It seems the closer we come to people rising upen masse to demand Julian Assange’s freedom, the more desperate his detractors become.
This isn’t the first time I’ve debunked a Guardian smear piece on Julian Assange but it’s certainly the first time that I’ve been able to debunk literally every single written line – including the caption.
“Photo Caption: Assange’s position is that the charges have been trumped up, because he is viewed by the US establishment as a dangerous and powerful insurgent.”
That is not Assange’s position. Because there are no charges. As has been repeatedly pointed out to members of the mainstream press who, as demonstrated in this very instance, continue to this day to write about and report on charges that have never been laid and do not exist.
“Six years on from the leak of accounts by two women of allegations of sexual assault and rape, Julian Assange has released his own interview with Swedish prosecutors, offering an alternative narrative to that offered by one of the women.”
Actually, he is offering the same narrative that he has espoused all along. The contents of his statement entirely align with prior releases of documentation related to the case, dating back years.
Specifically, his statements in relation to his innocence, his asylum claim, the manhunt, the persecution of WikiLeaks and the grand jury, the denials of the women themselves that they had been raped and the contents of the text messages of the younger of the two women are all contained in Assange’s publically available and thoroughly annotated 2013 affidavit which can be read in full here.
It is only to journalists like Ms Orr who have clearly not done their homework on the background to this case that anything contained in the recent statement release comes as a surprise.
“Somehow he has managed to persuade himself that his testimony satisfies the questions, but all it really does is advertise that he is a man who appears to have little respect for boundaries and who, far from even beginning to recognise this in himself, casts himself wholly as a victim of the sexual machinations of others.”
a) he is being and has been persecuted for his publishing and journalistic activities, by the highest echelons of international governments
b) he is not a rapist but was smeared as such
c) he has ample grounds for asylum, as was duly granted to him, and
d) his continued arbitrary detention is in violation of human rights, international law, and common decency
The ‘sexual machinations’ Ms Orr refers to are not of the women involved but in fact that of the police officers, politicians, bureaucrats and intelligence agencies involved in branding Assange a ‘rapist’ in order to serve their own political motives.
Indeed, GCHQ staff famously bragged about (and were reprimanded for) the Assange case having been a ‘fit-up’.
“Rather in the manner of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, Assange portrays himself as someone who always relies on the comfort of strangers.”
Actually, he portrayed himself as someone forced by the circumstance of persecution and pursuit by intelligence agencies wielding vast state powers, into seeking refuge wherever able.
Ms Orr’s supposition that he “always” does so is entirely disingenuous. Denied access to his own funds and with a huge target on his back, Assange had little choice but to rely on the sympathy of others.
“His argument is that during his time in Sweden he was a marked man.”
It is ridiculous to depict this as ‘his argument‘ when the Pentagon’s own releases announced that there was a manhunt for him. Yet again Ms Orr attempts to lay the responsibility for the persecution at the feet of the persecuted. The correct way to frame the statement would simply be to state the undeniable: he was a marked man.
“He had to be careful where he stayed, in case his cohort of known supporters was being monitored, in order that they would lead the spies to Assange. I don’t dispute that this worry might have been real and important for Assange.”
Gracious of her to depict this as real and important, but Ms Orr still personifies this to Assange, intimating that there were alternative approaches when there clearly weren’t any available.
“Nevertheless, quite why the perfect answer was to stay at the homes of women who wanted to have sex with him is completely glossed over.”
In fact it is Ms Orr doing the glossing over, as it is clear from Assange’s statement that the arrangements were made on his behalf.
His release clearly states in point 70:
“My contacts in Sweden had arranged for me to stay in two safe houses during the few days I had intended to stay in Sweden. One of the safe houses belonged to a journalist who I knew and another to a Social Democrat party figure unknown to me who had lent her apartment while she was away, or so I had been told. However, because these two original safe houses arranged prior to my arrival became known very soon, I stayed in three additional safe houses between 11 and 20 August 2010.” – Julian Assange
A far cry from Ms Orr’s depiction, which continues:
“In fact, he said one of the women was so “very clear” that she wanted to have intercourse that he “felt concerned about the intensity of her interest”.”
This quote has been partially selected for convenience. The full context is that the woman:
“…made it very clear that she wanted to have sexual intercourse with me. I felt concerned about the intensity of [her] interest and I also deeply loved another woman, which played on my mind and left me emotionally distracted. [She] knew an unusual amount of detail about me and appeared annoyed with me when I was on my phone searching for news related to the US official government statements about me. I perceived she was irritated when I wasn’t giving her my full attention. I felt there was a risk my location would be revealed and that she might act unpredictably if she believed I was rejecting her.” – Julian Assange
What Assange is saying is that the situation was a double-edged sword. While much-needed temporary sanctuary and companionship was being offered, he also felt threatened by his physical safety being dependent upon the goodwill of his host.
“Now, plenty of people ignore “red flags” in the undertaking of sexual dalliances, as Assange apparently did.”
As above, his situation was more than merely the “undertaking” of a “sexual dalliance”, such as people who are not being hunted by the US Empire might indulge in or undertake. His overarching situation was downright precarious and dangerous.
What Assange is illustrating is that he felt that neither rejecting her nor staying with her guaranteed his personal safety. Both were fraught with risk.
“An emotionally healthy person would understand that this concern was something to be heeded, and that it was a situation to be avoided.”
This is a further display of blaming the persecuted rather than examining the circumstances of the persecution. Exactly how “emotionally healthy” is one supposed to be when one is being man-hunted by billion dollar international intelligence agencies? Would Ms Orr be “emotionally healthy” in such a position? Holding Assange’s decisions and mental state up against that of any random member of the public is disingenuous and misleading. It was an extreme situation and thus the status quo test constantly being applied by Ms Orr is irrelevant and a distraction.
“Assange did not choose to take that course.”
Assange chose to take the course that he felt was most likely to increase his physical safety at the time. God knows he was not looking ahead six years to what Ms Orr and her kind would think about it after the fact – he was too busy trying to stay alive in that week.
“This in itself suggests a man who does not shrink from entering into situations that some may view as exploitative.”
What it suggests is a man travelling a path with no map, that few have ever walked before him, surrounded by strangers and tenuous plans and promises that too often fell through, doing the best he could under the most direst of circumstance.
“Assange’s position is that the charges have been trumped up, because he is viewed by the US establishment as a dangerous and powerful insurgent.”
As per my response to the misleading caption; once again, this is not Assange’s position. Because, to this day, no charges have been laid.
“Yet even his own supposedly vindicatory evidence reflects wider sexually exploitative attitudes.”
What his evidence reflects is that:
a) he has never been charged with any crime, yet was branded a rapist, including in the very publication in which Ms Orr writes
b) he left Sweden after consulting with the prosecutor first and receiving advance permission to depart, yet was then deemed a fugitive regardless
c) the first prosecutor cancelled the investigation as it was deemed without merit, only to later on be reopened after political intervention
d) Assange has been trying to give his statement for six years but has until now been denied the opportunity to do so, and
e) a ton of other material factors, all of which are completely absent from the content of Ms Orr’s article, which instead focuses on supposition and the projection onto Assange of assumed motives imagined by Ms Orr, among various other disparagements
“It’s not a crime to be sexually exploitative, to have little regard for the emotions or the boundaries of others, or to decide to have sex with someone because you need a place to spend the night.”
There is no evidence whatsoever that Assange was any more sexually exploitative than those who complained about him; both of whom have said that they were not raped, one of whom has claimed the police manufactured the investigation in order to tarnish Assange and the other of whom supplied a broken condom which was found to contain no DNA of either party whatsoever and had discussed taking their stories to the tabloids within a matter of days. Despite this and to his credit, Assange himself still does not accuse either woman of sexual exploitation.
“Indeed, this sort of behaviour seems pretty widespread, and hardly particular to Assange. And that is the really depressing thing.”
And here is the crux. Ms Orr is now expanding the playing field beyond Assange, to the wider sexual practices of millions. Which means she is taking general attitudes that she already held about society at large which appear to have coloured her opinions relating to the Assange case.
“People in the public eye are far more likely to be exposed for indulging in this sort of behaviour.”
Absolutely. They are. Which is what infuriates rape victims and survivor advocates like myself. Where I hail from, New Zealand, 95% of rape survivors never see their rapists charged and 99% of rape survivors never see their rapists convicted. Why? Because police agencies and indeed intelligence services and the governments who fund them, only have a vested interest in pursuing ‘justice’ in the few, select cases where it is politically expedient to do so. Thus seeing a man whose ‘victims’ state empirically that they are not victims at all be persecuted for six years while the overwhelming majority of actual rapists walk free amongst us is extremely exasperating and disappointing. This is then exacerbated by callous media personalities who indulge in furthering that persecution of the innocent targets of these political machinations, in the name of protecting women. The irony is rife and it is frankly a sick, Orwellian joke.
“Of course they defend themselves – and when they do so, they tend to feel they are being held to a different standard to others, and an unfair one.”
In this case it is worse. Assange is being held to the standards of others who have never been man-hunted by the US Empire, then what scraps of his experiences filter through to the public realm are then obsessively analysed by writers like Ms Orr who have also never been man-hunted by the US Empire.
“Often, a high-profile individual who has been implicated in a sexual scandal will attract many sympathisers, who understand that the behaviour of their hero is not so very unusual, and therefore believe there is nothing wrong with it. That’s depressing too – there is something wrong with it.”
To the contrary, other than solidarity from close friends and family, these people usually end up universally loathed. In the cases of Jimmy Savile, Rolf Harris, Bill Cosby, these men were protected for decades by the very establishment that they served. It took decades for their victims to raise awareness of what happened to them yet once they finally managed to achieve mainstream awareness, their attackers became reviled, etched in history as the monsters they are. The very speed and ferocity with which the Swedish (and other) governments targeted and persecuted Assange speaks volumes. Were he an actual everyday common rapist it is more likely than not that the police would have taken little to no action. Were he a high society predator, it would have taken decades for the public to become aware of it. But because he is neither, and is in fact a target of Empire, he was smeared internationally by the entire world’s media within 24 hours of the allegations and six years later is still fighting for the most basic acknowledgements of the facts – such as that he has still never been charged with any crime, which Ms Orr fails to mention even once in her entire piece.
“Interpersonal exploitation – emotional, sexual or physically violent – is a blight on human relations and on human psychological health, for perpetrators as well as victims. It corrupts the social bonds that are so important to a decent society or culture.”
Absolutely. Which is why it is such a powerful tool for governments and spies when wanting to destroy the reputation of an adversary, or in this case, of a journalist and publisher who is standing in ideological opposition to their corruption and war crimes.
His testimony in aggregate details gross violation after violation of his rights. It details the negligence and maliciousness of the prosecutor, Marianne Ny, up to and including her acting in violation of Swedish law. It also displays the complete disregard for international law and disrespect for the institutions of international governance such as the United Nations, which was established by the very countries who are persecuting him. None of this is mentioned in Ms Orr’s article.
“Any person who gives himself (or herself) leave to behave in such a way is unlikely to understand quite where other lines should be drawn. And in those circumstances, it might be possible for such a person to fail to comprehend his behaviour as sexual assault or rape.”
When the alleged victims themselves deny that they are victims, what else is left? Apparently, six years of hit pieces in publications like The Guardian.
“His insight into and ability to understand his behaviour, its impact on others, and the ways in which others might experience or interpret it, is severely impaired.”
It seems that in fact Ms Orr and journalists like her are struggling with understanding the impact of their constant slew of attacks on Assange. Nor do they seem to understand the way others might interpret them. If they did have insight into this as well as to the profound importance of his contributions to journalism despite all he has been put through, they might not be so mystified at why he continues to enjoy the support he does.
“Assange’s leaked document illustrates a lack of empathy for the women he slept with.”
This is purely down to the interpretation of the reader. The leak of the allegations against Assange, prior to him even having been interviewed or made any statement, or to any charges being laid, certainly illustrated a lack of empathy for him as well as a desecration of the presumption of innocence and of Assange’s legal and human rights.
“It’s understandable if not admirable that he shouldn’t be spending much time considering the feelings of two women who have brought him so much trouble.”
The use of the word ‘admirable’ is strange in this context. There are many things about Assange that are admirable, none the least the way he has coped with such extreme prejudice, malignance and persecution over the last six years.
“But his testimony shows that he most certainly wasn’t spending much time considering their feelings long before events took the course they did.”
His testimony states of the woman involved:
“During that night and again in the morning we had consensual sexual intercourse on four or five occasions. Her words, her expressions and her physical reactions made it clear to me that she encouraged and enjoyed our interactions… In the morning she went out to pick up breakfast for us. After enjoying breakfast together, I left her home on good terms.” — Julian Assange
In light of the women stating plainly that they have not been raped, it seems the media who continue to portray them as rape victims, and Assange as being charged when he has not been, are the ones not “spending much time considering their feelings.”
“This may not be a crime.”
The original prosecutor determined that no crime had been committed. The only crimes appear to be those manufactured by malicious entities and the intense and concerted pressure applied by mainstream media outlets like The Guardian.
“The courts or prosecuting authorities will pronounce on that. But it is an attitude of mind that is pretty abject, very destructive and horribly widespread.”
Unfortunately, so is the attitudes of the vast majority of the journalists who have been cashing in on this story for more than half a decade.
Journalists who write truth pay a high price to do so. If you respect and value this work, please consider supporting Suzie’s efforts via credit card or Bitcoin donation at this link. Thank you!
Not so long before the mainstream media was lying the United States into a war with Iraq, I had purchased a book called ‘What Liberal Media‘?
The book made its case exhaustively; that there was not a liberal media bias but in fact a neoconservative one.
In 2011, it became one of many books that I donated to the People’s Library at Occupy Auckland. Ill-fatedly it seems, as that library was dismantled and the books seized by private security contractors hired by the Auckland Council (the High Court in Auckland later judged the seizure and the raids to be illegal but no reparations have ever been offered to or obtained by Occupiers).
There is very little about my personal politics that would ever have indicated to anyone, let alone myself, that I could be a Trump supporter. On the surface, he stands against everything I have all but sacrificed my life fighting for.
He prides himself on his ability to throw his weight around. To effectively bully people into getting his own way. In ‘The Apprentice‘ he presided over a televisual representation of the dog-eat-dog corporate world. One where lies flow fast and freely and people are tacitly applauded for doing hatchet jobs on one another. Where only the immoral survive let alone flourish.
He is the embodiment of capitalism, a dying economic experiment that is the cause of untold misery the world over.
Yet due to the endless tirades against him in mass media, and his anti-TPP and anti-war stances, many activists including myself began to empathise with him.
Witnessing what we just have in the course of the US election, it is now impossible to deny that there is a liberal bias in the media. The obviousness of the bias, the refusal of that media to hold themselves to account and the apparent inability of anyone else to do it either, has created a massive backlash against it.
A backlash that Trump has benefited from.
In his recent CBS 60 Minutes post-election interview, Trump said that social media, particularly his massive followings on Facebook, Twitter and Instragram, had played a large part in his victory. He said he gained 100,000 followers in a day, and believed his social media footprint directly tackled, and won over, what he described as ‘a billion dollars’ spent against him by the Clinton machine.
And it wasn’t just the Clinton machine or the traditional liberal media that were out to put the knife in him. My favourite publication, The Intercept, which should be acknowledged and commended for consistently running stories critical of both candidates and of the process as a whole, in fact ran a series of dozens and dozens of hit pieces against Trump.
When The Intercept‘s reporter Robert Mackey filed his first anti-Trump piece, I barely noticed. I actually had a massive antipathy towards the electoral process, which I saw as entirely flawed and a choice between Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee – or “cholera versus gonorrhea” as Assange famously described it – sympomatic of the puppet show that is modern American politics.
It had been clear to millions of us around the world in 2011 that the system was irredeemably broken and corrupt and certainly there has been no meaningful reform since that time to change our opinions.
By Mackey’s third anti-Trump piece, it seemed like more of the same. By his sixth anti-Trump piece, it was becoming abundantly clear that Mackey just plain did not like Donald Trump and did not want him elected.
By the 12th anti-Trump piece I was becoming convinced (wrongly, I hope!) that Mackey might be part of some conspiracy involving the Clinton-endorsing New York Timeswith which he was formerly employed, and utilising The Intercept for Clinton’s own ends.
As an avid The Intercept reader, by the time the 20th anti-Trump piece rolled around I had decided that I just plain did not like Mackey, that he was a pro-Clinton bully, and that this Trump guy might not be so terrible if Hillary Clinton, arguably the most corrupt candidate of all time, and her supporters, disliked him so much.
Now to be fair to Mackey, he has been openly taking on Ann Coulter so he can’t be that bad a guy after all! I also think Greenwad wouldn’t back his work if he wasn’t convinced Mackey is genuine. But Mackey’s constant filing of anti-Trump themed articles made him appear to have an unhealthy obsession, which diminished any credibility his arguments had, and they all just melded together until they were indistinguishable, into one great big serialised diatribe.
At a certain point, the anti-Trump posts became so frequent that I stopped reading them at all. Just rolled my eyes and silently said to myself ‘oh, another anti-Trump piece, what a surprise.’
For the Trump camp, Mackey’s efforts became the practical embodiment of the phrase ‘even bad press is better than no press‘.
If I had to guess, I would have said The Intercept published 20 anti-Trump pieces. But according to him, the exact number was 37. In a three-week period.
Pushing an average of nearly two per day, what effect was it thought this would have? Since when has over-saturation not made people sick of whatever it is being shoved down their throats? The backlash was inevitable.
Trump, who I had no affinity with whatsoever, was being turned into an underdog besieged by establishment journalists in my eyes and I had just spent years standing up for underdogs besieged by the establishment. In a bizarre and twisted way, this simply served to make people like me want to defend him, despite the fact that he is someone who wields massive power and would not otherwise have ever been viewed as an underdog at all, nor a figure in need of defending.
Such is the polarising effect of this election – even the career anarchists picked a side. If even people considered as ‘radical’ as I (enough so to end up on a list passed from one government to the next) ended up participating in the Coke versus Pepsi contest, the string-pullers really are clinking champagne glasses while those of us who have been fighting for a systemic rebuild tear our hair out.
More than ever before, the media have become The Band That Played On. As Glenn Greenwald brilliantly pointed out, introspection is a foreign concept to the liberal class. The post-election period has only served to compound that the liberal media bias does exist and was in no way cowed let alone dismantled by their total and abject failure in the lead-up to election night.
The handling by CBS of the seemingly traditional first-post-election-interview of the President-elect is a great example of this.
I had hoped to put the questions up against each other in sequential order, for comparison. Except that would be impossible. Because although both interviews were roughly forty minutes in duration, 60 Minutes asked Obama 47 questions, but they asked Trump 73.
There is no greater indicator of the inherent bias of the editors than the note that each interview finished on. It’s so blatant it’s comical.
The last question asked of President-elect Trump and his family? “Let me ask if any of you think the campaign has hurt the Trump brand.”
The last question asked of President-elect Obama and his wife Michelle? “As President of the United States what do you plan to do about getting a college play-off for the national championship?”
Of the 47 questions asked of Obama, somewhere between 12 and 14 of them related to policy, depending on how strictly you apply the term. 3 of the questions were about his ex-apartment in DC. 2 questions were about what he was reading. Another 2 questions related to his mother-in-law and 2 more as to whether the incoming First Family would get a dog.
Despite Obama’s election win having occured in the middle of a Global Economic Crisis that drew constant comparison to the 30’s and the Great Depression (something Obama decries in the interview), the overwhelming majority of questions asked of him were jovial if not completely superfluous in nature. Each question led to a new topic, with very little pushback on any of his answers.
Of the 73 questions asked of President-elect Trump, somewhere around 6 were on policy, or if you include questions about his Cabinet appointments, about 10. How is this possible? That he would be asked substantially less about policy than Obama was, when he was asked two-thirds more total questions?
A closer look at the language is really revealing.
A question put to Obama is: “Have there been moments when you’ve wondered what did I get myself into?”
But with Trump it becomes “Are you in any way intimidated, scared, about this enormous burden, the gravity of what you’re taking on?”
I could go on and on, and usually would, but now that I’m endeavouring to write daily, have to keep this short. The full list of questions in each interview speak for themselves. There was every attempt to keep Obama at ease, and every attempt to provoke or trip up Trump. But the public didn’t buy it before and won’t now. That ship has sailed.
How many members of the public would love to get the heads and top anchors of the six major media organisations into one room and tell them exactly what they think of them? Apparently Trump has done exactly that.
The full story is available at the NYPost – at least what parts of it were leaked by the press organisations themselves despite their commitment to the meeting being off-the-record.
Trump, of course, would have anticipated this, and will be having the last laugh, as are all who are reading it and living vicariously. Whether or not it will be the wake-up call the press needed, remains to be seen. The most intriguing aspect of all is the extent to which the narratives of the major press corporations are an extension of the express wishes of the intelligence community and its covertly implanted members and thus what this really says about what is in store for America going forward.
The voice of reason may be John Stewart. His heartfelt appeal for people to understand how intellectually deprived it is to simply decry all Trump supporters as ‘racist’ is a must-read.
Or it may be the founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET) who has similarly appealed to his own community, drawing attention to a famous quote that African Americans should have ‘neither permanent friends nor permanent enemies, just permanent interests’.
This may be the tiny beginnings of reconciliation, though you won’t be able to tell that from today’s headlines in the New York Times, which are still scratching away at the same broken fiddle.
But funnily enough, derision doesn’t unite people and if you aren’t willing to reach out a hand to your ideological foe, you will never be able to bridge the faultlines that the elite so carefully devise and construct to divide us.
To that end, Robert Mackey, the next drink is on me.
Journalists who write truth pay a high price to do so. If you respect and value this work, please consider supporting Suzie’s efforts via credit card or Bitcoin donation at this link. Thank you!
[Update/January 2018] This post is now available at my Steemit blog
But because of where it was published, I’m taking it on.
Doing The Dirty
In a self-discrediting, tabloidesque, grasping-at-straws, thoroughly compromised “article” for Buzz Feed, ex-WikiLeaks intern James Ball once again attempts to spin his short-lived six-years-ago experience with Assange into contemporary relevance.
This isn’t a first. He’s been rehashing his story year in and year out.
In an earlier anti-Assange, anti-Ecuador piece he was editorially babysat on the by-line by a London BuzzFeed editor whose last 4 credits on the site are all aged anti-WikiLeaks articles crafted in tandem with James Ball.
A disclosure at the end of Ball’s latest WikiLeaks smear reads: “James Ball, one of the authors of this article, worked for WikiLeaks for a short period between late 2010 and early 2011.” (The disclosure does not appear on earlier articles on the same topic. Such as this one.)
What the disclosure fails to mention is that James Ball was in fact fired from WikiLeaks in early 2011.
This was revealed by notes published by WikiLeaks in response to the disputed Alex Gibney portrayal of related events in the unauthorised (and disputed) biography of WikiLeaks titled “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks”, in which James Ball was heavily featured, despite his extraordinarily brief tenure with the organisation.
While omitting to mention his firing, or that his involvement with WikiLeaks spanned at best, 23 days, Ball does allude to some controversy:
“To save readers a Google search or two, [Assange] would tell you I was in WikiLeaks as an “intern” for a period of “weeks”, during that time acted as mole for the Guardian, stole documents, and had potential ties to MI5.”
The lack of context surrounding these nefarious references is meant to come off as both humorous and self-deprecating. They serve to diminish the impact of an inevitable discovery of the reality: Ball told a friend he had interviewed for MI5.
He leads his readers to believe that the numerous denouncements of him are just outlandish rather than rooted in long-established fact, and that it is he and not Assange, who is the true victim.
That his body of anti-WikiLeaks work fits the messaging and agenda of the very intelligence agencies who oppose WikiLeaks, is of course, mere coincidence!
In this, Ball’s writing is as misrepresentative of himself as of his subject. Almost as misrepresentative as posting the same article under multiple different titles at precisely the same time and then circulating them both:
Both versions are timestamped October 23rd, 2016 at 8:11pm. Each article has its own unique URL so they are published as two seperate articles rather than just one with its headline changed. (Though by the time of writing, the former now has a redirect to the latter.)
One has a more benign title and the other an overblown, dramatic title. The former has a trending icon yet the latter earned over triple the hits and is positioned in a central position on the front page of BuzzFeed UK. Draw your own conclusions.
Going Down In History
Ball’s back catalogue of BuzzFeed work oscillates between the vacuous and the ridiculous and his WikiLeaks smears are no exception.
BuzzFeed is hardly renowned for high quality content but it did once have one of the greatest investigative journalists of all time at its disposal: Michael Hastings. Courageous, witty, bold, daring and polished, Hasting’s archive of BuzzFeed work directly confronted heads of state in a truly adversarial and critical manner.
Hastings famously crafted one of the best profiles of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks ever composed, for Rolling Stone magazine. It covers, vastly more comprehensively and with a finesse far beyond James Ball’s reach, the same period of time Ball refers to in his smear.
Unfortunately, Hastings was so brilliant and supremely talented, and his writing and presentation style so infectious, inspiring and ultimately so effective, that he was killed for it.
Thus BuzzFeed, WikiLeaks and the world was robbed of a giant and historic talent, and all we are left with is… James Ball.
God help us.
Having spent all week crafting an epic about the impending World War III that Assange’s persecutors are doing their damndest to usher in, I almost appreciate the mental respite of getting to effortlessly analyse something so small-minded as the pettiness of Ball’s attacks.
Except that I also resent that these bottom-feeders are still mercilessly crapping on the few journalists who are taking the biggest and most important risks of our generation and achieving the greatest of results, despite them.
Over The Line
Ball’s opus is over 2,900 words which in the realm of click-bait is practically ‘War and Peace‘.
BuzzFeed is, of course, a website whose main navigation mechanisms are buttons that read “LOL”, “win”, “omg”, “cute”, “fail” and “wtf”.
It’s safe to say that Ball’s work could fall into at least four of those categories.
Which makes it tragically easy to dissect.
Predictably, he starts with a homage to the proclamations of power.
“On 29 November 2010, then US secretary of state Hillary Clinton stepped out in front of reporters to condemn the release of classified documents by WikiLeaks and five major news organisations the previous day.
WikiLeaks’ release, she said, “puts people’s lives in danger”, “threatens our national security”, and “undermines our efforts to work with other countries”.
“Releasing them poses real risks to real people,” she noted, adding, “We are taking aggressive steps to hold responsible those who stole this information.” — James Ball
You could be forgiven for thinking that Hillary Clinton stating that she was taking “aggressive steps” against the leakers of CableGate might mean that she has some kind of vendetta.
Given that the law is not meant to be “aggressive“, but merely lawful.
Oblivious to this, James Ball instead uses much of the article advancing the mainstream state-mouthpiece strategy of attempting to convince us that it is in fact Julian Assange who has a vendetta against Hillary.
“Julian Assange watched that message on a television in the corner of a living room in Ellingham Hall, a stately home in rural Norfolk, around 120 miles away from London.
I was sitting around 8ft away from him as he did so, the room’s antique furniture and rugs strewn with laptops, cables, and the mess of a tiny organisation orchestrating the world’s biggest news story.” — James Ball
Having qualified himself as relevant by having been in Julian’s presence in that moment, the reader is expecting some grand revelation to be imminent. That Julian threw something at the television, perhaps? Or made some disgruntled commitment to vengeance?
No, of course he didn’t. So Ball has to fixate on a triviality instead.
“Minutes later, the roar of a military jet sounded sharply overhead. I looked around the room and could see everyone thinking the same thing, but no one wanting to say it. Surely not. Surely? Of course, the jet passed harmlessly overhead – Ellingham Hall is not far from a Royal Air Force base – but such was the pressure, the adrenaline, and the paranoia in the room around Assange at that time that nothing felt impossible.” — James Ball
So after watching Hillary Clinton on TV, Assange and others in the room… thought something.
James Ball knows they thought something because he could see it.
He doesn’t bother mentioning what that something was. Just intimates that it was thought.
What precisely is he suggesting with this anecdote? That the Air Force was going to bomb the mansion? No? Glitter-bomb it maybe?
In keeping with the rest of the piece, James never qualifies his suggestions with any actual conclusions. Just sets up tense scenes and quickly moves on, incapable of climax.
“Spending those few months at such close proximity to Assange and his confidants, and experiencing first-hand the pressures exerted on those there, have given me a particular insight into how WikiLeaks has become what it is today.
To an outsider, the WikiLeaks of 2016 looks totally unrelated to the WikiLeaks of 2010. Then it was a darling of many of the liberal left, working with some of the world’s most respected newspapers and exposing the truth behind drone killing, civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq, and surveillance of top UN officials.” — James Ball
Not two reading minutes earlier, Ball described WikiLeaks as “a tiny organisation orchestrating the world’s biggest news story”. Now, he is trying to drive a wholly invented ideological wedge between the ‘then’ and ‘now’.
Yet six years later, WikiLeaks is still a comparatively tiny organisation (compared to the media conglomerates that it frequently laps circles around) that is, sure enough, still orchestrating the world’s biggest news stories. Ball attempts to suggest that WikiLeaks is no longer working on exposing war crimes, despite their most recent work exposing mountains of evidence that states responsible for arming and funding ISIS are also funding Hillary Clinton’s foundation and/or election campaign.
