Watch the Laura Poitras movie "Risk"[1] if you want a really good feel for why Julian has every reason in the world to disrupt the possibility of a Hillary Clinton presidency.
It's an amazing movie that came out at a really unfortunate time for Laura, in that it got lost in the noise of the dcleaks drama. Anti-Julian people hated the movie because it humanized him too much, and pro-Julian people hated the movie because it made him look weak. It was a deeply personal look into the life of a man who suddenly got caught up in the polarizing shitstorm of the 2016 elections.
The leaks definitely came from GRU hackers, but it seems like the GRU was super careful to sell it to Julian as a DNC insider leak, and in his excitement to stick it to the Clinton campaign, he probably overlooked a lot of red flags that he might have caught if didn't have a personal grudge to satisfy.
I voted for Hillary, and I'd do it again, she'd have made a fine US president. I also seeded the hell out of the Podesta emails, because people deserve to know about political corruption. I also believe that the espionage crimes that Julian is charged with are 100% horseshit, and going after journalists like that sets an incredibly bad precedent coming from a nation that purports to be a world leader in press freedoms.
I agree, mostly. I stopped caring about Assange since the incident because selective information feeding is not a whistleblowing move but political manipulation. I don't have doubt that people representing my interests are corrupt to some degree but I don't want them eliminated in favor for people who don't represent my interest and are just as corrupt but protected from expose because the interests of the leaker aligns with them.
Whistleblowers are allowed to have an agenda. In practice most do. But for society it's better that shady stuff get revealed than them staying hidden because the whistleblower is not a paragon of morality.
You can be a whistleblower, you can be a journalist. I don't think you can be both. It's the job of a journalist to keep personal grudges out. It would be their job to keep political bias out too, but I guess we can't have that.
Journalists are people, and people have not been impartial ever. I don’t know where this meme came from, but even deciding to report on a story is being partial. There is no such thing as objective reporting, and it was not better 60 years ago.
The idea that journalist are not perfect, therefore they are terrible and entirely untrustworthy is much more dangerous than any journalist’s corruption.
The idea that it used to be better a century ago is laughable.
Which meme? The straw-man you just attacked?
There is a difference between the attempt to be impartial, or "declared" partial, on one side, and reporting maximally optimized to be one-sided, manipulative and biased on the other. Many US outlets are the latter. Many German ones are still the former.
It is clearly in the job description of a journalist. The complaint is not about the inability of humans to not live up to the ethics. The complaint is about not even trying. The pervasiveness of this has certainly increased, and is not the same between countries. The thought that this has been static in a profession which has changed dramatically (print to online, just as an example), is "laughable".
There are different cultures in different countries. While journalist often had a political lean in Germany, I think it has gotten worse. And the amount of manipulative methods US media outlets employ in current times is astonishing.
The fairness doctrine meant that when they aired something considered controversial, they had to give equal time to the opposing viewpoint. That didn't mean they had to be fair, since everybody got latitude on what was considered controversial i.e. if they ban you for something on twitter now, it wouldn't have been "controversial" then, it would have been settled, so you'd get no time without at least going to court over it. Also, they could just give some objector 2 minutes to make their case into a camera and play it during the news.
The things that would end up being "controversial" are things that your local Chamber of Commerce or an international fossil fuel lobbying group would find controversial.
Its scary how easy you think it is to dictate actual fairness and impartiality in law, though. The only places that have laws like that are extremely authoritarian and corrupt, like Zimbabwe.
nor ever. The only things in the news that are not biased are the sports scores and stock quotes. A major difference between good and bad journalists is whether they are up front about their biases. Julian was very upfront.
It’s probably the one that said not to use ivermectin and now say that what they said is that they didn’t recommend it meanwhile all news orgs and social media suppressed any mention of ivermectin and when they did it was to confound it with veterinary medicine.
Right, so there’s no ministry of truth but choices of some media companies to promote government recommendations that turned out to be best to their knowledge and not absolute truth?
No government officials promoted certain narratives which have been proven false and they walk things back and the news doesn’t push back on that.
Moreover the government had embeds and was in communication with social media and traditional coordinating what to disseminate and what to suppress.
The. You have more dignitaries at the WEF and UN COP saying how wonderful it was that Covid prepared people and provided for better government control…
I just don't see how a government body responsible for the public health having an advice for health which is pushed by some of the media counts as ministry of truth.
It's already been pointed out to you that when people say "Ministry of Truth", they're referring to the defunct "Disinformation Governance Board" created within the DHS. You chose to ignore that.
