Israel Arrests Ex-Army Lawyer Over Leaked Video Showing Palestinian’s Abuse

Al Jazeera

Israeli police have arrested a former military prosecutor after she leaked a video appearing to show soldiers abusing a Palestinian detainee.

Major General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi was detained overnight on Monday, according to the country’s national security minister, following a scandal that erupted after she leaked a video, resigned and then disappeared.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called the leaking of the video perhaps the most “severe public relations attack” on Israel since its founding.

Reporting from Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh said the arrest of Tomer-Yerushalmi has created “a political and legal storm in Israel”, noting the spotlight on the leaker has overshadowed attention to the original crime.

“There is so much focus on the fact that this video was leaked, at the expense of discussing how this crime actually happened – and the fact that the UN says that these kinds of crimes are being committed in a systematic manner,” Odeh said.

“In one way, it’s a way to shift attention from the fact that these crimes are happening, by focusing on this woman and the fact that she leaked the video.”

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The Mthethwa Case: Unravelling a Diplomatic Tragedy's Darker Questions

Anda Mbikwana | The Star (South Africa)

The death of South African Ambassador Nathi Mthethwa in a Paris hotel has thrust uncomfortable questions into public discourse: questions not just about how a senior diplomat died, but about what his death might reveal regarding the state of governance, investigative integrity, and institutional safety in South Africa.

While French authorities conduct their investigation, South Africans are left grappling with a narrative that feels disturbingly familiar — another prominent figure connected to sensitive inquiries, another unexpected death, another round of speculation about whether the official story holds water.

What we know is limited but significant. Ambassador Mthethwa was found after falling from his hotel room. A window was forced open. He had allegedly sent a "disturbing message" beforehand. He was connected to investigations touching on corruption involving high-level figures.

What we do not know is everything that matters: the content of that message, who might have had access to his room, what security protocols were in place, and crucially, what specific evidence or testimony he might have possessed.

The forced window presents the most glaring anomaly. Modern hotels — particularly those hosting diplomatic personnel — typically have windows designed against accidental opening.

For such a window to be "forced open" suggests either determined intent from within or external interference. Neither scenario comfortably supports a straightforward suicide narrative.

South Africa has witnessed a troubling pattern over the past decade: individuals connected to corruption investigations, whistle-blowers, and those positioned to provide damaging testimony have died under circumstances ranging from suspicious to inexplicable. 

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Same Scheme May Have Been Used for Suspending Jordan Peterson, Tulsi Gabbard – Google Whistleblower

Sputnik

Tulsi Gabbard, a vocal proponent of breaking up the tech monopolies, had her campaign’s advertising account suspended by Google after the Democratic debate in late June and is currently seeking $50 million in damages.

Zach Vorhies, a former Google employee who has been leaking documents suggesting political biases within the company, has rendered assistance to the representatives of 2020 Democratic candidate Tulsi Gabbard, who is suing Google for disabling her search ads account.

In an open letter on the social media network Minds, Vorhies said that he had investigated the suspension of the Google account of conservative thinker Jordan Peterson in 2017.

He wrote: “What I found was that Google had a technical vulnerability that, when exploited, would take any gmail account down. Certain unknown 3rd party actors are aware of this secret vulnerability and exploit it.”

According to the whistle-blower, “malicious actors” would change one letter in a target’s email address to create a “spoof” account and repeat this process until there is a network of bogus accounts.

These accounts, not linked with the original one in any way except for their similar name, would then start generating spam emails, triggering an AI system which fixed the problem by taking down the spam accounts and also Jordan Peterson’s original account.

“To my knowledge, this bug has never been fixed,” Vorhies said. “When Google says an account was deactivated because of ‘suspicious’ activity, this is how they often do it.”

While his revelation does not mean that Google itself was behind the scheme, it indicates that the company had failed to address the vulnerability in a timely manner.

He suggested that this knowledge may be of use to Tulsi Gabbard’s attorneys. 