WikiLeaks are working on the same issues they always have. The crimes of Empire. Corruption and war. But Ball needs you to believe otherwise.
“Now it is the darling of the alt-right, revealing hacked emails seemingly to influence a presidential contest, claiming the US election is “rigged”, and descending into conspiracy. Just this week on Twitter, it described the deaths by natural causes of two of its supporters as a “bloody year for WikiLeaks”, and warned of media outlets “controlled by” members of the Rothschild family – a common anti-Semitic trope.
The questions asked about the organisation and its leader are often the wrong ones: How has WikiLeaks changed so much? Is Julian Assange the catspaw of Vladimir Putin? Is WikiLeaks endorsing a president candidate who has been described as racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, and more?
These questions miss a broader truth: Neither Assange nor WikiLeaks (and the two are virtually one and the same thing) have changed – the world they operate in has. WikiLeaks is in many ways the same bold, reckless, paranoid creation that once it was, but how that manifests, and who cheers it on, has changed.” — James Ball
If the Democratic primaries were not rigged, why was there a slew of resignations of its top officials, not to mention lawsuits, as a direct result of the revelations?
If WikiLeaks is seeking to influence an election, why has it not openly endorsed a political candidate, as the New York Times and nearly every major U.S. publication (and many others around the world) do openly, every election cycle?
How inane and hypocritical, to accuse one of the few media organisations that does not endorse a candidate, of endorsing a candidate.
The questions Ball lists as “the wrong ones” – accusations of a change in philosophy or ideology, or of an association with Vladimir Putin – are the precise accusations being made by the candidate-endorsing mainstream publications that James Ball completely ignores the existence of in this article.
And with that, the man who has just informed us that he knew what every person in a room was thinking, without stating what that was, merely because a plane flew overhead, now tells us that WikiLeaks is “bold, reckless and paranoid”.
Pot, kettle.
Having smeared WikiLeaks, Ball goes back to defending Clinton.
“Clinton’s condemnation of WikiLeaks and its partners’ release of classified cables was a simple requirement of her job. Even had she privately been an ardent admirer of the site – which seems unlikely – doing anything other than strongly condemning the leak was nonetheless never an option.
That’s not how it felt to anyone inside WikiLeaks at that moment, though. It was an anxiety-inducing time. WikiLeaks was the subject of every cable TV discussion and every newspaper front page, and press packs swarmed the gates of every address even tenuously connected to it. Commentators called for arrest, deportation, rendition, or even assassination of Assange and his associates.” — James Ball
Simply: no. It is not Clinton’s job to “aggressively” pursue anyone. There is no legal mandate for that. Any more than it is her job to aggressively pursue donations, paid-for speeches, the invasion of Libya, or any of the other crazy, corrupt nonsense she got up to while employed as Secretary of State.
Nor is it the job of commentators to be using mass media to call for illegal assassinations, but this is the effect of corruption at the very top echelons of government going unchecked for so long – it trickles down. Those beholden to power become emboldened to emulate them because they know the system will forgive and protect the corrupt. This is how corruption spreads from administration to administration and from generation to generation.
This is how a black man selling loose cigarettes on a New York street can be killed by police while a modern-day political mafia operate in the White House with immunity and a blank cheque.
Just stop and think for a minute – Bill Clinton was impeached. Impeached for lying to Congress. His wife publically ‘forgave’ him his indiscretions and now she’s going to be President. And he’s going back to the White House.
An impeached President will be moving back into the White House.
Does this not seem a little strange?
Maybe there’s a bigger problem to be addressed than a publishing organisation exposing corruption? Like, maybe the actual corruption itself, should be worthy of 2,900 words of James Ball’s attention?
Apparently not. He is too busy mud-slinging for The Empire.
He continues:
“At the same time, WikiLeaks was having its payment accounts frozen by Visa and Mastercard, Amazon Web Services pulled hosting support, and Assange was jailed for a week in the UK (before being bailed) on unrelated charges relating to alleged sexual offences in Sweden.
Inside WikiLeaks, a tiny organisation with only a few hundred thousand dollars in the bank, such pressure felt immense. Most of the handful of people within came from a left-wing activist background, many were young and inexperienced, and few had much trust of the US government – especially after months of reading cables of US mistakes and overreactions in the Afghan and Iraq war logs, often with tragic consequences.”
“How might the US react, or overreact, this time? WikiLeaks was afraid of legal or extralegal consequences against Assange or other staff. WikiLeakers were angry at US corporations creating a financial blockade against the organisation with no court ruling or judgments – just a press statement from a US senator.
And the figurehead of this whole response was none other than Hillary Clinton. For Assange, to an extent, this is personal.” — James Ball
Assange has repeatedly stated that the system is broken, that the electoral process is a farce, and has described Clinton vs. Trump as Cholera vs. Gonorrhea.
By now it is pretty obvious that it is James Ball, for whom this is personal. He is yet again quite literally selling his dated, meagre WikiLeaks experience, and wants us to believe that he has a unique insight into the motivations of Julian Assange. Pffft.
“It’s unfair, or at least an oversimplification, to say Assange is anti-American. He would say he supports the American people but believes its government, its politics, and its corporations are corrupt.
A result of this is that he doesn’t see the world in the way many Americans do, and has no intrinsic aversion to Putin or other strongmen with questionable democratic credentials on the world stage.” — James Ball
What better description is there of the Clinton cabal and in fact the entire U.S. military industrial complex than “strongmen with questionable democratic credentials on the world stage“?
That is a literal definition of every single Western regime, yet it is being used to prop them up by attacking their political enemies to distract us from the obvious.
The facade of democracy lost it’s last leg in 2011 with the violent crushing of the Occupy movement.
Democracy is over. Finished. Kaput. It has been reduced to a race between a war-mongering wife of an impeached President who cheated her way to the nomination, versus a serial-groper reality TV star with a spray tan.
Democracy in 2016 is billion dollar corporations telling 400 million people that it is their civic duty to pick Tweedle Dum or Tweedle Dee.
No amount of burying our heads in the sand or reading James Ball articles on omg-lol-wtf-BuzzFeed is going to change that.
James Ball and the Rape Investigation
There is nothing more annoying to a survivor of rape than people who get sanctimonious on the behalf of alleged survivors, only when it is politically expedient to do so. Or worse, to cash in on it.
Of Assange’s alleged victims, Ball writes:
“Those who have faced the greatest torments are, of course, the two women who accused Assange of sexual offences in Sweden in the summer of 2010. The details of what happened over those few days remain a matter for the Swedish justice system, not speculation, but having seen and heard Assange and those around him discuss the case, having read out the court documents, and having followed the extradition case in the UK all the way to the supreme court, I know it is a real, complicated sexual assault and rape case. It is no CIA smear, and it relates to Assange’s role at WikiLeaks only in that his work there is how they met.” — James Ball
Nowhere does he mention that the women did not want Assange charged. Or that one said the police manufactured the case and that she was railroaded into it. Or that the other specifically said she was not raped.
Ball never once lets the facts get in the way of his story.
So Who Is James Ball?
In short, exactly what his article claims Julian Assange is. A bullshit artist.
By contrast, the following is what WikiLeaks had to say about James Ball, in their response to ‘We Steal Secrets’.
Ball lie number 1: That James Ball wouldn’t sign a non-disclosure agreement on ideological grounds
“James Ball is lying. James Ball signed a non-disclosure agreement with WikiLeaks on November 23, 2010.
WikiLeaks uses non-disclosure agreements to help protect the safety of its sources, its staff and its upcoming publications from informants. The FBI and rival media organizations have previously bribed or pressured persons they believe to be close to WikiLeaks. James Ball understood this, and saw no irony in being asked by WikiLeaks to sign his NDA in November 2010.
WikiLeaks staff suspected Ball was passing information from WikiLeaks onto others: rival media organisations or government agencies. WikiLeaks discovered that Ball had told a colleague he had a job interview with the UK intelligence service MI5 and had interned at the UK Home Office. WikiLeaks also discovered Ball was attending secret meetings with the Guardian journalist David Leigh – his former college professor at City University, and a vocal opponent of WikiLeaks.
While Assange was in prison it was discovered that someone had accessed the Sunshine Press press contacts account using an email client, and had mirrored its archive. Ball had briefly been given access to the account. Documents from the account subsequently appeared in the Guardian. Physical documents went missing, and Ball’s behaviour became erratic.
Therefore a second, special non-disclosure agreement was devised for Ball, to test his reaction. After being asked to sign it at WikiLeaks’ Norfolk office, Ball became anxious and asked to postpone signing it while he considered it. He then left for London.
It later became obvious to WikiLeaks staff that, showing malicious forethought, Ball had stolen what he thought was WikiLeaks’ copy of his original NDA (which would have given him both copies). However the document that James Ball stole was not WikiLeaks’ copy of the agreement. Ball had left his NDA out on a desk and it had been filed for security reasons. He had stolen his own copy of the NDA. The other copy had already been removed to a secure location, and is still in WikiLeaks’ possession.
Ball became unavailable for work, and stopped returning calls. He lied about his whereabouts, and invented reasons why he could not return, which were confirmed to be untrue by a mutual third party. After several weeks, it became clear that he had cashed in his favours to David Leigh, in return for which he was given a post at the Guardian and the first credit in David Leigh’s book.
Ball pursued career advancement at the Guardian by placing himself at the service of The Guardian’s institutional vendetta against WikiLeaks, publishing numerous deceitful attacks on WikiLeaks over the last two and a half years, all of which rely on heavily embellishing his role as a freelancer working as a junior intern at WikiLeaks.
During the short time he worked for WikiLeaks he insisted on being called “a journalist working with WikiLeaks” or “a freelancer working for them“. Some time after leaving, Ball reimagined his role at WikiLeaks for career advantage, changing his title in order to misrepresent himself to others as a “former spokesperson.” James Ball was never a spokesperson for WikiLeaks. Alex Gibney did not secure an interview with WikiLeaks’ actual spokesperson, Kristinn Hrafnsson.
Ball has consistently maintained that he never signed the WikiLeaks NDA, and has felt secure enough to lie in print and on camera because he believed he had destroyed the evidence, having stolen the NDA.
Although he lies straight to camera in “We Steal Secrets” about the NDA, in January 2013 Ball admitted that he did sign the WikiLeaks NDA, after having been challenged about it by WikiLeaks lawyer Jennifer Robinson. In admitting this, he lied again, claiming that he had never denied signing a WikiLeaks NDA. The evidence to the contrary is in the film itself.” — WikiLeaks
Ball lie number 2: re Julian’s ex-handle, ‘Mendax’
“Ball fabricates the significance of one of Julian Assange’s teenage screen names “Splendide Mendax”, this time in the mouth of an interviewee. The screen name is a joke. In Latin it means “Nobly untrue”, but as a pseudonym it describes how handles protect an author’s identity even though being inherently “untrue”. It is a phrase which describes itself, not its author, just like the word “word”.
‘Claims my teenage nickname was Mendax, “given to lying”, instead of Splendide Mendax, “nobly untruthful”, which is a teenage joke on handles being inherently untrue. It is self-referential, not a psychoanalysis 20 years ahead of its time!'” — Julian Assange, Complaint to Ofcom regarding the Guardian co-produced Secrets & Lies documentary, January 9, 2012.” — WikiLeaks
Ball lie number 3: That he was a WikiLeaks spokesperson
“The full interviews from which Gibney selects clips of James Ball talking to the media tell a different story. As James Ball makes a number of false statements in Gibney’s documentary these are worth watching in full. In one with Fox TV, for example, Ball appears alongside Kristinn Hrafnsson (as he usually did), who is introduced as “WikiLeaks spokesman” while Ball is described as “a journalist working with WikiLeaks”. James Ball never “essentially filled in” as “WikiLeaks’ principal spokesperson”.
At 2.45 mins in, Mark Stephens explains that Julian Assange is not in hiding: “the police know how to get in touch with him, the Swedish prosecutor knows how to get hold of him, so everybody knows where he is – except the media.” It is therefore false and misleading for James Ball to suggest that Julian Assange was “in hiding”.
Starting at 8.30mins, Ball refutes the suggestion that WikiLeaks has put anyone in harm’s way: “We have correspondents from all over – you know, the New York Times Chinese correspondent, the Guardian Chinese correspondent – checking those cables that are published to see what they’re like. Of course WikiLeaks takes redactions seriously. It was said on the Iraq War Logs that there were 300 names going to be in them by the Department of Defense. When they were actually published, of course, the whole things were published redacted and safe.”
Ball lie number 4: That WikiLeaks funds and fundraising were used for Julian’s defense
“This is a deliberately false statement by James Ball. Alex Gibney does not challenge Ball on it. The facts are easy to find. The Julian Assange and Wikileaks Staff Legal Defense Fund (JADF) and the various means by which Wikileaks receives donations for its running costs are kept separate.
Donors to “Dinner for Freedom of Speech” were given a choice to donate to WikiLeaks or JADF, and this was made explicitly clear. The different donation bank details were clearly set out. There is no confusion for donors about where their money is going.
The original ‘Dinner For Free Speech’ web page is still available, having been mirrored by the internet archive on February 10, 2011. It clearly indicates where donors can choose to donate to either the Defense Fund or to WikiLeaks, and also states unequivocally:
By pledging a donation on this day, no matter how large or small, you can help support Julian’s defence fund, and/or contribute to WikiLeaks.
This fundraising idea was organised in February 2011. James Ball’s internship had expired by mid-January 2011 and he had no involvement in this initiative at all.
The JADF is administered and audited by Derek Rothera & Co. The terms of the trust and trustees can be found here.” — WikiLeaks
Ball lie number 5: That WikiLeaks didn’t support Pfc. Manning
“This is a now-classic anti-WikiLeaks argument created by James Ball, an attempt to allege that the blame for Manning’s arrest lies with WikiLeaks and not with Adrian Lamo, the FBI informant who turned Manning in after telling him that he would protect him.
Ball’s allegation that WikiLeaks does not adequately support its sources conflicts with the account that Manning presented before the military court regarding his alleged contacts with WikiLeaks. In a plea statement, February 28, 2013, Manning said this:
After a period of time, I developed what I felt was a friendly relationship with Nathaniel [Manning’s designation for his contact at WikiLeaks]. Our mutual interest in information technology and politics made our conversations enjoyable. We engaged in conversation often. Sometimes as long as an hour or more. I often looked forward to my conversations with Nathaniel after work.” — WikiLeaks
This ties in to the audacious claim in Ball’s latest article that WikiLeaks “botched” the rescue of Edward Snowden by “stranding him” in Sheremetyevo Airport.
This is so ironic, as James Ball worked for The Guardian, one of the newspapers who had direct access to Snowden and who financially benefited from his leaks.
Unfortunately, The Guardian’s staff abandoned Edward Snowden in Hong Kong. Had WikiLeaks not stepped in, the end result of Snowden’s actions would have been life imprisonment (under unimaginable conditions, such as those meted out to Pfc. Manning), or death.
Nevermind the small fact that the U.S. cancelled Snowden’s passport, preventing him from being able to travel beyond Moscow.
In June 2013, it was not clear at all that Snowden would even live. Very few people expected him to make it as far as July. Let alone to be granted temporary asylum (and subsequently, according to Snowden, permanent residency).
The lengths WikiLeaks went to to make this possible are unimaginable to any other media organisation. They put their own staff on the line to accompany him across borders, help to negotiate his asylum, and spend months on end with him to ensure his physical and mental wellbeing.
When was the last time The Guardian did that? When was the last time BuzzFeed did it?
This is a clear cut case of professional envy. Ball seeks to piss on the achievements of WikiLeaks in saving Snowden precisely because those actions were so significant and historic.
Ball goes on to reference the single instance of Snowden and WikiLeaks ever having a cross word in public. Ball claims “In recent weeks, Snowden has publicly clashed with Assange…”
God forbid Ball quote what Snowden has actually said about WikiLeaks, from their 10th anniversary celebration this month –
Ball’s claims become more and more ridiculous, the further you get into the article:
“While the extent of WikiLeaks’ role in the Arab Spring remains a matter for debate, Assange was at the forefront of an information revelation. His attempts to regain the spotlight in the meantime have largely failed.” — James Ball
WikiLeaks is garnering up to 40,000 – 50,000 retweets per tweet. They have the entire world’s media as a captive audience. They are the most talked about news organisation in the world. Their releases are poured over by millions of people on a daily basis. Assange is invited to appear on the most significant and wide-reaching of media platforms.
This is what Ball deems failure?
And success is, what? Writing about sheep fetuses for BuzzFeed?
WikiLeaks has achieved stratospheric levels of impact, attention, growth, political and historical impact.
But this two-bit ex-intern from six years ago needs you to believe otherwise.
Journalists who write truth pay a high price to do so. If you respect and value this work, please consider supporting Suzie’s efforts via credit card or Bitcoin donation at this link. Thank you!
A critical look at history reveals that World War II started in 1933, not 1939.
With the invocation of a state of war and the granting of war powers to the head of state, Nazi Germany was emboldened to begin their rampage of propaganda-fueled totalitarianism and ultimately invasion, mass murder and assimilation.
The official World War II commencement date of 1st September 1939 marks the day that England and France declared war and began openly militarily opposing Germany’s aggressive, expansionist agenda.
It is the date that officials were finally allowed to confirm to the public who were subsequently engaged (and drafted) to support it, that there was in fact a World War going on.
But with a slew of countries already having been breached by invading armies, World War II had begun well prior to the public acknowledgement of it.
Similarly, World War III will not be determined by the history books to have officially begun until a country or a coalition of countries formally stand to oppose and/or declare war against the now long campaign of invasion, subversion and international destabilisation perpetrated by the United States and their allies.
But nonetheless – even in the absence of such proclamations, World War III is well underway. That fact is only now filtering through to the awareness of the global public.
My analysis of the 1933 – 1939 period in Germany’s history has grave implications. The diplomatic and military conduct of Nazi Germany eerily mirrors that of the USA & co (hereafter colloquially described as The US Empire) in the period 2001 – 2016.
The events leading up to World War II and World War III are scarily similar.
Acclaimed author Naomi Klein has often written about the 10 steps to fascism and warned that they apply to America. She lists the decline into fascism as being indicated by (paraphrasing);
Otherisation (creating an enemy)
Gulags (Guantanamo)
Paramilitary (outsourced military)
Immunised thuggery (Blackwater etc)
Domestic surveillance (NSA/facial recognition systems etc),
Arbitrary detention (TSA etc)
Targeting individuals
Subversion of media
Abuse of the definition and terms of espionage and treason, and
Legislative suspension of the rule of law.
This article will go beyond that, to look not just at the general trends and conditions but to compare the chronology of the specific acts of Nazi Germany with those of the modern day US Empire, in the context of World War II and the now well underway World War III.
The Naked Agenda
The most nefarious of acts are not the dastardly deeds waged covertly, in secret, but those executed publically in plain sight and then employed on a massive scale.
“Hitler never made a secret of his aims, he committed them to print and repeated them in countless speeches… he triumphed because the world was blind to the signals he constantly raised. Time and time again Hitler could have been stopped. By his fellow Germans first, and by foreign leaders later. Not until 1939 did the Allied leaders move to contain him and by then it was too late to block his road to war.” — from the documentary film ‘World War II – Germany – Road To War’
Time and time again over the last 15 years The Empire has declared that it is at war. They proclaimed that there would be multiple theatres of operation. That their “enemies” were numerous and would be hunted wherever they resided or roamed. Yet somehow we didn’t take it seriously enough.
Numbed to the overblown rhetoric of Western leaders, it never quite sunk in to the global public that America declaring a state of emergency, invoking war powers, dramatically expanding military capabilities and financing, employing legions of mercenaries, invading a string of foreign nations, upending elected governments, occupying foreign lands, incurring civilian casualties into the millions, creating massive refugee crises and incessantly lying about their motives for it, was in fact them instigating a Third World War.
Warning Signs
The subversion of constitutions and democratic principles is a common thread among all tyrants, dictators and military regimes.
When a permanent state of emergency was declared in Germany and the “Enabling Act of 1933” passed, the stage was set for unending war.
While different in letter and inferior in scope to the far more complex USA Patriot Act of 2003, the ultimate aims were similar – to enhance the powers of the Nazi government to engage in internecine warfare, on whim.
Likewise, according to Wikipedia, in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, the Bush Administration “asserted both a right and the intention to wage preemptive war, or preventive war. This became the basis for the Bush Doctrine.”
The Nazis soon used their powers to justify the execution and imprisonment of their own people and this is manifest in the recent conduct of The Empire also.
“intended to constitute specific statutory authorization within the meaning of section 5(b) of the War Powers Resolution of 1973.
An initial draft of Senate Joint Resolution 23 included language granting the power “to deter and preempt any future acts of terrorism or aggression against the United States… Members were concerned that this would provide “a blank check to go anywhere, anytime, against anyone the Bush administration or any subsequent administration deemed capable of carrying out an attack” and the language was removed. Constitutional law specialist professor Bruce Ackerman of Yale Law School has said that the Obama Administration’s use of the AUMF has so far overstepped the authorized powers of the final, enacted version of the bill as to more closely resemble the capabilities named in this draft text rejected by Congress.”
This is definitive proof that laws passed to expand the powers of the executive are carried over to subsequent administrations then employed as justifications and expanded upon, to devastating effect.
Wikipedia states that critics of the Bush Doctrine “were suspicious of the increasing willingness of the United States to use military force unilaterally. Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson argued that it reflects a turn away from international law, and marks the end of American legitimacy in foreign affairs.”
Both Nazi Germany and The US Empire share the trait of justifying their non-compliance with international law and treaties by manufactured legal caveat, to enable the abdication of their democratic responsibilities.
Germany claimed that international treaties were not adhered to by their political adversaries and therefore it need not uphold or be bound by them. The same argument has been made by Western powers about everything from the Kyoto Protocol, to torture.
Another similarity is a self-righteous contempt for established covenants governing the military conduct of nations.
Peace is an endlessly abused idealistic concept that quite obviously cannot ever be achieved by bombs, military expansion and more recently, drone warfare, yet we hear the term invoked over and over again in the speeches of the warmongers.
Incessant talk of peace in the context of waging preemptive war is a constant with both Nazi Germany and the modern day US Empire.
“Yearning for peace was greater in no other country of the world, was no more vibrant, than in the German volk” Hitler audaciously claimed, in one of countless such addresses.
‘The Road To War’ notes that Hitler “was always proclaiming his love of peace.”
Stated intentions to pursue peace while preparing for war were viscerally demonstrated at the Olympics of 1936 where Nazi Germany practised the Olympic tradition instituted in 1920 post-World War I by releasing 30,000 thousand white doves, in the immediate wake of their illegal occupation of the Rhineland.
In 2009, President Obama famously droned on for over 30 minutes about peace in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize. This despite his administration having dramatically advanced the prevalence and use of obscene and high-tech methods of achieving extrajudicial killings, an extension of that which was employed in George W. Bush’s hegemonic and interventionist foreign policy.
Conquest In Stages
Every Empire has a Grand Poobah with a master plan, supported by a vast bureaucracy with fistfuls of them.
The obsession with strategic planning reassures them of their longevity. Yet their thirst for victory and conquest is never sated. It is an addiction. Once the cogs of war are greased and in motion they become trapped in a cycle of their own inertia.
Inevitably the velocity they generate speeds them towards their undoing.
Nazi Germany’s trail of subjugation forged across Central Europe. Back to back unopposed and largely bloodless successes bolstered its aspirations to impose dominion over the greater Western European continent. The further that aim progressed, the more murderous the campaign.
Ultimately this brought them to the doorstep of the seat of power in the USSR as well as into the North Atlantic maritime channel, to the British Isles.
‘Risk’ is a great analogy for how war planners see war. To them it is not the stark reality of their lawlessness; the blood and bone, murder and rape, mass displacement; it is a map, upon which is determined the geographical control, monopolisation, distribution and ownership of resources.
According to General Wesley Clark, back in 2001 the U.S. Department of Defense also had a plan and it went far beyond the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
“He said we’re…starting with Iraq then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing off Iran.” — General Wesley Clark
The plan is not about democracy, or security, or fighting terrorism. The plan is about control. Just like Nazi Germany and many other Empires before them; they want to rule the world.
Each conquest is a launchpad for the next.
The invasion of Iraq allowed the United States to establish bases and to prepare itself for conflict in Syria. The invasion of Poland allowed Nazi Germany to establish bases and fortifications to prepare itself for the ground invasion of the USSR.
Nowadays, Ukraine is the new Poland.
The disbandment of the invaded nation’s military is another theme. Just as the Iraqi army was famously and disastrously dismantled post-invasion, Nazi Germany disbanded the Czech army, and others.
Stress factors for ethnic and religious tensions are deliberately exacerbated, as target countries are purposefully divided along sectarian lines by their invaders. The preconditions for civil war are maximised to provide further justification for an ongoing occupation, to create “bad guys” and “fall guys” and to prevent any cohesive opposition from forming or taking hold.
This invariably leads to sectarian warfare.
The tactic is simple: divide and conquer. Both Nazi Germany and The US Empire demonstrated the effectiveness of that strategy over and over again.
"Message from the mighty palace
Settled on the dirty streets
Got you fighting with your neighbour
Not the real enemy..."
- 'Wasted In The West' from FVEY by Shihad
Inaction By International Community
Inaction can be more dangerous than action.
In World War II the Allied powers failed to act again and again. They did not act against Hitler when he positioned his troops in the Rhineland, nor when he later occupied Austria.
“In 1936, Hitler moved his troops into the [demilitarized] zone, claiming that the recent treaty between France and Russia threatened Germany’s safety. His commanders had orders to retreat if the French army tried to stop them, but this time it was France who did nothing. The League of Nations, busy with the Abyssinian crisis, also did nothing.” http://www.johndclare.net/EII1.htm
The following table from JohnDClare.net explains the ‘Appeasement’ policy exercised during 1933-1939:
From: CLARE, JOHN D. (2002/2014), ‘International Relations 1919-1939’, at http://www.johndclare.net/Basics_intrel.htm
The modern military campaigns of The Empire have until recent times also been largely unopposed.
Modeled off the above, here is my own table of recent events:
Notably, none of the countries in which they have intervened has achieved a peaceful outcome. Active conflict remains in all of the above, up to the time of this writing.
There is a glaringly obvious line missing from my table and that is the bottom line of the World War II table: the open declaration of war by a nation or nations willing to declare war in direct opposition to the activities of The Empire.
Propaganda and Pretexts
The inception of war is always based on propaganda. This is true for each aggressive action undertaken in both World War II and World War III.
Nazi propaganda is a thoroughly explored topic. There are literally dozens if not hundreds of full-length documentaries on the topic. From anti-semitic, anti-Jew propaganda, to pro-state, pro-fascism propaganda, to anti-whatever-the-next-country-to-be-invaded-is propaganda, were one gullible enough to be influenced by it, they could soon become convinced that each German conquest was actually all for the benefit of the nation whose borders they violated and whose populations they decimated.
Nazi Germany’s tales of Germanic peoples supposedly being repressed in neighbouring nations were used to justify its incursions into multiple European countries. These myths came replete with tailor-made news reports containing images of crying women holding babies and whole families supposedly fleeing their homes.
The US Empire uses manufactured intelligence, criticism of the conduct of other foreign governments and the constantly recycled memory of 9/11 to claim that they are the ones under attack, rather than the countries they destabilise and the regimes they politically and militarily oppose.
Another recurring theme for the US is its cyclical doomsday warnings about the mortal dangers of weapons of mass destruction. Chemical weapons in Iraq are “unacceptable”, chemical weapons in Syria are “the red line”… but there is little mention or concern for where and how these technologies were supplied to or obtained by the countries possessing them.
“The Reagan administration even allowed Saddam to purchase the ingredients for weapons of mass destruction in the US. ‘The blueprints for chemical factories were supplied by sub-contractors of American companies to help the Iraqis build their own chemical weapons… the law stops you supplying the chemical weapons but you can get away with it by supplying the actual plans.’ This is cynicism of the highest order.” — Saddam Hussein – The Truth (Documentary)
Apparently only some uses of chemical weapons are offensive to the international commu nity. Others are not. According to the then Chairman of the Chemical Weapons Commission, when Iraq used chemical weapons against the Kurds “not one in this whole, at that time, thirty-five state’s Conference on Disarmament… no one lifted a finger.”
I have investigated the stated justifications of Nazi Germany and of The US Empire, for each of their military incursions and created the following tables:
Of course, for the propaganda of the state to thrive, there must be a wholesale subjugation of the press. This can be achieved economically, through mergers and acquisitions of the corporations that own them; it can be accomplished through smear campaigns and career disadvantages for those who refuse to tow the line.
If none of that works, then there is the outright criminalisation of the truth and the persecution of those who tell it.
Hitler deemed “The Munich Post”, a publication run by some of his most vociferous critics, Social Democrats in Munich, “The Poison Kitchen“.
