Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 9/27/21 Kevin Gosztola on the CIA’s War on Assange, Wikileaks and Journalism Itself

Episode Date: September 30, 2021

Kevin Gosztola is back on the show to discuss a recent Yahoo! News article about Assange that went viral. Gosztola thinks the piece contains some good reporting but leans too much on a flawed Russiagate framing. Scott and Gosztola discuss the semantic war our government is waging with attempts to redefine certain journalists as “information brokers” and “non-state hostile intelligence agents.” Gosztola also gives an update on Assange’s situation as his next hearing approaches next month.  Discussed on the show: “Kidnapping, assassination and a London shoot-out: Inside the CIA's secret war plans against WikiLeaks” (Yahoo! News) “The CIA’s War On WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange” (Medium) In Defense of Jullian Assange — OR Books Top Secret America at the Washington Post “UN expert says "collective persecution" of Julian Assange must end now” (ohchr.org)  Kevin Gosztola is managing editor of Shadowproof. He also produces and co-hosts the weekly podcast, “Unauthorized Disclosure.” Follow him on Twitter @kgosztola. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Dröm; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt; Lorenzotti Coffee and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of antivore.com, author of the book, Pools Aaron, time to end the war in Afghanistan, and the brand new, enough already, time to end the war on terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2000. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot four you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube dot com slash scott horton's show all right to you guys on the line is kevin gotstola he is from shadowproof dot com and from the dissenter dot org i think it is right uh welcome back to the show how's going

yeah you got it thanks it's good to be with you again uh very good to have you here and uh Man, you do such a good job of covering all of the trials and tribulations of all of the great whistleblowers of our generation here, man. And I don't know what we'd do without you. I'm really grateful for it. And in this case, we have this really important article by this nitwit, Michael Isikoff and his buddies at Yahoo News, about the Trump administration, apparently led by Mike Pompeo, plotting to kill Julian Assange or kidnap him, prevent the Russians from secreting him out of the UK. and at all costs and all of these crazy things, and including discussions of during the Obama years, you know, major discussions are the highest levels of whether to classify

Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitris, although for some reason not Bart & Gellman, as what the hell was the term again? Something other than a journalist so that they can be indicted. Information broker. Information broker. There you go. That's the double speak of the day, or what do you call it?

News speak. News speak. New speak. I got that wrong, too. Yeah. Well, there you go. We're even. So listen, this whole thing is madness, but let's start with the important part here.

I saw that you immediately reacted to this with a Twitter thread yesterday explaining what important parts in here you think are true and confirm your previous. reporting. So let's start with that. Well, yeah. So I do think that Michael Isikoff and I think he's named Zach Dorfman and Sean Naylor did some good work on this, although I wouldn't have reported this out with the Russia gate lens that they apply to it. And I don't know how they arrived at this information or why they decided to do the story, but it does seem like with Michael Isikov on the story and knowing that he has been spending the last three to four years of his life during the Trump administration, hyping a lot of things that we know are, it's provable nonsense now when it comes

to what the Trump administration was accused of having ties with Russian intelligence and Russian actors, etc., etc. But let's set that all aside, because there's, There's a lot of good material in here. They talked to over 30 people who are former intelligence officials, former Trump administration officials, and they had firsthand knowledge about what went on when it came to targeting Julian Assange. And so we knew. We knew I had put together this narrative, I put it out there, I said it was a CIA's war

on WikiLeaks. And essentially, I documented back in October 2019. these releases that had come out from WikiLeaks that singled out the CIA. And I've paid particular attention to the Vault 7 materials. And as it turns out, what we learn from this Yahoo News report is that Mike Pompeo became so obsessed with Julian Assange after the CIA lost control of these. They're 9,000 files, and they were offensive cyber warfare tools, which I think I've talked to you, a little bit here and there over the past year or two in covering the Assange case.

