Bombshell: WikiLeaks Claims Release of Hillary Clinton's Wall Street Speeches

She attacked Bernie Sanders' supporters as a "basket of losers."

She sure has a lot of despised baskets of Americans. This is the real scandal, not Donald Trump's "lewd" locker room chatter.

#Wikileaks: Hillary Calls Bernie Supporters & Millennials “Bucket of Losers” in Goldman Sachs Speech. #AMJoy pic.twitter.com/wevCMbLis8

— Amy Mek (@AmyMek) October 8, 2016

RELEASE: The Podesta Emails #HillaryClinton #Podesta #imWithHer https://t.co/pjX9tmfINt pic.twitter.com/kDTVFYHih7

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 7, 2016

Hillary Clinton paid speach own goals internal reseach #PodestaEmails https://t.co/8k8I3sHcIN and https://t.co/2kL8e8fz5W pic.twitter.com/bzS0b3w86M

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 7, 2016

Hillary Clinton's #Syria No Fly Zone will require 'boots on ground' #Turkey #ISIS #PodestaEmails https://t.co/vLCEmYH6HZ pic.twitter.com/skl8OHZeUF

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 7, 2016

#PodestaEmails: Sanders once wrote that women fantasize about "being raped by three men simultaneously." https://t.co/HqY3q9Dc6I pic.twitter.com/YXqdpwXJpp

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 7, 2016

Secret paid Clinton speech: "You need to have a public position and a private position on policy" #PodestaEmails https://t.co/iAy8zjDnSn pic.twitter.com/tXwoZJ0O8N

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 7, 2016

Clinton secret paid speech to bank: "My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders," https://t.co/5G8cSAQxJx pic.twitter.com/Nm1U9Ycq9F

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 7, 2016

Hillary Clinton. The #PodestaEmails https://t.co/pjX9tmfINt pic.twitter.com/zfKKT7W9Wh

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 8, 2016

The #PodestaEmails Part 1: https://t.co/pjX9tmfINt pic.twitter.com/A0yr1GZJAe

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 8, 2016

RELEASE: Hillary Clinton Goldman Sachs paid speech transcript excerpts 2013 & 2014 #PodestaEmails https://t.co/QKOqtwFgwM pic.twitter.com/Z6S4FeCrWR

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 7, 2016

Robby Mook: "it's a little troubling" that meeting of Clinton Foundation was held at Goldman Sachs HQ https://t.co/bdcuNtWGLR

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 8, 2016

At WSJ, "WikiLeaks Claims Clinton Speech Text":

The organization WikiLeaks on Friday released what it claimed to be Clinton campaign email correspondence revealing excerpts from paid speeches that Hillary Clinton gave in recent years, before her presidential bid.

A Clinton campaign spokesman declined to verify whether the documents are authentic.

The emails appear to show Mrs. Clinton taking a tone in private that is more favorable to free trade and to banks than she has often taken on the campaign trail. The emails also suggest she was aware of security concerns regarding electronic devices, which could feed into criticism that Mrs. Clinton was careless with national secrets when she was secretary of state.

The release marks the latest time WikiLeaks has inserted itself into this year’s presidential campaign, and it came the same day the U.S. intelligence community accused the Russian government of trying to interfere in the U.S. elections by purposefully leaking emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee and other entities. The intelligence agencies alleged the hacks were directed by the most senior officials in the Russian government, with WikiLeaks one of the entities whose methods are consistent with those of a Russia-directed effort.

“Earlier today the U.S. government removed any reasonable doubt that the Kremlin has weaponized WikiLeaks to meddle in our election and benefit Donald Trump’s candidacy,” said Clinton spokesman Glen Caplin in a statement. “We are not going to confirm the authenticity of stolen documents released by [WikiLeaks founder] Julian Assange who has made no secret of his desire to damage Hillary Clinton.”

Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, whose emails were WikiLeaks’s primary target, sent several tweets on the subject late Friday.

“I’m not happy about being hacked by the Russians in their quest to throw the election to Donald Trump,” he wrote. “Don’t have time to figure out which docs are real and which are faked.” He added that the organization’s claim on its website that he owns the Podesta Group, a lobbying firm headed by his brother, Tony, was “completely false.”

Some of the documents in the most recent WikiLeaks release are similar in their design to documents released in recent days by DCLeaks.com, another entity that the U.S. intelligence community says has published documents stolen by the Russian government. The documents have proven difficult to authenticate.

In the two years between her time at the State Department and her presidential campaign, Mrs. Clinton earned millions on the paid speech circuit, including $4.1 million from financial institutions, according to financial disclosures. This became an issue during Mrs. Clinton’s Democratic primary campaign when Sen. Bernie Sanders called for her to release the speech transcripts, particularly for speeches she gave to major financial firms. At the time, Mrs. Clinton said she would “look into” releasing the transcripts but hasn’t provided them.

This past January, the WikiLeaks documents suggest, Clinton campaign research director Tony Carrk emailed excerpts of Mrs. Clinton’s speeches to senior campaign officials, including Mr. Podesta and communications director Jennifer Palmieri, calling them the “flags from HRC’s paid speeches.”

Mr. Carrk said he had obtained the transcripts from “HWA,” an apparent reference to the Harry Walker Agency, which arranged Mrs. Clinton’s paid speeches after she left the State Department in 2013.

“I put some highlights below,” Mr. Carrk wrote. “There is a lot of policy positions that we should give an extra scrub with Policy.”

The more than 80 pages of transcript excerpts appear to have been broken down by a campaign official into sections titled “Awkward,” “Benghazi,” “Email,” and “Helping Corporations,” among others.

The excerpts appear to show Mrs. Clinton taking a more friendly attitude toward financial firms than she does on the campaign trail. At a 2013 speech at a Goldman Sachs event, she is shown lamenting that in Washington, “There is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives.” In another speech at a Goldman event, she told the room, “You are the smartest people.”

At another Goldman Sachs speech, discussing how to avoid another financial crisis, she said the “politicizing” of the financial crisis could have been avoided with greater transparency, and told the bankers, “You guys help us figure it out and let’s make sure that we do it right this time.” A year later, at a speech paid for by Deutsche Bank, she said that some element of financial reform “really has to come from the industry itself.”

On the campaign trail, Mrs. Clinton has issued a suite of proposals aimed at curbing some Wall Street risk-taking and holding more individuals accountable for misconduct...

More.

Progressives and WikiLeaks

I've had intermittent engagement with Professor Charli Carpenter on the utility of WikiLeaks. She's written much in favor of WikiLeaks, very little that's critical. She wrote earlier, in an August essay at Foreign Policy, regarding the Afghanistan document dump:

Assange's indiscriminate approach may have caused undue collateral damage this time around, the extent of which might never be known. But this doesn't mean that the weapons of his trade should be banned or written off altogether. A more targeted whistle-blowing architecture of this type could save civilian lives in warfare -- which is the whole point, after all.

I responded to Charli at "Bloody WikiLeaks." And to repeat:

Charli Carpenter wants to save lives, particularly civilians who are killed or injured in what is otherwise the lawful exercise of military power. The problem is that's not what Julian Assange wants, nor is it what his worldwide backers want. Frankly, I don't think these people care about "human rights" except as a vehicle to chain the United States to supranational norms and to limit America's international power. Thus, I don't think Assange and WikiLeaks should be the agents of the kind of military transparency that Charli proposes.

