A top UN official has accused the British and US governments of torture over their detention of whistleblowers Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, who between them embarrassed the West over its military operations in Iraq.

Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on torture, said Ms Manning, who is being held in a jail in Virginia after refusing to testify about Mr Assange, was being being subjected to an open-ended, progressively severe measure of coercion fulfilling all the constitutive elements of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

He added: The practice of coercive detention appears to be incompatible with the international human rights obligations of the United States.

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In regard to Britains treatment of Mr Assange, who is being held in Londons Belmarsh prison, where supporters say his health is fading, he said: Mr Assanges continued exposure to severe mental and emotional suffering which, in light of the circumstances, clearly amounts to psychological torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

The condemnation of the governments treatment of the two prisonerswas made in separate letters, that Mr Melzer, 49, made public after he said he received no response to concerns he raised with US and British authorities.

REUTERS

REUTERS

The continued detention of Ms Manning is not a lawful sanction.and should be discontinued and abolished without delay, he said on Twitter.

Of the letter released about Mr Assanges treatment, he said: My official findings, supported by medical experts, unquestionably provide reasonable ground to believe UK officials contributed to Assanges psychological torture or ill-treatment.

Though they have never met, the lives of Ms Manning, 32, and 48-year-old Mr Assange, became inextricably linked after the one-time army intelligence analyst provided a wealth of materials about the US-led invasion and military operation in Iraq to Wikileaks, the whistleblower organisation Mr Assange founded in 2006.

Among the most damning material was video footage that showed two USAH-64 Apache helicopters attacking buildings in Baghdad in 2007, and then closing in a group of people. Among the people were children and journalists.

Chelsea Manning: Jailed US analyst walks free after refusing to testify to WikiLeaks grand jury

Oh, yeah, look at those dead bastards, one US airman can be heard to say. The attack killed at least a dozen people.

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Ms Manning served seven years for leaking the video, much of that time spent in solitary confinement. She was detained again in the spring of 2019 after refusing to testify against Mr Assange at a grand jury that was established in Virginia to support a prosecution of him.

I will not participate in a secret process that I morally object to, particularly one that has been used to entrap and persecute activists for protected political speech, she said.

Mr Assange was arrested on April 11 at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, after US prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia unsealed a criminal case against him, alleging he conspired with Ms Manning to commit computer intrusion.

Mr Assange, whose organisation also published information about Guantanamo Bay, the US state department and Democratic Party emails allegedly obtained by Russian hackers, is preparing to fight his case at an extradition hearing, due to begin in February.

The US has charged him with 17 offences, most of the them under the Espionage Act. The US alleges he helped Ms Manning hack a Pentagon computer network, something his supporters have denied is true.

After he was arrested, a lawyer for Mr Assange, Barry Pollack, said: These unprecedented charges demonstrate the gravity of the threat the criminal prosecution of Julian Assange poses to all journalists in their endeavour to inform the public about actions that have been taken by the US government.

Mr Assange, whose health is said to be worsening according to friends and supporters who have visited him in jail, faces up to 175 years in jail if convicted.

An arrest warrant from Sweden, relating to allegations of sexual assault, has since been dropped.

The US state department did not immediately respond to inquiries from The Independent. A spokesperson for the British foreign office said: We strongly disagree with any suggestion that Mr Assange has experienced improper treatment in the UK. The allegation Mr Assange was subjected to torture is unfounded and wholly false.

The rest is here:
WikiLeaks: UN official accuses UK and US of torture over treatment of Assange and Manning - The Independent

In the meantime, Facebook has been used again and again to spread mass disinformation, from hate speech that fueled the massacre of Rohingya muslims in Myanmar to WhatsApp propaganda that helped elected far-right Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, to troll armies tasked with attacking the enemies of Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte and Donald Trump. In almost every instance, Zuckerberg has been slow to react, or even initially dismissive of concerns. The result has been a decade of disastrous effects, for both privacy and politics, across the globe. As Facebook has claimed a near-monopoly on social media, there's little sign that Zuckerberg is willing to slow his company's rapacious growth to prevent the next catastrophe.

