Tag: war on whistleblowers

Boeing whistleblower’s lawyers question whether he committed suicide, call for thorough probe: ‘No one can believe it’

Lawyers for a Boeing whistleblower found dead on the day he was due to testify against the jetliner giant are questioning that he killed himself in a South Carolina parking lot — and calling for an investigation.

“We need more information about what happened to John,” attorneys Robert Turkewitz and Brian Knowles, who represent former Boeing manager John Barnett, said in a statement Tuesday. “The Charleston police need to investigate this fully and accurately and tell the public.

“We didn’t see any indication he would take his own life,” they added. “No one can believe it.”

“No detail can be left unturned.”

Barnett, 62, was due in court for further testimony in a bombshell lawsuit against the company when he was found dead, with the Charleston County coroner ruling the cause as a “self-inflicted” wound.

Barnett was a quality control engineer who worked for the company for more than three decades before he retired in 2017 — and two years later told the BBC that Boeing cut corners by rushing to get its 787 Dreamliner jets off the production line and into service.

Turkewitz and Knowles said he was also “in very good spirits” as he prepared to give a deposition against the company on Monday.

“John was in the midst of a deposition in his whistleblower case, which finally was nearing the end,” the lawyers said. “He was in very good spirits and really looking forward to putting this phase of his life behind him and moving on.”

Charleston police are investigating the circumstances of Barnett’s death.

A statement from the police department said officers had been called to perform a welfare check on Saturday morning and “discovered a male inside a vehicle suffering from a gunshot wound to the head.”

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Boeing whistleblower found dead in US

A former Boeing employee known for raising concerns about the firm’s production standards has been found dead in the US.

John Barnett had worked for Boeing for 32 years, until his retirement in 2017.

In the days before his death, he had been giving evidence in a whistleblower lawsuit against the company.

Boeing said it was saddened to hear of Mr Barnett’s passing. The Charleston County coroner confirmed his death to the BBC on Monday.

It said the 62-year-old had died from a “self-inflicted” wound on 9 March and police were investigating.

Mr Barnett had worked for the US plane giant for 32 years, until his retirement in 2017 on health grounds.

From 2010, he worked as a quality manager at the North Charleston plant making the 787 Dreamliner, a state-of-the-art airliner used mainly on long-haul routes.

In 2019, Mr Barnett told the BBC that under-pressure workers had been deliberately fitting sub-standard parts to aircraft on the production line.

He also said he had uncovered serious problems with oxygen systems, which could mean one in four breathing masks would not work in an emergency.

He said soon after starting work in South Carolina he had become concerned that the push to get new aircraft built meant the assembly process was rushed and safety was compromised, something the company denied.

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Drone Whistleblower Subjected To Harsh Confinement Finally Released From Prison

Drone whistleblower Daniel Hale was released from prison in February after spending 33 months in some of the harshest confinement conditions ever imposed on a person for disclosing classified information to the press.

Hale remains in federal custody but is living in home confinement until July.

Though President Donald Trump’s Justice Department indicted Hale, his case became the first major Espionage Act conviction secured by prosecutors under President Joe Biden.

In an opinion article for Al Jazeera English, Hale marked his freedom by weighing in on the decision by Special Counsel Robert Hur to not recommend charges against Biden for mishandling classified information.

Hale noted the similarities between what he did and what Hur said Biden did and powerfully illustrated the disparate treatment that he survived.

Both Biden and Hale kept classified information “outside of a secure facility” at their homes and offices. Both spoke to a reporter about the information. Both expressed concerns about official United States policy, with Biden objecting to the 2009 “surge” in Afghanistan and Hale objecting to the “consequences” of prolonging the war.

“Biden [was] let off the hook because he did not mean any harm,” Hale wrote. “In contrast, the government’s pre-trial motions in my case argued that I not be allowed to present evidence of what it called my ‘good motives.’”

“Afraid my motives might make me appear too sympathetic to a jury, I—like every other whistleblower before me—was rendered effectively defenseless because of a legal technicality in the way the law is written. Given no other choice, I was forced to plead out to avert a costly, unwinnable trial,” Hale recalled.

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Feds Target Journalist Tim Burke With Law Intended for Hackers

People engaged in journalism frequently acquire information others wish would never see the light of day. This often means gathering tips in violation of workplace rules or through other people’s carelessness. That can result in legal battles and, in the age of technology and cybercrime, in governments coming after the curious with tools crafted for malicious hackers. All this appears to be the case with Tim Burke, who has been targeted with a controversial law by the feds after gathering information through electronic means.

