As the World Health Organization and other China puppets struggle to assemble a 'natural origin' theory for COVID-19, the CCP has been going to great lengths to quash non-sanctioned investigations that may instead point to a lab escape from research facilities which made international headlines in 2015 for dangerous 'gain-of-function' research - by which they were manipulating coronaviruses to better infect humans.
'Batwoman' Shi Zhengli, known for bioengineering bat coronaviruses, was criticized over dangerous 'gain-of-function' experiments
...for scientists and journalists, it has become a black hole of no information because of political sensitivity and secrecy.
A bat research team visiting recently managed to take samples but had them confiscated, two people familiar with the matter said. Specialists in coronaviruses have been ordered not to speak to the press. And a team of Associated Press journalists was tailed by plainclothes police in multiple cars who blocked access to roads and sites in late November.
More than a year since the first known person was infected with the coronavirus, an AP investigation shows the Chinese government is strictly controlling all research into its origins, clamping down on some while actively promoting fringe theories that it could have come from outside China. -Associated Press
Let's quickly review the world's easiest game of connect-the-dots:
Peng Zhou, Wuhan Institute of Virology's head of Bat Virus Infection and Immunization, was researching "the molecular mechanism that allows Ebola and SARS-associated coronaviruses to lie dormant for a long time without causing diseases," while a press release from his lab was titled "How bats carry viruses without getting sick."
Zhou's colleague, Shi Zhengli, has been involved in bioengineering bat coronaviruses - co-authoring a controversial 2015 paperwhich described the creation of a new virus by combining a coronavirus found in Chinese horseshoe bats with another that causes human-like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice.
In 2015, Nature magazine expressed concern over Zhengli's experiments with bat coronavirus. The same year, the US governmentsuspended funding to the labdue to their concern over risks of experimenting with bat coronavirus.
Add to that China's active suppression of lab-origin theories while their partners at the World Health Organization continue to hunt for some heretofore non-existent crossover species, and it doesn't take Matlock to figure out that the official narrative is severely flawed.
The government is handing out hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to scientists researching the virus’ origins in southern China and affiliated with the military, the AP has found. But it is monitoring their findings and mandating that the publication of any data or research must be approved by a new task force managed by China’s cabinet, under direct orders from President Xi Jinping, according to internal documents obtained by the AP. A rare leak from within the government, the dozens of pages of unpublished documents confirm what many have long suspected: The clampdown comes from the top.
As a result, very little has been made public. Authorities are severely limiting information and impeding cooperation with international scientists. -Associated Press
"What did they find?" asks Duke University epidemiologist, Gregory Gray, who oversees a lab in China studying the transmission of infectious diseases from animals to people. "Maybe their data were not conclusive, or maybe they suppressed the data for some political reason. I don’t know … I wish I did."
Scientists familiar with China's public health system say the CCP's standard operating procedure of information control and censorship apply to all aspects of COVID-19 research.
"They only select people they can trust, those that they can control," said one public health expert who works regularly with China's CDC. "Military teams and others are working hard on this, but whether it gets published all depends on the outcome."
According to the report, Beijing worries that investigations will also reveal that they were negligent in the spread of the virus.
Some public health experts warn that China’s refusal to grant further access to international scientists has jeopardized the global collaboration that pinpointed the source of the SARS outbreak nearly two decades ago. Jonna Mazet, a founding executive director of the UC Davis One Health Institute, said the lack of collaboration between Chinese and U.S. scientists was “a disappointment” and the inability of American scientists to work in China “devastating.”
“There’s so much speculation around the origins of this virus,” Mazet said. “We need to step back...and let scientists get the real answer without the finger-pointing.” -Associated Press
Steering the narrative
Now that AP has caught up and corroborated what we've been reporting on ad nauseam - albeit via burning their own hand on the stove - they're also piecing together the enormous disinformation campaign employed by Beijing to try and control the narrative.
After the initial batch of COVID-19 cases were traced to the Hunan Seafood market in Wuhan, authorities began collecting samples for analysis - finding that 33 out of 585 environmental samples tested positive for the virus.