The Poison Kitchen’s suspicion and criticisms of Hitler date back to 1921. This half dozen journalists and editors spent a dozen years publishing truths that the world didn’t take seriously enough.
Ignoring the warnings of Hitler’s critics ultimately cost an estimated 60 million human lives.
“In Nazi circles, the Munich Post became known as the “Poison Kitchen.” Prior to the Nazi takeover in 1933, “the Hitler Party” tried to silence the Post with libel suits and death threats against its staff. Nevertheless, the newspaper’s anti-Nazi resistance continued. Well into February 1933, the Post continued to publish reports about political murders carried out by the Nazis. Among its final anti-Hitler accounts was a three-part series that valiantly tried to counter what the Post had long regarded as Hitler’s most destructive characteristic: his willful falsification of history. The Post foresaw Hitler’s aims as disastrous for Germany and the world. Its views, however, did not prevail. Before the 1932-33 winter had ended, the Post’s anti-Hitler reporting was smashed, its courageous journalists imprisoned or killed.”
“Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party rigorously censored the news and media immediately after Hitler gained power in Germany in 1933 and throughout World War II. This extensive censorship made it impossible for any newspaper to stop or even obstruct Hitler in his political journey to exterminate non-Aryans during this powerful reign.”
Twogood continues:
“The Post was relentless in its reporting of the “secret death squad” within the NSDAP, called “Cell G”. They had been caught “red-handed” trying to assassinate members of the Nazi party that had been exposed and held responsible for insider leaks, specifically about the sexual blackmail scandal. The last of a series of articles on this squad quoted Hitler saying, “Nothing happens in the movement without my knowledge, without my approval . . . Even more, nothing happens without my wish.” This quote directly linked Hitler to the murders and covert violence of the NSDAP. The Munich Post was the first newspaper to openly make this claim.”
Twogood references‘Bernhard, Georg. “Tactics of Hitler.” New York Times, 13 December 1931, Sect III 1:8’ to show that the New York Times downplayed the significance and the risk of the Nazi’s cimes by publishing a flawed hypothesis that Hitler would just burn out or fade away of his own accord.
She writes:
“…the New York Times incorrectly predicted, “just as soon as this fostering soil becomes exhausted the National Socialists spook will vanish. What will probably remain then will be a small, discontented bourgeois party.” This prediction was typical of other newspapers as well – it stated that Hitler would disappear and make no further impression. The Munich Post knew he would not just disappear. It warned that Hitler’s actions and ideas were dangerous and took them seriously, even when no one else did.”
As Hitler took power and death squads openly operated in broad daylight, the feverish warnings of The Poison Kitchen became even more desperate.
One author quoted in the text describes the Munich Post as ‘Cassandra-like‘, in reference to the Trojan prophetess who forewarns of the fall of Troy but is ignored.
As their own demise became ever more inevitable, a fact of which they must have been well aware, still they tried to diligently report on the travesties, in no uncertain terms:
“Followed were reports of the “political murder summary: eighteen dead and thirty-four badly wounded in death squad attacks.” In February they continued to run such headlines and reports as “Nazi Party Hands Dripping with Blood” and “Germany Today: No Day without Death.”
The Post continued to fight on futilely against the onrushing strength of Hitler’s party until March 9, 1933, when the Nazis banned the last opposition papers still publishing… The Munich Post offices were turned over to an SA squad to pillage. They gutted it completely… The writers and editors were dragged away to imprisonment in concentration camps. That was the end of the Munich Post. Its battle against Hitler and the Nazis had been lost.”
After 12 years of valiantly trying to warn the world about Hitler, these truth-tellers were silenced.
For another 12 years thereafter, Hitler’s regime would rampage across Europe, devastating country after country and causing the deaths of tens of milions of people.
It is important that we name the names of the courageous. Twogood concludes:
“Protesters to Hitler fought with their hearts and jeopardized their freedom and lives hoping the world would listen. These men included Martin Gruber, Erhard Auer, Edmund Goldschagg, Julius Zerfass and others, reporters and editors of the Munich Post. They faced imprisonment and death, trying unsuccessfully to warn the world…”
With the passage of time, their truth rings ever stronger..
Even in this modern day, real journalists are often martyred for living up to the ideals of the profession. True journalism is a public service and a service to the historical record. To tell the unpopular truth about nefarious power, no matter the risk.
While the perilous days of The Poison Kitchen may seem long behind us, the preconditions for such a reoccurence surround us. Journalists around the world are being spied on and (in many cases, illegally) monitored by their governments using high-tech equipment and corresponding laws that were designed for combatting terrorism.
The death of American journalist Serena Shim and the lack of investigation into her passing; the jailing of citizen journalists who eye-witness police killings of unarmed citizens; the siege of WikiLeaks’ Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange; the litigation that brought Gawker media to its knees; the arrest and detention of Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman and the felony charges against a documentary producer at #NoDAPL, are all dire warnings that we might not be so far away from an escalation to internment camps, arbitrary detention and open military conflict as we might like to think.
At any given time, The US Empire has an ace in their pocket: for as they are well aware, bringing the press to heel can also be achieved, most potently, by harnessing galvanising events such as perceived attacks upon the country.
As with the Reichstag Fire in 1933, or the Gulf of Tonkin naval incident at the start of the Vietnam War, the culpability for the incidents can often lie a lot closer to home than the establishment ever lets on.
False Flags
The brilliant journalist Glenn Greenwald is known for his sardonic, adversarial style when exercising righteous and biting criticism of the hegemony of The US Empire.
Never more deservedly so than this last week, when reporting on an incident that very easily could have been escalated into something vastly more sinister than it initially appeared.
Greenwald’s indignant tweet is dripping with sarcasm and understandably so, given the incredible imbalances of the protracted and very one-sided conflict in Yemen.
Plagued by US drone strikes for years, the country has basically become a weapons testing lab for Western powers and particularly the airforce of Saudi Arabia, who have accordingly copped most of the criticism for their constant and unforgiving aerial bombardment of Yemen. Yet, they are dropping US munitions upon a besieged and starving population and both US and UK military advisors are reported to be present alongside them.
The story coming out of mainstream sources, however, was stripped down, bland and lacking contextual information;
To hear CNN tell it, the poor, beleaguered (giant, cutting-edge) Western warship (in another country’s territorial waters) was unjustly attacked by (emaciated, underequipped) heathen natives (who just so happen to have been being picked off by flying killer robots for the last dozen years). And thus we see how in modern times, the truth often lays only in mental parentheses added by the astute reader. For everyone else, it’s – Yemen who? Where *is* the Red Sea?
In the wake of the hysteria, a different story emerged:
In this instance, the nemesis merely being the impoverished Yemen, the implications of such a misunderstanding was not on the scale of previous similar incidents.
Such as the most significant of all: the Gulf of Tonkin ‘false flag’, used to pass the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that ultimately sparked the Vietnam War:
“The commodore at the time, Herrick, did say that there was one torpedo, but one had to take that with a good deal of salt, because he had been just as certain about the next 20 torpedoes, and it really took him many years before, looking at the evidence, he finally acknowledged that he had been mistaken about the first one as well. But even on that night, we knew that what the president proceeded to say and what McNamara proceeded to say to the press in television interviews, that the attack was unequivocal, we knew that that was false, as many years later it turned out that the assertions by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld that they had unequivocal evidence of WMDs, weapons of mass destruction, in Iraq were false and known to be false at the time…” — Daniel Ellsberg, interviewed by historian Gareth Porter.
According to the same article:
“Years later, then secretary of defense Robert McNamara admitted to the incident never taking place in this documentary Fog of War…”
McNamara’s retrospective take, as quoted from the documentary referenced above:
ROBERT MCNAMARA, FMR. U.S. SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: “No, it was just confusion, and events afterwards showed that our judgment that we had been attacked that day was wrong. It didn’t happen.”
The story of an attack that wasn’t an attack, crushed and traumatised an entire generation.
American citizens were drafted to the war and compelled to fight. Over 58,000 were killed.
According to the Wikipedia page for the War on Terror:
“In December 2012, Jeh Johnson, the General Counsel of the Department of Defense, stated that the military fight will be replaced by a law enforcement operation when speaking at Oxford University.”
Throughout history the United States has used counterintelligence tactics to wage war against its own citizens when they congregate en masse to exercise their democratic rights. But particularly since 2011, there has been a dramatic increase in the prevalence of military-grade equipment flowing to police forces and brutal, physical oppression meted out against demonstrators and occupiers.
While it was assumed to be a profit-driven consequence of the privatisation of key aspects of the military, or just harsh policing tactics, there is now evidence that stormtrooper-like riot police serving as a domestic army is in fact in alignment with the strategic plans of the Department of Defense.
In the accompanying article, reporter Nick Turse notes the ‘dystopian’ nature of the vision portrayed and how it relates to current counter-terrorism efforts. But a closer look at the combination of audio and imagery betrays an even more sinister agenda.
At 2:09 in the video, riot police are seen grabbing a woman by the hair. Graffiti on a wall in the background reads “Fight the Power”. Juxtaposed over this, the voiceover warns: “Social structures will be equally challenged if not dysfunctional…”
Lines of riot police square off against protesters holding green, white and red flags, reminiscent of the Palestinian flag. A store behind them is labelled “Pharmacie.” The voiceover continues “…as historic ways of life clash with modern living.”
Hacktivists who hack for social justice issues are equated with violent criminals and insurgents. At 2:35 a screenshot of an Anonymous video is shown as the voiceover says: “Digital security and trade will be increasingly threatened by sophisticated illicit economies and decentralised syndicates of crime..” leading to a photo of a masked black man in a tropical climate holding a huge shotgun and wearing a sling of bullets.
At 3:35, hundreds of riot cops are seen behind a barrier, while the audio says “the advice of doctrine from Sun Tzu to current field manuals has provided two fundamental options: avoid the cities or establish a cordon to either wait out the adversary or drain the swamp of non-combatants and engage the remaining adversaries in high intensity conflict within. Even our counterinsurgency doctrine, honed in the cities of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, is inadequate to address the sheer scale of population in the future urban reality.”
So military counterinsurgency doctrine, designed for warzones, is lightweight by comparison to what the Army intends to unleash on urban cities. Reassuring.
But wait, there’s more.
At 4:19 we see riot police with shields, helmets, body armour and billy clubs fighting a crowd. The Oz-like voice says “Our soldiers will have to operate within these ecosystems with minimal disruption and flow.”
Riot police. Our soldiers. Let that sink in.
This video was produced by the U.S. Army. If riot police in urban areas are their soldiers this can lead to only one conclusion.
America is already making open warfare in their homeland, standard practice.
The U.S. Constitution forbids the use of military on U.S. soil. It appears those pulling the strings of The US Empire have figured out how to get around that: Use civilian police forces as “soldiers”.
They are so kind as to reiterate the point: at 4:30 the video nears its climax by showing masses of helmeted riot police. The voiceover states “We are facing a threat that requires us to redefine doctrine and the force in radically new and different ways..” Shot of hundreds more black-clad riot cops. “The future army will confront a highly sophisticated urban-centric threat…”
“Our soldiers.” “The future army.” “Redefining doctrine and the force.”
By unleashing hordes of domestic police forces armed to the teeth with military-grade weapons and equipment upon unarmed civilians on domestic soil, the U.S. Army isn’t just “redefining doctrine and the force in radically new and different ways” – it is redefining Constitutional Law, without the consent of the governed.
The US Empire is not the first to have armies of black-clad police forces attacking it’s own citizens.
Nazi Germany also had them. They too operated in tandem with military objectives and made a hunting ground of their own cities.
They were called the S.S.
Overextension – The Demise Of Empire
Neither Nazi Germany or The US Empire possess an achievable long-term objective. The stated end goal is always literally impossible to obtain, yet the wars wage on nonetheless.
Empirical governors always seek to expand, expand, expand. Or in terms of the acquisition and exfiltration of resources; to usurp and consume.
Each military misadventure overplays itself into the next endeavour.
Until the breadth of the empire becomes completely unsustainable and ultimately collapses.
“The defeat of Poland gave Hitler his common frontier with Russia. He had made war. But it was not the war he wanted. His misjudgement of the temper of Britain and France had wrecked his plan. Before the great march of conquest in the east could begin, he must eliminate both France and Britain. Either that, or plunge Germany into a prolonged two-front war.” — World War II – Germany – Road To War
For America, the Pivot to Asia is the second front. The idea that The U.S. Empire could fight on both their East (against Iran and/or Russia) as well as their West (against China) and still win, is a huge stretch of the imagination.
The much-touted 40+ member Coalition of the Wiling was more fanfare than substance and use of the term has largely faded from public discourse. But even at its heights, in the wake of 9/11, the total amount of troops and resources contributed by the coalition was a tiny fraction of that required to sustain the entire war effort.
According to Wikipedia only 3 countries provided combat troops for the initial invasion, another 3 countries did not even have standing armies, and Costa Rica and the Solomon Islands declined to participate as they were apparently not even consulted about their inclusion in the list.
Wikipedia states:
It may also have been a zero sum game if not a net loss. Pundits labelled The Coalition of the Willing ‘The Coalition of The Billing‘ and ‘The Coalition of The Shilling‘ due to the large amounts of US aid being offered to some countries in order to secure participation.
While the United States currently enjoys military supremacy and thus alliance with many military partners and vassal states, that situation would change pretty quickly were The Empire to become weakened or exposed by fighting on both sides.
There is a long list of countries that The Empire has either overtly or covertly invaded or politically and economically subjugated, many with manufactured or installed pro-US puppet regimes that could easily be toppled by populaces which have not yet forgotten the crimes of the past, were the fortunes of The Empire to undergo substantial change.
Such an eventuality could make the Arab Spring look like a practice run.
Resilience
No sane person wants war. War is insanity by definition. Least of all a country that lost as many as 30 million of its people during World War II – more than every other country put together.
“There is a Soviet-era song titled ‘Do The Russians Want War?’ I think this is something the West does not understand about us… even for modern day Russians, who grew up at a peaceful time and didn’t witness World War II… there is no prospect more terrifying than war… my grandma used to tell me, ‘Remember, there is nothing more horrible than war.’ Every time I’d come to complain about something she’d tell me ‘That’s nothing. You can do anything. You can fix even the most disastrous of your mistakes but remember, there’s nothing worse in this world than war.’ Because war renders everything else irrelevant. When there is war, there’s neither good nor bad. There’s only war…
…the mere mention of war to a Russian makes our skin crawl. It gives us a sense of the world coming to an end, a sense of panic… once they realise that, if they ever do, they’ll be able to understand everything about us. We have lived through real war so many times. Not the movies or video games, the way they get to experience it. It’s not even the kind of war where they dispatch their troops elsewhere, not knowing what it’s like to fight a war at home. If they ever realise that, which I hope they will, they’re bound to feel guilty and ashamed of what they’re doing right now.” — Maria Zarakhova, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson speaking on RT.com’s ‘In The Now’
The most spectacular holiday of the Russian year is May 9th. The day that Germany conceded defeat and World War II was finally over. Even now, more than 70 years later, the end of that war is cause for celebration in Moscow. Not merely commemoration, but actual jubilance. Gratitude for peace.
Having never been a target of a large-scale ground invasion on their home soil in the 20th century, The US Empire is out of touch with the impact that the kind of devastation seen at Stalingrad has on a civilian population. The scars, the memories and the heritage, or how those scars are passed down through the generations both biologically in the physical composition of the offspring of those whom were literally starved by the war, and by word of mouth: Lest We Forget.
With each country invaded by US Empire, there has been increasing resistance, just as there was against Nazi Germany. If World War III progresses to armed conflict on Russian territory, that resistance will be raised to new heights unimaginable to the invaders.
In World War II, at Stalingrad every man, woman and child fought or aided in the fight. It was not merely an issue of a draft – or one military marching upon another. Every single resident fought tooth and nail against the invaders, for the future of their homeland.
“Many women fought on the Soviet side, or were under fire. As General Chuikov acknowledged, “Remembering the defence of Stalingrad, I can’t overlook the very important question … about the role of women in war, in the rear, but also at the front. Equally with men they bore all the burdens of combat life and together with us men, they went all the way to Berlin.” At the beginning of the battle there were 75,000 women and girls from the Stalingrad area who had finished military or medical training, and all of whom were to serve in the battle. Women staffed a great many of the anti-aircraft batteries that fought not only the Luftwaffe but German tanks. Soviet nurses not only treated wounded personnel under fire but were involved in the highly dangerous work of bringing wounded soldiers back to the hospitals under enemy fire. Many of the Soviet wireless and telephone operators were women who often suffered heavy casualties when their command posts came under fire. Though women were not usually trained as infantry, many Soviet women fought as machine gunners, mortar operators, and scouts. Women were also snipers at Stalingrad. Three air regiments at Stalingrad were entirely female. At least three women won the title Hero of the Soviet Union while driving tanks at Stalingrad.”
That kind of experience remains with the population long after the war is over. They simply do not forget. The need for peace, for sanity, is urgent and enduring.
Even the citizens of the West who haven’t personally experienced war on their home soil within many generations, want peace. Some 36,000,000 people around the world marched against the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Unfortunately, mass demonstrations, while very much in the spirit of democracy, seem consistently all but ignored by the political hierarchy of The US Empire. While they may give the causes of activists lip service in campaign speeches, seldom does any action follow other than blatant tactics of oppression and suppression reminiscent of many of the other countries who they then hypocritcally decry for a supposed lack of respect for human rights.
Inevitability
The escalation of the War seems inevitable, because it is so closely following the blueprint of the past.
The biggest indicator of impending conflict is the imposition of economic sanctions.
Since the dawn of time, trade sanctions precede war.
“As a blunt tool of diplomacy, the concept of sanctions has been around at least from the time of the ancient Greeks, when Athens imposed a trade embargo on its neighbor Megara in 432 B.C. Since then, there has been a long history of countries blockading their enemies to compel a change in behavior. But how did this tactic morph into today’s “targeted” or “smart” sanctions — measures such as arms embargoes, asset freezes, and travel bans on key individuals and organizations — now aimed at Iran and Syria? They may be more humane and high-tech than a flotilla at sea, but are sanctions any more effective today than they were 2,400 years ago? After all, Athens’s embargo didn’t cow Megara into submission — it helped trigger the Peloponnesian War.”
“Sanctions and war are linked to each other. If you go against sanctions, you should know – nothing against sanctions – but if you do that, you should know that there is only war left.”
Of course, some may argue that sanctions are active warfare. Certainly the method of murder – economic or military – made no difference to the half a million Iraqi children who died as a direct result of sanctions in the 90s.
Sanctions imposed by vampires, held in place even after the premises under which they were imposed had been proven to be false.
From the same documentary:
“In 1990 the U.N. voted for a strict economic blockade. Officially the embargo would remain in place until Saddam’s arsenal had been entirely destroyed. U.N. inspectors forced the Iraqis to cooperate and soon became convinced that Iraq no longer posed a real threat. And yet the sanctions were maintained…
…”There’s something comfortable about having him in the box of sanctions and a regime of international inspection… that we had come to accept”…
…”We knew we were in a losing battle, that sanctions were going to erode to the point where eventually they become a joke… if you lift sanctions you break containment, if you break containment you no longer have Saddam Hussein under control.”
There is the statesman and the war hawk. The former acts to prevent war, the latter acts as a cheerleader for the military industrial complex, egging them on to their next conquest and has no qualms about getting their hands dirty.
All the while, amassing top-tier military and corporate contacts and benefactors.
According to the Christian Science Monitor, there is somewhat of a chequered history to Secretaries of State becoming President.
They recount the history of the six prior Secretaries to do so:
So, Hillary would have been the seventh ex Secretary of State to become President, and the first to do so since 1845.
The last, as stated above, was James Buchanan. The reason the Christian Science Monitor describes him as the “worst US chief executive of all time” is because he was a one-term President who presided over the secession of states that led to the American Civil War.
The election of Donald Trump to President of the United States has been, to say the least, highly contentious. But given the hawkish international policies promoted by Clinton, it may have saved the world much blood and pain.
Now only one day after the election, no one really knows what is coming. There is almost universal dread among U.S. activists, due to Trump’s divisive domestic agenda. But among many others, there is genuine hope for a rebalancing of international power, away from the perennial misadventures of Empire – a profound change on the world stage. Only time will tell if President Trump will run the military industrial complex, or if the military industrial complex will run President Trump.
Building Bridges
So what builds bridges to peace? Failed Presidential bid aside, Clinton’s post-‘Stronger Together‘ slogan was ‘Love trumps hate‘.
The foundations of love are understanding and empathy.
Geopolitically, this requires an acknowledgement and respect for cultures foreign to our own.
Such respect for culture is not unprecedented in contemporary American history. It has been achieved most poignantly, through the arts. One example is Van Cliburn, a young American man who travelled to Moscow, where he earned the admiration of the Russian populace with a series of spectacular performances that won him an inaugural international Tchaikovsky competition for concert pianists.
The feat was considered so significant that he returned to a ticker-tape parade in New York and his subsequent studio recordings outsold even Elvis Presley.
In an interview with PBS, Cliburn distanced himself from a 1958 Time Magazine cover that had audaciously claimed that he’d ‘conquered the Russians‘. Cliburn states:
“I am so grateful because they were wonderful to me. They were such great audiences… I didn’t conquer anything. As a matter of fact, they conquered my heart.”
That kind of humility, coupled with a common humanity is how we, the citizenry, can build bridges between our nations. To boast of conquest is hollow and temporary. Even the strongest bodybuilder cannot flex impressively forever – age will eventually defy them. But to forge a friendship, an alliance based on mutual respect, is to truly win.
In 2004 Cliburn was awarded the Russian ‘Order of Friendship‘. The medal celebrates foreign nationals whose efforts strengthen international relations.
Any person can wage destruction with ease, even a toddler can. But to build something lasting, profound and historic, that spans beyond one’s personal lifetime… such as cultural understanding and friendship… or to inspire unity… that is truly remarkable.
The Nobel Peace Prize was originally intended for recipients who had “done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”
Unfortunately it has become little more than a status symbol for those who wield great power and often with limited (if not overtly detrimental) outcomes.
Better results come from a more pure motivation – love and genuine well-wishing – a heartfelt yearning to find common ground, not merely though diplomacy but through cultural exchange, tolerance and celebration.
Thus it is not only the leaders of our countries that must rise to find solutions and reach an outstretched hand, but the very citizens themselves.
When they do, let us promote such efforts by acknowledging, encouraging and rewarding them.
Journalists who write truth pay a high price to do so. If you respect and value this work, please consider supporting Suzie’s efforts via credit card or Bitcoin donation at this link. Thank you!
[Update/January 2018] This post is now available at my Steemit blog
The genesis of this groundbreaking series was a moral obligation to highlight obvious discrepancies in the coordinated smears against Jacob Appelbaum (IOError). That smear campaign’s self-pronounced and ostensibly achieved aim was to permanently shut down his (anti-surveillance, anti-three-letter-agency) public speaking by casting him out from the very communities he has dedicated his life to supporting.
Implemented, that aim had very little to do with protecting actual rape victims but everything to do with manipulating (by asserting social control over) the speaking circuit which is the visible face of the privacy and infosec movements, as well as dominating the critical infrastructure and the corporate structure (at board level) of the Tor Project:
Series In Review
“The Weaponising of Social” series kicked off with the first long-form article with the guts to seriously analyse the allegations against Jacob Appelbaum. This hit a lot of nerves and got a lot of exposure, with word-of-mouth more than making up for the total lack of commercial platfom, promotion or marketing of the work.
While intended to be a 3-part series, it really turned out to be 4 parts:
Performing a rudimentary linguistic analysis of the statements of the alleged victims (which range between 81 and 703 words each), the article notes that “people who are not survivors of rape cannot competently impersonate survivors of rape” and explains precisely why that is:
the inordinate brevity and apparently manufactured linguistic conformity of the JacobAppelbaum.net claims;
the profound and highly unusual absence of victim impact in those statements; and
the obvious presence of editing by third parties, giving the effect of multiple ‘voices’ within a single piece, when the norm is to respectfully allow the words of survivors to stand on their own merit without editorial manipulation.
The smear website’s initial exposure, then non-transparent retraction, of the name of a woman unrelated to the claims, is highlighted.
The article mentioned Meredith L. Patterson, the founder of a think-tank called “Weaponising Social“. One of three self-appointed “eye-witnesses” that famously went to media with a story about an incident that was promptly debunked by the alleged “victim“ herself.
The piece raised a plethora of concerns surrounding the site copy and the plagierism allegations, and pledged that a deeper look into the responses and conduct of the Tor Project and media, as well as the WikiLeaks connection, would follow.
Part Two dives headfirst into what it really means to be a Person of Interest – which there is no doubt Jacob Appelbaum is, especially given the context of the FBI and DoJ (amongst other agencies) investigations into WikiLeaks.
It discusses Appelbaum’s 30c3 revelations of spyware emitting up to a kilowatt of hardware radiation (which we dubbed #spycancer on Twitter at the time) – literally microwaving targets – and tells of my own experiences of being directly stalked and persecuted by state intelligence contractors when trying to amplify Jacob’s findings.
The near uniform anti-WikiLeaks positions of Jacob’s public critics are exposed, in their own words – including those of Leigh Honeywell, Valerie Aurora, Meredith L. Patterson, Andrea Shephard and Alison Macrina, just to name a few.
The article proved that Isis Lovecruft had (presumably unsuccessfully) attempted to gain access to the back-end of WikiLeaks’ secure whistleblowing platform, a year prior to her allegation against Jacob, and according to her own timeline, one year after he allegedly assaulted her.
While the smear website was designed by supposed privacy activists dedicated to anonymity, the article identified numerous security compromises inherent in its design.
Finally, it cautions that the desecration of Jacob Appelbaum is being actively used to hurt others associated with him including but not limited to Edward Snowden, and demonstrates that known FBI informants like Adrian Lamo (responsible for the arrest of beloved whistleblower Chelsea Manning) and Hector ‘Sabu’ Monsegur (whose betrayals led to the arrest of Jeremy Hammond among other whistleblowers) have been cheerleading the ostracision of Appelbaum from the outset.
This much shorter piece was initially intended to cover just a single issue – that Jacob Appelbaum’s Wikipedia page was being constantly monitored and manipulated by an editor, Kenneth Freeman, who openly espoused Tor and EFF affiliations and touted a personal friendship with one of the accusers – Alison Macrina.
However, the rabbit hole got even deeper. It emerged that some of the vociferous anti-Appelbaum troll accounts which had been, on a daily basis, lambasting anyone who questioned the narrative of the smears are allegedly operated by some of the accusers themselves.
In the interim, their associates were leaking information to, of all people, the very journalists at The Daily Dot who had worked to redeem the reputation of FBI informant Hector ‘Sabu’ Monsegur (but abysmally failed – he remains almost universally reviled to this day).
Meanwhile, it was revealed that Jacob Appelbaum had been incensed by the discovery of CIA infiltration at the Tor Project.
The same CIA proven to have a track record of editing Wikipedia pages.
4. The Weaponising of Social Part 3: The Resurrection of Jacob Appelbaum
This monolithic undertaking will dive deeper into some of the above issues and cover those aspects yet to be discussed – namely:
The attitudes of those involved in the smears, in their own words, and further details of the extent of their involvement
The recent revelations in Die Zeit that the key singular allegation of rape may in fact be false and that other material factors were omitted
The professional conduct of the Tor Project management and the web of associated relationships
The role of mainstream media, particularly the New York Times
The wider political environment and effects on the movements
The Worm Turns? Die Zeit Investigate
In a long-awaited move, Jacob Appelbaum has spoken with the German weekly magazine Die Zeit, who performed an in-depth investigation into the allegations against him.
The results – a depiction of that particular corner of the Berlin hacker scene as being drug-fuelled and sexually promiscuous – aren’t particularly flattering to anyone, but the findings with regards to the lack of veracity of the key allegations are utterly damning.
Speaking to eight eye-witnesses who spent the days in question with River and who vehemently deny that any sexual assault took place, many further details emerge, including some hard evidence that things may not be as she initially depicted. Particularly pertinent is that River had sent Jacob affectionate email communication after the fact, and spoke publically of wanting to return to Germany for more ‘fun’.
Furthermore, it is revealed that Alison Macrina – author of the 369-word “non-consensual washing” complaint posted under the pseudonym ‘Sam’ – is alleged to have had consensual sex with Jacob after his bath, a material factor that she did not reveal in her complaint against him, or apparently since.
When questioned about this by Zeit, she became incensed, and suggested that she did not consider her alleged omission of the consensual sex to be relevant.
The encounter between Jacob and Alison is said to have occurred in the days following what is alleged to be a consensual threesome with River that occured privately in a bedroom, rather than non-consensual sex in the lounge as had been claimed. This raises the possibility that the complainants becoming aware of the close timing of each other’s sexual encounters with Jacob may have retrospectively impacted the way they viewed, portrayed and related their interactions with him.
Taking Down An NSA Target
Regardless of the women’s motives, the net effect of their action has been the utter desecration of Jacob Appelbaum’s public image.
Appelbaum’s Tor Directory Authority had been specifically listed as an XKeyscore target in leaked NSA documents.
