Yves here. Sadly this Assange bombshell seems unlikely to derail the case against him, since the forces allied against him seem overwhelming. Or the informant who told the press he lied could recant on the stand and say he fabricated his media account.
By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies
It looks like the U.S. government’s case against Julian Assange is falling apart. One of its most important witnesses has now confessed to lying. Via the late Robert Parry’s site, Consortium News (emphasis mine throughout):
Key Witness in US Case Against Assange Changes His Story
An FBI informant on Julian Assange upon whose information the U.S. based a key part of its computer intrusion charge against Assange has now admitted that he lied.
An FBI informant upon whose information the United States based aspects of an indictment against imprisoned WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange has now admitted that he fabricated the evidence.
Sigudur “Sigi” Ingi Thordarson has told an Icelandic publication in an article that appeared on Saturday that he made up the allegation that Assange asked him to hack a government computer. That testimony played a key part in the indictment against Assange for conspiracy to commit computer intrusion.
Thordarson, 28, is referred to as “Teenager” in the part of the indictmentthat focuses on events in Iceland, where Assange was working in 2010. The indictment alleges that, “In early 2010, ASSANGE asked Teenager to commit computer intrusions and steal additional information, including audio recordings of phone conversations between high-ranking officials of the government of NATO Country-I, [Iceland] including members of the Parliament of NATO Country-I.”
Thordarson has now told the publication Stundin that this is a lie.
Since the lie is also on the record and it’s key to the charge underlying the extradition, this should mean Assange will be freed. That’s certainly one of the possibilities.
The other possibility is that Assange’s release will continue to be delayed — he should have been let go already — in the hope he succumbs to one of the many ailments his years-long confinement and current incarceration has inflicted on him (including suicide as the link in this paragraph notes).
It’s a safe bet that at least three of the English-speaking “Five Eyes” governments — the U.S., the U.K and Australia — want him dead, have wanted him dead ever since the release of Collateral Murder, the horrific U.S. war-crimes video we’re not supposed to know or care about.
So, will the U.K. release him or continue to hold him after this latest revelation? My guess: They’ll do whatever the U.S. wants them to try to get away with.
Treated Like an Enemy of the State
To get a sense of the illegal lengths to which the U.S. has gone to defame and destroy Assange — and also the kind of person his accuser, Sigi Thordarson, is — consider the following from this 2020 Intercept piece on Assange’s extradition trial:
The first recorded “black op” against Assange occurred on September 27, 2010, when a suitcase containing three laptops, hard drives, and clothing vanished from the aircraft carrying him from Sweden to Germany. Efforts to retrieve his belongings, which included privileged communications with his legal counsel, elicited vague excuses from the airline that it knew nothing. The fate of the purloined items became public knowledge in 2013 when information from his [stolen] laptops appeared in prosecution briefs against U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning.
And:
In 2011, FBI agents went to Iceland to employ an 18-year-old informant, Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson, to spy on WikiLeaks. When Iceland’s authorities discovered the FBI’s illegal activities, it deported the FBI agents. Tho[r]darson, whom the FBI had paid $5,000 and flown around the world, later confessed to stealing money from WikiLeaks and was convicted for sexually abusing underage boys.
The “black ops” against Assange have continued to this day and include such acts as these:
The extreme measures taken against Assange reached their all-time low when Lenín Boltaire Moreno Garcés replaced the pro-Assange Rafael Correa as president of Ecuador on May 24, 2017. Former employees of a private Spanish firm, Undercover Global SL, which was employed to provide security at the London embassy, testified on the final day of the Assange hearing that they installed more cameras and microphones, tampered with the mobile phones of visitors, stole the diapers of one of Assange’s babies to take his DNA, and discussed kidnapping and murdering him.
The Guardian has written that “Julian Assange’s health is so bad he could die in prison.” Here’s what awaits him if the U.S. were to succeed in its extradition (from the Intercept again):
An American former public defender, Yancey Ellis, described for the London hearing the conditions in Virginia’s Alexandria Detention Center, which would house Assange before and during his trial. Assange, he said, would be confined “at least 22 hours in a cell” that was “about the size of a parking space” with only a mat on a concrete shelf for a bed. Joel Stickler, an American prisoner advocate, testified that if Assange were convicted, his treatment at the “Alcatraz of the Rockies,” otherwise known as the U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Facility in Florence, Colorado, would be worse. Assange would be housed alone amid inmates like Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, Boston Marathon terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, FBI agent-turned-Russian spy Robert Hanssen, Mexican drug baron Joaquín “El Chapo” Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, and Oklahoma City co-bomber Terry McNichols. The prison’s regime is as ruthless as its prisoners: twenty-three-hour daily confinement in a concrete box cell with one window four inches wide, six bed checks a day with a seventh at weekends, one hour of exercise in an outdoor cage, showers spraying water in one-minute spurts, and “shakedowns” at the discretion of prison staff. There won’t be many other journalists and publishers there.