“Federal prosecutors in Florida have obtained a disturbing indictment against well-known journalist Tim Burke,” the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) warned last week. “The indictment could have significant implications for press freedom, not only by putting digital journalists at risk of prosecution but by allowing the government to permanently seize a journalist’s computers.”

Specifically, in the February 15 indictment, federal prosecutors say that Burke “intentionally intercepted, endeavored to intercept, and procured another person to intercept and to endeavor to intercept, the contents of a wire, oral, and electronic communication as it was occurring, by means of a device, namely a computer.”

Burke’s home was raided last year after he distributed intercepted video, including outtakes of the rapper Ye (formerly Kanye West) making antisemitic comments during an interview with Tucker Carlson while the host was still with Fox News. Burke has built a reputation with his very online presence and distinctive style. He has also rubbed some people the wrong way with his reporting and, perhaps, the means by which he acquires material. But the prosecutors going after Burke are also accused of resorting to questionable tactics, including invoking the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, an anti-hacking law.

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Alexei Navalny’s Death and Curious Well-Timed Coincidences

There is propaganda by commission and propaganda by omission, the former often serve to conceal the latter. Timing is crucial.

That the U.S. President Joseph Biden, his British, NATO, Israeli allies, and their corporate media mouthpieces are in need of a major propaganda victory is obvious. They are losing the war in Ukraine, have been condemned throughout the world for the genocide in Gaza, and are ruling over a disintegrating empire. Biden and Netanyahu’s political lives are at serious risk. And so they have just rolled out a full-court propaganda press effort aimed at covering their losses. It should be crystal clear to anyone who can use logic to see the timing involved.

The great French scholar of propaganda and technology, Jacques Ellul, wrote years ago that propaganda “is not the touch of a magic wand. It is based on slow constant impregnation. It creates convictions and compliance through imperceptible influences that are effective only by continuous repetition.”

However, once this groundwork has been laid over time – as it has been with the continuous anti-Russia Putin hysteria and support for Israel’s Zionist policies – it can be intensely ratcheted up in exigent circumstances when the long-serving narrative is in jeopardy, such as it is now.

Once the death in a Russian prison of the Western backed Russian dissident Alexei Navalny was announced on Friday, February 16, 2024, it was immediately followed by a cascade of anti-Russia pronouncements whose aim was to not only continue the demonization of Russia and its President Vladimir Putin but to serve other purposes as well.

With one fell stroke, the calm history lesson about Ukraine, Russia, and U.S./NATO that Putin had just delivered to the world via Tucker Carlson disappeared down the memory hole, as Biden, without any evidence, declared that “Putin and his thugs” and Putin’s “brutality” are responsible for Navalny’s death. This, of course, is a replay of the false charges sans evidence waged against Russia for an earlier poisoning of Navalny, the Skripals (since disappeared by the British government), Alexander Litvinenko, et al.

Shortly after, Zelensky, performing his puppet routine while coincidently appearing at the Munich Security Conference – on Saturday, February 17, a day after Navalny’s death was announced – with Navalny’s then widow, said it was “obvious” that Putin had killed Navalny, while Biden pushed for more money for Ukraine’s doomed war against Russia, a U.S./NATO war created by the U.S. from the start with its aggressive military push to Russia’s borders and its 2015 Ukrainian coup d’état that ousted the pro-Russian leader, setting the stage for Russia’s incursion into Ukraine in February 2022. That Putin told Carlson these obvious facts, while slyly mentioning to Carlson that he understood that Carlson once tried to join the CIA, is now for most people in the West history lost behind the headlines, if it ever were anything more.

All this happened while Russia pushed through Ukraine’s defenses and took the city of Avdeevka, which had long been contested. With each day that passes, it is obvious that Biden’s Ukraine war strategy is that of a desperate politician on the ropes and that Putin has completely outfoxed the American desperados and their NATO European stooges. The MSM prefer to suggest otherwise, that hope is just around the corner if we send billions more dollars and weapons, and if with the help of our British friends, we take the war further into Russian territory and risk a nuclear confrontation. But we are in a propaganda war for the minds of the Western public.