"This corona(virus) is very close to SARS," wrote Canadian microbiologist Gary Kobinger, a WHO adviser, according to internal China CDC data obtained by AP. "If we put aside an accident ... then I would look at the bats in these markets (sold and ‘wild’)."
Then, "As the virus continued spreading rapidly into February, Chinese scientists published a burst of research papers on COVID-19. Then a paper by two Chinese scientists proposed without concrete evidence that the virus could have leaked from a Wuhan laboratory near the market. It was later taken down, but it raised the need for image control."
Internal documents show that the state soon began requiring all coronavirus studies in China to be approved by high-level government officials — a policy that critics say paralyzed research efforts.
Then on March 2, Xi emphasized “coordination” on coronavirus research, state media reported.
The next day, China’s cabinet, the State Council, centralized all COVID-19 publication under a special task force. The notice, obtained by the AP and marked “not to be made public,” was far more sweeping in scope than the earlier CDC notices, applying to all universities, companies and medical and research institutions.
The order said communication and publication of research had to be orchestrated like “a game of chess” under instructions from Xi, and propaganda and public opinion teams were to “guide publication.” It went on to warn that those who publish without permission, “causing serious adverse social impact, shall be held accountable.”-Associated Press
"The regulations are very strict, and they don’t make any sense," said one former China DCD deputy director on condition of anonymity. "I think it’s political, because people overseas could find things being said there that might contradict what China says, so it’s all being controlled."
And after thousands of samples were taken from the Hunan Seafood market, no findings were ever made public. Yet, on May 25, CDC chief Gao Fu finally broke the silence - telling China's Phoenix TV that no animal samples from the market had tested positive, ruling out the market as the likely source of the virus despite its link to the majority of new cases in the region.
China’s government-controlled media used the theoryto suggest the original outbreak in Wuhan could have started with seafood imported from abroad — a notion international scientists reject. WHO has said it is very unlikely that people can be infected with COVID-19 via packaged food, and that it is “highly speculative” to suggest COVID-19 did not start in China. Bi did not respond to requests for an interview, and China has not provided enough virus samples for a definitive analysis.
We would be remiss if we didn't note that the now-destroyed Wet Market was located roughly 900 feet from a China CDC aboratory where they were experimenting on bat coronavirus.
The Kafkaesque Imprisonment of Julian Assange Exposes U.S. Myths About Freedom and Tyranny
The real measure of how free is a society is not how its mainstream, well-behaved ruling class servants are treated, but the fate of its actual dissidents.
Persecution is not typically doled out to those who recite mainstream pieties, or refrain from posing meaningful threats to those who wield institutional power, or obediently stay within the lines of permissible speech and activism imposed by the ruling class.
Those who render themselves acquiescent and harmless that way will — in every society, including the most repressive — usually be free of reprisals. They will not be censored or jailed. They will be permitted to live their lives largely unmolested by authorities, while many will be well-rewarded for this servitude. Such individuals will see themselves as free because, in a sense, they are: they are free to submit, conform and acquiesce. And if they do so, they will not even realize, or at least not care, and may even regard as justifiable, that those who refuse this Orwellian bargain they have embraced (“freedom” in exchange for submission) are crushed with unlimited force.
Those who do not seek to meaningfully dissent or subvert power will usually deny — because they do not perceive — that such dissent and subversion are, in fact, rigorously prohibited. They will continue to believe blissfully that the society in which they live guarantees core civic freedoms — of speech, of press, of assembly, of due process — because they have rendered their own speech and activism, if it exists at all, so innocuous that nobody with the capacity to do so would bother to try to curtail it. The observation apocryphally attributed to socialist activist Rosa Luxemburg, imprisoned for her opposition to German involvement in World War I and then summarily executed by the state, expresses it best: “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”
The metric to determine whether a society is free is not how its orthodoxy-spouting, well-behaved, deferential-to-authority citizens are treated. Such people are treated well, or at least usually left alone, by every sovereign and every power center in every era, all over the world.
