FREEING JULIAN ASSANGE: PART ONE

We've been so busy sifting through the ashes that too few of us have noticed what's been staring us in the face all along.

Let's change that.

The Big Picture

With millions of words written about Julian Assange, WikiLeaks and its associates, swirling all around us daily, it's easy not to see the wood for the trees.

The first port of call for those defending the world's most at-risk publishing organisation and its staff has been tackling the individual narratives of its oppressors. Focusing on Sweden, or Ecuador, or the US Department Of Justice, the Grand Juries or the United Kingdom and debunking their spin seems a necessary task. But we have to face the reality: Years of arguing til we're blue in the face about the intricacies of all the various aspects of the aforementioned - plenty of which I've engaged in myself - hasn't achieved victory. We aren't better off, or stronger for it. Things are slipping, and slipping fast.

A decade into this battle, it's time to reflect upon the sum total of the parts. We need to acknowledge what has happened not just to Julian - but to his organisation as a whole. We need to examine WikiLeaks at an architectural level, just as its opponents have. In doing so, we see that the desecration of Julian's reputation and the attacks against his work, relationships and his physical person were actually never about him - it was always about his organisation, what it is and what it does, all along.

Sweden and the cases against Julian were only ever a distraction, a red herring. To get a crystal clear picture of the situation we must zoom out to an eagle eye's view.

What that lofty vantage point reveals is an obvious and protracted systematic destabilisation of the key pillars of the organisation. The social decapitation of its most effective members. The undermining of their ability to continue to serve and add value to it.

These are the rotten fruits of the transnational agenda to eradicate WikiLeaks. A state-level, international conspiracy which long pre-dates then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo's declaration of war against WikiLeaks in 2017. His overt threats were merely a cover for covert operations that track back at least as far as 2009.

Those who oppose WikiLeaks are closer to their goal of destroying it than ever before. If we're to turn that tide, we must examine what made WikiLeaks good at its best, find the missing pieces between then and now, and reinstitute them with haste.

What A Strong WikiLeaks Looks Like

The organisation Julian engineered was robust. This is self-evident: it has been able to withstand 10 years of unceasing attacks by state intelligence agencies across multiple jurisdictions. That it has so far survived them is a historic accomplishment.

This is what WikiLeaks in its prime looked like: a publishing wing, an activism wing, and a media/PR wing.

Each of these three pillars were championed by individuals with very public facing roles. Specialists in their field. Taking huge powers head on, and huge risks.

In their competent hands, WikiLeaks was the world's premiere publisher; the pearl of the tech activism sphere; and platformed on major cable news networks, with opinion pieces in major MSM publications. WikiLeaks controlled the narrative; WikiLeaks was always on the front foot; WikiLeaks critics were forced into a defensive posture, always having to respond to whatever WikiLeaks was doing next.

WikiLeaks pulled rabbits out of hats. We always knew to expect the unexpected. Whenever it appeared that the chips were down, they bounced back better than ever before.

It was a golden age and I refer to the three major components of it as the dream team. Quite frankly, they rocked this shit.

The Dream Team

Julian Assange controlled policy, process, publishing and protected sources. He established satellite organisations and was the managing director of the WikiLeaks empire. Jacob Appelbaum went on stages around the world, speaking to hundreds of thousands of people about the value and importance of utilising and supporting WikiLeaks. He was a major conduit to the tech crowd and a constant presence at developer, privacy and journalism conferences. Trevor Fitzgibbon liaised with media bigwigs, musicians and celebrities, recruiting them to the cause and utilising them to enhance WikiLeaks public profile. He managed media relationships, engineered and pushed proactive narratives.

These three men relentlessly championed WikiLeaks.

These three men built the original campaign to save Chelsea Manning.

These three men helped to save Edward Snowden.

These three men all had their public reputations destroyed.

Victims Of Their Success

You don't have to look hard on social media or the web to see how often Julian Assange is described as a serial rapist.

Nor to discover that Jacob Appelbaum is described as a serial rapist too.

And Trevor Fitzgibbon? Yup, also called a serial rapist.

What is the likelihood of all three public figures representing the key pillars of WikiLeaks, conveniently being serial rapists?

In retrospect, it defies logic.

In aggregate, the subterfuge is so obvious as to be ludicrous.

But when the CIA is targeting you there's always more in store.

One rapist, two rapists, three rapists, four.

Rapists! Rapists Everywhere!

When celebrated Icelandic journalist Kristinn Hrafnsson was appointed Editor-in-Chief of WikiLeaks in October 2018, the announcement was lauded across the aisles.

The accolades would be short-lived however, as within a week of his accepting the mantle, he was being smeared as 'a hostile and abusive person toward women', and a 'violent drunk with a history of being physically and emotionally abusive of women'.

The wording of the smear article is as limp as the accusations - 'An air of allegations... He may now face allegations... unable to independently confirm the veracity of these allegations...'

No victims came forward. No charges were filed. No investigation launched. They just threw their mud at the new head of the WikiLeaks publishing pillar and hoped it would stick, as it had with the others.

This is a tactic often applied in social media as well as in print. Other towering figures in activism and whistleblowing have been tarred with the same brush. Matt DeHart had highly questionable child pornography charges manufactured against him. So did the alleged Vault7 whistleblower. Even Edward Snowden has trolls online baselessly attacking him along the same lines, despite there being zero suggestion whatsoever of such thing ever having occurred.

One commenter with a dark sense of humour nailed it perfectly:

Why is this tactic utilised time and time again? Because it works. Because we continue to let it work. Our failure to protect those who put themselves in the firing line on our behalf, sharpens the sword used to cull us.

That Sinking Feeling

In 2016 I wrote a series of articles about Jacob Appelbaum. The more I dug into the rabbit hole, the deeper it went. Linguistic anomalies, smear websites, false accusations, retracted allegations, censorship, collusion, professional malice, jealousy, spurious claims, career and social ladder climbing - it was an ugly picture. Eventually my series totalled five pieces and over 20,000 words.