But, you know, essentially these are things that, like, think along the lines of what we learn from NSA whistleblower Edward Stone and the way that they can plant malware into the hardware of, like, laptops, and they can plant malware into, even they can make it possible for them to own your television setting. It revealed that there were ways that they could get into Samsung televisions. So this is a big deal, but it didn't get even close to a fraction of the attention that the other releases received, releases being the ones that are at issue in this report. He's not indicted, by the way, for the release of this information, which is interesting.

That all of this is set off because of the Vol 7 materials and the Justice Department did not charge Julian Assange at all for publishing these CIA materials. So this sets it off. And we heard from Mike Pompeo, I'll finish this part by saying Mike Pompeo goes before this Washington think tank called CSIS, and it's one of the first speeches he ever gives as CIA director, and he labels WikiLeaks a non-state hostile intelligence agency. And that was a red flag for me. it was a red flag for a lot of other people

wasn't apparently enough for journalists to go digging until now because that was the signal that was them saying that they had redefined WikiLeaks from being a media organization so that they could justify and in their minds

I don't know if it really is but they believe it would be legal to go after and target this organization for disruption and do things like try and hack into their digital infrastructure, try and turn people against each other within the organization, and try and even steal their own electronic devices from them, go after WikiLeaks staff members and steal their personal property. So that's a big deal, and we should have known that this kind of thing was going on.

This confirms anything we would have suspected. Now, I'm trying to remember who wrote the story about how Assange was negotiating, I think, with the CIA and the, I guess it must have been during when Pompeo was still the director, that he would get a pardon or, you know, some kind of, or at least get the charges dropped if he would promise not to release the Vault 7 stuff. But then Senator John Warner was told that by, I can't remember who made a huge mistake. It was like Assange's lawyer told that to Senator John Warner. And then Senator John Warner told Comey, who then stepped in and ruined the whole thing, something like that. Do you know what the hell I'm talking about? Because I'm not sure if I do. Yeah, I do.

I'm quickly pulling this up. And I have to do a little refresher for my memory. I mean, there's so many tentacles of this. story. But this, I wrote about this for the collection of, that was put out by O.R. books in defense of Julian Assange. I mean, I did a whole thing about how the Democrats are, you know, there's all this talk about Republicans and how much they loathe WikiLeaks. And that's been pretty well known. And this mostly remained a constant going back the over a decade. But the Democrats have actually had no love for WikiLeaks. And, I mean, what?

What you're saying relates to the fact that there was a conversation about bringing in Julian Assange to have, he actually made an offer. He said, I'd be willing to talk to you about your questions that you have. I can't tell you exactly who my sources are when it comes to the materials like, let's say the Clinton campaign emails. but I could tell you who wasn't my source and I can also have a you know I'll come in and have a conversation I've got these materials and he said that he had these vault seven materials

and he would agree to not release certain materials if they would bargain with him over a pardon I think that's what you're getting at and there was going to be this conversation with people who were on the U.S. Intelligence Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee.

There were going to be these people who talked with Assange about it. In any case, that was killed by, I think it was Mark Warner. It was Mark Warner. And they did not like this as something because of the fact that they view Julian Assange as more of a hacker and not a journalist. Yeah. Now, which, you know, it's interesting, too. I'm not trying to pick on Bart and Gelman. He's the best guy at the post, probably, right? But he got the Snowden League, too. And he published all that stuff, too. And I know I'm conflating the, you know, the Snowden League with WikiLeaks here. But so are they, right? They're saying that Poitris and Greenwald, who received the Snowden League, they might also be information brokers, which, you know what? non-state intelligence agency that's some made-up crap too but that sounds a little fancier than just intelligence broker information broker hell that could be anybody um and they're saying that

they want to they were considering in the obama government that they were considering going after prosecuting greenwald and poitrous under the theory that which at the time she's a documentary filmmaker and he had a regular gig at the guardian but no they're not journalists they're just information brokers here, the same way they're trying to just reclassify WikiLeaks is something other than what it obviously is under any previous interpretation, just a publisher. You know? Yeah. Just so I can give it to you very clearly, so this is why I had written. In early 2017, Assange was willing to provide

