Tag Archives: WikiLeaks

Russiagate: The Miserable Truth

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in Washington, DC on April 14, 2004. Robert Mueller named special prosecutor for Russia probe, Washington DC, USA – 17 May 2017 (Rex Features via AP Images)

By Barry Kissin

Source: OpEdNews.com

Introductory Disclaimer: I have never voted Republican for Federal office and I deplore most of what Fox News has to offer. I am currently registered Democrat in order to vote in the Presidential primary for either Bernie Sanders or Tulsi Gabbard.

Going on three years ago, on Nov. 12, 2016, my local newspaper, the Frederick News-Post, published my letter that stated: “Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate. In an effort to deflect attention from the DNC rigging of her primary contest with Bernie Sanders, she resorted to somehow blaming the Russians. This was part of a pathological pattern, whose ultimate purpose was and is to remove the main obstacle (Russia under Putin) to neo-con schemes for global domination.”

We do not want to further demonize Russia (or Iran). This is unwarranted and dangerous to human survival. Its purpose is to aggressively assert American Empire against all limitations and to justify the astronomical sums we spend on war and weapons.

Hillary touted that all of our 17 intelligence agencies concluded with “high confidence” that the Russians meddled in our election for Trump’s benefit. False. The assessor was John Brennan, then spy-in-chief, who put together a secret panel of his choices from FBI, CIA and NSA in order to produce his miserable invention of the who, how and why the Russians did their dastardly meddling.

See Washington Post, June 23, 2017: “CIA Director John Brennan first alerts the White House in early August [2016] that Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered an operation to defeat or at least damage Hillary Clinton and help elect her opponent, Donald Trump” based on what Brennan claimed was some source “deep inside the Russian government that detailed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s direct involvement in a cyber campaign”. Which source had supplied “Putin’s specific instructions on the operation’s audacious objectives”? No evidence has ever been produced backing up any of this.

Enter Mueller, a “deep state” hack if there ever was one. It bears mentioning that Mueller is the grandnephew of Richard Bissel, second in command at the CIA when JFK fired him after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Mueller is married to the granddaughter of General Charles Cabell, third in command at the CIA, also fired by JFK; Mueller’s wife is also a grandniece of Earl Cabell, Mayor of Dallas when JFK was assassinated there, who was recently uncovered to have been a CIA asset. Small world.

Mueller’s career is replete with the production of disinformation and cover-ups. My community, home of Fort Detrick, got a dose of Mueller at work in the Amerithrax investigation. That investigation is the one in which Mueller framed Detrick scientist Bruce Ivins for sending the anthrax letters in order to cover up that the weaponization of the anthrax attack was a unique CIA technology.

On behalf of his current handlers, Mueller sang and danced his way into various indictments, most of which truly had nothing to do with Russiagate, but he couldn’t pull off even trying to nail Trump for collusion.

Of course, this isn’t the end of it. Pathetically, Democrats are pretending that Russiagate was nevertheless worthwhile (thus compounding the stupidity) on the basis that Trump obstructed justice, and also that we now know we have to protect our precious Presidential election from the Russians.

Obstructed what? Obstructed an investigation into the fabricated charge of collusion? Mueller just testified (on July 24) that whatever Trump did, it neither curtailed nor hindered his investigation, which after more than two years could neither find nor manufacture any evidence of collusion.

But now let’s drill down into this mantra of Russian meddling. According to the Mueller report, there were two facets: 1.) hacking of the DNC emails then sourcing to Wikileaks; and 2.) social media campaign. The social media campaign is a joke. The hacking story is more serious.

According to Mueller, it was the Russian company Internet Research Agency (IRA) that on behalf of the Russian government conducted the Facebook campaign. At page 25 of Vol. 1, Mueller informs us that this Russian company purchased 3,500 ads for a total expenditure of $100,000, which I ask you to compare to the $81 million spent on Facebook ads by the Trump and Clinton campaigns.

It’s sillier than that. According to Facebook’s testimony before Congress, most of the ads the IRA purchased were after the election and most said nothing about either Hillary or Trump. But they tended to promote “divisiveness” according to Mueller. Absurd!

We also now have a recently unsealed ruling by the U.S. District Court for D.C. that ordered Mueller to cease and desist from claiming that IRA was acting on behalf of the Kremlin – his linchpin claim — supported by no substantive evidence.

The most credible analyst of the hacking story has been completely (and deliberately) ignored by mainstream media. The implications of his analysis are so unsettling (dangerous) that even most alternative media avoid acknowledging him. But I believe “unsettling” is necessary to the process of waking up from the fairy tales Americans rely on, so I will lay out the truth about the stolen emails. This truth is simple and clear and unsettling.

The “most credible analyst” is named William Binney. He is a 32-year veteran of the NSA who, when he left the NSA in 2001, was the “Technical Leader” for intelligence, the senior technical analyst at the NSA. Binney resigned and blew the whistle when he discovered that his surveillance program was being used to spy on Americans without probable cause. Binney went on to co-found Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) comprised of our smartest and bravest intelligence veterans whose very first effort in Feb., 2003 was to debunk Colin Powell’s UN presentation and to warn against “a war [upon Iraq] for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic.”

The VIPS forensic analysis of the hacking story in all of its painstaking detail can be accessed at ConsortiumNews.com. Here is a takeaway: On July 5, 2016, the intrusion into the DNC emails transferred data at an average speed of 22.7 megabytes per second, a speed that far exceeded the capability of the Internet as of July 2016. The speed of that data transfer corresponds with the speed of copying to a thumb drive (memory stick). Thus, there was no hack via the internet; it was a leak by someone with physical access to a DNC computer or server, most probably an insider.

We know who that insider was. His name, Seth Rich; a 27-year old DNC staffer who supported Bernie Sanders, and who was murdered in Washington, D.C on July 10, 2016. Two gun shots in the back. D.C. police said Rich was the victim of a “random burglary,” but nothing was taken, not his expensive watch, nor his money, nor his credit cards, nor his cell phone.

On August 9, 2016, Julian Assange was interviewed on Dutch TV in a segment available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp7FkLBRpKg Without violating the Wikileaks cardinal rule of never revealing sources, Assange came as close as he could to identifying Seth Rich as the source of the DNC emails. On that same date, Wikileaks offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of Rich’s killer or killers.

William Binney informs us that in response to a FOIA request seeking records of communications between Seth Rich and others including Julian Assange, the NSA revealed that it has 15 documents, 32 pages of relevant records, but that it is all classified.

Next witness, Seymour Hersh. Wikipedia: “Hersh first gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. During the 1970s, Hersh covered Watergate for The New York Times and revealed the clandestine bombing of Cambodia. In 2004, he reported on the US military’s mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. He has won two National Magazine Awards and five George Polk Awards. In 2004, he received the George Orwell Award. More recently, Hersh uncovered that Obama, and Trump in 2017, blamed chemical attacks in Syria on Assad as a pretext for bombing Syria when in fact the chemical attacks were staged by the “rebels” we support.

In Nov. 2016, when Hersh did not realize he was being recorded, the recording became available months later on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwMKFnzLoxQ , here’s what Hersh said: “All I know comes off an FBI report”. Paraphrasing : The D.C. police got a warrant to search Rich’s apartment. They seized his computer and turned it over to the FBI’s cyber unit. What the [FBI] report says is that sometime in late spring/early summer, [Seth Rich] makes contact with Wikileaks. That’s in his computer; [Rich]; had submitted some juicy emails from the DNC. He offered an extensive sample”, and said, “I want money; anyway Wikileaks got access.

Hersh goes on to say: “Brennan’s an a**hole. I’ve known all these people for years. I have somebody on the inside who will go and read a file for me. This person is unbelievably accurate and careful. He’s a very high level guy. It’s a Brennan operation. [Russiagate] was an American disinformation operation.”

Seth Rich had to be eliminated before Russiagate could be perpetrated.

Finally Time for DNC Email Evidence

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By Patrick Lawrence

Source: Consortium News

Three years after the narrative we call Russiagate was framed and incessantly promoted, it crumbles into rubble as we speak. The mini-empire of allegations, presuppositions, fallacious syllogisms, leaps of logic, imagined connections and mis– and disinformation marshaled to support charges of Russian interference in the 2016 elections is more or less a ruin.

The total collapse of the Russiagate orthodoxy now appears within reach — this for the first time since the Democratic National Committee set the narrative in motion after its email servers were compromised during the Trump–Clinton presidential contest. There is a good chance — though this is not a certainty — that Attorney General William Barr’s just-launched investigation will fully expose the numerous charges of Russian intervention as fabrications. Evidence of these fabrications, long available but ignored in a remarkably prevalent case of willful blindness, continues to grow such that it may be difficult to obscure it much longer.

It is now officially acknowledged that there is no credible evidence that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. At this point, the demonstrably bogus assertion that Russian intelligence hacked into the DNC’s email system in mid–2016 is the one remaining feature of the Russiagate orthodoxy that is commonly considered rock solid.