> Right, so there’s no ministry of truth but choices of some media companies to promote government recommendations
If you think the government phone-calling people at social media companies flagging specific instances and people for "misinformation" is not a form of intimidation, then you need to familiarize yourself with the legal precedent here.
They "shut it down" when it became public due to the backlash[0]. But not really, they just started working in secret. Now we have a secret ministry of truth[1] like some nations have secret police.
Yes, the disinformation board was actually an attempt to formalize and create some oversight over the ad hoc, unaccountable process that the government has to go through today to pressure media companies to manipulate and censor the public.
I prefer it this way. It's better for people to feel like criminals who whiteboard in backrooms how to manipulate public opinion by laundering prior restraint through putting pressure on the incomes of billionaires. Formalization of this process would just be permanent institutionalization, and the US government has shown throughout the 20c to now that a public board won't prevent abuses, abuses will just be routed around the board.
You mean the fascist that kept bombing a country his own invaded because of "self-defense"? the same one who presided over the biggest government surveillance leak in the entire history, and then made sure to hunt down the leaker into the only place that would provide him safety and now conveniently uses it to discredit him?
Or you mean the fascist warhawk that actually started several wars that ravaged the middle-east and passed the patriot act to give the government untold power over its citizens, both with bipartisan support I might add?
How can Trump be seen with such disdain in comparison when at worst he's just a more incompetent version of Obama with a social media addiction and republican slant. The NSA scandal was merely a decade ago, george w bush wasn't that far back either, how short are the memories. If anything his unconditional withdraw of all troops in afghanistan is the biggest anti-fascist action the last 3 presidents have done, although this one action certainly doesn't put him above being one given he wasn't even pulling the breaks on their actions beforehand.
Your text is already faded enough that you must be clear that a lot of folks don't agree with your sentiment here, but let me try to engage constructively here, by pointing out that your text betrays a complete ignorance of what exactly fascism is and how it acts upon societies it infects.
Now if you want to talk about the many times that Democrats and Republicans all had a big lovefest so they could all vote together to invade a country, I'm with you on that, but it's a problem of both parties, as the voting record clearly demonstrates.
What's been happening the last decade or so is another thing entirely.
> Your text is already faded enough that you must be clear that a lot of folks don't agree with your sentiment here
Funnily enough, so is yours.
What I highlighted pointed towards government becoming increasingly overbearing and ramping up surveillance on its citizens(NSA and patriot act), military extremism(patriot act again and the middle east), paternalism over other cultures(fear that the people would choose the "wrong"side in a country they invaded as an excuse to keep troops or to install proxy governments), and the list goes on.
You're at a point that covering true stories like the hunter biden laptop(that now journalists are verifying its authenticity) have made people like glenn greenwald persona non-grata in mainstream journalism circles, while having the intelligence agencies saying it is false. You have people that risked and are paying with their life to make information known to the public demonized because apparently leaking things about the candidate I like is bad, regardless of it being true. You have people asking for oversight for the contributions to Ukraine being labelled as russian assets(ie:enemy of our great state). You have intelligence agencies being labelled as some all knowing benevolent protectors of the populace not even a decade after the NSA leaks. The only thing that could be disguising it is because as it stands mostly the democrats seem to be on this publically, but make no mistake the moment push comes to shove the republicans will also take such position as they had taken before trump, and with thunderous applause from the "bipartisan" population if the current outlook is something to go by.
Fascism has been acting on the american society for a long time, Trump just coincidentally showed where the allegiances lied once someone that wasn't a career politician took over, luckily for them the man was an incompetent buffoon with his own laundry list of problems who got assimilated into the machine very fast, even if he would say otherwise.
If all of this for you isn't clear signs of fascism and instead trump, who mostly just inherited the actions of his predecessors is(making him just as much as the others I might add), we'll just agree to disagree and leave it at that.
Again, you need to study up on the difference between fascism and other forms of authoritarian government. If you said that the US government has been becoming more authoritarian we would have no argument, because it absolutely has been doing that, but it has only been going fascist for a very short time, relatively speaking. Many bad things happened in the last fifty years, but this is something worse that a bunch of people seem to be convinced is something better. A conflagration that they are mistaking for a light at the end of a tunnel.
Fascism arises from a bad economy and a population who feel that they have no prospects or future. This tends to create a lot of angry young men hanging out in the streets, with nothing but time and cheap beer on their hands - a resource for sociopathic power seekers.
Whether these young men are Germans living under the absurd conditions of the Versailles treaty, lads from the trampled working class in Thatcher's England, or Americans working under late stage capitalism with No Child Left Behind Act schools, the fascist always works from the same playbook: Stoke the anger, and provide a convenient, nearly always racialized scapegoat outsider, then promise to do something about those outsiders with a never-ending reign of power as the actual goal.