technical evidence and discussion regarding who did not engage in the DNC releases. He also was willing before the release of Vault 7 materials from the CIA to help U.S. agencies address, quote, clear flaws in security systems, end quote, that led the U.S. cyber weapons program to be compromised. But when Democratic Senator Mark Warner learned Justice Department official Bruce Orr was negotiating some kind of a deal for limited immunity and a limited commitment from Assange, he urged FBI director James Comey to intervene and a potential deal with Assange was killed and no testimony was ever collected that would have helped the public better understand what happened with the DNC and the Clinton campaign email publications. So, yeah, that's what you were talking about. And this issue of the information brokers, I mean, that to me is something that we should be thinking of just as much as we're contemplating what it means that the CIA was plotting to assassinate Julian Assange. I mean, like obviously on its face, that's something to be outraged over. But the thought that they are looking at Assange and other high-profile journalists and, I mean, we don't know that it's just. just Laura and Glenn Greenwald. I mean, maybe they talked about other journalists as well.

And, you know, I don't know if it would have gotten to Barton or anyone at the Washington Post. But my guess is because Snowden was meeting with Laura and Glenn in Hong Kong, that kind of meeting was the sort of thing that made it seem like, you know, they weren't just journalists. They wanted to argue that they were doing more than just journalism by working with Snowden so closely. And that's the danger because essentially here, what I'm hearing is that the CIA would be willing to treat us journalists like we're some kind of arms traffickers or arms smugglers that like having these state secrets is akin to trafficking. So like to say that we're information brokers is to treat us like we're trying to do some kind of like illicit sales of something that shouldn't be allowed for people to access. And that's what they would want the world to accept. But this is information that's in the public interest. And I know that it's going to be a constant struggle for, you know, the next 10, 20, 30 years onward, especially in this climate.

when, where information can be leaked so easily, but it's really important to, you know, push back on this constantly because we can't let journalists be treated like criminals. And that's what they're trying to do by coming up with these, as you, you know, say it's not very, like, interesting or not very clever on their part to say they're information brokers. And, you know, I was on, I was on Rising a few hours ago. And even Ryan Grimm said that, like, information brokers, that's what journalists do all the time. Like, you're brokering information. I mean, but journalists are always talking to sources and trying to see what kind of information they can get out of them for their stories. And the fact that we're allowing the government,

the U.S. government, to make this seem like some kind of nefarious act for people to have these private discussions with people about what they're willing to disclose. And that's, that's something that people have to put their foot down and insist it's a boundary we can't allow officials to cross. I recognize that they've already crossed it, but I think we have to fight over it. We have to say that that's really going too far. Hey, you all, it's the digital age, and dating is no exception.

Well, Drom is a new values-based dating app. Pick deal breakers and deal makers to find like-minded people that care about the same core values as you. Drom can help you find your perfect match locally or anywhere in the world, and it's video only for more authenticity. Drum is free and available for Apple and Android phones and tablets. To install the app in your browser, go to drom.date slash Scott. Click the Apple or Android button and use the invite code Scott to sign up.

Now get on out there. Some of y'all have a problem. You've got chickens, but you don't want to stand around throwing food at them all day because of all the important stuff you have to do. Well, the solution to that is to get the free range feeder from freerangefeeder.com. The all stainless steel free range feeder has been developed to satisfy the needs of the poultry chicken hobbyist and the homesteader. The convertible design allows for four different mounting methods.

Go to freerangefeater.com slash Scott or use promo code Scott to get 10% off and get the free ebook. Subscribe to their newsletter to immediately receive your free free. free copy of getting started with backyard chickens. That's freerangefeater.com slash Scott. Yeah, like, for example, where the hell

is Bart and Gelman on this? I mean, look at the sleight of hand here. I mean, how slippery of a slope is it? To say, well, Assange isn't really a publisher. He's this other weird thing. And by the way, you know, Greenwald also published some leaks that we don't like, and we think that maybe Greenwald is also

something different than a journalist, just like Assange, since we already got that camel's nose in the tent kind of thing. But then guess what? Gelman from the post did the exact same thing that Greenwald did. In fact, Gellman published the black budget, man.