That opinion still stands.

Charli hasn't written much on the latest release, although she suggests there's nothing new under the sun. I linked her post at Right Wing News earlier: "WikiLeaks U.S. Embassy Cables Release." And my key line, "I continue to be amazed at the fawning credibility Assange gets on the progressive," is getting picked up by some ideological enemies on the left. Poor Barbara O'Brien thinks she's pwned me: "Donald Douglas is too stupid to recognize obvious sarcasm, mistaking it for 'fawning'."

Actually, I'm not mistaking anything with respect to Charli's commentary on WikiLeaks. Yeah, I've posted my share of stupidity, but WikiLeaks commentary is not it. Stupid is as stupid does, in any case. Besides, more bothersome is willful dishonesty, which is what Scott Lemieux is all about: "Did You Know That Charli Was An Uncritical Defender of Wikileaks?" Frankly, that's what all of these progressives are all about, especially since the latest doc dump is making mincemeat of progressive foreign policy. And to that effect, folks should check out Spree at Wake Up America, "Examples of Progressive Liberal Wikileak 'Fawners'." This is an awesome post. Spree captures the absolute glee among some of the left's top bloggers. WikiLeaks is just peachy according to:

Attaturk from Firedoglake.

AmericaBlog.

Nicole Belle at Crooks and Liars.

Digby.

BradBlog.

Robert Farley of Lawyers, Gays and Marriage.

Paul Rosenberg from Open Left.

John Cole from Balloon Juice.

That's a roundup from Memeorandum, although I could add a few more to Spree's list. For example, at Newshoggers, "Wikileaks Cablegate: Nothing New But The Truth," and Matthew Rothschild, "Wikileaks and the Reactionary Impulse to Repress."

Leftists love WikiLeaks, which is no surprise, since it's essentially a neo-communist information warfare operation against the U.S. I've written much on this, for example, "How Communists Exploit WikiLeaks," and "Daniel Ellsberg Works to Give Radical Imprimatur to Latest WikiLeaks Disclosures."

What's key this time is that WikiLeaks is making progressives look bad, really bad. Barbara O'Brien's too stupid to break from the pack to call it what it is: a disaster. Sure there's some pushback, from Heather Hurlburt, for example: "Why Wikileaks Is Bad for Progressive Foreign Policy." But on balance leftists are responding to the latest release with equanimity. WikiLeaks is out to destroy establishment institutions, governments and business. And Julian Assange makes no attempt to hide his enmity of the United States. As with all the previous releases, the damage to American interests is enormous. It's no wonder leftists are thrilled, like the neo-communists at Democracy Now!

RELATED: "Whack WikiLeaks."

Bloody WikiLeaks

I like Charli Carpenter. She's a serious political scientist. In relation to myself, her work's over on the other side of security studies (human rights, constructivist theories). She's published in top-notch journals and she takes positivist methodology as legitimate. (Her lead article in I.O. Fall 2003, "'Women and Children First': Gender, Norms, and Humanitarian Evacuation in the Balkans 1991–95," is cool.) Charli also blogs. I think I first saw her stuff at Duck of Minerva, where the content is mostly all-academic. Some time back, though, Charli joined the roster at Lawyers, Guns and Money. I thought it strange, and I've said so here previously. Dave and SEK are basically hate-bloggers, and while Robert Farley generally eschews that kind of demonology, he's an unserious academic who's not only dishonest but revels in it. And because of that, I don't think she's a good fit over there. In fact, in speaking to Charli recently I joked that I was going to convert her to neoconservatism, since we have overlapping interests on security issues, and especially on Julian Assange's WikiLeaks media whistle-blowing operation. I don't think Charli's going to become a feminist "Charli" Krauthammer any time soon, but I hope sometime she finds a prominent (high-traffic) blog that's a better fit.

Perhaps toward that end, Charli's got an essay up at Foreign Policy on WikiLeaks (maybe a good sign, considering the stable of solid bloggers over there). See, "How WikiLeaks Could Use Its Power for Good."

Charli argues that WikiLeaks' is not in fact a "criminal enterprise" (as Marc Thiessen has argued, and I've seconded). Yet, she notes that the massive, indiscriminate "document dump" by WikiLeaks wasn't smart, and that perhaps a more carefully designed leaking strategy might be good. In releasing its information, WikiLeaks ought to pick its targets carefully, not unlike how the military targets its enemies. And Charli adds:

WikiLeaks adds real value to the international regime governing the behavior of soldiers in wartime by promoting precisely the sort of accountability that the Geneva Conventions require but military culture tends to discourage. The laws of war compel soldiers to refuse illegal orders and report war crimes, but troops are typically expected do so through their own chain of command, an act that goes against the grain of everything else they're taught about obedience and loyalty. When service personnel do take the leap to speak out, they can only hope their confidentiality will be respected and that they will be rewarded rather than penalized for honesty.

WikiLeaks could provide a solution -- a reporting mechanism through which individual soldiers could report specific war crimes without fear of retribution. The organization has servers in many countries and sophisticated encryption techniques, all of which are intended to disseminate incriminating secrets while protecting the anonymity of sources. Consider what this could have meant in the case of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, for example. When Sgt. Joseph Darby saw former high school friends abusing prisoners in 2004, he fulfilled his duties under the Geneva Conventions by reporting the abuses to the U.S. Army's Criminal Investigation Command. Though he asked to remain anonymous, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld revealed his identity, inviting hate mail and death threats from the public. It is no wonder that so many other participants at Abu Ghraib chose not to stick their necks out for fear of compromising their careers and personal safety. The Abu Ghraib case is hardly an isolated one.

More at the link.

Charli's argument is fine on its face, or, at least to the extent that it's good to have the release of information (and accountability) on criminal military liabilities. What I think she omits --- and this is a fatal omission with regards to the WikiLeaks project --- are the intentions of Julian Assange and those of the (nefarious) global network of anti-American whistle-blowers. Charli Carpenter wants to save lives, particularly civilians who are killed or injured in what is otherwise the lawful exercise of military power. The problem is that's not what Julian Assange wants, nor is it what his worldwide backers want. Frankly, I don't think these people care about "human rights" except as a vehicle to chain the United States to supranational norms and to limit America's international power. Thus, I don't think Assange and WikiLeaks should be the agents of the kind of military transparency that Charli proposes.

Let's look a bit more at some related issues, which cast more light on the un-humanitarian motives of the WikiLeaks network. First, as I've pointed out here, WikiLeaks puts lives at risk, both needlessly and indiscriminately. See, "Julian Assange and Wikileaks Abbetting Murder in the Name of 'Openness'." At issue is the compromised information on the identity of hundreds of Afghan nationals working with the United States. Taliban operatives pledged to kill them when the news of the Afghan operatives came to light. As bad as that was, Assange's response assuaged nothing. He claimed that "Anything in theory has the potential to harm anything else." He also blamed the United States, saying he was "appalled that the U.S. military was so lackadaisical with its Afghan sources. Just appalled." Assange has come under fire from many on the left, for example, Reporters Without Borders. But for the most part, the world's antiwar, anti-American neo-communists have relished the release of the documents, Afghan civilian casualties be damned.