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The Trump Administration Is Using the Full Power of the U.S. Surveillance State Against Whistleblowers

The Intercept

 

Government whistleblowers are increasingly being charged under laws such as the Espionage Act, but they aren’t spies.

They’re ordinary Americans and, like most of us, they carry smartphones that automatically get backed up to the cloud. When they want to talk to someone, they send them a text or call them on the phone. They use Gmail and share memes and talk politics on Facebook. Sometimes they even log in to these accounts from their work computers.

Then, during the course of their work, they see something disturbing. Maybe it’s that the government often has no idea if the people it kills in drone strikes are civilians. Or that the NSA witnessed a cyberattack against local election officials in 2016 that U.S. intelligence believes was orchestrated by Russia, even though the president is always on TV saying the opposite. Or that the FBI uses hidden loopholes to bypass its own rules against infiltrating political and religious groups. Or that Donald Trump’s associates are implicated in sketchy financial transactions.

So they search government databases for more information and maybe print some of the documents they find. They search for related information using Google. Maybe they even send a text message to a friend about how insane this is while they consider possible next steps. Should they contact a journalist? They look up the tips pages of news organizations they like and start researching how to use Tor Browser. All of this happens before they’ve reached out to a journalist for the first time. 

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Whistleblower Who Warned About False Flag Attacks to Justify U.S. Invasion of Iran Found Dead, YouTube Channel Removed

State of the Nation

Whistleblower David Goldberg, a resident of New York City, has reportedly died of unknown causes.

Yesterday, the governmentslaves.news site reported that the White House insider who was quoted — David Goldberg (59 years old) — has since been found dead in his New York apartment on June 8th. His death is being investigated and no cause of death has yet been disclosed.
Goldberg also said that a false flag attack would be used to escalate the situation, which appears to be what we’ve seen take place in the Gulf of Oman with the two attack of two oil tankers. (Source: False Flags, Cooked Intelligence and the ‘War on Terror’ Con)

In April of 2019, Goldberg warned the world of a false flag attack planned by the U.S. Military and Intelligence Community working in concert with Israel’s Mossad.

What follows is the original Alt Media news report that explains the entire black operation.

Since Goldberg first issued his warning to the world community of nations, there have been two sets of obvious false flag attacks: one in the Gulf of Hormuz and a second one in the Gulf of Oman. See: Gulf of Oman False Flag Bombing Obvious Pretext for US Attack on Iran.

Each of these attacks was immediately blamed on Iran without a shred of evidence or any type of meaningful investigation.  Both the Trump administration and Israel falsely accused Iran of attacks that were in fact orchestrated by US-Israeli operatives and/or proxies. See: NSA Bolton Conspires With Israel to Trigger War with Iran Based on False Flags

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‘Assange extradition should be warning to liberals who believe in American democracy’ – Zizek

   “What really worries me is the inertia of the wider public; they are aware and yet they don’t really care about it.”

RT

The UK’s decision to extradite WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange to the US should be taken as a warning to all liberals who still have any faith in ‘American liberal democracy,’ says cultural philosopher Slavoj Zizek. 

The Slovenian sociologist told RT that signing of the extradition order is just one of two recent events that really worry him. The other “ominous” event was the Ecuadorian government’s invitation to US authorities to take possession of Assange’s property from its London embassy when he was taken to prison, including book manuscripts, computers and other personal possessions.

“The nightmare is that the accuser was directly invited to take possession of all these documents. This breaks even the elementary the norms of legality,” Zizek explained.

“The message is, ‘Yes, we will be brutal beyond measure.’”

Zizek drew particular attention to the sheer brutality of the coordinated effort against the whistleblower after he exposed the US government and military’s gross misdeeds.

“It’s always an ominous signal when measures against a threatened individual are done in such a directly brutal way that this very brutality means something,” he said.

Zizek also railed against so-called liberals back across the pond in the UK arguing that “those in the UK who are most fervent advocates of Assange’s extradition, are not conservatives but more centrist Blairite wing of the Labour Party.” 