The mythology on this question remains deeply embedded, the absence of any supporting evidence notwithstanding. Press and broadcast reports rarely miss an opportunity to cast Russian responsibility for the DNC email intrusion as a foregone conclusion. But this, too, is a tower built on sand. To put Russiagate decisively in the past now comes to demolishing this last, unsound edifice. The rest is already too discredited for anyone but naïve liberals, wishful-thinking “progressives” and the most committed ideologues to take seriously.
This focuses attention on the evidence — considerable and accumulating — that Russian intelligence agencies, officially charged with intrusion into the DNC’s servers, had nothing to do with it. It is now two years since technically qualified intelligence professionals of long experience reported viaConsortium News that the theft of Democratic Party email in 2016 was neither a hack nor a Russian intelligence operation. In July 2017 Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity presented persuasive evidence that the DNC’s servers had been compromised by someone with direct access to them.

The email messages subsequently posted by WikiLeaks had been pilfered by an insider of unknown identity: This was the conclusion VIPS drew in VIPS50, the group’s report on the mail incident, on the basis of the evidence it had gathered while working with other independent forensic investigators. The “hack,” in short, was not a hack. It was a leak.

A cacophony of objections erupted after Consortium posted VIPS50. Much — vastly too much — has been made of a group of “dissenters” within the VIPS organization who did not endorse the report. But neither these dissenters nor the many others attempting to discredit VIPS50 have succeeded in doing so. No countervailing evidence from any quarter has been presented. Based on continuing research, VIPS subsequently altered some of its initial conclusions, as noted in this space a year ago. But its principal findings stand.

VIPS50 

This puts VIPS50, while still officially excluded from the record, among the most consequential documents to be published since the Russiagate narrative took shape three years ago. If we are to recover from the destructive, divisive nightmare Russiagate has become, VIPS50 will be key to the process. There are indications now that its findings, based on impartially conducted data analysis and forensic science, will soon get the consideration they have deserved from the first. My sources suggest Barr’s office is making use of VIPS report and subsequent findings as it begins its investigation into the genesis of the Russiagate allegations.

Much anticipation preceded the publication in mid–April of the report on Russian interference completed in the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Contrary to prevalent expectations, however, the 448–page document failed to confirm the case for Russiagate and did much to weaken it. Not only did the report conclude that neither President Trump nor anyone in his campaign colluded with Russia as he fought the 2016 election; it also made clear that the special counsel’s office did not undertake a credible investigation of the charge that Russian intelligence hacked the DNC’s mail servers.

Mueller failed to call numerous key witnesses, among them Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder and publisher, and Bill Binney, formerly a technical director at the National Security Agency and one of several technical experts in the VIPS group. He also failed to pursue alternative theories in the email-theft case; a duty of any investigator in Mueller’s position. Only the willfully blind can accept these irregularities as legitimate conduct.

Remarkably enough, Mueller’s investigation appears to have conducted no forensic tests of its own to verify allegations of a Russian hacking operation. It relied instead on the patently faulty findings of Crowdstrike, the disreputable cyber-security firm that was working for the DNC by mid–2016. Critically, the special counsel also appears to have neglected to consult the NSA for evidence pertaining to the DNC incident. Had the intrusion been a hack conducted over the internet, by Russians or anyone else, the agency would have a fully detailed digital record of the operation and the means to trace the intervention to its perpetrators. Why, it is perfectly logical to ask, was such a record not cited prominently in the Mueller report?

Mueller’s testimony before two congressional committees on July 24 was a further blow to the Russiagate thesis. The special counsel came over as a detached, out-of-touch figurehead with a very loose grip on his own investigation and poor knowledge of the report bearing his signature. Soon afterward, even Trump’s adversaries in the Democratic camp began to give up the ghost. “In the hours and days after Mr. Mueller gave his opening statement before the House Judiciary Committee,” wrote Samuel Moyn, a Yale law professor, “it became clear how tenaciously many liberals and progressives are clinging to fantasy.” Moyn’s piece appeared in The New York Times. The headline reads, “The Mueller Fantasy Comes Crashing Down.”

Despite the stunningly anticlimactic outcome of the Mueller report and his subsequent appearance on Capitol Hill — which was intended from the first to be a matter of spectacle rather than substance — new allegations of Russian interference  continue to arrive on front pages and in news broadcasts. The latest came the day after Mueller’s testimony, when the Senate Intelligence Committee reported that Russia intruded into the election systems of all 50 states during the 2016 campaigns. The report offered no supporting evidence, per usual. It was heavily redacted at the request of the relevant intelligence agencies, again per usual.

Question of Evidence

This brings us to the question of evidence. To go back to the initial allegations of Russian interference three years ago, at no point since have any of these commonly accepted charges been accompanied by hard, legally and logically sound evidence to back them up. This astonishing lacuna, while intently papered over in the media, on Capitol Hill, at the Justice Department, in the intelligence apparatus, and among law-enforcement agencies, has rendered the Russiagate orthodoxy vulnerable from the first. It now emerges that the evidence problem is worse than even the most committed critics of the Russiagate narrative had thought.

This came to light this spring, during the pre-trial discovery phase of the case against Roger Stone, the onetime Trump aide charged with obstructing justice and misleading Congress. When Stone’s attorneys requested Crowdstrike’s final report on the DNC email theft, which they said was relevant to his defense, prosecutors returned with the stunning revelation that Crowdstrike, the DNC’s cyber-security firm, never submitted a final report. “The government does not possess the information the defendant seeks,” the Justice Department responded via a court filing.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s failure to take possession of the DNC’s email servers from Crowdstrike after the mid–2016 intrusion, a shocking case of official malfeasance, has long been dismissed as an unimportant detail. We now know that the FBI, the Justice Department and the Mueller investigation relied on nothing more than three Crowdstrike drafts — all of them redacted by Crowdstrike — to build the case for Russia’s culpability in the theft of the DNC’s email.

Not only did the FBI fail to establish a proper chain of evidentiary custody after the incident at the DNC; it is now clear the bureau knows of the email theft only what Crowdstrike chose to tell it. There is no evidence that the FBI asked the NSA for its records of the incident. Nor is there any indication that Crowdstrike has ever given the FBI or prosecutors in the Stone case the data it used to produce its never-completed report. “Crowdstrike appears to have destroyed evidence or is hiding it,” Bill Binney said in a telephone interview.

The corporate media continue to pretend in their press reports and news broadcasts that the official investigation of the DNC email incident was conducted according to the highest standard of legitimacy. Democrats on Capitol Hill, still pursuing their own investigations, never question the validity of the officially constructed case alleging Russia’s responsibility. The revelation of negligence the Stone trial brings to light, which amounts to corruption, could hardly expose this prolonged charade more starkly.

Forensic investigators, meantime, continue to gather evidence supporting the leak-not-hack case made in VIPS50. The gap thus widens between the official story of the DNC mail incident and the case supported by forensic research done by VIPS and other independent investigators working in association with it.

Last February these investigators discovered that email pilfered in 2016 and subsequently conveyed toWikiLeaks had been stored according to a system called File Allocation Table, or FAT. The FAT system time-stamps data according to their last modifications and, because it is less precise than other storage systems, it rounds up time stamps to the next even number. If the FAT system is used to store data, it is a strong indication that the data were stored on a memory key or another such portable device.

In the 35, 816 email messages investigators examined, the FAT system assigned even-numbered time stamps to all of them. Binney, a mathematician by training, puts the chance of this occurring without the use of a portable storage device at 1 in 2 to the 35,816thpower — meaning it is a virtual impossibility.

The FAT numbering pattern detected in the email messages tested does not indicate at what stage or where a portable device was used. It shows only that such a device was used at some point in the handling of the data; a portable device may or may not have been used to execute the initial download. But the presence of the FAT system in the metadata of the emails tested adds another layer of circumstantial evidence supporting the VIPS case that the theft of DNC mail was a leak executed locally via a portable device and not a remote hack conducted through the internet. At the very least, it is an additional line of inquiry the FBI, the intelligence agencies, and the Mueller investigation have left unexamined.

VIPS Dissenters

Among the critics of VIPS50, none has influenced public opinion as much as the dissenters within the group’s membership. The presence of these dissenters has been evident since VIPS50 went through repeated drafts over a period of nearly two weeks. This is a group of honorable, in many cases brave people. But they advanced no coheren objections to the VIPS document prior to its publication, and this remained the case for some time after Consortium News posted it on July 24, 2017. Having begun reporting on VIPS50 shortly after that date, I found — and continue to find — the dissenters’ position heavily inflected with personal animosities and political leanings having no bearing on the validity of the VIPS50 findings.

A number of dissenters signed a contribution to a forum The Nation hosted after the magazine published a piece I wrote on VIPS50 in August 2017. This was the first time the dissenters publicly presented substantive objections to VIPS50, and they focused on the core of the VIPS case. This case continues to rest primarily on the speed at which a mail theft could be executed in mid–2016. The transfer speed, identified by an analysis of metadata found on documents stolen at that time, was considerably faster than the rate possible over the internet at the time of the intrusion, indicating a leak by someone using a portable storage device and with direct access to the DNC’s servers.

The dissenting group took specific issue with these findings. “Data-transfer speeds across networks and the Internet measured in megabits per second (or megabytes per second) can easily achieve rates that greatly exceed the cited reference in the VIPS memo,” the dissidents wrote.