One way to spot a fascist is, if they lose legitimate elections, they will attempt things like insurrections where they storm capital buildings. It's like a dark spot on the society's x-ray.
Those putsches don't always succeed, but as far as getting a movement of armed thugs to fight in the streets, the playbook works every time. The Republican party has been showing signs of a willingness to engage in Fascist behavior for decades, ever since they embraced the Southern Strategy, which even [Barry Goldwater](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/777519-mark-my-word-if-and-...) said would be the death of the party. And here we are, living with the GOP that he predicted would come as a result of their doing just that.
You bring up the NSA's surveillance, the Patriot Act, the various foreign wars that everyone except Bernie voted for with a rah rah rah - these all happened under GOP presidents, with a compliant, cooperative Democratic party that got behind the president, supposedly for the safety of the nation. This is the opposite of fascism.
I leave it to you whether you're gonna choose to notice the clear difference between the recent actions of the two parties, and I hope at the very least you can employ the right terminologies. Sometime in the early aughts I got into it with a Bush cheerleader who kept saying things like "You don't understand the philosophy of terrorism. Terrorists make women wear robes that cover their entire bodies and their societies are like, sexist!" That's what your use of the term "Fascism" reads like.
Yeah I definitely don't agree with that opinion. Whistleblowing is about helping the public By doing the right thing for the right reasons. It's a highly moral act. When society puts a higher value on selfishness over selflessness corruption becomes a big part of the problem. We already live in a world where people are too selfish we don't need any more of that.
It's your prerogative to not care about someone being imprisoned indefinitely and illegally as a political prisoner because they have different politics than you, but it's not a virtue.
I don't care about legality, I'm not a judge or in the law enforcement. Was he wronged? Yes. Did he wronged the people who supported him in an attempt to get back to people wronged him? Yes. Well, then it's up to him and his remaining supporters to pursue justice. I don't care as long as he doesn't do more harm to me.
I have family in Turkey and spent good chunk of my adulthood in this country. Trump was a big enabler for Erdogan, to the point that 2020 election results were broadcasted live all day together with live graphics and stats just as the elections in Turkey as it was viewed as Erdogans last hope if Trump wins again.
Erdogan is destroying my alma mater, his ridiculous economics are having very bad impact on my parents and friends, kids are sent to religious schools in much larger numbers than before which means social problems in the years to coma and the general totalitarian approach of his is something I don’t like enduring.
This whole thing didn't start with Trump. I have family that is no longer eligible for ESTAs in the US and people like to put it all on the racists in Trumps admin like Miller.
Quite a bit of this stuff actually went through both House and Senate during the Obama presidency. The coup d'etat in Turkey happened in July 2016 and the subsequent purge and extra radicalization of Erdogan didn't just suddenly happen with Trump. Things like this are usually planned a while in advance. On top of that Trumps cabinet was a mess and took a while to get started, so it's inconceivable that it started during Trump days.
It doesn't really absolve Trump's administration from anything, but at the same time don't think that Obama's administration and by extension Hillary and Biden didn't have their hand in this crap either.
I'm quite concerned that some of these leaks that are now gone are for example the current CIA directors Burns' warnings about Ukraine when he was still ambassador to Russia back in the days. Or just unrelated things like documentations about Landmark or other cults that were removed from all other parts of the web due to lawsuits.
The coup of 2016 and many other independent things happened through the years, what having Trump in power instead of someone else changes how Erdogan navigates through these things.
Do you know that Erdogan today is a nationalist and pro Ataturk(Ataturk himself is not purely right or left wing) right winger? A decade ago he was almost the exact opposite and was targeted harshly by his current coalition partners and his primary rivals were his partner in crime. Go back one more decade and Erdogan was pro-West liberal. He simply navigates the conditions and the US president is one of the major conditions.
You mean just like how you go back 1.5 decades and Putin was a pro-West liberal? Just like like how Biden with his almost 80% Obama cabinet navigated the Ukraine-Russia thing so nicely. Biden and Burns both called Ukraine the brightest of all red lines for Russia[1]. I'd like to post the wikileaks link for Burns' comment, but it's sadly gone.
Yes presidents are supposed to navigate these situations. But none of the past couple of administrations have. To try to pin it all on Trump is a cop-out.
As I said, Trump was one of the factors how he navigates. Obviously, if the coup hand't happen or a meteor struck Istanbul we would have completely different political landscape. Trump was a very influential enabler for Erdogan and that's why all the pro-Erdogan media covered the US elections as if they are Turkish elections.