Jacob’s work with the documents furthered his interest and involvement in trying to curb the excesses of intelligence agencies engaging in surveillance.
There is a long, long list of reasons why the National Security State and its international counterparts are extremely pissed at him.
In the below video of an event at which he appeared with WikiLeaks’ Investigations Editor, Sarah Harrison (who is also the Acting Executive Director of the Courage Foundation) Jacob openly calls for direct action to be taken against US military bases, specifically the drone operation relay center at Rammstein, suggesting that activists should target its water supply:
Fastforward to this week and Alison Macrina tweeted:
According to Zeit and others before them, after Jacob Appelbaum’s expulsion from Tor their website listed Alison Macrina in his former position:
When I had questioned Macrina about this, she replied to me via Twitter that it was not true and stated that she does not work for the Tor Project. She then promptly blocked me before I could retweet her denial or screenshot it. Her tweet then disappeared from Twitter.
Why she stated that she does not work for Tor and may have deleted the tweet, is unclear. She is published on the Tor website, directly amplified through the official @TorProject Twitter account and additionally was named by Roger Dingledine in internal communications as someone that Tor staff should speak to with regards to the accusations against Jacob Appelbaum.
The association is beyond denial. So why would she attempt to distance herself from Tor? The only distinction that can logically be drawn is that as the founder of the Library Freedom Project, she may be in fact a Tor contractor/supplier of services rather than a salaried employee. Which, for someone so visible within the organisation, is splitting hairs.
Desecrating The Heroes Who Shared Their Platforms
Alison Macrina’s rise in exposure got a giant boost via the Library Freedom Project being amplified by Edward Snowden on Twitter in October 2015. On February 8th, 2016 she officially introduced herself to the Tor community by authoring a guest post on the Tor website.
Alison’s body language during the event was in stark contrast to the others present. Nervous laughter and fits of protracted too-loud and too-long giggling, combined with, at one point, her arms folded tightly across her chest. When it was her turn to speak, she spoke eloquently and confidently; when it was others speaking, she picked at loose strands of invisible fluff on her shoulder, kicked her crossed leg back and forth and leaned back in her seat.
At 54:35 in the video, when the person sitting next to her on the panel, David Mirza Ahmad, mentions Jacob Appelbaum by name, Alison Macrina does not even blink. There is no sign whatsoever of any recognition, discomfort, negative association, suppression of emotion or even the most subtle reaction to hearing Jacob’s name.
Despite the event occurring several months after she now alleges he had sexually assaulted her and some eight to ten weeks prior to her involvement in publishing the accusations against him.
In the wake of going public with her allegations, Macrina was directly pressuring WikiLeaks for comment.
By the end of July 2016, Appelbaum dispensed with, Macrina’s constant ribbing of and ire towards WikiLeaks, who were understandably reluctant to be drawn into the maelstrom, was being ratcheted up several notches:
Her above tweet – which was in defense of Edward Snowden – seemed ignorant of the fact that as a direct result of the campaign against Appelbaum, Snowden himself was being attacked by sock puppet accounts who were accusing him of being a rapist by association.
Some of the ensuing rhetoric got really, really nasty:
Unfortunately, it is not just sock puppet accounts attempting to take chunks out of Snowden.
After some discussion about ‘gatekeepers’ and leaking methodologies, this:
The term “rapey” is itself, offensive. With its use, the definition of rape is being willfully expanded into borderline meaninglessness and obscurity. As if there can be “racisty” or “sexisty” or “homophobicy”. There cannot. Rape is an absolute, and a serious crime against humanity. The term should not be callously invoked; watered down for the social convenience of he or she exercising the privilege inherently wielded when bastardising the language of the violated.
Macrina’s participation in the desecration of the very people who helped her rise to prominence, extends to jumping on the bandwagon of any criticism against WikiLeaks whatsoever, whether or not it was subsequently proven to be founded.
New York Times writer Zeynep Tufekci’s varying accusations of WikiLeaks having published (it didn’t) a dump of private information, have been thoroughly debunked:
Yet this has gone unacknowledged by Macrina and supporters, who lambast WikiLeaks at every opportunity.
Amazingly, WikiLeaks staunch support of organisations whose staff are actively undermining it, has continued unabated. When someone tried to deny that support exists, WikiLeaks made the salient point that in fact, every single page of their website promotes the use of Tor.
Unfortunately, these days WikiLeaks’ solidarity with these organisations seems to be a one-way street.
By August 2016, Alison’s original guest post on the Tor Project website had evolved into “Alison’s blog” – a dedicated space for her voice to be amplified by Tor, where she has now championed the release of official Tor internal policy documentation.
The passage they quote is from what I think of as the ‘second voice’ in River’s testimony… and we’ll look into how that may have come about soon.
A ‘Come To Jesus’ Moment
So how did Alison get from sitting on a stage with Julian Assange mid-March, not even registering or flinching at the mention of Jacob Appelbaum’s name, to claiming to be a sexual assault victim?
“I had my ‘come to Jesus’ moment months ago when I started hearing from victims.” – Alison Macrina, 6/6/2016
Herein lies a common thread in these stories.
What Alison is saying explains why she didn’t twitch a muscle at the mention of Appelbaum’s name on March 16. Because she didn’t realise she was a “victim” until later, when she heard complaints from other women.
River also says she didn’t realise she was a victim until she was told that her experiences were rape.
Isis Lovecruft says she had tried to convince herself she wasn’t a victim.
As explored in this series previously, Leigh Honeywell said she didn’t realise she was a victim until she took exception to Jacob Appelbaum’s support for Julian Assange.
So all four of the most significant claims of sexual assault, took years/months and group-think/collaboration in order to “realise” that they had been assaulted.
The strangeness doesn’t stop there. Isis’s blogpost revealing that she is the accuser ‘Forest’, simultaneously claims that she:
had spent “six months” collecting the stories of ‘victims’
didn’t initially tell the ‘victims’ who supposedly confided in her, that she was also a ‘victim’
didn’t intend to tell the Tor Project
planned to threaten Jake that they would tell the Tor Project “and other organisations”
told the Tor Project, but didn’t initially tell them she was a ‘victim’ either
After Jake caught wind of the intervention and, Isis alleges, threatened her, she presumably shelved the plan for an intervention. Her recounting of the so-called threats is really oblique at best, although later in her piece she subjectively lists a prospective legal count of blackmail.
In fact, she lists an entire slew of prospective legal counts against Jacob, with a final count of 35 years imprisonment as per her own calculations, all under the guise of answering why she wouldn’t pursue legal remedy. But the entire exercise just comes across as, ironically, a threat.
Especially given the sheer invention of counts such as “instructing a third-party to rape”, which do not reflect the published accusations at all.
Multi-party Edits, Manipulations and Manufactured Testimony
Researcher Janine Römer, who has been instrumental in documenting the unfolding saga, found evidence that seems to point to the presence of multiple editors making changes to the copy of the accusations published on the smear website.
The following is an excerpt of a conversation I had with her:
Janine: I noticed yesterday that the text of the entries on GitHub are coloured blue in odd places, and some have more blue text than others. Daniel’s has the least amount of blue from what I can tell. I can’t be sure about this but I suspect the blue text might be editing marks. The reason I think they’re editing marks is that places where I would expect the writer to put identifiable details (like Phoenix’s, where it describes the event), are areas where the text is blue. Same with the one that mentioned Jake’s fiancee. Actually in the one with “Jake’s fiancee,” it’s the opposite. Surrounded by blue text but then black text is inside the quotations. Either way I don’t know why the text is different colors.
Suzie: Typed/edited by multiple people?
Janine: Yes, this could support that.
Suzie: Fits with everything else I’m finding. Is there any way to show that that break in [River’s] rape testimony was typed by another person? If I’m right and it was an interjection – it says a LOT about the psychological profile of the person who did the interjecting and particularly in the powerplays of their relationship to that victim.
Janine: I’m not sure [of] it, they are images and I don’t know if the metadata would show that.
Given the obvious contentiousness of non-survivors editing or interjecting their own voice into alleged rape testimony, it is past time for the administrators of the site to come clean as to whether this indeed did happen, and to what extent.
Janine also brought to my attention the following tweet by one of the authors of the Die Zeit article:
Janine says of the above tweet:
“It sums up my thoughts on it. People who use GitHub do so for transparency reasons – open-source code, open-source writing. But the way they did it was not transparent, as they tried very hard to erase evidence of mistakes by deleting repositories.” – Janine Römer
Additionally Janine tells me that there was “an obvious tampering” with the dates of the entries on the website:
“The GitHub copies of the entries are PNG images. Initially, all the entries were marked with the same date of December 31st, 2015; since then, newer entries have not only been given different dates but the dates on earlier entries were changed (you can [compare them in the archives](https://archive.is/https://github.com/ioerrror/jacobappelbaum.net*)). It is unclear what the date signifies.” – Janine Römer
According to Die Zeit, at least one of the ‘victim’ testimonies was manufactured on their behalf without their permission:
That the creators of the site saw fit to outright concoct a testimony on the basis of hearsay and rumour, then to publish it without the consent of the so-called ‘victim’, jeopardises the integrity of all of the testimony that they published.
Of additional concern, is the 81-word testimony of ‘West’:
From the beginning, this account seemed anomalous. How could someone traumatised by an unwanted advance of a sexual nature only have 81 words to say about it? The reference to being ‘very wary of communicable disease‘ reads as if the writer needed to create a reason why the subject would be so offended by a surprise kiss. The reference to ‘others present voiced their disapproval of the surprise advance, especially given my concerns about disease‘ begs the question – how did these others know of said concerns?
Is West an actual complainant, willingly participating in JacobAppelbaum.net? Or has this account been manufactured to, yet again without consent, represent the subject of the later-debunked claims of what Shepherd, Patterson and Tan said they saw at a hacker event?
Regardless, the fact that such a benign allegation was ever included alongside a claim of rape, speaks volumes about the intentions of the editors. Their focus on quantity of allegations over quality has only served to dillute and detract from the severity of the accounts of River and Isis.
Revisiting The Linguistics
In the first part of this series, I published screenshots of linguistic analyses of each of the allegations. All of the originally published testimonies including Sam and Forest’s, with the exception of Daniel and West, resolved to a reading level of 9th-10th grade.
Daniel and West’s pieces were written at ‘College Student’ reading level.
Curious about the anomaly, I analysed multiple samples of each of Alison Macrina, Isis Lovecruft and Meredith Patterson’s published writings on other blogs. All of the test samples produced a ‘College Student’ reading level.
So who wrote Daniel’s testimony? Did that same person then write West’s? If so, logically these accounts would be written by Meredith. Only she can confirm whether that is true. And why would the ‘Sam’ and ‘Forest’ testimonies on JacobAppelbaum.net be written at a 9th-10th grade reading level, when their writings on other sites are all ‘College Student’ level?
Apparently, if you want your information to have impact, good writing is all about knowing your readers:
According to the below statistics (from the website linked directly above), the average adult reads at a 9th grade reading level. The maximum “tolerable limit” is 11th grade.
It appears that the core testimonies on JacobAppelbaum.net were carefully constructed to have impact with a wide, common audience, and thus needed to be dumbed down in order to be approachable.
Yet the editors apparently felt that Daniel’s either couldn’t or shouldn’t be altered, which speaks to the power dynamics within the “collective”.
In short – the site copy was constructed to achieve maximum saturation.
Maximum damage.
Meredith, Victims of Jake & Weaponising Social
What first gave me the idea to analyse the linguistics of the allegations was the early discovery that Meredith L. Patterson is a linguistics graduate.
Her widely circulated Twitter commentary on the scandal, along with her track record of many years of labelling Appelbaum a plagiarist, and later a rapist; the prominence of the accusations of plagiarism on the JacobAppelbaum.net website; and the early reference of the @VictimsofJake account (then called @TimeToDieJake) to her deceased husband, Len Sassaman, led to a logical conclusion that she may have a deeper significance in the campaign against him.
However, the @VictimsofJake tweet was not the only instance of Sassaman’s death being tied to Appelbaum by someone who dislikes him:
According to Janine Römer:
“The VoJ account was created on June 3rd and that’s when it first tweeted and it had relatively early knowledge of the website because it tweeted a link to an early version that wasn’t live anymore. That was also the day Steele published the first blog post…
…very few knew about the website before the 4th [of June], so anyone who did is significant.” – Janine Römer
Founder of the think-tank Weaponising Social, Meredith has, funnily enough, published a 3-part blog series about the saga. It is framed as a complex theoretical-cum-practical academic discussion about psychopathy and sociopaths.
There’s a pattern most observers of human interaction have noticed, common enough to have earned its own aphorism: “nice guys finish last.” Or, refactored, “bad actors are unusually good at winning.” – Meredith L Patterson
She soon launches into a mini-lecture about social engineering:
She sneers at the idea that federal agents might work to engineer a scenario like this, even though the Snowden revelations re JTRIG, and many other real-world examples have proven that is precisely what they are employed to do.
“As accounts of the sociopath’s misdeeds come out, the sociopath’s narrative has to become more and more convoluted in order to keep the fanboys believing. “They’re all feds!” he shrieks. “Every last one of them!” Uh-huh. Sure. Because the feds always assign multiple agents not only to target one guy who can’t even keep his dick in his pants, but to become his coworkers, don’t they? This is not exactly an inexpensive proposition. Reality check: if the feds had wanted to pull a honeytrap (which there’d be no reason to do, given his mascot-only status at Tor), everything would have been a lot more cut-and-dried.” – Meredith Patterson
Funnily enough, the extrapolation of valid, precedented, founded fears of malicious interference by state agents into “They’re all feds… Every last one of them!” is something I have not seen suggested by any of Appelbaum’s supporters, but which is constantly touted by his detractors, in defense of themselves.
The obvious reality is that it wouldn’t have to be “all”. That is simply a smokescreen. It would only have to be one.
One who for example, dressed the “collective” action up as a good cause (defending victims! Holding a serial rapist to account!) to convince a couple of others close to them that they had been wronged and should participate. Who then collectively convinced increasing numbers of people that they should side with the ’cause’, for everyone’s benefit. While, funnily enough, the end result is to almost everyone’s detriment. Except the engineer/s of the plot and their small handful of key beneficiaries.
Patterson is right however that HUMINT infiltration of activist’s lives is not an inexpensive undertaking. That is why, literally, billions of dollars are assigned to funding U.S. Counterinsurgency strategy, which has been proven to be at play against activists and is predicated upon a theory that the target’s ideology, places of refuge or sanctuary, and resources must be relentlessly attacked and ultimately denied them.
Precisely as has happened to Jacob Appelbaum.
The sanctity of his home, his established reputation, his community affiliations and organisations, his employment and income, his reputation and even his ideology, stripped from him.
In the 3rd part of her blog series, Meredith resurrects her claim that this is somehow an unfounded fear rather than a daily reality:
“The rockstar activist plays on non-rockstars’ fears of organized state opposition to their activism, and convinces non-rockstars that any challenge to the rockstar’s status is evidence of an organized plot against the activist group.”
It defies logic that Meredith isn’t well aware of how The Empire operates. She quotes military theory in her own blogposts:
Especially in the context of her think-tank, Weaponising Social, her last sentence is really worth quoting again, as it is just so fitting to this entire situation.
“Push hard enough from enough directions, and possibly the victim even becomes overwhelmed and stops functioning – a distributed denial of service.” – Meredith Patterson
The first Twitter accounts to tweet out the ‘early version’ of the website were:
On 15 June 2016 @VictimsOfJake intimated that Wired magazine would be interviewing River.
No such interview eventuated. Wired‘s June 6th article appears to be their only published piece on the scandal.
However, the suggestion that River will be coming forward to the press reinforces information provided to me by various sources. Though the subject of that information also seems to take issue with the @VictimsofJake account.
One person suggested that @VictimsofJake is EFF Director and journalist Jillian C. York, although based on other evidence, it is unlikely to be the case.
Distancing Themselves From Themselves
On August 9th, two months after the fact, Meredith finally covered off the topic everyone had been wondering about, for so long: why she hadn’t apologised for coming forward as an ‘eye-witness’ to an alleged incident that turned out to be a misrepresentation of yet another (non)victim:
As for Andrea Shepherd, this is the closest to an (non)apology that I’ve been able to find: [note: if something more substantial exists elsewhere, I’ll happily include it here]
The full-time anti-ioerror troll account @VoodooHacks seems to think Shepherd was the instigator of the scandal:
In Meredith’s posts, she ostensibly admits to being an organiser of the events, chides accuser Leigh Honeywell and alludes to Andrea Shepherd being a survivor of rape:
“Honeywell conveniently neglects to mention that this solution has its own critical failure mode: what happens to members of marginalized groups whom the existing affinity group considers unpersons? I can tell you, since it happened here: we had to organize on our own. Honeywell’s report came as a surprise to both me and Tor developer Andrea Shepard, because we weren’t part of that whisper network. Nor would we expect to be, given how Honeywell threw Andrea under the bus when Andrea tried to reach out to her for support in the past.” – Meredith Patterson
This seems to be reinforced by the @VictimsofJake account:
[UPDATE: further information has shed light on Meredith’s comment – she was apparently not intimating that Andrea had complained of rape to Honeywell, but of harrassment re the Pando crowd]
Clearly there is no love lost between the organisers of the campaign.
“the opportunity to gloat over seeing one’s prey stumble is too difficult to resist.” – Meredith Patterson
It is a shame Shepherd, Tan and Patterson didn’t take Meredith’s own advice and just frankly and immediately publically apologise for what they did to Jill, who was needlessly dragged into this highly public mess through no fault of her own.
“An honest person will try to find out how to make it right, while a bad actor will try to make it all about them.” – Meredith Patterson
When Friends and Enemies Say The Same Thing
An anonymous Tor developer posted a text file to the internet which made a number of significant claims about who is behind the JacobAppelbaum.net site and what their involvement is.
@VictimsOfJake promptly responded in a similar format.
Meanwhile, one of Alison Macrina’s friends was inadvertently corroborating some of the claims of the anonymous Tor developer and dropping Macrina in the proverbial by bragging about the extent of her involvement, on Jacob Appelbaum’s Wikipedia Talk page.
He then recanted “for legal reasons”.
A puzzling element regarding Macrina’s involvement, is why her ‘Sam’ story was not published when the site went live. It was in fact at that time, merely a placeholder.
Looking back at her Twitter timeline, she spent the night of the release of the allegations “excited to see the morning sunlight“. Her next tweet was a retweet of the Stanford rape survivor’s statement – seemingly a deliberate attempt to prep her audience for what would come. However, as discussed in Part One of this series, at 7,200+ words chock-full of victim impact, that statement bears absolutely no resemblence whatsoever to the so-called testimonies subsequently posted on the smear website JacobAppelbaum.net:
So Macrina went from not realising she was a victim and not being one of the original statements posted, to being the first to ‘out’ herself as a victim publically, to being ‘OK’ with her face being plastered onto her alleged attacker’s Wikipedia page.
Branding The Take-Down
There was a clear agenda to brand Macrina as “the face of victims” – despite the fact that she had not been raped.
The attempt to have a non-survivor become a self-styled representative for the survivors of violent rapes is reprehensible.
But there is no doubt that the scandal was yet again raising Macrina’s profile.
When being called out by Shava Nerad, ironically the original Executive Director of the Tor Project, for decrying “rock stars” while quite obviously becoming one, none other than Macrina’s Wikipedia-editor friend jumps to her defense:
Becoming The Police
The unfortunate Tor employees and advocates who had nothing to do with either those being smeared or those doing the smearing, were inevitably feeling the strain.
As were the wider activist community. What was done to Appelbaum had a catastrophic effect on personal relationships between long-time colleagues and friends, and fractured solidarity between organisations and subgroups.
“We’ve seen peak Berlin“, a core member who had been around for more than a decade told me.
Anyone who had visibly worked closely with Appelbaum and didn’t choose to instantly abandon him became collateral damage and subject to attacks and rumourmongering.
Even if their choice was based on knowledge that what was being said about him didn’t add up.
Tor allowing months to go by with accusations of rape hovering over the heads of unnamed persons known only as “Jake’s friends” was a callous and effective smear on everyone that knew him. Their constant refusal to this day to elaborate on precisely what those friends are supposedly guilty of or alleged to have done, on what basis two of them have now been fired, and the masking of their identities, is a brush that has tarred scores of people.
Meanwhile, the over-saturation of the story, which was being rehashed by anti-ioerror sockpuppet accounts on a daily basis, who were acting as a thought police by asked leading, open-ended questions of anyone who even mentioned him on Twitter, began to wear thin.
The controversy became more than an attack on Appelbaum – it became an existential threat to the Tor Project itself:
The narrative of the so-called ‘victims collective’ was ‘codes of conduct’ and ‘(un)acceptable behaviours’ and ‘safe spaces policy’ – social contracts that have ironically been used to rip activists groups apart for decades.
The introduction of safer spaces policy at Occupy had been the turning point that marked the rise of the movement becoming the demise of the movement. As soon as your personnel and resources are spent writing social contracts that then require enforcement, your focus is no longer external but internal.
Because when you start making laws, then someone has to become the police.
And having police around doesn’t make anyone feel any safer.
The message has been very clear: if you are with the newly ruling clique, they have your back. If you question them, the bees are coming.
In this instance, the institution of safer spaces policy and codes of conduct is a reinforcement of the rule of those who have formed a new executive governance.
That the policies are being instituted by the same people who have wreaked havoc upon the community, is a signal: if you don’t bow down, then as Meredith says, either jump or be pushed.
[Note: the social contract promoted by Macrina above is not the new code of conduct and community guidelines which is supposedly, to follow.]
Selective Solidarity and Dirt Digging
Little of the conduct evinced in this article by Tor’s new police force aligns with the creation of inclusive, safe spaces.
While perceived adversaries are mocked and mobbed instead of embraced and reconciled, the hostility culture is only going to get worse.
Likewise as ideological disagreements become highly personalised.
Throughout this series I had people come foward to me with information. I also uncovered a ton of it myself. This included veritable mountains of info about people’s intimate and sexual relationships. Some of the evidence I found blatantly contradicted other public claims they have made about them. I have decided not to publish any of it, because, as Shepherd once said of Pando:
In defense of her misrepresentations about the AKP emails “dump”, Zynep Tufekci sent me a link to a New York Times piece that was supposed to reinforce her claims. Being me, I clicked on the source links and found myself at Gawker and Gizmodo, reading about Julian Assange’s children, and his ten-year-old love letters.
Any credibility the article had went straight out the window.
The state agencies come at you through your romantic relationships, whether it be past, present or future; through your children, through your family, through your work, through your identity. That is the methodology of the unscrupulous; the immoral. Of scoundrels.
It is clear without any doubt that all personal grievances aside, the ultimate target is WikiLeaks and the aggravating factor is that the U.S. Presidential election is now a matter of mere weeks away.
The corporate media are speaking in unison against Trump and for the election of Clinton. You can find a half dozen articles decrying the former and another half dozen promoting the latter on any of the vast majority of big name American media websites.
It is not a coincidence.
Even though, to (very loosely) borrow from Sebastian Mondial, the candidates are two socks on the feet of the same person.
As this series progressed, the uniformly anti-WikiLeaks positions of Appelbaum’s accusers and their supporters became increasingly evident. Which neatly lined up with larger governmental objectives of bringing down the entire WikiLeaks publishing organisation rather than just some individuals associated with it.
But just as with the very protracted desecration of Julian Assange’s reputation, despite all the furore and spectacle the public dismemberment of Jacob Appelbaum did not stop WikiLeaks publishing, nor has it visibly hindered their work.
In the wake of the #DNCLeak, arguably WikiLeaks most successful release to date, it has become clear that yes, WikiLeaks remains the meta target, and more – that the catastrophic divisions created within the privacy and infosec community in the wake of the Appelbaum smears are falling squarely along ideological political lines.
The Circus In Full Swing
Election year madness has kicked in full-throttle, exposing the true colours of organisations and individuals alike and throwing a bunch of unlikely bedfellows together.
Wholly embracing the stage-managed divide-and-conquer dichotomy of (in Assange’s words) “Cholera versus Gonorrhea“, countless major players have thrown their full weight behind their preferred candidate.
The military industrial complex has stamped their seal of approval on Hillary Clinton. They fully intend her to be the next President of the United States of America.
So have the major New York magazines and newspapers – in particular, the New York Times, and more broadly, the vast majority of the media networks and the monopolies that own them.
In the case of the New York Times – denouncing WikiLeaks is not only ideological but a desperate attempt to distance themselves from any perceived culpability for having partnered with them, co-publishing their leaks, in the past.
It is the mass media equivalent of obtaining immunity by publically testifying against your co-accused. A corporate’s version of “turning state witness” – before the trial, in the court of public opinion.
The same New York Times that told America in 2002 that Iraq had WMD’s, has published at least three hit pieces on WikiLeaks this month alone, and incredibly, yet somehow fittingly, became the “exclusive” publication of choice for the Tor Project’s “independent investigation” findings.
The ties between the Tor Project and the New York Times run deep. It is well known, and was publically celebrated by those close to the individual involved, that an ex Tor Project employee took up a significant position at the NYT.
Nicole Perlroth, the author involved failed to answer as to how or why they had gained access to the ‘exclusive’ from the Tor Project, and the Tor Project refused to answer to why the findings of a rape investigation was an ‘exclusive’ at all.
Perlroth has a history of propagating anti-WikiLeaks sentiment in the paper.
In her June 4th statement, published the same day that JacobAppelbaum.net began widespread public circulation, Shari Steele wrote:
“We expect that this will be our only public statement.” – Shari Steele, Executive Director of The Tor Project
Less than two months later, Steele is exclusively interviewed by the New York Times. What happened in between, to prompt such a radical change in strategy?
Tor’s choice of mass-media outlet was almost as strange as the packaging of rape-investigation findings as an “exclusive” at all. Not to mention that, without any apparent request for retraction or correction by the Tor Project, the New York Times had recently reported that the Tor Project’s board “was pushed out“:
…a claim that directly contradicted Executive Director Shari Steele’s statement that the board had “elected” their replacements in “a bold and selfless decision” to effectively resign en masse.
For such a claim to go unchallenged, and answered by the granting of an “exclusive”, reads as if the messaging of what had really occurred was being tacitly approved if not outright pushed through the NYT, from behind closed doors at Tor.
Selecting The New Board Members
Ideological alignment with the actions of Shari Steele and “the company” regarding Appelbaum’s exit, and/or those behind the JacobAppelbaum.net site, may have been an assumptive prerequisite of qualification for placement on the new Tor Project board.
Coleman begins with praise for the aforementioned:
20 days later, she was officially announced as a member of the new board.
Also announced as a new board member, was Associate Professor Matt Blaze:
Shari Steele’s NYT Exclusive
It is in the wake of this appointment of the new board that Shari Steele was ‘exclusively’ interviewed by the New York Times, over the outcome of the Tor Project investigation into the rape claims.
The crux of the exclusive interview with Steele isn’t even mentioned until the 15th of the 18 paragraphs in the article.
The two sparse quotes from Shari appear at the very bottom and comprise less than 10% of the total word count.
Why did the New York Times feel the need to minimise their exclusive access?
They state that their interview with Steele was undertaken “late Tuesday” – that is the day before the Tor Project announced the findings of the investigation. So there is no doubt that they indeed had exclusive access regarding the outcome. Gizmodo had knowledge of the exclusivity of the interview at least several days beforehand. Yet that fact is as downplayed as the verbiage of the original allegations.
It may have something to do with the first sentence of the article:
The Tor Project, a nonprofit digital privacy group, announced on Wednesday that an internal investigation had confirmed allegations of sexual misconduct…
“Sexual misconduct.”
The article references the official Tor Project statement that accompanied the so-called release of the findings.
“Many people inside and outside the Tor Project have reported incidents of being humiliated, intimidated, bullied and frightened by Jacob, and several experienced unwanted sexually aggressive behavior from him.”
“Sexually aggressive behaviour.”
Not sexual assault. Not rapes. Not gang rape. Not serial rape. Not instructing others to rape. Not violence, or sexual violence. Not stupefication. Or any of the other claims plastered all over social media and elsewhere, by his accusers and others.
Instead, as a result of their supposedly thorough, independent investigation, the claims have been dramatically downgraded.
I anticipate that Tor’s defenders will say that this is just the organisation trying not to get sued. Trying to limit its liability. That the statement is the result of professional advice. That they are not law enforcement and cannot label something a crime that hasn’t been tested in court by a judge and/or jury.
Which would run completely contrary to the lauding of Tor by those same defenders as having taken a strong stand for women, in support of the community and against rape and sexual assault.
As being ‘feminist’ superheroes, working for Gaia.
What is far more likely, is that the promised “dozens of victims” never manifested.
[UPDATE: the majority of the existing allegations relate to inappropriate workplace behaviour. However, with the exception of one joke at the Valencia conference where the complainant was not the person the joke was directed at, all other complaints of ‘professional misconduct’ did not occur at a place of work. There was in fact, no workplace. Jacob has been in exile for three years. There were no official Tor rules against, and indeed there was a culture of, social fraternising at pubs/clubs/private homes.)