As we saw with the Apache attack video released previously, WikiLeaks' interest is in damaging the United States. The "Collateral Murder" episode clearly showed Assange's agenda (which wasn't objective journalism), and unfortunately few in the mainstream press investigated the now-debunked claims made at the tape (bloggers did, especially Jawa Report). There's litte more to be expected with the pending release of the remaining Afghanistan documents. All along, myself and others have portrayed WikiLeaks as not a "journalistic" outfit but an information warfare operation against the United States Military.

My friend Charli Carpenter means well in making the case for a benign incarnation of WikiLeaks. I'm not confident that's possible. And while Charli may still not be convinced, I'm pleased to see IBD's latest editorial echoing these themes, "WikiLeaks' Hands To Get Bloodier":

The Pentagon warns that WikiLeaks' vow to publish more stolen U.S. documents may be worse than the first leaks. Even the anti-war left opposes the theft. When will WikiLeaks be treated as an enemy?

WikiLeaks, which puts stolen, mostly classified U.S. documents on the Internet, justifies its publishing of secrets as throwing sunlight on the devious doings of governments.

In reality, its founder, Julian Assange, is an anti-American agitator whose main aim is to end the U.S. war in Afghanistan by any means necessary. If that means publishing the name of an Afghan tribesman who's so much as given a U.S. soldier a drink of water in Kandahar, he's indifferent to the impact.

So there's no doubt the 76,000 stolen documents he's already published are the work of an enemy who is maddeningly exempt from the U.S.' excessively legalistic approach to war.

He's already published more than 100 names of Afghans connected to U.S. troops in his first info dump. The name-filled battlefield reports shed no sunlight on anything readers of the news don't already know of the U.S. war strategy — which is based on relationships with informants. But for the Taliban, it's a gold mine.

Having been defeated in battle, they've turned to killing Afghans who oppose them. Already a Taliban spokesman has said the Taliban is scouring these documents to find U.S. allies "to punish."

Newsweek says that, four days after WikiLeaks released its first U.S. documents, 80 death threats rolled in at the homes of tribal elders in southern Afghanistan. In a Kandahar village called Monar, the Taliban took Khalifa Abdullah from his home and killed him.

It's blood on the hands of WikiLeaks, and even the anti-war left is taking cover. Last week, George Soros-funded leftist groups like the Open Society Institute, the International Crisis Group and Amnesty International warned WikiLeaks that "we have seen the negative, sometimes deadly ramifications for those Afghans identified as working for or sympathizing with international forces."

It was followed by a letter from another group, Reporters Without Borders, warning of the same thing. If they think this is a bad thing, what moral justification does WikiLeaks have left?

WikiLeaks Update: How the Leftist Media Massacres Truth and Helps America's Enemies

Doug Ross and Rusty Shackleford are my heroes.

In just two separate blog posts, Doug and Rusty have put the left's media-industrial-complext to brutal shame, they've exposed for all to see the alliance between America's MSM and the enemies of freedom across the globe.

Spend a couple of minutes with Doug's post, "Cleverly-Eited Video Becomes Anti-Military Infomercial for World's Dumbest Blogger and His Traditional Posse of Useful Idiots." The evidence is right before your eyes. No murder. Nothing to cover up. (The "dumbest blogger" is Matthew Yglesias, but he's joined by Glenn Greenwald as perfect representatives of the mindless anti-Americanism that's encroaching deeper into what were once great national institutions.) And see also Rusty Shackleford's post, "Case Closed: Weapons Clearly Seen on Video of Reuters Reporters Killed in Iraq." Plus, in a follow up, "MSM Continues False Reporting of Reuters 'Murder' in Iraq," Rusty explains simply:

My biggest problem with this whole story is that it's a story at all. It took me no more than two minutes of watching Wiki Leak's video to realize that not only was their nothing to the accusations, but also that the video did exactly the opposite of what the Left Wing conspiracy theorists over at Wiki Leak claimed it did: fully exonerated those involved, proved that the investigation into the matter was spot on, and that there was no "cover up" as they alleged.

Seriously, this whole thing didn't even deserve a "debunking" story. The evidence that the US soldiers acted well within the rules of engagement and that Reuters stringers were embedded with enemy combatants is that overwhelming.

But we have to debunk, because with the exception of Fox News I've yet to yet a MSM report that's genuinely critical of WikiLeaks' jihad against America and our military in Iraq. See Fox News, the single source pushing back, "Military Raises Questions About Credibility of Leaked Iraq Shooting Video":

WikiLeaks, the self-proclaimed "whistle-blowing" investigative Web site, released a classified military video Monday that it says shows the "indiscriminate slaying" of innocent Iraqis. Two days later, questions linger about just how much of the story WikiLeaks decided to tell.

At a press conference in Washington, D.C., WikiLeaks accused U.S. soldiers of killing 25 civilians, including two Reuters journalists, during a July 12, 2007, attack in New Baghdad. The Web site titled the video "Collateral Murder," and said the killings represented "another day at the office" for the U.S. Army.

The military has always maintained the attacks near Baghdad were justified, saying investigations conducted after the incident showed 11 people were killed during a "continuation of hostile activity." The military also admits two misidentified Reuters cameramen were among the dead.

WikiLeaks said on Monday the video taken from an Army helicopter shows the men were walking through a courtyard and did nothing to provoke the attack. Their representatives said when the military mistook cameras for weapons, U.S. personnel killed everyone in sight and have attempted to cover up the murders ever since.

The problem, according to many who have viewed the video, is that WikiLeaks appears to have done selective editing that tells only half the story. For instance, the Web site takes special care to slow down the video and identify the two photographers and the cameras they are carrying.

All I can say is DAMN! It's about time someone's shifting the MSM meme. (And RTWT at the link.)

And I'm surprised at this, but in an otherwise fawning report, "Inside WikiLeaks’ Leak Factory," the far-left Mother Jones dishes some pretty damaging dirt. Apparently Julian Assange lists bigshot names as members of WikiLeaks' "advisory board," but then Noam Chomsky, who's cited as a member, says he's never heard of the joint. And then there's this:

Digital security expert Ben Laurie laughs when I ask why he's named on the site. "WikiLeaks allegedly has an advisory board, and allegedly I'm a member of it," he says. "I don't know who runs it. One of the things I've tried to avoid is knowing what's going on there, because that's probably safest for all concerned" ....

John Young, founder of the pioneering whistleblower site, Cryptome.org, is skeptical. Assange reverently describes Cryptome as WikiLeaks' "spiritual godfather." But Young claims he was conned into registering the WikiLeaks domain when Assange's team first launched (the site is no longer under his name). He fought back by leaking his correspondence with WikiLeaks. "WikiLeaks is a fraud," he wrote to Assange's list, hinting that the new site was a CIA data mining operation. "Fuck your cute hustle and disinformation campaign against legitimate dissent. Same old shit, working for the enemy."

Amazing that a far-left journal of opinion provides more balance than a typical report at the New York Times, although they could have gone a lot further by linking Jawa Report and others who're uncovering the scam. Still, Julian Assange, WikiLeaks' founder, left an angry comment at the thread there:

I am Julian Assange, and the subject of this article, which is full of errors and was not shown to me, even in part, prior to publication.

