Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters this week [July 14, 2017] that he was perplexed by the amount of interest shown in Assange—a “petty thief running around on the Internet.”
Tag Archives: assange
Who Guards The Guardian?
Gate-keeper of the left, The Guardian, has been attacking Gilad Atzmon for the “anti-Semitism” of his book on Jewish identity “The Wandering Who?” which tackles controversial questions about origin myths, race, and religion. It’s not the first time, and Atzmon is not the only one.
Wikileaks and Assange, as well as Chomsky, Hermann, and others, have come in for bashing.
Of course, I, like others, have had my problems with Assange and with Chomsky too. But for altogether different reasons. Both seemed to me to be engaged in a kind of misdirection. Others whom I respect have agreed with that take.
But The Guardian‘s criticism, especially of Assange, seems to stem from professional rivalry. I say that because The Guardian supported the intervention in Libya, while Assange, though he has distanced himself from NATO’s bombing, takes credit for inspiring the rebels.
So it is likely not really a difference in ideology that’s split them.
“The Guardian’s discrediting of the “left” – the left being a concept never defined by the paper’s writers – is far from taking place in a fair battle of ideas. Not least the Guardian is backed by the huge resources of its corporate owners. When it attacks dissident writers, they can rarely, if ever, find a platform of equal prominence to defend themselves. And the Guardian has proved itself more than reluctant to allow a proper right of reply in its pages to those it maligns.
But also, and most noticeably, it almost never engages with these dissident writers’ ideas. In popular terminology, it prefers to play the man, not the ball. Instead it creates labels, from the merely disparaging to the clearly defamatory, that push these writers and thinkers into the territory of the unconscionable.
A typical example of the Guardian’s new strategy was on show this week in an article in the print edition’s comment pages – also available online and a far more prestigious platform than CiF – in which the paper commissioned a socialist writer, Andy Newman, to argue that the Israeli Jewish musician Gilad Atzmon was part of an anti-semitic trend discernible on the left……..
….As is now typical in this new kind of Guardian character assassination, the article makes no effort to prove that Atzmon is anti-semitic or to show that there is any topical or pressing reason to bring up his presumed character flaw. (In passing, the article made a similar accusation of anti-semitism against Alison Weir of If Americans Knew, and against the Counterpunch website for publishing an article on Israel’s role in organ-trafficking by her.)
Atzmon has just published a book on Jewish identity, The Wandering Who?, that has garnered praise from respected figures such as Richard Falk, an emeritus law professor at Princeton, and John Mearsheimer, a distinguished politics professor at Chicago University.
But Newman did not critique the book, nor did he quote from it. In fact, he showed no indication that he had read the book or knew anything about its contents…..
… the Guardian was happy to offer its imprimatur to Newman’s defamation of Atzmon, who was described as a conspiracy theorist “dripping with contempt for Jews”, despite an absence of substantiating evidence. Truly worthy of Pravda in its heyday.
The Atzmon article appeared on the same day the Guardian carried out a similar hatchet job, this time on Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks. The paper published a book review of Assange’s “unauthorised autobiography” by the Guardian’s investigations editor, David Leigh…..
…..The low point in Leigh’s role in this saga is divulging in his own book a complex password Assange had created to protect a digital file containing the original and unedited embassy cables. Each was being carefully redacted before publication by several newspapers, including the Guardian……
….Some of this clearly reflects a clash of personalities and egos, but it also looks suspiciously like the feud derives from a more profound ideological struggle between the Guardian and Wikilieaks about how information should be controlled a generation hence. The implicit philosophy of Wikileaks is to promote an ever-greater opening up and equalisation of access to information, while the Guardian, following its commercial imperatives, wants to ensure the gatekeepers maintain their control.”
That Transparency Meme…
About that transparency meme that I caught on to in 2010, from whence it… er…percolated..to others, like the estimable Daily Bell, whom I have often and meticulously cited, whom I applaud for its wonderful work and have supported over and over, despite many misgivings….
(One of its associates/editors’ comments to my post can even be seen later in this blog post).
A nod in the direction from where you get stuff, folks, would be nice. It would be even nicer if I got it without having to bring it up, although, as you can see, I’m not bashful about doing that either…
I give credit regardless, and I hope for the same, politely, humbly, and patiently at first, but if not, then a tad more assertively. Ultimately, this blog is committed to subverting and destroying the lies on which modernity has lived for centuries and a little (intellectual) blood-letting will take place when it has to, with no qualms.
