Tag: war on whistleblowers

Spanish company provided CIA with information leading to Julian Assange’s arrest

“Be on the lookout tomorrow to see what you can get… and make it work.” Michelle Wallemacq, head of operations of a Spanish company called UC Global, wrote this message on December 20, 2017, to two technicians monitoring security at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was living after being granted asylum. She was alerting them to the arrival of Rommy Vallejo, the head of SENAIN, Ecuador’s secret service, who was scheduled to meet the next day with Assange to receive confidential information that could influence the cyberactivist’s future.

Vallejo had hired the services of this small company from Jerez de la Frontera in southwestern Spain to provide security for Ecuador’s diplomatic corps in London but didn’t know that it was planning to record his meeting with Assange. Vallejo was unaware that UC Global had planted hidden microphones throughout the embassy, even in the women’s bathroom. Nor did he know that UC Global’s owner, David Morales, had been sending information about Assange’s meetings with his lawyers to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) soon after he took refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy.

Ecuador’s president at the time, Lenin Moreno, had ordered his staff to work with Assange’s Spanish lawyers to develop a plan to get Assange out of the embassy, grant him Ecuadorian nationality and provide a diplomatic passport. The plan was set weeks before Vallejo’s meeting and was known to only six people. When UC Global’s cameras recorded the meeting attended by Assange, his lawyer Stella Morris, Ecuadorian consul Fidel Narváez and Vallejo, it learned that the getaway would happen in four days: December 25. Assange would leave in one of the ambassador’s diplomatic cars and travel through the Eurotunnel to Switzerland or another destination in continental Europe.

“It’s very late… Because it’s so big, I put the file in a shared Dropbox [cloud data storage service] folder. Someone with experience in audio can make it more intelligible… The ecu [Vallejo] is quite audible, but the others [Assange and Morris] are very muffled,” wrote one of the technicians a few hours later to David Morales.

Morales dispatched the data in the early morning hours to his “American friends,” and the impact was immediate. The United States quickly sent an arrest warrant for Assange to the United Kingdom, so the escape plan had to be aborted. Two years later, Assange was expelled from the Ecuadorian Embassy. In June 2022, the British government ordered his extradition to the United States. Since then, Assange has been held in a London jail pending an appeal. The United States has charged him with 18 alleged crimes that could lead to a maximum of 175 years in prison.

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In Push To Dismiss Lawsuit, CIA Says Americans Who Visited Assange Had No Privacy Rights

The Central Intelligence Agency and former CIA director Mike Pompeo contend that attorneys and journalists, who visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, had no “legitimate expectation of privacy” when it came to conversations with a “notorious wanted fugitive in a foreign embassy.”

“There is no plausible argument that it would be unreasonable or indiscriminate for the government to surveil Assange, who oversaw WikiLeaks’ publication of large amounts of U.S. national security information,” the CIA and Pompeo additionally contend. “Thus, any alleged surveillance of Assange that incidentally captured his conversations with U.S. citizens such as plaintiffs would not violate the Fourth Amendment [right to privacy] as a matter of law.”

The statements are part of a motion to dismiss [PDF] a lawsuit that was brought by a group of Americans, who allege that they were spied on by the CIA when they met with Assange while he was living under political asylum in the Ecuador embassy.

When one considers that Assange has been held in detention at Belmarsh prison and faces Espionage Act charges for publishing classified documents, the government is essentially arguing that it may spy on any journalist who publishes such documents and “incidentally capture” the communications of anyone communicating with that particular journalist.

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US STILL TRYING TO BURY ‘COLLATERAL MURDER’ VIDEO THAT WIKILEAKS RELEASED

There is no shortage of activists, journalists, academics, and people of conscience who have some story to share about the impact of the “Collateral Murder” video.

The U.S. military footage of an Apache helicopter crew shooting indiscriminately at a dozen Iraqi civilians — including Reuters journalists Namir Noor Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh, and two young children — is widely recognized for exposing the true nature of the United States war in Iraq and for making WikiLeaks and Julian Assange household names.

Three years before WikiLeaks made it possible for the public to watch this video, Dean Yates, Reuters bureau chief in Iraq, learned of its existence. Yates testified about the impact of the video at the Belmarsh Tribunal in Sydney, Australia on March 4, 2023.

Later in the Tribunal, another delegate, Australian lawyer Bernard Collaery, called Yates’ testimony “admissible evidence,” which could serve as witness testimony in defense of Assange. (In fact, a statement from Yates was submitted to a British court during Assange’s extradition trial.)

It has now been nearly 13 years since WikiLeaks published the video, and nearly 16 years since the attack took place. No one responsible for the attack or the invasion of Iraq has faced even a modicum of accountability.