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Vatican Whistleblower Says ‘Gay Mafia’ Is Blocking Needed Reforms

Briebart News

The former Vatican ambassador to the United States told the Washington Post a gay mafia among Church leadership is blocking attempts to seriously address clerical sexual abuse.
In an extensive interview, snippets of which were published Monday, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò said that the sexual abuse crisis would be "far less severe" if the "problem of homosexuality in the priesthood were honestly acknowledged and properly addressed."

"Given the overwhelming evidence, it is mind-boggling that the word 'homosexuality' has not appeared once, in any of the recent official documents of the Holy See" dealing with clerical sexual abuse, Viganò told the Post.

Instead, a "gay mafia" among the bishops, seeking to protect themselves, was "sabotaging all efforts at reform," he said.

Late last August, Archbishop Viganò released a shocking 11-page report declaring that in 2013 he had personally informed Pope Francis of the serial homosexual abuse of then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, but that the pope had ignored the information, elevating McCarrick to a position of influence in the Vatican.

In that report, Viganò linked the clerical sex abuse crisis as well as coverups by bishops to an extensive "homosexual network" in the Church. 

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Police raids escalate as the war on journalism goes worldwide

Caitlin Johnstone
Medium

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." 

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EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Belmarsh Prison Inmate Provides Photos of Julian Assange, Says the ‘Internet is the One Thing They Can’t Control’

Cassandra Fairbanks
The Gateway Pundit 

The Gateway Pundit has obtained exclusive testimony, as well as photos, from a fellow inmate of imprisoned WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange inside London’s highest security prison. 

The inmate, who wishes to remain anonymous, sent multiple photos of Assange from inside Belmarsh maximum security prison and spoke to The Gateway Pundit about the WikiLeaks founder’s situation using a contraband phone he has inside.

Assange is imprisoned in the United Kingdom and faces eighteen charges under the Espionage Act in the United States for his publication of the Iraq and Afghan War Logs. If extradited and convicted, he could be face a maximum sentence of 175 years for the “crime” of publishing material that the US government did not want the population to know.

Along with the photos from inside the prison, the inmate pushed a fundraiser — causing supporters to worry that he was attempting to extort WikiLeaks or harm Assange by violating his privacy. The Gateway Pundit reached out to him to get his side of the story.

This reporter spoke to the inmate through a series of online messages and a phone call for multiple hours on Wednesday evening. At the beginning of the conversation I asked him if he was a prisoner or someone who works there — and if his motive was to extort money from the organization. 

“I’m in prison right now,” he said, sending a photo from inside his cell. “Extort him for what reason? He exposed the biggest scandals in the world. Whose side do you think someone in prison would be on? The government who have us locked up in here or a fellow prisoner who actually doesn’t deserve to be here?” 

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Julian Assange and the unrelenting state

craigmurray.org.uk

We are seriously worried about the condition of Julian Assange. He was too unwell to appear in court yesterday, and his Swedish lawyer, Per Samuelson, found him in a state where he was unable to conduct a conversation and give instructions. There are very definite physical symptoms, particularly rapid weight loss, and we are not satisfied that genuine and sufficient diagnostic efforts are being made to determine the underlying cause.

Julian had been held for the last year in poor, highly confining and increasingly oppressive conditions in the Ecuadorean Embassy and his health was already deteriorating alarmingly before his expulsion and arrest. A number of conditions, including dental abcesses, can have very serious consequences if long term untreated, and the continual refusal by the British government and latterly the Ecuadoreans to permit him access to adequate healthcare while a political asylee was a callous denial of basic human rights.

I confess to feeling an amount of personal relief after his arrest that at least he would now get proper medical treatment. However there now seems to be no intention to provide that and indeed since he has been in Belmarsh his health problems have accelerated. I witnessed enough of the British state's complicity in torture to know that this may be more than just the consequence of unintended neglect. That the most lucid man I know is now not capable of having a rational conversation is extremely alarming.