You know, it's not like he did a lesser job of publishing the Snowden League. I mean, he did a damn fine job of that. You know what I mean? And so it's the exact same thing. So, if Greenwald is Assange, then

so's Gellman and so's the end of publishing national security secrets in America, and we have an official secrets act like in England de facto, which the reason we don't have an official secrets act is because the idea always was that that's un-American and unconstitutional. And so you wouldn't even try it. But it looks like we're going to get that anyway. It's supposed to make a difference that we have a First Amendment and the United Kingdom does not. But the U.S. government, through its intelligence agencies, have essentially allowed the erosion to take place for the last 10 to 15 years.

It's erosion through these cases where it is clearly a war on whistleblowers and it looks like they're just going after leakers. But really and truly almost a majority of these sources, these media sources are trying to expose what they see as corruption or something that they think is a bad policy. on the part of the U.S. government, and then they get put in prison and collateral damage is journalists, except now they've decided to go beyond just collateral damage. Now they're going to actually target the journalists as aiders and abettors of these, of a conspiracy to disclose this information without authorization. I can, in my head immediately, and we've had conversations about some of the,

cases on your show, I can think of people who would immediately need to be consulting a lawyer based on this information that they have just learned about the targeting of Assange and redefining journalists as information brokers. I mean, Jeremy Scahill probably might want to make sure that he's protecting himself. Jason Leopold, just one of his sources just went to prison. She published, she released files from the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Investigation Network on money laundering throughout the world in banks. And she's doing a six-month sentence right now. Her name's Natalie Sauer Mayflower Edwards, and she was the source for Jason Leopold. And Jason Leopold may want to protect himself as well.

He also has experience doing coverage of CIA torture. So maybe he's an information broker to the U.S. government. It's, you know, and then you think New York Times reporters and people at the Washington Post might be off limits. But I emphasize that you don't know. Hang on. Stop at Leopold for just one second. Because one of the things that he did in the spring of 2016, And summer of 2016 was he was publishing a huge, you know, trunch, I guess you'd call it, of Hillary Clinton's State Department emails that he got under FOIA because after getting burned by single source stories or on single source stories a couple of times, he decided to be document guy for a little while there. He made the same mistake again later on the Trump's lawyer story.

But anyway, he became FOIA guy. And so I don't know the exact totals, but I'd be willing to bet that it's like half of the Hillary emails on wikileaks.org right now came from Jason Leopold, who got them through FOIA, which just goes to show that what, you know, not that what Leopold did is espionage, but it goes to show that what WikiLeaks did is the same thing that BuzzFeed did, which is journalism. And if the leaker is in trouble, tough. Leaky is never in trouble in the USA. Come on. And how do they refer to him privately? I'm sure you've heard that Leopold was labeled a FOIA terrorist at one point or another in the last few years. That was an official government document, called him a FOIA terrorist. That wasn't like praise from a friend that was the government trying to reclassify him.

Yeah. Yeah. For using the law, the freedom. What does FOIA stand? for the Freedom of Information Act it's a federal law that says here's how to get documents if you want them yeah sounds like terrorism to me and meanwhile did leopold ever say if you don't do what i say and change your policy i'm going to use for you to publish documents about you right did he ever try to blackmail anyone or extort anyone or anything no he just published a lot of

stories oh okay thank you yeah he just used a tool that honestly many media organizations and journalists don't do enough to use it you know it's it's pretty it's it's there anyone can make them and force them to abide by this process but but yeah and so you don't think it can stop at these journalists who are on at online media outlets that aren't don't have the kind of histories that Washington Post and the new york times have they don't hold the same place in the beltway that the new york times or the washington Post does, but I don't think that's true because at any time, you know, it's basically like game theory.