But I stumbled across something huge, when I was researching the Jake case. I read about someone called Trevor Fitzgibbon from Fitzgibbon Media. While I'd seen the results of his P.R. and advocacy work many times, I'd never known it was him behind it all. It turns out he owned the firm that ran US media and P.R. for WikiLeaks, Chelsea Manning, for Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and The Intercept, and multiple nation states including Venezuela and Ecuador.

In my reading, I learned that six months prior to the branding of Jacob Appelbaum as a serial rapist, Trevor Fitzgibbon had gone through the same thing. It destroyed his P.R. firm, his career, his marriage, his finances and his life. Just as the JakeGate scandal had robbed WikiLeaks of one of its most outspoken and powerful public advocates and organisers, the Fitzgibbon scandal before it had robbed WikiLeaks and the whistleblowers it represents of their most capable media and P.R. liaison.

Because I didn't know Fitzgibbon and had no contact with him, I filed away what I learned about his case in the back of my mind. But I couldn't escape the eerie, disquieting feeling that this was all an echo. An echo of what had been done to Julian.

These last few months I have been investigating the three cases in tandem, overlaying and analysing them. The patterns are impossible to ignore.

• A target engaged in activity that was highly threatening to the global intelligence complex
• Multiple accusers of rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment or sexual misconduct
• Spurious claims that don't qualify as any of the aforementioned
• Retracted claims
• Lack of criminal charges
• Target publicly branded and smeared as a 'serial rapist'
• Massive reputational damage
• Severe impact on the productivity of the target and their ability to perform in their professional capacity

This is a table of my findings:

In each of the three cases, there is material evidence that suggests no rape ever took place.

In Julian's case, one of the women involved submitted a condom that was found to have contained no trace of DNA - either his or hers. She then went on to state publicly that she was not raped. The other complainant told friends she had been 'railroaded by police' and did 'not wish to charge him with anything'.

In Jacob Appelbaum's situation, what turned out to be the sole rape complainant (despite promises by his detractors of the existence of dozens of victims) emailed him after the fact to tell him what a wonderful time she'd had and how she looked forward to coming back to Berlin to visit again. Another supposed victim said that the story told by Appelbaum's accusers about her was factually incorrect and had been used against him without her consent.

In Trevor Fitzgibbon's case, the sole accusation of rape came from a woman who it eventuated had sent him a slew of nude and semi-nude photos before the alleged incident, and then another text message afterwards to congratulate and praise him for his sexual performance. She then immediately thereafter asked him to do a number of professional favours for her and her clients. Her rape claim was investigated by authorities - who after a year-long inquiry, struck them down as baseless and declined to charge him. He subsequently took the evidence of her duplicity to a court, and successfully sued her for defamation. She has now publicly retracted her allegations against him.

Despite all of the above, the mantra of 'there are multiple accusers' continues to be used against all three men. Julian was seen explaining in the Laura Poitras documentary 'Risk' why there being multiple accusers is problematic, and was promptly deemed a 'misogynist' for having dared to utter such a basic observation. He was portrayed as a guilty man plotting counter-narratives against victims to evade justice, instead of an innocent man marvelling at the intricacy of the chains being used to bind him.

In all three cases, spurious claims were made that either barely meet the standard of a sexual crime or simply don't at all. Despite nine years worth of invocations of the word 'rape', and the term 'serial rapist', the accusations against Julian don't amount to rape at all. They are what the Swedish law books describe as 'a lesser rape' and describe activities which are not crimes in most Western countries. In Jacob's case, his accusers saw fit to drag in career disputes, jokes made in bars, a third-party allegation about a simple kiss, and the back-washing of an accuser who failed to disclose when writing about the incident, that after said back-washing, she had in fact decided to have consensual sex with Appelbaum. In Trevor Fitzgibbon's case, the retracted-rape complainant was accompanied to the police station by two other complainants. One claimed that Fitzgibbon had 'hugged her inappropriately.' The other claimed that his hand had brushed her backside during a hug. These complaints were also struck down by the investigating agency.

I've written at length elsewhere about how such spurious claims effectively water down the seriousness of rape. I'll save myself the discomfort of doing so again, other than to say: to those of us who have experienced the violence and trauma of rape, gang rape and serious sexual abuse, it is an unforgivable affront to see such pitiful, shallow complaints, conflated as rape. Those engaging in this behaviour damage the credibility of, and in fact endanger, all genuine rape complainants, and should be deeply ashamed of themselves.

None of the three men - Julian, Jacob or Trevor - have ever been charged with a crime. Nor have they had any civil suits filed against them, even though the evidential barrier is lower. Yet all three continue to be abused by their political opponents, who brand them 'serial rapists'.

This has caused irreparable harm to them and to those close to them. It also materially damaged their careers.

And that's really what this is all about. It was never about them. It was about their professional pursuits: what they are good at doing, what they love doing, who was inconvenienced by them doing it, and who stood to benefit from inhibiting their ability to continue doing it.

The Playbook

The playbook of the intelligence agencies is to divert, control and consume the attention of their targets. Once they can direct your attention, they can control your entire life.

Julian's attention and resources were diverted to trying to defend himself. The Swedish accusations against him were used as a cover to detain him in the UK while secret US grand jury indictments for his publishing activities were prepared. A Swedish researcher I spoke with told me that NGOs that had dared to show support for Julian in 2010 such as Amnesty Sweden, were hounded by state-affiliated detractors who decried them for daring to support a 'rapist', compelling them to alter their positions.

Jacob was made persona non grata within his own community - outcast. Denied his places of refuge, expelled from organisations. I wrote previously of how certain tech activism figures took it upon themselves to lobby conference organisers and hacker organisations around the world to issue public bans of Appelbaum from their events, their member lists and their premises. Many, many organisations caved in to the pressure. In 'Orwell's Swan Song: Free Speech Activists Whitewashing Wikipedia To Silence Dissent' I wrote of Jake's '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'. Prior to Jake's smearing, he had been doing all of that, as well as studying, writing about and making presentations on the NSA drone kill list from the Snowden files.

Trevor had the same experience. Seventy progressive and media organisations signed an open letter declaring that they would never work with him again. This was not a spontaneous synchronicity at work - it was a coordinated effort driven by malignant figures to prevent him from ever being able to work in his sector again. Ultimately, to prevent him from working for WikiLeaks, for Manning, for Snowden, for Ecuador, for Venezuela. To prevent him working for active, high-priority, political targets of the US government. To prevent him working on endeavours like The Snowden Treaty, on which he was collaborating with Glenn Greenwald's husband, Brazilian Senator David Miranda, in negotiation with multiple countries to create a network of states willing to be safe havens for whistleblowers.