What kind of nonsense is that Trump enabled Erdogan. Sure, if Trump hadn't been POTUS then, would you have expected another President to intervene in Turkey? Definitely, not.
I think you underestimate the kind of example the US president sets in the world. Lesser devils Luke Erdogan, Bolsonaro, Orban, were quick to mimick Trump talking points and policies, just as they are quick to package and pace things differently when a Democrat's in office. Potus sets a tune that's heard far and wide. Pointing at Amicans and the American president as an excuse for bad behaviour is a time honored tradition amongst the opportunistic after all.
People gave him some crap because he didn't leak the white rose Trump leak, but it was already everywhere and he mostly just declined to promote it. Other than that, there were no Trump related leaks in the inbox, so it's not like he leaked for one side of an election, but not the other. Also Trump's corruption was already known far and wide. It's the kind of shit he brags about.
I was pretty shocked not only at how far right media twisted the contents of the Podesta emails into wild conspiracy theories like PizzaGate etc, but fully disgusted at the sheer volume of people who just ate all that up without a moment of critical thinking.
Even still, no sane person thought that Trump was going to win. Even the couple days before the election, all the polls had Hillary up by a wide margin. I highly doubt that Julian was hoping for a Trump presidency. I think it's much more likely that he was imagining a Clinton presidency, but where people were a lot more critical of her actions.
Lots of people were saying he was gonna win, including me to everyone around me. It's not that we were so smart, I'm sure of that because Michael Moore is an idiot much of the time.
Nobody cares, though, what he thought he was doing. In social justice circles, we talk about impact being what matters, not intention. There's a lot of impact that he has to answer for.
You seem to assume, that one can know what the impact of one's actions will be. That's basically asking for the ability to predict the future.
I don't want to imply that the outcomes don't matter. But at least I prefer living in a justice system where planned murder and fatal accident are not considered as equal offences, although outcomes might be the same.
We have evidence that when the DNC was hacked, so was the RNC. Only one of those hacks has ever been released. Unless you believe republicans have literally never done anything wrong, something doesn't add up.
Assuming those hacks did happen, is there any evidence that the hackers gave the info to Assange? And what could they have found that would hurt Trump?
As far as I can remember, the RNC was openly anti-Trump in 2016. There was no need to leak that, unlike the DNC being anti-Bernie, which wasn't so open.
And any damaging leaks about the RNC would only have helped Trump's anti-establishment campaign. Other Republicans being corrupt was a big part of his message.
>And what could they have found that would hurt Trump?
So just to be clear, you think information should only be released if it hurts someone you want to hurt? Is that the ethical standard that was touted by Wikileaks?
No, I think the original accusation was "selective information feeding", meaning that Assange was trying to hurt Hillary and help Trump, and therefore held something back.
That accusation falls apart if the accuser can't even think of a plausible scenario in which Assange might have had information that would have hurt Trump. Assange couldn't hold back information he didn't have.
It's just made up. The "logic" goes: if there was bad stuff about H. Clinton out there, there must be worse stuff about Trump out there, because Trump is worse than H. Clinton. Therefore, Assange ignored all of the bad stuff (that neither the FBI, constant congressional investigations, numerous private intelligence firms, and every single anti-Trump media outlet spent nearly a decade at this point looking for still have yet to find) just to target poor H. Clinton.
The most bizarre part of this theory is why anyone would think that Trump, a NYC real estate guy who wasn't good at actually building things so turned into a guy who sold his branding to real estate projects, a wrestler, a game show host, would have more or worse skeletons in his closet than H. Clinton, somebody at the center of one of the two ruling parties of the world hegemon for 25 years. We know everything that H. Clinton did (she was proud before she wasn't, like the rest of the New Democrats), so the leaks were literally about her corruption and DNC corruption during the election. The DNC also fired all of their executives over it because they were obviously corrupt. If the DNC were actually concerned about corruption rather than being caught, you'd think they'd celebrate Assange for smoking it out.
I always used to wonder how dictatorships or strikebreakers could call in huge groups of thugs to beat up people at protests, or to show up to rallies for the dictator. A lot of them are paid, of course, but a lot of them just have the mindset that really prioritizes trying to figure out if Trump was misrepresenting his net worth by exaggerating the success of some of his buildings in order to secure financing from new investors, over what H. Clinton did to Haiti. Or Honduras. Or Iraq.
But, you know, I think the Trump Foundation was a way for him to avoid paying taxes on a painting in the lobby of his building. Lock him up.
> I also believe that the espionage crimes that Julian is charged with are 100% horseshit, and going after journalists like that sets an incredibly bad precedent coming from a nation that purports to be a world leader in press freedoms.