The article is full of extremely irritating tabloid insinuations of the type that might be expected from a poor quality magazine which is unsurprising, since the content is recycled from an old article that even Wired refused to publish.

My interview with the author was 12 months ago. I have not spoken to him since.

There plenty of gutter journalism insituations [sic], some examples:

1. The article very irritatingly goes for the "fear" angle, but contains not a single example of any of our publications causing harm related to their content. Not a single example! The whole thesis is pure invention. There is a reason no example was given. No one knows of any case where this has occurred and we have a 4 year publishing record.

2. The article, despite the insituations [sic], does not mention a single example of us ever having released a misattributed document. There is a reason no example was given. It has, as far as can be determined, never happened. Compare our record unblemished record to, say, the New York Times.

3. The article outrageously tries to insinuate that the tragic death of two very public human rights lawyers in Nairobi is related to some failing of WikiLeaks. The insinuation deplorable and it is false. The men were not confidential sources. They were public sources and very brave ones at that.

4. The article states that I believe all leaks are good. I have never stated this. The claim is an idiotic and false.

There are many others, but Mother Jones can do its own damn research.

Assange protests too much:

(Image Source.)

The media's toally enabling WikiLeaks' domestic and global propaganda efforts. Below, the first video shows hack Press Secretary Robert Gibbs responding to questions on the non-murders and non-cover up, and second is Al Jazeera's video showing family members of the Reuters journalists, where one of the sons pledges to "take up the camera" in his father's name (and thus embed with terrorists).

Also, Atlantic does a roundup, but excludes sources debunking the murder/cover-up myth: "The Focus Falls on WikiLeaks." And I e-mailed leftist gossip rag Gawker after seeing this story, which offers the appearance of objectivity but omits the key details as well: "Wikileaks Video Demonstrates Conclusively That Innocent People Get Killed in Wars." Haven't heard back yet ...

Finally, scum Glenn Greenwald continues his push for war crimes trials, "Follow-Up Points on the WikiLeaks Video." And communist Laura Flanders at AlterNet, "The Wikileaks Tape — How War Poisons the Soul."

Amazon Hosts WikiLeaks?

Oh, great. What a way to start the morning. I sell Amazon products on my blog and I learn that Amazon hosts WikiLeaks on its servers? Sometimes there's no justice in the world.

At WSJ, "WikiLeaks Using Amazon Servers After Attack":

WikiLeaks, the website that published a quarter-million sensitive diplomatic cables on Sunday, is using Amazon.com Inc. servers in the U.S. to help deliver its information. It sounds like an odd choice, but it could make sense.

The site cablegate.wikileaks.org, which WikiLeaks is using for the diplomatic documents, is linked to servers run by Amazon Web Services in Seattle, as well as to French company Octopuce. Wikileaks.org, the site’s front page, links back to Amazon servers in the U.S. and in Ireland. Several Internet watchers, including technologist Alex Norcliffe, reported earlier on WikiLeaks’ use of Amazon services.

Amazon and WikiLeaks did not return requests for comment.

The choice of Amazon, a U.S. company, seems strange given the amount of criticism WikiLeaks has received from the U.S. government. Rep. Peter King of New York, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Homeland Security, sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder Sunday saying he supported charging WikiLeaks activist Julian Assange under the Espionage Act.

But experts said it was unlikely that Amazon would face legal action for selling services to WikiLeaks. For one thing, now that the information disclosed by the site is already public, it might not be considered contraband, said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard University.

“If that data happens in the moment to be in the U.S., that’s really good because we have a First Amendment,” said Eben Moglen, a law professor at Columbia Law School.

Mr. Moglen added that, although where hardware is located can make a difference legally, there wouldn’t be much point in getting Amazon to stop providing services to WikiLeaks. “For all practical purposes … if the law is unfavorable, that Web server process will go somewhere else,” he said.

Maybe it's no so bad after all: "It’s Good That Wikileaks Is Using Amazon’s Servers."

Exposing the WikiLeaks/Communist/Media Alliance

Okay, it's time to update my coverage on the WikiLeaks story. I especially want to emphasize some context that might otherwise get overlooked as developments continue. As I first reported, Julian Assange is a convicted computer hacker and communist activist. His agenda is nothing short of a worldwide delegitimation and destabilization program of the U.S. and its allies. And because he's being feted as a hero across the leftist-media-industrial complex, the naked truth of the actual events in Baghdad 2007 are getting shrouded in a fog of anti-American propaganda.

There's a story up this afternoon at Gawker claiming that Reuters has spiked a "muscular" story on the alleged "war crimes." See, "Exclusive: Reuters Chief Spikes Story on Killing of His Own Staffers In Baghdad":

David Schlesinger, the editor in chief of Reuters, declined to run a story by one of his own reporters containing claims that the 2007 killings of two Reuters staffers in Baghdad by U.S. troops may have been war crimes.

Reuters staffers Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh were killed by U.S. helicopter gunships in Baghdad in 2007. Video of the attack, which shows the journalists standing next to unidentified armed men on a Baghdad street and records the destruction of a van attempting to retrieve a wounded Chmagh, was published this week by Wikileaks.

The video has launched a debate about the legality of the attack, which also wounded two children (you can read our take here). Yesterday, Reuters' deputy Brussels bureau chief Luke Baker filed a muscular story repeating allegations from several human rights and international law experts that the killings may have constituted war crimes. But Reuters chief David Schlesinger, a tipster says, spiked the story because "it needed more comment from the Pentagon and U.S. lawyers." It never ran, but you can read it in full below.

Gawker has published a number of badly one-side stories on WikiLeaks. John Cook is the author of the one above, as well as a previous report on Tuesday, "Wikileaks Video Demonstrates Conclusively That Innocent People Get Killed in Wars." Cook's reporting is riddled with feigned objectivity (even generating a backlash against Gawker in the comments), but he's in fact just another leftist media-enabler attempting to renew the case for prosecutions against former Bush administration officials and former and current military personnel.

In response, I sent Cook an e-mail Tuesday, titled "WikiLeaks: Why Gunships Were Called In ...":

Sir:

You write:

"It's not discernible from the video what immediately preceded the slayings or why the gunships were called in, but according to a contemporaneous New York Times account, the military claimed that U.S. troops in the area called in air support after encountering small arms fire during a raid."

You should update ...

Gunships were called in for backup for the ground operation against insurgents. Even Reuters' own photos show ground contingents standing by:

CNN, NYT Boost WikiLeaks War Crimes Gambit, Downplay/Omit Key Evidence: MSM Joins Daily Kos, Neo-Communists in Renewed 'BushCo' Recriminations

Jawa Report has all the facts you need to get this story right, and I know you're trying:

MSM Continues False Reporting of Reuters "Murder" in Iraq

Thanks.

Donald

Cook and Gawker have not responded to my e-mail.