'They took me out of the [2016] election cycle, that's what they did' Fitzgibbon told me. The timing of the smears of Appelbaum similarly occurred in the lead-up to the 2016 US Presidential election.

The timing of the rape smears against Julian Assange was similarly suspicious. Events immediately prior to the accusations against him have been all but memory holed. In all the talk about Sweden, it is never mentioned that Julian was already on a Pentagon manhunt list when he traveled to the country.

Revisionist History

The truth about the months prior to Julian being targeted with the 'serial rapist' smear are meticulously detailed in his affidavit on the matter, which is available online.

Below, I paraphrase relevant portions from subsection 3: 'Known intelligence operations prior to travelling to Sweden'.

March 2010: Collateral Murder publishing team subjected to intense physical surveillance

May 2010: Manning arrested

June 2010:

* Pentagon 'conducting an aggressive investigation'
* Prosecutor joining 'Terrorism and National Security Unit' of Eastern District Court of Virginia is involved with the WikiLeaks grand jury
* Pentagon investigators reported to be 'desperately trying to track [Julian] down... would not discuss the methods being used to find Assange, nor would they say if they had information to suggest where he is now'
* Department of Defence spokesperson confirms an ongoing investigation into WikiLeaks involving the Army Criminal Investigation Division and other agencies

July 2010:

* Department of Homeland Security agencies gatecrash the HOPE Conference in New York City trying to find Julian, in whose stead Jacob Appelbaum appeared
* White House Press Secretary calls WikiLeaks 'a very real and potential threat'
* Australians confirmed to be assisting US 'counter-espionage investigation'* Then-FBI Director Mueller engaged in WikiLeaks investigation* Ex CIA and NSA Director Hayden pens an op-ed denouncing WikiLeaks
* Justice Department investigators 'exploring whether Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks could be charged with inducing, or conspiring in, violations of the Espionage Act.'
* While Assange still in the UK prior to visiting Sweden, 'FBI was carrying out operations on UK soil in relation to its investigation into WikiLeaks publishing activities'
* 'Prominent commentators and former White House officials championed extraterritorial measures and the violation of international law 'if necessary''

Early August, pre-accusations:

* 'Former speech writer for President George W. Bush, Marc Thiessen, published a Washington Post article entitled 'WikiLeaks Must Be Stopped.''
* Announcement of an 'anti-WikiLeaks Task Force at the Department of Defence', operating 24 hours a day with 80 staff.
* Brig. General Robert A. Carr 'who runs 'the Pentagon's equivalent to the CIA', the Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), was 'handpicked' by Defense Secretary Robert Gates' to run the Task Force.
* US pressuring allies to prosecute WikiLeaks under their own counter-terrorism laws and to refuse Julian entry into their territories
* Australian government 'publicly entertained the possibility of cancelling [Julian's] passport', again confirmed to be assisting US authorities
* US pressured Switzerland not to grant Julian asylum

11 August 2010: Julian travels to Sweden

13 August 2010: Julian's personal bank cards blocked. Left without any access to funds.

19 August 2010: 'Swedish Security Service (SÄPO) requested information about [Julian] from an Australian intelligence organisation'

20 August 2010: Sweden launches a 'preliminary investigation' into Julian for 'lesser rape'.

In researching this article, I read literally every tweet that had been sent by or about WikiLeaks or Julian Assange for the year of 2010 (no small task). I found that 90% of source links are broken. Countless articles appear to have been obliterated from the Internet. Just as I showed in 'Being Julian Assange' that much of the history of the original WikiLeaks-led support campaign for Chelsea Manning had been disappeared, it appears that much of WikiLeaks early history has been as well.

Julian once said: 'George Orwell said that he who controls the present controls the past and he who controls the past controls the future. This is never more true than with electronic archives... the electronic archive of most major newspapers is not trustable and the same goes with every other organisation. We have seen many, many examples of major newspapers such as The Guardian or The Telegraph pull material from their archive permanently, material that had been published... if you go to the URLs for those stories, you won't see 'this story has been removed'... you will see 'Not found' and if you search for the indexes of the newspapers you will see 'Not found'. Those stories not only have ceased to exist, they have ceased to have ever existed. So the centralisation that is occurring in archive repository means that the censorship is very easy.'

In my research, I also reviewed mountains of related media. A collection of the most pertinent examples are below:

Julian's 22 August 2010 interview with Al Jazeera is a must watch. He says he had received tips prior to the accusations against him to expect something like this could happen to him.

That same day, the spokesperson for the Swedish Prosecution Authority, Karin Rosander, was giving one of the most bizarre interviews I've ever seen. The insane exchange between her and an Al Jazeera news anchor went like this:

AJ Anchor: 'Have you spoken to [Julian]?'
Swedish Spokesperson: 'No'
AJ Anchor: 'Any idea where he is?'
Swedish Spokesperson: 'No'
AJ Anchor: 'Are you looking for him?'
Swedish Spokesperson: 'Not at the moment and the prosecutor in question doesn't know yet whether she wants to interview him or not. She'll be deciding that matter later.'
AJ Anchor: 'Well surely that would be the first step - to try to contact the person at the centre of such an allegation, whether it turns out to be baseless or whether it has some basic in fact - surely the first step is to contact the person who has been accused?
'Swedish Spokesperson: 'I can't give you any details cos it's under investigation.'
AJ Anchor: 'Wouldn't it be logical to try and talk to him?
'Swedish Spokesperson: 'I can't comment on that unfortunately.'
AJ Anchor: 'Do you feel a bit embarrassed by all of this?'
Swedish Spokesperson: 'No not at all, it's not embarrassing.'
AJ Anchor: 'Why not?'
Swedish Spokesperson: 'Because this is normal procedure.'
AJ Anchor: 'It's quite normal to accuse somebody of rape then 2 hours later say, no, it's not the case?'
Swedish Spokesperson: 'Yeah it's quite common that new information gets into a case and we have to revise earlier positions.'