Hillary was the secretary of the united states when those charges was written (and leaked). There was also reports about political pressure done by the US government directed at the Sweden and UK, allegedly to influence the legal case around Assange. Accusations was made, long before the election, that Hillary was the person responsible of authorizing and organizing those deeds.
Based on that I find the events of the 2016 elections to be fairly self-explanatory. It is just sad that we will never fully know the full extend of what Hillary role was as the secretary of US during in the aftermath of the cable leaks, or how much real involvement the US had in the Swedish and UK legal cases.
I would also love more in-depth coverage of her involvement in the early days of the Syrian civil war. Her leaked calendar showed weekly meetings with the Saudi foreign minister (much much more than any other FM), and other leaked documents showed her involvement in arming groups of Saudi jihadists who were flown from Riyadh to northern Iraq and Syria - where ISIS subsequently formed.
I'll also never forget the leak that proved that she encouraged the media to take Trump seriously and "elevate" him in the GOP primary because she thought a radical would be easier to beat in the general election.
She was not fit to be president. 2016 was the year of two horrible choices.
Regardless of his personal reasons, he lost credibility.
If he had done the same to make sure Clinton won he would have lost credibility as a trustworthy source too.
You can in fact lie with facts, especially without context. You can arrange and frame them so as to paint a biased or outright false picture.
If the GRU manipulated him that just shows as well how foolish it is to think amateurs can play spy games with the pros. It’s like having your local street ball league go up against a pro basketball team.
Why on earth is this website asking me who I voted for before letting me read an article?
Why does the headline make it sound like the FBI wants the documents sealed for 66 years rather than accurately conveying that they'll be release the documents at 500 pages per month, and that therefore it will mathematically take 66 years?
>If Mazzant upholds his order, the FBI wants a lengthy period of time to perform the work—66 years, or 500 pages a month.
Oh, it's the Epoch times... I guess that answers both questions
There are FOIA statutes that require federal, state and local governments to release documents and other data in the public interest in a reasonable amount of time. In this case, the statute gives the FBI 14 days. Limiting the release of documents to 500 per month to make the process take 66 years start to finish (IMO) is a violation of this statute. And there are tools the government has to automatically scrub documents of potentially sensitive information and these tools can run at a clip far higher than 500 documents a month. And so far, this district judge appears to agree.
If I could find any other publication covering this court case I would have provided the link.
Similarly, the FDA has asked a court for 55 years to respond to a FOIA request for COVID vaccine data. Assume you won't object to this source. [0]
Look I'm all for massively boosting FOIA funding across the government to improve FOIA compliance. Note that that is not what the Epoch Times is trying to advocate with their deceptive headline here. I'm annoyed when "news" sources - especially ones that are deeply connected to cults - borderline lie in their headlines to get people riled up.
The FBI has an annual budget of $9.7-billion. How much more do you think they need to use tools they already have to scrub a hard drive image of sensitive information and send the rest to this FOIA requester on a thumb drive? FOIA allows the government to set a reasonable price for the labor and equipment involved in processing such a request, but that doesn't appear to be the sticking point here.
State and federal governments arguing "it's really hard and expensive so you shouldn't make us do it" is the default response to pretty much any FOIA request. This instance isn't special.
How large were the documents you requested that needed review? Was it the first time they were being reviewed?
Edit: also, I haven't looked further into this but can almost guarantee you that the FBI was trying to work with the requester to narrow down what they're requesting to something that is slightly more focused than hundreds of thousands of pages that all need review first
Yeah I'm sure that 66 years is actually how much time that should take and not just a delay tactic. I'm also sure that they aren't going to release anything juicy last.
Like I said to the other commentor, I'm all for advocating for massive funding for FOIA for all agencies. However, that is absolutely not what the Epoch times is doing with deceptively edited headlines like this.
If I’m ever murdered, I hope the FBI isn’t forced to hand over the contents of my private laptop to random strangers who file FOIA requests. This whole thing is despicable and you should be ashamed.
What if the FBI seized a personal laptop of yours? Should that be subject to FOIA requests by anyone who wants it?
The Fourth Amendment rights against government seizure of your property should also extend to giving that property to random yahoos who can fill a form out.
at the risk of tying my horse to the epoch times (which I am not trying to do), I think it should be pointed out that the DNC and RNC being in a separate category of scrutiny from government agencies is utter horseshit.
If we lived in a world where a third party had a fighting chance, fine, but these institutions are literally deciding who we get to vote for.
