Yes. I heard Amy Goodman's interview, and thought that Julian Assenge
was doing himself no favors. But he is what he is, and whether he
likes it or not, the issues are bigger than even Julian Assenge.
I just hope we can accept that and stay focused.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/14/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Yes, but my problem is that Barret Brown is also a victim of the state and
that I know, having listened to Julian Assenge many times in many
interviews, that he is self important and a bit narcicistic, to say the
least. So I can imagine him taking revenge on people whom he defines as
enemies, just as our narcicist in chief does. That does not mean that I side
with his enemies. But I have been saying all along, that Assenge is a
complex character, to say the least, and his personality issues do muddy the
waters. In the last interview that I heard Amy Goodman do with him, she was
questioning him about the reasons for his support of the Catalonian
separatists and instead of explaining his reasons, he gave a curt, rude
answer. It was a peak into his personal authoritarianism.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2018 10:55 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Julian Assange Went After Former Ally,
Barrett Brown. It Backfired Epically.
I remember the Reagan attack on the Air Traffic Controllers Union.
The American Empire Ruling Class had a goal of dismantling unions. So they
turned their propaganda machine to dividing Labor Unions, and encouraged
them to turn on one another. I clearly remember friends who were members of
unions, denouncing the Air Traffic Controllers as being too greedy in their
demands. The feeling by those union members earning lower wages, that the
Controllers were making unrealistic demands. Through the years of behind
the scenes efforts, Labor Unions had become discredited. Stories of corrupt
union officials, communist infiltration and sellouts to big business had
many union members questioning why they even belonged to a union.
The Empire's Rulers had patiently planted the seed and now, with the help of
many disgruntled union members, were reaping the harvest, the dismantling of
unions.
Today, this same Empire Ruling Class, through their Mass Media, has turned
the fight for Freedom of Speech into a critique of Julian Assange. By the
time he is finally dragged into the Empire's Court, Julian Assange's few
remaining supporters will be edging toward the exits.
And just who will be the responsible Party? As Pogo said to Albert, "We
have met the enemy and they are us."
Carl Jarvis
On 8/14/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Julian Assange Went After Former Ally, Barrett Brown. It Backfired
Epically.
By Spencer Ackerman, The Daily Beast
13 August 18
WikiLeaks’ founder tried to retaliate against hacktivist hero Barrett
Brown and prompted a crack-up at a whistleblower protection group,
losing an asset in an extradition clash.
Abotched power play by Julian Assange has led to a split within a key
organization supporting whistleblowers and leaves the WikiLeaks
founder more isolated than ever among his core constituency of radical
transparency activists.
Assange has grown furious at a one-time ally with substantial moral
authority within their movement: the journalist and activist Barrett
Brown.
Since his release from federal prison on trumped-up charges related to
a major corporate hack, Brown been increasingly public in voicing
disgust at Assange’s embrace of Donald Trump and his general comfort
with the nationalist right. That has led Assange, an erstwhile
transparency advocate and whistleblower champion, to retaliate.
“I have been increasingly vocal about my growing distaste for
WikiLeaks in general and Julian Assange in particular, largely due to
his close and ongoing involvement with fascist entities, his outright
lies about his role in the last U.S. election, and his willingness to
have others tell similar lies on his behalf,” Brown told The Daily
Beast. “I have also continued to support his rights against the state
and private organizations that have pursued him from the very
beginning, when his original mission of ethical transparency was still in
play.”
Assange had a lever against Brown. Brown has received financial
backing from the Courage Foundation, a whistleblower protection group.
Courage operates WikiLeaks’ legal defense fund, which is increasingly
important to Assange amid rumors that Ecuador will soon evict Assange
from its London embassy, where he has lived since 2012 following a
since-shuttered rape investigation in Sweden and possible interest in
Assange from U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller. Mueller, as part of
his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, last
week subpoenaed an alleged backchannel between Assange and Trump
consigliere Roger Stone.
While Assange has no formal role on Courage, multiple knowledgeable
sources said he continues to exert informal influence over it. Assange
co-founded what would become the group and was an initial trustee. In
May 2017, Courage formally took on WikiLeaks as a beneficiary.