At any time, the people who are in Washington, as the politics change, as the people in power shift, they could be against you, you know, one moment you've got the Biden administration and maybe they want to stop people at Fox News and they want to go after people and say they're aiders and abettors, like they went after, like they labeled James Rosen at Fox News. news when Obama was in office. But if, you know, let's say Mike Pompeo wants to run for president in 2024, even though he's been the subject of all this, and I think that should be wholly discrediting, but it might endear him to the people he wants to vote for him.

So he runs for office. If he wins, what do you think he's going to do? I don't think he's going to really let the New York Times liberal journalists there on their masthead get away with publishing CIA secrets without retaliation. So then all those people. Other than the ones they want them to publish. I mean, I think the New York Times are pretty useful tools for that kind of thing from the CIA's point of view, Charles Savage.

But what if it ends up being like the Trump administration where people within these institutions were pretty openly opposed to the presidency? Right. And then Mike Pompeo feels he's got a garden shop. I think the New York Times like Mike Pompeo a lot better than they like Donald Trump. But I understand what you're saying. And it's true that sometimes they publish scoops that are real scoops, that the administration at least would prefer that they didn't publish, even if one agency or another wanted it out there. Yeah, every once in a while, real journalism breaks out. I mean, Dana Priest and Bill Arkin did the Top Secret America series for Washington Post. documenting that national security and can't live with them can't live without them it's true yeah and dana priest was on top of the CIA rendition network fairly early um compared to other journalists so uh you know and then jane mayor at the new yorkers doing torture the torture program and talking to john kiriaku about uh the rendition of abu zabida so it's like these people you never know

when they could be the ones that are singled out by a political administration. And I think that's why we need to take all of this seriously. It shouldn't just be that we read this and we go, it sounds like a Jason Bourne movie or just read it as this sounds like a Tom Clancy thriller or whatever. Like that's childish because like it sounds like your government. It sounds like what the United States government has really been doing for the last five to ten years and we should be concerned because the one thing we haven't gotten to and

I want to make sure I get in before we wrap is that there's a section of this story that says the Justice Department and people in the National Security Council for the Trump administration were afraid of what the CIA was going to do next that maybe Julian Assange is going to be put on a rendition flight or that there was going to be some kind of like shootout in the streets in front of the embassy, like the British law enforcement or whatever, to start firing the tires of some Russian vehicle. And there was going to be a diplomatic catastrophe on their hands. And so what did they decide to do? They wanted to speed the charging of Julian Assange and they got the indictment out. They had it ready in 2017 so that they could prevent this

from getting completely out of control, although I would argue it already was. But they said the solution was to charge Julian Assange and go back on everything they had decided about Julian Assange, that there was a New York Times problem so they could not charge Julian Assange without jeopardizing press freedom. So I think it's something people need to consider that like there's a bit of like good cop bad cop going on here and the good cop isn't all that good. I mean, it's not really good that Julian Assange was charged to be put on trial in the United States and he's rotting essentially he's he's continuing to have his health deteriorate in a jail

in london but i suppose the justice department got him out of the clutches of the CIA it's really hard to tell yeah well let me ask you too about this inflammatory headline about them plotting to kill the guy you know they kind of float that at the top and the way i read the thing and i admit that i did read in a real hurry yesterday. I didn't sit and take detailed notes and write at Twitter 3 about the way you did and all that. But the way I read the thing or the way I remember it anyway was they don't really get back to that until much later in the article. And then it's all Trump's idea. Is that rather than Mike Pompeo or the CIA? And then they make it sound like everybody kind of shot that down that that was just Trump, which on one hand is believable, but that doesn't

mean, it's true, but it sounds like something he might say or, you know, ask about or something, but was there more to it than that? Well, so what we learn is that there really were sketches of plans for potentially assassinating people who had these Vault 7 materials. So they really were considering going after people who had, especially files that still were not public. And they prosecuted the guy who leaked that to Sange, right? uh well he's and or he's accused of it i'm not saying he's guilty i don't know he's accused of it

there was a mistrial and they've yet to actually connect him i don't think they know the source and uh this is a whole other like we could do a whole other half hour talking about him because he was put under special administrative measures talking about uh he was put under special administrative measures just like what they would like to do to julian asan what's the guy's name again, do you remember? Josh Schulte. And he's in the Metropolitan Detention Center in New York, the MDC. And this is effectively a dungeon.