In contrast, Assange is languishing in Belmarsh Prison under torturous conditions. He sits in legal limbo while the United States continues to pursue his extradition under Espionage Act charges, in a case which poses an unprecedented threat to press freedom.

While WikiLeaks’ publication of military documents from Iraq and Afghanistan are at the heart of the case, the “Collateral Murder” video is absent from the 18-count indictment that spans 37 pages.

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DOJ to Charge ABC News Journalist Who “Fell Off the Face of the Earth” After FBI Seized Classified Documents From His Laptop in Home Raid

As previously reported, an Emmy-winning investigative journalist went missing after the FBI raided his Virginia home and seized classified information from his laptop in April.

James Gordon Meek, 52, went missing after the feds raided his Arlington penthouse apartment, the Rolling Stone reported.

Meek produced the Hulu documentary “3212 Unredacted” which detailed the 2017 Pentagon coverup of the deaths of US special forces in Niger.

The “lightning raid” was conducted after a search warrant was approved by a federal magistrate judge in the Virginia Eastern District Court, Rolling Stone reported.

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Eighteen Years Ago, Journalist Gary Webb Was Murdered After Exposing CIA Drug Trafficking

On December 10, 2004, the body of journalist Gary Webb, 49, was discovered in his home near Sacramento after a moving company worker found a note posted to his front door that read: “Please do not enter. Call 911 and ask for an ambulance.”

Webb’s death was listed as a suicide, but Webb was found with two bullet holes in the head, indicating that he was executed.[1]

In the days leading up to his death, Webb had told friends that he was receiving death threats, being regularly followed by what he thought were government agents, and that he was concerned about strange individuals who were seen breaking into and leaving his house.

In the late 1990s, Webb had written a series of stories for the San José Mercury News, which provided the basis for his book, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998).

In it, Webb detailed how the explosion of crack cocaine in South Central Los Angeles during the 1980s was sparked by two Nicaraguan émigrés, Danilo Blandón and Norwin Meneses, who sold huge amounts of cocaine to raise funds for a CIA-backed rebel army—the Contras.

Webb was a Pulitzer Prize winner whose “Dark Alliance” series went viral in the early days of the internet. It caused a firestorm that led to the resignation of CIA Director John Deutch after he was grilled by angry Black activists at a meeting in L.A.[2]

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The Guardian Could Help Assange By Retracting All The Lies It Published About Him

The Guardian has joined The New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País in signing a letter from the five papers which collaborated with WikiLeaks twelve years ago in the publication of the Chelsea Manning leaks to call for the Biden administration to drop all charges against Julian Assange. This sudden jolt of mainstream support comes as news breaks that Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been personally pushing the US government to bring the Assange case to a close.

The Guardian’s participation in this letter is particularly noteworthy, given the leading role that publication has played in manufacturing public support for his persecution in the first place.

If The Guardian really wants to help end the persecution of the heroic WikiLeaks founder, the best way to do that would be to retract those many smears, spin jobs and outright lies, and to formally apologize for publishing them.

This is after all the same Guardian which published the transparently ridiculous and completely invalidated 2018 report that Trump lackey Paul Manafort had met secretly with Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy, not once but multiple times.

Not one shred of evidence has ever been produced to substantiate this claim despite the embassy being one of the most heavily surveilled buildings on the planet at the time, and the Robert Mueller investigation, whose expansive scope would obviously have included such meetings, reported absolutely nothing to corroborate it. It was a bogus story which all accused parties have forcefully denied and no serious person believes is true, yet to this day it still sits on The Guardian’s website without retraction of any kind.

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US Officials Concern Troll About World Press Freedoms While Assaulting Them

I will never get used to living in a world where our rulers will openly imprison a journalist for telling the truth and then self-righteously pontificate about the need to stop authoritarian regimes from persecuting journalists.

Just today US State Department spokesman and CIA veteran Ned Price tweeted disapprovingly about the Kyrgyz Republic’s decision to deport investigative journalist Bolot Temirov to Russia, where press freedom groups are concerned that the Russian citizen could face conscription to fight in Ukraine.

“Dismayed by the decision to deport journalist Bolot Temirov from the Kyrgyz Republic,” said Price. “Journalists should never be punished for doing their job. The Kyrgyz Republic has been known for its vibrant civil society — attempts to stifle freedom of expression stain that reputation.”

This would be an entirely reasonable statement for anyone else to make. If you said it or I said it, it would be completely legitimate. But when Ned says it, it is illegitimate.