If you wanna make a "the RNC and DNC are subject to FOIA" rule, fine. This isn't how you accomplish it. It wasn't an investigation of the DNC; it was an investigation of Rich's murder, of which there's zero evidence of DNC involvement.
A standard of "if you're the victim of a crime, your personal info is fair game to anyone who wants it" would be a very, very dangerous precedent to set.
Are you implying that this court case and FOIA request don't exist? Or that the FBI did not request 66 years to release documents? It's fine if you don't find Epoch Times to be reputable, just curious what alleged facts you are objecting to. Court filings are typically a matter of public record. Seems like you are just rejecting this information wholesale based solely on the source? Is that the optimal personal filter you are advocating?
As far as I can tell the facts of the matter are that a federal judge with his own agenda attempted to force the FBI to give over all of Seth Rich's personal data and gave them 14 days to comply.
The FBI responded that 14 days was an unreasonable amount of time and asked the judge to either specify exactly what it is they want, or give them time to review the data themselves.
The alt-right media has twisted what the FBI was saying about the time it takes to review documents and trying to paint their rebuttal as 'they want to hide this forever', which is not the case. .. which is why you won't find this "66 years" thing on any reputable website.
> As far as I can tell the facts of the matter are that a federal judge with his own agenda attempted to force the FBI to give over all of Seth Rich's personal data and gave them 14 days to comply.
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is law. The judge was following the law here. 14 days is what the statute provides. Seems unfair to call this a personal agenda by the judge?
> The FBI responded that 14 days was an unreasonable amount of time and asked the judge to either specify exactly what it is they want, or give them time to review the data themselves.
14 days is statutory. The FBI responded with an even less reasonable amount of time (66 years from start to finish). Why is that acceptable but 14 days is not?
> The alt-right media has twisted what the FBI was saying about the time it takes to review documents and trying to paint their rebuttal as 'they want to hide this forever', which is not the case. .. which is why you won't find this "66 years" thing on any reputable website.
The 66 years is how long it will take the FBI to release 396,000 documents at a rate of 500 a month. The individuals involved in this case will likely be deceased by the time they are done, which might as well be forever.
The whole point of FOIA is government transparency. If the public is expected to wait until they are long dead to get access to public records, then that is undermining both the spirit and letter of the law.
Assange was leaking selectively for years for different reasons. You can hardly find any leaks on China or Russia. This is why the Surkov leaks went through just random forums and later Suddeutsche. Finding a humanized agenda there is a bit more difficult.
The duty to report on Russian or Chinese crimes against humanity and war crimes, falls on the shoulders of Russian or Chinese citizens.
Assange is a citizen of the criminal 5-eyes superstate, and in that context has every right to select materials designed to reign in the crimes of that criminal, 5-eyes superstate - especially since it has, as an entity, been responsible for the utter destruction of countless sovereign nations and the mass murder of their innocent civilians - at scales far, far exceeding that of Russia or China.
The moral authority that you claim should have been exercised over Russia and China, simply doesn't exist. 5-eyes states are not 'better' at these things than Russia or China.
By statistics of "murder of innocent people", and "destruction of civilian infrastructure designed to make the target state fail, utterly", the worst criminal state in the world is the USA and its minion lapdogs - by a wide, wide margin.
It is, therefore, entirely appropriate for 5-eyes citizens to focus on the crimes of their own states, and utterly inappropriate for members of war-crime committing, crimes-against-humanity committing states, to be calling for the destruction of any other sovereign nation - while their own war criminals roam free to do whatever continued evil they desire.
> It is, therefore, entirely appropriate for 5-eyes citizens to focus on the crimes of their own states, and utterly inappropriate for members of war-crime committing, crimes-against-humanity committing states, to be calling for the destruction of any other sovereign nation - while their own war criminals roam free to do whatever continued evil they desire.
This is not a logical statement. A person can, of course, absolutely call out the crimes of Russia and China, while also calling out the crimes of people in their own country. You are fabricating a moral restriction without basis.
Given that the ones calling out Russia are also the ones committing and justifying the commission of continued war crimes and crimes against humanity, I do not agree with your assessment one bit.
Until the USA prosecutes its war criminals it should not be allowed to start any futher wars, fund terror groups, or further involve its intelligence apparatus in the destruction of any additional sovereign states. The fires started by American war criminals are far, far more destructive to the peace of the free world than anything Russia or China are up to. The imperative is to put out the greater fire: American war crimes.
If you think that you can catch criminals by setting criminals, then you're not going to have a good time in life.
If you truly think that Americans should have the moral authority to call out Russians for their war crimes, to the point that the nation is being prepared for war conditions against Russia in the immediate future, then Americans should not be committing war crimes every twenty minutes. They should be better than the Russians on this subject.