There is no rational reason that Assange needs to be kept in a high security facility for terrorists and violent offenders. We are seeing the motive behind his unprecedented lengthy imprisonment for jumping police bail when he entered political asylum. As a convicted prisoner, Assange can be kept in a worse regime than if he were merely on remand for his extradition proceedings. In particular, his access to his lawyers is extremely restricted and for a man facing major legal proceedings in the UK, USA and Sweden it is impossible, even were he healthy, for his lawyers to have sufficient time with him adequately to prepare his cases while he is under the restrictions placed on a convict. Of course we know from the fact that, within three hours of being dragged from the Ecuadorean Embassy, he was already convicted and sentenced to a lengthy prison term, that the state has no intention that his lawyers should be able to prepare. 

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Assange's Judge A Disgrace To The Bench, Former UK Ambassador Says

Craig Murray

Both Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange are now in jail, both over offenses related to the publication of materials specifying U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, and both charged with nothing else at all. No matter what bullshit political and MSM liars try to feed you, that is the simple truth. Manning and Assange are true heroes of our time, and are suffering for it.

If a Russian opposition politician were dragged out by armed police, and within three hours had been convicted on a political charge by a patently biased judge with no jury, with a lengthy jail sentence to follow, can you imagine the Western media reaction to that kind of kangaroo court? Yet that is exactly what just happened in London.

District Judge Michael Snow is a disgrace to the bench who deserves to be infamous well beyond his death. He displayed the most plain and open prejudice against Assange in the 15 minutes it took for him to hear the case and declare Assange guilty last week, in a fashion which makes the dictators’ courts I had witnessed, in Ibrahim Babangida’s Nigeria or Isam Karimov’s Uzbekistan, look fair and reasonable, in comparison to the gross charade of justice conducted by Michael Snow.

One key fact gave away Snow’s enormous prejudice.

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Ecuador accuses Assange of ‘misbehavior’ to justify his arrest – lawyer

RT

The Ecuadorian authorities have fabricated claims about Julian Assange's alleged "gross misbehavior" at its embassy as a pretext to surrender him to the UK police, the WikiLeaks founder's lawyer said. 

 

"The first thing to say is [that] Ecuador has been making some outrageous allegations," Assange's lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, told Sky News on Sunday following the whistleblower's arrest earlier this week. Quito made these claims to divert public attention from its own misdeeds and to "justify the unlawful and extraordinary act of letting police come inside an embassy," she added.

Earlier, Ecuadorian Interior Minister Maria Paula Romo complained about the embassy staff having to tolerate gross misconduct for far too long. The 47-year-old was specifically accused of "putting feces on the walls," among other things. He was also alleged to have left dirty underwear in the lavatory, failed to clean dishes, and left a cooker on.

Apart from that, the embassy staff complained earlier that the WikiLeaks founder also listened to loud music and skateboarded inside the embassy hall at night – claims that make the whistleblower sound like a rowdy teenager.

Robinson dismissed all those allegations as "not true" and hit back by saying that it was the Ecuadorian authorities that eventually turned the whistleblower's life in the embassy into a sort of a solitary confinement as he was holed up for seven years.

"I've been visiting him for the last seven years. This man has been inside a room with no outside access. Inside the embassy, it has become more difficult," the lawyer said, adding that Ecuador's attitude to Assange drastically changed for the worse after its current president, Lenin Moreno, came to power.

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Silencing the Whistle - The Intercept Shutters Snowden Archive, Citing Cost

Comment: Confirming the limited hangout/psyops nonsense that is Edward Snowjob. Glenn Greenwald would sell his grandmother if he could.

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Mint Press News

The closing of The Intercept’s Snowden archive will likely mean the end of any future publications, unless Glenn Greenwald’s rather absurd promise of finding “the right partner … that has the funds to robustly publish” is fulfilled.