The biggest lie fostered by modernity is the lie called western supremacism, whose economic form is mercantilism. This, as I see even in this day, can only be sustained by the appropriation of other people’s work, whether physical or mental. That is fundamental to it.
My attribution battles, small and great, are thus an intrinsic part of the mandate of this blog, and not solely personal. More later…
Thus this brief history of the transparency meme is not the first such and it probably won’t be the last.
Over and over, even recently, I blog something and then see it surface a day or so later, without a nod in this direction. [One recent example was when I blogged why we need avoid treating ‘End the Fed’ as a slogan and why I think that power has already moved to the BIS].
Sometimes, I daresay, it’s just accidental. I allow for that. But more often it isn’t. Then I am reluctantly forced to call them out.
That kind of thing is simply wrong, no matter how many people do it and what theories or philosophies they quote. It is a kind of theft. Whether it is simply careerism or the professional standards of hard money people or marketers or the financial industry, it has to be called out. Nothing will get better without a clean up of the intellectual pollution and smog that clogs political debate.
Think about it. How can you denounce state actions as the means to enforce norms, if your own conduct adheres to none? If you yourself worship at the foot of power, whether money power, or status, or marketing clout, or anything else, and rely on your ability to “get away with it” because “everyone does it,” rather than on objective truth, then you have no moral grounds to complain when another kind of power (state power, the power of law, or the will of the people) opposes you. In fact, your behavior invites it.
That is why, in the end, the OccupyWallStreet folks will triumph. Soros will win. Why shouldn’t he?
If all you really care about is your network, and the money you make from them, and aggrandizing yourself, rather than objective truth, well then, on all those counts Soros is your master. He has proved it.
You cannot complain. If capitalists express in their behavior no more than the tenet, “might makes right”, they have nothing on which to stand when the might of the state turns against them. And it will turn against them. In fact, it already has.
And, truthfully, they have no one to blame but themselves.
See below:
http://mindbodypolitic.org/2010/08/03/the-tangled-web/
“Again, I could be mistaken about Wikileaks.
But even if I were, even if Assange himself turned out to be well-meaning and principled, I’m not enthusiastic about his perfect transparency, leak-for-profit model. I think it has ominous parallels in corporate and state intelligence services. In my reading (and that of some others), it was one of the instigating factors in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. Furthermore, the model depends on flouting the privacy rights of innocent people and private outfits.
So however things turn out, I’ll pass on Wikileaks and the “glamor” of spy v. spy. Means are just as important, if not more, than ends. That’s a lesson the Cold War should have taught us. In fact, I thought libertarianism was premised on it.
It troubles me then to see so many liberty-minded people simply brush off these questions as “spiteful” or “envious”……
In such matters, no one is beyond respectful questioning.”
And this post below (I’d actually started doubting Assange much earlier…as you can see from checking back at my posts)
http://mindbodypolitic.org/2010/06/27/more-on-assange-and-wikileaks/
Here’s the main theoretical reason why one might tend to suspect Wikileaks.
Assange objects to privacy. Wikileaks violates privacy. Kind of like Google, notice? Google thinks it’s heroic too and Google has its China-connection too. Wikileaks makes anonymous sources, hacking, leaking, and ratting out your associates cool. It makes snitches heroes.
Cui bono? Need I ask? Corporate rivals, speculators and short-sellers, blackmailers, rival governments, spy agencies. Does that sound like the company the power-elites keep?
So even if Wikileaks were not a disinformation agent, whose agenda would its work finally help? A totalitarian outfit’s. It certainly doesn’t help individualism.
A friend said…
06/27/10 2:05 PM | Comment Link Edit This
The Case Against Wikileaks – I
Posted at Veterans Today:
Let me first say that harassing Julian Assange for having published leaked government documents is completely wrong. There’s no evidence so far that anyone has been injured directly because of the leaks. National
security (even as understood by mainstream statists) hasn’t been damaged. As for the embarrassment some officials might be feeling, tough. Governments routinely subject their citizens to much worse for no valid reason. As for diplomacy, there’s none worth the name. All we have is blackmailers, bullies, and outright bandits in high places. Some outing and shaming of their public actions is in order. Exposing the crimes and blunders of the state is not only a right of citizens, but a
duty.