He is there being kept under the tightest restrictions. As I said, they are authorized by the Attorney General. general on how he is kept in confinement to limit his access to communications and also to keep him in pretty harsh confinement conditions. But they haven't proven that he's the source. They're going to do a second trial with him. They failed to prove and the jury deadlocked and they couldn't get a conviction. And so it was a mistrial.

This was a little more than a year ago. So, you say Trump was talking about killing Julian Assange, and if you look at the article, it's spitballing. To me, it's like what we know Donald Trump has been known, what was known to do when he was in the White House, which is to talk about, I think he was talking about it in the terms of wanting to know what kind of power he really. had as a president. So I think he was always impressed by what he would be able to do if he chose to do it and wanted to know. So I hear, when I see this talked about in the article, I don't think Donald Trump was calling for Julian Assange to be assassinated as much as he was basically saying, hey, look, if I wanted to, could I order the killing of Julian Assange? And then they gave him the legal answer. And they said, well, if we were going to

kill Julian Assange, how would I go about doing it? And it was sort of like a fun thing for him to sit there and feel like he had this power in which he could take away Julian Assange's life if he chose to do it. But, you know, well, by the way, I'm probably not going to do that. Hey, y'all, check out my new book, Enough Already. Time to End the War on Terrorism at Enough Alreadybook. Early reviews are that people either think it's hilarious or they get so angry that they put it down. But it's the Iranian Revolution, the 80s Afghan War, the Iran-Iraq War, Iraq War I, Iraq War One, Iraq War I and a half, and then Afghanistan, Iraq War II, Somalia, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Iraq War III, Yemen, and all the special operations wars throughout Africa in the aftermath of the war in Libya. It's all there for you. It might change your friend's mind. Enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism. And enough already. book.net.

Hey guys, Scott Horton here for Expanddesigns.com. Harley Abbott and his crew do an outstanding job designing, building, and maintaining my sites, and they'll do great work for you. You need a new website? Go to expanddesigns.com slash Scott and say 500 bucks. Hey guys, check out Listen and Think audiobooks. They're at Listen and Think.com and, of course, on Audible.com. And they feature my book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.

as well as brand new out inside Syria by our friend Reese Erlich and a lot of other great books mostly by libertarians there Reese might be one exception but essentially they're all libertarian audiobooks and here's how you can get a lifetime subscription

to listen and think audio books just donate $100 to the Scott Horton show at Scott Horton.org slash donate Hey what did you think about this whole story about oh yeah see we had reason to believe that Putin was going to you know, kidnap him, rescue him,

smuggle him out of the country, and that the Brits would have to, you know, stop them at the airport. They talk about hovering a helicopter over a Russian plane to prevent it from taking off and they gamed all this out. What do you think?

It's insanity. And I actually don't think that that has the kind of evidence, and I don't think it's as corroborated as the details about the CIA plots against Julian Assange's life. the things that we've learned which we've learned

are now putting him on a rendition flight or even they talked about poisoning him too that was something that came up through the undercover the UC Global revelations which is remember I remind people that there's the CIA

and then there's also the private security company that was working for the CIA in the Ecuador embassy that was giving them access to video footage and audio from within the embassy as they were doing their operations.

So, so yeah, I'm not sure that it's, I don't find it to be that credible, that this was as intense as they make it out to be. I mean, they really think, they really want us to believe that Russia was going to come in to the embassy, try and take Julian Assange and bring him back to Russian soil. And I personally just think that was something that was conjured in order to just, justify the amount of attention they were giving Julian Assange. You know, you have to find some way to make your obsession seem like it isn't totally insane. And that one way to do it is to say, well, we've got our adversaries.