The ugly response to Julian Assange from all U.S. elites and their media enablers exactly mimics the ugliness he exposed by releasing Collateral Murder.
(If you’re seeing an age-restricted warning from YouTube in the video above, it’s because Google know this is a U.S. government snuff film.)
Worse, as one of the first soldiers on the scene after the attack, Ethan McCord, said soon after the film’s release, “Things like this happened on an almost daily basis in Iraq.”
If you listen through to the end of the video above, note how the Army screwed McCord out of his benefits, claiming that his war-related injuries — for example, his broken spine — were “pre-existing conditions.” To repeat a old Star Trek line, these people are without honor. Or conscience.
Murder and the War-Crimes State
As I wrote some years ago about Collateral Murder, the film is brutal to watch, but I challenge you to do it anyway. It shows not just murder, but a special kind of murder — murder from the safety of the air, murder by men with heavy machine guns slowly circling their targets in helicopters like hunters with shotguns who walk the edges of a trout pond, shooting at will, waiting, walking, then shooting again, till all the fish are dead. And again, as Ethan McCord tells us, the shells they’re firing are a foot long each. They blow people into pieces when they hit.
The film also shows war crimes that implicate the entire structure of the U.S. military, since everyone involved was acting under orders, seeking permission to fire, waiting, then getting it before once more blasting away. The publication of this video, plus all the Wikileaks publications that followed, comprise the whole reason everyone in the U.S. who matters, everyone with power, wants Julian Assange dead.
There’s no getting around it: We do this every day around the world. This is the state we defend when we defend the state. These are the people we honor when we honor those who continue to defend these deeds. (Looking at you, Mr. Biden, and you, his former boss.)
Despite this revelation, will the state still try to murder Julian Assange? It will be fascinating to watch its continued attempts to do so, if indeed it continues to attempt it.
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“…this Assange bombshell seems unlikely to derail the case against him, since the forces allied against him seem overwhelming. Or the informant who told the press he lied could recant on the stand and say he fabricated his media account”
If the first sentence is true, the second is, unfortunately, irrelevant.
The fact that there has been total and utter blackout in the mainstream media of this latest development simply yet again shows how utterly corrupt, bought and paid for the media are. What the media do not report, is just as significant as what they do report.
I doubt Assange will ever be released, a bit like the poor prisoners at Guantanamo. Assange’s only ‘crime’ for which he remains in a top security prison, is skipping bail, for which the general tariff is 6 months, reduced to 3 on good behaviour.
https://www.tareqhaddad.com/investigation-lies-newsweek-and-control-of-the-media-narrative-first-hand-account/
Agreed. I can’t imagine a scenario where this guy sees the light of day. Very unfortunate, to say the least, and directly speaks to the pure evil embedded in the institutions running the west—I mean watch that video. Where was/is the outrage?
Here is a lengthy but informative (link above) piece on the how this media blackout works. It has a long back story but has some tid bits on the mechanism of how media blackout.s occur.
One take away is that there are a bunch of lame losers in the editor role, getting very high salaries, not doing much of anything but dissing any story that makes the elites uncomfortable.
Somebody needs to do more of a deep dive on the Council on Foreign Relations and it’s role in msm. We all know they are full of shit but we don’t necessarily know how they get to be such a dysfunctional institution.
Anyway, nuff said.
Have you read “Wall Street’s Think Tank”? It’s been years since I read it but it was a pretty good rundown of the CFR especially considering I had no real prior knowledge. Not sure how heavily it focused on media—- I’d probably benefit from reading it again.
Also thanks for the link to Tariq. I knew there was some former Newsweek guy that I lost track of when I quit Twitter.
If you want a REAL account of the origins of the council on foreign relations and their sister , the royal institute of international affairs; also called “chatham house”… you should read Carroll Quigley’s “Tradgedy and Hope”…
In it he details the people and ideas which drove the creation… His book was real.