You will not feel the sting of Silicon Valley or other institutional censorship as long as you affirm the latest COVID pronouncements of the World Health Organization and Dr. Anthony Fauci (even as those decrees contradict the ones they issued only a few months earlier), but you will if you question, refute or deviate from them. You will not have your Facebook page deleted if you defend Israeli occupation of Palestine but will be banished from that platform if you live in the West Bank and Gaza and urge resistance to Israeli occupying troops. If you call Trump an orange fascist clown, you can stay on YouTube for eternity, but not if you defend his most controversial policies and claims. You can vocally insist that the 2000, 2004 and 2016 U.S. presidential elections were all stolen without the slightest concern of being banned, but the same claims about the 2020 election will result in the summary denial of your ability to use online tech monopolies to be heard.
Censorship, like most repression, is reserved for those who dissent from majoritarian orthodoxies, not for those who express views comfortably within the mainstream. Establishment Democrats and Republicans — adherents to the prevailing neoliberal order — have no need for free speech protections since nobody with power would care enough to silence them. It is only the disaffected, those who reside on the fringes and the margins, who need those rights. And those are precisely the people who, by definition, are most often denied them.
Similarly: powerful officials in Washington can illegally leak the most sensitive government secrets and will suffer no punishment, or will get the lightest tap on the wrist, provided their aim is to advance mainstream narratives. But low-level leakers whose aim is to expose wrongdoing by the powerful or reveal their systemic lying will have the full weight of the criminal justice system and the intelligence community come crashing down on them, to destroy them with vengeance and also to put their heads on a pike to terrorize future dissidents out of similarly stepping forward.
Journalists like Bob Woodward, who spend decades spilling the most sensitive secrets at the behest of the ruling class D.C. elites, will be lavished with awards and immense wealth. But those like Julian Assange who publish similar secrets but against the will of those elites, with the goal and outcome of exposing (rather than obscuring) ruling class lies and impeding (rather than advancing) their agenda, will suffer the opposite fate as Woodward: they will endure every imaginable punishment, including indefinite imprisonment in maximum-security cells. That is because Woodward is a servant of power while Assange is a dissident against it.
All of this illustrates a vital truth. The real measure of how free is a society — from China, Saudi Arabia and Egypt to France, Britain and the U.S. — is not how its mainstream, well-behaved ruling class servants are treated. Royal court vassals always end up fine: rewarded for their subservience and thus, convinced that freedoms abound, they redouble their fealty to prevailing status quo power structures.
Whether a society is truly free is determined by how it treats its dissidents, those who live and speak and think outside of permissible lines, those who effectively subvert ruling class aims. If you want to know whether free speech is genuine or illusory, look not to the treatment of those who loyally serve establishment factions and vocally affirm their most sacred pieties, but to the fate of those who reside outside of those factions and work in opposition to them. If you want to know whether a free press is authentically guaranteed, look at the plight of those who publish secrets designed not to propagandize the population to venerate elites but, instead, those whose publications result in generating mass discontent against them.
That is what makes the ongoing imprisonment of Julian Assange not only a grotesque injustice but also a vital, crystal-clear prism for seeing the fundamental fraud of U.S. narratives about who is free and who is not, about where tyranny reigns and where it does not.
Assange has been imprisoned for almost two years. He was dragged out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London by British police on April 11, 2019. That was possible only because the U.S., U.K. and Spanish governments coerced Ecuador’s meek President, Lenin Moreno, to withdraw the asylum extended to Assange seven years earlier by his staunch sovereignty-defending predecessor, Rafael Correa.
The U.S. and British governments hate Assange because of his revelations that exposed their lies and crimes, while Spain was enraged by WikiLeaks’ journalistic coverage of and activism against Madrid’s 2018 violent repression of the Catalan independence movement. So they bullied and bribed Moreno to throw Assange to the wolves — i.e., to them. And ever since, Assange has been held in the high-security Belmarsh prison in London, a facility used for terrorist suspects that is so harsh that the BBC asked in 2004 whether it is “Britain’s Guantanamo Bay.”