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The Outrageous Persecution of Julian Assange

Today marks the second and final day in what could very well be Julian Assange’s last extradition trial in front of the British High Court. For almost five years now, the United States government has been working to get the Wikileaks founder extradited to the US to face charges that he violated the Espionage Act.

Inspired by Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers back in 1971, Julian Assange founded Wikileaks in 2006. Assange’s vision was to develop an online portal where whistleblowers could submit evidence of corporate or government wrongdoing without needing to identify themselves or risk exposure. Once submitted, teams of volunteers and journalists would parse the documents to determine legitimacy. And, if it was determined to be authentic, publish the material straight to the internet so the public could see for itself.

For the last decade and a half, Wikileaks has broken a number of major stories. Many of the biggest came from the Afghanistan and Iraq War Logs, along with the so-called Diplomatic Cables leak, all published in 2010. The leaked documents revealed that not only had the US government committed numerous war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first decade of the war on terror, but there had been official efforts to cover them up.

The Iraq War Logs also brought many details to light about the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) use of torture. And, as journalist Keven Gosztola writes in his excellent book about Assange’s current case, after President Barack Obama famously refused to prosecute anyone involved or compensate survivors of the program, the Diplomatic Cables revealed that American officials “had meddled in the justice systems of France, Germany, Italy, and Spain to shield CIA agents, US military officers, and Bush administration officials from prosecution” related to the torture program.

In 2016, tens of thousands of emails of senior Democratic officials and higher-ups at the Democratic National Committee were leaked to Wikileaks. The emails contained politically damaging revelations for the Hillary Clinton campaign—such as details about a series of private speeches the candidate gave to Wall Street executives—and even some evidence of outright corruption, like the fact that the Democratic National Committee had been sharing upcoming questions with Clinton before primary debates.

A year later, the organization obliterated any resulting goodwill it might have enjoyed from the Donald Trump White House when it published the so-called Vault 7 documents. The leaks detailed aspects of the CIA’s cyber warfare capabilities—most notably the agency’s ability to monitor and remotely control newer cars, smart TVs, personal computers, web browsers, and most smartphones.

The leaks infuriated CIA director Mike Pompeo. In response, he turned the agency’s sights on Assange, who had been granted asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London five years earlier. The CIA got UC Global, the Spanish company in charge of the embassy’s security, to secretly record Assange, including while he met with his lawyers, and to send the recordings back to the CIA—a scheme the head of the company would later be charged for in Spanish court.

And according to a stunning Yahoo News report by Zach Dorfman, Sean Naylor, and Michael Isikoff, Pompeo’s CIA then “plotted to kidnap the WikiLeaks founder” by getting UC Global employees to “accidentally” leave the embassy door open. And further, “some senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration even discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request ‘sketches’ or ‘options’ for how to assassinate him.” According to depositions from UC Global employees, the preferred plan was to poison the Wikileaks founder.

Evidently, a different approach was chosen. In 2018, the US indicted Assange for conspiring to obtain classified material all the way back in 2010. A year later, Ecuador revoked Assange’s asylum, leading to his April 2019 arrest by London police. The following month, the US requested extradition and added seventeen espionage charges against Assange.

The extradition process has dragged on for almost five years, in large part because of concerns over Assange’s safety in US custody. And based on Dorfman, Naylor, and Isikoff’s reporting, that’s a very reasonable concern.

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Biden Is Overseeing the Silent Death of the First Amendment

In early 2024, a new, grim chapter may be written in the annals of journalistic history. Julian Assange, the publisher of Wikileaks, could board a plane for extradition to the United States, where he faces up to 175 years in prison on espionage charges for the crime of publishing newsworthy information.

The persecution of Assange is clear evidence that the Biden administration is overseeing the silent death of the First Amendment—with global consequences.

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s exposé during the Watergate scandal is seen as a triumph of truth over power. Their investigative reporting led to the downfall of President Nixon, cementing their status as champions of press freedom. However, what if this tale had taken a dark turn, with the journalists prosecuted for espionage and silenced under the guise of national security? While this is mere fiction, Assange’s plight is all too real.

Assange, the standard-bearer of our era’s investigative journalism, awaits extradition in a British cell in Belmarsh Prison, a fate that could stifle the beacon of transparency he represents. At a time when the world grapples with the erosion of press freedom, with journalists imprisoned and killed, Assange’s case raises profound questions about the consequences of challenging power and unveiling uncomfortable realities.