Julian Assange

Julian Assange first came on the general public's radar in a 2010 WikiLeaks video called Collateral Murder. It represented a radical new model of secret-spilling that empowered whistleblowers by offering them a digital dead drop, one that protected with their anonymity with strong encryption. WikiLeaks would follow up with one blockbuster leak after another, with hundreds of thousands of classified files from the war in Afghanistan and then Iraq, followed by a quarter million secret cables from the State Department. With those megaleaks from his tiny group, Assange successfully upended parts of the global order, hastening the US pullout from Iraq and helping to touch off the Arab Spring with its revelations about the Tunisian dictator Ben Alieven as WikiLeaks was accused of also endangering innocents like State Department sources whose names were included in the files. But Assange would have another, unexpected second act in 2016, when Russian agents would exploit WikiLeaks to launder documents stolen from the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. After all, Assange never cared much for distinctions between whistleblowers and hackers. Throughout those years, Assange always maintained that the US intended to imprison himthat US hegemony considered him too dangerous to be left free. When Assange was pulled out of the Ecuadorean embassy in April and put in a British prison awaiting extradition to face US hacking and espionage charges, he was proven right.

ISIS

Violent Islamist group ISIS integrated terrorism with the internet like no one else in history. From its initial takeover of Mosul in 2014, ISIS both horrified the world with its acts of barbarism and also carried out a deeply effective online recruiting campaign. With grisly propaganda videos and lies about the Islamist paradise it sought to create posted to YouTube and other social media, it convinced many young Muslims across the globe to rally to its cause, turning Iraq and Syria into magnets for juvenile, misguided bloodletting and forcing every tech company to consider how the most violent humans in the world might misuse their services. But ISIS also successfully turned the internet into a means of distributing its violence physically, persuading lone wolves to carry out unspeakable attacks from Paris to Nice to London to New York. Even as ISIS's caliphate has been dismantled and its founder killed by US forces, that placeless call to violence still rings out across the internet, and may yet pull more troubled young men under its sway.

Lazarus

North Korea may have largely cut off its populace from the internet. But it makes a few very notable exceptions, including for the North Korean hackers broadly known as Lazarus, which has carried out some of the most aggressive hacking operations ever seen online. Lazarus first shocked the world with its attack on Sony Pictures in retaliation for its Kim Jong-un assassination comedy, The Interview. Under the cover story of a hacktivist group known as "Guardians of Peace," they breached the company, spilled thousands of its emails online, extorted the it for cash, and destroyed hundreds of its computers. Since then, Lazarus has shifted its tactics in part to purely profit-motivated cybercrime, stealing billions of dollars around the world in bank fraud operations and cryptocurrency thefts. Those cybercriminal operations hit a new low in May of 2017, when Lazarus released WannaCry, a ransomware worm that exploited the leaked NSA hacking tool EternalBlue to automatically spread to as many computers as possible before encrypting them and demanding a ransom. Thanks to errors in its code, WannaCry didn't make much money for its creators. But it had a far larger effect on its victims: It cost somewhere between $4 and $8 billion globally to repair the damage.

NSO Group

At the beginning of this decade, hacking contractor firms and sellers of techniques known as "exploits" were barely heard of. The few known cybermercenaries were subjects of scandal and accused of digital arms dealing. Today, the Israeli firm NSO Group has made them all look tame by comparison. The company has sold techniques for remotely breaking into iPhones and Android phones with little or no interaction from the victim. In some cases, the company and its customers were able to plant malware on a target phone simply by calling it on WhatsApp. And despite the company's repeated insistence that it doesn't sell its hacking services to human rights abusers, the targets of its hacking have shown otherwise: Activist Ahmed Mansour, one of the first high-profile victims of NSO's exploits, is now serving a 10-year prison sentence in the United Arab Emirates. NSO malware targets in Mexico have included activists who have lobbied for a soda tax and the wife of a slain journalist. When WhatsApp sued NSO in October, it accused the firm of helping to hack 1,400 victims across the globe, including dissidents, diplomats, lawyers, and government officials. All of that makes NSO's spying-for-hire operation just as dangerous as many of the world's most brazen state-sponsored hackers.