Assange is not currently imprisoned because he was convicted of a crime. Two weeks after he was dragged out of the embassy, he was found guilty of the minor offense of “skipping bail” and sentenced to 50 weeks in prison, the maximum penalty allowed by law. He fully served that sentence as of April of this year, and was thus scheduled to be released, facing no more charges. But just weeks before his release date, the U.S. Justice Department unveiled an indictment of Assange arising out of WikiLeaks’ 2010 publication of U.S. State Department diplomatic cables and war logs that revealed massive corruption by numerous governments, Bush and Obama officials, and various corporations around the world.
That U.S. indictment and the accompanying request to extradite Assange to the U.S. to stand trial provided, by design, the pretext for the British government to imprison Assange indefinitely. A judge quickly ruled that Assange could not be released on bail pending his extradition hearing, but instead must stay behind bars while the U.K. courts fully adjudicate the Justice Department’s extradition request. No matter what happens, it will takes years for this extradition process to conclude because whichever side (the DOJ or Assange) loses at each stage (and Assange is highly likely to lose the first round when the lower-court decision on the extradition request is issued next week), they will appeal, and Assange will linger in prison while these appeals wind their way very slowly through the U.K. judicial system.
That means that — absent a pardon by Trump or the withdrawal of the charges by what will become the Biden DOJ — Assange will be locked up for years without any need to prove he is guilty of any crime. He will have been just disappeared: silenced by the very governments whose corruption and crimes he denounced and exposed.
Those are the same governments — the U.S. and U.K. — that sanctimoniously condemn their adversaries (but rarely their repressive allies) for violating free speech, free press and due process rights. These are the same governments that succeed — largely due to a limitlessly compliant corporate media that either believes the propaganda or knowingly disseminates it for their own rewards — in convincing large numbers of their citizens that, unlike in the Bad Countries such as Russia and Iran, these civic freedoms are guaranteed and protected in the Good Western Countries.
(The ample evidence showing that the indictment of Assange is the single gravest threat to press freedoms in years, and that the arguments mounted to justify it are fraudulent, has been repeatedly documented by myself and others, so I will not rehash those discussions here. Those interested can see the article and video program I produced on this prosecution along with my op-ed in The Washington Post; Laura Poitras’ New York Timesop-ed last week on the indictment; former Brazilian President Lula da Silva’s Guardian op-ed calling for Assange’s immediate release; the editorial from The Guardian and column from The Washington Post’s media reporter Margaret Sullivan condemning this prosecution as abusive; and statements from the Freedom of the Press Foundation, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Columbia Journalism Review, and the ACLU warning of the serious dangers to press freedoms it poses).
I am, of course, hugely proud that a fellow Kiwi, Suzie Dawson, unsung in her own country, is behind #Unity4J along with some superb journalists whom I will not mention out of fear of leaving them out.
Ray
McGovern pays tribute to Unity4J and Suzie Dawson
The myth that became Russiagate was seven years in the making. In this article we examine just how far back the real conspiracy stretches.
A Lie Too Big To Fail
The public has been led to believe that the 2016 election and the resulting Mueller Report is the definitive evidence that WikiLeaks was somehow in cahoots with Russia, reinforcing the premise that they were in a political alliance with, or favoured, Donald Trump and his Presidential election campaign.
Prominent Russiagate-skeptics have long pointed out the multitude of gaping holes inherent in those theories, including the advocacy group Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) who have produced credible forensic work analysing the 2016 WikiLeaks releases, that resoundingly debunks officials claims.
In the course of researching this article, I stumbled across a major discovery that augments that: the false notion of WikiLeaks being a front for Russian intelligence isn’t new – it has been pushed by media since 2009.
It turns out the circulation of the WikiLeaks-Russia myth was a tried and true diversionary, smear tactic that was simply regurgitated in 2016.