And it's safe to say that it's not just Gawker that's actively suppressing available information disproving the war crimes meme. Indeed, it's quite frightening how extensive is the WikLeaks/communist/media alliance. Huffington Post is also running the "Reuters spiked story" report, and the Washington Post features yet another fawning MSM entry on convict Julian Assange, "The Man Behind Wikileaks." And yesterday's New York Times ran a completely lame piece on milblogs covering the story, but refused to link to bloggers who've debunked the WikiLeaks scam. See, "Reaction on Military Blogs to the WikiLeaks Video." The hardline World Can't Wait is cross-posting report's from London's left-leaning Guardian, "Wikileaks reveals video showing US air crew shooting down Iraqi civilians." And the communist Smirking Chimp clearinghouse is running updates, "The F Word: Impossible to Ignore Wikileaks Tape."

And the reports keep coming, not only more biased, but even more strident in their push for war crimes tribunals. See today's Vancouver Sun, "Reuters Families Demand U.S. Troops Be Tried Over Shooting":

The families of two Reuters news agency employees killed in a 2007 U.S. helicopter attack in Baghdad on Thursday demanded justice, telling AFP the Americans responsible should stand trial.

Graphic video footage of the shooting, which left several other people dead and wounded two children, was published on the Internet by WikiLeaks, a website that discloses information obtained from whistleblowers.

"The truth came out and the whole world saw. The American pilot should be judged by international justice and we want compensation because the act left orphans," said Safa Chmagh, whose brother Saeed Chmagh, a Reuters driver, died.

"He (the pilot) killed unarmed innocent people, among them a photographer whose camera was very visible. On top of that when they evacuated the wounded they opened fire again," said Safa, whose brother was 44 when killed.

The "unarmed" meme has been entirely discredited, in the Pentagon's own internal investigation, and by Doug Ross and Rusty Shackleford, among others. And because of this, the left continues to suppress conflicting information while constantly moving the goalposts. Selective editing is just the beginning. Communist Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! segment today pushed the "civilian murders" meme, and continued with the charge of war crimes. See, "EXCLUSIVE: One Day After 2007 Attack, Witnesses Describe US Killings of Iraqi Civilians." (This entry was cross-posted to communist filmaker Michael Moore's website as well.

Note how this disinformation then enters into a feedback loop, whereby WikiLeaks incorporates it and disseminates even more falsehoods and allegations:

And this Al Jazeera broadcast from a few days ago gives you a really good sense of what leftists are hoping to achieve. I can't thank Bill Roggio enough for all his reporting, but Glenn Greenwald and the others outflank him. Notice especially at about 22:00 minutes, where Greenwald makes the case that WikiLeaks is the new Abu Ghraib:

Fortunately, we've had a significant pushback among conservative bloggers, although the rebuttals need to gain more traction in the press.

Bob Owens has a couple of entries at Pajamas Media, for example. See, "Shame on WikiLeaks: Framing Lawful Engagement as Anti-American Propaganda (Part One)," and "Shame on WikiLeaks: Framing Lawful Engagement as Anti-American Propaganda (Part Two)."

Also, check the latest at Jawa Report, "For The Idiots Who Still Say There Was no RPG -- UPDATED: Wiki Leak as Left Wing Propaganda," and "59 Seconds of Crucial Reuters 'Murder' Video," which shows -- once again -- insurgent combatants armed with AK-47s and RPGs:

These reports are a much-welcomed corrective to the WikiLeaks/communist/media propaganda machine, but it's not enough at this point. We'll see more stories claiming that U.S. forces attacked "civilians" (Roggio notes that the "rescue" van was patrolling all morning in nearby Baghdad streets while U.S. forces engaged insurgents), and the focus will be increasingly on the children who were wounded.

It'd be a grave miscarriage for U.S. military personnel, who meticulously observed ROE, to be charged with violating rules of war; and it'd be an even greater injustice to truth and common decency should this communist propaganda campaign gain even more domestic and international legitimacy than it already has.

ADDED: Via Steve Schippert, see Mudville Gazette, "War Porn (part three - for the children)."

Julian Assange Belongs in Jail

Marc Thiessen nails it with this piece, "Wikileaks is no hero":

Wikileaks is no hero. @marcthiessen: https://t.co/nGrJz8ElJL

— AEI Foreign Policy (@AEIfdp) October 28, 2016

Winston Churchill once said that “if Hitler invaded hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.” So it’s not surprising that many conservatives are thrilled to see WikiLeaks and the Clinton campaign at war, as Julian Assange releases emails exposing the duplicity and potential self-dealing of the Clinton machine and the blurred line between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department.

But in our excitement, let’s not forget: Julian Assange is no hero. He is the devil.

Some conservatives seem to have lost sight of this. Rudy Giuliani recently said, “I find WikiLeaks very refreshing.” And Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) declared on Twitter, “Thank God for Wikileaks — doing the job that MSM WON’T!”

These conservatives seem to have forgotten that before Assange was revealing Clinton campaign emails, he was serially leaking stolen, classified national security information that has endangered the United States and its allies across the world. In 2010, WikiLeaks dumped more than 76,000 unredacted, secret U.S. intelligence documents into the public domain, including the identities of at least 100 Afghans who were informing on the Taliban. At the time, Assange admitted in an interview that his leaks might harm innocent people (“collateral damage, if you will,” he declared) and that WikiLeaks might get “blood on our hands,” but this was a price he was willing to pay for transparency.

In the years that followed, Assange continued his serial disclosures of stolen U.S. secrets. He released a troveof classified documents on Guantanamo Bay detainees, an unredacted archive of more than a quarter-million secret U.S. diplomatic cables, classified CIA documents exposing how CIA operatives maintain cover while traveling through airports, secret details of European military operations to intercept refugees traveling from Libya to Europe, and top-secret documents describing National Security Agency intercepts of foreign government communications, among others.

The cost of WikiLeaks’s disclosures to our national security is unfathomable. As former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden has put it, “We will never know who will now not come forward, who will not provide us with life-saving information” because of WikiLeaks, “but we can be certain that the cost will be great. And foreign intelligence services, with whom we have established productive and legitimate partnerships, will ask, ‘Can I trust the Americans to keep anything secret?’ ”

For these and other crimes, Assange should be in jail. But instead, he is being given sanctuary by the left-wing, anti-American government of Ecuador. Moreover, let’s not forget that Assange is attacking Hillary Clinton not because he thinks she is a corrupt liberal, but because he believes that she is too interventionist. “She’s palled up with the neocons responsible for the Iraq War,” Assange recently told Megyn Kelly, “and she’s grabbed on to this kind of neo-McCarthyist hysteria about Russia.” Assange wants the United States to pull back from Iraq and Afghanistan and stop criticizing Russian President Vladi­mir Putin — not exactly conservative priorities.

While the conservative embrace of Assange is troubling, the hypocrisy displayed by some in the media in not fully covering WikiLeaks’s Clinton revelations are equally galling. They had no problem reporting on WikiLeaks’s revelations of highly classified national security information, falling over themselves to publish what amounts to espionage porn. But according to the Media Research Center, between Oct. 7 and Oct. 13, “the morning and evening news shows on ABC, CBS and NBC dedicated 4 hours and 13 minutes to discussing the recent allegations of sexual misconduct surrounding Donald Trump’s campaign,” while “the continual release of the WikiLeaks emails from top Hillary staff [got] a comparatively puny 36 minutes of coverage .” That is a ratio of 7 to 1. And much of that meager coverage has been focused not on the revelations themselves, but on how the emails were hacked and leaked.

The Clinton campaign has a clear strategy for tamping down coverage of WikiLeaks — to paint the revelations as an assault on American democracy...