The trouble is, they are really not better. They are worse. America kills more innocent people, on a more regular basis - for the last twenty years - on the basis of lies and falsehoods, than Russia and China combined.
Americans, and indeed the willing Western coalition which supports the war crime-committing aparatus at the core of the US' economy, simply don't have the moral authority to challenge any other nation on this issue. It is the height of hypocricy, and will simply never work.
Want to do something effective about Russia or China? Set your own example. At the moment, the world is following America's lead in starting aggressive wars, it isn't following America's lead on peaceful activities.
You set the precedent by allowing the illegal invasion and subsequent murder of 5% of Iraq's population. Russia isn't doing in Ukraine anything that the USA and its criminal allies haven't already done in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, etc...
Clean that up and you might have a valid point about Russia and China. Ignore it all, and the world simply sees you as the pathetic nation of cowardly hypocrites that you are.
Americans certainly do not have the moral authority to call any other nations crimes out while they continue to allow their state to murder innocent people with impunity, on average every twenty minutes.
Neither do Ukrainians. Nor Russians, or indeed, Chinese.
"Superstate" is not a thing unless the five participants in the "5-eye" intelligence sharing program actually agree to form a state. So to stick with your logic, Assange should be responsible for leaking Australian things only. To be fair, a pretty strange logic tho, since you only allow the perpetrator of the crime to confess as means of accountability.
Your statistics is a function of how you count it. You could, for example, include "use of rape as a military tactic"[1] or "deliberate genocide"[2, 3] - which might have a bearing on the whole thing.
Not to mention the blatant, veiled whataboutism. Just because "USA bad" doesn't mean that countries such as Russia and China can do anything they want and we shouldn't hold them accountable.
To claim any kind of moral authority "calculation" here is perverse.
Did the citizens of the 5-eyes superstate vote to invade Iraq? (No: the war legislation in each state was abrogated utterly by the USA's criminal cabal, which decided to invade and destroy Iraq, illegally, on the basis of utter lies.). Were their democracies utterly corrupted in order to refactor the world order according to fundamentally racist, bigoted views, demolish countless other sovereign states, and leave their people in utter ruins? (Yes, and this injustice still goes on.)
Have you moved on from those crimes to focus on other 'whataboutist' situations in order to deflect, demur from oversight and degrade any attempt at addressing our own war crimes? (Yes, because Americans/5-eyes'ers are incapable of finding the courage to jail our own war criminals and would rather run to stir up the mob at the next house fire.) Is Russia/Ukraine more important to you now than the suffering of the Iraqi people? The Yemeni people? The Somalian, Libyan and Afghani people?
Why is that, exactly?
Yes, it is a criminal superstate, inasmuch as it doesn't have legitimacy and has been committing crimes against humanity with impunity. The member states of the 5-/9-eyes superstate are no longer sovereign, as their civilians' rights have been utterly abrogated by the construct. You are correct in pointing out it isn't really a "superstate" - it is factually a criminal cabal.
Such a cabal has no moral authority over any other state in the world. Period. The 5-eyes states violate the human rights of far, far more human beings on the planet than any other, including Russia and China combined.
>"we shouldn't hold them accountable."
You can't expect a mass murdering, baby-raping, house-fire starting criminal to have the moral authority to do anything about other murderers in the neighborhood, except maybe steal their spoils and reduce their competition over further criminal enterprises.
This is an utterly fallacious leap to make and speaks more to your own personal complete lack of understanding of ethics than anything else, which I agree is perverse to an extreme.
The USA and its 5-eyes minions do not have the Right nor the Moral Authority to do anything other than jail our own war criminals, and only then will the rest of the innocent world accept our oversight of Russian and Chinese crimes.
Unless of course you consider the USA and the 5-eyes superstate to be somehow morally more superior to any other state?
>"USA Bad"
The superiority you claim that belongs only to the USA and its 5-eyes minion 'allies' belies your heavy investment in the fallacy that the USA isn't the worlds worst actor when it comes to crimes against humanity and war crimes - perhaps on the basis of blind nationalism?
34 million refugees from our wars would like a word. The souls of the missing 5% of Iraqs' population, murdered by "our side", are also standing in line. The Syrian people would like their nations' wealth back. Yemen wants to return the American-made bombs that have been used to genocide their children. Libya would like to close the slave markets and send the CIA a bill for the infrastructure rebuild.
You might find it easy to ignore these 5-eyes crimes, but the rest of the world is not so cowardly.
Because you are a coward and lazy? Here's a summary:
Fix the heinous war crimes and crimes against humanity being committed by your own state, and only then will you have the moral authority to do anything, effective, about the crimes of other states.