The legacy of WikiLeaks goes beyond exposing government misconduct; it pierces the veil of secrecy shrouding global affairs. The release of Collateral Murder, the haunting camera footage from a 2007 Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad showing the murder of several civilians, including two Reuters journalists, shocked the world. As we’ve seen in the past two months, the killing of civilians and journalists in war continues. In the last two months, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza has killed dozens of journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. On Thursday, human rights groups determined that Israel had deliberately fired on a Reuters journalist in southern Lebanon—a blatant war crime.

The aim of targeting journalists is to keep information where governments want it—under lock and key. That is why Wikileaks is such a threat—because, since its founding, it has fearlessly worked to wrest that information out of the hands of the powerful and put it in the hands of the people.

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JULIAN ASSANGE JUDGE PREVIOUSLY ACTED FOR MI6

One of the two High Court judges who will rule on Julian Assange’s bid to stop his extradition to the US represented the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and the Ministry of Defence, Declassified has found.  

Justice Jeremy Johnson has also been a specially vetted barrister, cleared by the UK authorities to access top secret information.

Johnson will sit with Dame Victoria Sharp, his senior judge, to decide the fate of the WikiLeaks co-founder. If extradited, Assange faces a maximum sentence of 175 years.

His persecution by the US authorities has been at the behest of Washington’s intelligence and security services, with whom the UK has deep relations.

Assange’s journalistic career has been marked by exposing the dirty secrets of the US and UK national security establishments. He now faces a judge who has acted for, and received security clearance from, some of those same state agencies.

As with previous judges who have ruled on Assange’s case, this raises concerns about institutional conflicts of interest.

Exactly how much Johnson has been paid for his work for government departments is not clear. Records show he was paid twice by the Government Legal Department for his services in 2018. The sum was over £55,000. 

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UK steps up war on whistleblower journalism with new National Security Act

Under a repressive new act, British nationals could face prison for undermining London’s national security line. Intended to destroy WikiLeaks and others exposing war crimes, the law is a direct threat to critical national security journalism.

It was the afternoon of May 17 2023 and I had just arrived at London’s Luton Airport. I was on my way to the city of my birth to visit my family. Before landing, the pilot instructed all passengers to have their passports ready for inspection immediately upon disembarking the plane. Just then, I noticed a six-strong squad of stone-faced plainclothes British counter-terror officers waited on the tarmac, intensely studying the identification documents of all travelers.

As soon as the cops identified me, I was ordered to accompany them into the airport terminal without explanation. There, I was introduced to two officials whose names I could not learn, who subsequently referred to each other using nondescript callsigns. I was invited to be digitally strip searched, and subjected to an interrogation in which I had no right to silence, no right to refuse to answer questions, and no right to withhold pin numbers for my digital devices or sim cards. If I asserted any rights to privacy, I faced arrest and up to 48 hours in police custody. 

I chose to comply. And so it was that over the next five hours, I sat with a couple of anonymous counter-terror cops in an airless, windowless, excruciatingly hot back room. They fingerprinted me, took invasive DNA swabs, and probed every conceivable aspect of my private and professional life, friend and family connections, and educational background. They wanted to know why I write, say and think the things I do, the specifics of how I’m paid for my investigative journalism, and to which bank account.

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Tucker Carlson Met with Joe Biden’s Rape Victim Tara Reade and NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden While in Moscow

On February 5th Citizen Free Press noted that Tucker Carlson may also interview Edward Snowden and Biden rape accuser Tara Reade while in Moscow.

Semafor reported on this earlier.

Tucker Carlson has kept a busy agenda in Moscow, meeting with two key American figures living in exile there.

The former Fox News host met for hours Thursday with the NSA leaker Edward Snowden, Semafor has learned. While the former NSA whistleblower was a regular figure in the press in the years after he fled to Russia, he has largely receded from public appearances in recent years, citing the desire for wanted greater privacy for his family.

The Snowden interview was not for Carlson’s video program, but he did tape an interview with Tara Reade, a former junior Senate aide who decades later accused President Joe Biden of sexual assault (an allegation he denied). Reade moved to Russia last year after several years of increasingly speaking out in support of pro-Russian policies. In 2022, the Russian delegation to the United Nations called her to speak in 2022 on “weapons diversion,” and hosted Russia’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations on her YouTube channel. When she made her allegations in 2020, Carlson stood out on the right for his skepticism.

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