Julian Assange interviewed

Assange to RT: 'US empire' planned to overthrow Syrian govt years before uprising

RT,

9 September, 2015

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has opened up about his new book, 'The WikiLeaks Files,' speaking about the 'US empire' and telling RT's 'Going Underground' program that Washington had plans to overthrow Syria's government long before the 2011 uprising began.

Speaking to 'Going Underground' host Afshin Rattansi, Assange referred to the chapter on Syria, which goes back to 2006. In that chapter is a cable from US Ambassador William Roebuck, who was stationed in Damascus, which apparently discusses a plan for the overthrow of the Assad government in Syria

“...That plan was to use a number of different factors to create paranoia within the Syrian government; to push it to overreact, to make it fear there's a coup...so in theory it says 'We have a problem with Islamic extremists crossing over the border with Iraq, and we're taking actions against them to take this information and make the Syrian government look weak, the fact that it is dealing with Islamic extremists at all.'

He added that the most serious part of the plan was to “foster tensions between Shiites and Sunnis. In particular, to take rumors that are known to be false...or exaggerations and promote them – that Iran is trying to convert poor Sunnis, and to work with Saudi and Egypt to foster that perception in order to make it harder for Iran to have influence, and also harder for the government to have influence in the population.”

#Assange says it was he who advised #Snowden to turn to Moscow for refugehttp://t.co/Ilo1c0fDCQpic.twitter.com/ml9VcosW4y

— RT (@RT_com) August 30, 2015

Assange stressed that this particular cable was “quite concerning,” adding that while you often have to read between the lines in cables, “its all hanging out” in that one.

To understand what is happening in and around Syria, one must look at regional alliances, Assange said.

“Part of the problem in Syria is that you have a number of US allies surrounding it, principally Saudi and Qatar, that are funneling in weapons. Turkey as well [is] a very serious actor. [They] each have their own hegemonic ambitions in the region. Israel also, no doubt, if Syria sufficiently destabilized, it might be in a position where it can keep the Golan Heights forever, or even advance that territory. So you've got a number of players around Syria that are looking to bite off pieces...”

'US empire'

Assange said that when the US government wants something, it brings together the various arms of American power – including military, intelligence, financial, and commercial, as well as its informational and diplomatic power, in order to“push” on a country.

But Washington's habits don't pay off so easily in South America, according to Assange. He said the US empire's influence is harder to achieve there, because those nations are surrounded by relatively supportive states.

One cable in Assange's book details an instance when the US went to Brazil, telling the country that it wanted to reign in Venezuela. Brazil responded with a resounding “no.”

But while Assange maintains that the US is indeed an empire, he says it's not one in the classical sense. Instead, its imperialism lies in over 1,400 US military bases in more than 120 countries, as well in its trade deals.

Assange can’t leave embassy, UK wants to arrest him no matter what – attorney to RThttp://t.co/RjRtQGdnkN#WikiLeakspic.twitter.com/gZ950WrBOv

— RT (@RT_com) August 13, 2015

“It uses these mechanisms of its embassies, of its military bases, of its presence in organizations like the UN and IMF, in order to secure advantageous deals and structures for the largest American companies.”

Assange spoke to RT from the Ecuadorian embassy, where he has been holed up for three years. He has been granted asylum in the Latin American country, but should he leave the embassy and step on British soil, he faces extradition to Sweden, where he faces accusations of sexual assault.

From Sweden, the WikiLeaks founder fears he could be extradited to the US to face trial over WikiLeaks' publication of classified US military and diplomatic documents five years ago – which amounted to one of the largest information leaks in United States history. If found guilty by a US court under the Espionage Act, Assange could face life imprisonment or even the death penalty.

The British government has so far spent £12 million (US$18.4 million) on a round-the-clock police operation outside the Ecuadorian embassy, with officers standing guard to arrest Assange if he leaves the premises

Here is the full article

This is another version of a brilliant article by Julian Assange which appeared in Newsweek. I read it last night but after the RT story was no longer able to access it - I had exceeded my 5 free articles a month. So too had my partner onher computer although she has never looked at Newsweek online in her entire life

How "The Guardian" Milked Edward Snowden's Story

By Julian Assange, Newsweek

Reader Upported News,

22 April, 2015

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange investigates the book behind Snowden, Oliver Stone's forthcoming film starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Shailene Woodley, Nicolas Cage, Scott Eastwood and Zachary Quinto. According to leaked Sony emails, movie rights for the book were bought for $700,000.