The H.R. Leaks
On the liability front – Tor’s prior statements and conduct regarding this debacle have been highly questionable. Tor management have allowed multiple staff members to remain employed while visibly running an ongoing online smear campaign against another employee. There is evidence senior management knew about it in advance. They have tacitly endorsed, by their silence regarding it, the leaking of private human resources documents and other information from within the organisation. Leaks that were prejudicial and likely to be in the personal interest of those anonymously making the disclosures in order to support their own claims and to shore up the position of the organisation, rather than in the public interest.
Tor’s initial statement was, in the words of Roger Dingledine, “stripped down” and “bland“. It was in fact 24 words.
It was soon followed up by a much more verbose statement that vastly contrasted their intially minimalist statement.
Rape Survivors Denied Justice For Decades
It is actually highly unusual for cases, even involving large numbers of victims, to get immediate attention in mainstream press.
Bill Cosby has constantly been brought up by Appelbaum’s detractors, but what they fail to note is that Cosby’s victims, all of whom had been raped or sexually assaulted, had to organise and fight for decades in order to be heard.
Likewise with those behind the Child Sex Inquiry in Britain, which has also spanned decades and still not yet achieved any laudable outcome.
While ignoring demonstrable, provable cases of rape, those who seek to champion rape survivors in name only have a tendency to apply their sympathies only where it suits them.
Worse – there is a clear pattern of partisanship evidenced by key voices in other major outlets which were specifically established to provide a critical counter-narrative to the duopoly of the status quo. Partisanship to me does not mean expressing political views – by all means, journalists should have and express political views. But when their articles are running the same lines as the New York Times on a regular basis – and ignoring material facts while quoting New York Times writers – chances are, they should still be at the New York Times.
Slowly but surely, once-radical organisations which many risked their lives to establish, grow and promote, are being co-opted into reinforcing the reality TV sideshow of the election cycle.
Those who are naturally disgusted by both the obviously corrupt and dangerous Hillary Clinton and the painfully inept and equally dangerous Donald Trump are being browbeaten into supporting Clinton regardless, constantly bludgeoned by the manufactured ‘threat’ of Trump being elected.
They are told that third-party ‘protest’ votes either don’t matter, or worse. As if third-party options that have incrementally increased their vote share, maturing and ultimately rising to prominence around the world (and ultimately even winning elections) did do so by no one voting for them.
The obviousness that in order for there to be a viable third party, people have to vote for them, seems to escape these hawks, who are so obsessed by chasing their next funding round that they end up undermining their own founding objectives and principles, to the detriment of us all.
In their quest to ‘play the game’ and thus secure their own fiscal future – nothing guarantees a favoured status like promoting amongst their own ranks and supporters, hatred of and disdain for Clinton’s number one enemy: Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
CIA Employee Hired By Tor Project
As has been proven, Tor/EFF and associated organisations are now being dominated by WikiLeaks detractors. But even more menacing, is the revelation of a CIA employee literally leaving the agency one day and starting work for Tor the very next day.
His inclusion took employees by surprise, and none were more visibly incensed about it than Jacob Appelbaum.
Funnily enough, when the ‘State of the Onion’ address at HopeX rolled around this year – an update on Tor Project recent happenings that Appelbaum traditionally gives – the schedule contained absolutely no mention of the elephant in the room:
The widely-perused leaked chat log of Appelbaum and others confronting the recently ex-CIA employee about his presence in Tor speaks volumes about the internal culture, and the voraciousness of Appelbaum’s understandable opposition to the hiring.
What hasn’t been widely read is the full text of the email that the ex-CIA employee sent to Tor staff, which was mentioned in the above chat transcript. You can read the full email at this link.
In short, the employee says he left the CIA because he loves Tor so much. You be the judge.
Jake’s concerns about Tor funding had predated the ex-CIA employee incident by some time:
While the target of widespread criticism for being effectively paid by the same government that he so often railed against, it is clear that Jacob himself was deeply concerned about Tor’s funding ties and the extent to which that effected decisions made by the organisation.
[Note: Several people – none of which are Jacob – have come forward to me privately raising concerns not just about the above issues but also about other activities that Tor has been “spending money on” – including but not limited to enhanced metrics for measuring user activity and location around specific ‘events’. That project has been funded “in part by the National Science Foundation”, and as other specific project funders (“sponsors”) are marked only by pseudonymous letters, it is an entire kettle of fish in and of itself that will need people with more technical expertise than I to examine further.]
WikiLeaks and The Iraq War
Indeed, the derision Jacob has faced has not only been due to the sexual assault/rape allegations, or the funding sources of his former employer.
Rather than ask the obvious questions surrounding the revelations of the ex-CIA employee ostensibly leaving an intelligence agency one day to arrive amongst the ranks of Tor developers the next, the topic of conversation over the leaked log astonishingly instead focused on other comments made by Jacob in the log.
Particularly, where he referenced his volunteer work with WikiLeaks.
His reference to WikiLeaks having helped to scale down military conlict in Iraq were personified to him.
The ridicule expounded upon Jacob’s comment: “later with WikiLeaks, I did help end the Iraq War.” This was regurgitated by @ErrataRob, to great hilarity, that Appelbaum was claiming to have “single-handedly ended the war in Iraq“.
However, in the eagerness to poke fun at Appelbaum and at WikiLeaks, the facts of the matter fell by the wayside. As Glenn Greenwald had reported for Salon – WikiLeaks indeed did have a hand in events that ultimately led to decisions by the Iraqi government that led to the down-scaling of the conflict.
“..negotiations were strained following WikiLeaks’ release of a diplomatic cable that alleged Iraqi civilians, including children, were killed in a 2006 raid by American troops rather than in an airstrike as the U.S. military initially reported.” – Glenn Greenwald
[UPDATE: as per WikiLeaks statement at the time, which ratifies the above: “It was WikiLeaks’ revelations – not the actions of President Obama – that forced the U.S. administration out of the Iraq War. By exposing the killing of Iraqi children, WikiLeaks directly motivated the Iraqi government to strip the U.S. military of legal immunity, which in turn forced the U.S. withdrawal.”]
The above accusation that Appelbaum doesn’t back up his assertions is eerily similar to the denials by FBI informant Hector ‘Sabu’ Monsegur that Appelbaum was of interest to the FBI.
In the above thread, @ErrataRob demands logs of Appelbaum’s references to Monsegur having attempted to entrap him on behalf of the FBI.
Ironically, Sabu also asks for logs. The reason it is ironic, is because it has been widely reported that the FBI monitored all of Sabu’s interactions 24/7, throughout the time that he was entrapping and informing on activists and journalists, including myself. So the simple answer is – while we might not have the logs – the FBI sure do. But funnily enough, they aren’t forthcoming with information, as poignantly demonstrated by the FBI General Counsel’s replies to Jacob Appelbaum’s questioning of her, in the below video:
National Security Letters were served on providers requesting the personal data of Jacob Appelbaum and gagging them, as reported by the Wall Street Journal in October 2011. Well in advance of Sabu’s informing rampage which stretched at least throughout most of 2012, and well into 2013. Yet Sabu continues to maintain that Appelbaum is not an FBI target.
Mustafa Al-Bassam promptly replied with the obvious:
@ErrataRob has a long history of trying to debuff Appelbaum, only to be shot down with publically available information.
It is now being reported by Violet Blue that Jacob Appelbaum has been listed as “an official Charlatan”:
Branding Appelbaum a charlatan is an eerie throwback to years of FBI informant Monsegur slinging about the exact same term. Searching @hxmonsegur & ‘charlatan’ yields 19 results.
Now that using the term ‘serial rapist’ is clearly off the cards, maybe subjective terms like ‘charlatan’ are all his detractors have left.
The long list of people the FBI informant has referred to as a “charlatan” is quite impressive.
Fastforward to this week, and the ‘rapist’ smear of Jacob Appelbaum is being downgraded to ‘sexual aggressor’.
This is probably indicative of the trajectory of opinion for the vast majority of the crowds that got on the anti-Appelbaum bandwagon early, only to belatedly discover that things are not at all as they seemed.
The Voice Of Reason
There were several voices of sanity, however. Even in the heat of the campaign, Courage beneficiary, whistleblower and hacker Lauri Love made it clear the issue was not the simple black or white dichotomy that Appelbaum’s accusers had been determined to force people into.
The ‘you’re either with us or against us’ attitude espoused by @VictimsofJake, openly wielded against anyone who didn’t immediately side with the mob from the outset, is immature, hypocritical and counter-productive.
Risky Behaviour
At 01:09:51 in the first video embedded in this article featuring Sarah Harrison and Jacob Appelbaum, Jacob makes a fascinating offhand comment:
“I know that I’ve behaved completely differently knowing that there’s probably sex tapes being made in my – not just by me! – not to imply what I think I just implied but, you get the point…” – Jacob Appelbaum
This corroborates my earlier suspicion that Jacob knew full well that his home was under constant surveillance and that that surveillance may extend to the interior of his home and not just the exterior.
Making the suggestion that he was an operational serial rapist, under such conditions, even more ludicrous and difficult to believe.
Many have asked – both supporters and detractors – how could Jake have been so foolhardy, to have engaged in risky behaviours and socially grey areas like promiscuity and group sex, in his situation?
Common conventional methods of forming romantic partnerships that the general public takes for granted, become simply out of the question. Dating apps, cruising bars, hooking up with strangers for one-night stands, or engaging in liaisons outside of your trusted peer group can present not just a reputational risk but even a mortal one. Many of us, as a necessary measure of self-protection, are forced into prolonged periods of abstinence purely for survival.
When meeting new people doesn’t gel with your threat model, there is no other choice but to seek comfort amongst those in your existing community. Thus, the answer as to why Jacob engaged in such ‘risky’ behaviour is likely that amongst his close friends – those he perceived as facing many of the same challenges as him – was the sole environment in which he could express his sexuality.
A lesson hard learned.
In that same video, Appelbaum comments:
“You can’t really blow the whistle these days without blowing up your own life; on really serious issues, with large state adversaries.” – Jacob Appelbaum
The massive powers that Jake Appelbaum took on, have taken the spotlight off themselves, by making a spectacle of him.
Just as they did with Julian Assange.
The Missing Dozens
FBI informant Sabu’s publication of choice The Daily Dot, claimed a female source told them there were “easily a dozen” victims of Appelbaum.
For the record, the Daily Dot has spoken to a dozen sources alleging misconduct. We have spoken to four people who have relayed personal stories of harassment and sexual assault. Some of these women have described themselves as members of an underground “victim network” that now consists of more than a dozen individuals. We understand some are discussing revealing their names and stories soon.
In Isis Lovecruft’s follow-up blogpost, she writes:
“…additional reports of extremely severe sexual assaults and rape are pouring in to The Tor Project.”
In the findings of the Tor Project’s rape investigation there is only mention of two other cases. It is not stated whether these two cases are ‘Briar’ and ‘Alice’.
Isis continues…
“It should not be required that a dozen people are harmed before any one of them is taken seriously.”
However, if we take into account the information in this series, and in the Die Zeit article, it changes that picture dramatically.
“Victim”
Nature of Complaint
Public / Anonymous
Material Factors
Sam
“Non-consensual washing”
Public
(Alison Macrina)
Allegedly omitted mention of consensual sex following the bath. Claim relates to same timeframe as River
River
Rape
Anonymous
Eye-witnesses claimed to Die Zeit: multiple consensual events over a three day period have been muddled into one misrepresentative non-consensual claim and that no rape actually occurred.
Forest
Sexual Assault
Public
(Isis Agora Lovecruft)
Organised victim statements/reported to Tor Project but didn’t disclose that she was also a victim. Later claimed victim status
Daniel
Professional grievance
Anonymous
Potentially written by one of the creators of the website or its administrators
Kiwi
Professional grievance
Anonymous
Extremely brief account that does not detail any specifics
West
Uninvited kiss
Anonymous
May have been invented by one of the creators of the website/administrators
Phoenix
Professional grievance
Anonymous
Professional improprieties including propositioning. Has been ratified by several prominent eye-witnesses.
Nick
Professional grievance
Claims was targeted after entertaining notion of snitch-jacketing Appelbaum
Alice
Withdrawn
Anonymous
‘Alice’ says her account was manufactured/ published without her knowledge or consent
Briar
Never eventuated
Anonymous
It is unknown at this time why this ‘placeholder’ account never eventuated
Leigh
Boundaries ignored
during BDSM consensual sex (particulars of claimed non-consensual activity unstated)
Public
Historical claim. Says that years after the fact, Appelbaum’s support for WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange made her realise she had been violated
Jill
Self-described “eye-witnesses” wrongly claimed that Jill was a “victim”
Public
(came forward by necessity)
The “victim” herself says she was not a “victim” and was alarmed to find that she was being misrepresented as one
In the above table:
ORANGE: Accounts that may have been misrepresented, manipulated or invented by smear organisers. (Not reflected: a ‘second’ voice may also have been inserted into middle of River’s testimony)
GREY: Claims that do not involve physical contact of any description but outline personal or professional grievances
BLUE: Complaints that don’t actually describe what happened in detail or are highly unlikely to be pursuable by law – i.e. being kissed in a bar
RED: Claims which are contested by eye-witnesses or by the ‘victim’ themselves
YELLOW: The sole remaining testimony which details a crime
Not listed above:
Accounts by others who say they were pressured into claiming ‘victim’ status
Some other historical accounts by third parties related to unprofessional or unkind speech – such as has already been admitted to by Appelbaum in the Die Zeit article and prior to that, in his original press statement
Taking the findings in the table into account, using the same colour code and looking objectively at what remains, this is what the “serial rapist” / “dozens of victims” claims now look like:
Isis a.k.a. ‘Forest’, who admits to spending “six months” collecting the stories of “victims”, and who didn’t reveal her own allegations to the others or to the Tor Project until after the fact, is the only one left.
Only two people know for sure whether her allegations are true.
Jake and Isis.
The Macrina Logs
Multiple sources have provided me with chat logs featuring Alison Macrina. Some I have been able to verify the authenticity of, some I have not.
There is evidence of a concerted effort not just to air the grievances of alleged rape victims, or to warn others away from having anything to do with Appelbaum, but of a conspiracy to act against him in unison with the very specific objective of damaging his career beyond repair.
Furthermore, there is evidence of pressure being applied both to people whose testimonies appear on the smear website and some who don’t, to denounce Appelbaum or to come forward publically to shore up support for the others involved.
At this time, in the interests of source protection I am withholding the full logs. It is possible that they will be released at a future date.
[UPDATE: this heartbreaking open letter by @shiromarieke cannot be ignored. It catalogues the toxic culture remaining at Tor, the failures of management, the lies and selectivity of those who created the smear campaign and the extremely disappointing end results.]
[UPDATE:posted on the same day as the above, but from half a world away, yet another Tor supporter (one who was the subject of a police raid for running a Tor exit node) has pulled his support from the project, citing gross professional misconduct on the part of Tor management.]
Yes It Is All About Us – They Make Damn Sure Of That
For Persons of Interest, it is made to be all about us because the government is desperately afraid of it being all about them.
Their illegality, their wrongdoing. Which is perpetrated on a massive scale.
So they invest ridiculous amounts of resources into creating a file that is quite literally all about us.
They undertake investigations which are internally framed as being all about us.
They plant agents and concoct situations which are all about us.
They attack us by every possible vector because to them, their very survival requires that it be all about us.
The reason for this is because having shone a spotlight on the powers that be is usually how Persons of Interest are selected in the first place.
Then, once they’ve turned our lives upside down and made a huge spectacle of us, they say “oh – so it’s all about you! You’re a narcissist!”
They called Julian Assange a narcissist, they called Edward Snowden a narcissist, now they call Jacob Appelbaum a narcissist.
In this, the post-Orwell age – where spy agencies are turned upon their own citizens just like the Stasi they used to decry, and drone murderers kill teenagers and babies and then win the Nobel Prize: to be called a narcissist by these people who are the ultimate narcissists – those who kill with impunity and lie about it with no remorse – to be told with scorn and derision in a mocking and accusatory tone that it is “all about you” – is a badge of merit and a profound honour.
In the backwards Orwellian nightmare we live in, exercising common sense or stating things as they quite plainly are and thus expressing views that oppose the monied and complicit status quo, is deemed a ‘radical’ and untenable position.
Radical because too few have the proverbial balls to openly speak their mind or own the full extent of their true opinions in public, making those of us who do a rarity.
Untenable because doing so makes you a target for relentless persecution or worse; a deterrent which is highly effective against those who treasure their public perception or persona, possessions, property, prosperity or (perceived) privacy above the need to appease their conscience by calling a spade a spade, honouring their humanity and openly advocating for the sociopolitical evolution we so desperately need.
It was only a few years ago that millions of people were emboldened to speak up and demand radical (read: common sense) change. The relative speed with which they were largely subdued and corralled back into the political mainstream is frankly shocking and testament to the lethal efficiency of the systems of social control that surround us.
Even Occupy Has Forgotten What Occupy Is About
“No true democracy is obtainable when the process is determined by economic power.” – The Occupy Wall Street General Assembly
The founding declaration of Occupy Wall Street needs to be periodically revisited, to remind us of what birthed the movement.
It is poignantly read below, by Keith Olbermann.
Unfortunately, the societal conditions described remain to this day and have become even further entrenched; exacerbated by the passage of time. Every word of the founding statement holds true, yet the spirit of resistance in which it was authored, has been mostly co-opted by the same politicians and organisations who it once critiqued and decried.
During Occupy, the idea that our main social media accounts – @OccupyWallSt & @OccupyWallStNYC would be used to congratulate politicians, would have led to a massive outcry, but we have become so used to the blatant co-option of our movement that few barely even notice it anymore.
“Our Revolution Endures” etched in the colours of a political party, above a “Paid For By Bernie 2016″ campaign disclaimer makes a complete mockery of the word revolution:
“Not the billionaires” it says inside parentheses, the words spelled out in a pale grey scale – as if, as I predicted in December 2015 that he would, Bernie hasn’t just sold his campaign supporters out to Hillary and the very same billionaires he spent so long decrying.
I got the month wrong – April rather than July – but it was clear from the outset that Bernie Sanders was B.S.
Occupy was born of the betrayal of the broken promises of Obama.
Of course the elites knew that ruse would work again. It always has. Generation after generation, we never learn.
And thus – when the politician full of attractive rhetoric eventually sells us out – the cycle of disillusionment, civic rage and institutional violence, oppression and then political co-option renews.
It isn’t revolution at all.
It’s a cycle and it’s perpetual. Manufactured by the elites. They just pull the levers and watch it spin, around and around again.
I smelled it coming when the compositional horror story that is the band “Nickelback” released the song “Edge of a Revolution.” I can’t even embed the video here because it is so revolutionary that anyone who uploads it to You Tube is instantly hit with a copyright notice and removal.
Bless her soul, even Jill Stein isn’t immune to using the word ‘revolution’ to describe a political campaign. I retweeted and liked the tweet despite it, because I also think if Bernie was worth his salt that in the wake of the betrayal, he would have joined Stein and not Clinton.
The real revolution started by Occupy and not yet finished can be quantified in the bodies of the literal dead – the hopes crushed, the houses lost, the citizens exiled, the relationships and careers destroyed, the homeless re-disenfranchised by the evictions, the property stolen and destroyed.
Every time a politician says the word ‘revolution’ that is all I see. Tents being ripped to shreds, the People’s library being hauled away in rubbish trucks ultimately paid for by the same People whose will was being subverted, whose dreams lay shattered.
Those who gave everything they were and had, to bring the movement to prominence, only to be completely betrayed and violated by the societal infrastructure that was supposed to protect us.
We are spat on every time the language of our struggle is misappropriated for temporary political gain.
The Age Of Hypocrisy
This is the age of hypocrisy that we live in. We know the political process is bullshit – we knew it in 2011. Prior generations knew it, railed against it and lost, just like us. But here we all are, participating in it once again nonetheless.
I know full well that it is all just a great big reality TV show. But I have still voted every election cycle of my adult life.
Most of the people who know me, with the exception of those few who are in even deeper trouble for their honesty and principles than I am, would tell you I am the most ‘radical’ person they have ever met.
Yet even I find myself writing tweets and articles – albeit criticisms, including this one – that feed the electoral monster just by giving it breath.
My own inadvertent complicity scares me almost as much as the corruption and the collusion behind the political farce – because it indicates the level of saturation of the message that participation in the political process – even the critique of it – is a requirement of a properly functioning democracy.
But we knew in 2011 that the process was irredeemably broken.
Just like we knew it in 2000. In 1986. In 1963. In 1935.
George Bush’s brother handing him the presidential election was “democracy” in action.
JFK getting shot in the head on live TV. That was “democracy” in action.
Wall Street making billions while everyone else goes bankrupt. Police beating, pepper-spraying and mass arresting protesters, while “protecting” a bronze bull statue. That was “democracy” in action.
The same nepotism, grand larceny, financial crimes and human rights violations that the USA accuses everyone else of but themselves. That, is “democracy” in action.
We don’t need or want it and desperately have to find a way to get free of the political mousewheel, for good.
In a real revolution, no one would be allowed to own luxury holiday homes in seven different cities that sit empty 50 weeks per year, while retirees and veterans sleep on park benches.
Every bedroom in the White House would be open to homeless families.
Public money paid for every luxury in that building, yet the public are restricted from even seeing the inside of it let alone enjoying it.
All politicians, including the U.S. presidents are the same ilk of usurpers, usurists and tinpot dictators that they so frequently decry.
A real revolution would put direct democracy into the hands of everyone, and undermine the power of the few.
It is long overdue.
Snowden Nailed It
The U.S. election is an illusion of choice and that fact, at least, is more widely accepted than ever before.
Edward Snowden’s publically expressed distaste for both political candidates tracks back quite some time.
WikiLeaks Led The Charge
Julian Assange and WikiLeaks’ criticism of Trump tracks back even further.
Largely as backlash for the wildly successful #DNCLeak, the world’s corporate press are currently accusing WikiLeaks of essentially being a front for Russian hackers and/or favouring Trump.
Yet in a September 13, 2015 interview with Assange by Argentinian newspaper Página/12, Assange was asked about his opinion of Trump.
A rough translation of his response was:
I look at it from the following perspective. I followed Hillary Clinton for years, you know that I have a personal issue with Hillary because she was Secretary of State when we published diplomatic cables and more recently emails refused to disclose. And she is much more warlike than Obama. What happened in Libya, the destruction of that country and the collapse of its state, it was mostly a war of Hillary. Hillary was behind it all. Pentagon generals opposed to intervene but Hillary pushed for that bombing. So now comes in Donald Trump, who is more ‘guerrero‘ than Hillary. So whoever wins will be even more aggressive than Obama. The Trump phenomenon is interesting. At this time there is not a massive flood of Latin Americans wanting to enter the United States. Then it is interesting to see where does this phenomenon. Trump is appealing to the same grotesque nationalism can be seen in discussions on refugees in Australia and Europe. The issue of immigrants really was not on the agenda significantly until Donald Trump began to lift. The rest of the Republican Party has more decency and more willing to like voters Hispanic roots.
[Note: The Google translation of the word ‘guerrero’ made little sense so I left the word in Spanish and linked to another translation of that specific term which seems to explain it]
More recently, Assange made his feelings even more plain:
If essentially calling Donald Trump “Gonorrhea” isn’t enough to convince you – time for more hard evidence than merely opinion.
WikiLeaks, it turns out, as part of the very same leak they are copping so much criticism for, actually published Donald Trump’s donor list.
WikiLeaks – A Library Besieged By Barbarians
For the Empire, WikiLeaks getting 16,202 retweets on a single tweet is a nightmare from hell. Especially when the tweet in question was an epic release of US government insider information from inside the political party of the sitting US president.
The corporate media are no doubt equally apopleptic over WikiLeaks getting 14,304 retweets on a tweet like this:
Even the spelling mistake couldn’t stop such a pertinent point about the obvious mass media politically-motivated collusion and hypocrisy from going viral.
Yet politically-motivated collusion is what those already proven to be engaged in, are so eager to accuse WikiLeaks of. Along with a slew of associated accusations that ultimately just serve to distract from the actual content of the disclosures, which have been catastrophic for the Democrats.
Their subsequent National Convention has devolved into nothing short of a circus, as disillusioned Democrats find their voices and raise them in unison.
Julian Assange has famously compared WikiLeaks to the ancient Library of Alexandria. A colossal treasure trove of authentic documentation – a catalogue of human knowledge and historical documents, unmatched in modern times and besieged by barbarians who wish to bury, burn or suppress that knowledge by any means possible.
The barbarians in question are a who’s-who of the military industrial complex, as well as politicians in positions of significant power in many governments around the world who have been embarrassed, inconvenienced or angered by WikiLeaks publishing hidden truths.
The Greenwald ‘Slate’ Interview
Hyped by Snowden last night, was this 99% amazing interview with my favourite journalist, Pulitzer Prize-winner Glenn Greenwald.
His insights are really welcome and the interview is filled with original thought.
The interview debunks a slew of the criticisms against WikiLeaks.
On leaks versus hacks:
Information is constantly stolen by intelligence agencies the world over, for their own ends – yet when it is “stolen” and released to the public for the public good, the same governments who profit from the antics of their intelligence agencies, suddenly take affront at the methods by which the information in the releases are obtained.
Greenwald tackles this beautifully, with his comparison to Ellsberg and The Pentagon Papers:
With regards to criticisms (which are prevalent but for which no actual evidence has been provided by critics – only conjecture) that WikiLeaks withheld the DNC release until the most politically expedient time, for maximum damage – Greenwald entirely debunks the theory, stating that -if- this was done, that it is a common practice for news media to withhold stories, for a variety of reasons.
“I think there is a lot of hypocrisy going on in criticizing WikiLeaks for that.” – Glenn Greenwald
The journalist presses him on the issue, but Greenwald stands strong in the face of continued questioning. He goes on to tackle some of the major anti-Trump talking points also; pointing out that criticism of NATO’s interventionist escapades (especially post-Libya) and a desire to tone down the aggression against Russia does not actually make Trump an agent of Russia – that these are legitimate aspects of foreign policy debate that should be had regardless of who is standing.
The pushback gets even firmer when Greenwald states:
Burn!
It gets better. Reading the next part, I’m literally applauding in my seat. Finally, finally, a major mainstream figure is speaking the righteous rage of the people, without co-opting the message to a particular political platform.
The quote is so incredible it really needs to be read twice.
The reason [Brexit] resonated is that people have been so fucked by the prevailing order in such deep and fundamental and enduring ways that they can’t imagine that anything is worse than preservation of the status quo. – Glenn Greenwald
Absolutely correct and this sham of an election is just adding fuel to the fire.
America saw martial law in how many states last year? Three? Four? Neither Clinton nor Trump are going to address any of the prevailing social conditions that have led to that situation. As was made famous by the Occupy Oakland activist and livestreamer BellaEiko – and as I have heard repeated so many times by people around the globe – “Shit is FUCKED UP and BULLSHIT!“
I don’t usually litter my articles with swear words and neither does Greenwald usually propagate them in his interviews either. But this is the level of frustration we are experiencing.
Nothing meaningful has changed since 2011. And we are all sick to death – literally – of that. No justice – no peace.
The Slate interview is long and comprehensive and there is a ton more worthy content in it than what is discussed above. It is well worth your time to read.
Old Grudges Rehashed
Unfortunately the debunking of so much of the anti-WikiLeaks hysteria has been predictably overshadowed by the singular criticism Greenwald upheld – and not for the first time.
In a media environment where few words and fast output equals easy money for beleaguered “journalists” – a single tweet by Snowden often spirals into global news.
Few journalists are interested in the “big picture” unless it can be explained in a paragraph or two and in a way that aligns with their own strategic career goals.
At a time when the temperature of establishment rage towards WikiLeaks is well past boiling point, it was inevitable that any criticism levelled at them by a usually sympathetic figure, or anyone who may have been viewed as an ally, would be immediately picked up and capitalised upon.
And whoomp – there it is:
Snowden sharing the Greenwald interview? 610 retweets. Snowden concurring with the singular Greenwald criticism of WikiLeaks? 5,100 retweets.
Which really makes you wonder how many people lauding the criticism actually bothered to read the full interview.
But the point Snowden was making isn’t new. He’s said it all along.
Snowden’s tweet counts 138 characters. (Yes, I’m such a geek as to have checked). Which might account for some of the problematic language. Being, the diminutive “helped“, when WikiLeaks has arguably engineered, advanced and championed their field, at extreme risk and sacrifice; and the inflammatory “hostility“.
Hostility unfairly implies emotion rather than ideology, at least to my reading.
The tweet itself generated plenty of hostility – predictably dividing respondents into three categories – those who agree with WikiLeaks on principle, those who agree with Snowden on principle, and those who don’t want to see them criticising each other for whatever reason, and just want them to play nice and get along.
The emotiveness of the tweet is reminiscent of counter-criticisms that track back years regarding Snowden’s strategy for his release of information. I think both parties are so conditioned to receiving torrential waves of abuse regarding their every choice and utterance, that they are understandably tender from the constant bruising.
