How Can the WikiLeaks Kremlin Collusion on Snowden Be Proved?

Kremlin's RT. Except for that one airport meeting with lawyers on July 12 from which journalists were blocked, Snowden has never been able to talk to the world directly on any form of media or communication, but Assange was hearing from him and speaking on his behalf.

Business Insider is a publication I have little regard for because it's not really about business and is more often than not antithetical to capitalism (boosting the entire "copyleftist" agenda of the hacker movement, for example) and is rarely "inside" because it's mainly rewording and reprinting other people's stuff.

Michael Kelley has a story up today on Business Insider saying -- gosh, gasp, can it be true?!

Edward Snowden Walked Right Into A Bizarre Alliance Between Wikileaks And Russia

Of course a number of us have been saying something like this for weeks, but Michael Kelly is just discovering it now. Such is the life of a blogger.

But...he's not really getting it right, because he's continuing the same line as Joshua Foust -- endlessly reprinted by Business Insider without criticism, ever -- which is that Snowden is "naive" and a hapless victim of the wily WikiLeaks and the even more cunning Kremlin.

In fact, Foust has probably done more than anyone to push Kelley into this "realization," but he also happened to watch Assange's show on Kremlin-sponsored RT (had he never done that before?)

The purpose of an article like this is actually to spin backwards what is in fact increasingly obvious by seeming to admit it:

The Kremlin and the renegade publisher haven't overtly coordinated moves in regards to Snowden, but they certainly haven't been working against each other.

Really, Michael? They haven't coordinated moves? You've absolutely sure of that? Sarah Harrison has been with Snowden through the entire trip. What kind of visa does she have, do you think? Most foreigners don't get more than a tourist visa or possibly a 30-day business visas, yet Snowden has been there now for more than 40 days.  Getting a multiple-entry or longer visa takes effort and money. How was that done? Every single foreigner's visa has to be approved by the Foreign Ministry, with an invitation letter from a Russian sponsor that has registration status (i.e., Pussy Riot can't invite you) and a second number of Foreign Ministry approval that is then telexed to the Russian embassy in your country. Who helped Sarah clear those hurdles? The Law-Enforcers' Union? Komsomolskaya Pravda? One of Kucherena's many institutions?

Russia is not one of those countries where you just land and buy a visa for $30 and walk in.

Note how Joshua Foust's timeline is now reprinted in earnest to show the sinister WikiLeaks:

• November 2, 2010: An official at the Center for Information Security of the FSB, Russia’s secret police, told the independent Russian news website LifeNews “It’s essential to remember that given the will and the relevant orders, [WikiLeaks] can be made inaccessible forever.”

But Lifenews.ru is completely unreliable, it seems always to be the first to have news of accidents as they happen, and sometimes people joke they even help them to happen. Independent? Really? What is "independent" in Russia, really? This threat is completely nonsensical and meaningless threat had no value, as everyone knows that WikiLeaks' scores of foot-soldiers in the infowars, as Barlow called them, raced to make mirror sites of WL and host it on all kinds of weird places in order to keep the action measure going if the main WL servers were taken down by any company or country.

Foust thinks that this threat that Simon Shuster originally reported on is somehow proof that WikiLeaks buckled to Russian pressure or knew they'd met their match in Russia. But that's silly. Assange, with his highly Leninist technocommunist and anarchist ideas does not see Russia as an enemy  (and yes, these ideologies do go together, regardless of the historical antagonism between Leninism and 19th and 20th century anarchist movements competing with the Bolsheviks to terrorize Russia and break up society and its institutions).

Assange's notion of "sovereign groups" and their takeover of the Internet is really not that different than Putin's notion of "sovereign Internets" plural in the countries of the world.

You know how Dinah Pokempner of Human Rights Watch chuckled that WikiLeaks is certainly the go-to group if you are fleeing NSA persecution? Well, Russia's the go-to country, because it is "the only one to stand up to the Unipolar World," which is the Kremlin's long-held propagandistic view of the world that portrays the US as evil hegemon and itself as poor victim -- rather silly when you realize that Putin had the US completely and literally over a barrel with the NDN route to the war in Afghanistan, and of course has Europe over an oil and gas barrel. And Assange has always understood that and has been happy to use Russia in his war on America, all the while thinking he's not going to be used.

And the increasingly visible figure of Israel Shamir is someone whom Foust points to and Kelley includes:

• December, 2010: Israel Shamir, a long-standing associate of Wikileaks traveled to Belarus, a close ally of Russia, in December with a cache of Wikileaks files. Belarussian authorities published the cables and cracked down, harshly, on pro-democracy activists.

But as much as I give Shamir his due as the role of the individual in Hegel's dialetical history, you know, he is a buffoon, a caricature, a cut-out as Schindler calls him, but more than that -- the humorous distraction from other people, some with necks that attach to brains, some with no-necks, who are running this show. He's the decoy. Because if you keep pressing on him, he will never lead to the KGB really and can always say that he came by his views honestly and you are persecuting him as a Jew who is critical of Israel.

Where has Shamir done most of his damage? In Belarus, using WikiLeaks to harm the opposition. And on the Snowden story, giving it the tawdry feel of the Soviet agentura. But, really? Not so much.

Then Assange's talk show on RT is mentioned -- but millions of RT lovers in Europe and America who have it piped in not only by Internet but on apps will angrily tell you that this is a decent TV station that criticizes America which won't criticize itself and is no different than the BBC, which is also run by a government. It's very hard to make people understand that RT and Assange going together is anything different than Steve Cohen and RT going together.

This seems most like a smoking gun, no?

June 23, 2013:Izvestia , a state-owned Russian newspaper, writes that the Kremlin and its intelligence services collaborated with Wikileaks to help Snowden escape from Hong Kong

But it's not that Izvestiya is reporting this from some reliable source in the Russian secret police. Read the original. It says that "According to the opinion of experts..."