As enough people have argued, Assange is obviously not guilty of treason, since he’s not a citizen of the US. And, although some people think he’s guilty of espionage, that’s doesn’t seem true either. He didn’t hack any state computer or blow any agent’s cover to get his information. It was mostly given to him voluntarily by whistle-blowers and leakers. All he did was publish it. And, since New York Times Co. v. United States (1971), US law has protected the right of publishers to publish politically sensitive information without “prior restraints,” as long as it doesn’t cause “grave and irreparable damage”
to the public.
Having said that, though, I must admit that for almost a year now, as I’ve
blogged, I’ve found the whole Wikileaks operation strange, if not a bit fishy. Let me recount the ways.
1. Most of the documents seems to cover material already fairly well-known to informed people. The new material is mostly embarrassing stuff, nothing truly revelatory, say dozens of critics. Now, mainstream critics might just be trying to do damage control, but why would
respected alternative investigators who are outspoken critics of war and the police state, people like Wayne Madsen or co-founder John Young or Chris Floyd, among many others, also come to that conclusion? [Floyd seems to have “gone
wobbly” since then].
By Assange’s own account in the Australian, here are the most important revelations from Wikileaks:
“The US asked its diplomats to steal personal human material and information from UN officials and human rights groups, including DNA, fingerprints, iris scans, credit card numbers, internet
passwords and ID photos, in violation of international treaties. Presumably Australian UN diplomats may be targeted, too.King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia asked the US Officials in Jordan and
Bahrain want Iran ‘s nuclear program stopped by any means available.Britain’s Iraq inquiry was fixed to protect “US interests”.
Sweden is a covert member of NATO and US intelligence sharing is kept
from parliament.The US is playing hardball to get other countries to take freed detainees from Guantanamo Bay. Barack Obama agreed to meet the Slovenian President only if Slovenia took a prisoner. Our Pacific
neighbour Kiribati was offered millions of dollars to accept detainees.”
Now, these disclosures would be nothing to scoff about on any activist’s resume. But is Assange telling us anything we didn’t already know? What has really been added so far except specifics and
details? Then why are the revelations being called a
new 9-11 ?
2. An overblown media story is not the only difficulty with Wikileaks.Consider that in all this welter of damaging information, whatever you think of it, there’s nothing that really damages Israel.
Justin Raimondo, a right-wing libertarian, has tried to suggest there is. He says there’s material in Wikileaks that reveals the sinister activities of the Israeli mafia. Big deal. Everyone knows the
Israeli mafia is everywhere, not just in Israel. The Russian mafia is a euphemism for the Russian and Ukrainian Jewish mafia, which has strong ties to Israel. The Colombian drug trade is run by this mafia. So is the Eastern European sex trade. According to Mark Mitchell, Wall Street is run by it. A leak about the
world’s most dangerous mafia, that everyone already knows about, doesn’t really damage Israeli foreign policy, does it? It even carries a good guy flavor about it.
That means what we really have in Wikileaks is a document dump slanted a particular way. So says at least one establishment figure, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former Secretary of State under President Carter.
Say what you will about him, Brzezinski, master-mind of the policy of luring the Soviet Union to its destruction in Afghanistan, is nobody’s fool. He spots the hand of an intelligence agency in all this.
Could this be a calculated subliminal “prepping” of the collective pysche by a state intelligence outfit, masquerading as an expose of states?
3. Now comes a
report that Julian Assange cut a deal with Israeli officials to keep anything damaging to Israel out of the revelations. I don’t know how well-sourced or credible this report is. But then there’s also Assange’s citation of Benjamin Netanyahu, the hawkish Israeli prime minister who’s praised Wikileaks. And there’s Assange’s statement in the Australian crediting Rupert Murdoch, a hard-line
Zionist and one of the biggest promoters of war with Iraq, as his inspiration. That alone should make people think twice . It’s not just that Israeli isn’t damaged by Wikileaks. A lot of the material on the site actually helps Israel’s global objectives. We now know that neighboring Arab states are alarmed by the idea of a nuclear Iran. We learn that the Saudi rulers are in bed with the Israeli government and are thoroughly corrupt. Pakistan is treacherous and a threat. There’s a hornet’s nest of terror in South India. This is news? And even if you think it is, who benefits?