Snowden and Assange are not silly people. They are in fact, the smartest and most strategic thinkers on the planet. Neither are prone to rashness. They know full well the impact and consequence of their actions. I suspect there is likely much more at play than meets the eye, more than any of us observing can know or guess at.
The issue of curation is an interesting one to me, because in order to have curation, you must have a curator, or curators.
Snowden often makes the point of the behemoth surveillance apparatus – that it isn’t just about who controls the infrastructure and calls the shots now – but who will in the future.
The logical answer would be to have an editorial board, but in these times of freedom of information organisations being under siege – what guarantee is there that any such board would also remain in tact?
We have just witnessed the wholesale firing of the entire board of the Tor Project – or to be politically correct – their “graciously stepping down” en masse… on the back of revelations of a Central Intelligence Agency employee literally having left the agency one day and started work at Tor the next.
WikiLeaks is arguably THE most under-threat journalistic organisation in the entire world. (Which for the record, Greenwald has covered extensively in a long string of brilliant articles about the US persecution of Assange, WikiLeaks and associates).
So the question for me is, where would the curation start and where would it end? Every person has their own ideas of precisely how such curation should or could be done and it would be extremely difficult to get a unified consensus on every single instance.
For their particular threat model, having one fixed rule that can provide a benchmark and carry on for future generations seems the safe bet.
Then of course, there is the significant issue of resourcing. WikiLeaks has been under a historic banking blockade for years now. They can’t place ads in newspapers and hire staff. They rely on an extemely rare breed of people who are willing to quite literally dedicate their lives and risk losing everything they have, in order to skill share with the organisation.
It is high risk and often thankless work.
That they manage to produce what they do, under the circumstances they are daily confronted with, is frankly miraculous. None of their detractors could compete with their output. None are. Their tally was at over 10,000,000 documents some time last year. Over a dozen major releases in 2015 alone.
Many, many stones are cast but who can even begin to claim achievements on a similar scale?
It’s not even just a matter of their journalistic output – they somehow not only manage to keep their head above water while facing unprecedented levels of danger, obstruction, interference, infiltration, oppression and difficulty – but they also support others who are endangered.
Recently, they have constantly had the stuffing kicked out of them by some staff at organisations who they continue to support and promote on their pages.
At what point do we actually collectively pause, consider what they endure in a field few else are endeavouring to compete in and have the graciousness to say THANK YOU WIKILEAKS!!!!!!!!!!
Their publishing models and releases have been capitalised on by multiple news organisations who have made bank off their work and then stabbed them in the back. Yes, I’m looking at you New York Times and The Guardian, in particular.
News organisations all around the world have their own SecureDrop installations – and what is the genesis for the concept? WikiLeaks.
Brother Vs. Brother, Org Vs. Org, Friend Vs. Friend
I recently said on Twitter: “The US election is a public exercise in Divide & Conquer and the extent to which it is working is frankly depressing.”
I can’t help but wonder how many people all over the United States are falling out with each other over the Trump-vs-Clinton dichotomy. How many family members. How many workmates? Employers and employees? Siblings? Lovers? Husbands and wives?
Does this ridiculous, unnecessary side show result in divorces? Broken homes? Is the price really worth it?
What exactly do the public stand to gain?
The obvious irrationality of both candidates, and their unsuitability for office, is so obscene it would be hilarious if it weren’t so horrific.
The wife of an impeached president versus a casino, golf club and supermodel tycoon. And it’s even worse: this is the reality that few will confront, but everyone is really having to subliminally reconcile regardless:
The image on the left is a Huffington Post article begging people not to turn a blind eye to the current child rape allegations against Trump.
The image on the right is a Free Beacon article containing leaked audio of Clinton bragging about how she got a child rapist’s 30-year possible sentence reduced to 2 months time served.
The devastating follow-up article by The Daily Beast is a really, really hard read, including details of the traumatic ordeal of the victim and the manipulation and callousness she subsequently suffered.
Journalism In The School of Hard Knocks
Many people, especially this year, have been referring to me as an investigative journalist. I actually wouldn’t call myself that, because I’m not classically trained in investigative journalism and that hasn’t been my primary focus.
Nearly 5 years ago now, I began reporting live from events then blogging about them afterwards. News spotting in my spare time. Keeping a close eye on what was happening to our fellow independent media teams in occupations around the world and working with them to the best of my ability.
Amplifying for anyone I felt wasn’t getting the attention for their issues that they deserved.
I morphed into a long-form journalist by necessity – in a chronically nepotistic media microcosm (New Zealand) – telling as many people as possible about the corrupt political and media antics being wielded against people in my home town of Auckland. It wasn’t really journalism so much as whistle-blowing. Over and over and over again. Whistle-blowing on police, on civic authorities, on the intelligence agencies, on the military industrial complex.
I eventually came to the conclusion that that is what a good journalist is. Someone who blows the whistle and never stops.
It’s usually circumstantial rather than deliberate. I get curious and dig, or I accumulate scraps of information over a protracted period of time, or I witness things myself. My mental data-microwave goes “DING!” and out pops an article.
Overall what drives me is the realisation that I’m in a unique position to contribute and I feel morally obliged to, despite the obvious drawbacks.
Whenever our media team was burning out, overtired, overstressed, suffering from lack of resources and the strain constantly imposed upon us by state and private agencies and saboteurs – when we really didn’t feel like going on anymore – we would look at each other and say, “if not us, then who?” Then we’d get off our butts and go do it all again. That is the spirit in which I write.
I think the real reason I am being described as an investigative journalist is because I have a habit of unearthing significant information that corporate media haven’t or won’t. What few realise is how easy that is to do, and what an indictment it is on the mainstream press that they so often either fail at it, or refuse to look.
How did I find out WikiLeak’s position on Trump? I searched “@WikiLeaks” + “Trump” on Twitter.
The idea that the dozens if not hundreds of journalists falsely accusing WikiLeaks of being a front for Russia and/or Donald Trump didn’t do the same thing, is astonishing. Or that if they did, that they didn’t amplify the obvious.
But among the learned and free thinkers – there is consensus. Assange thinks, as does Snowden, and apparently Greenwald, that Trump is as bad as Clinton.
For what it’s worth, so do I.
As Greenwald stated in the Slate interview, much better than I could:
I think in general there is no effort on the part of media elites to communicate with [Trump sympathisers] and do anything other than tell them that they are primitive, racist, and stupid. And if the message being sent is that you are primitive, racist, and stupid, and not that you have been fucked over in ways that are really bad and need to be rectified, of course those people are not going to be receptive to the message coming from the people who view them with contempt and scorn. I think that is why Brexit won, and I think that is the real danger of Trump winning. – Glenn Greenwald
As for the accusation that WikiLeaks is in league with Russia… that has already long since been dealt to. It is an unfounded and ridiculous allegation. A smear.
If only the mainstream media would get the memo and cast off their willful blindness.
But that is merely wishful thinking. while money, promotions and status remain largely bestowed upon those most beholden to the corporatocracy that are the true string-pullers, the shadow governments of the West.
And while the vanguard of the people; namely WikiLeaks and Julian Assange; remain Public Enemy Number One.
[This post was blogged live. Thanks for watching! Further source links yet to be added.]
Journalists who write truth pay a high price to do so. If you respect and value this work, please consider supporting Suzie’s efforts via credit card or Bitcoin donation at this link. Thank you!
[Update/January 2018] This post is now available at my Steemit blog
If you’d told me a year ago that I’d be writing a blogpost in July 2016 about how EFF and TorProject supporters are actively censoring free speech on the internet, I would have thought I’d be writing it for The Onion.
Unfortunately, I’m not.
I have supported and amplified for EFF, the Tor Project and related organisations, staff members and campaigns relentlessly, for years. As a ‘Person of Interest’, I have relied on their enterprises to keep me safe. I have defended them ideologically and in principle, when they have been unfairly under attack.
However in an unbelievably Orwellian twist, recent and current events have completely transformed the situation from free speech organisations being similarly under attack by the State, to the State using free speech organisations to attack enemies of the State, and free speech as a whole.
I recently wrote two articles for Contraspin, raising numerous questions about Tor Project staffer’s extra-judicial character assassination of arguably the world’s most well-recognised Tor advocate and WikiLeaks journalist and technologist Jacob Appelbaum, known as @ioerror.
In the first part I analysed the copy of the smear website used to destroy his reputation and career. In the second part, I proved that nearly all of the main characters involved had been publicly lambasting WikiLeaks in the years prior to grouping up to take down Appelbaum.
Although the only promotion I did for the articles was a couple dozen tweets, they received many thousands of hits each, likely because they were the only serious long-form articles available providing a critical look at the allegations against Appelbaum.
Other authors and analysts were understandably shit scared of being labeled a rape apologist by the massive online lynch mob that had been assembled and unleashed upon anyone who dissented against their position. Those fears were well-founded, as a cabal of sock-puppetTwitter accounts rumoured to belong to some of the accusers themselves, relentlessly trolled the ‘ioerror’ search results, lambasting anyone who dared question the allegations or related areas of concern.
However, one publication was brave enough to pick up and republish my work – an online magazine called The Indicter, run by a group of Swedish Human Rights intellectuals, including several PhD’s.
That website was then cited on Jacob Appelbaum’s Wikipedia page. One of the most vociferous anti-ioerror sockpuppets, by the name of @VoodooHacks, picked up on it, and described my articles as ‘partisan blogs‘.
A Wikipedia moderator named Kenneth Freeman, responded that he had deleted the references as ‘a biased, unreliable source.’
According to his Twitter bio, Kenneth Freeman associates himself with both EFF (the Electronic Frontier Foundation), and the Tor Project.
One person in particular was exuberant over the removal of the references to my articles: the Christian Science Monitor’s Dan Murphy.
Looking further into the past, it seems that Murphy had past beef with Appelbaum:
I knew I’d seen Murphy on Twitter, but initially couldn’t place it. However it’s not every day you get misquoted by someone with a blue tick, so I soon remembered – it was the same person who had written the below misrepresentation of my article:
To state the obvious, I have never said that “All the women accusing ioerror of rape are lying”. Those words have been wholly invented by Murphy, paraphrased and falsely attributed to me.
For starters, the statement “All the women accusing ioerror of rape” is a literal impossibility as only one person has accused ioerror of rape. One other, of sexual assault.
Every other person has accused Appelbaum of a bunch of vague actions that range from propositioning someone to embarrassing them in front of workmates, kissing them or ‘washing’ them.
As things currently stand, in order for Appelbaum to not be a rapist, only one person would have to be “lying” – and I certainly did not accuse her of that – or to have been belatedly convinced that what she experienced was rape, which would be supported by the first sentence of her own account of what happened, which describes precisely that scenario having occurred.
For Appelbaum not to be guilty of sexual assault, only Isis Lovecruft would have to be “lying”. I didn’t accuse her of that either.
Regarding the other claims against ioerror it is likely, given the content of Appelbaum’s own statement, that some of the superfluous accusations have some founding in reality, as he states:
I want to be clear: the accusations of criminal sexual misconduct against me are entirely false.
Inevitably, there may have been moments in my professional or private life when I may have inadvertently hurt or offended others’ feelings. Whenever I was aware of these instances, I have, and will continue to, apologize to the friends and colleagues in question and to continually learn how to be a better person. Though the damage to my reputation caused by these allegations alone is impossible to undo, I nonetheless take the concerns of the Tor community seriously.
But the obviousness of the above facts escape his accusers and their supporters, who have put all their eggs in the “ioerror is a rapist” basket and refuse to look critically at the wider picture.
It seems there may be a concerted effort to have me declare that the women involved are all lying, as I had received a query along these lines from another sock puppet account heavily engaged in denouncing Appelbaum:
As well as engaging me frequently, the above account had been particularly concerned with why I hadn’t, and then later why I had, signed ourresponse.org – a website established by journalists, academics, researchers and others in support of due process for Appelbaum.
A board member of FreeAnons has accused the above account of being a sock puppet of Isis Lovecruft herself:
The account retweeted but did not deny the accusation.
If it is true, it would make an interesting partial timeline of events.
June 12: The sock-puppet account asks me why I hadn’t signed ourresponse.org
Why, of all people, would he become the journalist of choice for Appelbaum’s accusers? Who are supposedly pro-whistleblower pro-free speech pro-privacy activists?
As mentioned in my Contraspin articles – Sabu was one of the first to leap on the recent ioerror witch-hunt bandwagon – soon followed by @6, the informant who put Chelsea Manning behind bars.
While Sabu claims that Appelbaum was not an FBI target – an idea that is laughable given that years prior, the FBI had showed up at a speech Appelbaum gave in lieu of Julian Assange, hunting the latter – Appelbaum was sufficiently a target for the US Department of Justice to gag Google over the seizure of Appelbaum’s personal records, as reported by The Intercept:
So yes, Jacob Appelbaum was a target of the US Government, who are no doubt overjoyed not only at the desecration of his reputation, his almost wholesale removal from the stages on which he shared pleas for people to leak sensitive intelligence information, to take direct action at NSA sites, his revelations about the dystopian surveillance complex affecting us all and of the tactics being employed against persons of interest.
Likewise, those who wish to compromise the architectural integrity of the Tor network will be overjoyed at the recent removal of Jacob’s Tor directory authority.
Conclusion
As usual, the rabbit hole turns out to be so much deeper than the original intention behind this post, which was just to write about the Wikipedia whitewashing being engaged in by an EFF/Tor supporter who is also a Wikipedia moderator.
The history of such whitewashing is long. According to Wikipedia itself, conflict-of-interest editing has been undertaken by many dubiously-motivated parties including the Central Intelligence Agency:
That would of course, be the same CIA that is now revealed to have had an employee resign one day and become a Tor employee the next – much to Jacob Appelbaum’s chagrin at the time:
True free speech activists are unafraid to allow those who disagree with us, their opinions or their platform. They do not harass or abuse those who will not tow their lines.
The suppression of dissent and targeting of people like Jacob Appelbaum is par for the course for intelligence agencies and associated corporations.
It is frankly an eternal shame and disgrace that supposed free speech activists can now be added to that list.
Journalists who write truth pay a high price to do so. If you respect and value this work, please consider supporting Suzie’s efforts via credit card or Bitcoin donation at this link. Thank you!
I once tried to tell Jacob Appelbaum a funny joke. He did not think it was funny.
In fact, he was visibly mortified and uncomfortable.
My joke was a retelling of something that had happened to me when I was still on the opposite side of the planet.
I have a really dark, sardonic, acerbic Kiwi sense of humour, that has been sharpened by surviving everything that has been thrown at me to date.
Unfortunately, it didn’t translate well.
Fortunately, he didn’t make a smear website lambasting me about it.
Warning
There are Persons of Interest who the surveillance state merely monitors – and there are those who it actively harms.
The latter, and those who facilitate and inflict that harm, will instantly understand that every word of this article is true.
Everyone else is going to need to read carefully, do a lot of thinking, and click on all the links and their source links in turn.
For this post is not just about a group of women who accused Jacob Appelbaum of heinous assaults and social improprieties, although that will be extensively covered.
This article is, as promised, about the mammoth and monumental, colossal issues which are intertwined with that and are conveniently being overshadowed by it.
For we are all being polarised into a fake diametric supposition – that either Jacob Appelbaum targets people, or Jacob Appelbaum is being targeted.
But the real target is WikiLeaks.
The Joke
I was stunned by the massive and consequential ramifications of Appelbaum’s #30c3 revelations, so I was determined to get the key messages through to non-techy people.
I had been talking about what was being done to activists cellphones by spy agencies since early 2012. The reason I knew what was happening was not from reverse engineering spyware like Jake or Morgan Marquis-Boire or Jeremie Zimmerman and other clever people do, but from my own personal experience of being a target.
Quoting from the blurb of this video of “To Protect and Infect – The Militarisation of the Internet“, presented by Morgan Marquis-Boire and Claudio Guarnieri:
“Chaos Communication Congress – 29/12/2013
2013 will be remembered as the year that the Internet lost its innocence for nearly everyone as light was shed on the widespread use of dragnet surveillance by the NSA and intelligence agencies globally. With the uprisings of the Arab Spring where people raided the offices of their regimes to bring evidence to light, we’ve seen a tremendous phenomenon: a large numbers of whistleblowers have taken action to inform the public about important details. The WikiLeaks SpyFiles series also shows us important details to corroborate these claims. There is ample evidence about the use and abuses of a multi-billion dollar industry that have now come to light. This evidence includes increasing use of targeted attacks to establish even more invasive control over corporate, government or other so-called legitimate targets.”
To have hacker-journalists discussing the intracies of the capabilities I had seen in use against me and other Kiwi activists, was incredible. As far as I was concerned, and still am, that Congress was one of the most important ever, and to this day the vast majority of people still remain willfully ignorant of the messages contained in it.
[Note: that also happened to be the very same Congress at which Nick Farr says he entertained the notion of giving airtime to someone who claimed Jacob Appelbaum was a plant. Yet Jake’s work revealed in the above talk is utterly beyond reproach.]
So I endeavoured to belatedly tweet out a point by point time-stamped, dumbed-down, layman’s-terms version of his speech, hoping that the NZ mainsteam media, who by late 2013 were avidly following my timeline in the wake of the GCSB movement, would pick it up.
As soon as I started the tweets, the stalkers/spies/private contractors who had been increasingly intruding on my life ever since I had first started documenting FBI and DHS activities in New Zealand, during Occupy, went into overdrive.
I could always tell when I was hitting a nerve by their reaction, which would be immediately reflected in the aggressiveness of their interventions in my life and by 2014, their outright physical assaults on me. On this particular occasion, I was at home alone, and once again, they began hurting me.
You see, it isn’t just as a rape victim that I had to struggle to be believed. All tellers of uncomfortable yet obvious truths not yet accepted by the mainstream face a hell of a time trying to explain what is being done to us.
For a long time I didn’t talk to anyone outside of my immediate activist circle about electronic weapons being used on me. Because they “didn’t exist” as far as the public was concerned, and as a solo mother, the stakes were twice as high for me if I disclosed it. It likely would have been used by the state as justification to question my mental health, which is a known tactic that they use to cover for their crimes and silence their victims.
So I developed my own method of coping with it when it would happen. First, I would call someone from my media team and tell them “I’m going onto TrapWire“. They would know instantly what I meant – that I would escape my house and go to somewhere as visible and as public as possible. So public in fact, that it was on public surveillance cameras (hence the TrapWire reference).
This was a deliberate tactic that we had developed to force an evidence trail if we were followed and continued to be hurt.
So in this particular instance, I went to the original site of Occupy Auckland at Aotea Square, which is an urban green space wedged between the Town Hall and the Auckland Council building. It is surrounded by cutting edge facial recognition cameras with pan, tilt, zoom, area mics and all the bells and whistles, and I continued my tweeting.
Two years later, in Berlin, what was the joke that I was trying to tell Jacob?
That when being attacked with electronic weapons by teams of private contractors intent on preventing us from spreading his truth-telling, we had evaded them by learning how to use public surveillance systems against them.
To me, especially as someone who had written about TrapWire when the GIFiles revelations came out, the irony of using The Empire’s own fascist systems to outwit them and continue my work, was delicious.
Jacob Appelbaum didn’t laugh.
He was aghast.
Beyond Any Shadow Of A Doubt
It is a testament to how well truth is hidden that many will get to this point of the article and have decided that I am certifiably nuts.
Hacking Team is a government contractor, and they don’t hand over EUR8,800 for a weapons procurement report that is conspiracy theory.
They pay it because they know it is fact.
For those who were too lazy to check the link and read the article, here’s more:
The above is the specific list of contracts for the procurement of electronic weapons and who by.
Below is the list of manufacturers of the weapons.
So we know electronic weapons exist, that they have been tested *prior* to their roll-out for use by law enforcement 2014-2024, we know who manufactures them and who they have been sold to.
We know this because of the Hacking Team leak published by WikiLeaks.
The source email for the above article, can be found here and there are more emails related to this topic if you go to the WikiLeaks’ Hacking Team main page here and type ‘Directed Energy Weapons’.
What The Hell Does This Have To Do With IOError?
To answer that question, you have to look at what I was tweeting that day, that so enraged those paid to harm me.
This Pirate Pad contains 10 of the key points. [Other people made transcriptions of some of my tweets which were derived from Jacob’s speech].
But that’s just a drop in the bucket. To read what should technically be all of my tweets from that day of me being chased around Auckland, it seems you need to expand each one to read them all – click here to have a go at it.
(Please note – the dates are Twitter dates not New Zealand dates. Which is why this tweet is marked 4 Jan 2014, when the earlier ones are marked 3 Jan. They were in fact all tweeted on the same day.)
The content speaks for itself.
As does the fact that by attempting to translate and promote Jacob Appelbaum’s work to mainstream audiences, activists can be and are subject to such attacks.
What Total Surveillance Really Means
If you work for WikiLeaks like Jacob Appelbaum; or if you start movements against intelligence agencies; or if you write about the FBI/DHS/CIA & co without massive organisational backing, funding and visibility; or if you boldly and righteously declare to people in a position of significant governmental power that they should leak sensitive internal intelligence information about immoral government activity that should be in the public realm, then are flabbergasted and elated to find that they do so; or if you are involved in any serious research which is inconvenient or dangerous to the security state; or if you target any individual in the chain of political hierarchy and they get wind of what you’ve done; then the great Eye of Sauron feels entitled to, and does, make a point of of trying to know every single thing you do, say and think, 24 hours out of every day, 7 days a week.
It pays for the entire undertaking with a virtually limitless pool of tax money.
Even if Jacob was able to secure all his devices, his communications, his hardware and his personal spaces, he still could not do a damn thing to prevent external methods of surveillance intruding upon him. Satellite surveillance, which is used at the push of a button as readily as XKeyscore, PRISM or anything else, right down to private investigators mounting microphones and sound amplifiers pointed at Jacob’s house and wherever else he frequents, are just some of those ways. Let alone HUMINT.
Therefore it is highly unlikely that any events that occurred within the supposedly private space of his home were actually private.
In yet another great irony, if anyone knows the truth about the accusations against ioerror – it is likely to be those who control the global surveillance apparatus, and I presume he would be well aware of that fact.
Listening to the stories being told about him, you would think Jacob a callous, foolhardy, exhibitionist. Every experience I’ve had of him and his inner circle (and no, I do not know them exceedingly well however, being in Berlin, they are very visible within the community) is that they were the opposite. Careful, reserved, private. Particularly wary of outsiders and newcomers.
Well aware that they are all targets and of the ways in which they could be entrapped.
Early on in my investigation into this giant debacle, it occurred to me that taking down Jacob may be part of a continuing series of major blows against WikiLeaks, stripping it of key allies.
It is election year after-all and as far as The Empire is concerned, Julian Assange is Enemy Number One.
The WikiLeaks Connection
One of the first ‘corroborating’ public testimonies against Appelbaum was a historic claim made by Leigh Honeywell.
I was instantly struck by the following passage from her blogpost, which at the time seemed anomalous:
Leigh identifies herself as siding with Assange’s persecutors.
She says that she didn’t ‘fully realize how bad [her] own experiences with [Appelbaum] had been‘ until she saw him support Julian Assange.
In that post, she details the reasons why she thinks Assange is at fault, then says ‘I’m tired of my friends being assaulted’, and links to feminist blogs she has read on the issue, as well as other links she feels are pertinent to support her opinion.
The key problem with this, and which Leigh couldn’t have known in December 2010, is that Assange’s “victims” themselves say they were not raped.
Honeywell might not be blamed for jumping to conclusions in December 2010. Many people did and WikiLeaks themselves didn’t know about this evidence until December 2011.
But with the “victims” themselves saying they weren’t raped, it certainly shines a different light on her position.
So if Appelbaum supporting an alleged rapist tipped the balance for Honeywell, but then the alleged rapist turns out to be innocent, where does that leave us?
Yet not only does Honeywell still blame Assange, she describes the allegations against him – as recently as this month – as “sexual violence“.
Despite there being no allegation of such.
This made me wonder – what are the opinions and positions of Appelbaum’s other accusers and key supporters, on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks?
Back in December 2015 – five years after Honeywell’s post about Assange and four years after the text messages from the “victims”, Honeywell has the following exchange:
So Honeywell wouldn’t donate to Freedom of the Press Foundation because of their support for WikiLeaks.
Her tweet is ‘liked’ by one Valerie Aurora.
Appelbaum Detractor’s Takes On WikiLeaks
Vocal supporter of the alleged Appelbaum victims, Valerie Aurora has been quoted in the media about the case. From her Twitter account:
Yet as pointed out by the commenter, WikiLeaks’ first tweet had in fact linked to the website featuring the accusations against Appelbaum. Its second, linked to his denial.
They did not take a public position (and still have not, to my knowledge) as being in favour of either side. Yet Valerie Aurora ostensibly deliberately, and quite ridiculously, extrapolates the benign reporting as being an attack on anonymity and whistleblowing, even though neither are even mentioned by WikiLeaks.
Tor Project employee Alison Macrina recently disclosed that she is ‘Sam’, the ‘nonconsensual washing‘ bath story discussed in the first part of this article.
In that disclosure, she states “it took months to be honest with myself about what happened” and then alleges hearing of “often violent” behaviour by Jacob Appelbaum.
Much like the original ‘Serial rapist‘ claim by @VictimsofJake, the ‘often violent‘ claim seems to be completely unsubstantiated. Taking a protracted period of time to realise she’d been allegedly violated, however, is a recurrent theme in the allegations against Appelbaum.
It seems Macrina has also displayed past hostility towards Julian Assange despite her having shared stages with him as recently as March 2016.
Macrina recently wrote the following tweet:
The person she has cc’d into that tweet, is someone who recently disclosed that she is the Appelbaum accuser “Forest”.
Her post begins:
“…after two years spent trying to inhibt my rage and convince myself that I hadn’t been hurt, followed by seeking out other victims..” – Isis Lovecruft
In a sub-section of her disclosure titled “The Plan”, Lovecruft describes how she “first started out seeking other [alleged] victims“, and had planned to group them together to confront him at a Tor event in Spain. Jake apparently found out, and that plan was set aside.
“Having run out of ideas and being threatened out of alternative options, I reported everything to the rest of The Tor Project. Well, almost everything. Originally, I only reported others’ stories (with their permission). I left my own story out, and I did not tell it until it was decided that Jake would no longer be part of The Tor Project.”
Despite repeatedly stating that she doesn’t recommend filing legal complaints, (a position endorsed by many rape victims including myself who have had horrific experiences trying to obtain justice through law enforcement) Lovecruft strangely goes on to list a whole bunch of laws and accompanying sentencing guidelines that she feels would apply to Applebaum.
Curiously, these include charges that aren’t reflected in the original allegations themselves, even if they are taken at face value, including: “Instructing a third party to rape the victim (§177 of the Strafsgesetzbuch paragraph 2, sentence 2), making it a “severe case”.”
Although she attributes the application of this law to the accusations by ‘River’, those accusations do not state that Jacob instructed another party to rape the alleged victim.
Given the gravity of the situation and that both Macrina and Lovecruft are garnering hundreds of retweets effectively declaring the takedown of Appelbaum as a done deal, it is impossible to reason why the exaggeration of potential charges would be deemed necessary, or in fact the inclusion of them at all.
It is as if those references to laws and sentences exist only as an overt threat to Appelbaum.
Given the pattern of anti-WikiLeaks sentiment amongst the other accusers, I looked to see what Lovecruft’s position was.
I saw this:
Then I saw THIS:
The bottom tweet on that thread is Isis Lovecruft effectively asking for access to WikiLeaks’ source code for their whistleblower submission platform.
I’m going to say that twice.
The bottom tweet on that thread is Isis Lovecruft effectively asking for access to WikiLeaks source code for their whistleblower submission platform.
Who Is Behind The Website?
The identities of most of the accusers including the lone rape accusation, and of those who co-ordinated the launch of the site are an ‘open secret’.
That said, I am not at all comfortable with revealing the name of anyone who has not already done so themselves in a public forum. I do believe that the alleged victims have a right to anonymity should they so choose to exercise it.
I have also received a number of communications from various people providing further contextual information. I am not prepared to and will not publish the names of, or information provided by, anyone whom I cannot independently verify and who has not given me express permission to do so. Therefore the information that appears in this article is restricted to what is already in the public realm.
Neither of the women who have made these recent disclosures outright admit to being a part of creating the website JacobAppelbaum.net, presumedly either for legal reasons, or because they actually weren’t involved in the creation of it, or both.
It might also be because the site itself is a travesty from a privacy perspective. Non-HTTPS, with a stated JavaScript reliance and apparently lacking a no-JS fallback, which is used to make sure a site can be displayed, and forms used, by dated or uncommon browsers.
At the present time it is still not public which person/s actually registered, built, wrote copy for, curated and edited the site, although there are certainly many clues.
Some other people who came forward to media and were named as eye-witnesses to an alleged incident (which, as discussed in the first part of this article, was later disproven) were already named in my previous article, and that incident referenced.
They are Meredith L. Patterson, Andrea Shephard and Emerson Tan.
To the best of my knowledge they are yet to issue a retraction of or apology for their very public false allegations.