It was at this point the dissenters repeated the failures of the intelligence apparatus and the Mueller investigation: They produced no evidence. There is no indication the dissenters conducted tests to support their assertion on the speed question. The VIPS memo applied scientific method to the DNC mail theft for the first time and was intended as an “evidence to date” document. This marked a transformative advance in how the DNC incident can be understood: The imperative since has been to bring countervailing evidence to the investigative process, which continues. No one —not the dissenters, not the DNC, not the “intelligence community,” not Mueller, not the press — has done so.

The dissenters have been silent since their contribution to The Nation’s forum. Members have declined invitations to work with VIPS50 signatories to develop further the evidence presented in the memo. When I queried a number of dissenters for this commentary, one replied. This person did not address the findings of forensic investigators while reproducing what VIPS50 signatories term the “emotional arguments” that have characterized the dissenters’ response to the memo since the drafting phase two summers ago. These continuing difficulties appear partly to reflect a desire not to be seen defending either Trump or the Russians.

Barr’s Investigation

The NSA, the CIA, the FBI, the Mueller investigation, the press — none has shown the slightest interest in the findings outlined in VIPS50. This can come as no surprise, given the heavy investments all of these entities have made in the Russians-did-it explanation of the DNC email incident. But this omission is nonetheless negligent when one considers the contradicting evidence VIPS and those associated with it continue to amass. A key question now arises: Will the Barr investigation into the genesis of allegations of Russian interference, begun three months ago, transcend this politically inspired ignorance to expose official accounts of the mid–2016 mail theft as fallacies?

The early signs were that Barr’s investigators would at last explode the Russiagate narrative. Trump was unmistakably determined to do so when he urged Barr to “investigate the investigators” last spring. In mid–May Barr appointed John Durham, a federal prosecutor, to direct this effort. Ten days later Trump gave Barr “full and complete authority to declassify information” related to the conduct of the intelligence agencies, the FBI, and the Justice Department.

It was clear very early that Trump was aware of VIPS50 and entertained a lively interest in its findings. In September 2017, two months after Consortium published the memo, he ordered Mike Pompeo, then director of the CIA, to interview Bill Binney, the leading technical expert within the VIPS group. Pompeo did so in October 2017, but by Binney’s account he flinched: Pompeo heard Binney out at the president’s insistence, but he never pursued the forensic findings the former NSA technical director walked him through.

This was an early sign, it is now plain, that even efforts to unearth the truth of the allegations against Russia that emanate from the White House would meet political resistance. Another came last Friday, when Trump was forced to drop John Ratcliffe, a Texas Republican who pledged to support a full investigation of Russiagate, as his nominee to replace Dan Coats as director of national intelligence. While Ratcliffe considered the orthodox Russiagate narrative bogus, Coats was vigorous in his promotion of it.

This makes political will another key question to ask of the Barr investigation: Full exposure of the travesty of Russiagate is almost certainly within Barr’s power to achieve. Will he do so?

Whether Trump will remain consistent in his backing of Barr is another such question. While Trump habitually terms Russiagate “a hoax,” he has also indicated on a number of occasions that his true objective is simply to escape the charge that he colluded with Russians to win the 2016 election. “I never said Russia did not meddle in the election,” Trump tweeted earlier this year. “I said, ‘It may be Russia, or China, or another country or group, or it may be a 400–pound genius sitting in bed and playing with his computer.’ The Russian ‘hoax’ was that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia—it never did!”

A president who slips and slides, an administrative state — the Deep State if you like — thoroughly committed to defending falsified accounts of the mid–2016 intrusions into the DNC’s email servers, a supine press: It is impossible to say when or whether the truth of the events of three years ago will emerge. The evidence is there, sufficient now to conclude the Russigate case. The greatest remaining obstacle is the willful ignorance that incubated the Russiagate narrative and now prolongs it. We reach a point when evidence and more evidence, along with political integrity, are the only effective replies to this cynical, foolish, and costly recalcitrance.

 

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is “Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century” (Yale). Follow him on Twitter @thefloutist. His website is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site. 

Russiagate as Organized Distraction

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By Oliver Boyd-Barrett

Source: Consortium News

For over two years Russiagate has accounted for a substantial proportion of all mainstream U.S. media political journalism and, because U.S. media have significant agenda-setting propulsion, of global media coverage as well. The timing has been catastrophic. The Trump administration has shredded environmental protections,jettisoned nuclear agreements, exacerbated tensions with U.S. rivals and pandered to the rich.

In place of sustained media attention to the end of the human species from global warming, its even more imminent demise in nuclear warfare, or the further evisceration of democratic discourse in a society riven by historically unprecedented wealth inequalities and unbridled capitalistic greed, corporate media suffocate their publics with a puerile narrative of alleged collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.

The Russiagate discourse is profoundly mendacious and hypocritical. It presumes that the U.S. electoral system enjoys a high degree of public trust and security. Nothing could be further from the truth. The U.S. democratic system is deeply entrenched in a dystopian two-party system dominated  by the rich and largely answerable to corporate oligopolies; it is ideologically beholden to the values of extreme capitalism and imperialist domination. Problems with the U.S. electoral system and media are extensive and well documented.

U.S. electoral procedures are profoundly compromised by an Electoral College that detaches votes counted from votes that count. The composition of electoral districts has been gerrymandered to minimize the possibility of electoral surprises. Voting is dependent on easily hackable corporate-manufactured electronic voting systems. Right-wing administrations reach into a tool-box of voter-suppression tactics that run the gamut from minimizing available voting centers and voting machines through to excessive voter identification requirements and the elimination of swathes of the voting lists (e.g. groups such as people who have committed felonies or people whose names are similar to those of felons, or people who have not voted in previous elections). Even the results of campaigns are corrupted when outgoing regimes abuse their remaining weeks in power to push through regulations or legislation that will scuttle the efforts of their successors. Democratic theory presupposes the formal equivalence of voice in the battlefield of ideas. Nothing could be further from the reality of the U.S. “democratic” system in which a small number of powerful interests enjoy ear-splitting megaphonic advantage on the basis of often anonymous “dark” money donations filtered through SuperPacs and their ilk, operating outside the confines of (the somewhat more transparently monitored) electoral campaigns.

Free and Open Exchange of Ideas

Regarding media, democratic theory presupposes a public communications infrastructure that facilitates the free and open exchange of ideas. No such infrastructure exists.  Mainstream media are owned and controlled by a small number of large, multi-media and multi-industrial conglomerates that lie at the very heart of U.S. oligopoly capitalism and much of whose advertising revenue and content is furnished from other conglomerates.

The inability of mainstream media to sustain an information environment that can encompass histories, perspectives and vocabularies that are free of the shackles of U.S. plutocratic self-regard is also well documented. Recent U.S. media coverage of the U.S.-gestated crisis in Venezuela is a case in point.

The much-celebrated revolutionary potential of social media is illusory. The principal suppliers of social media architecture are even more corporatized than their legacy predecessors. They depend not just on corporate advertising but on the sale of big data that they pilfer from users and sell to corporate and political propagandists often for non-transparent AI-assisted micro-targeting during “persuasion” campaigns. Like their legacy counterparts, social media are imbricated within, collaborate with, and are vulnerable to the machinations of the military-industry-surveillance establishment. So-called election meddling across the world has been an outstanding feature of the exploitation of social and legacy media by companies linked to political, defense and intelligence such as – but by no means limited to – the former Cambridge Analytica and its British parent SCL.

Against this backdrop of electoral and media failures, it makes little sense to elevate discussion of and attention to the alleged social media activities of, say, Russia’s Internet Research Agency.

Russian Contacts Deplored

Attention is being directed away from substantial, and substantiated, problems and onto trivial, and unsubstantiated, problems. Moreover, in a climate of manufactured McCarthyite hysteria, Russiagate further presupposes that any communication between a presidential campaign and Russia is in itself deplorable. Even if one were to confine this conversation only to communication between ruling oligarchs of both the U.S. and Russia, however, the opposite would surely be the case. This is not simply because of the benefits that accrue from a broader understanding of the world, identification of shared interests and opportunities, and their promise for peaceful relations. A real politick analysis might advise the insertion of wedges between China and Russia so as to head off the perceived threat to the USA of a hybrid big-power control over a region of the world that has long been considered indispensable for truly global hegemony.

Even if we address Russiagate as a problem worthy of our attention, the evidentiary basis for the major claims is weak.

Former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments and investigations implicated several individuals for activities that in some cases have no connection whatsoever to the 2016 presidential campaign.  In some other instances they appear to have been more about lies and obstructions to his investigation rather than material illegal acts, or amount to charges that are unlikely ever to be contested in a court of law.

The investigation itself is traceable back to two significant but extremely problematic reports made public in January 2017. One was the “Steele dossier” by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele. This is principally of interest for its largely unsupported allegations that in some sense or another Trump was in cahoots with Russia. Steele’s company, Orbis, was commissioned to write the report by Fusion GPS which in turn was contracted by attorneys working for the Democratic National Campaign. Passage of earlier drafts of the Steele report through sources close to British intelligence, and accounts by Trump adviser George Papadopoulos concerning conversations he had concerning possible Russian possession of Clinton emails with a character who may as likely have been a British as a Russian spy, were instrumental in stimulating FBI interest in and spying on the Trump campaign.