Julian Assange believed that UK intelligence agencies were behind the pushing of that narrative, and he was publicly stating so at the end of last decade.
He wouldn’t make such claims lightly, and other emerging facts support his suspicion.
By December 2010, only the (fired) WikiLeaks defector Daniel Domscheit-Berg appeared, ostensibly to promote IMMI, the Icelandic media initiative on which WikiLeaks had collaborated with then-Icelandic Pirate Party’s Birgitta Jonsdottir and others. However he used his appearance to make blithe disparagements of Julian, pushing the message that support for WikiLeaks and support for Julian shouldn’t be one and the same thing, and to promote his own WikiLeaks-competitor initiative OpenLeaks, (which spectacularly imploded, failing to ever get off the ground).
One of the most interesting pieces of viewing I stumbled across, was a short clip from the Q+A at the end of Julian’s 2009 CCC appearance. In it, he was asked about the WikiLeaks releases that spiralled into the famous UK scandal known as Climategate. His answer stunned me, and made concrete something I’ve known for years, but which is the opposite of the narrative advanced about WikiLeaks in media.
Russiagate started in 2009 and was cooked up by the same malignant intelligence agencies whose activities Julian has consistently exposed.
Initial reporting on its contents contained claims of scientists manipulating research findings and methodologies, conspiring together to alter conclusions and generally behaving unethically.
While disputed by the scientists involved, who said their communications were being taken out of context, and by the findings of myriad official investigations into the matter, the release was largely viewed by the climate change skeptic community as validating their skepticism and their own existence. By critics, WikiLeaks was depicted as having taken an anti-climate change position by publishing the cache at all.
This is the earliest case in which I’m aware of the fact of WikiLeaks having published leaked documents, being extrapolated by observers into the assumption that WikiLeaks was taking a political position on one side or the other, of an issue.
In an attempt to quell what was becoming a global uproar, corporate media around the world, led by UK media, turned ClimateGate into an opportunity to advance their own geopolitical interests: in chorus, they depicted the WikiLeaks release as being both perpetrated by, and for the benefit of, Russia.
“The UK papers, which have close involvement with British intelligence – lots of journalists have come out and said that they have secret briefings from British intelligence and that they do each other favours etcetera etcetera – said that we received this stuff from the FSB. Just 3 days before the Copenhagen conference they said this – so my opinion is that probably, not certainly, maybe the papers did it by themselves, but probably UK intelligence tried to frame us as being a conduit for the FSB because they didn’t like the truth of what was in those emails.” – Julian Assange, 2009 [emphasis added]
The only ‘evidence’ cited by UK media to support the Russia-did-it theory was that the files had been uploaded to a Russian server in the city of Tomsk.
“Russian hackers were blamed by dozens of outlets for the Climategate hack, because that was consistent with global media coverage of cyber crime incidents which portrayed Russians as highly powerful hackers responsible for many hacking incidents. This narrative also was congruent with the new Cold War rhetoric that consistently takes issue with Russia acting on its geopolitical interests… [Climategate] was consistently attributed to Russia by the global media. This attribution be- came particularly clear after several key figures, such as Professor Jean-Pascal Ypersele, the vice chairman of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, supported the Russian hackers scenario. Here are some typical examples of the narratives that followed: ‘Russian hackers illegally obtained 10 years of e-mails between the world’s top climate change scientists’ (Kolasinski 4 December 2009); ‘The British media and some U.N. scientists have suggested that the Russian secret service, the FSB, was complicit in the theft’ (Snapple 7 Janu- ary 2010); ‘The guiding hand behind the leaks, the allegation went, was that of the Russian secret services’ (Walker 7 December 2009); ‘Russia, a major oil exporter, may be trying to undermine calls to reduce carbon emissions’ (Telegraph 6 December 2009); ‘This is not the first time Russian hackers have created global Internet disarray’ (MacNicol 7 December 2009); ‘Russian computer hackers are suspected of being behind the stolen e-mails’ (McCarthy and Owen 6 December 2009). A typical coverage in the Times by Tony Halpin sums all the reasons why Russian hackers and Russia were immediately implicated: Russia’s desire to discredit the summit, poor talented but unemployed hackers, the RBN and the use of patriotic hackers by the FSB. All these were connected together, fitting the overall move to blame Russian hackers – a move already built up by the global media (Halpin 7 December 2009).” – Dr Athina Karatgozianni
According to Dr Karatgozianni, “In fact, the files were originally uploaded in Turkish and Saudi Arabian servers before Tomsk.”