But then along came the early radical right, the john birch society and other Koch family orifices, where they want to attack the morgan /rockefeller syndicates Who are entwined in the creation of the american side of the thing;which was called, the council on foreign relations.. and turn actual history into the realm of “conspiracy”… which has insulated groups like the council… as much as anything else..
Without making a conspiracy case, just looking at the rosters, and who and how many decision makers all seemed to have “towed the party line” well enough and long enough to be considered “acceptable” for inclusion to “the establishment”…; is like being picked to be in a fraternity/sorority, where then they are “in the group”. and if nothing else , they can be said to suffer from “group=think”.
The numbers of people and their relative control of all the levers in our gov’t and cultural institutions for so long, really SHOULD , at least be open to discussion of conflicts of interest.
there are so many reasons , but since the members of the council were the globalists, and have ushered in our neoliberal present day reality… these children of the children who were the ones who enshrined the banking system to create our money supply… and whose community of interest are the foundations of wall street interest, which continue to dominate to this very day…. they ought to be included in “real history that is taught”
It is akin to critical race theory just meaning history that is accurate and inclusive of all things in a racial context..
The council on foreign relations as a front group for economic interests who actually have been at the forefront of history. as an anecdote…
I noticed in oliver stones netflix series on “history” of the 20th century… Almost ALL the names mentioned were council on foreign relation members… all those presidents,cabinet members,industrialists,etc.the only ones who weren’t were foreigners… pretty much.
Thanks for the comments and references rob and Cory. Much appreciated.
Carroll Quigley was one of the young Bill Clinton’s professors.
https://ccwritersite.wordpress.com/2016/03/20/meet-carroll-quigley-bill-clintons-prof/
I read somewhere that Quigley’s motive for writing the book was to try and inspire in its readers a sense of hopelessness and ” too late now anyway “, so that when people began to feel it, they would not try resisting with things like Goldwater Movements and such. Quigley wanted the readers of this book to feel there was nothing for it but to ” lie back and think of England”.
That doesn’t really make any sense. It doesn’t seem he was thinking that at all.
In fact in reading his books… It was more of a feeling of a veil being lifted.
To know that the 100 years quigley accounts for in tradgedy and hope, and the hows and whos in the various western governments who were aligned,related, and interdependent of each other, all working towards “shaping” the world we live in… gives me the certainty that THIS was done, and people can UNDO it… if they weren’t all chasing windmills… provided as cover….
so little actually important happens, yet the ramifications are constant.
Another book of his, was “the anglo-american establishment”… it was more just concerned about the anglo-american ties.
tradgedy and hope, included the economic history of the us and the big european countries from 1895 to 1950@ 1960… when it was written.
The coolest thing about tradgedy and hope, is it names names, and gives dollar amounts… and it shows the pupeteers and the puppets.
He was also very much “in the establishment”… so this is an insiders view.. But one where even he didn’t believe the depravity of these “elites”;giving them the benefit of the doubt.. but the treasonous acts have since been proven in declassified releases.
Not a peep about it in the tech platforms or the MSM, aka the POOP media ( Purveyors of Omissive Propaganda)
Not quite true that. Cenk Uygur over at The Young Turks came out and labeled him a Russian agent who supported Trump. There is that.
I should mention too that today is Julian Assange’s 50th birthday. Happy birthday, mate.
TYT may have been captured by the Borg but they’re not close to being MSM or a tech advertising platform
But who is going to tell Cenk & Ana that?
Aaron Mate apparently. Its been quite entertaining to watch.
I like to ask them what they think the motive was for the OPCW staffers who leaked. I have only seen one attempt to answer this from a smug young man who hopes to have a career in media – apparently they might have done it for the money. Not that he has any evidence for that and backed off as soon as i asked him whether that was what he was saying.
And once again I ask, “Why isn’t TYT a worker co-op?”
Answer given here exclusively: Because Cenk, like Kos, egomaniacally fancies himself a wildly successful media entrepeneur in spite of his embarrassingly lame Congressional run (Cenk, not Kos — the latter seems satisfied with the big fat fees he got as a stealth “new media consultant”) and financial capture by the Democratic Money Machine. As for Ana, I see her presence on Jacobin’s air as a sort of political warrant canary that they’ve been compromised and can’t be trusted.