Our adversaries are Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela. If we can link him to any of these countries and say that they're going to have operatives try and spirit him out of the country, then that gives us a pretext to spring into action. Yeah. And at the very least, too, you know, they've used that connection with Snowden, for example, to just completely tar his reputation, even though it was our current president, Joe Biden, who was then vice president, who was responsible for essentially stranding Snowden in Russia

so that then they could say, aha, see, he's in bed with the Russians. which was, you know, also seems to have been an attempt to avoid having to prosecute the guy, too. You know, they, in fact, think of the risk they were taken, turning him over. I guess at that point they figured the damage was already done, but, I mean, turning them over, leaving him stranded in Russia, if they really thought he was a traitor, he knew a lot that he could have told them, you know? And I don't believe that he ever did. There's no other than fantasies in the Wall Street Journal editorial page, there's no reason. to believe that he ever squealed to the Russians

about anything. But that was a great propaganda campaign against him that Joe Biden helped to orchestrate. And people still, and it worked too, right? Like people hate Ed Snowden based on the idea that, oh, he did that for Russia and China, because the words Russia and China were in the news coverage

of his story. Remember that? And we don't need real details. Yeah. And so that's my biggest gripe with this entire story is the the Russia gate narrative that runs throughout it because there is no proof whatsoever that Julian Assangean WikiLeaks ever were working directly for Russia.

In fact, it actually says in the article that the CIA couldn't prove it. So that's why they decided to go a different route and define the organization as a hostile entity. And that should be basically game set match for all Democrats, but they're going to keep going on and on. But then you keep reading it, and, you know, Isikov and everyone, they take it as fact that WikiLeaks was working for Russia, or they also treat it as reasonable that the U.S.

intelligence agencies believe that WikiLeaks was working for Russia. And then they do something at the end where they mentioned that the CIA is now doing similar hack and dump operations like WikiLeaks. And there's this whole paragraph that is really incredible where apparently they actually obtained some, it looks like stolen information related to a Russian company and then they posted it somewhere to expose that company. And this is a secret authority that was given to the CIA under Donald Trump to basically be the caricature of WikiLeaks that they think it is. because I'll insist that WikiLeaks is not a hack and dump operation. WikiLeaks is a journalistic enterprise that when they receive these files, they do not hack the files themselves.

That doesn't mean that they don't accept hacked materials from people, but they do not hack the files themselves. And when they get a cache of material, they sift through it and form partnerships with journalists who then try and pull out the best stories from those files so that they can have the most impact. So they're not engaged in hack and dump operations. It's always been a phrase that the mass media uses to discredit on behalf of these U.S. intelligence agencies. All right.

Now, give us a word on Assange's current predicament. There is an appeal hearing coming up on October. 27th. That will be very narrow. Again, we're arguing over whether he would be oppressed and his health would not be taken care of if he was imprisoned in the United States. And then they're going to argue over whether the judge made an error in applying the extradition law to this case. And so I don't know how that's going to go. But Julian Assange continues to sit in a high security prison in the United Kingdom and he's there.

I'll end on this detail. He's there because Britain, this is what it says in Michael Isikov's in the Yahoo News report. He's there because the British government agreed to maintain the bail jumping charge against Julian Assange after the Swedish authorities dropped the investigation into sexual allegations. So that thing that really led him to go to the embassy in the first place was no longer there. So how could he be accused of bail jumping in addition to that because there's no crime? And they say, well, we'll leave this on the books because then he won't come out of the embassy and that'll keep him in the embassy. And then now that charges what they're using to keep him in jail and not allow and be free during the appeal.

And it's the thing that makes everyone act like he's a fugitive and that he wasn't seeking political asylum. He was trying to flee a crime. And so he's only in jail because the British government has been doing the bidding of the United States. Right. And, you know, I think it's especially clear in Nell's. millsner or millsner yeah yeah those melzer

yeah where he explains you know behind the scenes here the UN reporteur on torture on yeah on torture and he explains behind the scenes about a lot of the machinations going on and it goes to show that besides the First Amendment

implications that this whole thing just completely makes a mockery out of the rule of law where there was all of this obvious American influence behind the Swedish campaign against him in the first place and behind the British campaign to use that as an excuse to lock him up and all these things. The whole thing is absolutely political and not based on the criminal law at all. It's clearly just a pretext. Yeah. Craig Murray, I believe, who's by the way

finishing up a ghastly prison sentence because he was targeted for his postings. He said something to the effect of, you know, it was either him or John Pilger and both have a really good grasp of the deterioration of British civil liberties and British rule of law. They said, is this

not suggest that they're really trying to undo the Magna Carta through this case? I mean, it's like we're seeing due process go completely away as they prosecute Julian Assange.