It wouldn't be the last time Sweden revised their position. Some days later, the case they opened then closed would be opened again, by a new prosecutor. Then closed again seven years later, only to recently be opened again. What a farce.

The desperation of the powers that be to separate the accusations against Julian from his publishing work with WikiLeaks was palpable and is evidenced in the wording used by major US news sources when reporting on the situation. A reporter for CBS News, on 1st December 2010, said 'Well, in fact, he's been put on a Wanted List in connection with a case of alleged sexual assault in Sweden. The prosecutors simply want to question him, no charges have been laid. And it has nothing at all to do with the thousands of documents leaked by WikiLeaks over the last few days.' [Emphasis added]

In stark contrast to this, Mark Stephens, Julian's UK lawyer, told the ABC on December 7th 2010: 'I think there's an attempt to criminalise Julian Assange and I think that's what we're seeing here. And it's a traditional method of the black arts and the dark operatives - to criminalise somebody. And obviously when they're fighting it they're distracted from their main activities.'

On December 11th, 2010 Julian appears on Larry King Live alongside Daniel Ellsberg. Julian wants to talk about the tens of thousands of civilian deaths uncovered by WikiLeaks, but Larry just wants to talk about the rape accusations. Ellsberg says: 'The so-called plumbers were looking for information with which to blackmail me into silence and I'm sure that kind of operation is going on now to try to - quote - neutralise - to use the Pentagon or the White House word, for the bearer of these messages...'

To Ellsberg and other seasoned targets of the US government, what was being done to Julian was plain as day. Yet all too soon, the allegations against him would be wielded not just as a tool to smear him, but as a wedge to attempt to divide him from his own organisation - WikiLeaks.

The Double-Edged Sword

It's a refrain we've heard often from Julian's critics - that the allegations against him, and he himself, should be separated from the support base for WikiLeaks.

http://bit.ly/g9JVXN Lets separate support for wikileaks from support for Assange - and his rape trial. - :- (@subzerochi) December 29, 2010

This agenda has three effects: firstly, it upholds the fantasy that Julian wasn't targeted for his work with WikiLeaks when he clearly was. Secondly, it pressures WikiLeaks to divorce itself from Julian, it's founder, thereby agitating internal conflicts within the organisation itself, splitting it between those who understand that Julian was being scapegoated and were loyal to him, and those who would rather put their heads in the sand in the hopes of somehow salvaging the organisation from being tarnished by the association with something as hideous and provocative as the words 'serial rape'. But thirdly, and as I have no doubt the engineers of this narrative were fully aware - it is no more possible to divorce Julian from WikiLeaks in the public mind, than it was possible to divorce Kim Dotcom from the Internet Party in 2014, when this precise same tactic was used against him and it. Kim Dotcom is the founder, visionary and creative genius behind the Internet Party. Yet his 2014 election campaign staff were infected with this exact same insidious narrative: 'We have to separate Kim Dotcom from Internet Party in the public mind in order not to associate ourselves with the charges against him.'s They then spent half a year trying to do so and failing miserably, because in the public's mind, Kim Dotcom was the Internet Party, just as the public quite rightly will never be able to be convinced that WikiLeaks isn't Julian Assange.

The correct tack to take would have been for WikiLeaks to come out off the bat and say strongly: 'Our publisher is being persecuted because of his work with us. We stand by him unequivocally.' Eventually, they did exactly that, but it took a lot of drama, and the departure of a few either gullible, faint-hearted or malignant people, to get there.

Take Back The Tried And True And Never Let Go

Jacob Appelbaum used to say that he was a proud member of the cast-iron club - an NSA term William Binney and he once had a public discussion about. It means those who have raised their head above the parapet sufficiently that they are going to be targeted and spied on by the intelligence agencies forever more, unceasingly.

I think of the cast-iron club a little differently. I think of it as those who have had everything that can be thrown at them, thrown at them; who have paid massive prices, and yet still continue to sacrifice, still continue to speak, still remain active. Still remain spiritually alive.

One of the few differences in Julian, Jacob and Trevor's cases, was the way they responded to what happened to them.

Indomitable, Julian refused to let being smeared worldwide as a 'serial rapist', stop him doing what he did best. Although what he's had to endure commandeered his attention, sapped his resources, and has ultimately come at a severe physical and mental price, so long as he was and is able to speak, to whatever extent he could or can, he never stopped speaking.

For Jacob it was harder. His social circle, his community, and much of what he held dear, were ripped asunder in 2016, pre-election, (and then likely again post-election). Tor was ripped in half, Chaos Communications Club was ripped in half, using tactics that I will touch upon in more detail at a later date. Berlin was ripped in half. De-platformed, shunned and scorned, he had little choice but to fade from the public eye. Although it is the most common advice to men who find themselves in that situation - apologise, step back, seek therapeutic remedy, take some time out - I personally believe it is the wrong approach.

Because it rewards the agencies who are behind the smears. The snuffing out of voices is why they keep using these tactics time and again. They benefit from it, we lose.

Likewise with Trevor Fitzgibbon. The entire infrastructure he had built with his P.R. company lay in ruins - even rendered into non-existence - the colossal damage to his professional and family life must have seemed insurmountable. It is a miracle that we did not lose any of these men to permanent despondency, mental illness or suicide. But I thank God for it. Because we need them.

We need their voices, their skills, their drive, their commitment, their experience, their loyalty to WikiLeaks and Julian and their advocacy work now more than ever before.

The vacuum left by their absence is undeniable. The damage to WikiLeaks as an organisation is undeniable. Now, at the time of greatest peril to Julian and to his life's work, we need the cast-iron club back in action. We need them redeemed and we need them active.

Only we, the support base, can create the environment for that to occur. We need the truth about what happened to these men, and why, to be spread far and wide. We need to let them know that despite everything they have gone through, they are still loved, welcome and appreciated.

It is my personal hope that if enough voices are brave enough to stop worrying about their own social capital and set aside the implanted fear of being associated with 'serial rapists', embrace the truth of what really occurred, and lend our vocal support to restoring the ability of these men to again publicly pursue their life's work, that they will feel comforted enough to return to their public advocacy.