Sure enough, Saudi Arabia came down on the side of the climate change skeptics, in the debate over the release, raising it as an issue at the Copenhagen climate science summit days after the publishing. Yet their interests often escaped the notice of UK and global media’s reporting on the issue. As far as media were concerned, it was Russia’s fault, and WikiLeaks had been used as the tool by which to advance Russian interests.
Dr Karatgozianni argues that the Tomsk server upload was not evidence of Russian involvement at all. In her paper, she writes:
“Since hackers used open proxies to mask their identities, they could have originated from anywhere in the world. And if Russian hackers where indeed involved, leaving the files at Tomsk would be too obvious… Even if there are indeed individuals from Russia or elsewhere in the post-Soviet space who are engaged in cyber crime, the assumption of Russian guilt in all cases reinforces the older Cold War portrayal of Russians in the Western world… There is a demonstrated tendency for the global media to look for a Russian hand and geopolitical implications in stories relating to former Soviet countries or countries under Soviet influence in the past.”
The obviousness of the ruse is reminiscent of my own debunking of the 2018 Dutch-Russia hacking scandal. I mercilessly dissected a mainstream story about American intelligence officials who had invoked the supposed existence of security operations by their counterparts from the Netherlands in order to claim slam-dunk evidence of Russian involvement in the hacking of the DNC in the lead-up to the 2016 election.
The claims laundered by media were utterly preposterous – that the hacking of the DNC had occurred in a Moscow University building next door to the Kremlin; that the hackers had coordinated via cellphone text messages; that they had been filmed on security cameras. Proponents of the hoax (unnamed, anonymous intelligence officials cited in Western corporate media reporting) claimed to be in possession of pictures and video footage of the hacking – yet none of this evidence was ever released to the public.
My article went viral in the Netherlands and across Europe, outperforming mainstream media articles, drawing the attention of the ‘Alliance for Securing Democracy’ aka Hamilton68 (a Western intelligence-backed think tank). Predictably, they blamed the popularity of my article on ‘Russian trolls’.
Because blaming Russia appears to be the extent of their creativity, when their psyops are blown, and despite the best efforts of their censors, the public is accessing the truth.
My reporting was heavily contextualised by findings made from the Snowden files. It turns out that the Snowden files are also instructive regarding the issues of intelligence agencies’ monitoring of officials involved in climate change diplomacy and negotiations.
Climate Change-focused news and opinion websites (yes, there is a bunch of them) such as the above, picked up straight away on the significance of the spying.
“Documents from whistleblower reveal extensive intelligence operation at 2009 COP15 meeting in Danish capital”read Climate Change News. Reporter Ed King quoted Meena Raman, “a negotiations expert from the Malaysian based Third World Network“: ““The UN climate talks are supposed to be about building trust – that’s been under threat for years because of the US’s backward position on climate action,” she said.”
As is so often the case with spying, it wasn’t just passive electronic surveillance – it included the use of human intelligence spies. The article references documents from WikiLeaks’ 2010 CableGate release:
“A few diplomats have told RTCC they believed most rooms at the 2010 Tianjin talks in China were bugged. Another talked of ‘honey traps’ laid for influential envoys, with one delegate reportedly losing their official phone as a consequence. The Snowden documents are not the first to identify UN climate summits as a bed of intrigue and dirty tricks. In 2010 US diplomatic cables released by the Wikileaks site detailed how the US launched a secret diplomatic offensive to ensure the Copenhagen Accord was agreed. This included financial assistance to developing countries in return for support, as well as threats to those who were pushing for a stronger and more comprehensive agreement.”