Doesn’t all this simply amplify Israel’s hardline attitude to the Islamic world and justify the recent introduction of the biometric ID into India, Afghanistan, and the Af-Pak border? Don’t the revelations reflect most poorly on the Arab states and on America, but not on Israel? Don’t they channel global attention and anger away from the global economic collapse master-minded by Zionist financiers and their supremo, the Federal Reserve? Don’t they redirect anger at Israel for the slaughter in Gaza, for the massacre
on the Mavi Marmara, and for the AIPAC espionage case, as Gordon Duff, at Veterans Today points out? Even
liberal commentator Juan Cole writes that Assange is being tarred and feathered for giving to the public what AIPAC routinely gives to Israel.
And what is the ultimate result? Israel now claims that the US is too distracted to broker a deal on settlements.
Again, who benefits from that? Israeli hard-liners, of course.
4. But maybe all this is just the price Assange has to pay to get wide coverage in the Western mainstream, largely dominated by Zionist editors, writers, and publishers?
Maybe.
Is it also part of the price that he has to bash the 9-11 movement? If you’re against empire and exploitation, as Assange says he is, then shouldn’t you be interested in uncovering the truth about the attack that was the explicit trigger for the unjust
war on Iraq, the global war on terror, Homeland Security, and every police state measure since?
And if you’re not, what’s your excuse?
It’s not just that Assange is not interested in 9-11. He’s gone out of his way to mock people who’ve devoted countless unpaid hours of work to investigate it, with none of the media attention that follows every step Assange takes.
5. And that brings me to my fifth point. The fate of whistle-blowers and tellers of dangerous truth is rarely rock-star celebrity. Count them. Mordechai Vanunu, who exposed Israel’s nuclear program – imprisoned for nearly 20 years. Gary Webb, who exposed the CIA connection to the distribution of crack cocaine in the US – probably murdered. Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, who criticized Putin’s policies in Chechnya -assassinated. Lebanese journalists Samir Qassir and Gebran Tueni, who criticized the Syrian government –
killed in car bombings. In 90% of such cases, says the Committee to Protect Journalists, the killers are never brought to justice. Yet, Assange, “the
most dangerous man in Cyberspace,” according to the faux-alternative
magazine Rolling Stone, lives to tell the tale of his persecution from the cover of Time magazine and the podium of TED conferences, weighted down with awards and honors from such establishment worthies as Economist, New Statesman, and Amnesty International.
And now he is the center of an international man-hunt. Here too, the claims are bizarre. If Wikileaks hasn’t put lives at risk or seriously damaged “national security,” by even the government’s own account, what to make of all these feverish cries for prosecution under the espionage act, for imprisonment
and torture, even for execution?
Are they for real, or does any one else detect an element of theater?
The Wikileaks disclosures have been called cyber-terrorism by many. When before have we seen an international man-hunt for a rag-tag band of terrorists headed up by a charismatic mystery man with a striking appearance and a personal life shrouded in mystery? Now we have Osama-bin-Assange and Al-Wikileaks at war with Joe Lieberman and Sarah Palin, on one hand, and cheered on by David Frum, on the other. Notice that Frum points out that the disclosures actually support George Bush’s rationale for invading Iraq.
This is box-office gold. As some wide-awake journalist has noted, the big winner in all this is the establishment media. Before, it had one foot in the grave. Deservedly. Now it is a “truth-teller.” Readership is up, resurrected by proxy. And the major alternative press, the foundation activists, are bolstering the conclusions of the New York Times. How convenient.
I dearly wish Julian Assange were exactly as he seems – a brilliant iconoclast delivering the death blow to imperialism. But my memory is not so dim. I remember another media circus besides the one around
Osama. I recall the mass adulation of a man who exuded brilliance, youth, hope, and salvation. That was in 2008, and he was a young law professor from Chicago. How did that turn out?
6. Then again, if Assange’s message is so subversive to the state, why are the state’s most reliable mouthpieces plastering his message everywhere? Why did Assange himself choose the New York Times, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel for his initial exposes?
These are left-center outlets, statist to the core. And Assange, the self-proclaimed libertarian chooses them? Perhaps, one could argue, the left-center is where the most powerful and influential media organs are located. Assange is just being a savvy marketer in picking those outlets.