Xenotime

In August of 2017, a piece of malware known as Triton or Trisis shut down an oil refinery owned by petrochemical firm Petro Rabigh, on the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia. That was, in fact, a lucky outcome. The malware had actually been intended not to stop the plant's operations, but to disable so-called safety-instrumented systems in the plant designed to prevent dangerous conditions like leaks and explosions. The malware, planted by a mysterious hacker group known as Xenotime, could have easily been the first cyberattack to have cost a human life. Xenotime's motivations aren't clear, nor are its origins. Though the usual suspect for any attack on Saudi Arabia is Iran, FireEye in 2018 found links between its Triton/Trisis malware and a Russian university. Since the Petro Rabigh incident, Xenotime's target list has grown to include North American oil and gas operations, and even the US power grid. By all appearances, the group has only displayed a fraction of its destructive potential.

Cody Wilson

Over the last 10 years, Cody Wilson has developed a talent for incubating nightmares in the space between new technologies and the laws that control their most dangerous applications. In 2013, he released blueprints online for the world's first fully 3-D printable gun, allowing anyone with a 3-D printer to create a deadly, unregulated weapon in the privacy of their home. But Wilson soon traded the sci-fi shock value of that idea for practical lethality: He sold thousands of Ghost Gunner machines capable of carving away aluminum to finish fully metal AR-15s and Glocks from fully unregulated parts. In the meantime, Wilson's side projects have been just as controversial. He founded Hatreon, a Patreon-type donations site that funded extremists and white nationalists, as well as a bitcoin wallet designed for perfectly untraceable transactions, unlocking powerful new forms of money laundering. (That cryptocurrency project was halted only when his partner, Amir Taaki, unexpectedly smuggled himself into Syria to fight ISIS alongside the Kurds.)

Last year, Wilson was arrested and charged with sexual assault of a minor. But by September 2019, he was already released on probation. Given how Wilson has thrived on controversy and negative press, don't expect his bomb-throwing career to be over just yet.

Peter Thiel

Once, Peter Thiel was simply a rich libertarian eccentric, dreaming of seasteading, advocating against college education, and watching the fortune he made cofounding PayPal multiply as a major investment in Facebook. This decade, however, it's the politics of his businesses, not their profit-making, that has raised the most eyebrows. Palantir, another company he cofounded, has become the world's most active embodiment of Silicon Valley's partnership with surveillance agencies, controversially offering up its data-mining software and services for undocumented immigrant-hunting at ICE, and reportedly stepping in for the Pentagon's controversial Project Maven after Google bowed out under employee pressure. Anduril, founded by Palmer Luckey with an investment from Thiel, sells surveillance technologies designed for the southern border to Customs and Border Protection. Even earlier, starting in 2012, Thiel notoriously bankrolled a series of lawsuits designed to destroy Gawker as an apparent act of vengeance, although Thiel himself described it as "deterrence." Regardless, his libertarian ideals seem to find their limits at press freedom, surveillance, and rights for US immigrants.

Anonymous

The faceless hacker collective known as Anonymous came into being in the late 2000s. But it hit its peak in the first years of the 2010s, with hacking operations that hit Visa, Mastercard, and Paypal with waves of junk traffic as vengeance for their financial blockade of WikiLeaks, as well as waves of hacking that tormented Sony for suing George Hotz for reverse engineering the Playstation. Anonymous' anarchistic hacktivism peaked in the summer of 2011, when an offshoot of the group known as LulzSec went on a months-long rampage, hacking security firms, defense contractors, media, government, and police organizations. It turns out, however, that young hackers without the backing of a government nor a comfortable geographic remove from their victims isn't exactly a sustainable form of protest. Virtually all of the most active Anonymous hackers were arrested. Some, like Jeremy Hammond, received lengthy prison sentences, while others like Hector Monsegur became informants against their former colleagues. Since then, Anonymous has largely petered out as a movement, and hacktivism has faded from the headlines, more often used as a cover story for state-sponsored hackers than a tool for idealistic agents of chaos.

More Great WIRED Stories

Read more:
The Most Dangerous People on the Internet This Decade - WIRED

This appeared at CaitlinJohnston.com on December 28, 2019.

This is getting really, really, really weird.

WikiLeaks haspublished yet another set of leaked internal documentsfrom within the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) adding even more material tothe mountain of evidencethat weve been lied to about an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria last year which resulted in airstrikes upon that nation from the US, UK and France.