On Thursday, three Courage trustees aligned with Assange instructed
Courage’s widely respected director, Naomi Colvin, to cut off Brown.
According to a new statement Colvin has posted on Medium, the trustees
explicitly based their reasoning on “‘nasty adversarial remarks’ about
WikiLeaks” Brown has made.
Colvin rejected the retaliation on principle. But they persisted,
instructing her to work out getting rid of Brown expeditiously.
On Sunday, Courage trustee Susan Benn, who came to Courage from the
Julian Assange Defense Fund, informed Brown that Courage will no
longer represent him.
“You have made a number of hostile and denigrating statements about
other Courage beneficiaries who are facing grave legal and personal
risks,” Benn wrote in an email acquired by The Daily Beast. “Courage
expects solidarity and mutual aid from its beneficiaries, especially
when those among you face extreme uncertainty and danger; and Courage
as an organisation cannot afford to be conflicted because of the
conflicting interests of others. Moreover, your own criminal
proceedings have concluded and you were released from prison almost
two years ago.” (Chelsea Manning, it’s worth noting, remains a Courage
beneficiary despite being released from prison in May 2017.)
Brown told The Daily Beast: “I’m afraid I cannot agree with the
stance, presented by the Courage board to me yesterday via a poorly
written email, that I am somehow obligated to not only defend
Assange’s rights, as I’m happy to do, but also to refrain from
speaking out about the problems facing a movement that I risked a
hundred years of prison time in order to defend.”
But the retaliation came with a price for Assange. It prompted a split
within Courage, complete with at least one outraged resignation:
Colvin, the director of the organization. A transition in staff may be
underway, knowledgeable sources said.
The short-term result of Assange’s behavior may be to consolidate
control over Courage. But it has come at the expense of broken ties
with two heavily respected and influential figures within the
hacktivist circles from which Assange emerged. At this point, it
leaves Assange with more solid support from the extreme right and its
media organs than from his original community.
“Courage supports our beneficiaries because they have spoken out, at
great risk to themselves, in order to make the world a better place,”
Colvin wrote in a statement. “I am fundamentally and implacably
opposed to excluding anyone from beneficiary status on the basis of
their political speech, and still more when that comes out of
responding angrily to being baited on Twitter.”
Colvin’s statement anticipates a line of attack she is likely to face
by WikiLeaks’ remaining supporters and hints at the raw emotions
within the transparency community where Assange is concerned.
“In resigning from Courage on a fundamental point of principle, I am
not ‘turning against WikiLeaks’ or ‘abandoning Julian in his hour of
greatest peril,’” Colvin continues in the statement. “I remain
absolutely, unambiguously opposed to the withdrawal of Julian
Assange’s asylum and the prospect of his extradition to the United
States. I do, however, have acute concerns about the way advocacy on this
issue is developing.”
Losing the Courage money won’t be a significant financial blow for Brown.
“Courage, though a fine organization staffed by extraordinary people,
has provided me with something along the lines of $3,500 out of the
total
$14,000 that was donated to me since FreeBB [the Free Barrett Brown
legal-defense fund] was incorporated into that organization,” Brown said.
“Assange and close associates have nonetheless chosen to publicly
imply that I am somehow indebted to Assange for having made me a
beneficiary after I’d already been sentenced.”
But Assange’s allies at Courage, sources said, didn’t try to argue
that Brown no longer needs the money. They instead made it clear they
wanted Brown excommunicated for the sin of criticizing Assange and
WikiLeaks—a move reflecting a willingness to become a cudgel for
Assange, despite Courage’s lofty principles.
Colvin’s departure from Courage is especially ironic for Assange and
speaks to the botched manner in which his allies retaliated against
Brown. Colvin led and recently won a fight to prevent the U.K. from
extraditing the computer scientist and activist Lauri Love to the
United States to face hacking charges. With Assange ostensibly fearing
his own prospective extradition, his desire to silence Brown has cost him
a key legal asset.
The Assange-Brown falling out is simultaneously predictable and
astonishing.