Snowden

he Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man 

(Guardian/Faber & Faber, 2014) by Luke Harding is a hack job in the purest sense of the term. Pieced together from secondary sources and written with minimal additional research to be the first to market, the book's thrifty origins are hard to miss.

The Guardian is a curiously inward-looking beast. If any other institution tried to market its own experience of its own work nearly as persistently as The Guardian, it would surely be called out for institutional narcissism. But because The Guardian is an embarrassingly central institution within the moribund "left-of-center" wing of the U.K. establishment, everyone holds their tongue.

In recent years, we have seen The Guardian consult itself into cinematic history—in the Jason Bourne films and others—as a hip, ultra-modern, intensely British newspaper with a progressive edge, a charmingly befuddled giant of investigative journalism with a cast-iron spine.

The Snowden Files positions The Guardian as central to the Edward Snowden affair, elbowing out more significant players like Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras for Guardian stablemates, often with remarkably bad grace.

"Disputatious gay" Glenn Greenwald's distress at the U.K.'s detention of his husband, David Miranda, is described as "emotional" and "over-the-top." My WikiLeaks colleague Sarah Harrison—who helped rescue Snowden from Hong Kong—is dismissed as a "would-be journalist."

Flatulent Tributes

I am referred to as the "self-styled editor of WikiLeaks." In other words, the editor of WikiLeaks. This is about as subtle as Harding's withering asides get. You could use this kind of thing on anyone.

The book is full of flatulent tributes to The Guardian and its would-be journalists. "[Guardianjournalist Ewen] MacAskill had climbed the Matterhorn, Mont Blanc and the Jungfrau. His calmness now stood him in good stead." Self-styled Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger is introduced and reintroduced in nearly every chapter, each time quoting the same hagiographic New Yorker profile as testimony to his "steely" composure and "radiant calm."

That this is Hollywood bait could not be more blatant.

Adaptation rights for Harding's book were acquired last year by Oliver Stone, whose Edward Snowden film began principal photography in January, and is due for release just before Christmas. I wince to think of the money that has now soaked into this turkey of a book.

According to the budget for the production, found in the Sony archive leak published by WikiLeaks on Thursday, April 16, the film rights for Harding's book fetched $700,000, none of which, it must be remarked, has been contributed to Snowden's legal defense. Having spoken to Stone, I'm confident that he is aware of the humdrum nature of his source material, and that his script does not lean too heavily on the book.

If any A-list director can put the sour omen of a Luke Harding film rights purchase behind him, it is probably Stone. And yet I'm still surprised that this author is not kryptonite to movie financiers by now. Harding was also the co-author of 2011's WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy, another tour de force of dreary cash-in publishing, which went on to be the basis for Dreamworks' catastrophic box-office failure: 2013's The Fifth Estate.

Harding's co-author on that book—the self-styled former senior Guardian editor David Leigh—is absent in The Snowden Files. This is good: In writing about his work with me on the WikiLeaks material, Leigh chose—over my explicit warnings—to print a confidential encryption password as a chapter heading, undoing eight months of our work (and of over a hundred other media organizations) and resulting in the dumping of hundreds of thousands of State Department cables onto the Internet without the selective redactions that had been carefully prepared for them.

In a Goebbelsian projection, Leigh and The Guardian promptly blamed me for this. Harding repeats the libel without irony in The Snowden Files.

In any case, gone is Leigh. Consequently, no sensitive passwords appear to have been disclosed in the making of Harding’s book. Furthermore, there is evidence in these pages that The Guardian is now attempting to embrace basic operational security procedures, a positive development, even if it is years late and being done haphazardly.

Back in 2010, when we were publishing classified Pentagon and State Department documents, the paper’s journalists jovially branded me "paranoid" for refusing to discuss sensitive information over email. Would-be lifestyle journalist Decca Aitkenhead later even took this as far as insinuating that I might be losing my mind. But I was just doing my job, and I am relieved that it's starting to sink in at The Guardianthat it's their job, too.

Since I've started praising the book, I might as well continue. As hack jobs by Luke Harding go, a lot of work has gone into this one. Mr. Harding has clearly gone to uncharacteristic lengths in rewriting most of his source material, although it remains in large part unattributed.