Meredith appears to be the root of the ‘plagiarism’ accusations against Appelbaum, of which there seems to be a tiny bit more light shed on in this thread, which really speaks for itself, both in terms of not actually appearing to justify any accusation of plagiarism by definition, and in her refusal to continue to engage on the subject.
While great pains seem to be taken by the accusers to validate the sexual assault claim, very little seems to be forthcoming about the claims of plagiarism.
As pointed out to me by researcher Janine Römer, the About page originally consisted of five lines of text attacking Jake for everything under the sun except rape and sexual assault, then the claims of sexual, emotional and physical abuse are shoved into the final line.
Making it really clear where the writer’s priorities, or where they felt the strength of their arguments, lay.
In this thread, Meredith explains why a person’s behaviour off the stage and on the stage should be considered seperately. When someone argues that it shouldn’t, Andrea Shepherd backs Meredith up. Meredith’s theory is that if they exhibit unsavoury behaviour off the stage, you should separate it from their public speaking. She says if they exhibit their bad traits on the stage, you can kick them off the stage. But if they don’t exhibit it on the stage, to leave them on.
I had a look to see what Meredith’s take is on WikiLeaks.
In 2012 Meredith decries “Assange supporters *attacking allies*” and says it “delights both’s mutual enemies”.
Given that the accusations against Appelbaum have been picked up and are being run with 24/7 by every known anti-Snowden anti-WikiLeaks anti-Assange anti-privacy pro-govt and anti-Tor troll under the sun, the above is just plain ironic.
Targeting an iconic essay by Assange in the book ‘Cypherpunks’ – “A Call To Cryptographic Arms”;
Given sentiments like that, it is getting harder and harder to deny that WikiLeaks, rather than Appelbaum, may be the utimate target here.
Despite the statements of the women involved in Assange’s case actually exonerating him, Andrea Shephard agrees with a commenter that she sees “parallels” between the women in both the Assange and the Appelbaum allegations:
Previously, to her credit, she had rightly been critical of the New York Times’ tabloid-style reporting about Assange.
However there is more derision of WikiLeaks by Andrea.
Manhunting WikiLeaks
Stepping back to 2010 again, we discover where Tor and WikiLeaks really intersect.
The manhunt of Julian Assange.
In the same time period as FBI agents were showing up in New York looking for Assange at a conference, and he was being ‘manhunted’ by the Pentagon, WikiLeaks identified Tor as being a core part of their infrastructure, and asked their supporters to use and help strengthen it.
So according to the US Government, “non-state actor Assange, and the human network that supports WikiLeaks” are the dangerous ones.
As opposed to everyone named in this article who publicly kick the shit out of WikiLeaks.
Women Protecting Women
As much as I would have liked to wrap up this article and never have to write about it again, it seems inevitable that there will eventually be a 3rd part.
With the creators of the site still not yet taking reponsibility for it, Jacob’s enduring silence and the key sole accusation of an actual rape occurring and the context of that remaining obscured, it is highly unlikely this is the end of the saga.
The primary complainant is being sheltered behind a periphery of other women complainants. If this is truly for her protection that is admirable. But if that person is indeed being sheltered to prevent the discovery of other profoundly mitigating information that would dramatically change the overall depiction of this situation, the effort is not only corrupt but is in vain.
The truth will out.
When it does, the 3rd part of this series will be titled “The Weaponising of Social Pt 3: The Resurrection of Jacob Appelbaum”.
What caused me to write these articles was not a wish to protect Jacob, or to befriend him. We are not in direct contact, nor have I sought to be.
The “risks” (in terms of that hideous and constantly flung-about term ‘social capital’) far outweighed the gain for me but if I was risk averse out of self-interest I wouldn’t be me.
I am speaking out because of all the reasons above, below, aforementioned, and yet to come.
Why Did I Continue Writing, When His Accusers Are Already Celebrating?
Because there is clearly more to the story than is being told, much, much more. I will not sit idly by while the life of a genuine radical is dismantled by women of privilege bizarrely aspiring to victim status who want to take him down in the name of representing rape survivors.
The initial and most serious allegation of all, that Jacob is a ‘serial rapist’ is clearly utterly without merit. It is additionally frankly offensive that an alleged ‘rape’ testimony sits alongside what by contrast seem to be frivolous complaints. Is there such doubt in the original claim that it couldn’t stand alone? Does it really need to be surrounded with circumstantial accounts of what, by comparison, are the most minor of alleged infractions?
Has sexual assault really now come to mean ‘anything I found uncomfortable, was upset by or was unable to deal with’? From being kissed, to bad jokes, to being propositioned, to being pulled into a bath and washed, to having someone out the fact that you were dating a workmate in front of your workmates?
Who hasn’t had these things happen? Why don’t we just declare everyone on Earth a victim? Because when you actually are a survivor of a violent rape, you understand clearly what the difference is.
Presenting common social occurrences as being tantamount to sexual assault, or even posting them on equal ground alongside them, profoundly trivialises what real rape and sexual assault are.
Likewise these accusations of ‘violence’ in terms of the use of the word ‘rape’ fall well short of the violent rapes that are genuinely prevalent in society – violent, horrific rapes that occur every single day all over this planet – especially to teenagers, street-workers and the homeless. Particularly to women of colour. For some people rape is a seemingly constant experience. There are women who can’t remember how many times they were raped. There are victims of domestic violence and incest who are raped for years on end.
Is it really necessary for the accusers to assemble a list of everyone their accused ever offended in his adult life, in order to lend their testimonies credibility?
The lack of victim impact in the statements is massively disturbing.It is as if the statements were written and/or edited by women who are not victims at all.
I have highlighted that in bold type because it is such a profound and obvious discrepancy. It sticks out like a sore thumb, across all of the testimonies.
There is constant complaint of power imbalance and fear of reprisal but no tangible complaint of ongoing personal emotional ramifications from these alleged experiences, other than embarrassment. No claim or description of lasting harm. This contradicts everything I have seen, witnessed and personally experienced over the years, and I find it impossible to ignore.
If you don’t understand what victim impact is, let me spell it out for you.
I was abducted from quite literally the central street of my city. I had to walk up and down that street countless times in my life since. Every time, swallowing the memories. Feeling that the concrete under my feet, my very city, had betrayed me.
I was gang raped at night in the rain on a children’s playground at what Americans would call an elementary school. I knew that the next day, little children’s feet would be skipping over the asphalt where I lay, or playing hopscotch. It haunted me for years. (Massive understatement). I still remember the feeling of the asphalt, the feeling of the rain (which far from soothing, felt like a karmic betrayal in itself; it was just wet and cold and utterly miserable), and anytime I went near a school, I relived the experience as if it was floating in front of my eyes like a translucent movie superimposing itself over my vision. For months if not years afterwards, you walk around in a semi-stupor, as if you are inebriated, out of focus, because you are seeing two things at once – what is in front of you and what is behind you.
The sign at the front of the school is forever burned into my mind’s eye. Because when I saw it, I still didn’t know whether or not they were going to kill me, so I was trying to memorise everything I saw in case I survived. I constantly had the irrational urge to go to the school and demand that they close it down, because it seemed too sick to allow young children to play every recess and lunchtime on the very ground where a woman was gang raped. Even though I knew on a subconscious level that the closure of an entire school was a ridiculous and extreme measure that would never manifest. For years I wondered inane irrelevant things… had the teachers been told? Did the caretaker know? Did the student’s parents know? Even though the school was in a part of town I had never been to in my life and would never go to again. A part of town where I knew no one. Even though the actual location where they did that to me could have been anywhere, I was transfixed on the specificities.
You see, it is not merely the act that is grotesque and destructive it is the haunting. The way in which completely normal things become utterly poisoned by the experience: in later years, going to events at my children’s school and wondering if anyone had ever been raped on their playground. Being triggered by the back seats of cars. By petrol stations. By things you have to see again every single day, and somehow have to learn to live with, or else drown in the pain.
It is this haunting, and the profound emotional after-effects, which take a horrendously long time to begin to fade, All of your relationships are affected. No matter of what type. From re-learning how to answer when a stranger says “How are you?” To how to face your parents. How to explain to your friends why you stare off blankly into space when they’re trying to talk to you. How to make love again without fearing an impending act of violence with every touch.
Your very identity is internally called into existential question.
There are a hundred, a thousand more intimate details of aspects that haunted me, which I will not detail here because they are utterly disgusting and despicable and it is frankly no ones business. It took a significant portion of my life for the memories to start to not be so jagged, the triggers to not be so visceral, all-encompassing.
Generally speaking, I actually consider myself healed. Enough so that I don’t feel physically ill anymore. I am finally able to live in the present now.
I am re-opening that old wound for the sole purpose of demonstrating for you all what victim impact is. It is hideous and embarrassing to have to do but it serves a greater good. The difference between the Stanford rape survivor’s victim impact statement and the allegations on the Appelbaum-hit site should be abundantly obvious to even the most casual observer. Seven supposed testimonies on that site and not a single one describing post-trauma victim impact. It is not a coincidence.
They have conflated common tenets of rape culture with actual rape.
There was a time when a trigger would cripple me for an entire week, then eventually just an entire day. Now when I read the Stanford rape testimony – all 7,500 words of it, I just press my clenched fist against my mouth, squeeze my eyes shut, tell myself ‘breathe, breathe’ for a few seconds and then I can resume reading.
I can tell you exactly how many triggers I had while reading that testimony. Three. And its been 17 years.
Victim impact is what made the Stanford rape victim’s account so compelling, because real rape testimony cannot be manufactured.
Sadly, with the level of co-ordination behind their efforts and realising that they’ve been seen right through, I wouldn’t be surprised if they have a belated go at it now, so vociferous is their opposition to Appelbaum, so fervent their stated desire to prevent him speaking truth on stages. Still, they will fail.
Survivor status is not something to aspire to or to claim lightly.
It is an indescribable burden.
Ending Appelbaum’s Career
The constant demand that Appelbaum, who so directly confronts superpowers, stop doing so in the name of victims is just plain suspicious.
What is being exercised by his accusers is the power to harness social media to cause mass distraction and brutal damage, to their own ends.
In practice, their demand for the utter exclusion of Appelbaum entails preventing him from continuing to explain to Persons of Interest the precise ways in which the agencies trying to torture and kill us on taxpayer dollars are doing so.
Information that has been of extreme value to targets and should be also to the public, who largely remain blissfully unaware of the full extent of what is being done on their dime.
Information that he has long been circulating that, more than an inconvenience; is an extreme danger to the perpetrators of torture, rendition and murder.
Information which cannot be replaced by a bunch of Tor developers waxing lyrical about safe spaces and self-care while ripping our community apart.
Just try self-care on for size if 3-letter agencies have decided they want to actively destroy your entire existence. I wish you the best of luck.
Mammoth resources – literally BILLIONS OF DOLLARS – are being wielded against people like us, and the too few truly combating it, those like Jacob and Julian, are constantly under life-threatening attacks, including from personalities in our own movements.
I would be far more sympathetic to a description of how the state interferes with and meddles in every single aspect of the lives of Persons of Interest as being ‘rape’, than I am someone being kissed in a bar or propositioned at dinner, or embarrassed in front of workmates.
POI’s are unable to hold down a job because the state will not allow them to have access to funds or employment. The Empire literally destroys any and every opportunity that comes their way because one of their main priorities is to not allow POI’s to have any assets or sustainable resources. They set teams of HUMINT against POI’s in the workplace, in domestic spaces, in social spaces.
(Don’t believe me? The Snowden docs aren’t academic. They are an in-practice guide of what is still happening every single day.)
At least that kind of all-encompassing trauma comes closer to the after-effects of an actual rape because it fucks up your entire life. But for those who have made a career out of privacy, those who came to it from academia or because they work for an NGO, or because it is “The Scene” – or because they heard about it in some cool videos – guess what? You might be monitored but you aren’t individually targeted. Any more than someone who has been hit on or propositioned is a sexual assault victim. You live in a bubble of luxury – a meritocracy as you call it – where you can actually make something of yourself despite being monitored.
Unless a gang of people and their group-think activism come after you and do the government’s work for them.
For first they came for Julian Assange… then they came for Jacob Appelbaum.
Real militant truth-tellers can only run and hide and seek refuge however and wherever they can, while telling as much truth about The Empire as they can, in whatever time they have left before they are taken out of the equation. The truth is not permitted in this day and age. The truth is not published by Dell Cameron in The Daily Dot. If it was, they would have Michael Hastings’d him. Yes, my hero, and that of thousands, Michael Hastings, is now a verb. You won’t see Dell running articles on how we know for a fact electronic weapons are being used on human beings, on activists and (truly radical) feminists, on journalists, and have been for years. Or how Julian Assange’s vanguardism through WikiLeaks, which the WikiLeaks detractors are all busy shitting on, is the only reason we even know that. Nor will you see the Guardian writing that, or Violet Blue, or any of the half dozen publications that it is now claimed are interested in running more stories about the accusations against Appelbaum.
Have a guess how long any mainstream journalist would remain employed if the manufacturers and sub-contractors making, distributing, experimenting with and selling electronic weapons became their subject of choice.
The last person to seriously go after that network was Barrett Brown.
Instead everyone wants to play popularity contest, and protect-my-job’ism, and be-politically-correct’ism, and listen to each other wax lyrical about power and social capital and solidarity, while the bodies of real POI’s, activists, journalists, hacktivists and lawyers stack up around them.
While they sit in comfy chairs critiquing WikiLeaks and convincing themselves that they are “dangerous together”, hardcore supporters of WikiLeaks are being taken out one by one. People are losing their LIVES, their citizenships, their liberty. The biggest investigation in US history is ongoing – remember why the FBI supposedly wants to talk to Isis Lovecruft?? Because they’re already after Jake and WikiLeaks. Yet these women are now writing congratulatory tweets about how they took down someone who is actually an FBI target.
The difference between the instances of alleged sexual assault and all the other superfluous crap that has been kicked up could stretch from the North Sea to Antarctica.
The way this campaign against Appelbaum – and let’s be frank, that’s exactly what it is – has been conducted is a disservice to rape victims, a disservice to activism, a disservice to the privacy community and a disservice to humanity.
Somewhere the heads of the agencies that harm us are rubbing their hands together with glee at our own-goals. Proposing toasts. Laughing at our collective foolishness. Exactly what Meredith once accused WikiLeaks supporters of, Appelbaum’s detractors are fulfilling. That is their legacy.
Every time this scandal is used to smear Snowden, to smear Assange by association, to hurt WikiLeaks, and subsequently all the whistleblowers and journalists they support through the Courage Foundation, Freedom of the Press and anywhere else.
The above tweet using the Appelbaum allegations to disparage WikiLeaks is authored by the FBI snitch Adrian Lamo. Lamo is responsible for social engineering the heroic whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who as a direct result of Lamo’s manipulations, was arrested and sentenced to decades in jail.
For the next 5 years, this hit on Appelbaum will be used to undermine everyone whose life is actually on the line. It is already happening.
Dear Jake
If someone passes you this to read and you make it past the reminder of my terrible joke, the documentation about the electronic weapons, the umpteen stupid tweets from foolish people, and the example of an actual victim impact statement, to this point: here’s my unsolicited advice.
You helped start Noisebridge? Start another collective. Make it invite only. The most skilled of the skilled will continue to work with you just as they continue to work when targeted by the same shit themselves.
Funding-dependent conferences jumping on the CIA bandwagon? Start your own conferences. They don’t even have to be attended in person. Put up a black sheet and tell us the truth Snowden-style. We will still listen, be inspired by it, and share it.
Your audience will follow you.
Because to be honest, we don’t give a flying toss how many new libraries are running Tor nodes nor do we want to spend hours on end listening to a bunch of pseudo-“victims” waxing lyrical about the inherent violence in their non-violent would-be-rapes.
We want to hear about what you described as those who operate on the dark edges of society – the agencies, the contractors, the sub-contractors, and the technology they use against anyone that they perceive is standing in the way of their fantasy of global domination.
You helped build the following that the deluded think they can usurp.
You can do it again and time will tell all truths.
Karma Rules
Karma rules and I suspect that there are many, many more revelations to come. They will come from people way smarter and more accomplished than me. So I am going to set this aside for now and do what I do best.
In the meantime, Appelbaum’s accusers will continue collecting their salaries while sticking Jake’s head on a pike and dancing on his grave. THAT is their privilege.
Trading on the profiles they have gained from sitting on stages that WikiLeaks’ support of the Tor Project put many of them on in the first place.
Thanks to a small group of supposed anonymity-protecting privacy activists thousands of people now know the name of Jacob Appelbaum’s fiancée`. Even those that didn’t want to.
We found it out by reading an extremely controversial website launched a week ago, that had a few sparse accounts of some nasty sounding happenings allegedly involving Jacob, with promises of more to come.
No one truly concerned with privacy issues should care if Jacob has a fiancée let alone who she is, out of respect for his right to a private life and because it is patently obvious that attacks on him shouldn’t extend to her.
Her name was later removed after the bulk of the damage had been done, without any editorial admission that it had ever been there in the first place.
Unfortunately, that simple yet far-reaching invasion of privacy, is only the tip of the iceberg.
[Update 12/06/16: Detractors are claiming the above is factually incorrect as they say Appelbaum is no longer engaged. The source was the smear website itself, which named Appelbaum’s ‘partner’, then removed her name and called her his ‘fiancée’, and now implies past tense. IMO, who he is or isn’t engaged to is frankly his own business. The point stands.]
Preamble
In a strange paradox, Jacob Appelbaum’s accusers both want to deny any relevance between their accusations and him being a known target of the US government as a result of the nature of his work, while having the clearly stated aim of wanting to prevent him from being able to continue it.
Even as they are being dwarfed, swept aside and forgotten in the controversy, the topics on which Jacob Appelbaum and WikiLeaks work are much larger and more important than any individual. Those who concertedly dedicate themselves to such causes are unjustly forced to quite literally risk our safety, our families, our livelihoods, our citizenships, our liberty and everything we own, in our fight to preserve our ideals and our planet.
The high stakes in a situation like this demand more than knee-jerk reactions, hearsay, and because-all-my-friends-say, when one of us is attacked or discredited. They deserve the investment of time; of serious, weighty yet measured consideration; analysis; and investigation. All of the elements that should be prerequisite to forming any intellectual opinon, let alone one where reputations and potentially lives are at stake.
But we are yet to see any of that, at least anything more in-depth than a series of personal statements via “Twitlonger”. Just a whole lot of uproar; a whole lot more silence; and a bunch of axe-grinding. With very little actual analysis, because the topic of rape is so taboo that most people are shit scared of approaching it objectively.
As such, this post should be subtitled “We Owe IO More Than 600 Words”. Because we do. We owe him much, much more than that.
We owe it to him and to our causes, to find out the truth.
Preamble dispensed with, I’m going to give some historical context to what made me write this article and analyse the claims made on and by the anti-IO website. In Part 2 of this article, we will look into the main personalities that appear to be driving this, discuss some of the environmental factors affecting the response and get into the wider context, which is all but being ignored
Lessons Long-Since Learned
The website now being widely sourced as justification for dismantling Appelbaum’s career and reputation does as much to discredit itself as it does to discredit Jacob.
That the name of the female closest to him was disclosed in a forum that claims to exist to protect women was not the first red flag.
Several years ago, a situation unfolded where a prominent activist (Activist A) was privately accused of rape by another activist (Activist B). This was then broadcast far and wide through the creation of a Twitter account that purported to be Activist B talking directly and openly about her first hand experience of being raped by Activist A.
Many fell for it, and instantaneously an online frenzy was being whisked up against Activist A. For all the same – on the surface – seemingly valid reasons that we see people turning on Jacob Appelbaum for now.
However, when I read the tweets of the account calling for the persecution of Activist A, I innately knew that what I was reading was not the words of a rape survivor. It came across to me as someone trying to posture themselves as one, out of empathy and/or indignation, rather than legitimately recounting an actual firsthand memory of a personal experience.
So I did the socially unacceptable but morally right thing and spoke out. While people were aghast that I dared to question a “victim” – the facade soon crumbled and it turned out that my instincts were absolutely correct.
The account claiming to be a rape victim was not Activist B at all. It was Activist C, her boyfriend, who had (according to Activist B, without her knowledge) taken it upon himself to impersonate her and attack Activist A in public after she had raised issues in confidence. There had been some question of infidelity, she had privately claimed lack of consent, Activist C had decided that Activist A’s life should be ruined as a result, and gone public.
Whether or not Activist A ever did in fact rape Activist B got lost in the controversy of Activist C’s foolish meddling in the entire situation. Activist A claimed no. Activist B claimed yes. Activist C permanently obscured the situation by his actions.
So how was I able to immediately identify, on gut feeling, that this anonymous account claiming to be a rape victim was not a rape victim? And why did I risk my “social capital” to speak out on such a highly contentious topic?
Because people who are not survivors of rape cannot competently impersonate survivors of rape. They think the act itself is the whole story but it is just a tiny fraction of it. So when they attempt to concoct the scenario, they always limit it to the specific event rather than the holistic experience, the emotional journey.
Rape Testimony
Real rape testimony is 20% what physically happened and 80% how it affected us. It is visceral. It is memories and shapes and impressions and images. It is sights and smells and feelings, a twisted nostalgia we would desperately like to free ourselves from but cannot ever. It is asymmetrical and it evolves. It unfolds. The expression of it is a cathartic, painful release but a necessary step in the healing.
It is not a telegram. It is not a thematical construct with set form or submission rules.
They are not a fixed length. Nor fixed sentence structures. They do not have a statistical linguistic pattern. They are not uniform. They ebb and flow in proportion to the victim’s telling. They sway and move, mobile in the outpouring of emotion, of grief.
When multiple examples of rape testimonies are compared side by side, they don’t conform in any way save in their effective translation of trauma, of a raw and primal pain.
So when I realised the extent to which the accounts on the anti-Jacob website do conform and began to note other anomalies, huge alarm bells started ringing.
Speaking From Experience
As someone intimately acquainted with the plight of survivors, you can feel inside you when something is just not right with a situation like this. As a survivor, my personal obligation to other victims and to the truth has led me to speak up several times in the past – even when it is utterly humiliating, damaging to my reputation or even outright dangerous to do so. This is not an expectation I have of others – I have the benefit of the passage of time, maturity, experience and healing – water under the bridge – that many others don’t. Thus I spoke out in an article addressing statements made by the Minister of Police and the grotesquely poor conduct of NZ cops in handling sexual assault including my own historical abduction and gang rape. I likewise spoke the difficult and humiliating truth against the notorious ‘FBI’ snitch Sabu when he assumed the identity of one of my friends in order to target me sexually, in an attempt to entrap me. I spoke out about my favourite publication in the world when a new staffer there published a ridiculous pile of rape apologist bullshit. I spoke out against the self-admitted serial pack rapists known as The RoastBusters who weren’t even so much as arrested after bragging about stupefying and pack-raping dozens of 13-16 year old girls. Then I spoke out against media’s irresponsible reporting on the issue. And again, when the Minister of Justice used the plight of the many Roastbusters victims who had received no justice whatsoever, in order to falsely justify the passage of anti-trolling legislation.
Even though it triggered the hell out of me to do so, I attended protest events, supported movements, and covered live actions in support of survivors, and in defiance of the repressive tactics wielded by New Zealand’s blatantly corrupt and incompetent police forces, who so profoundly fail survivors, and the public.
As faithfully as I spoke out in all those cases, so must I speak out too when I believe that rape testimony may be being falsely manufactured, or manipulated, or misrepresented, or used to serve the ulterior motives and agenda of someone(s) who may not be rape survivors at all.
“Believe victims“, some people say. The key word is not believe. The key word is victims. Not “believe any two-bit twat(s) who impersonate survivors and/or edit rape testimony because they have something to gain by smearing someone all over the net, in the name of other victims.”
Especially when in doing so, knowingly or not, those someone(s) are also serving the interests of The Empire and damaging movements that people pay dearly to create, build and sustain. (If you are in any doubt about this take note that among the first people gloating about Jacob Appelbaum’s perceived downfall was in fact, Sabu.)
For The Empire, I can assure you, does not give the slightest flying shit about rape victims, unless they can be used to its advantage. On a daily basis, it perpetuates and facilitates mass rape all over the world, while expending tax dollars to cement and maintain all of the societal and environmental conditions that create rape culture.
The double-edged sword of the taboo of rape was constantly wielded against Julian Assange and his supporters over the last five years, albeit with ever-dwindling effectiveness. Allegations of rape against information activists are a lose-lose situation for us but a ‘win’ for our enemies, and that is again apparent in Appelbaum’s case. The end result is a real-life example of why these types of accusations are such an efficient tool for those wishing to utterly devastate and incapacitate a perceived rival. It emboldens the targets enemies and silences their friends. It isolates them and eclipses all their prior undertakings.
For all these reasons I cannot merely sit silent, or put out an ambiguous 600-word opinion piece sitting on a fence.
Instead I did what I do best. I read, read, read, read and read more. Dug, investigated and analysed.
The following, is my findings.
Analysis Is What We Do Best – So Let’s Do It
In the first hours of the allegations against Jacob hitting the public sphere, they were primarily pushed through one website, a shady Twitter handle with acrid yet low output, and two personal Twitter accounts. Although in the days that followed many, many others jumped on board, some of the first out of the gates were:
The Meredith quoted above, who, incidentally, is described as the founder of a “think-tank” called “Weaponizing Social”, went on to send more than a dozen tweets about the situation, in surplus to those quoted above.
What a strange question they ask – “who watches those watching the watchmen?” One would assume, the Watchmen do, because they keep a super close eye on anyone questioning or shining a light on them, and in reality they do much more than simply “watch”.
[“Weaponizing Social” both as a concept and an entity will be further discussed in the second part of this article.]
For now, looking closely at the anonymous website featuring the accusations against Jacob is key to better understanding the whole situation.
JacobAppelbaum.net
The first impression of the website (which strangely, is not HTTPS) is of a huge picture of Jacob Appelbaum with his name written across it in bold type. It initially gives the impression of being an official website. Until you read the ‘About’ page.
Hey there! We’re a collective of people who have been harassed, plagiarized, humiliated, and abused — sexually, emotionally, and physically — by Jacob Appelbaum. Jake enjoys manipulating people through his built-up social capital, influence, and power, in order to get what he wants.
Here are some of our stories.
— http://jacobappelbaum.net
Taken at face value, the About page conforms to all the rules of good marketing – short, to the point and high impact.
The high gloss effect slips though, the further you get into the content.
The ‘Victims’ Page
This page makes three central claims.
Firstly, that Jacob Appelbaum seeks out ‘new’ members in activist communities and targets them for their naiveté.
Although several stories published on the site mention looking up to Jacob as a central figure in the movement, none claim to have been fresh on “The Scene” at the point of the alleged incidents.
Secondly, under the sub-heading “Have a partner?” the page states “If you spurn Jake or attempt to stand up to him, he’ll go after the people you care about the most next, doing whatever he can to humiliate and harm them.” Given the fact that Jacob’s alleged fiancée became the collateral damage of the publishers of the website, this passage is highly ironic.
Nor does their concern appear to be providing any protection to a woman being accused of being currently romantically involved with Jacob Appelbaum:
Thirdly, the page claims that Jake is a plagiarist who falsely claims credit for other people’s work in order to “increase his level of power and influence“. The claims of plagiarism against Jake are extremely hard to track down, especially Meredith’s. While she waxes lyrical about Jacob having allegedly taken credit for “our research in 2007” it is difficult to ascertain to what she is referring. Then there is this semi-famous exchange between Appelbaum and @kaepora, which is frankly an obscene stretch of the term plagiarism to say the least, for which kaepora ultimately withdraws and apologises, stating: “I’m sorry I let [a] personal fight interfere with my judgment of Jacob on a purely professional issue. That’s something I certainly should apologize for.”
But the hollow complaint of plagiarism, and the ascribed accusation of a motive of wanting to increase his power and influence, completely ignore Jacob’s numerous, frequent and significant achievements in recent activism history. From calling for civil disobedience against the behemoth NSA data storage facility in Utah; to being extremely visible (understatement) in the #Landesverrater movement that stopped a German treason investigation into journalists in its tracks and resulted in the German Minister of Justice firing the Chief Prosecutor who had brought the charges; to being a supporter of @PengBerlin’s #IntelExit initiative advocating for the employees of intelligence agencies to quit their jobs; to supporting the victims of renditions and wrongfully accused ex-prisoners of Guantanamo Bay, to photographing noteworthy activists and journalists by old-school means and holding gallery openings… the guy has hardly been sitting on his laurels. To claim that he makes his bones via plagiarism when he is so prolific, is a massive stretch at best. It’s like throwing one tiny brick at a wall and hoping it will fall down. No wonder they needed something more to try to cut him at his roots.
The FAQ
The FAQ, which contains more content that appeared in the wake of the initial launch, gives away much.
As to the question of “Who Made This Site?” the pseudo-answer reads: “Some of us have personal stories of being abused by Jake and some don’t.” Red flag! Another red flag in the very next sentence: “We have heard lots of complaints about his behavior over the years, and have experienced it first hand.” Given the recently debunked eye-witness accounts provided by Tan, Shephard and Patterson… the words “have experienced it first hand” just don’t quite have the ring they used to.