Honey pots. For climate scientists and tariff negotiators. Takes the shine off the whole James Bond image doesn’t it.
But back in 2009, other factions ostensibly of the climate change debate community, but less favourable to WikiLeaks, were putting their two cents in.
Their version of events can be summarised as follows:
That WikiLeaks release wasn’t an exclusive, as the documents had already been available on the web for 4 days prior
That WikiLeaks downplayed the UK media Russia-Russia-Russia plot: “there was brief interest by the UK tabloids in the Russian angle, and an article appeared in the Daily Mail speculating that Russian intelligence officials had hacked the UEA and stolen the emails. But nobody took that line seriously and the story died within 48 hours.”
WikiLeaks had political motivations: “They evidently like leaks that embarrass their political opponents, but in this case they found themselves tagged with a leak that had damaged the side they like; and since it seems to be more about political warfare against governments they dislike than some impartial ideal of transparency and freedom of information, they were stuck scrambling to make up a story about how it really served some nobler purpose.”
WikiLeaks had never claimed the Climategate files were an exclusive (nor were they packaged on its website as an exclusive release, as their exclusives are) and that the files had been available on the web prior was widely reflected in Climategate reporting.
As for it being politically motivated by being on one side or the other – a claim that is consistently and baselessly made against WikiLeaks – well the proof is in the pudding isn’t it.
Well, Well, Well, What Do We Have Here
Examining what WikiLeaks does is so much more telling than examining what people say that it does.
Five days after the inauguration of President Trump, guess what WikiLeaks was doing?
Soliciting leaks of data from the Trump administration, in an attempt to preserve endangered information about climate change.
This act was a strong indication that far from sucking up to the Trump administration, WikiLeaks was already agitating it. It also lays waste to those who ten years earlier, had been trying to posture WikiLeaks as being in the climate change-denier camp, publishing documents with an agenda to bolster that narrative.
In fact, what WikiLeaks was doing in 2009 was preserving documents it deemed to be important to the public record. In 2017, it was likewise trying to procure and preserve documents it believed were important for the public record. Even though the document sets were on opposing sides of the same debate.
WikiLeaks’ ClimateGate publication wasn’t about politics: it was about providing a digital safe haven to documents of historical importance.
“[WikiLeaks] founder, Julian Assange, told PBS [in 2009] that the university had been trying “to suppress information from the Freedom of Information Act.”
Unfortunately, the rest of that Mother Jones article tries to paint the ClimateGate publication as being a precursor to Russiagate, but for the wrong reasons. It quotes a former NSA analyst: “If you were a Russian operative [and] pitching influence ops for the DNC, and somebody’s like, ‘Eh, I don’t know about that,’ literally you just turn around and go, ‘Look at how well it worked [with Climategate],’” says Jake Williams, a cybersecurity expert and former analyst at the National Security Agency. “I wouldn’t necessarily say one influenced the other, but certainly it’s good proof that that’s a technique that works.”
It then goes on to repeat an oft-made claim that WikiLeaks had tailored its publication schedule of the Podesta emails, to run interference for bad publicity faced by the Trump campaign: “And when the Trump campaign was thrown into chaos after the Washington Post unearthed a 2005 video of Trump boasting about grabbing women “by the pussy,” WikiLeaks began publishing the Podesta emails less than an hour later. WikiLeaks then rolled out new batches of emails on a near-daily basis in the month leading up to the election. Once again, the timing was clearly designed for maximum impact.”
The timing wasn’t a scheme to help Trump at all; it was coincidental.
Maurizi writes: “Many media outlets continue to report that the Podesta emails were released only minutes after the Access Hollywood video aired, hinting at some sort of coordination between WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign… As I worked on the Podesta emails, I do know that their publication was not a last-second decision. I had been alerted the day before, and their staggered release was a choice WikiLeaks made after the organization was harshly criticized by mainstream media for publishing the DNC documents all at once. This time the emails would trickle out to make them easier for the public to digest. But that was criticized too by the U.S. media and the Democrats as an attempt to leave Clinton bleeding a few weeks before the elections.”