WikiLeaks founder Assange gestures during a news conference on August 18, 2014, at the Ecuadorian
embassy in London. (photo: John Stillwell/pool/Reuters)

Plagiarist of the Year

Notoriously, as the Moscow bureau chief for The Guardian, Harding used to ply his trade ripping off work by other Moscow-based journalists before his plagiarism was pointed out by The eXile's Mark Ames and Yasha Levine, from whom he had misappropriated entire paragraphs without alteration. For thishe was awarded "plagiarist of the year" by Private Eye in 2007.

But—disciplined by experience—he covers his tracks much more effectively here. This book thereby avoids the charge of naked plagiarism.

Yet the conclusion cannot be resisted that this work is painfully derivative. Snowden has never spoken to Harding. The two have never met. The story is largely pieced together from more original work by James Risen, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Peter Maas, Janet Reitman, writers from the South China Morning Post and others.

The subtitle of the book, "The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man," is therefore disingenuous. If this is an inside story of Snowden, then anyone can write an inside story of anything.

Something in me has to applaud the chutzpah. There simply isn't a book here. Tangents and trivia serve as desperate page-filler, padding out scarce source material to book length. We are subjected to routine detours through Snowden's historical namesakes, rehearsals of the plot of the James Bond movieSkyfall and lengthy forays into Harding's pedestrian view of Soviet history.

Elsewhere, Harding runs out of external material to recycle and begins to rehash his own, best evidenced in the almost identical Homeric introductions Harding's boss, Alan Rusbridger, receives every time he arrives on the page.

To be fair, not all of the book is secondhand information. The middle chapters, which document The Guardian's internal struggles over the publication of the Snowden information, contain mostly novel anecdotes. True, I'd already heard many of them (The Guardian leaks like a sieve), but it’s convenient to have them all written down in one place.  

For most of his narrative, however, Harding is riding on the coattails of other journalists. His is more of a “backside story” than an “inside story.” It reveals a glaring lack of expertise in just about every topic it touches on: the Internet and its subcultures, information and operational security, the digital rights and policy community, hacker culture, the cypherpunk movement, geopolitics, espionage and the security industry.

For our author, "computer skills" are about as comprehensible as magical powers in a J.K. Rowling novel. Although examples of this can be found throughout the book, it is nowhere more apparent than in a transparent promo piece in The Guardian where Harding claimed that while he was writing The Snowden Files, his word processor would occasionally start to delete paragraphs while he watched.

Mundane explanations abound, but Harding is apparently desperate to attribute the episode to clandestine actors. “Was it the NSA? GCHQ? A Russian hacker?” the article asks breathlessly. Or, a reader might be forgiven for wondering, a bit of clotted cream stuck under the backspace key?

As a computer security expert who's been in this business for a long time, I can assure Harding that if a well-resourced intelligence agency has compromised his computer, it will not be going out of its way to advertise itself to him by playing silly games with his word processor. As we like to say at WikiLeaks, “the quieter you become, the more you can hear.”

But maybe Harding isn't as paranoid or gullible as he appears. After all, the “self-deleting paragraph” episode is only the latest in a string of self-aggrandizing promotional “likely stories” he has penned. As Richard de Lacy points out in his article “Face It, the FSB Is Just Not That Into You,” an earlier Harding book on Russia was announced with another article in The Guardian where the author constructed an elaborate Russian secret police conspiracy against him from such telltale signs as problems with his screen saver, stiff door handles and bouncing emails. The article was called—with characteristic immodesty—“Enemy of the State.”

Bullshitter’s Guide

This kind of breezy approach to facts is reflected throughout the volume. The persecution of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake by the U.S. Justice Department—so central to this story—is summarized clumsily and then forgotten. And even I know that Namco's "Tekken" is not—as Harding claims—a "role-playing game."

We are left with a "Bullshitter's Guide" to the world of the world's most wanted man. It is a book by someone who wasn't there, doesn't know, doesn't belong and doesn't understand.

Where the book is accurate, it is derivative. And where it is not derivative, it is not accurate. In the chapter on Snowden's exit from Hong Kong, I discover that I had been "frantically trying to make contact with Edward Snowden" and that I had "barged [my] way into [his] drama."