There are indirect links between Steele, another former MI6 agent, Pablo Miller (who also worked for Orbis) and Sergei Skripal, a Russian agent who had been recruited as informer to MI6 by Miller and who was the target of an attempted assassination in 2018. This event has occasioned controversial, not to say highly implausible and mischievous British government claims and accusations against Russia.

The  most significant matter raised by a second report, issued by the Intelligence Community Assessment and representing the conclusions of a small team picked from the Director of Intelligence office, CIA, FBI and NSA, was its claim that Russian intelligence was responsible for the hacking of the computer systems of the DNC and its chairman John Podesta in summer 2016 and that the hacked documents had been passed to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. No evidence for this was supplied.

Although the hacking allegations have become largely uncontested articles of faith in the RussiaGate discourse they are significantly reliant on the problematic findings of a small private company hired by the DNC. There is also robust evidence that the documents may have been leaked rather than hacked and by U.S.-based sources. The fact that the documents revealed that the DNC, a supposedly neutral agent in the primary campaign, had in fact been biased in favor of the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, and that Clinton’s private statements to industry were not in keeping with her public positions, has long been obscured in media memory in favor a preferred narrative of Russian villainy.

Who Benefits?

Why then does the Russiagate discourse have so much traction? Who benefits?

Russiagate serves the interest of a (No. 1) corrupted Democratic Party, whose biased and arguably incompetent campaign management lost it the 2016 election, in alliance (No. 2) with powerful factions of the U.S. industrial-military-surveillance establishment that for the past 19 years, through NATO and other malleable international agencies, has sought to undermine Russian President Vladimir Putin’s leadership, dismember Russia and the Russian Federation (undoubtedly for the benefit of Western capital) and, more latterly, further contain China in a perpetual and titanic struggle for the heart of EurAsia.

In so far as Trump had indicated (for whatever reasons) in the course of his campaign that he disagreed with at least some aspects of this long-term strategy, he came to be viewed as unreliable by the U.S. security state.

While serving the immediate purpose of containing Trump, U.S. accusations of Russian meddling in U.S. elections were farcical in the context of a well-chronicled history of U.S. “meddling” in the elections and politics of nations for over 100 years. This meddling across all hemispheres has included the staging of coups, invasions and occupations on false pretext in addition to numerous instances of “color revolution” strategies involving the financing of opposition parties and provoking uprisings, frequently coupled with economic warfare (sanctions).

A further beneficiary (No.3) is the sum of all those interests that favor a narrowing of public expression to a framework supportive of neoliberal imperialism. Paradoxically exploiting the moral panic associated with both Trump’s plaintive wailing about “fake news” whenever mainstream media coverage is critical of him, and social media embarrassment over exposure of their big-data sales to powerful corporate customers, these interests have called for more regulation of, as well as self-censorship by, social media.

Social media responses increasingly involve more restrictive algorithms and what are often partisan “fact-checkers” (illustrated by Facebook financial support for and dependence on the pro-NATO “think tank,” the Atlantic Council). The net impact has been devastating for many information organizations in the arena of social media whose only “sin” is analysis and opinion that runs counter to elite neoliberal propaganda.

The standard justification of such attacks on free expression is to insinuate ties to Russia and/or to terrorism. Given these heavy handed and censorious responses by powerful actors, it would appear perhaps that the RussiaGate narrative is increasingly implausible to many and the only hope now for its proponents is to stifle questioning. These are dark days indeed for democracy.

 

Oliver Boyd-Barrett is professor emeritus at Bowling Green State University. He is author of “RussiaGate and Propaganda: Disinformation in the Age of Social Media” London and New York (Routledge).

The Thought Police Are Coming

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By Chris Hedges

Source: TruthDig

Chris Hedges gave this talk Tuesday, June 11, at an event held in London in support of Julian Assange.

Ask the Iraqi parents of Sabiha Hamed Salih, aged 15, and Ashwaq Hamed Salih, aged 16, who were killed by shrapnel in Baghdad on July 31, 2004, what they think of Julian Assange.

Ask the man and his two young daughters who saw their wife and mother shot to death and were themselves wounded in a car fired upon by U.S. Marines in Fallujah on July 22, 2005, what they think of Julian Assange.

Ask the parents of Huda Haleem, an 18-year-old girl, and Raghad Muhamad Haleem, a 5-year-old boy, shot dead by U.S. soldiers on June 2, 2006, in Iraq’s Diyala province what they think of Julian Assange.

Ask the parents of the 15-year-old boy choked with a wire and then shot to death by U.S. Marines in Ramadi on Aug. 10, 2006, what they think of Julian Assange.

Ask the relatives of Ahmed Salam Mohammad, who was shot dead on Nov. 27, 2006, when U.S. troops attacked a wedding party near Mosul, an attack that also left four wounded, what they think of Julian Assange.

Ask the families of the over one dozen people shot to death with .50-caliber machine guns by bantering U.S. Apache helicopter crews in east Baghdad in July 2007—the crew members can be heard laughing at the “dead bastards” and saying “light ’em up” and “keep shooting, keep shooting”—a massacre that included two journalists for Reuters—Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh—what they think of Julian Assange. Ask the then 10-year-old Sajad Mutashar and his 5-year-old sister, Doaha, both wounded, whose 43-year-old father, Saleh, was shot to death from the air as he attempted to assist one of the wounded men in the Baghdad street what they think of Julian Assange.

There is nothing like the boot of the oppressor on your neck to give you moral clarity.

None of these war crimes, and hundreds more reported to the U.S. military but never investigated, would have been made public without Julian, Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks. That is the role of journalists—to give a voice to those who without us would have no voice, to hold the powerful to account, to give the forgotten and the demonized justice, to speak the truth.

We have watched over the last decade as freedom of the press and legal protection for those who expose government abuses and lies have been obliterated by wholesale government surveillance and the criminalizing of the leaking and, with Julian’s persecution, publication of these secrets. The press has been largely emasculated in the United States. The repeated use of the Espionage Act, especially under the Obama administration, to charge and sentence whistleblowers has shut down our ability to shine a light into the inner workings of power and empire. Governmental officials with a conscience, knowing all of their communications are monitored, captured and stored by intelligence agencies, are too frightened to reach out to reporters. The last line of defense lies with those with the skills that allow them to burrow into the records of the security and surveillance state and with the courage to make them public, such as Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Jeremy Hammond, now serving a 10-year prison term in the United States for hacking into the Texas-based private security firm Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor. The price of resistance is high not only for them, but for those such as Julian willing to publish this information. As Sarah Harrison has pointed out: “This is our data, our information, our history. We must fight to own it.”

Even if Julian were odious, which he is not, even if he carried out a sexual offense, which he did not, even if he was a poor houseguest—a bizarre term for a man trapped in a small room for nearly seven years under house arrest—which he was not, it would make no difference. Julian is not being persecuted for his vices. He is being persecuted for his virtues.

His arrest eviscerates all pretense of the rule of law and the rights of a free press. The illegalities carried by the Ecuadorian, British and U.S. governments in the seizure of Julian two months ago from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London are ominous. They presage a world where the internal workings, abuses, corruption, lies and crimes, especially war crimes, carried out by the global ruling elite will be masked from the public. They presage a world where those with the courage and integrity to expose the misuse of power, no matter what their nationality, will be hunted down around the globe and seized, tortured, subjected to sham trials and given lifetime prison terms. They presage an Orwellian dystopia where journalism is outlawed and replaced with propaganda, trivia, entertainment and indoctrination to make us hate those demonized by the state as our enemies.

The arrest of Julian marks the official beginning of the corporate totalitarianism and constant state surveillance, now far advanced in China, that will soon define our lives. The destruction of all protection of the rule of law, which is what we are witnessing, is essential to establishing an authoritarian or totalitarian state.

The BBC China correspondent Stephen McDonell was locked out of WeChatin China a few days ago after posting photos of the candlelight vigil in Hong Kong marking 30 years since student protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square were gunned down by Chinese soldiers in June 1989.

“Chinese friends started asking on WeChat what the event was?” he wrote. “Why were people gathering? Where was it? That such questions were coming from young professionals here shows the extent to which knowledge of Tiananmen 1989 has been made to disappear in China. I answered a few of them, rather cryptically, then suddenly I was locked out of WeChat.”

In order to get back on WeChat he had to agree that he was responsible for spreading “malicious rumors” and provide what is called a faceprint.

“I was instructed to hold my phone up—to ‘face front camera straight on’—looking directly at the image of a human head. Then told to ‘Read numbers aloud in Mandarin Chinese.’ My voice was captured by the App at the same time it scanned my face.”

Governmental abuse of WeChat, he wrote, “could deliver to the Communist Party a life map of pretty much everybody in this country, citizens and foreigners alike. Capturing the face and voice image of everyone who was suspended for mentioning the Tiananmen crackdown anniversary in recent days would be considered very useful for those who want to monitor anyone who might potentially cause problems.”