 

NEW YORK — On March 13, a report in the Daily Beast revealed that the New York-based outlet The Intercept would be shutting down its archive of the trove of government documents entrusted to a handful of journalists, including Intercept co-founders Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, by whistleblower Edward Snowden. However, that account did not include the role of Greenwald, as well as Jeremy Scahill — another Intercept co-founder, in the controversial decision to shutter the archive.

 

According to a timeline of events written by Poitras that was shared and published by journalist and former Intercept columnist Barrett Brown, both Scahill and Greenwald were intimately involved in the decision to close the Snowden archive. 

While other outlets — such as the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post and the New York Times — also possess much (though not all) of the archive, the Intercept was the only outlet with the (full) archive that had continued to publish documents, albeit at a remarkably slow pace, in recent years. In total, fewer than 10 percent of the Snowden documents have been published since 2013. Thus, the closing of the publication’s Snowden archive will likely mean the end of any future publications, unless Greenwald’s promise of finding “the right partner … that has the funds to robustly publish” is fulfilled.

Poitras told Brown that she first caught wind of the coming end of the Snowden archive on March 6, when Scahill and Intercept editor-in-chief Betsy Reed asked to meet with her “to explain how we’ve assessed our priorities in the course of the budget process, and made some restructuring decisions.” During the resulting two-hour meeting, which Poitras described as “tense,” she realized that they had “decided to eliminate the research department. I object to this on the grounds Field of Vision [Intercept sister company where Poitras works] is dependent [on the] research department, and the Snowden archive security protocols are overseen by them.”

Poitras later sent two emails opposing the research department’s elimination and, in one of those emails, argued that the research department should stay, as it represented “only 1.5% of the total budget” of First Look Media, The Intercept’s parent company, which is wholly owned by billionaire Pierre Omidyar. The last of those emails was sent on March 10 and Poitras told Brown:

Throughout these conversations and email exchanges, there was no mention of shutting down the archive. That was not on the table. That decision was made on either Monday March 11 or Tuesday March 12, again without my involvement or consent.”

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See also:  Glenn Greenbacks Completes the Edward Snowjob

Whistleblowers Say NSA Still Spies on American Phones in Hidden Program

Comment: Obvious doesn't even come close...

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Nafeez Ahmed

INSURGE INTELLIGENCE

On Monday 4th, the New York Times reported that the National Security Agency has “quietly” shut down a controversial phone records surveillance program revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013.

The claim was made by a senior Republican congressional aide who told the newspaper that the Trump administration had stopped using the program, which analyses the domestic call and text logs of American citizens, due to technical problems.

On Twitter Snowden hailed the news as a “victory”, while Intercept journalist Glen Greenwald, who broke the Snowden story to international acclaim, took the story at face value. Neither of them raised the obvious question — is the “shut down” of this program merely a smokescreen to continue spying on American phones under new or different secretive programs?

Since then, further doubt was cast on the NYT report when NSA chief General Paul Nakasone refused to confirm or deny the story. But he did tell a major security conference on Wednesday that the agency was still “in a deliberative process” about whether to use a revamped version of the vast database of American phone records.

All of this, however, is an elaborate ruse. According to two former top NSA officials interviewed by INSURGE, there is no credible reason to believe that NSA phone surveillance has truly been shut down. 

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BBC Producer Blows The Whistle & Admits The “Gas Attack” Footage From Syria “Was Staged”

Arjun Walia
Collective Evolution

 

“The problem of fake news isn’t solved by hoping for a referee, but rather because we as citizens, we as users of these services, help each other. We talk and we share and we point out what is fake. We point out what is true. The answer to bad speech is not censorship, the answer to bad speech is more speech. We have to exercise and spread the idea that critical thinking matters, now more than ever, given the fact that lies seem to be getting more popular.” –Edward Snowden (source)

It’s truly amazing what’s happening in regards to information today. It’s being heavily censored. News browser extension NewsGuard is one of the latest examples, which promises to help readers pick out fake news. However, NewsGuard is funded and run by individuals tied to the CFR, Atlantic Council, and prominent elite figures who own mainstream media. You can read more about that here.