We need Kristinn Hrafnsson to publish. Publishing is the strongest and most vital thing WikiLeaks could do right now. We need Jacob out there talking to his 100k followers about WikiLeaks again. We need Trevor writing and issuing press releases, responding to media inquiries, devising and pushing narratives and hooking up press opportunities again.

I believe WikiLeaks will be stronger as a result. Further - I believe it would greatly enhance the chance that the organisation will ultimately survive what has befallen it. You don't have to look far to see that sources, whistleblowers, activists and journalists need WikiLeaks not to die. We need it active and strong. We must protect it, as it has protected so many others before.

WikiLeaks saves lives. It has saved the lives of at-risk journalists and whistleblowers. It has revolutionised journalism and source protection. It can only have a hope of continuing to do so, with our unrelenting support.

Sabotage, Threats and Defiance

As I was diligently working to complete this article and prepare it for publishing, I had a long-term close friend come to me in desperation, with what they said were critically important messages to me.

They wanted to talk to me about the content of this article, which I had shared with no one other than a trusted member of the WikiLeaks team and my own self.

They warned me against writing about Trevor Fitzgibbon. They referenced historical tweets from figures in his PR organisation, trying to convince me that Trevor Fitzgibbon was in fact a serial abuser (tweets I had long since examined). They threatened me that if I dared to publish the above content about him, that there would be massive backlash and attacks on me 'in a few weeks' that they wouldn't be able to protect me from.

They said they were coming as an emissary on behalf of someone who was close to Julian and to Jacob. They claimed that Julian wouldn't approve, and that Jacob explicitly did not want to be mentioned in any article about Trevor Fitzgibbon. They said I would be attacked by 'Anons'. They then cited word for word lines from my article to me, even though it was password protected and not available to the public.

I care about this person a lot, but I smelled the rat instantly. The RAT in fact. Yes, the Remote Access Tunnel. Throughout my crafting of this article, I had watched the familiar screen blink of a Remote Access link being established on my computer. For those that don't know what that means, it means that someone was watching my screen in real time, or recording it, as I wrote this piece.

The funny thing about all this modern day spyware is that some of the basic functions are dependent on 90s technology. Remote Access being one of them. To experienced targets who know what they're looking for, it is recognisable, it has its own distinct fingerprint.

Being spied on, and certainly while I craft important and long-awaited articles, is nothing new to me. Nor is having people attempt to hoodwink me, distract me, or sabotage my work.

I reached out to Jacob to see if it was true that he had said he didn't want to be written about in this article alongside my reporting on Trevor Fitzgibbon. He stated that he had never said any such thing, and suggested that it was important that I make note of what had occurred.

I asked my friend to divulge who it was that had compelled them to approach me with this lie about Jacob. He refused to disclose the source. Out of respect, I will not name my friend. But nor will I alter my reporting to suit unknown watchers and spies, or liars who feed me misinformation in an attempt to influence my writing.

So I told my friend that, in explicit terms. That he was being played, and that my reporting was MY reporting, and I sent the following tweet:

To the people obsessing over the idea that they're exposed by my article / named in my article - you aren't. Get over yourselves.

To those sending me proxy threats through my friends - if you want to smear or attack me, you can take a number and get in line. It's a long one. - Suzie Dawson (@Suzi3D) June 7, 2019

I have no doubt that I will suffer major attacks on my reputation and perhaps even my person, this year. I have pending campaigns and actions that I have not announced publicly yet, which will put me on the shit list even worse than I already am from everything I've done to date, or from writing articles like this.

Those who threaten me are messing with the wrong Kiwi.

I fully anticipate pending tabloid exposes and slanted depictions of my past or present relationships; dumpings of the contents of my social media accounts, or the Unity4J Discord channels, of my DM's, audio or video files of my personal life, exposures of my relationships with my children or family, my phone calls, Zoom chats or any other miserable, underhanded, lowlife, intelligence agency-backed smear operation that comes my way. They operate with deniability, so it will appear to be a personal betrayal rather than a state-level attack, but we aren't stupid, and we know full well who will ultimately be behind it, no matter how good their cover or their coordination is.

I fully expect to be meted out in part or in whole, exactly the type of treatment that Trevor, Jacob or Julian have been dished up. I expect more smear articles about me, Wikipedia pages with surreptitious negative edits, accusations that I am a terrible person/friend/mother/activist/political party President, take your pick, or all of the above.

And despite it all I will continue to work. And I will continue to speak. Even if they depict me as the greatest monster known to humankind: I will continue to work, and I will continue to speak.

It is only when we remain impervious to their attacks and prove our resilience to them, that we will undermine their effectiveness.

When we, as viewers, readers and supporters, cease to be hooked in by tabloid narratives, bottom-feeding trolls and Reality TV-style salaciousness, we can finally transcend these methods of the destruction of activists and movements, and start to achieve some real change.

Bob Marley said 'How long shall they kill our prophets, while we stand aside and look?' In this day and age - 'How long shall they call our prophets serial rapists while we stand aside and look?'

When I think of Julian, I think of his work and his contribution, and the significance of it. When I think of Jacob, I think of his work and his contribution, and the significance of it. When I think of Trevor, I think of his work and his contribution, and the significance of it.

That is why they were and are attacked. That is why I have been and will continue to be attacked. Their courageous endeavours are what we all must mimic, or at the very least stubbornly support, so that it's not just a few pariahs brave enough to stand up to Empire. So that it can be all of us.

I have watched every whistleblower and journalist of worth before me be relentlessly persecuted and attacked. Indeed, I've spent many years defending them, debunking the smears at length. I've seen them attacked from every direction and desecrated in every way. Any time that it happens to me, no matter how scurrilous, vicious or humiliating, it is a badge of honour.

I am not scared and I will not be cowed.

To Be Continued...

There will be two more parts to this article. In the second, we are going to talk extensively about WikiLeaks in the context of Trump and Russia. In the third part, I'm going to talk about the movement to free Julian past, present and future, and provide my very own survival guide for activists and organisers jumping into the fray on this, the most important emancipation movement of our generation.

Stay tuned!