Sibel Edmonds, who was fired by the FBI in 2002 for whistleblowing, had this this to say about Cenk –
https://youtu.be/YBrjFpWwwqU
…essentially he is a nobody, a low level parasite and a willing tool of the intelligence community….
And yes, Happy birthday Assange….
Assange’s crime was unforgivable, HRC even proposed a drone attack while he was in the Ecuadoran Embassy.
So, yes I expect Assange to be hounded until his death if not outright murdered by US agents or proxies.
Embarrassing the powerful has always been punished, seldom more so than in today’s America.
The powerful, like the Bourbon of France never learn and never forget, yet they expect, even demand forgiveness.
Thank you for publishing this and putting another small chink in the mainstream media’s censorship of this news.b
Which USA office holders have spoken out against this treatment of Assange?
Crickets from lefty congress people, e.g., AOC, Omar, Tliab, etc.
She is not an office holder, but Marian Williamson was a presidential candidate and has spoken out in support of Julian Assange.
crickets from “The Nation” “MotherJones” “In These Times” etc
Much of the legacy “progressive” media is decidedly part of the problem here. Kevin Drum, Joan Walsh, Todd Gitlin… useful idiots all, over several administrations, Democrat and Republican
Their, ahem, business model deprecates such offences, in the modern version of Lèse-Majesté.
In a parallel matter, this is Chris Hedges with Craig Murray. It is considered that Murray’s prosecution was in part to prevent him from testifying in the Spanish legal action concerning the spying on Assange and his legal team in the Ecuadorean Embassy. The spying which alone should cause the charges against the latter being thrown out, in any reasonable venue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qURhQMhAw78&t=50s
Thanks for this I hadn’t seen it.
Murray’s situation is another travesty but it really shows how this whole system works. I would really recommend his “Murder in Samarkand” as a semi autobiography. It’s very him if you know his blog. Warts and all. Anyway I couldn’t get it as an Ebook but it was worth the wait for my paper copy.
From wikipedia:
“A film version of the book was in development. Paramount bought the rights and developed a script written by David Hare. Michael Winterbottom was attached to direct and actor Steve Coogan to play Murray. After disagreements over the script, Paramount passed on the project, their rights meaning no one else could produce Hare’s script.”
His situation just makes me so sad. He deserves to be feted, not die in a dungeon as seems increasingly likely.
In the long term though I’m heartened to see the role that Wikileaks continues to play with respect to the OPCW coverup. They haven’t been completely kneecapped. Though this might just be attributed to their well earned reputation as a safe place to dump info. But it does indeed seem to be a well known, reputable and safe place and I hope it continues. (I mean what are the alternatives.. the intercept?…. *grim laughter*)
I don’t mean to write his obituary but man it’s fucking depressing.
At least he hasn’t been ripped limb from limb and thrown in the Tiber.
Yet
“It looks like the U.S. government’s case against Julian Assange is falling apart.”
Utterly despicable opening. There has never been any case against Assange.
” It looks like the U. S. government’s fake case against Julian Assange is rotting in the High Noon sun like a dead dog by the side of the road.”
( We will each have to be the Hunter S. Thompson we want to see in the world.)
Krystal and Saagar call out the collective silence. Their leap to their own program seems like it’s going pretty well although if you connect through yutube. you will probably see extremely ugly ads before their program appears:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_YE1pjB9d0
Sh*t gots to be paid for. We can either pay the time needed to watch the ugly ads, or we can pay the money needed to get Ad-Free You Tube Premium.
But either way, if we don’t pay, sh*t goes away, by and by.
However explosive the Collateral Murder tapes, are I believe that the real reason The Blob despises him is that he exposed Vault 7.
From Wikileaks:
By the end of 2016, the CIA’s hacking division, which formally falls under the agency’s Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), had over 5000 registered users and had produced more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other “weaponized” malware. Such is the scale of the CIA’s undertaking that by 2016, its hackers had utilized more code than that used to run Facebook. The CIA had created, in effect, its “own NSA” with even less accountability and without publicly answering the question as to whether such a massive budgetary spend on duplicating the capacities of a rival agency could be justified.
Wanna’ hack somebody and leave footprints blaming it on somebody else? Let’s just ask the librarian! Believe electronic BS at your peril.
Vault 7: a project that entirely failed to do the really hard work of developing defenses to computer security compromises, but instead contented itself with exploring attack vectors — even failing at that when it came to the products of a certain small Latvian network equipment company. They should have taken a page from the NSA’s playbook for Cisco and tried diverting shipments enroute to customers for the purpose of retrofitting back doors into the hardware. But then there was that whole thing about Latvia being an ally…
This is what Ray McGovern believes.