I was present at these events (Harding was not), and it was Edward Snowden who contacted me for help, not the other way around. This is something Snowden will happily confirm, at least to those who have access to him. The entire chapter is irredeemably specious. "Much is mysterious, but..." writes the self-styled journalist Harding, a polite way of saying that what follows has been made up.

Clues abound that Harding is filling in the blanks himself. All too often, we are presented with sentences such as "Snowden may have allowed himself a wry smile," reminding us of the paucity of actual content. The result is a story that is a non-story—a generic rendition of the Snowden cycle where lifeless bromide and imagined melodrama stand in for authentic human narrative.

There is no attempt to make the arguments consistent, either. American newspapers are "deferential to authority," but The Guardian is brave because it emerged from the "Darwinian" publish-or-perish London arena, supposedly a breeding ground for apex predators in the journalist food chain.

But later on, claims Harding, The Guardian holds out alone against the U.K. government while the rest of the London press cowers before a draconian Defense Advisory notice. It is hard to reconcile these stories, except insofar as they dignify The Guardian.

In reality, The Guardian also caved to government pressure—something it continues to do. Originally, the paper wasn't even going to publish the Snowden leaks—Glenn Greenwald had to force its hand. On request of the government, the paper later voluntarily destroyed its copies of the Snowden documents—and the computers they were saved on—in the basement of its London offices, under the supervision of [Britain’s electronic spying headquarters] GCHQ.

Greenwald eventually broke with The Guardian over reported censorship issues, which were later confirmed by Alan Rusbridger, keen to demonstrate the Guardian's "patriotism" to a U.K. Home Affairs Select Committee, when he boasted that "there's stuff in there about Iraq and Afghanistan. We're not even going to look at it."

Solidarity with The Guardian from the U.K. press was, indeed, thin on the ground in 2013, but this was not, as Harding wants us to believe, because the rest of the London press was trembling in its boots. It was because the holier-than-thou Guardian had rounded on the News of the World in 2011, something for which it is still loathed within the industry.

Cliché After Cliché

And it is certain that more papers would have run Snowden stories in the U.K. if The Guardian had shared its material with the rest of the London press. Who wants to recycle someone else's scoops?

As you'd expect from a serial plagiarist, the book is a stylistic wasteland. There are no regular impasses in here, only the more refined kind of "impasse we can't get past." Never simply "deny" when you can "categorically deny." Sympathetic characters are always either "wry" or "calm"; that is their entire emotional repertoire.

The words "Orwellian," "Kafkaesque" and "McCarthyite" seem to apply to everything. Far too much is found to be "ironic," all too often "cruelly" so. Cliché after cliché sweeps by in a wash of ugly prose until you are overwhelmed with the cynical functionalism of the thing.

It wouldn't be a Guardian book without some institutional axe-grinding. I made the mistake of glancing at the index before I read the book. There I spotted my name, with the following reference:

Assange, Julian; Manichean world view of..........224.

There is something about seeing my "Manichean world view" casually assigned its own index entry that epitomizes the Guardian's longstanding, cartoon-like vendetta against me.

Whence issues the charge of Manicheanism? In 2012, I independently produced and presented a television show where I interviewed a range of world figures, from Noam Chomsky and Hassan Nasrallahto the presidents of Tunisia and Ecuador.

Among those I invited was Alexei Navalny, hoping to discuss the "managed democracy" of post-Yeltsin Russia. I was game, but Navalny declined. It was worth a try. But I sold a broadcast license to—among others—Russia Today, which is financed by the Russian taxpayer. I am therefore to be held complicit—at least in Harding's judgment—in Russian state repression.

Harding's buddies are spared this sort of nonsense. Ewen MacAskill, who spent years in Hong Kong writing for The China Daily, gets the benefit of the doubt, having been, says Harding "in theory at least"—meaning "not really"—employed in “the Chinese Communist Party's official propaganda unit.” And yet it is considered self-evident that I identify with Vladimir Putin. This is the level of sophistication of the author who imputes to me a "Manichean world view."

If anyone should answer to the charge of "Manicheanism," it is Harding, who, when he is not slogging through clumsy Hollywood film treatments smearing whistleblowers, can be found busily obsessing over Putin in the pages of The Guardian.

Decades after the Cold War, British liberal antipathy to Russia continues to distort the perception of human rights transgressions at home. Harding just cannot resist insinuating that the "high-minded and melodramatic" Snowden's residency in Russia makes him a useful idiot, a "gift to Putin." He spends a whole chapter seriously trying to argue that Russia is holding Snowden "captive."