There is a war on information right now, especially any information that threatens the elitists’ and globalists’ agendas or corporate profits. It’s not morally right to have government authorities step in and determine for the population what is real and what is fake, and what to censor and what not to censor. Our free speech is being shut down, and this is evident by Facebook’s recent deletion and mass censorship of multiple alternative media outlets acting as a new ‘ministry of truth.’ It’s truly Orwellian-like.

Truth, however, cannot be stopped, and it’s mainstream media that’s recently been outed as promoting the most ‘fake news,’ which is evident by the multiple award-winning mainstream media journalists who’ve ‘blown the whistle,’ so to speak, about mainstream media and how they are paid by corporations, governments and intelligence agencies to spread and alter the news they share. There are also some very telling documents that go into detail regarding mainstream media’s relationship with multiple governments, and how it’s used to alter the perception of the masses and keep a tight grip on the information that’s disseminated through academia and journalism. I provide many examples within this article if you’re interested, which includes access to those documents. The article is about William Arkin, a well-known military and war reporter who is best known for his groundbreaking, three-part Washington Post series in 2010, who just went public outing NBC/MSNBC as completely government run agencies.

But let’s get to this latest example regarding Syria.

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Another “suicide” of a child sex trafficking whistleblower

The Sun

 

AN ACTIVIST whose claims led to the "rape" arrest of a celebrity healer called John of God has taken her own life at her hideaway in Spain.

Sex abuse support group Victimas Unidas, which worked with Sabrina Bittencourt, said she had left a note explaining why she killed herself.

Eldest son Gabriel Baum confirmed her death, writing on Facebook: “She took the last step so that we could live. They killed my mother.”

More than 600 women have accused John of God - real name Joao Teixeira de Faria - of sexually abusing them during so-called healing sessions.

He was arrested in his homeland of Brazil in December and remanded in prison before being charged with rape and sexual assault.

The cult leader gained international fame in 2010 when US TV star Oprah Winfrey visited his retreat to interview him for her talk show.

She wrote she left feeling “an overwhelming sense of peace”, although she later deleted the comments and has since said she hopes justice is done. 

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Joshua Schulte named as suspect in 'Vault 7' leak of CIA tools to Wikileaks, but charged instead over child porn

Comment: Looks like a set up. 

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Boing Boing

Federal investigators believe a man who once worked for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is responsible for last year's massive leak of Top Secret CIA hacking tools, court documents reveal.


The suspect has been named as Joshua Adam Schulte, 29, who lived in New York, and is now in federal jail in Manhattan--not for the hack, but on child pornography charges.

Chat log found on Joshua Schulte's computer - feds say he's discussing how to keep child porn secret. I'm more interested in the CIA coder's comment about how encryption can be broken. Feds didn't need to break the encryption on his computer. They found password on his cellphone pic.twitter.com/eoRuQAnPhm

— Kim Zetter (@KimZetter) May 15, 2018

The government has filed no charges against Schulte in connection with the CIA leak. It's not clear why.

In court, Schulte's lawyer Jacob Kaplan said the FBI suspects his client was behind the leak of some 8,000 CIA documents to WikiLeaks in March, 2017.

"The FBI believed that Mr. Schulte was involved in that leak," said Kaplan, according to a transcript of a Jan. 8, 2018 hearing published by NBC News.

"As part of their investigation, they obtained numerous search warrants for Mr. Schulte's phone, for his computers, and other items, in order to establish the connection between Mr. Schulte and the WikiLeaks leak."

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Ecuador to Expel Assange from its London Embassy?

Stephen Lendman
stephenlendman.org

In August 2012, Ecuador granted WikiLeaks founder, director and editor-in-chief Julian Assange asylum in its London embassy - granting him citizenship in December 2017. He's been there since June 2012. If he steps out of the embassy, Washington wants him arrested and extradited to America.

Whistleblowers exposing government wrongdoing are endangered in the US. Anyone exposing its high crimes and/or other dirty secrets is vulnerable. Challenging the nation's policies, no matter how heinous, risks severe punishment.

