The Atlantic monthly has published exchanges between Roger Stone and Wikileaks that Wikileaks has been denying existed. Wikileaks has repeatedly denied their existence.
I’m sure that The Saintly Glenn Greenwald is already kicking back with a refreshing tropical drink in Rio de Janeiro and writing a rebuttal to The Atlantic, and that that rebuttal will be duly repeated here by the usual suspects, who will assure us that exchanges between Stone and Wikileaks may have occurred but didn’t matter. Those remarks will be peppered with condemnations of “the Clintons”, who we ought to recognize as the real villains, and with reminders that The Saintly Julian Assange is a martyr to free speech.
And we have always been at war with Eastasia.
Isn’t “Wikipedia lies” kind of a “dog bites man” story?
Oh noes, not Wikipedia, too!
There’s nothing really in these messages that incriminates anyone of anything except that Wikileaks (Julian Assange, as Wikileaks doesn’t exist anymore) lies, which we have already known.
In any case, emptywheel believes he’s one of the people who were under investigation in 2016, including Flynn, Manafort, and Page. Sleep well, Roger.
Regarding Glenn, there are so many reasons why he would rather be in denial. The most obvious is that he has dug in so far he can’t admit he was wrong, pure ego. Tangential to that is the fact that he didn’t just report on DNC/Podesta emails dumped by Wikileaks, which I think had some worth in reporting, but he was fed information curated by Russian state agents:
Glenn hasn’t done any original reporting since Snowden dropped documents in his lap.
OK, explain why Glenn Greenwald deliberately outed Reality Winner when she whistleblew on Trump? He spends years complaining about government secrecy and shielding whistleblowers, but as soon as a Russian puppet is in office he changes his tune and hands them over. That’s not ignorance and it’s certainly not pigheaded dedication to his old positions.
Do you have evidence that the Intercept — and Glenn in particular — purposefully outed Reality Winner? Ryan Grimm was in charge of reporting on that, and his reporting is solid. They obviously messed up in doing what they could to protect her, but she was fucked no matter what due to her own careless mistakes. What I do know is that he has downplayed her leaks, publicly criticized his colleagues on their reporting, and completely abandoned her cause as a whistleblower in general. That perfectly fits in with his persona to only talk up things that fit his narrative, and Winners leaks completely destroyed it.
From the linked Atlantic article:
Yes.
Of course.
But…hostile to what?
Hostile to the Permanent Government, to the Deep State.
And what is that Deep State’s primary intelligence operation?
The CIA.
It is no surprise that Pompeo would say that. It’s quite true.
Do you not believe that Stone is also…for different reasons than is Wikileaks…hostile to said Permanent Government? I have been saying all along that this whole Trump/AntiTrump mishegoss is simply war between the established, bipartisan DC crime family and a group that wants in…or maybe even wants to take over.
Stone and Wikileaks? Wars make strange allies.
You want to believe the professional liar…another term for intelligence officer…Mike Pompeo? Fine. Go ahead. He just didn’t finish the sentence.
Like this, perhaps:
It’s up to you whether you want to ally yourself with that vicious government and against all of its enemies. Choose your own enemies…and friends, also…very carefully. If you can see your way clear to allying yourself with that government, be ready to shoulder some part of the blame for the millions and millions of lives lost and ruined across the world over the last 70 years of so by economic imperialist military forces seeking to sustain the U.S./NATO alliance as King of the World.
I personally will not do so.
Is Russia any better?
No.
Are there activists caught in the crossfire of competing gangs with loftier ideals than either side?
I believe that there are.
I also believe …on the evidence of hundreds of screeds over the last several years if not before…that The Atlantic Monthly is a well-functoning part of the PermaGov media. (Leftiness division thereof.) I am through with that shit, myself, no matter which source puts it in click-play.
You?
You apparently believe it.
Why?
Because Pompeo says so?
Because the Atlantic Monthly publicizes it?
Oh.
Nevermind.
Yore freind…
Emily Litella
Hello Miss Bitters
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjNBzyLqDPM
That’s brilliant, AG. You don’t believe anything coming from…well, coming from whichever outlet of the day has published information that discomfits you. Talk about moving targets! Did you inform us ahead of time that The Atlantic was not credible? Mot that I recall, but then I haven’t searched through your archives.
I do understand your line of reasoning. It can be succinctly summarized as follows, and applies to all subjects:
Anyone who disagrees with AG is a fool and a tool of the Deep State.
The whole Deep State thing is a hoot. I know you and most folks on this site have the good sense to avoid conspiracy-theorizing, but AG and some others do not. For those curious, the term Deep State is a relatively recent term that has its origins in right-wing fringe circles and became popularized once Trump emerged as the likely primary season victor. Wise for liberals and leftist to avoid adopting such terminology as it only further mainstreams some toxic thinking and behaving that will only further degrade the US political environment.