Written by Suzie Dawson.
Original link: https://contraspin.co.nz/freeing-julian-assange-part-one/
Link to Part Two: https://contraspin.co.nz/freeing-julian-assange-part-two/

Freeing Julian Assange: Part Two

The myth that became Russiagate was seven years in the making.

In this article we examine just how far back the real conspiracy stretches.

A Lie Too Big To Fail

The public has been led to believe that the 2016 election and the resulting Mueller Report is the definitive evidence that WikiLeaks was somehow in cahoots with Russia, reinforcing the premise that they were in a political alliance with, or favoured, Donald Trump and his Presidential election campaign.

Prominent Russiagate-skeptics have long pointed out the multitude of gaping holes inherent in those theories, including the advocacy group Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) who have produced credible forensic work analysing the 2016 WikiLeaks releases, that resoundingly debunks official claims.

In the course of researching this article, I stumbled across a major discovery that augments that: the false notion of WikiLeaks being a front for Russian intelligence isn't new - it has been pushed by media since 2009.

It turns out the circulation of the WikiLeaks-Russia myth was a tried and true diversionary smear tactic that was simply regurgitated in 2016.

Julian Assange believed that UK intelligence agencies were behind the pushing of that narrative, and he was publicly stating so at the end of last decade.

He wouldn't make such claims lightly, and other emerging facts support his suspicion.

A Walk Down History Lane

Julian's old stomping ground, the Chaos Communications Club in Germany, holds annual hacker conferences in late December, at which Julian had made several consecutive years of rousing appearances. You can see his 2008 appearance here. You can see his 2009 appearance here.

By December 2010, only the (fired) WikiLeaks defector Daniel Domscheit-Berg appeared, ostensibly to promote IMMI, the Icelandic media initiative on which WikiLeaks had collaborated with then-Icelandic Pirate Party's Birgitta Jonsdottir and others. However he used his appearance to make blithe disparagements of Julian, pushing the message that support for WikiLeaks and support for Julian shouldn't be one and the same thing, and to promote his own WikiLeaks-competitor initiative OpenLeaks, (which spectacularly imploded, failing to ever get off the ground).

One of the most interesting pieces of viewing I stumbled across was a short clip from the Q+A at the end of Julian's 2009 CCC appearance. In it, he was asked about the WikiLeaks releases that spiralled into the famous UK scandal known as Climategate. His answer stunned me, and made concrete something I've known for years, but which is the opposite of the narrative advanced about WikiLeaks in media.

Russiagate started in 2009 and was cooked up by the same malignant intelligence agencies whose activities Julian has consistently exposed.

Trump, Climate Change and Russia Russia Russia

WikiLeaks' November 21, 2009 release of the Climatic Research Unit's emails, data and models, sourced from a database leaked on the internet containing a major UK university climate research project dating back to 1996, caused a huge stir.

Initial reporting on its contents contained claims of scientists manipulating research findings and methodologies, conspiring together to alter conclusions and generally behaving unethically.

While disputed by the scientists involved, who said their communications were being taken out of context, and by the findings of myriad official investigations into the matter, the release was largely viewed by the climate change skeptic community as validating their skepticism and their own existence. By critics, WikiLeaks was depicted as having taken an anti-climate change position by publishing the cache at all.

This is the earliest case in which I'm aware of the fact of WikiLeaks having published leaked documents, being extrapolated by observers into the assumption that WikiLeaks was taking a political position on one side or the other, of an issue.

In an attempt to quell what was becoming a global uproar, corporate media around the world, led by UK media, turned ClimateGate into an opportunity to advance their own geopolitical interests: in chorus, they depicted the WikiLeaks release as being both perpetrated by, and for the benefit of, Russia.

'The UK papers, which have close involvement with British intelligence - lots of journalists have come out and said that they have secret briefings from British intelligence and that they do each other favours etcetera etcetera - said that we received this stuff from the FSB. Just 3 days before the Copenhagen conference they said this - so my opinion is that probably, not certainly, maybe the papers did it by themselves, but probably UK intelligence tried to frame us as being a conduit for the FSB because they didn't like the truth of what was in those emails.' — Julian Assange, 2009 [emphasis added]

The only 'evidence' cited by UK media to support the Russia-did-it theory was that the files had been uploaded to a Russian server in the city of Tomsk.

An academic paper by Dr Athina Karatgozianni for the University of Hull, UK entitled 'Blame It On The Russians: tracking the portrayal of Russian hackers during cyber conflict incidents', is worth quoting from at length. It states:

Russian hackers were blamed by dozens of outlets for the Climategate hack, because that was consistent with global media coverage of cyber crime incidents which portrayed Russians as highly powerful hackers responsible for many hacking incidents.

This narrative also was congruent with the new Cold War rhetoric that consistently takes issue with Russia acting on its geopolitical interests...

[Climategate] was consistently attributed to Russia by the global media. This attribution became particularly clear after several key figures, such as Professor Jean-Pascal Ypersele, the vice chairman of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, supported the Russian hackers scenario. Here are some typical examples of the narratives that followed:

'Russian hackers illegally obtained 10 years of e-mails between the world's top climate change scientists' (Kolasinski 4 December 2009);
'The British media and some U.N. scientists have suggested that the Russian secret service, the FSB, was complicit in the theft' (Snapple 7 January 2010);
'The guiding hand behind the leaks, the allegation went, was that of the Russian secret services' (Walker 7 December 2009);
'Russia, a major oil exporter, may be trying to undermine calls to reduce carbon emissions' (Telegraph 6 December 2009);
'This is not the first time Russian hackers have created global Internet disarray' (MacNicol 7 December 2009);
'Russian computer hackers are suspected of being behind the stolen e-mails' (McCarthy and Owen 6 December 2009).

A typical coverage in the Times by Tony Halpin sums all the reasons why Russian hackers and Russia were immediately implicated: Russia's desire to discredit the summit, poor talented but unemployed hackers, the RBN and the use of patriotic hackers by the FSB. All these were connected together, fitting the overall move to blame Russian hackers - a move already built up by the global media (Halpin 7 December 2009).' — Dr Athina Karatgozianni

According to Dr Karatgozianni, 'In fact, the files were originally uploaded in Turkish and Saudi Arabian servers before Tomsk.'