Of course. It's all about revenge, you know. And that's what they say in there, too. I think at the end is some of these people, I guess, former Obama officials are saying, yeah, revenge doesn't really make for good policy here. We're kind of out on a limb. What are we going to do?

Yeah. A lot of the people talking were Trump administration officials, surprisingly. And it's my belief that, and this is also CIA whistle, are John Kyriaku's view as well, that any of these people who talked anonymously to Michael Isikoff, they really should come forward and say who they are and they should speak more openly about this. Because this is a deep systemic problem. I know there are really rich debates about the CIA, and I tend to gravitate toward the camp that believes it should just be entirely

abolished and that there is no useful reason to have a CIA. I got that right. But if it's going to be there, then we have to recognize that this is a problem that's 15 to 20 years in the making going all the way back to the September 11th attacks, starting with the torture program, all the way through to the drone program and putting people on kill lists. And the fact that President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder decided to that they're going to move forward without looking backward

and they're not going to put anybody on trial they're not going to have any criminal prosecutions of people and they're just going to let it go you know you've got people who get murdered you've got James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen contract psychologists who are getting paid

$80 million plus to develop a torture program with no expertise whatsoever and they are implicated in brutality and they get off, they're indemnified from being prosecuted by the U.S. government, they could be sued civilly and they were, and they had to settle in an ACLU case, but there's all kinds of horrible examples we could go through that have not been attended to, there's been no justice, and then that's how we arrive at people having these

conversations about assassinating journalists. And it's just going to keep getting worse until somebody does something. It's not enough to put your foot down and say the Justice Department is going to take over and prosecute people who deserve to be prosecuted and actually put them through trials. That's not the solution. The solution is bringing this all out into the open, much like they kind of did with the study, although we don't really have transparency. We should have the full torture report released all 6,000 pages plus, but, you know, the point being that we need more transparency, we need more of this to be brought out in the open by people who know it. It used to be that people believe that there were boundaries and things that were

off limits. I mean, John Kyriaku, again, I go back to him because he's been such a good person of conscience on this, shared a story with me of how he was in a room with somebody who asked him to basically help him take out a hit on someone. And he turned to another person in the room and they were just like, look, that is wrong. That's illegal. We're going to the general counsel's office right now and we're going to tell him that someone working for us

just said that, you know, wanted me to help take out a hit on a man. And that's not what we do here at the CIA. So they marched down. And this is in the 2000s. They marched down and they give that information to the general counsel. Well, today, that just seems like everyday conversation, that's allowed.

I mean, there's no, and there's not going to be any consequences for it. Yeah. Well, and meanwhile, they were assassinating all kinds of people during that time. I don't think you're supposed to call it taking out a hit. Maybe that was the problem, is he said it wrong or something. Well, if it was like a personal... It probably was a personal enemy or something. Neutralized the adversary.

Someone having a private issue in their neighborhood. Yeah, yeah, ex-wife's new boyfriend, something like that. All right. Well, yeah, good times when your country's run by the secret police. You know, this is how things go. Yeah, we have an assassination. We have an assassination squad that is dominating our government. These things happen when you're.

have a world empire. Okay, well, everybody, that's the great Kevin Gostola. He's at shadowproof.com and at the dissenter.org, doing the world's greatest job of keeping up with all the great whistleblowers and their stories and their persecutions at the hands of this government. Thank you so much, Kevin. Appreciate it, bud. Thanks.

The Scott Horton Show, an anti-war radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APS Radio. dot com antiwar dot com scot horton dot org and libertarian institute dot org