As CIA director, neocon extremist Mike Pompeo falsely accused Assange of causing "great harm to our nation's national security." He lied calling WikiLeaks "a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia." 

In 2012, a secret grand jury convened. A sealed indictment followed, allegedly accusing Assange of spying under the long ago outdated 1917 Espionage Act, enacted shortly after America's entry into WW I - used to prosecute, convict and imprison Chelsea Manning.

Neocon Attorney General Jeff Sessions prioritizes arresting, prosecuting and imprisoning Assange, earlier saying: "(I)t is a priority. We've already begun to step up our efforts and whenever a case can be made, we will seek to put some people in jail" like Assange for whistleblowing.

In late March, his Internet access was cut off. New restrictions limit his outside communications - his phone privileges and visits from colleagues and others banned, according to WikiLeaks. 

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Asylum-Seeking New Zealand Journalist Suzie Dawson Is Critically Ill In Moscow

Susan Vos
Disobedient Media

Suzie Dawson, asylum-seeking journalist and current President of the Internet Party of New Zealand, is critically ill in Moscow. Dawson is seeking asylum in Russia after being targeted by New Zealand intelligence agencies as a result of her activism in the Occupy movement and against the TPP, among other causes.

Prior to becoming seriously ill, Dawson had published a major work on the altered and deeply manipulated history of Wikileaks and Julian Assange, titled Being Julian Assange. When Assange’s asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London was transformed into solitary confinement by the Ecuadorian government under President Lenin Moreno in late March, Dawson and Internet Party founder Kim Dotcom launched a ten hour online #ReconnectJulian vigil, in which activists, whistleblowers, journalists and figures from across the political spectrum unanimously called for the immediate restoration of Julian Assange’s communications with the outside world.

Although the vigil was a resounding success in terms of social media reach and impact, Assange’s communications with the outside world have yet to be restored at the time of writing. Due to this intolerable and ongoing situation, Dawson and others joined forces to organize a massive, long-running and all-inclusive second online vigil, under the banner of “Unity4J.”

When Dawson was suddenly struck down with illness, she was in the final days of preparation for the public announcement of the vigil, and was on the verge of sending out both invitations and press releases advertising the event.

Dawson has been a ferocious advocate for political prisoners, whistleblowers and targeted individuals including but not limited to Julian Assange. She has also been a major supporter in the spheres of activism and independent journalism, previously under the pseudonym Endarken. Her work has consistently exposed the manipulations of the establishment.

Dawson and this author have also collaborated on the ongoing DecipherYou project, in which we analyze Snowden documents – specifically SID Today files, published by The Intercept – that have never received media scrutiny. Dawson and this writer have described a number of ground breaking findings that have resulted from the initiative.

Christine Assange responded to Dawson’s illness, telling Disobedient Media: “Journalist Suzie Dawson has been a staunch long-time defender for justice for my son Julian. She has been taken suddenly and seriously ill, and she and her children need our support. Please help. Thank you. ”

Although Dawson became ill at the time of preparation for the Unity4J event, Dawson does not believe that the illness was the result of having been targeted. Those who wish to support Suzie Dawson during this difficult time are encouraged to donate using the following links:

Suzi3d Support Fund

Suzie’s Steemit Account.

Disobedient Media will continue to report on this matter as necessary.

5 Whistleblowers Who Died Mysteriously

Sputnik

In the wake of the death on Wednesday of Iraq War veteran and computer security expert James Dolan, Sputnik decided to recall other whistleblowers that have passed away under rather vague circumstances.

1. James Dolan was a co-creator of the whistleblower submission system SecureDrop along with Aaron Swartz, who killed himself in 2013 following prosecution for an alleged criminal hacking incident. 36-year-old Dolan, who reportedly also took his own life, joined the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) after Swartz’s death. The circumstances of Dolan’s death are yet unknown, however the FPF reported that he had been suffering from PTSD since the Iraq War.

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