Sure enough, Saudi Arabia came down on the side of the climate change skeptics, in the debate over the release, raising it as an issue at the Copenhagen climate science summit days after the publishing. Yet their interests often escaped the notice of UK and global media's reporting on the issue. As far as media were concerned, it was Russia's fault, and WikiLeaks had been used as the tool by which to advance Russian interests.

Dr Karatgozianni argues that the Tomsk server upload was not evidence of Russian involvement at all. In her paper, she writes:

'Since hackers used open proxies to mask their identities, they could have originated from anywhere in the world. And if Russian hackers were indeed involved, leaving the files at Tomsk would be too obvious...; Even if there are indeed individuals from Russia or elsewhere in the post-Soviet space who are engaged in cyber crime, the assumption of Russian guilt in all cases reinforces the older Cold War portrayal of Russians in the Western world...; There is a demonstrated tendency for the global media to look for a Russian hand and geopolitical implications in stories relating to former Soviet countries or countries under Soviet influence in the past.'

The obviousness of the ruse is reminiscent of my own debunking of the 2018 Dutch-Russia hacking scandal. I mercilessly dissected a mainstream story about American intelligence officials who had invoked the supposed existence of security operations by their counterparts from the Netherlands in order to claim slam-dunk evidence of Russian involvement in the hacking of the DNC in the lead-up to the 2016 election.

The claims laundered by media were utterly preposterous - that the hacking of the DNC had occurred in a Moscow University building next door to the Kremlin; that the hackers had coordinated via cellphone text messages; that they had been filmed on security cameras. Proponents of the hoax (unnamed, anonymous intelligence officials cited in Western corporate media reporting) claimed to be in possession of pictures and video footage of the hacking - yet none of this evidence was ever released to the public.

My article went viral in the Netherlands and across Europe, outperforming mainstream media articles, drawing the attention of the 'Alliance for Securing Democracy' aka Hamilton68 (a Western intelligence-backed think tank). Predictably, they blamed the popularity of my article on 'Russian trolls'.

Because blaming Russia appears to be the extent of their creativity, when their psyops are blown, and despite the best efforts of their censors, the public is accessing the truth.

My reporting was heavily contextualised by findings made from the Snowden files. It turns out that the Snowden files are also instructive regarding the issues of intelligence agencies' monitoring of officials involved in climate change diplomacy and negotiations.

Including the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Summit.

(Link: Snowden NSA files reveal US spied on diplomats at UN climate summit)

Climate Change-focused news and opinion websites (yes, there is a bunch of them) such as the above, picked up straight away on the significance of the spying.

'Documents from whistleblower reveal extensive intelligence operation at 2009 COP15 meeting in Danish capital' read Climate Change News. Reporter Ed King quoted Meena Raman, 'a negotiations expert from the Malaysian based Third World Network': ''The UN climate talks are supposed to be about building trust - that's been under threat for years because of the US's backward position on climate action', she said.'

As is so often the case with spying, it wasn't just passive electronic surveillance - it included the use of human intelligence spies. The article references documents from WikiLeaks' 2010 CableGate release:

'A few diplomats have told RTCC they believed most rooms at the 2010 Tianjin talks in China were bugged. Another talked of 'honey traps' laid for influential envoys, with one delegate reportedly losing their official phone as a consequence. The Snowden documents are not the first to identify UN climate summits as a bed of intrigue and dirty tricks. In 2010 US diplomatic cables released by the Wikileaks site detailed how the US launched a secret diplomatic offensive to ensure the Copenhagen Accord was agreed. This included financial assistance to developing countries in return for support, as well as threats to those who were pushing for a stronger and more comprehensive agreement.'

Honey pots. For climate scientists and tariff negotiators. Takes the shine off the whole James Bond image doesn't it.

But back in 2009, other factions ostensibly of the climate change debate community, but less favourable to WikiLeaks, were putting their two cents in.

Their version of events can be summarised as follows:

1. That WikiLeaks release wasn't an exclusive, as the documents had already been available on the web for 4 days prior
2. That WikiLeaks downplayed the UK media Russia-Russia-Russia plot: 'there was brief interest by the UK tabloids in the Russian angle, and an article appeared in the Daily Mail speculating that Russian intelligence officials had hacked the UEA and stolen the emails. But nobody took that line seriously and the story died within 48 hours.'
3. WikiLeaks had political motivations: 'They evidently like leaks that embarrass their political opponents, but in this case they found themselves tagged with a leak that had damaged the side they like; and since it seems to be more about political warfare against governments they dislike than some impartial ideal of transparency and freedom of information, they were stuck scrambling to make up a story about how it really served some nobler purpose.'

WikiLeaks had never claimed the Climategate files were an exclusive (nor were they packaged on its website as an exclusive release, as their exclusives are) and that the files had been available on the web prior was widely reflected in Climategate reporting.

As for it being politically motivated by being on one side or the other - a claim that is consistently and baselessly made against WikiLeaks - well the proof is in the pudding isn't it.

Well, Well, Well, What Do We Have Here

Examining what WikiLeaks does is so much more telling than examining what people say that it does.

Five days after the inauguration of President Trump, guess what WikiLeaks was doing?

Soliciting leaks of data from the Trump administration, in an attempt to preserve endangered information about climate change.

This act was a strong indication that far from sucking up to the Trump administration, WikiLeaks was already agitating it. It also lays waste to those who ten years earlier had been trying to posture WikiLeaks as being in the climate change-denier camp, publishing documents with an agenda to bolster that narrative.

In fact, what WikiLeaks was doing in 2009 was preserving documents it deemed to be important to the public record. In 2017, it was likewise trying to procure and preserve documents it believed were important for the public record. Even though the document sets were on opposing sides of the same debate.

WikiLeaks' ClimateGate publication wasn't about politics: it was about providing a digital safe haven to documents of historical importance.

Outlets recently hostile to WikiLeaks, such as Mother Jones, inadvertently printed some truth:

[WikiLeaks] founder, Julian Assange, told PBS [in 2009] that the university had been trying 'to suppress information from the Freedom of Information Act'.

