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this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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Today I Learned
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Assange was the tool of a foreign intelligence service who salted WikiLeaks with disinformation harmful to national interests. I believe the term of art is "useful idiot".
He's not an idiot, just a foreign agent.
Do you have evidence for that or should I don the proverbial tinfoil hat?
Tinfoil hat time!
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/11/wikileaks-trump-mueller-roger-stone-jerome-corsi/576940/
Thank you for the link, it was an interesting read. Allow me to unpack your previous statement for the sake of argument.
No argument here. Wittingly or not, he was used as a destabilizing force by Russia, and that is corroborated in the article.
Disinformation implies he shared falsehoods. However, the article and the state both treat his disclosures not as fabrications, but as factual. This is what I was really looking for in terms of evidence. It would indeed be quite a revelation to me.
That is a matter of opinion. Here's another take: The crimes the state committed were harmful to the nation. Exposing them was beneficial as it allows the nation to set the state back on the right path.
That might very well be the case. One could make the case that Assange was merely working with the information he got. It just turned out the information was one sided because one side had external help in espionage resources. The article is ambiguous about it but does tend to put him in a less innocent light though.
The problem with a salted archive is that some percentage of it is true - let's say 99.9%. So if you start to verify material it all appears to be factually correct. The agency will slip some very damaging falsehoods into a mountain of embarrassing but true material. The accurate material "cleans" the falsehoods. Welcome to WikiLeaks, and probably Hunter Biden's laptop as well.
Part of the game is that the salting doesn't get acknowledged. You don't want them to know what you know and by revealing what's false you implicitly verify the remaining material. You can game this out by slipping in a couple of whoppers and some subtle lies. The whoppers get denied implying the subtle ones are true. So not revealing the salt is the equivalent of " no comment".
There used to be more chatter about Assange and the intelligence community but it has gone quiet for the last few years. That alone might suggest something is up.
https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/mar/18/wikileaks-russias-useful-idiot-its-agent-influence/
Another great article, thank you.