeaks republished it:

I published on Cryptome.org unredacted diplomatic cables on September 1, 2011 and that publication remains available at the present no US law enforcement authority has notified me that this publication of the cables is illegal, consists or contributes to a crime in any way, nor have they asked for them to be removed.

One of the charges against Julian Assange is that he supposedly conspired with the soldier Chelsea Manning to obtain greater access to government databases y hid his identity to do it.

The argument is that Manning spoke in an encrypted chat with the user Nathaniel Frank (who the United States alleges, but has not proved, was Assange) and requested help from him to open an encrypted part of a password. The defense argues that Manning asked for help to protect her identity, something that journalists are obligated to do with their sources.

The defense brought before the court the best possible expert on the material: Patrick Eller, a forensic digital expert who worked for two decades for the U.S. Army and now is a professor of forensic evidence and the president of Metadata Forensics, which investigates civil and criminal cases. Eller reviewed the transcriptions from the court-martial of Manning in 2013 and came to the following conclusions:

a) The attempt to decrypt the password was technologically impossible and computationally not viable in March 2010, when the conversation took place between Manning and Nathaniel Frank.

b) Even if it were feasible, it would not have given Manning greater access to the government databases. At the date of Mannings chat with Nathaniel Frank about the decryption of the key, Manning had already leaked all of the documents to Wikileaks, excluding the State Department cables, that were being stored on a network that did not require login information, because Manning already had access to it.

c) And even if it were feasible, the purpose would not have been to conceal Mannings identity. What is much more probable, testified Eller, who interviewed members of Mannings military unit, was that they wanted to use the administrative account to download unauthorized movies, music, and games, and this required decrypting the password. Manning, Eller said, was the person to go to in her unit to help her colleagues do this.

In his testimony, Eller also established that neither he nor the U.S. government can prove that Nathaniel Frank was truly Julian Assange, or any other person.

Julian Assange would be tried in the Spy Court of the United States, where national security cases go, and which in 2010 opened a secret investigation against WikiLeaks and Assange, for which he requested political asylum from Ecuador.

This is the Eastern District of Virginia, where the CIA and major national security contractors are based. The jury, therefore, comes from the place with the largest concentration of the U.S. intelligence community, where Assange would have no change of getting a fair trial.

Daniel Ellsberg told the court that those accused of espionage cannot even argue reasons that justify their actions. I did not have a fair trial, no one since me had a fair trial on these charges, and Julian Assange cannot remotely get a fair trial under those charges if he were tried.

This was also confirmed by the lawyer Carey Shenkman, who told the court that the Espionage Act does not allow the accused to argue their defense in the public interest.

Trevor Timm noted in the court that 99.9 percent of grand juries make charges based on what the prosecution establishes, and that a study of 162,000 grand juries revealed that just 11 rejected the request of a federal prosecutor to press charges.

Eric Lewis said the judge of the Eastern District of Virginia would give Assange an extremely aggressive sentence.

The professor Mark Feldstein told the court that a large amount of academic material demonstrates that grand juries are maleable and do what the prosecutors tell them to do.

By being accused of spying, Julian Assange would be imprisoned under Special Administration Measures (SAMs). He would be in solitary confinement, would not be allowed any contact with family, and would only be able to speak with lawyers, who could not be able to communicate any messages from him or would face criminal punishment. Such conditions are a sentence to a living death.

For his entire trial, Assange would be imprisoned in Alexandria Detention Center (ADC), and he would later serve a life sentence in the maximum security prison ADX Florence in Colorado.

The prosecution has tried to whitewash the conditions, in the written testimony of the assistant United States attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, Gordon Kromberg, who tried to depict the hell of maximum-security prisons as friendly, which the defenses witnesses said was a fiction.

Yancey Ellis, a former defense lawyer for the U.S. Marines, who has defended many clients from ADC, told the court that the situation with Assange would be cruel and oppressive, with an unknown time in solitary confinement, where he would be subjected to torture and inhumane and degrading punishment.

Assange would pass 22 to 23 hours per day without any contact in a cell of less than five square meters. Normally, food is eaten inside the cell, and he would not have access to therapeutic programs of any kind. There is no outside area for recreation or exercise in the Alexandria prison.

The lawyer Joel Sickler, an expert on prison conditions and founder of the Justice Advocacy Group in Virginia, who also has clients in ADC and is familiar with ADX Florence prison in Colorado, told the court that Assange absolutely wont have communication with other inmates. He added, Your whole world is the four corners of that room.

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Julian Assange faces the 'trial of the century': 10 reasons why it threatens freedom of speech - The Grayzone