This is almost certainly our future, and it is a future that Julian has fought courageously to prevent.

In another sign the noose is tightening, the offices of the Australian Broadcasting Corp., the country’s national broadcaster, were raided by federal police last Wednesday. The raid was carried out because the broadcaster had disclosed detailed accounts of Australian special forces in Afghanistan killing unarmed people, including children. That story was generated, in part, by a leak of hundreds of classified military documents. The police raid and search through raw footage and thousands of files, emails and internal documents appear to be part of a hunt for the source, who will, no doubt, be arrested and imprisoned.

Under what law did Ecuadorian President Lenín Moreno capriciously terminate Julian’s rights of asylum as a political refugee? Under what law did Moreno authorize British police to enter the Ecuadorian Embassy—diplomatically sanctioned sovereign territory—to arrest a nationalized citizen of Ecuador? Under what law did Prime Minister Theresa May order the British police to grab Julian, who has never committed a crime? Under what law did Donald Trump demand the extradition of Julian, who is not a U.S. citizen and whose news organization is not based in the United States?

The psychological torture of Julian—documented by the United Nations special rapporteur on torture and ill treatment, Nils Melzer—mirrors the breaking of the dissident Winston Smith at the end of the novel “1984.” It is said the Gestapo broke bones and the East German Stasi secret police broke souls. Today, we too have refined the cruder forms of torture of the Gestapo. We break souls as well as bodies. It is more effective. This is why Julian, his physical and psychological health in serious decline, has been moved to a prison hospital. We can all be taken to George Orwell’s dreaded Room 101 to be made compliant and harmless. These “special administrative measures”—and you can be sure there are American intelligence operatives here assisting the British in the psychological torture of Julian—have destroyed thousands of detainees in black sites around the globe. These techniques, including prolonged solitary confinement, are the staple form of control in maximum-security prisons in the United States, where the corporate state makes war on its most oppressed and politically astute underclass—African Americans.

There has been a coordinated smear campaign against Julian by our Thought Police, one that is amplified by the very media organizations that published WikiLeaks material. The campaign was detailed in a leaked Pentagon document prepared by the Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch and dated March 8, 2008. The document called for eradicating the “feeling of trust” that is WikiLeaks’ “center of gravity” and destroying Julian’s reputation.

This character assassination was championed by the Democratic Party establishment after WikiLeaks published 70,000 hacked emails copied from the accounts of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. The Podesta emails exposed the donation of millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, two of the major funders of Islamic State, to the Clinton Foundation. It exposed the $657,000 that Goldman Sachs paid to Hillary Clinton to give talks, a sum so large it can only be considered a bribe. It exposed Clinton’s repeated mendacity. She was caught in the emails, for example, telling the financial elites that she wanted “open trade and open borders” and believed Wall Street executives were best positioned to manage the economy, a statement that contradicted her campaign statements. It exposed the Clinton campaign’s efforts to influence the Republican primaries to ensure that Trump was the Republican nominee. It exposed Clinton’s advance knowledge of questions in a primary debate. It exposed Clinton as the principal architect of the war in Libya, a war she believed would burnish her credentials as a presidential candidate. Journalists can argue that this information, like the war logs provided to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning, should have remained hidden, that the public did not have a right to know, but they can’t then call themselves journalists.

WikiLeaks has done more to expose the abuses of power and crimes of the American Empire than any other news organization. In addition to the war logs and the Podesta emails, it made public the hacking tools used by the CIA and the National Security Agency and their interference in foreign elections, including in the French elections. It disclosed the internal conspiracy against British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn by Labour members of Parliament. It intervened to save Snowden from extradition to the United States by helping him flee from Hong Kong to Moscow after he made public the wholesale surveillance of the American public by our intelligence agencies. The Snowden leaks also revealed that Julian was on a U.S. “manhunt target list.”

We must build popular movements to force the British government to halt the extradition and judicial lynching of Julian. We must build popular movements to force the Australian government to intervene on behalf of Julian. We must build popular movements to reclaim democracy and the rule of law. If Julian is extradited and tried, it will create a legal precedent that will terminate the ability of the press, which Donald Trump has attacked as “the enemy of the people,” to hold power accountable. The crimes of war and finance, the persecution of dissidents, minorities and immigrants, the pillaging of the ecosystem and the ruthless impoverishment of working men and women to swell the profits of corporations and consolidate the global oligarchs’ total grip on power will no longer be part of public debate. First Julian. Then us.

 

Australian police chief links media raids to US-led “Five Eyes” spy network

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By Mike Head

Source: WSWS.org

The Australian Federal Police (AFP) called a news conference on Thursday to justify its raids targeting journalists at two media organisations this week.

Police spent seven hours ransacking a News Corp political reporter’s home in Canberra on Tuesday, and eight hours poring over and seizing files at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) Sydney headquarters on Wednesday.

In an extraordinary admission, the AFP’s acting commissioner Neil Gaughan blurted out that the real reason for the raids was to protect the information that the Australian police and intelligence agencies receive from their “Five Eyes” counterparts. Five Eyes is a top-level network of intelligence agencies dominated by the US that also includes Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

“The Australian government, or particularly the Australian enforcement and intelligence communities, rely on secret and top-secret information from our international partners, particularly our Five Eyes partners,” the police chief said. “If we can’t be seen to protect our own internal information, [then] we are concerned that the information flow to us dries up.”

Citing government demands for investigations into leaks of secret information, Gaughan said the AFP received “numerous referrals to us [of leaks] and to be honest we get too many. But the premise of investigating these matters is to ensure the international community knows that we take the leaking of information, sensitive information, seriously.”

In other words, the AFP is under pressure not just from Canberra, but from Washington, to ensure that information, including about criminal actions of governments and its agencies, is kept from public view. This takes place amid the Trump administration’s mounting threats of war against Iran and Venezuela, as well as its escalating confrontation with China.

The AFP search warrants related to leaked documents exposing war crimes perpetrated by the Special Air Service (SAS) in Afghanistan and plans to legalise domestic mass surveillance by the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), which are both central to Five Eyes operations.

Gaughan’s remarkable declaration went virtually unreported throughout the establishment media in Australia and internationally. His admission vindicates the analysis made by the WSWS on Thursday:

“[I]t is inconceivable that the Australian government would have instigated and pursued the investigation of the ABC and Murdoch media journalists without the agreement, if not urging, of Washington. Both the SAS and the ASD surveillance agency are closely integrated into all the wars and war preparations of the US.”

Gaughan’s statement also underscores the warnings made by the WSWS that the persecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for exposing the war crimes, mass spying and regime-change operations of Washington and its allies, including Australia, is setting a precedent for the criminalisation of journalism.

By specifically targeting journalists, as well as whistleblowers, the Australian government is following the lead of the Trump administration. The US has charged Assange, a journalist and publisher, with multiple counts under the Espionage Act, for which he faces life imprisonment.

At his press conference, Gaughan refused to rule out laying charges against News Corp journalist Annika Smethurst or ABC reporters Dan Oakes and Sam Clark for publishing alleged “national security” secrets. Such charges against journalists would be without precedent in Australia since World Wars I and II.

In a pointed warning, Gaughan said “no sector of the community should be immune” from police investigations into alleged law-breaking. Gaughan said the police are probing the “publication” of documents marked “secret” and “top secret,” placing journalists and publishers squarely under threat of prosecutions.

The AFP is investigating breaches of the Crimes Act, which criminalises unauthorised disclosures by public servants, and also contains offences that apply to journalists. Journalists, as well as alleged leakers, can be jailed for up to seven years. Dating back to World War I, the legislation outlaws “receiving” information that “prejudices the security or defence” of Australia.

But, asked what was the harm of revealing wrongdoing by Australian troops or plans to extend spying laws, Gaughan said the substance of the reports was “irrelevant.” The mere disclosure of protected information was a crime. He bluntly stated: “The issue of whether or not the public has the right to know is really not an issue that comes into our investigation process.”

The Crimes Act provisions were recently replaced by even more far-reaching measures embedded in the “foreign interference” legislation that the Liberal-National government pushed through parliament at Washington’s urging late last year, supported by the Labor Party. The maximum penalties were increased to 10 years’ imprisonment. However, the new laws could not be applied to the current cases, because the alleged leaks occurred in July 2017 and April 2018.

Gaughan tried to refute accusations that the AFP was acting at the government’s behest. He denied that the police had waited until after the May 18 federal election to execute warrants and claimed no contact had been made with the government since the AFP informed Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton when the investigations first began.

These claims fly in the face of the facts. The government itself instigated both AFP investigations, and the Labor Party fully supported it in doing so. And Dutton and other government ministers immediately defended the raids. When Prime Minister Scott Morrison was asked at a press conference if he was bothered by police raiding journalists’ homes, he replied: “It never troubles me that our laws are being upheld.”

Above all, as Gaughan himself revealed, the raids were mounted to satisfy the Five Eyes powers, which means the US above all. Successive governments, both Liberal-National and Labor, have committed Australia to be a key partner in this network as part of its military alliance with the United States.

The police raids are part of a global crackdown on freedom of speech, including in the US and other countries, such as France, where governments are taking the Trump administration’s repressive lead.