Outside of Harding's alternative reality, Snowden is a refugee. Russia is not holding him captive. I know this. I had one of my employees stay with him 24 hours a day for four months to make sure his rights were respected.

Anyway, it is quite odious that Snowden is being beaten over the head with Russia by The Guardian—a publication he ought to have been able to trust. Snowden has to be in Russia. Russia is now the only place asylum for him can be meaningful. If he is anyone's captive, he is a peculiar kind of captive of the United States, which, having canceled his passport, will not allow him to safely leave Russia's borders, trapping him there.

Snowden Deserves Better

Even if Russia may not be kind to its journalists or its dissidents, granting Snowden asylum was a good thing to do and it deserves praise. Thanks to Russia (and thanks to WikiLeaks), Snowden remains free. Only someone with a "Manichean world view" would be unable to acknowledge this.

The most disappointing thing of all about The Snowden Files is that it is exploitative. It should not have existed at all. We all understand the pressures facing print journalism and the need to diversify revenue in order to cross-subsidize investigative journalism. But investigative journalism involves being able to develop relationships of trust with your sources.

There is a conflict of interest here. Edward Snowden was left in the lurch in Hong Kong by The Guardian, and WikiLeaks had to step in to make sure he was safe. While WikiLeaks worked to find him a safe haven, The Guardian was already plotting to sell the film rights.

How can one reconcile the duty to a source with the mad rush to be the first to market with a lucrative, self-glorifying, unauthorized biography? For all the risks he took, Snowden deserves better than this.

The Snowden Files is a walloping fraud, written by frauds to be praised by frauds. Michiko Kakutani, the renowned New York Times book critic, wrote that it "reads like a le Carré novel crossed with something by Kafka." Really? It's more Tom Clancy meets Dan Brown, but without the crowd-pleasing plot, a thriller without thrills by the man who wasn't there.

That a work so artless, so exploitative, so self-congratulatory, so cynical, so perfectly mediocre asThe Snowden Files could receive such blinding praise from such a reputed critic completes the farce. The Snowden Files is—in effect if not in substance—a window into the tiny, shrinking world of industrial journalism and the swindling hacks that live in it.

For Snowden's sake, it is fortunate that Oliver Stone and his production team seem to know what they are doing. Without their intervention, we might now have been facing another Guardian-inspired box office catastrophe. 

 

And talking of Luke Harding and the Guardian....

Luke Harding : the hack who came in from the cold

part one of our “Guardian Russophobes” series

Off-Guardian,

9 September, 2015

Luke Daniel Harding (born 1968) studied English at University College, Oxford. While there he edited the student newspaper Cherwell. He worked for The Sunday Correspondent, the Evening Argus in Brighton and then theDaily Mail before joining The Guardian in 1996. He was the Guardian’s Russia correspondent from 2007-11.

Aside from his more publicly known achievements, it’s worth noting Harding was accused of plagiarism by Mark Ames and Yasha Levine of the eXile for publishing an article under his own name that lifted large passages almost verbatim from their work. The Guardian allegedly redacted portions of Harding’s article in response to these accusations.

---

According to his own testimony, Luke Harding is the guy who realised he was in the siloviki cross hairs one day when, during his stay in Moscow as the Guardian’s bureau chief, he came home and found one of his bedroom windows open.

A less situationally-aware person would have made the fatal mistake of thinking one of his kids or his wife had done it, or he’d done it himself and just forgotten, or that his landlord had popped in to air the rooms (a bit of a tendency in Russia apparently). But Luke was sure none of his family had opened the window, because they always kept it closed. So it had to have been the FSB.

You see, Luke isn’t confined as we are by the constraints of petty mundanity. That was why it had been so clear to him, even without any evidence, that the FSB had murdered Litvinenko. And that was why Luke took one look at that open window and realised the entire Russian intelligence machine was out to get him….

The dark symbolism of the open window in the children’s bedroom was not hard to decipher: take care, or your kids might just fall out. The men – I assume it was men – had vanished like hosts.

And that was only the start of the vicious campaign that was to follow. Tapes were left in his cassette deck, when he knew he hadn’t put them there. An alarm clock went off when he knew he hadn’t set it. Luke was filled with ” a feeling of horror, alarm, incredulity, bafflement and a kind of cold rational rage.”