This new WikiLeaks drop includes an email from the OPCW Chief of CabinetSebastien Braha (who isreportedly so detestedby organisation inspectors that they code named him Voldemort) throwing a fit over theIan Henderson Engineering Assessmentwhich found that the Douma incident was likely a staged event. Braha is seen ordering OPCW staff to remove all traces, if any, of its delivery/storage/whatever from the organisations (sic) secure registry.

The drop also includes theminutes from an OPCW toxicology meetingwiththree Toxicologists/Clinical pharmacologists, one bioanalytical and toxicological chemist, all four of whom are specialists in chemical weapons analysis.

With respect to the consistency of the observed and reported symptoms of the alleged victims with possible exposure to chlorine gas or similar, the experts were conclusive in their statements that there was no correlation between symptoms and chlorine exposure, the document reads.

According to the leaked minutes from the toxicology meeting, the chief expert offered the possibility of the event being a propaganda exercise as one potential explanation for the Douma incident. The other OPCW experts agreed thatthe key take-away message from the meeting wasthat the symptoms observed were inconsistent with exposure to chlorine and no other obvious candidate chemical causing the symptoms could be identified.

Like all the othermany,many,many,many different leakswhich have beenhemorrhaging from the OPCWaboutthe Douma incident, none of the important information contained in these publications was included in any of the OPCWs public reports on the matter. According to theOPCWs Final Reportpublished in March 2019, the investigative team found reasonable grounds that the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon took place. This toxic chemical contained reactive chlorine. The toxic chemical was likely molecular chlorine.

We now know that these reasonable grounds contain more holes than a spaghetti strainer executed by firing squad. This is extremely important information about an unsolved war crime which resulted in dozens of civilian deaths and led to an act of war whichcost taxpayers tens of millions of dollarsand had many far-reaching geopolitical consequences.

Yet the mass media, freakishly, has had absolutely nothing to say about this extremely newsworthy story.

As of this writing, a Google News search for this story brings up an article by RT, another byAl-Masdar News, and some entries by alternative outlets youve almost certainly never heard of likeUrduPoint NewsandPeoples Pundit Daily.

Make no mistake about it: this is insane. The fact that an extremely important news story of immense geopolitical consequence is not gettinganymainstream news media coverage,at all, is absolutely stark raving insane.

Up until the OPCW leaks, WikiLeaks drops always made mainstream news headlines. Everyone remembers how the 2016 news cycle was largely dominated by leaked Democratic Party emails emerging from the outlet. Even the relatively minor ICE agents publication by WikiLeaks last year, containing information thatwas already public,garnered headlines from top US outlets likeThe Washington Post,Newsweek, andUSA Today. Now, on this exponentially more important story, zero coverage.

The mass medias stone-dead silence on the OPCW scandal is becoming its own scandal, of equal or perhaps even greater significance than the OPCW scandal itself. It opens up a whole litany of questions which have tremendous importance for every citizen of the western world; questions like, how are people supposed to participate in democracy if all the outlets they normally turn to to make informed voting decisions adamantly refuse to tell them about the existence of massive news stories like the OPCW scandal? How are people meant to address such conspiracies of silence when there is no mechanism in place to hold the entire mass media to account for its complicity in it? And by what mechanism are all these outlets unifying in that conspiracy of silence?

We can at least gain some insight into that last question with the internalNewsweekemails which werepublished by journalist Tareq Haddadtwo weeks ago. The emails feature multipleNewsweekeditors telling Haddad that they would not publish a word about the OPCW leaksfor two reasons: (1) because no other outlets were reporting on them, and (2) because the US government-funded narrative management firm Bellingcat hadpublished a laughably bogus articleexplaining why the leaks werent newsworthy. Haddad has since resigned fromNewsweek.

We may be certain that this story is being killed in news rooms all around the world in similar fashion, and possibly using those very same excuses. As long as no other respectable (i.e. establishment) outlets are covering this story, it can be treated as a non-story, using a deceitful US government-funded narrative management operation as justification as needed. If one journalist threw his life into chaos and uncertainty by resigning and blowing the whistle on this conspiracy of silence, we may be certain that the same is happening to countless others who dont have to courage and/or ability to do the same.

Many alternative media commentators are highlighting this news media blackout on social media today.