This assault is targeted directly at the basic right of the working class to know the crimes, war plans and conspiracies of the capitalist ruling elites and the state apparatuses they control. It is being mounted amid growing struggles by workers around the world against soaring social inequality and declining living and working conditions.

The Australian police chief’s open threats highlight the urgency of the worldwide campaign being waged by the WSWS and the Socialist Equality Parties for the defence of Julian Assange and the jailed whistleblower Chelsea Manning. Their plight is a test case in the struggle against the lurch toward war and dictatorial forms of rule.

More Police Raids As War On Journalism Escalates Worldwide

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

The Australian Federal Police have conducted two raids on journalists and seized documents in purportedly unrelated incidents in the span of just two days.

Yesterday the AFP raided the home of News Corp Australia journalist Annika Smethurst, seeking information related to her investigative report last year which exposed the fact that the Australian government has been discussing the possibility of giving itself unprecedented powers to spy on its own citizens. Today they raided the Sydney headquarters of the Australian Broadcasting Corp, seizing information related to a 2017 investigative report on possible war crimes committed by Australian forces in Afghanistan.

In a third, also ostensibly unrelated incident, another Australian reporter disclosed yesterday that the Department of Home Affairs has initiated an investigation of his reporting on a story about asylum seeker boats which could lead to an AFP criminal case, saying he’s being pressured to disclose his source.

“Why has AFP suddenly decided to carry out these two raids after the election?” tweeted Australian Sky News political editor David Speers during the Sydney raid. “Did new evidence really just emerge in both the Annika Smethurst and ABC stories?!”

Why indeed?

“If these raids unconnected, as AFP reportedly said, it’s an extraordinary coincidence,” tweeted The Conversation chief political correspondent Michelle Grattan. “AFP needs to explain ASAP the timing so long after the stories. It can’t be that inefficient! Must be some explanation – which makes the ‘unconnected’ claim even more odd.”

Odd indeed.

It is true that the AFP has formally denied that there was any connection between the two raids, and it is in fact difficult to imagine how the two could be connected apart from their sharing a common theme of exposing malfeasance that the government wanted kept secret. If it is true that they are unconnected, then what changed? What in the world could have changed to spark this sudden escalation of the Australian government’s assault on the free press?

Well, if as I suggested recently you don’t think in terms of separate, individual nations, it’s not hard to think of at least one thing that’s changed.

“The criminalization and crack down on national security journalism is spreading like a virus,” WikiLeaks tweeted today in response to the ABC raid. “The Assange precedent is already having effect. Journalists must unite and remember that courage is also contagious.”

“The arrest and espionage charges against Assange was just the beginning, as many in the media, even those who hate Assange, feared,”  tweeted Consortium News editor-in-chief Joe Lauria in response to the News Corp raid. “The home of a mainstream Australian journalist was raided Wed. morning by police because of a story she worked on.”

“Shameful news from Australia as the police raid journalists’ offices and homes,” tweeted legendary Australian journalist John Pilger. “One warrant allows them to ‘add, copy, delete or alter’ computer files at the ABC. The assault on Julian Assange was a clear warning to all of us: it was only the beginning.”

If you think about it, it would have been far less disturbing than the alternative if there were a connection between the two raids, because the alternative is vastly more sinister: that the Australian government’s attitude toward the free press has changed. And that it has perhaps done so, as Australia has been doing for decades, in alignment with the behavior of the rest of the US-centralized empire.

In an article for Consortium News titled “After Assange’s Espionage Act Indictment, Police Move Against More Journalists for Publishing Classified Material”, Joe Lauria reminds us that Australia is not the first nation within the western power alliance to see such an escalation since the paradigm-shifting imprisonment of Julian Assange in the UK.

“Police in Paris arrested two journalists who were covering Yellow Vest protests on April 20,” Lauria writes.  “One of the journalists, Alexis Kraland, said he was taken into custody after refusing to be searched and to turn his camera over to police at Gare du Nord train station. The largest journalism union in France demanded an explanation from police.”

“And on May 10 in San Francisco, police using sledgehammers to break down the door, raided the home of Bryan Carmody, a freelance journalist, to get him, while handcuffed, to reveal his source who leaked him a police report into the sudden death the city’s elected public defender,” Lauria added. “Police took away computers, cameras, mobile phones and notes.”

So we’re seeing a pattern already. You can choose to ignore it or dismiss it with a pleasant story, or you can acknowledge that we appear to be in the midst of a rapidly escalating shutdown of the free press in the western world.

There does not necessarily have to be any centrally-planned conspiracy behind this trend; it can simply be the natural result of an ailing empire seeing that it’s going to need a lot more war, lies and deception in order to keep from collapsing, and responding accordingly. Once the Assange line was crossed, it could simply have served as a precedent for the other governments within the empire to begin doing things they’d already wanted to do anyway.

https://twitter.com/AssangeMrs/status/1136169465026994176

Julian Assange is the dot of a question mark at the end of a historically important question which we are all being asked right now. That question reads as follows: Does humanity wish to create a society that is based on truth and holds power to account, or does it want the exact opposite?

So far, the general consensus answer to that question has been going somewhere along the lines of “We’re actually fine with a headlong plunge into Orwellian dystopia, thanks.” But as the implications of that answer become clearer and clearer, we may yet see some stirrings in the other direction before it is too late.

U.S. War Criminals, Conspiracy Theorists and the Mainstream Media vs. Julian Assange

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By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

Julian Assange exposed U.S. war crimes, CIA spying capabilities, false flag cyber attacks and corruption within the Democratic Party and he’s the bad guy? Trump’s Justice department has decided to charge Julian Assange with “17 counts of violating the Espionage Act for his role in obtaining and publishing secret military and diplomatic documents in 2010, the Justice Department announced on Thursday, a novel case that raises profound First Amendment issues” according to The New York Times. The article ‘Assange Indicted Under Espionage Act, Raising First Amendment Issues’ does mention the fact that charging Assange under the Espionage Act sets the precedent to criminalize investigative journalism that is “related to obtaining, and in some cases publishing, state secrets to be criminal, the officials sought to minimize the implications for press freedoms.” However, The New York Times has become the judge and jury and says that Assange is a fugitive trying to avoid Sweden’s justice system for an alleged sexual assault charge and that he is a useful tool for the Russians in regards to interfering in U.S. elections:

The charges are the latest twist in a career in which Mr. Assange has morphed from a crusader for radical transparency to fugitive from a Swedish sexual assault investigation, to tool of Russia’s election interference, to criminal defendant in the United States.

Mr. Assange vaulted to global fame nearly a decade ago as a champion of openness about what governments secretly do. But with this indictment, he has become the target for a case that could open the door to criminalizing activities that are crucial to American investigative journalists who write about national security matters.

The case has nothing to do with Russia’s election interference in 2016, when Mr. Assange’s organization published Democratic emails stolen by Russia as part of its covert efforts to help elect President Trump. Instead, it focuses on Mr. Assange’s role in the leak of hundreds of thousands of State Department cables and military files by the former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning

According to the head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, John Demers, he said that “Some say that Assange is a journalist and that he should be immune from prosecution for these actions,” and that “The department takes seriously the role of journalists in our democracy and we thank you for it. It is not and has never been the department’s policy to target them for reporting.” But Mr. Assange, was “no journalist.”

Demers has accused Assange of collaborating with Chelsea Manning to steal classified information when he said that “No responsible actor, journalist or otherwise, would purposefully publish the names of individuals he or she knew to be confidential human sources in a war zone, exposing them to the gravest of dangers.”

The New York Times admits that they can be charged for doing what Wikileaks has done in the near future under the Espionage Act:

Notably, The New York Times, among many other news organizations, obtained precisely the same archives of documents from WikiLeaks, without authorization from the government — the act that most of the charges addressed. While The Times did take steps to withhold the names of informants in the subset of the files it published, it is not clear how that is legally different from publishing other classified information

Assange’s lawyer, Barry J. Pollack said that his client was charged for a crime, but according to Pollack, Assange is guilty “for encouraging sources to provide him truthful information and for publishing that information.” The New York Times also said that “the United States has asked Britain to extradite Mr. Assange, who is fighting the move, and the filing of the new charges clears the way for British courts to weigh whether it would be lawful to transfer custody of him to a place where he will face Espionage Act charges.” Britain will most likely extradite Assange to the U.S. since Britain is a close U.S. ally. The New York Times is sort of playing good cop, bad cop with the case of Julian Assange. They describe Assange as a fugitive who is avoiding Sweden’s sexual assault investigation to becoming a tool or a puppet for “Russia’s election interference” which is a joke, then they say that they can face the same charges as Wikileaks if they use the same tactics to obtain information. However, The New York Times and every other mainstream media outlet works for the U.S. government and are on the same page with the politicians as they shamefully and continuously discredit Assange. According to a report by FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) titled ‘Media Cheer Assange’s Arrest’ said that the media demonized Assange after his arrest:

A Washington Post editorial (4/11/19) claimed Assange was “no free-press hero” and insisted the arrest was “long overdue.” Likewise, the Wall Street Journal (4/11/19) demanded “accountability” for Assange, saying, “His targets always seem to be democratic institutions or governments.”