Things developed rapidly. Luke went to visit a woman called Olga who warned him to take care, because he was “an enemy of Putin.” He was sure someone had hacked his email account. Whenever he said the name “Berezovsky” his phone line would go dead, so he started using the word “banana” instead. A person from the Russian president’s office called and asked for his mobile number. Unable to imagine a single good reason why a Russian government official would need a cell phone number for the Guardian’s Russia bureau chief, he refused.

That wily Putin wasn’t going to catch him that easily. The game of cat and mouse had begun.

A middle-aged woman with a bad haircut knocked at his door at 7am, and walked away when he opened it. Had she just gone to the wrong door? Of course not, it was the FSB taunting him. At the airport on his way back to London a man with a Russian accent (in Moscow!) tapped him on the back and told him there was something wrong with his jacket. Noticing the man was wearing a leather coat, which meant he must be from the KGB, Luke immediately rushed to the gents and took off all his clothes to find the “bugging device” the man had planted on him. He didn’t find one, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

When the Russian government launched its prosecution of Berezovsky for fraud, someone from the FSB phoned Luke and asked him to come in and make a statement about the interview he’d conducted with the man a short time before. 

They also advised him to bring a lawyer, which seemed sinister to Luke. A man called Kuzmin interviewed him for 55 minutes. Luke got quite thirsty, but wouldn’t drink the fizzy water he was offered, because he was pretty sure it had been tampered with. Surprisingly Kuzmin didn’t interrogate him as expected, but Luke decided this was because the FSB were trying to intimidate him. They probably didn’t need to do an interrogation, thought Luke, since they’d been breaking in to his flat almost every day for like – ever, switching on his alarm clock and probably also bugging his phone.

After the western-backed Georgian invasion of South Ossetia Luke was amazed to note there was widespread antagonism toward western journalists in Moscow. 

And the FSB just would not leave him alone. Worried by this “campaign of brutishness” he decided to keep a log of the dreadful things they were doing. 

Reading this we find not only did they continue to regularly open his windows, they once turned off his central heating, made phantom ringing sounds happen in the middle of the night (Luke couldn’t find where they were coming from), deleted a screen saver from his computer and left a book by his bed about getting better orgasms.

All this would have broken a lesser man. But Luke didn’t break. Maybe that’s why in the end, they knew they’d have to expel him like in the old Soviet days. Which is what they did. Well, they didn’t renew his accreditation, which is the same thing. 

They pretended it was because he didn’t have the right paperwork for an extended visa and offered him a short extension so his kids could finish up at school. But Luke knew it was actually a Soviet-style expulsion. Because Luke can always see the real game when most of us just can’t.

He demanded to know if President Medvedev had been told – personally – that Luke was going home. The person in the press department he was speaking to just sort of looked at him and didn’t say anything.

Luke was pretty sure he worked for the FSB.

So he went home, got on the lecture circuit and wrote a book all about his terrible experiences in Vladimir Putin’s neo-Stalinist hell. But just when he thought all his espionage problems were over, they started up again when he began his book about Edward Snowden.

This time it was the NSA, GCHQ and a host of other western agencies stalking him. The PTB obviously realised that Luke’s book would be much much more of a threat to national security than even Snowden himself, and did everything they could to try to stop him writing it. They followed him around (he knew they were agents because they had iPhones) and even used spy technology to remote-delete sentences from his computer – while he was typing them. Especially when he was writing mean things about the NSA. But after he typed “I don’t mind you reading my manuscript… but I’d be grateful if you don’t delete it”, they realised they’d met their match and stopped.

He wasn’t sure if the culprits were NSA, GCHQ or a Russian hacker, but one thing it definitely wasn’t was a glitchy keyboard.

I mean that would just be stupid.

In case any of our readers are inclined to think we must be making this up, we encourage them to read about it here and here in Luke’s own words.

We also recommend you take in this opinion piece by Julian Assange, andthis one by a Brit ex-pat in Moscow.

After that feel free to complete the following questionnaire:

Is Luke Harding:
• 1: “the reporter Russia hated”
• 2: an “enemy of Putin”
• 3: a borderline psychotic paranoiac, whose narcissistic delusions have been deliberately encouraged and exploited by an intelligentsia that will use any old crap it can find to further its agenda
• 4: a bit of a tosser