Still more.

Misunderstanding WikiLeaks

There's some debate on the degree of international cooperation in apprehending WikiLeaks' Julian Assange. At Telegraph UK, "WikiLeaks: British Police Asked to Join Hunt for Julian Assange." Also at Memeorandum. And there's some breaking stuff at NYT that I haven't gotten to yet, for example, "Diplomats Noted Canadian Mistrust Toward U.S."

For now what's sparking my interest, and some frustration, is the easy accolades so many commenters are offering to WikiLeaks, with attention especially on claims that increasing transparency is a means to a greater libertarian end. And in this I'm finding, as a side note, through Ross Douthat, that Will Wilkinson is now blogging at The Economist. I was a subscriber for three years while in graduate school. I read that magazine religiously. But like just about every other mainstream periodical in recent years, its quality has deteriorated badly. Outside the pages of Wall Street Journal, The Economist used to be the place to read the most rigorous analysis of free market economics. Yet now the previously classically-inclined editors at The Economist have jumped ship. (Alan Caruba captured this unfortunate descent just the other day, "Climate Change Idiocy and The Economist.") So I guess it makes sense that Will Wilkinson's blogging there now. The countercultural left has increasingly joined with ideological libertarianism to escalate the contemporary attack on the modern moral regime and the foundations of social order. To take that attack to its logical conclusion is to launch an extreme repudiation on state power, since it's the state that controls the monopoly of force and the means to prohibit certain activities, such as drug use and prostitution. But with the recent WikiLeaks dump, the left-libertarian alliance has metastasized into a romantic nihilism, which sees a heroic purpose to WikiLeaks when the exact opposite is true. My old infantile antagonist E.D. Kain gleefully provides a synopsis, which perfectly illustrates the verbose left-libertarianism's replacement of firm realism with fluffy fawning:

The government has a monopoly on violence; the media has only words. We should encourage underdogs like WikiLeaks who continue to fight an uphill battle, not against the United States – this country is more than its government, after all – but against the over-reach of the state. We have ceded so much of our own privacy to our government, perhaps now we would like to return the favor.

WikiLeaks may be a small player, really, in the bigger scheme of things. But to some degree it is also a bellwether, a forecast of things to come as information and technology continue to nip at the heels of the state. Perhaps we really are approaching a time when government becomes less relevant, less necessary, where other institutions both real and virtual can begin to supplant the role of the state in our lives, subversively at first but then more openly as time passes. I don’t know. I’m not even sure what that would look like in practice. Predicting the future is not among my talents; I cannot see where frying pans leave off and fires begin. But if I am at all correct then we should also realize that when an institution is threatened it reacts accordingly. Things will get worse before they get better.

If this were just a philosophical excursion vis-à-vis theories of federalism and government devolution, that'd be one thing. But it's not. We're talking about a 21st century non-state actor conducting information warfare against the United States. It's not a big surprise that WikiLeaks' most enthusiast backers are found among the world's anarcho-communist contingents. What's pathetic --- although not new, just even more pronounced --- is how willingly the libertarians jump on board this lame new vehicle toward alleged greater government accountability.

So to be clear: Julian Assange despises America with all he's got. There's nothing good about his agenda. And libertarianism is deathly nihilism if folks can't get their heads around the idea that there's little functional alternative to the nation-state in today's post-modern advanced democratic societies. That's not to say we can't limit the expansion of the state nor improve government performance and accountability. But we'll destroy ourselves by radical attempts to tear it down. And back over at The Economist is a deep clue to the ideological confusion. Folks apparently never got the memo from earlier this year on the bogus WikiLeaks Apache video "Collateral Damage." There's wasn't anything "objective" about it. But tell that to The Economist:

WikiLeaks's release of the "Collateral Murder" video last April was a pretty scrupulous affair: an objective record of combat activity which American armed forces had refused to release, with careful backing research on what the video showed. What we got was a window into combat reality, through the sights of a helicopter gunship. You could develop different interpretations of that video depending on your understanding of its context, but it was something important that had actually taken place.

A lot of commentators apparently act as though they're offering profound insights of democratic theory when expounding on WikiLeaks. I note E.D. Kain as one exhibit, although Glenn Greenwald comes to mind as well. But it's really not such a super sophisticated or intellectually glamorous issue. WikiLeaks wants to destroy authority. People are going to get killed, and not in the name of any state interest that could be otherwise checked by the processes of democratic governance. IBD had a great editorial on Julian Assange the other day, and I'll close with this, "An Infoterrorist?":

Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., the soon-to-be chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, is absolutely correct in calling for Assange's outfit to be classified a terrorist organization under U.S. law. King has called on Attorney General Eric Holder to charge Assange with a crime under the Espionage Act. While Holder's office has announced an investigation, don't hold your breath.

But what of Assange's accomplices in the U.S. and foreign media?

The New York Times, where Assange gets to dump "all the secrets fit to leak," boasts that its collaborations with WikiLeaks give "the unvarnished story of how the government makes its biggest decisions" — hardly a rationale for endangering our liberty.

This is a continuing, slow-motion disaster for the U.S., and our government has done little beyond having a State Department lawyer send a huffy letter to Assange's lawyer in Sweden.

These leaks must be plugged — by force if necessary — before it is American blood we find flowing.

At the video, more radical left-wing Wiki-boosting from communist Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!

RELATED: From Peter Feaver, "WikiLeaks Only Interested in Damaging U.S. Foreign Policy."

Human Rights Groups Slam WikiLeaks

At WSJ, "Rights Groups Join Criticism of WikiLeaks":

A group of human-rights organizations is pressing WikiLeaks to do a better job of redacting names from thousands of war documents it is publishing, joining the list of critics that claim the Web site's actions could jeopardize the safety of Afghans who aided the U.S. military.

The letter from five human-rights groups sparked a tense exchange in which WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange issued a tart challenge for the organizations to help with the massive task of removing names from thousands of documents, according to several of the organizations that signed the letter. The exchange shows how WikiLeaks and Mr. Assange risk being isolated from some of their most natural allies in the wake of the documents' publication.

The human-rights groups involved are Amnesty International; Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, or CIVIC; Open Society Institute, or OSI, the charitable organization funded by George Soros; Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission; and the Kabul office of International Crisis Group, or ICG.

The groups emailed WikiLeaks to say they were concerned for the safety of Afghans identified as helping the U.S. military in documents obtained by WikiLeaks, according to several of the groups. WikiLeaks has already published 76,000 of the documents and plans to publish up to 15,000 more.

Some of the already published documents included names that critics including the Pentagon claim could lead to harm for Afghans seen as helping the U.S. war effort. The Pentagon last week demanded that WikiLeaks hand over all the classified Afghan war documents it has.

"We have seen the negative, sometimes deadly ramifications for those Afghans identified as working for or sympathizing with international forces," the human-rights groups wrote in their letter, according to a person familiar with it. "We strongly urge your volunteers and staff to analyze all documents to ensure that those containing identifying information are taken down or redacted."

In his response to the letter signed by the human-rights organizations, Mr. Assange asked what the groups were doing to analyze the documents already published, and asked whether Amnesty in particular would provide staff to help redact the names of Afghan civilians, according to people familiar with the letter.