I hear Strzok is a Deep State NeoLiberal attempting to create a crisis where in the ensuing confusion Chelsea Clinton can be appointed Secretary of State by fatwa, so she can then start a war with Russia.
Because the enemy of my enemy is automatically trustworthy, I will side with Putin.
.
As Davis X might say:
мир и дружба
That deserves an accolade from “Clockwork Orange.”
I now know that it is acceptable to down rate people in their own diaries.
It pleases me to have defined standards.
.
By the person who howls furiously if anyone dares to doughnut him, no less.
Glass houses. Just sayin’.
There’s a lot of extraneous, inflammatory crap — crap is presenting fact-free allegations as facts — in the Atlantic article. However, it does present the information for a critical reader to sort out the “big lie.”
October 13, 2016 – morning. Wikileaks statement that it has never communicated with Roger Stone.
October 13, 2016 – afternoon. R Stone DM to Wikileaks.
So, no evidence that that Wikileaks statement was false.
(Whoever responded to R Stone on behalf of Wikileaks appears to know that it’s Roger Stone (the lifelong GOP scum operator and liar); if that impression is wrong, it’s up to Wikileaks to correct/explain.)
Oct 15 – Stone DMs Wikileaks. No response from Wikileaks.
The Oct 13 and Nov 9 Wikileaks DM to Stone don’t appear to be friendly.
March 20, 2017 – Wikileaks tweet that Assange and Stone have never communicated directly.
No evidence that that statement is false.
March 27, 2017 and January 31, 2018 in email exchanges with CNN and a tweet on March 27, 2017, Wikileaks claimed that the group had never had never had direct contact with Stone.
That appears to be false statements from Wikileaks. Perhaps Wikileaks will clarify. However, R. Stone’s DM and Wikileaks’ responses barely rise to the level of direct contact and the content is whine from Stone and a “suck it up” from Wikileaks.
Since August 2016 (including his testimony to the House committee) Stone has made numerous conflicting statements. So, at a minimum some of them are false. One that may be close to true from Aug 2016 is that someone he was in contact with told him that Podesta emails had been passed to Wikileaks. (He bullshitted beyond the tip he received and got it all wrong.)
I’ve suspected for some time that whoever lifted the Podesta files shopped them (likely making use of multiple intermediaries – pros and not pikers like the Trumpkins) and only submitted them to Wikileaks after getting a payday. Plenty of wealthy and sleazy Republicans would have bit on such a clandestine offer. That’s how Stone could have picked up the tip. This will remain a mystery for some time or possibly forever.
You know what, marie3? It ought to have been you instead of Bill Clinton parsing the the meaning of the word “is”. Even your edited chronology includes communications between Stone and Wikileaks in October 2016, which would appear to give the lie to the claim by Wikileaks on March 20, 1987 that the organization had had no communications with Roger Stone. But oh, you’ve fixated on that word “directly”. Yup, The Atlantic doesn’t have the name of the individual who “opened” the messages from Stone, so you’re arguing that no “direct” communication occurred. Go ahead. It’s sort of like you can’t demonstrate the identity of the individual who’s typing these words, so perhaps they don’t really exist: nope, they were sent from the future by an advanced alien species. And I can’t demonstrate that “marie3” really wrote the commentary signed by “marie3”, so it’s nonsense, too.
And then where you actually acknowledge Wikileaks’ lies, you follow up with “perhaps Wikileaks will clarify” and a dismissal of the messages’ content, and a closing paragraph that even further tries to trivialize Stone and deflect the readers from the story of the lies by The Saintly Wikileaks Organization.
At least AG up-thread has a sort-of-coherent argument: he simply does not believe anything in The Atlantic.
BTW you forgot to include your customary condemnation of “the Clintons”. But you didn’t forget your customary self-congratulatory nonsense about your critical reading skills. Gawd, don’t you ever get tired of being The Most Intelligent Person on Earth?
You’re the one that made a mountain out of a molehill. Then, as usual, you toss out your long-standing negative opinion of me to bolster your rejection of the points in my comment. (btw that is dishonest argumentation.)
Do you believe Roger Stone’s claim, prior to his first (and now documented) DM message to Wikileaks in Oct ’16 that he was in contact with Wikileaks? Nothing in these tweets suggest that it was true. Or his later claim that he wasn’t in direct contact with Wikileaks? Or that his contact with Wikileaks was through an intermediary? How do you decide when Stone is lying and when he’s telling the truth?
While you and I have had numerous spats on this site, if you told anyone that you were in “direct contact” with me, I’d say not true. Same with unsolicited email contact that doesn’t go beyond a terse response from me.