No, because your position is indefensible. You argue that only the biggest perpetrator of terrible crimes should be held accountable, and everybody else could be left out. Which is a double standard and you know it, which is why all that you have left is emotional diatribes and ad hominem.
In fact, that's an extremely evil thing to push, because - who holds USA accountable? Surely not Russia or China. So nobody is held accountable. Well done!
And being Ukrainian I have enough moral authority to call out Russia at least.
I'm arguing that the largest criminal is not qualified to police the next-largest criminal.
The US has no moral authority when it comes to illegal invasions and murdering innocent people. Period.
If you want to do something effective about criminal, illegal wars - jail your own war criminals. Ukraine has plenty of them, even prior to Febuary 23rd. You did nothing effective about them, and thus the mess you are in.
Anything less is hypocricy and moral grandstanding.
> If you want to do something effective about criminal, illegal wars - jail your own war criminals. Ukraine has plenty of them, even prior to Febuary 23rd. You did nothing effective about them, and thus the mess you are in.
You are blaming Russias invasion of Ukraine, on Ukrainians?.
Ukraine certainly played its part in extending the hostilities that resulted in 14,000 murdered Russian-speaking citizens in its border regions prior to Feb 23.
If you are unaware of this, and just swallowing the agitprop designed to sell more weapons into the region, then I'm sure you have nothing more productive to add to the conversation.
> Ukraine certainly played its part in extending the hostilities that resulted in 14,000 murdered Russian-speaking citizens in its border regions prior to Feb 23.
Do you have a credible source for this?, id be interested to see one if you do.
> Watch the Laura Poitras movie "Risk"[1] if you want a really good feel for why Julian has every reason in the world to disrupt the possibility of a Hillary Clinton presidency.
It does not really matter. You cannot pretend to be all about freedom of speech and exposing government misbehaviour without taking sides and play these partisan games.
I was supportive of the whole Wikileaks thing before his role as a pawn for totalitarians became really visible.
The fact was that at that point disrupting the election meant acting for a Trump presidency, and I cannot see how any properly-calibrated moral compass would want that. The most charitable interpretation is that he was played and a useful idiot.
> I also believe that the espionage crimes that Julian is charged with are 100% horseshit, and going after journalists like that sets an incredibly bad precedent coming from a nation that purports to be a world leader in press freedoms.
Yes. It also does not make Assange any less of an arsehole. Your enemy being immoral does not give you the moral high ground.
What an opportunity for her to make a sequel to "Citizenfour". Something like "Russian Citizenfour". Lots of opportunities to reflect on how Ed took her for a ride with his BS and now serving Putin. In "Risk" she implies that something is not like it seems with Julian BTW. New generations should be accustomed with a concept of a useful idiot. It is not strictly an old Comintern/USSR tactic.
What crime was revealed by the leaked emails. There's a nice recipe in there, and some emails about getting together, but what shady dealings are in those leaked emails?
Why does it have to be a crime to be morally wrong? It showed active opposition of Bernie Sanders directly from the DNC. And it showed collusion between Clinton and the DNC. As a Democrat, at the time it made me leave the party.
I am trying to say that you are being brianwashed into thinking Assange is the evil persons when it is the people you are idolizing and who want to kill him in prison.
People love defending Bernie when it means they can turn the DNC into the Illuminati, but they never seem to want to talk about his platform.
Since you're very concerned about Bernie, that means you're totally 100% about Medicare For All and Free Tuition and a Federal law guaranteeing access to free, safe abortions by real doctors, right?
Cause if you're just using him as a cudgel, that says more about you than it does about anyone else.
It's an amazing movie that came out at a really unfortunate time for Laura, in that it got lost in the noise of the dcleaks drama. Anti-Julian people hated the movie because it humanized him too much, and pro-Julian people hated the movie because it made him look weak. It was a deeply personal look into the life of a man who suddenly got caught up in the polarizing shitstorm of the 2016 elections.
The leaks definitely came from GRU hackers, but it seems like the GRU was super careful to sell it to Julian as a DNC insider leak, and in his excitement to stick it to the Clinton campaign, he probably overlooked a lot of red flags that he might have caught if didn't have a personal grudge to satisfy.
I voted for Hillary, and I'd do it again, she'd have made a fine US president. I also seeded the hell out of the Podesta emails, because people deserve to know about political corruption. I also believe that the espionage crimes that Julian is charged with are 100% horseshit, and going after journalists like that sets an incredibly bad precedent coming from a nation that purports to be a world leader in press freedoms.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_(2016_film)