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Ecuador Wanted To Make Julian Assange a Diplomat and Send Him To Moscow (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last year, Ecuador attempted to deputize WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as one of its own diplomats and send him to Russia, according to a Friday report by Reuters. Citing an "Ecuadorian government document," which the news agency did not publish, Assange apparently was briefly granted a "special designation" to act as one of its diplomats, a privilege normally granted to the president for political allies. However, that status was then withdrawn when the United Kingdom objected. The Associated Press reported earlier in the week that newly-leaked documents showed that Assange sought a Russian visa back in 2010. WikiLeaks has vehemently denied that Assange did so.
Well...Wikileaks is not exactly an equal opportunity leaker. In retrospect there's no higher morality to it's actions or the "materials" released.
The value is in creating chaos. In the Clinton case, in order to believe there was substantive criminal activity, one must believe that the whole of the FBI and intelligence community were in cahoots with Clinton.
It's not like other true leaks like Snowden or the Pentagon Papers. Those were acts of conscience which led to at least some change.
Even in the McCarthy era the real nuance in his actions was not apparent until years later. If you don't get it now- give it ten years.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
There was enough foul play uncovered that the chairiman of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, was forced to resign from the position and be replaced, during the height of the campaign when such a move was extremele disruptive. You can try to smooth that over with words, but there was big-time rotten activity and we should be grateful it was exposed.
> The value is in creating chaos. In the Clinton case, in order to believe there was substantive criminal activity, one must believe that the whole of the FBI and intelligence community were in cahoots with Clinton.
No, it's more than that, there's still too many people looking at the whole Russia-Trump-Clinton thing through the eyes of US politics, let's be clear here, the morning Wikileaks leaked the damaging material on Clinton, Nigel Farage attempted to sneak into the Ecuadorian embassy to meet with Julian Assange - the US House Intelligence Committee has since received intelligence that this was to provide Assange with a thumb drive and that Farage was a Russian conduit:
https://www.theguardian.com/po...
https://www.france24.com/en/20...
If you're looking purely through the lens of "My candidate won, you're just bitter" then you're missing the point here. Let's be absolutely clear - Nigel Farage is incredibly friendly with a guy in British politics called Arron Banks. Arron Banks is a guy who no one had ever heard of until he dramatically appeared on the British political scene around 2015 with a story about how he was going to defect from being a major Conservative party donor to being a UKIP donor, despite the fact no one in the Conservative party had any idea who he was, he suddenly had £1million pounds to dramatically donate to UKIP. Since then he has come under investigation, because no one can explain the source of all his wealth as it's hidden incredibly well behind a cascade of fake businesses in places like the Cayman Islands which are well known conduits of Russian money. Of course, you could fairly trivially dismiss this as paranoia if it weren't for the fact that Arron Banks is married to Ekaterina Paderina. Who you ask? Someone a Russian defector described as one of their greatest intelligence assets, someone who had an affair with a much older MP who just happened to be in charge of one of the constituencies where Britain's nuclear submarines are housed:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ne...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/...
On top of that, Farage has consistently refused to condemn Russia even when it annexed Crimea, he has attended Russia's far right convention in St. Petersburg where a number of far right anti-EU parties in Europe were granted support and funding from Russian state entities:
https://themoscowtimes.com/art...
So at this point, if anyone things it's about Clinton or Trump, they really are failing to see the bigger picture. There's a massive web here with ample evidence trailing all the way back to Putin's doorstep, and what's more, it stems from before Trump was even a US political candidate at all, which in itself highlights the fact it's got nothing to do with "bitter Hillary" supporters or whatever justification people like to use for refusing to acknowledge it.
At this point, if you really don't think Russia is involved in interfering in Western politics in an incredibly serious manner, and if you don't think Putin had anything to do with Brexit, Trump, Hungary's Jobbik, France's NF, Greece's Golden Dawn and so on and so forth then you're in denial over such an overwhelmingly large body of evidence that you genuinely only can be either pro-Russian and anti-Western, or the kind of useful idiot that these kind of intelligence operations rely on in the first place.
Assange and Wikileaks are just one part of a massive web
Seems to me I recall Julian Assange publicly trying to use the threat of the disclosure of something Wikileaks had allegedly been given, as a tool to try to escape his current legal predicament(s) when it/they started, years ago. The fact that he'd use information as a tool like that, while pretending that Wikileaks never sits on anything, and publishes whatever they have and believe to be credible, made me think he was just a tool, to put it bluntly. Nothing I've seen or heard from him since has in any way changed my opinion of him, or the organization he 'leads'. The very fact that he had, allegedly, again, information he COULD publish, (presumably it means they vetted it and determined it was credible,) damaging to those trying to extradite and/or prosecute him, and he held it back as a shield, flies in the face of claims made of being journalists.
Journalists, REAL journalists, protect sources, and publish information for the good of the readers, etc., not timed or calibrated for their own maximum personal benefit. Even if the charges against him are totally fake and politically motivated, there's no moral difference between that and a doctor taking a patient hostage. Journalists should have to swear the Hippocratic Oath too, specifically, first to do no harm to their readers/listeners/viewers, and then never deliberately, knowingly, or intentionally to deceive them, nor to be used by anyone else negligently to do so. (Obviously, if a journo is reporting on a pol who IS ALSO a reader, the good of the many SHOULD win out, and as long as the truth is being told, the reader who is the malefactor is exempt from the reporter's proscription against doing harm to that specific person or group.) Obviously the highest call is to the truth, even when it's a hard truth, but just in terms of ethics... yeah.
Perhaps I was misinformed on this point, or I'm confusing Assange with some OTHER news guy being accused of rape or whatever... but I believe my recollection is intact in this case, and if it is, that's a real douchebag kinda move to pull, and NOT what any person describing himself (or herself) as a journalist should be doing.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.