Our fearless media watchdogs still maintaining complete blackout on OPCW whistleblower leaks debunking WMD attack in Douma. The leaks show that Trumplike Dubya used fake WMDs to bomb Arab countrythen strong-armed OPCW to cover up the lies,tweetedjournalist Mark Ames.

The US attacked Syria for a chemical attack by Assad last year. But official OPCWscientists who investigated the event didnt find evidence the Syrian military used chemical weapons. The media has chosen to ignore this story and fire its own journalists who try to report on it,tweetedauthor and analyst Max Abrahms.

This is the FOURTH leak showing how theOPCWfabricated a report on a supposed Syrian chemical attack,tweetedjournalist Ben Norton. And mainstream Western corporate media outlets are still silent, showing how authoritarian these democracies are and how tightly they control info.

Media silence on this story is its own scandal,tweetedjournalist Aaron Mat.

But this spin machine is twirling off its axis trying to normalize this silence.

Bellingcat narrative jockeys such as senior investigator Nick Waters are already scrambling to perception manage everyone into believing their own eyes are lying to them. Watershas a thread on Twitterthats being shared around by all the usual Syria spinmeisters claiming, based on no evidence whatsoever, that WikiLeaks is selectively publishing the documents it has to create a false impression of events in the OPCW. Waters falsely claims that an email by Sebastien Voldemort Brahathe guy at the center of the scandalproves that Ian Henderson was not a part of the Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) in Douma, in contradiction to the claims made by the anonymous second OPCW whistleblower who goes by the pseudonym of Alex.

As Waters is one hundred percent aware, Henderson absolutelywaspart of the Douma Fact-Finding Mission, and one of the FFM members who actually went to Douma no less. Ive put together a Twitter thread refuting Waters ridiculous claims whichyou can read by clicking here, but in short an arbitrary distinction seems to have been made between the FFM and the FFM core team, or what is labeled the FFM Alpha team in a newly leaked email trying to marginalize Hendersons assessment. Henderson actually went to Douma as part of the FFM, unlike almost all members of the so-called core team who except for one paramedicoperated solely in another nation(probably Turkey).

Of course, the distinction of whether Henderson was or was not in the FFM is also itself irrelevant and arbitrary, since we know for a fact that he is a longtime OPCW inspector who went to Douma and contributed an assessment which was hidden from the public by the OPCW.

So this narrative being spun by the US government-funded propagandists at Bellingcat is bogus from top to bottom, but whats infuriating is that we already know who editors in news rooms are going to listen to.

Its absolutely amazing how tightly interlaced Bellingcat is with the upper echelons of mainstream news media and the public framing of whats going on in Syria. Mere hours after the latest WikiLeaks drop,CNN pundit Brian Steltershared an articleabout Bellingcat founder and former Atlantic Council Senior Fellow Eliot Higgins, who warns of the dangers posed by alternative media reporters who cover underreported stories like the OPCW scandal.

We have this alternative media ecosystem that is driving a lot of disinformation. It is not understood by journalists or anyone really beyond a very small group of people who are really engaged with it, reads the ironic Higgins quote in the excerpt shared by Stelter.

Weve been seeing a mad rush from mass media pundits to give this US government-funded narrative management operation unearned and undeserved legitimacy, churning out tweets like Stelters and fawning puff pieces byThe New York Times,The GuardianandThe New Yorker.This unearned and undeserved legitimacy is then used by editors to justify looking to Bellingcat for instructions on how to think about important information on Syria rather than doing their own basic investigation and analysis. Its a self-validating feedback loop which just so happens to work out very conveniently for the government which funds Bellingcat.

It remains unknown exactly whats transpiring in news rooms around the world to maintain the conspiracy of silence on the OPCW scandal, but what is known is that by itself this scandalous silence is enough to fully discredit the mass media forever. WikiLeaks has exposed these outlets for the monolithic propaganda engine that they really are, and they did it just by publishing extremely newsworthy leak after extremely newsworthy leak.

In order to perception manage us any harder, these freaks are going to have to go around literally confiscating our ears and eyeballs.

Caitlin Johnstone

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Link:
Media's deafening silence on latest WikiLeaks drop is its own scandal - Personal Liberty Digest