Have you never been falsely accused of doing something that you didn’t? Having a short response comment blown up into something it wasn’t? (Yes, Clinton’s “depends on the meaning of is” may have been entirely appropriate and responsive and understood in that situation. (In depos and on a witness stand I’ve had opposing attorneys attempt to trap me into admitting something that wasn’t true. They didn’t succeed but that doesn’t mean that the task was easy for me.) Did Clinton lie about having an extramarital sexual relationship? Yes — numerous times. Did I care about his lies or consensual relationships? No because it wasn’t any sort of capital offense or dereliction of his public duties and I found Starr’s pursuit of that in his Whitewater investigation offensive.)
My opinion of Wikileaks, and in general all media and reporters, is primarily based on what they publish. Is it authentic and of importance for the general public to know? If the work passes muster, I don’t expect full transparency or disclosures on sources and methods used to obtain the information in response to inquiries by other media sources seeking to discredit the messenger. Good investigative journalism can be dangerous to a messenger and his/her sources. So, it’s important to cut them some slack in holding back or even misleaing on how and from whom they obtained the information. However, that’s not a license to present/publish crap, lies, etc. and those that do so, have only themselves to blame for not being a credible and reliable reporter.
Did WoodStein’s Watergate work hold up? Yes. Did they mislead about one (possibly more) source, yes. There was no shortage of critics, Republicans and other media folk, that harangued WoodStein and WAPO for their deceptions, but the final arbitration was “the work” and that stood up as credible and reliable. Then there was the thirty year mystery (a Beltway parlor game) as to the identity of “Deep Throat.” Once known, it’s still rather curious and Felt himself couldn’t satisfactorily explain why he’d acted. So, now we have a brand new mystery — or two if one doesn’t see the same hand behind the extraction and submission to Wikileaks of the DNC and Podesta emails. (I only use that as example and am aware that Felt’s importance as a source to crack the CRP/Nixon conspiracy was grossly inflated, but it made the story sound better.)
The CIA knew by 1985 (because human assets were disappearing) that a KGB asset was at the CIA. Yet it wasn’t until early 1993 that they began seriously focusing on Aldrich Ames. (Before then they were like the guy searching for his keys under the lamppost when he’d dropped them far from there.) Similar story at the FBI in finding its KGB mole, Robert Hanssen only the FBI active investigation of him didn’t begin until 2001 (sixteen years after he began passing information to the GRU). Meanwhile and for decades earlier and after, the FBI and CIA kept seeing non-existent Soviet/Russian fingerprints on all sorts of matters in all sorts of places. Given the odds, it’s a sucker’s bet to believe most of what is publicly released from US intell agencies.
While it’s nice to have a liking for those that produce work I can respect, for me the former isn’t necessary for the latter. As I see contemporary libertarianism as anti-social (testosterone driven for the CPAC flunkies), I don’t much care for those with that particular orientation or bias. It’s different from the anti-socialism of Republicanism, neo-cons, and neo-liberalism, but I don’t like those folks either, but they’re also not producing any work — reporting and business and government policies — that I respect and they lie a lot. Truth-tellers are rare.
It’s devolved further from “who to believe” to “who and when” to believe. Newsweek 2/18/18
Who/When to believe: US intell then (before bombing) or now (after bombing). At the moment, looks as if I won the “then” wager.
Слишком долго, не читал
.
Have a teal deer.
Wow. Somehow you got from The Lies of Julian Assange to the Syrian Civil War, Watergate, KGB moles, and being under cross-examination.
I don’t know “marie3” and have no opinion of “her”. I don’t care for much of what “she” writes because “she” arrogantly considers “herself” superior to the rest of us: more ethical, more inquisitive, more honest, more intelligent. I don’t care for the way that “she” savages potential allies of progressives, but can’t find anything more critical to say of Mr. Trump than calling him a “nincompoop”.
Citing a chemical weapons denier by a magazine that has no editors at this point, quoting James Mattis who was referencing chemical attacks in recent weeks, not the confirmed chemical weapons attacks of 2013 and 2017, you genocide denying piece of shit.
“Russian state propaganda is obvious bullshit, and no one would ever fall for it” as she cites Russian propaganda to make her point that is actually counter to her point, but can’t look further
How about rather than citing Newsweek and its lies and purposeful misreading of transcripts, let’s go to the actual transcript:
link
Personally, and this is just me, but maybe we should look at what the UN says:
Syria regime responsible for gas attack on rebel-held town, UN finds
Also, 700 people are dead in ONE WEEK in Ghouta MSF hospitals because of Putin and Assad’s siege. Seriously, fuck off.
Khan Sheikhoun
Don’t say Seth Rich don’t say Seth Rich don’t say Seth Rich…
Nailed it!