Other coverage was more condemnatory still. The View’s Meghan McCain (4/11/19) declared she hoped Assange “rots in hell.” Saturday Night Live’s Colin Jost (4/13/19) said it was “so satisfying to see an Internet troll get dragged out into the sunlight.” But it was perhaps the National Review (4/12/19) that expressed the most enthusiastic approval of Assange’s arrest, condemning him for his “anti-Americanism, his antisemitism and his raw personal corruption” and for harming the US with his “vile spite”

Trump and the CIA

The CIA is Trump’s wet dream, I know it sounds nasty but it was obvious from the start when Trump made his first visit as President of the United States to the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia and said “But I want to say that there is nobody that feels stronger about the intelligence community and the CIA than Donald Trump. There’s nobody.” Trump practically brown-nosed the CIA, and in doing so, the writing was on the wall to where the Trump-CIA relationship was going, that’s why Trump’s u-turn on Julian Assange’s arrest was not surprising and may I say, one of the most dishonest responses made by the president since the Obama and Bush years. Let’s remember during Trump’s campaign trail, it was reported that he mentioned Wikileaks more than 141 times until the day Assange was dragged out in handcuffs from the Ecuadorian embassy, and then Trump changed his tune when he was asked by the media about Assange’s arrest, and what was his response? “I know nothing about WikiLeaks.” Politicians from both sides of the aisle in Washington praised the arrest of Julian Assange especially Hillary Clinton who said Assange “has to answer for what he has done” according to The Guardian.

Trump’s entire administration wants Julian Assange and his Wikileaks organization to be permanently shut down including Trump’s advisor John Bolton who was exposed by Wikileaks when they released more than 800 files exposing his war crimes. Secretary of State and former CIA Director, Mike Pompeo is another war hawk neocon who wants Assange either dead or alive. Pompeo had called Julian Assange a “narcissist” who allegedly works hands in glove with Russia and that Assange depends on “the dirty work of others to make him famous.” During a speech at The Center for Strategic and International Studies(CSIS) back in 2017, Pompeo said that “It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.” Pompeo said that the U.S. intelligence community (including the CIA) had already determined that Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU used WikiLeaks to release hacked information from the DNC. But the reality is that the hacked emails came from a source who faced a serious risk according to Assange and that source was Seth Rich who was shot and killed in an affluent neighborhood in Washington, D.C. in the summer of 2016 in an apparent robbery that “failed” according to Seth Rich’s father, Joel during an interview with a local TV station KMTV. In 2016, Assange was interviewed on a Dutch television program Nieuwsuur, and said that they concerned about what happened to Seth Rich and were investigating the situation:

“We have to understand how high the stakes are in the US, and that our sources face serious risks. That’s why they come to us, so we can protect their anonymity. We are investigating what happened with Seth Rich. We think it is a concerning situation. There is not a conclusion yet; we are not willing to state a conclusion, but we are concerned about it. And more importantly, a variety of WikiLeaks sources are concerned when that kind of thing happens”

 Wikileaks offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to a conviction for the murder of Seth Rich.

Robert Mueller is a Conspiracy Theorist

The New York Times published an article based on the Mueller Report regarding the murder of Seth Rich ‘Seth Rich Was Not Source of Leaked D.N.C. Emails, Mueller Report Confirms’ claiming that Seth Rich was not the source of the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) leaked emails proving that they were undermining the Bernie Sander’s campaign. The emails were first published by DCLeaks and then by WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016 right before the 2016 Democratic National Convention. According to The New York Times:

The special counsel’s report confirmed this week that Seth Rich, a young Democratic National Committee employee whose unsolved killing became grist for a right-wing conspiracy theory, was not the source of thousands of internal D.N.C. emails that WikiLeaks released during the 2016 presidential race, officially debunking a notion that had persisted without support for years

The report also said that “tucked amid hundreds of pages of the report’s main findings, the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, took aim at WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, for falsely implying that Mr. Rich was somehow involved in the dissemination of the emails, an act that aided President Trump’s campaign.” Mueller said that “WikiLeaks and Assange made several public statements apparently designed to obscure the source of the materials that WikiLeaks was releasing.” The report claims that WikiLeaks collaborated with the “true source of the leaked emails — Russian hackers — after Mr. Rich’s death.” The New York Times also said that “The theory linking Mr. Rich to the email leak took root in conservative circles and was cited by prominent conservatives like Newt Gingrich and right-wing commentators like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Alex Jones of Infowars.” Mueller’s final statement regarding the murder of Seth Rich is just a diversion away from the truth and with Mueller’s help he can make it just go away, at least in the mainstream-media. The only people that can expose the truth regarding Seth Rich is Julian Assange and the Wikileaks organization. According to an nbcwashington.comarticle “The Mueller report says beginning in the summer of 2016 Julian Assange and WikiLeaks made statements about Rich falsely implying he leaked the stolen emails.” Last month, Vox.com published an article declaring that ‘The Seth Rich conspiracy theory needs to end now’ and falsely claimed that Assange knew that Seth Rich was not the source, because it was the Russians:

The report definitively disproved the notion that a Democratic National Committee staffer named Seth Rich was the source of leaked DNC documents later published by WikiLeaks, and that his July 2016 murder came as the result of his decision to leak those documents to WikiLeaks. This wasn’t true, although Trump associates like Jerome Corsi, Roger Stone, and countless others, have argued vehemently for years that it was. And WikiLeaks, and its founder Julian Assange, knew it

The Trump-Russia collusion hoax has been on air since Trump took office more than 2 years ago. MSNBC who was a cheerleader for the removal of Trump was humiliated after the Mueller Report revealed that Trump did not collude with Russia in the 2016 Presidential elections to defeat Hillary Clinton. Clinton lost the election because of Clinton, not Assange, the Russians or anyone else. Clinton was and still is despised by most people within the U.S. especially when she tried to undermine the other hypocrite, Bernie Sanders (who would be another puppet of the deep state if he were to win the 2020 U.S. elections)and she was exposed. Clinton and the DNC’s plan to undermine the Sander’s campaign was to secure her nomination. Wikileaks embarrassed the DNC and forced them to make an apology to Bernie Sanders and his supporters by saying “On behalf of everyone at the DNC, we want to offer a deep and sincere apology to Senator Sanders, his supporters, and the entire Democratic Party for the inexcusable remarks made over email” and that “These comments do not reflect the values of the DNC or our steadfast commitment to neutrality during the nominating process.” The Mueller report claims that the emails were allegedly stolen by hackers associated with Russian intelligence called Guccifer 2.0. In the summer of 2018, Robert Mueller indicted 12 Russian military intelligence agents called Fancy Bear who were allegedly responsible for the attack. Fancy Bear was supposedly behind Guccifer 2.0 who claimed they were responsible, but then again, it’s all a lie.

Vault 7: The CIA’s ‘Global Covert Hacking System’

One of the biggest news stories involving Wikileaks and the release of more than 8,761 documents under ‘Year Zero’, exposing the CIA and its global operations. It was the first part of a series of leaks that Wikileaks called ‘Vault 7’ a network that was inside the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence based in Langley, Virginia that involves a “global covert hacking program,” including what Wikileaks describes as “weaponized exploits” used against such devices as “Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.” The CIA bypassed encryption codes on messaging services such as WhatsApp and other phones devices. WikiLeaks said that government hackers can hack Android phones that basically collects “audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.” There are various parts of Vault 7 such as ‘Dark Matter’ that exposed the CIA’s hacking capabilities including Apple’s iPhones and Macs. Weeping Angel is another hacking tool that was developed by the CIA and the U.K.’s very own MI5 used to penetrate smart TVs to gather intelligence. Once the program is installed in smart T.V.s with a USB stick, it enabled those same televisions’ with built-in microphones and sometimes even video cameras to record while the television is turned off. Then the recorded data is either stored into the television’s memory or sent to the CIA through the internet. There are several other programs exposed under the ‘Year Zero’ global covert hacking program, but one other program stands out the most is what the CIA uses to conduct “false flag” cyber-attacks that has portrayed Russia in the past as the aggressor. Regarding the CIA’s Remote Devices Branch’s UMBRAGE group, which is a subdivision of the center’s Remote Development Branch (RDB), and according to Wikileaks’s source, the program “collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques” that were stolen from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation. Wikileaks said the following:

With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the “fingerprints” of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from. UMBRAGE components cover keyloggers, password collection, webcam capture, data destruction, persistence, privilege escalation, stealth, anti-virus (PSP) avoidance and survey techniques

Kim Dotcom commented on the Wikileaks revelations when he tweeted that the “CIA uses techniques to make cyber attacks look like they originated from enemy state. It turns DNC/Russia hack allegation by CIA into a JOKE.” Wired.com claimed that “Russian hacking deniers” were at an advantage in a 2017 article titled ‘WikiLeaks CIA Dump Gives Russian Hacking Deniers the Perfect Ammo’ and said that:

One nugget of particular interest to Trump supporters: a section titled “Umbrage” that details the CIA’s ability to impersonate cyber-attack techniques used by Russia and other nation states. In theory, that means the agency could have faked digital forensic fingerprints to make the Russians look guilty of hacking the Democratic National Committee

The CIA’s ability to hack smart TV’s, Smartphone’s and encrypted messaging applications and we must add to the fact that the CIA also has the capability to conduct cyber-attacks under the UMBRAGE group and make them appear it came from a foreign power is as Orwellian as one can get, it also carries very serious geopolitical implications. What is insane about the CIA’s UMBRAGE group is that according to Wikileaks, “With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the “fingerprints” of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from.” In other words, the CIA could launch a malware attack that was originally developed by another country to intentionally “misdirect attribution” for the hack that would not be traced back to the CIA in any way. In 2017, CNN quoted the former CIA director James Woolsey as saying that “It’s often not foolproof to say who it is because it is possible and sometimes easy to hide your tracks,” he said. “There’s lots of tricks.” and he should know. “I think the Russians were in there, but it doesn’t mean other people weren’t, too,” Woolsey told CNN.

