Richard,
My position is that WikkiLeaks is a legitimate and useful journalistic
enterprise. The people wishing to close it down, wish to control the
information available to the public in the interest of power and money. If they
are permitted to do so, all real journalism will be eliminated.
Julian Assenge, as an individual, is a difficult person with narcicistic
aspects to his personality. As such, he has alienated many people. This, in the
end, may hurt the cause of open and free journalism.
Some supporters of open and free journalism are so devoted to the cause, that
they are blind to Julian's faults and therefore, refuse to criticize him when
he does things that are unwise and may hurt others.
It is important to differentiate between criticism of Assenge's personal
shortcomings from criticism of the work he has done.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of R. E. Driscoll Sr
Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2018 4:50 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: carjar82@xxxxxxxxx; Miram Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Julian Assange Went After Former Ally, Barrett
Brown. It Backfired Epically.
Carl/Miriam:
Julian and his ally have found their political bed uncomfortable.
Tsk! Tsk!
Richard
Sent from my iPhone
On Aug 14, 2018, at 12:05 PM, Carl Jarvis <carjar82@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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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