The Truth Is One Keyword Search Away
Lies depend on laziness in order to thrive. Think of the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of posts written about WikiLeaks, Trump and Russia since 2016. How many of them told you that WikiLeaks had published 14,531 documents about Donald Trump? Or told you that WikiLeaks have published 660,179 documents about Russia? Not many, if any. Instead you were told “WikiLeaks never published anything about Trump! WikiLeaks never publishes anything about Russia!”
Members of the public are only one keyword search away on wikileaks.org from finding the truth for themselves: that not only have they been actively deceived, but they’ve been deceived by journalists who didn’t bother to do even the most rudimentary fact-checking on their own claims.
What people often forget in all the Russiagate reporting, is that the DNC leaks contained all the opposition research on Trump. That included mountains of information detrimental to his campaign. Far from being spared – he was actually quite exposed by the releases – it’s just that too few, especially mainstream reporters, cared to look.
That’s just a few of the tasty morsels in WikiLeaks files about Donald Trump, and I’ve previously written extensively about the damning information on Russia contained within WikiLeaks publications. WikiLeaks repeatedly cited my work on the topic, so did other great journalists like Caitlin Johnstone, but it has been completely ignored by the mainstream. Why?
Because they don’t actually want to investigate Russia. Russia is just a scapegoat. They don’t actually want to investigate Trump either. He is just a means of distraction, a spectacle – by which they divide and conquer the American public, and increasingly the global public.
Their real agenda has been to smear WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks, the only publication to meaningfully challenge the supremacy of the intelligence agencies. The powers that be see not Trump, or Russia, but WikiLeaks as their real enemy, and their ultimate target.
Because it is the education of the public and the public’s access to true, verified, unvarnished information about the misdeeds and criminal enterprises of the powerful, that scares the elite more than any 8-year Presidential term or foreign adversary, ever will.
Getting Back To The Roots
“All Russiagate Roads Lead Back To London As Evidence Emerges Of Joseph Mifsud’s Links To UK Intelligence” wrote Elizabeth Lea Vos in a groundbreaking April 2018 scoop that exposed more wholly the involvement of UK intelligence operatives in Russiagate.
“Did the entire narrative originate with UK intelligence groups in an effort to create the appearance of Russian collusion with the Trump Presidential campaign, much as the Guccifer 2.0 persona was used in the US to discredit WikiLeaks’ publication of the DNC emails?” Vos asked, going on to lay out a multitude of reasons why that appears to be the case.
But it was one line in her reporting that really made my jaw drop. One compelling line, that ties Russiagate to Climategate, and the agenda to depict WikiLeaks as being a Russian front, spanning 2009 to 2016.
Because if Assange was correct as he is wont to be, that UK intelligence was behind the 2009 frame-up of Russia for Climategate, and if Vos is correct as she is now widely accepted to be, that UK intelligence was behind the frame-up of Russia in 2016, there is one name that connects both those events.
Guess who was head of the Russia desk for MI6, the United Kingdom’s foreign intelligence service, in 2009?
There will be one more part to this article. In the third, I’m going to talk about the movement to free Julian past, present and future, and provide my very own survival guide for activists and organisers jumping into the fray on this; the most important emancipation movement of our generation.
Author’s note
At the end of the first part of this series, I disclosed what appeared to have been an effort to interfere with my journalism. After the article was published, I was again approached. I was told that their pre-publication regurgitation of whole lines in my article was sourced from “my document” – a PDF – and suggested that it was leaked by someone from WL. Except no such PDF existed. I hadn’t saved my article in a document. And I have since confirmed that no, it wasn’t leaked by someone from WL. This entire week I have been subjected to continued technical interference which seemed to be aimed at slowing me down in the release of this second part of my series. No amount of sabotage is going to stop me publishing. Just as I stated previously, no matter what is thrown at me, I will continue to speak and I will continue to write.
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