This is very interesting. Not a friend of Clinton's, clearly, but presents convincing arguments that wikileaks has been doing Putin's dirty work for a while.
http://observer.com/2016/07/wikileaks-dismantling-of-dnc-is-clear-attack-by-putin-on-clinton/
Certainly interesting, but I don't find it remotely convincing.
Given that Assange is not the most popular figure among the ruling political classes in the west, we can assume they will, and have, tried to discredit him repeatedly. It's an obvious tactic. You discredit him, you discredit wikileaks and you therefore undermine the credibility of everything on there.
So are we supposed to take everything this former NSA and counterintelligence officer says at face value? Could this article not be part of a larger campaign against Assange to paint him in a negative light? I'm not saying it is necessarily. But given the guy's background, we have to consider it at least.
He says Snowden is a Russian spy, and links to some sketchy article in Bild (Germany), hardly the most convincing news source to say the least.
He claims Assange knew the Kremlin would welcome Snowden when he was seeking asylum, and ponders how exactly he could have known. But Russia had come out publicly and stated they would welcome him, so I'm not sure what the point is there except to suggest Assange has connections high up in Russia, though he points to no-one in particular.
He makes the needless comparison of wikileaks to the 1970s magazine Covert Action Information Bulletin, simply by equating Snowden to their former editor who ended up in Cuba, but without any real facts beyond that.
He finds it strange that Assange felt the FSB might offer good protection. I don't find that strange at all. Who better to protect you from the threat of western security forces than the people who've been trained to thwart them? I certainly wouldn't be ruling them out on ideological grounds centered on issues of privacy, as the author suggests Assange should have, if I felt my life was in grave danger.
He also talks about how Russia has planted fake emails among the leaked DNC emails, a tactic he calls 'disinformation' and describes it as 'a venerable Russian spy trick that can be politically devastating to its target.'
Is he seriously asking us to believe his former buddies at the NSA or CIA never used disinformation? I would have thought it was a primary weapon in any intelligence based organization.
When exactly did Russia plant these fake emails? Could they not have planted them without wikileaks knowing, given the huge amount of data we're talking about here? He doesn't even attempt to address that.
The general tone of the whole article and the language he uses is so belligerent and one-sided, that I find much of it hard to swallow. It's not the language you'd see used by a competent investigative journalist, which of course he isn't. He's a former counterintelligence officer who worked for the NSA, an organization who openly lied about it's public spying program.
Given the damage wikileaks could do to successive US governments, I'd find it strange if Russia didn't try to engage with the site (or Assange) in some way, by fair means or foul. My enemy's enemy is my friend and all that. How complicit wikileaks might be in that relationship is another story. This article doesn't really convince me anyway.
I wouldn't call myself an Assange fanboy by any stretch, but I do find the whole wikileaks phenomenon interesting. Given that we're in the world of hacktivism/hacking and intelligence/counter-intelligence here, it's very hard for anyone not involved directly to take any of it at face value. It's a game of smoke of mirrors being played out in a media landscape of smoke of mirrors.