An Amnesty official replied to say that while the group has limited resources, it wouldn't rule out the idea of helping, according to people familiar with the reply. The official suggested that Mr. Assange and the human-rights groups hold a conference call to discuss the matter.

Mr. Assange then replied: "I'm very busy and have no time to deal with people who prefer to do nothing but cover their asses. If Amnesty does nothing I shall issue a press release highlighting its refusal," according to people familiar with the exchange.

Later, WikiLeaks posted on its Twitter account: "Pentagon wants to bankrupt us by refusing to assist review. Media won't take responsibility. Amnesty won't. What to do?"

In an email Monday, WikiLeaks declined to comment on the exchange with the human rights groups.

Taliban representatives have said publicly that they are searching the documents and plan to punish people who have helped U.S. forces.

Freakin' Assange has blood on his hands. Folks should give him up to the Taliban.

Massive WikiLeaks C.I.A. Hacking Dump Reveals Spy Secrets, Possible Espionage on Americans (VIDEO)

I just don't know what to think anymore.

Absolutely nothing is safe these days from cyberhacking, and what's worse, the C.I.A. may well have been involved in domestic espionage, which is prohibited by statute. Either that, or other operators using the same technology.

In any case, at the New York Times, "WikiLeaks Releases Trove of Alleged C.I.A. Hacking Documents":

WASHINGTON — WikiLeaks on Tuesday released thousands of documents that it said described sophisticated software tools used by the Central Intelligence Agency to break into smartphones, computers and even Internet-connected televisions.

If the documents are authentic, as appeared likely at first review, the release would be the latest coup for the anti-secrecy organization and a serious blow to the C.I.A., which maintains its own hacking capabilities to be used for espionage.

The initial release, which WikiLeaks said was only the first part of the document collection, included 7,818 web pages with 943 attachments, the group said. The entire archive of C.I.A. material consists of several hundred million lines of computer code, it said.

Among other disclosures that, if confirmed, would rock the technology world, the WikiLeaks release said that the C.I.A. and allied intelligence services had managed to bypass encryption on popular phone and messaging services such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram. According to the statement from WikiLeaks, government hackers can penetrate Android phones and collect “audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.”

The source of the documents was not named. WikiLeaks said the documents, which it called Vault 7, had been “circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.”

WikiLeaks said the source, in a statement, set out policy questions that “urgently need to be debated in public, including whether the C.I.A.’s hacking capabilities exceed its mandated powers and the problem of public oversight of the agency.” The source, the group said, “wishes to initiate a public debate about the security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyberweapons.”

The documents, from the C.I.A’s Center for Cyber Intelligence, are dated from 2013 to 2016, and WikiLeaks described them as “the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency.” One former intelligence officer who briefly reviewed the documents on Tuesday morning said some of the code names for C.I.A. programs, an organization chart and the description of a C.I.A. hacking base appeared to be genuine.

A C.I.A. spokesman, Dean Boyd, said, “We do not comment on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents.”

WikiLeaks, which has sometimes been accused of recklessly leaking information that could do harm, said it had redacted names and other identifying information from the collection. It said it was not releasing the computer code for actual, usable cyberweapons “until a consensus emerges on the technical and political nature of the C.I.A.’s program and how such ‘weapons’ should be analyzed, disarmed and published.”

Some of the details of the C.I.A. programs might have come from the plot of a spy novel for the cyberage, revealing numerous highly classified — and in some cases, exotic — hacking programs. One, code-named Weeping Angel, uses Samsung “smart” televisions as covert listening devices. According to the WikiLeaks news release, even when it appears to be turned off, the television “operates as a bug, recording conversations in the room and sending them over the internet to a covert C.I.A. server.”

The release said the program was developed in cooperation with British intelligence...

Keep reading.

And watch, at CNN:

Daniel Ellsberg Works to Give Radical Imprimatur to Latest WikiLeaks Disclosures

I've been following the latest WikiLeaks document dump, but haven't had a chance to comment. Certainly the truth about the morally bankrupt Julian Assange is starting to go mainstream, "WikiLeaks Founder on the Run, Trailed by Notoriety." And it's no surprise that when under some real journalistic questioning the dude can't take the heat:

But the latest buzz over WikiLeaks has mostly bypassed the criminal corruption of the top leadership. And of course most MFM reporting, as well as leftist blog commentary, has gleefully focused on the charges that Iraq forces used torture and the allegedly "grim portrait of civilian deaths." Of course what was most astonishing, and by far much more important, was the latest evidence of massive Iranian intervention in the war, and not to mention the evidence that WMD --- long alleged by the left to have been a Bush administration lie --- were being used by insurgents as recently as 2008. And on top of all this, in one more interesting relationship, the New York Times featured a story on the Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, "WikiLeaks Founder Gets Support in Rebuking U.S. on Whistle-Blowers." Given how dramatically the MFM has been all over the Wikileaks agenda since we first were lied to with the doctored Apache video early this year, this latest report on the communist Daniel Ellsberg (shown here at an ANSWER protest in March) should be getting more attention than it has:

LONDON — Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, and Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, lashed out together on Saturday at the Obama administration’s aggressive pursuit of whistle-blowers, including those responsible for the release of secret documents on the Iraq war.

Mr. Assange also said that WikiLeaks, which released the trove of almost 400,000 Iraq war documents on Friday, would shortly be posting an additional 15,000 remaining secret documents on the Afghan war.

Mr. Assange, speaking at a news conference in a London hotel a stone’s throw from the headquarters of Britain’s foreign intelligence agency, MI6, was joined by Mr. Ellsberg, 79, the former military analyst who leaked a 1,000-page secret history of the Vietnam War in 1971 that became known as the Pentagon Papers.

Mr. Ellsberg, who said he had flown overnight from California to attend, described Mr. Assange admiringly as “the most dangerous man in the world” for challenging governments, particularly the United States. He said the WikiLeaks founder had been “pursued across three continents” by Western intelligence services and compared the Obama administration’s threat to prosecute Mr. Assange to his own treatment under President Richard M. Nixon.

Both men hit out at what they described as the Obama administration’s aggressive pursuit of whistle-blowers, which Mr. Ellsberg said put the United States on a path to the kind of repressive legal framework that Britain has under its broad Official Secrets Act. He said the criminal investigations under President Obama of three Americans accused of leaking government secrets represented a new low.

The three men he was referring to were Pfc. Bradley Manning, a former military intelligence analyst suspected of providing the documents on Afghanistan and Iraq to WikiLeaks; Thomas Drake, an official with the National Security Agency who was indicted this year; and Shamai Kedem Leibowitz, an F.B.I. linguist who pleaded guilty to leaking five classified documents in late 2009.

Mr. Ellsberg said the Pentagon’s demand that Mr. Assange “return” any classified materials in his possession was carefully couched in language similar to that used in the aftermath of the Pentagon Papers release, when he was threatened with criminal prosecution for espionage. “Secrecy,” Mr. Ellsberg said, “is essential to empire.”

It Begins: 'WikiLeaks Founder Charged in Sweden With Rape' -- UPDATED!! Sweden Withdraws Arrest Warrant!

It's rape charges now. Later he'll be up for violating the Espionage Act and for providing material support to terrorism.