This is after all the same government that is working to extradite an Australian journalist from the United Kingdom with the goal of imprisoning him for up to 175 years for exposing US war crimes. Price says “Journalists should never be punished for doing their job,” but that is precisely what the government he represents is doing to Julian Assange, who has already spent three and a half years in Belmarsh Prison awaiting US extradition shenanigans. This is in top of the seven years he spent fighting extradition from the Ecuadorian embassy in London under what a UN panel ruled was arbitrary detention.

A UN special rapporteur on torture determined that Assange has been subjected to psychological torture by the allied governments which have conspired to imprison him. Scores of doctors have determined that his persecution is resulting in dangerous medical neglect. Yet he is being pulled toward the notoriously draconian prison systems of the most powerful government in the world, where he will face a rigged trial where a defense of publishing in the public interest will not be permitted.

All to establish a legal precedent that will allow the most powerful empire that has ever existed to extradite journalists from anywhere in the world for exposing inconvenient truths about it. But sure, Ned, “Journalists should never be punished for doing their job.”

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LAPD officer who died in training was targeted because he was about to blow the whistle on four other cops he was investigating for gang rape, lawyer claims: At least one of them was present when he was injured

LAPD officer Houston Tipping who died during police training was targeted because he was investigating fellow cops for an alleged gang rape, his lawyer has claimed.

The 32-year-old suffered a fatal spinal cord injury after he fell down while holding another officer in a ‘bear hug’ grappling exercise on May 26 at the Police Academy in what a coroner ruled was an accident.

But Brad Gage, the attorney for Tipping’s mother Shirley Huffman, has made the bombshell claims that the officer was a whistleblower in an assault case that involved four other officers 10 months before his death.

Tipping wrote a report on the alleged assault and one of the cops said to be involved was present when he died, Gage said.

The department said at the time that Tipping, a five year veteran of the LAPD who also served as a bike instructor in the City of Angels, was injured while ‘grappling’ with another officer and referred to his death as a ‘horrible accident.’  

But in her lawsuit, Huffman alleges he was ‘repeatedly struck in the head severely enough that he bled’ during the training activity.

An autopsy found Tipping suffered broken ribs that suggested the use of a LUCAS device, an automatic CPR machine, suggesting there were attempts to revive him.

Bu Gage said: ‘The problem with that is other medical reports show the LUCAS device was never used.’

He has also raised questions as to why no security footage was available.

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Snowden Didn’t “Flee to Russia”: Obama Trapped Him There

When Russian President Vladimir Putin granted citizenship to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden on Monday, the news revived a long-simmering debate about the propriety of his revelations of U.S. government secrets. At the same time, it prompted reiterations of a widely-embraced falsehood: that Snowden “fled to Russia.”

The disinformation-trafficking wasn’t limited to random people on social media. Among others, The New York Times, The Guardian, ABC, Christian Science Monitor and Canada’s CBC all asserted in the past week that Snowden “fled to Russia” in 2013 after revealing that the United States government had created a mass surveillance regime targeting its own citizens, in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment.

What many people don’t realize — and what some people both inside the government and out of it purposefully ignore — is that Snowden wasn’t traveling to Russia, but merely through it.

When he left Hong Kong after meeting with journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras and turning over hundreds of thousands of stolen files, Snowden’s ultimate destination was Quito, Ecuador.

It’s important to note that Snowden says that, before leaving, he destroyed his cryptographic keys that provided him access to the files, and didn’t bring any copies of the files with him.

At the time, the Ecuadoran government was providing political asylum to Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange at the country’s London consulate, and Snowden hoped Ecuador would provide him asylum as well.

Snowden’s itinerary was arranged such that he wouldn’t land in countries that would extradite him to the United States. Nor would he cross U.S. airspace along the way. He was to make four flights in all, taking him from Hong Kong to Moscow, then Havana, Cuba; Caracas, Venezuela and finally Quito.

However, upon arriving in Moscow, Snowden was escorted by Russian security officials to an airport conference room, where they informed him that, while he was flying to Moscow, the Obama administration had invalidated his passport.

He’d spend the next 40 days at the Sheremetyevo airport, during which he applied to 27 countries for political asylum. “Not a single one of them was willing to stand up to American pressure,” Snowden wrote in his memoir, Permanent Record, “with some countries refusing outright, and others declaring they were unable to even consider my request until I arrived in their territory — a feat that was impossible.”

Seemingly tired of the spectacle, Putin granted Snowden asylum, and he’s been in Russia ever since. The essential point, however, is that Snowden is in Russia because the Obama administration deliberately trapped him there.

In 2013 and ever since, rabid Snowden detractors have failed to acknowledge how that move by the Obama White House belied its own assertions that Snowden was a traitor who traveled to Moscow with highly valuable intelligence information and was at high risk of turning it over to the Russian government.

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