If this is a site about rape victims, it needs to be by and for rape victims, without the meddling of non-victims who have merely “heard lots of complaints” and talked of experiencing things that turned out to not be at all what they claimed. “What Is The Goal Of This Site?” another question asks. This is where the biggest giveaway of all can be found, after a smooth claim that it is just for awareness and protecting people. Word for word, the crux of the issue:
“Also we hope that this site will prompt groups and organizations to think twice about any involvement they have with [Jacob Appelbaum]. Maybe it is not a great idea for him to be part of their communities. Maybe they shouldn’t invite him to speak at or attend their conferences. Maybe they don’t want to be associated with a person who is accused of the behaviors detailed on this site.”
Could the NSA have written it any better themselves? By making these stipulations, the publishers are literally stating the express wishes of The Empire. They don’t ask for apologies. They don’t ask for Jacob to acknowledge his actions. They don’t ask for him to be educated. They don’t ask for him to spend his life educating others about rape culture and sexual assault. They ask for him to no longer be allowed to educate the world about privacy, information security, activism and surveillance.
Appelbaum was involved with both the Snowden disclosures and with Julian Assange – literally the two most controversial, polarising, wanted, endangered men in the entire world. Men who have massive resources set against them, up to and including for the purposes of their immediate detainment, rendition and/or extradition, and trial.
Are we really supposed to believe that an anonymous group of people expressly stating that they wish to put a permanent and wholesale end to Jacob’s inclusion in the forums in which he promotes his work, and to his professional relationships, are valid in doing so, based on prima facie complaints?
On “Why Should I Believe You” the would-be career-ending complainants state “If you’re a sexual predator, what better cover story is there than “the FBI is making shit up about me.” If the FBI has it in for you, what better story is there than for you to be anonymously labelled a sexual predator??? None.
Their response to “Why won’t you stand publicly behind what you’re saying?” gets even more ludicrous: “We are afraid we will be doxxed or harassed… We are afraid Jake will threaten us or falsely smear our reputations.”
Any activist worth their salt – let alone a legit Tor developer – has already been doxed or worse, long since. First and foremost by multiple governments and a network of private security companies (yup, they call it a file) then secondarily through social media. Such people are already harassed on a daily basis. Are usually rightly in fear for their very life.
The only people who could reasonably by “afraid” of such elementary levels of actions being taken against them, at this echelon of infotech, are either active in fields which are not seen as threats at all to any government, or who serve their purposes. Everyone else is a target.
There are gaping holes all the way through the rest of the FAQ. From the claim that Twitter requiring phone numbers for new accounts prevented them getting a Twitter (as if there aren’t free guides as to how to circumvent this, not to mention the option of just buying a throwaway SIM or using a virtual number… come on now, countless anonymous accounts are created every day…) to the claim that the site was created out of an altruistic wish to make people safe. Considering the timeline of events as revealed by Cryptome, there are indications that the existence of the complaints were used as a tool for what could easily be described as employment-related blackmail before they even went public.
If that isn’t damning enough: the proof is in the pudding:
The Stories
Perhaps the most bizarre aspect is the vague and then staggered manner in which the stories appeared on the site.
The best part of a dozen images of Jacob Appelbaum appear under (fake) names of victims – each linking to an individual story of being wronged by him. Unfortunately, in its first iteration, the vast majority of these images, when clicked on, simply lead to text which read “This is a placeholder“.
Several instances still remain to this day. Leaving it up to our imagination as to whether or not there was actually a victim behind each fake name at the time of first publishing, or whether the publishers were hoping to collect more once the site was live and post them at a future date.
Immediately sensing something wrong, I tried to put my finger on it. Then I realised the first giveaway. The word counts. I ran some basic stats on each testimony that was posted. These and my observations on the stories that did appear, both initially and in the later versions of the site, are as below.
Story 1: Sam (369 words)
“Sam”‘s story did not initially appear on the website. It starts “Jake and I had some minor romantic interest in each other when he invited me to his apartment one evening.” It continues on to describe Jake allegedly pulling him or her into a bath and then washing their back against their wishes. “His nonconsensual washing lasted about a minute or two before I leaped out of his bathtub and started crying in the corner of his bathroom.” The alleged victim states “I eventually confronted Jake about this, plus other behaviors I’d witnessed: he started drunkenly kissing another person at the bar with no invitation, he started giving another friend a really aggressive shoulder massage with no invitation, plus a million stories that I’d heard through backchannels.”
This account was one of the first published and is by far the most serious accusation against Jacob. Firstly because it is the only story that involves an actual allegation of outright rape and secondly because it implicates (but does not name) other people as being witness to and/or complicit in the alleged rape.
The account begins: “I didn’t know until very recently that nonconsensual sex, by a friend, is rape.” indicating that it is a historical claim (which does not make it any more or less valid, but is contextual information) and that something that has occurred “very recently” has altered how the alleged victim viewed what happened.
There are 34 instances of the word “I” in the first section of the story before there is a break in what had very clearly been, until then, a first-person narrative. The break reads in its entirety:
“This cannot continue.
He cannot be a leader in this community, the first name that many people think of, an inspiration to those new entering the field, and also someone who uses his power and influence to sexually prey on individuals who think he is trusted.
It is critical that our community is safe for women, and for any individual who is passionate about protecting privacy and anonymity.”
“The Tor Project in particular should be recognized for how they have handled this respectfully and honorably.”
Due to the sudden lack of personalisation of the sentence structure, and the concrete position, it reads as if another voice has been inserted into the text.
The break over, the testimony is concluded with a final paragraph, which includes another 6 instances of the term “I”, feeling very much as if it has returned to the original voice.
The most puzzling aspect of the account is why the person involved fails to name any of the eye-witnesses and/or participants that they allege were present.
Under the cover of anonymity, and obviously having a good idea of what was at stake for Jake, why not name the others involved? In not naming them, anyone who is one of Jacob’s “friends” or “followers” is subject to fall under the cloud of suspicion. Was this intentional or negligent?
The storyteller states firmly that they believe they were not the only one to receive this treatment from this group of people. So if the stated aim of the site, as it claims, is to forewarn other women and to protect them, why only name Jacob? If he is, as claimed, just one of a group participating in the sexual assault of intoxicated women?
3. Forest (596 words)
This is the story which initially named “Jake’s partner [REDACTED]” which was later removed without acknowledgement and replaced by the term fiancée. The writer complains that both her partner and her had been “completely humiliated” by Jacob, yet then “invited him to stay at my house” and to sleep in her bed, as friends. She says this “turned out (mostly) fine” though it is unclear what “mostly” means in this context. The author says they “proceeded to share beds in a friendly manner over the years, and nothing bad ever happened.” She then describes visiting Germany and staying at Jake’s house and sleeping in his bed, where she describes him sexually assaulting her while they were sleeping. She then describes confronting Jake, and him initially denying it, then apologising and saying that he had mistaken her for his fiancée in his sleep.
4. Daniel (463 words)
Unlike the aforementioned accounts, “Daniel” writes in a markedly different linguistic style, as noted by the above table. The crux of the accusation is that Jacob divulged the existence of a romantic relationship between workmates that they had endeavoured to keep secret. This appears to conform to the prior instances of misconduct discussed in a recently leaked Tor Project HR email.
5. Kiwi (257 words)
“Kiwi”‘s complaint is that Jacob has attempted to influence and/or control the trajectory of his or her career and professional relationships. They state “sexual abuse is not the only form of abuse” and refer to not having “so much social power as Jacob.” Whether or not true, equating interpersonal social and employment issues with sexual abuse just waters down the seriousness of the other allegations.
6. West (81 words)
At 81 words, it is hard to put much stock in “West”. Were they really so alarmed or harmed, it seems incredibly hard to believe that all they would have is 81 words to say about the matter. The account reads as if it were an attempt to write in the first person by someone else – perhaps someone who had believed they had witnessed the incident and was attempting to write as the victim, in a foolish attempt to lend credibility to other claims on the website.
The core of the whopping 4 sentences posted is that Jake kissed them without first gaining prior consent. The triviality of the claim by comparison to the accusations of sexual assault, is stark.
When someone kisses you, it is generally referred to as “being hit on”, or someone “making a pass” at you. While I certainly don’t suggest that people go around kissing people who they don’t know for sure want to kiss them back, the act of being hit on is usually the point at which you either return the attention, or not, rather than a crime or an actionable offence.
7. Phoenix (408 words)
Phoenix appears to suggest that, a) Jake solicited a sexual encounter with them, b) that he used his access to Julian Assange to impress them and made a foolish remark about Julian being accustomed to him doing so. Despite the obvious discomfort of the storyteller, which should be taken into account, the complaints could as easily amount to being the subject of a bunch of bad jokes being taken the wrong way. In UK English, we would call it “taking the piss“. Americans might call it “joshing“.
While the writer clearly wasn’t amused, there is no way to be sure that humour was not the intention.
If not, and Jacob was being as knowingly inappropriate as the writer suggests, once again these allegations dramatically pale in comparison to those of sexual assault.
8. Nick (1,661 words)
Nick’s 1,661 words leave no doubt at all that he feels victimised sufficiently to be compelled to express it at length. Again there are references to “social capital” – in this case, his own – and then a rather disproportionate comparison to Bill Cosby, who is known to have drugged and raped dozens of women (if not more) over decades.
Nick clearly takes the other complaints at face value and proclaims “whatever you do don’t cast doubt on Jake’s vctims of sexual abuse. It’s one thing to be raped, that’s enough to destroy someone’s life. It’s quite another thing to speak up after being raped by your hero and lose your job, your friends, everything you’ve worked for and your trust in humanity to boot. Imagine what that must be like.”
To date, the only person who appears to have “lost their job” as a result of making allegations against Jake, was not in fact claiming to be a victim, but to have been made aware of the rumours/allegations of others and then spreading them in turn.
When they participated in circulating these, they were, along with Jake, subject to disciplinary action and subsequently resigned, as outlined in the leaked Tor Project internal email linked to already.
The strangest part of Nick’s story is that he admits that he attracted ire by entertaining the notion of giving people who wanted to snitch-jacket Jacob Appelbaum a platform in a forum in which he was participating. I can’t help but wonder if the situation were reversed, and it was Jake considering giving someone ‘Lightning Talk’ space at Congress in order to snitch-jacket Nick, how Nick would have felt about that. In such a situation, surely you have to ask ‘but what if the shoe was on the other foot?’
The most serious allegation made by Nick is that anonymous notes were left in his hotel room. He feels sure that these were left by someone close to Jacob or Jacob himself.
Yet this is a tactic known as “gaslighting“, and is usually perpetuated by intelligence agencies. As a ‘Person of Interest’ in New Zealand, I would routinely return to my home to find items that didn’t belong to me, left in unmissable places. On occasion a newspaper I had not purchased would be left lying open on my coffee table, turned to a specific article about a topic on which I would understand the significance.
If Nick was having a very public beef with Jacob, as it seems, it is not out of the realm of possibility that intelligence agencies were aware of this, and intervening with the express purpose of accelerating and aggravating the gravity of the situation.
From Nick’s testimony there is absolutely no way to know for sure that Jacob or his friends were somehow accessing his hotel room and planting the notes, or whether other malicious parties had a hand in the events and were capitalising on the situation.
“Alice” / null – remains a “placeholder”
“Briar” / null – remains a “placeholder”
The Stanford Rape Testimony
For comparison, here is the stats on the testimony of the rape survivor in the case of the convicted rapist Brock Turner that recently went viral.
Lack Of Evidence
The site is particularly unusual in that it lumps in people who have personal grievances against Jake alongside allegations of rape.
Evidence of one rape is enough to destroy any reputation. But it is clear that the authors of the site were going for quantity over quality; hoping to win over readers with the sheer number of testimonies, rather than actual evidence.
This has the net effect of both trivialising and cheapening the experiences of rape victims, and of watering down the severity of the claims, in an attempt to present a united front – or in the words of the site, “a collective” – of victims.
Early on, top Italian journalist and WikiLeaks affiliate Stephanie Maurizi had tweeted:
The lack of hard evidence is likely why the media were initially reluctant to report on the accusations, although that changed when Tor released a statement about Jacob Appelbaum leaving the Project.
Given the recent unravelling of some of the accusations, and the fervour with which the same paid government troll accounts that have been going after Assange, WikiLeaks, Snowden, Appelbaum and anyone associated with them for years, are now lapping up the opportunity to milk the Appelbaum controversy for all it is worth, it is impossible to exclude the motives of and gain to The Empire, from this analysis.
The Empire
Nothing pisses The Empire off more than those of us who engage others to fight against their corruption and oppression. Perusing and spreading information puts you on their radar. Instructing others to undertake actions takes you to a whole other level.
So when you hear Jacob Appelbaum openly calling on the employees of intelligence agencies to leak secrets to him, or encouraging people to compromise utilities at NSA facilities as acts of civil disobedience, there can be no doubt how far up the shitlist of the military-industrial complex that puts him.
By its own admission, The Empire classifies us all as either:
a) Idealist (can be disillusioned, such as by fallen heroes etc, or otherwise convinced to turn away from their ideals)
b) Realist (motivated by money or self-interest, can be bribed/coerced into capitulation)
c) Reformist (restricted to conventional avenues of political change… politics, academia, NGO’s; places where you are forced to ultimately tacitly compromise your ethics in order to achieve/excel or progress in your environment)
OR… dum de dum dum….
d) Radical (demands system-wide change, is active & incorruptible)
The Empire has decided that the best way of dealing with “radicals” (the label THEY have constructed and imposed upon qualifying “persons of interest”) is to completely dismantle their lives at a “whole of Government” level. Which means, politely, using all the various departments and avenues of civic oppression available to them.
The Empire has deemed Jacob Appelbaum, a radical.
As it did Julian Assange.
Part Two of this article will cover the elephants in the room:
The (second) Tor Statement
The media response
Other accusations against Jacob on the WWW
The WikiLeaks Connection
A much deeper look into those who lay behind the curtain of JacobAppelbaum.net
While trust lawyers market us to foreign capital, Tourism New Zealand has spent the last 17 years proclaiming us to be “100% Pure New Zealand“.
Although there was a time when New Zealand had a pristine and untouched environment, it is long past.
Yet the assertions to the contrary are deliberately constructed, tailored and manicured by marketing and advertising gurus who, with wheels freshly greased by public funds, then impress them upon the global public.
Exactly how much public money is spent on maintaining the facade, no one knows.
“The national tourism agency can’t put a dollar figure on the total cost of 100% Pure over its [then] 13-year run, citing commercial sensitivity…”
Indeed the Tourism Authority, which publishes its Three Year Marketing Strategy, has redacted the entire budget allocation section. It is the only segment which has been blacked out.
Astonishingly, the leader of New Zealand likened the country’s tourism marketing to, of all things, a McDonalds meal and infers that the advertising should not be taken seriously. Stuff.co.nz reports:
Prime Minister John Key compared New Zealand’s global “100% Pure” tourism marketing campaign to a fast food ad. “It’s like saying ‘McDonald’s, I’m lovin’ it’ – I’m not sure every moment that someone’s eating McDonald’s, they’re loving it… it’s the same thing with 100% Pure,” he said.
“It’s got to be taken with a bit of a pinch of salt.”
The Panama Papers is a prime example of the Prime Minister applying this ‘with a bit of a pinch of salt’ attitude to the international image and reputation of New Zealand .
Now the world is beginning to rub its eyes and awaken from the dream that has become a nightmare: ‘100% Pure New Zealand’ is as pure as a Big Mac Combo.
New Zealand Is A Big Mac
According to McDonalds.com a Big Mac contains:
“A double layer of sear-sizzled 100% pure beef mingled with special sauce on a sesame seed bun and topped with melty American cheese, crisp lettuce, minced onions and tangy pickles.”
According to Fooducate.com, a Big Mac contains over 80 ingredients, the vast majority of which are human-manufactured chemical compounds, including:
So this is what our Prime Minister’s political agenda and spin has reduced us to. A Big Mac combo. Looks good and safe in the posters, but it can kill you.
Unfortunately there is a whole lot more under the surface than just dodgy hamburger ingredients. The damage that has been wreaked upon the land, particularly after the last 8 years is vast, profound and potentially irreversible.
It is overdue for us to examine how precisely the Land of the Long White Cloud was so thoroughly desecrated – when, why and who by.
The Big Picture
The 1% run a transnational operation and they collect countries like baseball cards. Once consumed those countries exist in name and our memories only. They are added like stocks to a portfolio, run by the real bond traders – a conglomerate of intelligence agencies that, where New Zealand is concerned, operate under the auspices of the Five Eyes (FVEY).
Tiered, like a twisted wedding cake in reverse, FVEY holds the vast majority of all the world’s electronic data. A two-way waterfall, it vacuums up everything it can off all those below it, with or without their co-operation, then trickles a portion of it back down over the tiers, in quantities that reflect their diplomatic priority or favoured status.
The harsh truth is that for the countries who have been sucked into this arrangement, there are effectively no governments. The entire charade of politics is precisely that – a pantomime. You could turn the sound off and it would make no tangible difference to the political course of the country which, except in extremely rare circumstances, is not charted by the citizens.
Those extremely rare circumstances are what intelligence and police agencies are in fact hell-bent on avoiding. They are tasked to expend great resources mitigating the risk of actual democracy occurring. Because democracy is the greatest undelivered promise of the 20th century. Which is why the mask of Western civilisation is set askew by any exercise of democratic rights to dissent – by any mass movement of the people – be it Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, or any other.
Our heads of government are civil servants only in the sense that they maintain a public veneer of civility and they are indeed servants – to people who we seldom know the names of and have never voted for.
Who Does New Zealand Belong To, Anyway?
New Zealand’s Prime Minister John Key frequently accuses Kiwis who oppose his policies of being “anti-American.”
“Our relationship with the United States is in the best shape it’s been in for a very, very long time.” – John Key
This is unsurprising given that a member of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has been in charge of our country for the last 8 years.
According to Wikipedia, the FRBNY is ‘the most important of the banks‘.
…
So first we get a Prime Minister with a U.S. Federal Reserve seal of approval, then next thing we know, American National Security Agency facilities are revealed on New Zealand soil.
Despite the obvious lack of any foreign bases operating on American soil. Because funnily enough, the Americans do not allow foreign countries to operate bases on their soil.
As I once discovered by reading Bob Woodward’s books, you can often learn more from those who disagree with you than from those who agree. It’s amazing what slips through the cracks. While full of imperial apologism, this link is an absolutely fascinating anatomy of the justifications for US military hegemony that are used to indoctrinate much of the First World.
I highly recommend that you take the time to read the full discussion. There are countless edifying morsels. Also many contradictions. The various reasonings for American global domination include:
It’s just to save global trade from pirates and criminals
It’s because other countries can’t defend themselves
It’s so other nations don’t have to spend so much on their own military
It’s because “America cooks the dinner and Europe does the dishes“
While more than 90% of the conversation is pro-Empire, eventually the excuses lessen and there are some pretty major insights.
Which indicates that the exercise of US power is less about stopping pirates or protecting trade routes, but actually involves outright malicious invasion and subterfuge to the detriment of its perceived enemies.
“The US military is that house guest of dubious benefit, questionable timing, faulty manners, but impeccable credit. “
What has never been sufficiently explained either in rhetoric or in law is how a Commonwealth Country like New Zealand, supposedly beholden to the British Crown, has American military facilities and direct political influence, seemingly more so than British.
New Zealand is, after all, a corporation. Registered to the Queen of England. So if any foreign nation is to go planting military facilities on our land you’d think it would be hers.
Yet Britain ostensibly didn’t bat an eyelid at the Edward Snowden revelations about New Zealand. Which suggests that, as with arguably more than 100 other countries, the U.K. has also been thoroughly compromised by the United States. That from a military perspective, they function as one. That their national interests are aligned.
But this is not how we were raised. We were raised to believe we are a sovereign nation that, when necessary, stands up to the superpowers and exerts an independent foreign policy, even if that comes at a diplomatic or political cost.
Yet how could we ever again engineer and assert a differentiating foreign policy now? With the infrastructure of global oppression present on our soil, hoovering up the private communications of all our citizens, in complete irreverence for our Bill of Rights?
We have to go back 30 years to get a glimpse of a Prime Minister prepared to take personal risks on principle.
One who not only stood against the Americans, but even against the Commonwealth itself, when Prime Minister David Lange went to England to publicly defend our anti-nuclear stance.
David Lange: “Margaret Thatcher sent a note through her High Commissioner, which he delivered to me, asking me not to do it and that sealed it as far as I was concerned. I told him what I thought of him, and of his new hair dye and various other things like that! And I decided definitely to go, and we settled the terms of the debate. It was one of those interesting occasions when Foreign Affairs were put to the test. I went to the UK without any Foreign Affairs official. It was the only time a Prime Minister has ever travelled out of New Zealand, without a Foreign Affairs official.
Interviewer: “Was that because they disapproved…’
David Lange: “Oh, they disapproved completely. ”
Interviewer: “Did they try to talk you out of it?”
David Lange: “They did… It was unbelievably fraught with danger and yet had such potential for advantage, and I was attracted to it.”
There was of course, despite the risk, a happy ending. Lange’s performance was historic and compelling; he received a standing ovation from both sides of the debate at the Oxford Union – an occurrence the President of the Union said he had never witnessed in 25 years.
In that very debate, Lange spoke to the United States’ reaction to New Zealand’s exertion of its own sovereignty.
Lange: “We are in fact, to be made an example of! We are to be ostracised! We are to be convicted of some form of heresy and put on probation. We are to be kept there until we are compelled to resume our seat in the dress circle of the nuclear theatre.”
The debate was a huge win, for which Lange was internationally lauded. Yet it was soon followed by an act of terrorism on New Zealand territory, when French agents bombed the Greenpeace flagship, the Rainbow Warrior, killing a New Zealander and sinking the vessel.
David Lange: “It was a defining moment for me because I knew that was the end of any New Zealand commitment to the so-called Western alliance. It was not when it was sunk that I knew, it was when we knew who’d sunk it that I knew. Then the overwhelming silence from Great Britain. Margaret Thatcher was prepared to condemn Gaddafi for everything but the French could go and kill people in our harbour. [Australian Prime Minister] Hawke never said anything. Ronald Reagan pretended total indifference. We never had a peep out of those people that we were allegedly in a Western alliance with, those people who fought for democracy.”
So the UK was silent when an ally committed an act of “state-sponsored terrorism” on its own Commonwealth territory. What a remarkable object lesson.
New Zealand, however, was not cowed. It upped the ante and passed its nuclear-free legislation into law and was promptly kicked out of the ANZUS defense agreement.
Yet we stood tall and defiant.
David Lange: “The great irony of the last fifteen years of foreign policy, has been that our foreign policy stance had the seeds of its change.. in my government… it was nurtured and watered by the American reprisals, but it was set in a hanging basket by the French. It was all their own work.
Thus the bullying of New Zealand had the opposite of its intended effect.
As Marianne Elliott from ActionStation.co.nz says:
“…it reminds me that it is possible to completely shift a political narrative and to arrive at a political outcome which seemed radical and impossible at the beginning.”
And Peter Douglas:
“…New Zealanders are very proud of the fact that they live in a country that was small but brave enough to make those sort of pronouncements and to suffer the consequences of them at that time.”
The American political and military subjugation of New Zealand that has occurred in this new millennium would once have been considered a literal invasion.
Their bases being present on our land, an act of war.
Yet John Key’s government, awash in and drunk on the conspiratorial secrecy of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network, has been complicit in playing down the extent of the American infiltration and projected a nonchalance in the face of the recent revelations.
It has openly accelerated our very obvious transition into American vassalage and despite there being no legal precedent outside of various secretive military co-operation agreements, New Zealanders are supposed to ignore or accept the corrosion and ultimately the loss of their natural rights and their national identity.
Patriotism: A Foreign Concept
We are suffering attack after attack on hard-won liberties and allowing the agenda of the global American Empire to dominate all domestic considerations.
An Empire that literally consumes everything it touches. Sucks out all worth and value, asset-strips and impoverishes. Privatises gains and socialises losses.
While banksters gorge themselves on our heritage, our inheritance and applaud.
We battle for sovereignty, by opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, and many other encroaching initiatives that ultimately are intended to strip New Zealand of its lawful authority and jurisdiction, or to supersede it. But with foreign countries dominating our defense landscape and controlling our government by proxy, we have no sovereignty.
Our country is but a hollow shell, relegated to nostalgia.
A country where patriotism has become a foreign concept – a luxury only afforded within the bounds of American Exceptionalism – and even then, the only true loyalty is to capital.
A country where the desecration of our land and the blood and pain of our people is the price of our enslavement to the global 0.00001%.
Where humanitarianism is depicted as a dirty word and empathy ill-advised; a privilege; one with strings attached, that attracts blowback.
In a world where narcissists brand the courageous narcissistic; and call the learned naive. Empaths, they call us. They spit it. As if to care about others is the most dirty, heathen concept imaginable to them.
The problem is of course, that that is total bullshit.
Bullshit because the impotent indexes themselves are inherently flawed. They prop up a myth that ‘somewhere is OK!’ and provide false hope to the global populace.
But I call bullshit mostly because New Zealand is in fact, unsafe, not at all peaceful, and corrupt.
It is however, accomplished at hiding it, and trades on a reputation that is extremely outdated, if not outright misleading.
Children are not safe in New Zealand either – there are countless instances of horrific child abuse.
Poverty is on the rise. Homelessness is on the rise. Domestic violence is at epidemic levels.
Domestic break-ins and petty theft, white-collar fraud abound.
Austerity measures target the physically and mentally disabled, as well as re-victimising rape victims. Sexual abuse is also at epidemic levels in New Zealand, which has the same tacit tolerance of the subjugation and degradation of women as other colonised nations.
Massive co-ordinated civil unrest is now a routine occurrence. Each time the will of the people is thwarted and a social movement ignored, the next movement grows larger.
Political corruption is rife. On the rare occasion that it is exposed, it is effectively whitewashed and enabled to continue.
It is inevitable that something has got to give.
What They Didn’t Show You In ‘The Hobbit’
A legacy of John Key’s predecessor, Helen Clark, is the absolute mountains of money spent on international P.R. during the making of Peter Jackson’s ‘Lord Of The Rings’ movies, to promote an image of New Zealand befitting the scenery of the movies: wholesome. Green. Natural. Untouched.
The decades of unregulated fracking of New Zealand farmland makes a mockery of that image.
Citizens who dare protest the above conditions, are being interfered with, stalked, harassed, maligned, abused, assaulted and exiled by the domestic security agencies.
All this under the auspices of the Five Eyes.
The Five Eyes Is Actually The Four Eyes… And The Three Eyes…
Herein lies the great inequality of the intelligence sharing agreements with the United States that New Zealand citizens have been subjected to.
For while we are told that through the FVEY, we are ‘partners’, which supposedly is of significant enough value to justify spying on our entire domestic citizenry and handing all that intelligence over to FOREIGN NATIONS…. it turns out that actually, FVEY is not the top-tier of that twisted, reverse wedding cake.
There is in fact:
Kiwis refusal to allow nuclear-powered US warships in our waters led to the creation of the Four Eyes, a new military intelligence-sharing tier and explicitly excluding us.
Then when the Canadians had a crisis of conscience, quite rightly as history shows us, and refused to join in the destruction of Iraq in 2002, they too effectively got kicked from the club, and the Three Eyes was born.
Making the US, the UK and Australia the top tier of the wedding cake. Right?
Well, actually, no.
The Two Eyes
According to a commenter on electrospaces.net:
Cost Vs Benefit
Given all the above, we have to ask ourselves.
What is New Zealand really gaining by our alignment with Empire?
There is clearly no risk of piracy, or of hostile military invasion.
Where then, would our allegiance lay, if the long-predicted implosion of the American economy and thus empire, were to occur?
It is widely accepted that the castle is built on sand; that a return to the Gold Standard or the end of the petrodollar could soon herald an economic collapse that would make 2008 look like the good old days.
No matter what happens, Prime Minister Key can always retire to his mansion in Hawaii. Or his mansion in London. Or his mansion in Aspen, Colorado. If he doesn’t stay in his mansion in Auckland’s Parnell. Or his Omaha beach house.
While inevitably, study after study will come out claiming that we are a Utopian paradise.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
If the country in its current form really is the best this world has to offer – we have utterly failed ourselves, this planet, its peoples and our future generations.
For the desecration of New Zealand continues to be tolerated domestically and concealed internationally.
The picture is really bleak and will remain so, until we accept responsibility and rise to change it.
I pray to one day be able to report on how we reversed the trend.
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By the 12th anti-Trump piece I was becoming convinced (wrongly, I hope!) that Mackey might be part of some conspiracy involving the Clinton-endorsing New York Times 
Her above tweet – which was in defense of Edward Snowden – seemed ignorant of the fact that as a direct result of the campaign against Appelbaum, Snowden himself was being attacked by sock puppet accounts who were accusing him of being a rapist by association.
Pilger’s source is an affidavit from the case.