At New York Times (via Astute Bloggers and Memeorandum):

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Sweden has issued rape and molestation charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whose whistle-blowing website last month published secret U.S. military files on Afghanistan.

Assange, whose whereabouts were unclear, told WikiLeaks' Twitter page the charges were "without basis and their issue at this moment is deeply disturbing."

Assange was in Sweden last week to discuss his work and defend his intent to publish further documents on the war in Afghanistan.

He has close contacts in the Nordic country, which has some of the world's strictest laws on the protection of sources and where WikiLeaks also keeps many of its servers.

"We can confirm that he's wanted. He was charged last night -- the allegation is suspected rape," said Karin Rosander, Director of Communications at the National Prosecutor's Office.

"One is rape and one is molestation," she said. She did not elaborate.

WikiLeaks wrote on Twitter that it had not been contacted by police.

"We were warned to expect 'dirty tricks'. Now we have the first one," WikiLeaks, whose page has more than 100,000 followers, tweeted. It also provided a link to the right-leaning tabloid Expressen, which first published the allegations.

WikiLeaks was not available when contacted by Reuters and Stockholm police declined to comment.

There's a statement at the WikiLeaks blog. The Expressen article is here. And the conspiracy theories are already percolating: "Did US Government Fabricate Charges Against Julian Assange? WikiLeaks founder ‘Wanted In Sweden For Rape’ (UPDATE 9)."

**********

UPDATE: "Sweden withdraws arrest warrant for WikiLeaks founder" (via Memeorandum). Sure. And of course this is just the beginning. Assange has some enemies out there (and he's still charged on lesser counts). The dude should watch his back.

Christian Caryl, Contributing Editor at Foreign Policy and Newsweek, Slams Julian Assange and WikiLeaks

And Caryl's currently a Senior Fellow at MIT's Center for International Studies (CIS). And he's got a refreshing take on the WikiLeaks phenomenon, at New York Review, "Why WikiLeaks Changes Everything":

Among the cables released so far are revelations that have prompted headlines around the world, but there are also dispatches on Bavarian election results and Argentine maritime law. If the aim is to strike a blow against American imperial designs—as Assange has suggested in some of his statements—I don’t see how these particular cables support it. Assange has claimed to Time magazine that he wants to “make the world more civil” by making secretive organizations like the US State Department and Department of Defense accountable for their actions; he also told Time that, as an alternative, he wants to force them “to lock down internally and to balkanize,” protecting themselves by becoming more opaque and thereby more “closed, conspiratorial and inefficient.” This is, to say the least, a patently contradictory agenda; I’m not sure how we’re supposed to make sense of it. In practical terms it seems to boil down to a policy of disclosure for disclosure’s sake. This is what the technology allows, and Assange has merely followed its lead. I don’t see coherently articulated morality, or immorality, at work here at all; what I see is an amoral, technocratic void.

As Alan Cowell has written in The New York Times, the careers of some foreign officials—and not necessarily high-level ones—have already been destroyed or threatened by these revelations.

In at least one case the person’s name had been redacted, but his identity was clear enough from the context. One is justified in asking: Will deaths occur as these and other statements are published? We do not know, and we may not hear about them if they do. But damage of various kinds is sure to result. (For his part, Assange seems remarkably unable to discuss these very real dangers; in the Time interview he claims that “this sort of nonsense about lives being put into jeopardy” is simply an excuse.) Can WikiLeaks at least tell us why this was necessary?

In the old days, journalists would have done what WikiLeaks’s print media partners, like The Guardian and Der Spiegel, are attempting to do now: make judgments about which documents to release and whether or not to redact the names mentioned in them based on the larger public interest and the risk of inflicting harm on innocent bystanders. Yet one cannot escape the feeling that the entire exercise is rendered tragicomically moot by the mountain of raw material looming, soon to be equally accessible, in the background. Khatchadourian contends that WikiLeaks is evolving into something more like a conventional journalistic organization, one that will make value judgments about what it’s doing rather than simply dumping documents into cyberspace willy-nilly. But the sheer scale of what the group does suggests that this is something of a fool’s errand. Assange says the organization has been releasing the cables at the rate of about eighty a day. (By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, that means that we have three thousand days of revelations to go as this article goes to press.)

The comparison some people have been making between the WikiLeaks document dumps and the Pentagon Papers affair back in the 1970s is illuminating precisely because it shows how little the two stories have in common. As pointed out by Max Frankel, an ex–New York Times editor who was one of those overseeing publication of the papers, the leaker in that case, Daniel Ellsberg,

was not breaching secrecy for its own sake, unlike the WikiLeakers of today; he was looking to defeat a specific government policy. Moreover, he was acutely conscious of the risks of disclosure and did not distribute documents betraying live diplomatic efforts to negotiate an end to the fighting. And it took him years to find a credible medium of distribution, which is now available at the push of a button.

I’m fully aware that Daniel Ellsberg has lent his support to Julian Assange. That’s his right. But I think he might be overlooking a few vital points.

One of the most obvious is that WikiLeaks is posting these raw documents on the Web, the most permissive information medium we have yet to invent. As a result we are now experiencing yet another jump from the ploddingly analog to the explosively digital. Just as the concept of “privacy” fades into obscurity when sixteen-year-olds can present their innermost thoughts to an audience of billions, so, too, the Internet distribution of official secrets changes the rules of the game. Once all the documents are online they will be subjected not only to the often clumsy ministrations of journalists and historians but also to the far more efficient data-mining programs and pattern- analysis software of foreign governments and private companies (the extent of which, in the case of China’s handling of Google, the cables themselves make clear). The implications for the conduct of government policy (not to mention individual lives) are monumental. I wish I could predict what they might be, but I can’t. I’m not sure anyone can.

There's more at the link.

I noted Caryl's credentials at the title above because he seems so unusual --- and incredibly lucid. Continuing the essay he unfolds the logic of the argument, which is to say that the enormity of the latest WikiLeaks data dump is greater than any one individual or institution to manage. And the consequences --- collateral damage for the information leakers, who are less interested in changing policies than they are in bringing down governments --- are the untold and potentially catastrophic risks to the lives and careers of honest people carrying out their jobs in government, military institutions, humanitarian organizations, and so forth. These are questions ultimately of tremendous power, and Caryl in fact indicates his support for much of what WikiLeaks is supposedly all about --- greater transparency and accountability of governments. But in the end, Julian Assange comes out looking both quite poor and insignificant in this account. And Caryl perhaps might have continued a bit more by delving into the motivations of Assange, and especially his more enthusiastic adherents on the anarcho- and neo-communist left. If there was ever an equalizing force for anti-establishment actors to take down the state sources of world hegemonic power, WikiLeaks is it. Its utility lies not so much in exposure of government duplicity, corruption, or realpolitik, but in radicalizing the radicals, and enabling their growing revolutionary program. And recall there's an almost perfect ideological correlation betwen those who favor and those who oppose the WikiLeaks project. Even purportedly moderate leftists are gung ho on this transformationalist agenda, while either naive or in conscious denial to the nihilist destruction that's essential to the anarcho- and neo-communist program. Caryl does yoeman's work in getting the alternative meme out in leftist outlets like New York Review. It's an interesting development that will hopefully gain traction.

I'll have more later, in any case ...