Perhaps.
But perhaps not.
Perhaps, instead, he could have thrown in one libertarian or conservative newspaper, at least, to show even- handedness? How hard would it have been to send material to, say, the Independent?
7. But he didn’t, so again I ask you, how libertarian can he really be? And if he isn’t a libertarian, why does he go out of his way to proclaim he is? There’s nothing wrong, after all, with being a
socialist or even a communist, at least in most places outside the US.
Why doesn’t Assange just declare himself a left-wing peacenik and leave
it at that?
Ah, now things get even more interesting. Dig into Assange’s writings – most of it very engaging and thoughtful – and contradictions emerge.
On June 18, 2006, he writes:
“Rights are freedoms of action that are known to be enforceable. Consequently there are no rights without beliefs about the future effects of behavior. Unenforcable general rights exist only insofar as they are argumentation that may one day yield enforcement. Hence the Divine Right of Kings, the right of way, mining rights, conjugal rights, property rights, and copyright. The decision as to what should be enforced and what may be ignored is political. This does not mean that rights are unimportant, but rather, that politics (the societal control of freedom) is so important as to subsume rights.”
I will repeat that. Assange places societal control above the exercise of rights.
This is not libertarian. And it’s not an isolated statement. It’s repeated elsewhere.
“Technical people, good at stacking houses of abstract cards often look at the law and see rules, but this is a shadow, for law hangs from the boughs of politics, that branch of behavior involved with the societal control of freedom of action. Always consider the real politik
of law; who will push for change and who will resist.”
And then about global warming (Assange seems to believe in anthropogenic global warming), he says this:
“The bottom line is, as Benford notes, “we’re going to have to run this planet.”
Some libertarianism. One critic has pointed out that at the core of Assange’s philosophy is not openness and freedom so much as a left-leaning concern with “justice.” Nothing wrong with that. So why the dress-up in American-style libertarianism? At whom is the repackaging, if it is that, directed?
Authoritarianism emerges also in Assange’s work at Wikileaks, where he is technically the chief editor and spokesman. His associates complain of egotistic, autocratic behavior, much different from his anarchist professions.
Some have left to start their own sites. Others complain about the secrecy he maintains about his own work, also at odds with the transparency he advocates for others.
This secrecy might, at first, seem justified. Wikileaks, after all, is a private, not a public outfit. Maybe so. But that distinction hasn’t stopped the site from publishing the secrets of other private organizations, like the Christian Scientists and the Mormons. It’s also published the hacked private emails of Sarah Palin and the financial information of private clients of the Swiss bank, Julius Baer.
Wayne Madsen has argued that this ultimately benefits Democrat financier George Soros.
This is a performance that seems not only hypocritical but curiously partisan and parochial, especially when set against the generous intellectual sweep of Assange’s theoretical writing.
And that’s exactly the taste left in your mouth after a sampling of Wikileaks‘revelations.
After all the hype about “scientific journalism,” the conclusions Wikileaks
supports are downright provincial: our government lied us into war in Iraq; Hillary Clinton’s a bitch; Arab regimes are corrupt and deserve regime change; private contractors are bilking tax-payers; corporate corruption is the real conspiracy, not 9-11.
This is stuff that could have come out of the computer of any
government propagandist.
More to the point, some of us are wondering if it really did.
(To be continued)
Reports Suggest Wikileaks May Be Front – Updated
Update: I thought back to the climate-gate e-mails, which, I’d momentarily forgotten, were uploaded to wikileaks. If wikileaks were a Soros-funded disinformation operation, I wonder if it would be uploading emails that damage the AGW theory. That tends to make me wonder about the reason the left-liberals might not like wikileaks.
Update III: Here’s Justin Raimondo on the subject. Raimondo thinks the only people who criticize wikileaks are limousine liberals and tin-foil hat conspiracists…for now, I’ll let him have the last word:
“A child could understand this, but it’s way beyond the executive director of the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, and also far beyond the comprehension of the “liberal” Mother Jones magazine, which ought to change its name to Encounter. Kushner “reports” this nonsense uncritically, and even cites the loony John Young, of Cryptome.org, who rants:
“’WikiLeaks is a fraud,’ [Young] wrote to Assange’s list, hinting that the new site was a CIA data mining operation. ‘Fuck your cute hustle and disinformation campaign against legitimate dissent. Same old shit, working for the enemy.’”