IIRC someone the other day wrote here that Caitlin Johnstone is shrill.
Yes, she is.
KLG: That darn Johnstone.
Thanks for the link. It is definitely worth reading.
“Shrillness in the defense of truth is no vice. And modulation in the face of evil is no virtue.”
— Barney Silverbeer
Let us not forget the verdict of Madame Banality of Evil, Hilary Clinton:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/12/hillary-clinton-julian-assange-arrest-wikileaks
A large portion of the U.S. Democratic Party doesn’t want Assange freed because that portion might have to assume some responsibility for their own banality of evil.
I don’t use the term lightly, but Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem defined it as the bureaucratic mentality that considered genocide a problem of logistics, much as our own champions of banality of evil consider mass murder a price of a Great Empire.
If Assange were released, 10 million Pink Pussy Hat Clintonites would hit the streets screaming ” Burn him!”
Did the US sign anything about human rights or is, as usual, above any kind of law?
I seems to me this prosecution goes well beyond any kind of sensible justice and I don’t believe that Sigudur’s declarations were his own initiative and the lies lie in the prosecutor’s roof.
This looks very much as a preventive process, designed to show anyone in the world what happens when someone gets out of the official basket and Assange could be considered collateral damage of this strategy. Is there any possibility that, under the British judicial system, the process could backfire? Can the prosecutors be prosecuted if misconducts are seen or suspected?
Am I being naive as usual?
In the past, some prosecutorial misconduct charges have been prosecuted and the parties found guilty, but that’s waaay after the damage has been done.
Seems that Governments, like banks, are too big to fail – and the bigger they are the more impenetrable/anti-fragile they become. In that sphere, the last superpower government to fail was the Soviet Union, to be replaced by what is now Russia. Tianemen Square was a hopeful sign of democracy, only to be brutally crushed.
The US is only signatories to those worldwide human rights agreements that only benefit the government. In many ways, we have become what Niall Ferguson (who is so wrong on many things) calls “Chimerica”…
Expected the lame stream media to raise the issue is pretty hopeless.
U. S. Government . . . ” Witness? We don’t have any witness. We don’t need no steenkin’ witness!”
Caitlin Johnstone today in her post entitled “The Horrifying Rise of Total Mass Media Blackouts on Inconvenient News Stories:”
“Once you have accepted that journalists have not just a right but a duty to suppress news that is both factual and newsworthy in order to protect a political agenda, your out in open water in terms of blatant propaganda manipulation.”
” The way the mass media have begun simply ignoring major news stories that are inconvenient for the powerful across not just some but all major news outlets is extremely disturbing.”
“This is a threat to the thing that the press fundamentally is. It is the end. The end of the possibility of any kind of journalism having meaningful impact.”
“What is being communicated to whistleblowers and journalists in these blackouts is, don’t bother. It won’t make any difference because no one will ever see what your reveal.”
“And if that’s true, well, God help us all.”
“the Army screwed McCord out of his benefits”
The same thing happened to Gen. Taguba, who led the investigation that exposed the Abu Graib torture. He was threatened by a higher up and later fired once the publicity had died down. No “looking forward, not Backwards” for Taguba or other whistleblower types.
Alexandersson was recently interviewed about Thordarson by Scott Horton:
https://scotthorton.org/interviews/7-1-21-bjartmar-alexandersson-on-the-lies-of-americas-star-witness-against-julian-assange/
I read the phenomena mentioned here as evidence of the ongoing collapse of the present American state, not its overwhelming power. Somewhere I read that only 29% of Americans believe that the government or media are truthful or reliable. It may be possible to manage a state using a lot of surveillance, police activity, and terror with such little trust, but the US wasn’t built that way and many unpleasant adjustments will have to be made.
They can make us all obey, but they can’t make us all comply.
They can make us all go to work, and maybe they can make us all vote, but they can’t make us all go shopping.
It’s not off-topic for me to suggest to you guys to this search:
Youtube Vladimir Putin challenges Joe Biden to public debate
Here’s another search for you,
“Why is America getting another $100 billion nuclear weapon?”
It seems our president is incompetent to discuss establishing a peaceful relationship with the Russians. OK, Trump was not able to either — too much flak.