Tag: whistleblowers

She told the truth about Wuhan. Now she is near death in a Chinese prison.

China committed one act of barbarity when it prosecuted the citizen journalist Zhang Zhan for her revealing look at Wuhan in the first stages of what became a global pandemic. Ms. Zhang was sentenced in December to four years in prison on the specious charge of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” which China uses to suffocate free speech. Now her health has deteriorated, and relatives say she is near death. China will compound the barbarity unless it sets her free and saves her life.

Ms. Zhang, a former lawyer, made an indelible contribution to our understanding of what happened in Wuhan. Over three months there, she posted 122 YouTube videos, the first of which she titled “My claim for the right of free speech.” When she got to Wuhan on Feb. 1, 2020, she later recalled, “There was not a single soul. It felt as if I stumbled on a movie set right after the shooting was over and everybody has left the set. The world didn’t feel real.” Her videos confirmed chaos inside a hospital. Ordered to stop filming, she moved around the city in February and March, posting what she witnessed.

Her arrest and imprisonment are part of China’s larger coverup. In December 2019, officials in Wuhan attempted to hide information about the outbreak of a new disease; when eight doctors expressed concern about the sickness, they were reprimanded. A second coverup occurred in early January 2020, when top Chinese officials remained silent, although they knew of human transmission of the virus, and informed the public only on Jan. 20. A third coverup has involved their repeated attempts to frustrate investigation into the origins of the pandemic and their campaign to blame it on sources outside China.

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‘Another nail in the coffin of democracy’: Tulsi Gabbard slams Biden administration’s ‘crusade’ against Julian Assange

Former Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has called out the “Biden-Garland administration” for its “vindictive retaliatory crusade against Julian Assange,” warning it was a slippery slope to the demise of American democracy.

“If they succeed in [extraditing Assange], this will be yet another nail in the coffin of democracy here in our country and around the world,” Gabbard warned in a video posted to social media on Thursday. 

The Democratic representative slammed what she referred to as the “increasingly authoritarian Biden-Garland administration,” dodging any mention of Vice President Kamala Harris in favor of Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Gabbard’s dislike of the VP is well known and her debate-stage takedown of Harris’ controversial record as attorney general of California is pointed to by some as the moment the senator’s own presidential campaign went up in flames.

In its continued persecution of Assange, Gabbard declared, the Biden administration was “doubling down on its crusade against our constitutionally protected rights,” specifically those protected by the First Amendment: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press. 

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The Assange Persecution Is Western Savagery At Its Most Transparent

The first day of the US appeal of the Julian Assange extradition case saw grown adults arguing in a court of law that the US government could guarantee that it would not treat the WikiLeaks founder as cruelly as it treats its other prisoners.

I wish I was kidding.

In their write-up on Wednesday’s proceedings, The Dissenter’s Kevin Gosztola and Mohamed Elmaazi report that the prosecution argued that “the High Court should accept the appeal on the basis that the U.S. government offered ‘assurances’ that Assange won’t be subjected to Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) or incarcerated in ADX Florence, a super-maximum prison in Colorado.”

What this means is that in order to overturn the January extradition ruling which judge Vanessa Baraitser denied on the basis that the notoriously draconian US prison system is too cruel to guarantee Assange’s health and safety, the prosecution has established as one of their grounds for appeal the claim that they can offer “assurances” that they would not inflict some of their most brutal measures upon him. These would include the aforementioned Special Administrative Measures, wherein prisoners are so isolated that they effectively disappear off the face of the earth, or sending him to ADX Florence, where all prisoners are kept in solitary confinement 23 hours a day.

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Facebook leaks reveal employees pushed for censorship of conservative news outlets

More reports based on leaked internal Facebook documents are getting published, this time to show that suppression of conservative and alternative media outlets is not happening on the giant platform by accident, but also that this type of bias is creating divisions within the company itself.

The Wall Street Journal reported, based on internal message board discussions that it has seen, that many lower-ranked employees put pressure on their managers to effectively deplatform news organizations like Breitbart, which is considered right-wing.

The message board logs appear to have from the same cache of documents provided earlier by former Facebook employee Frances Haugen, that the WSJ is now reporting about in a series of articles called “Facebook Files.”