Kushner has all bases covered: the white-wine-and-brie liberals who would rather look the other way while their hero Obama slaughters children on the streets of Baghdad, and the tinfoil hat crowd who can be convinced Wikileaks is a “false flag” operation.”
Update II: I should reiterate, I don’t endorse the WM piece. I merely present it…
Update I: I should also add that it doesn’t mean the documents they unearth might not be very important or useful. That’s not what I think this report is suggesting. A front always has a legitimate purpose, which gives it its credibility. How to differentiate disinformation from honest error? Well, evidence of someone/some outfit being funded by intelligence or government agencies; obvious lies or distortions repeated even when evidence contradicts the distortion; giving credence to very few sources or setting up some voices as totally credible and not listening to the range of voices; character assassination rather than rational debate, stigmatization; lack of self-criticism; unwillingness to rethink ideas when faced with new facts.
From The Wayne Madson Report via Alex Constantine:
“In January 2007, John Young, who runs cryptome.org, a site that publishes a wealth of sensitive and classified information, left Wikileaks, claiming the operation was a CIA front. Young also published some 150 email messages sent by Wikileaks activists on cryptome. They include a disparaging comment about this editor [Alex Constantine] by Wikileaks co-founder Dr. Julian Assange of Australia. Assange lists as one of his professions “hacker.” His German co-founder of Wikileaks uses a pseudonym, “Daniel Schmitt.”
Wikileaks claims it is “a multi-jurisdictional organization to protect internal dissidents, whistleblowers, journalists and bloggers who face legal or other threats related to publishing” [whose] primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we are of assistance to people of all nations who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations. We aim for maximum political impact. We have received over 1.2 million documents so far from dissident communities and anonymous sources.”
In China, Wikileaks is suspected of having Mossad connections. It is pointed out that its first “leak” was from an Al Shabbab “insider” in Somalia. Al Shabbab is the Muslim insurgent group that the neocons have linked to “Al Qaeda.”
Asian intelligence sources also point out that Assange’s “PhD” is from Moffett University, an on-line diploma mill and that while he is said to hail from Nairobi, Kenya, he actually is from Australia where his exploits have included computer hacking and software piracy.
WMR has confirmed Young’s contention that Wikileaks is a CIA front operation. Wikileaks is intimately involved in a $20 million CIA operation that U.S.-based Chinese dissidents that hack into computers in China. Some of the Chinese hackers route special hacking program through Chinese computers that then target U.S. government and military computer systems. After this hacking is accomplished, the U.S. government announces through friendly media outlets that U.S. computers have been subjected to a Chinese cyber-attack. The “threat” increases an already-bloated cyber-defense and offense budget and plays into the fears of the American public and businesses that heavily rely on information technology.”
My Comment:
Julian Assange was always sending me emails and requests to join wikileaks a couple of years ago. I thought the outfit was interesting, but I don’t really deal in “secret” documents or cloak-and-dagger stuff, because something founded on distrust is bound to founder on distrust.
Even media activism has the same result. You start wondering if everything you’re reading is disinformation. At a certain point, you have to ask, so what if it is? Can’t I still arrive at the right conclusions by operating from strict rules of reason and ethics?
It seems to me that you can figure out what is going on without going under cover or hacking or stealing classified information because propaganda has a very distinctive flavor you get to recognize after some time. I’ll leave the exciting spy v spy stuff to more adventurous sorts. I can’t confirm anything in this piece, but since it’s something I’ve wondered about myself and since it looks like there’s at least one other person (besides Alex Constantine) who’s wondering as well, Assange’s co-worker, it becomes blog-worthy. I remain agnostic.-to-mildly skeptic about wikileaks….
Hi! Interesting article. Can you post a definitive (or semi-definitive article) showing Assange is a disinformation agent? Is that your point in this excerpt … that your suspicions are re-ignited? Maybe we misunderstood.
At this point, (without evidence to change our tiny, collective mind) our betting is still that it is more likely MADSEN is one (since he is actually a member of several US old boy intel clubs) than Assange. We have our doubts about Rense too, where Madsen often appears.