Unfortunately, the rest of that Mother Jones article tries to paint the ClimateGate publication as being a precursor to Russiagate, but for the wrong reasons. It quotes a former NSA analyst: “If you were a Russian operative [and] pitching influence ops for the DNC, and somebody’s like, ‘Eh, I don’t know about that,’ literally you just turn around and go, ‘Look at how well it worked [with Climategate],'” says Jake Williams, a cybersecurity expert and former analyst at the National Security Agency. “I wouldn’t necessarily say one influenced the other, but certainly it’s good proof that that’s a technique that works.”

It then goes on to repeat an oft-made claim that WikiLeaks had tailored its publication schedule of the Podesta emails, to run interference for bad publicity faced by the Trump campaign: 'And when the Trump campaign was thrown into chaos after the Washington Post unearthed a 2005 video of Trump boasting about grabbing women “by the pussy,” WikiLeaks began publishing the Podesta emails less than an hour later. WikiLeaks then rolled out new batches of emails on a near-daily basis in the month leading up to the election. Once again, the timing was clearly designed for maximum impact.'

Yet we know from WikiLeaks' media partner, Stefania Maurizi, that the WikiLeaks team's internal notification of the pending Podesta publication was made prior to the emergence of the infamous Access Hollywood tape.

The timing wasn't a scheme to help Trump at all; it was coincidental.

Maurizi writes: 'Many media outlets continue to report that the Podesta emails were released only minutes after the Access Hollywood video aired, hinting at some sort of coordination between WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign...; As I worked on the Podesta emails, I do know that their publication was not a last-second decision. I had been alerted the day before, and their staggered release was a choice WikiLeaks made after the organization was harshly criticized by mainstream media for publishing the DNC documents all at once. This time the emails would trickle out to make them easier for the public to digest. But that was criticized too by the U.S. media and the Democrats as an attempt to leave Clinton bleeding a few weeks before the elections.'

The Truth Is One Keyword Search Away

Lies depend on laziness in order to thrive. Think of the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of posts written about WikiLeaks, Trump and Russia since 2016. How many of them told you that WikiLeaks had published 14,531 documents about Donald Trump? Or told you that WikiLeaks have published 660,179 documents about Russia? Not many, if any. Instead you were told 'WikiLeaks never published anything about Trump! WikiLeaks never publishes anything about Russia!'

Members of the public are only one keyword search away on wikileaks.org from finding the truth for themselves: that not only have they been actively deceived, but they've been deceived by journalists who didn't bother to do even the most rudimentary fact-checking on their own claims.

What people often forget in all the Russiagate reporting is that the DNC leaks contained all the opposition research on Trump. That included mountains of information detrimental to his campaign. Far from being spared - he was actually quite exposed by the releases - it's just that too few, especially mainstream reporters, cared to look.

Thanks to WikiLeaks, I was able to study Trump's SuperPAC donors in 2016 - his campaign donations were included in the publications. Thanks to WikiLeaks, I know that ex-Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi rented land in NYC from Donald Trump. I also know from WikiLeaks #GIFiles release that Trump University had a Stratfor Global Intelligence account and was advertising through their private intelligence list.

That's just a few of the tasty morsels in WikiLeaks files about Donald Trump, and I've previously written extensively about the damning information on Russia contained within WikiLeaks publications. WikiLeaks repeatedly cited my work on the topic, so did other great journalists like Caitlin Johnstone, but it has been completely ignored by the mainstream. Why?

Because they don't actually want to investigate Russia. Russia is just a scapegoat. They don't actually want to investigate Trump either. He is just a means of distraction, a spectacle - by which they divide and conquer the American public, and increasingly the global public.

Their real agenda has been to smear WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks, the only publication to meaningfully challenge the supremacy of the intelligence agencies. The powers that be see not Trump, or Russia, but WikiLeaks as their real enemy, and their ultimate target.

Because it is the education of the public and the public's access to true, verified, unvarnished information about the misdeeds and criminal enterprises of the powerful, that scares the elite more than any 8-year Presidential term or foreign adversary, ever will.

Getting Back To The Roots

'All Russiagate Roads Lead Back To London As Evidence Emerges Of Joseph Mifsud's Links To UK Intelligence' wrote Elizabeth Lea Vos in a groundbreaking April 2018 scoop that exposed more wholly the involvement of UK intelligence operatives in Russiagate.

'Did the entire narrative originate with UK intelligence groups in an effort to create the appearance of Russian collusion with the Trump Presidential campaign, much as the Guccifer 2.0 persona was used in the US to discredit WikiLeaks’ publication of the DNC emails?' Vos asked, going on to lay out a multitude of reasons why that appears to be the case.

But it was one line in her reporting that really made my jaw drop. One compelling line, that ties Russiagate to Climategate, and the agenda to depict WikiLeaks as being a Russian front, spanning 2009 to 2016.

Because if Assange was correct as he is wont to be, that UK intelligence was behind the 2009 frame-up of Russia for Climategate, and if Vos is correct as she is now widely accepted to be, that UK intelligence was behind the frame-up of Russia in 2016, there is one name that connects both those events.

Guess who was head of the Russia desk for MI6, the United Kingdom's foreign intelligence service, in 2009?

It was Christopher Steele.

To Be Continued...

There will be one more part to this article. In the third, I'm going to talk about the movement to free Julian past, present and future, and provide my very own survival guide for activists and organisers jumping into the fray on this; the most important emancipation movement of our generation.

Author's note

At the end of the first part of this series, I disclosed what appeared to have been an effort to interfere with my journalism. After the article was published, I was again approached. I was told that their pre-publication regurgitation of whole lines in my article was sourced from 'my document' - a PDF - and suggested that it was leaked by someone from WL. Except no such PDF existed. I hadn't saved my article in a document. And I have since confirmed that no, it wasn't leaked by someone from WL. This entire week I have been subjected to continued technical interference which seemed to be aimed at slowing me down in the release of this second part of my series. No amount of sabotage is going to stop me publishing. Just as I stated previously, no matter what is thrown at me, I will continue to speak and I will continue to write.

Stay tuned!

Written by Suzie Dawson.
Original link: https://contraspin.co.nz/freeing-julian-assange-part-two/
Link to Part One: https://contraspin.co.nz/freeing-julian-assange-part-one/