Former CIA officer Edward Snowden flew to Moscow with WikiLeaks lawyer Sarah Harrison in total secrecy, and a real special operation was conducted for his reception and evacuation from the airport with the involvement of foreign diplomats: while the attention of journalists was distracted. the Ecuadorean ambassador in Russia (his car was parked at the airport terminal) picked up the leaker from American intelligence right at the steps of the airplane and a car with the diplomatic plates of the ambassador from Venezuela took him into the city. In the opinion of experts, the flight of Snowden to Moscow was coordinated with the Russian authorities and intelligence services and despite the fact that his exposes are not a sensation for specialists, representatives of the GRU and FSB will definitely meet and talk with him.

It woud be funny if Snowden, too, was on a cot in the Moscow Embassy of Ecuador all that time, just like Assange in London.

What that report from Izvestiya tells us is that Assange coordinated the reception in Moscow of Snowden using the help of pro-Moscow leftist governments of Ecuador and Venezuela...in Moscow. Of course we all expect that the Russian intelligence services dealt with Snowden. But it may have been more complicated, and they may have preferred to pretend a distance by dealing with him through the cat's paw of Latin Americans loyal to them, and hoping they might take him off their hands eventually. In any event, it's just "experts" claiming this. I'd be interested to see if any British or American reporters independently saw and reported the Ecuadorean and Venezuelan diplomatic cars greeting Snowden at SVO.

Yes, we all saw how WikiLeaks script kiddie on duty issued a breathless headline with a mispelling about helping Snowden. But like terrorists, WikiLeaks often claims credit for things it didn't really do (like help bring about the Arab Spring). Yes, maybe Assange got the Latin Americans to stand tall in Moscow, which isn't exactly the same thing as proof that he is working with the GRU -- even though I don't doubt he is.

But, as Michael Kelly summarizes from other people's reports -- yes, as Anna Nemtsova relayed, Snowden was surrounded by 20 people in suits at the airport (Simon Shuster of Time also reported the goons around Snowden), WikiLeaks keeps claiming that Snowden hasn't been debriefed by the FSB.

There's no new news here in this story, nor even any insights, yet once again, BI acts as if they have brought penetrating insight into a story they copied from everybody else.

So if I think that Snowden is really being handled by Russian intelligence agencies, why am I picking on these versions of ostensibly the same point by Foust or Michael Kelly? Just jealous that they have more traffic for their higher-profile blogs?

No, just wanting some fresh news and some real news on this story to make these deductions go further and finally constitute proof. AND wanting more focus on the hackers and the Kremlin both. When it is so easy to dismiss the WikiLeaks-Russian collusion -- as it is now for many (starting with Chris Hayes, who sneers to John Schindler that he is just ascribing too much power to these anarchists), then more has to be done to show these connections.

I do believe they exist. And I think you do have to go back and study all the elements of the timeline and study Poitras and Appelbaum carefully as well, as their anti-American crusades have also made them vulnerable to exploitation by Russia, if not collusion. It would be also good to get more on Sarah Harrison and her past before WikiLeaks in particular.

But this rewarmed story cobbled together in fact from other people's reports from Business Insider which then gets reprinted on Yahoo Finance and gets many more eyeballs just doesn't prove it yet. It also continues the actives-measure purpose of exonerating Snowden as a naif exploited by the big boys, when I think there's every reason to believe he's been in on it all along himself, given that both he and Jacob Appelbaum were in Hawaii at the same time in April 2012 and April 2013.

I'm wondering if Snowden is such a prize, although Business Insider has breathlessly hyped this, mainly based on Schindler's tweeted comment that during the Soviet era, NSA level intelligence was code-named OMEGA.

The reason isn't because I don't think Russia is still hugely interested in any NSA thing they can get, in whatever form.

It's because I think Edward, a contractor who didn't graduate from high-school and has a hugely over-inflated opinion of himself, can mainly tell the Russian intelligence officers about how contracting agencies hyped their product to NSA, and made it seem as if NSA could do more with their consulting product than it could, but doesn't really have fresh, deep knowledge of the inner workings of the NSA itself that credentialed full-time employees would have.

When you look at his resume which has been increasingly dissected, it looks like he has inside knowledge of the CIA, but not the NSA, and even what he has is very old -- I continue to maintain that what he has leaked is just not true or is over-hyped even if damaging to the reputation and procedures of NSA. But...while he was in Liverpool, did he meet Sarah Harrison?

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

[Craig Pirrong]

Hear, hear, Catherine. Keep it up.

Re Business Insider. This is the project of Henry Blodget. A project that he undertook after being banned from the securities industry for life due to his egregious conduct during the DotCom boom. (How's that for irony, eh? He was a flack for the technocommunists back then, and has just continued that endeavor by different means.)

I had the unique experience of testifying against him during the first (of many) arbitration actions filed against him for his conduct. Actually, the unique experience was watching *him* testify. You can't imagine the contortions that he went through to try to convince the panel that the phrase "POS company" he used in an email to describe a company he had given a strong "Buy" recommendation for didn't mean what any sentient being with an understanding of American idiom knew that it meant.

I saw the slimy snake perform, and learned never to trust a word that passes over his forked tongue.

IOW, he is a perfect flack for the copy-leftists.

[Catherine Fitzpatrick]

I had never heard any of this back story, thank you.

I've always felt that this publication was ill-named.

It's funny how the technocommunists gravitate to the whole pro-Russian thing, too.

[c3]

yeah blodget is just another new media loser crook. he did his oprah moment and is logrolling on MIPS and the inability for most to google beyond the first page of paid/ or friends of links.