The CIA and the Persecution of Julian Assange 

When Julian Assange was arrested by British authorities, Wikileaks immediately released a statement on twitter mentioning the role of the CIA:

This man is a son, a father, a brother. He has won dozens of journalism awards. He’s been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize every year since 2010. Powerful actors, including CIA, are engaged in a sophisticated effort to dehumanise, delegitimize and imprison him. #ProtectJulian

The arrest of Assange has sparked outrage and anger around the world. Assange is a hero to us all especially those in the alternative media. The mainstream-media, as we all know are based on conspiracy theories, fabrications and flat-out lies are celebrating the arrest of Assange. Perhaps, they are hoping to rebound after the ‘RussiaGate’ conspiracy theory hoax which backfired in their faces and since then, their viewership has completely collapsed.

Julian Assange will face a U.S. court if he is extradited. But rest assured, there will be those of us who will continue to speak out for Assange, and there will also be worldwide protests in coming months and years until Julian Assange is released from prison. There is hope because Assange has the truth on his side no matter what happens. If is imprisoned for life or god forbid executed at the behest of Washington and the CIA, Assange will become a Martyr. There will be many more people like Assange because the truth is like a virus to the establishment, and that’s why they want to destroy Wikileaks and the alternative media, but it’s too late, the truth is out and it will never be stopped. #ProtectJulian

“Truth ultimately is all we have:” Julian Assange appeals for public supporta

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By Oscar Grenfell

Source: WSWS.org

In his first publicly-released comments to supporters since his arrest, WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange has detailed the repressive conditions he faces in Britain’s Belmarsh prison and called for a campaign against his threatened extradition to the United States.

“I am defenceless and am counting on you and others of good character to save my life,” Assange wrote, adding, “Truth ultimately is all we have.”

Assange’s comments were made in a letter addressed to independent British journalist Gordon Dimmack, who decided to make it public following last Thursday’s announcement by the US Justice Department of additional charges against Assange under the Espionage Act. The WSWS is republishing the letter, with Dimmack’s permission, in full below.

Assange explained that since he was convicted on trumped-up bail charges shortly after his arrest on April 11, he has been “isolated from all ability to prepare to defend myself, no laptop, no internet, no computer, no library so far, but even if I do get access it will be just for half an hour with everyone else once a week.”

The WikiLeaks founder stated that he is allowed “Just two visits a month and it takes weeks to get someone on the call list.”

All of his calls, except those to his lawyers, are monitored and limited to a maximum of ten minutes. There is a window of just 30 minutes per day for phone calls to be made “in which all prisoners compete for the phone.” Assange receives only a few pounds of phone credit per week and is not allowed to receive inbound calls.

The WikiLeaks founder declared that, despite these onerous conditions, he is “unbroken albeit literally surrounded by murderers. But the days when I could read and speak and organise to defend myself, my ideals and my people are over until I am free. Everyone else must take my place.”

The WikiLeaks founder stated that he faced “A superpower” that has “been preparing for 9 years with hundreds of people and untold millions spent” on the case against him.

He warned that “The US government or rather those regrettable elements in it that hate truth liberty and justice want to cheat their way into my extradition and death rather than letting the public hear the truth for which I have won the highest awards in journalism and have been nominated seven times for the Nobel Peace Prize.”

The unveiling of the US charges is a vindication of Assange’s warnings, in the letter and over the past nine years, that he faces a politically-motivated US prosecution for his role in WikiLeaks’ exposures of war crimes, mass surveillance operations and global diplomatic conspiracies.

The 17 counts against Assange carry a combined maximum prison sentence of 175 years. They are an unprecedented attempt to criminalise investigative journalism, and abolish the free press protections of the US Constitution’s First Amendment.

The charges centre on WikiLeaks’ receipt and publication of classified US government documents. These core journalistic practices are presented as criminal activities which “risked serious harm to United States national security to the benefit of our adversaries.”

The documents covered include the Afghan war logs, which exposed the extrajudicial killing of civilians by US-led forces, and other violations of international law.

Assange’s letter further exposes the ongoing political conspiracy against him, which included his illegal expulsion from Ecuador’s London embassy and detention by the British authorities.

The WikiLeaks founder was convicted, within hours of his arrest, on the British charges. The judge dismissed the fact that the offenses were effectively resolved years ago as a result of Assange’s forfeiture of bail monies, his years of arbitrary detention in the small embassy building and his United Nations-upheld status as a political refugee.

Despite the minor character of the bail conviction, Assange has been held in virtual isolation in a maximum security prison. This is a clear attempt to hinder his defence against the Trump administration’s extradition request, and the revived Swedish investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct, which is aimed at blackening his name and creating an alternate route for him to be dispatched to a US prison.

Assange’s call for a campaign in his defence coincides with growing opposition to his persecution and to the Espionage Act charges against him.

In a Tweet shared almost 5,000 times, investigative journalist John Pilger warned that “The war on Julian #Assange is now a war on all. Eighteen absurd charges including espionage send a burning message to every journalist, every publisher… Modern fascism is breaking cover.”

The American Civil Liberties Union branded the charges “an extraordinary escalation of the Trump administration’s attacks on journalism, establishing a dangerous precedent that can be used to target all news organizations that hold the government accountable by publishing its secrets.”

The Freedom of the Press Foundation described them as “the most significant and terrifying threat to the First Amendment in the 21st century.”

In Australia, there are mounting calls for the government to fulfil its obligations to Assange as an Australian citizen and journalist. Former Labor politician Bob Carr yesterday cynically warned that Foreign Minister Marise Payne “needs to protect herself from the charge that she’s failed in her duty to protect the life of an Australian citizen”

Greg Barns, an Australian-based advisor to Assange, declared “Australia does have a role to play here and our view is that the Australian government needs to intervene.” He said the US prosecution of the WikiLeaks founder was aimed at applying US domestic law extraterritorially. This meant that “anyone who publishes information the US deems to be classified anywhere in the world” could be targeted by the US government.

Over the past 18 months, the WSWS and the Socialist Equality Parties (SEP) around the world have played a prominent role in the struggle against the stepped-up persecution of Assange.

The SEP (Australia) has held a series of rallies, demanding that the Australian government secure Assange’s release from Britain and return to Australia, with a guarantee against extradition to the US.

The events, addressed by SEP national secretary James Cogan, and well-known fighters for civil liberties, including Pilger, Consortium News editor-in-chief Joe Lauria and Professor Stuart Rees, have been attended by hundreds of workers, students and young people.

The SEP (Britain) held a powerful public meeting in London on May 12, which brought together 150 defenders of Assange, and featured speakers from around the world. It was streamed live on Dimmack’s YouTube page to an audience of thousands.

On May 18, the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei held a rally in Berlin, attended by 300 people, under the banner “freedom for Julian Assange.”

Over the coming weeks, the WSWS and the SEP’s will intensify the struggle against Assange’s extradition to the US, and for his complete freedom. We appeal to all supporters of civil liberties to join us in this crucial fight, which is the spearhead of the defence of democratic rights and against imperialist war.

Assange’s next hearing is set for Thursday May 30 at Westminster Magistrates Court in London. We urge all readers of the WSWS in the UK to attend.

Below is the full text of Assange’s letter to Gordon Dimmack:

I have been isolated from all ability to prepare to defend myself, no laptop, no internet, no computer, no library so far, but even if I do get access it will be just for half an hour with everyone else once a week. Just two visits a month and it takes weeks to get someone on the call list and the Catch-22 in getting their details to be security screened. Then all calls except lawyer are recorded and are a maximum 10 minutes and in a limited 30 minutes each day in which all prisoners compete for the phone. And credit? Just a few pounds a week and no one can call in.

A superpower that has been preparing for 9 years with hundreds of people and untold millions spent on the case. I am defenceless and am counting on you and others of good character to save my life

I am unbroken albeit literally surrounded by murderers. But the days when I could read and speak and organise to defend myself, my ideals and my people are over until I am free. Everyone else must take my place.

The US government or rather those regrettable elements in it that hate truth liberty and justice want to cheat their way into my extradition and death rather than letting the public hear the truth for which I have won the highest awards in journalism and have been nominated seven times for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Truth ultimately is all we have.

 

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