It is predictable because Assange’s ego for years has prompted him to
publicly condemn ally after ally for minute infractions, usually
encouraging a horde of trolls to harass targets and police deviations
from a narrative of glory for WikiLeaks. Last year, as The Daily Beast
first reported, a formerly crucial source of support and funding for
WikiLeaks, the influential Freedom of the Press Foundation, cut ties,
in part because of disillusionment with Assange. As well, Brown’s
extensive, National Magazine Award-winning body of writing
demonstrates an inability to resist subjecting lordly figures like
Assange to abrasive examination and ridicule.
But it is also astonishing considering Brown’s closeness to WikiLeaks.
His willingness, as part of Anonymous, to examine a hack exposing a
corporate plot against Assange preceded the Justice Department’s
malicious, pretextual prosecution that led to Brown doing four years
in federal prison.
“The original FBI investigation into me stemmed directly from my
involvement in defending WikiLeaks from firms like HBGary, Booz Allen
Hamilton, and Palantir, as made clear by the FBI’s own search
warrant,” Brown noted.
Many of Assange’s dwindling original allies have stuck with Assange in
part because of U.S. intelligence’s now-public assessment that
WikiLeaks is a catspaw of Russian intelligence. Mueller, in a recent
indictment of 12 members of Russian military intelligence, alleged
that the Kremlin used an online persona, Guccifer 2.0, to provide
WikiLeaks with thousands of Democratic National Committee emails it
had stolen. WikiLeaks published them on July 22, 2016.
Brown is no fan of the intelligence agencies. Yet he has been
unsparing in his public criticism of his former ally. “WikiLeaks is
bullshit” and “WikiLeaks is over” are two of his recent tweets. An
appearance last month at the hacktivist HOPE conference in New York
featured Brown in conversation with this reporter and is said to have
contributed to Assange’s desire to retaliate.
During that appearance, Brown reflected that back in WikiLeaks’ early
days, “I was very much enthusiastic about WikiLeaks existing. I was
enthusiastic about Assange jumping into the vacuum here and serving in
a leadership role in an effort to enforce transparency on fascist
institutions.” But now, Brown continued, “It’s time for [WikiLeaks] to
pass the baton to something with the moral authority and the capability”
to publish whistleblowers’
exposés of powerful opaque institutions.
“I will always defend Julian Assange against governments. They are not
going after him for his vices, they’re going after him for his
virtues. They’ve been going after him since the very important work
that he did. I was not opposed to that release of the DNC emails
because that is an appropriate thing for a leaking organization to
do,” Brown said.
But Assange, Brown continued, “has collaborated closely with outright
fascists. He has uttered absolute demonstrable falsehoods over and
over again recently… It was difficult for me to come out and have to
criticize WikiLeaks for the first time. I just did four years in
prison largely because I was inspired by WikiLeaks. It wasn’t fun for
me, but it was a necessary thing for me to do if I was to maintain
intellectual honesty, which is all I have.”
Brown’s allies consider the retaliation attempt yet another revealing
moment from WikiLeaks.
Kevin Gallagher, who ran the Free Barrett Brown legal-defense fund for
nearly three years before Courage stepped in, said he was “initially
hesitant” about its involvement. “I’d thought that WikiLeaks was like
an octopus with its tentacles reaching into everything, trying to
capture all of the politicized hacktivist legal cases at that time,”
Gallagher said.
Assange “prefers to surround himself with a cult that washes his feet
and thinks he can do no harm; and therefore finds himself increasingly
isolated due to flexibility of his principles and these devious and
foolish machinations of petty revenge,” Gallagher continued. “That
said, I support and defend WikiLeaks and what they stand for and have
accomplished, as well as their right to publish, and I once admired
and respected Assange. This is not surprising but it’s completely
unwarranted. Julian, we’re sick of your shit, get a grip, man.”
Colvin, in her statement, suggested that Assange’s maneuver may
fatally weaken Courage.
“Building Courage up into a useful organisation has been a major part
of the past four and a half years of my life,” she said. “I still
believe that an organisation that fulfills Courage’s mission would be
valuable to have
around: we might just have to put together a new one.”
Neither Courage nor WikiLeaks responded to The Daily Beast’s requests
for comment.
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