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Netflix To Launch WikiLeaks Smear Job Three Days Before Assange Court Date

Netflix will begin streaming a brazen hatchet job on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks for its American subscribers on October 24th, just three days prior to a significant court date in Assange’s fight against extradition from the UK to the United States on October 27th.

“You can stream We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks on Netflix starting Sunday, October 24, 2021, at 12 AM PT / 3 AM ET,” Netflix Schedule reports.

We Steal Secrets was a “documentary” that is now so outdated beyond its 2013 release that one of its central characters, Chelsea Manning, is referred to by a dead name throughout its entirety. Why choose this specific moment to release it?

Well it doesn’t make much sense at all, if the timing wasn’t deliberately geared toward damaging Assange’s reputation in the nation whose government is trying to extradite him for exposing its war crimes. Assange’s October court date was set way back in August and Netflix didn’t announce it had scheduled to begin streaming this film until two weeks ago.

After all, We Steal Secrets was so egregious in its spin that not only did WikiLeaks supporters like World Socialist Website and journalist Jonathan Cook pan it as a smear at the time, but WikiLeaks itself went to the trouble of publishing a line-by-line refutation of the mountains of propaganda distortion heaped on the narrative by filmmaker Alex Gibney.

“The title (‘We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks’) is false,” WikiLeaks writes at the beginning of its response. “It directly implies that WikiLeaks steals secrets. In fact, the statement is made by former CIA/NSA director Michael Hayden in relation to the activities of US government spies, not in relation to WikiLeaks. This an irresponsible libel. Not even critics in the film say that WikiLeaks steals secrets.”

“Gibney’s latest release—We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks—is something else again,” World Socialist Website wrote in 2013. “The 130-minute feature is a political hatchet job against Julian Assange and dovetails with the media and US government campaign against the WikiLeaks web site. Whether Gibney has shifted to the right or simply revealed the fatal limitations of his liberal ‘oppositional’ views is a matter for a separate discussion. In any event, his newest work is an effort at disinformation.”

“The job of a good documentarist is to weigh the available material and then present as honest a record of what it reveals as possible. Anything less is at best polemic, if it sides with those who are silenced and weak, and at worst propaganda, if it sides with those who wield power,” critiqued Jonathan Cook at the time.

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Facebook Whistleblower’s Private Twitter Account Reveals Marxist Sympathies.

Frances Haugen – who went from nobody to testifying on Capitol Hill within a matter of days – has been demanding mass censorship on social media, particularly aimed at those who don’t share her worldview.

But her own behavior on social media may serve to undermine her moral authority on the matter.

A private profile linked to Haugen which appeared in her biography for speaking events such as the 2015 Girl Geek Dinner reveals an even more bizarre side to the former Facebook staffer.  It also contains posts detailing work for her previous employers such as Google and her time attending Harvard Business School.

While the account – “@Frizy” – is currently obscured, an archive of the profile from 2008 and 2009 reveal strange public posts made by Haugen.

Among them, Haugen tells jokes stereotyping “brown men” and mathematics while recounting her airborne attempts at flirting.

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The CIA Plot to Kidnap or Kill Julian Assange in London is a Story that is Being Mistakenly Ignored

Three years ago, on 2 October 2018, a team of Saudi officials murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The purpose of the killing was to silence Khashoggi and to frighten critics of the Saudi regime by showing that it would pursue and punish them as though they were agents of a foreign power.

It was revealed this week that a year before the Khashoggi killing in 2017, the CIA had plotted to kidnap or assassinate Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who had taken refuge five years earlier in the Ecuador embassy in London. A senior US counter-intelligence official said that plans for the forcible rendition of Assange to the US were discussed “at the highest levels” of the Trump administration. The informant was one of more than 30 US officials – eight of whom confirmed details of the abduction proposal – quoted in a 7,500-word investigation by Yahoo News into the CIA campaign against Assange.

The plan was to “break into the embassy, drag [Assange] out and bring him to where we want”, recalled a former intelligence official. Another informant said that he was briefed about a meeting in the spring of 2017 at which President Trump had asked if the CIA could assassinate Assange and provide “options” about how this could be done. Trump has denied that he did so.

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