Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

JimLur, Thanks for bringing Shamir Israel back to mind, in that Putin-friendly post you made.

"Putin Claims U.S. Intelligence Agents Funneled $400 Million To Clinton Campaign
[...]
Israel Shamir, a keen observer of the American-Russian relationship, and celebrated American journalist Robert Parry both think that one man deserves much of the credit for the new Cold War and that man is William Browder, a hedge fund operator who made his fortune in the corrupt 1990s world of Russian commodities trading.
P - Browder is also symptomatic of why the United States government is so poorly informed about international developments as he is the source of much of the Congressional “expert testimony” contributing to the current impasse. He has somehow emerged as a trusted source in spite of the fact that he has self-interest in cultivating a certain outcome. Also ignored is his renunciation of American citizenship in 1998, reportedly to avoid taxes. He is now a British citizen.
P - Browder is notoriously the man behind the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which exploited Congressional willingness to demonize Russia and has done so much to poison relations between Washington and Moscow. The Act sanctioned individual Russian officials, which Moscow has rightly seen as unwarranted interference in the operation of its judicial system."

See - The WikiLeaks-Russia connection started way before the 2016 election

By Zack Beauchamp@[e-mail] Jan 6, 2017, 9:10am EST

[...]

The curious case of Israel Shamir


Israel Shamir. (A.Savin)

WikiLeaks first came to international attention in 2010, when it published secret US government footage showing American helicopters in Iraq firing at journalists. By the end of the year, it had also published tranches of US military documents on the Afghan War as well as State Department diplomatic cables.

These disclosures established what would become a clear pattern: WikiLeaks disclosures would, disproportionately, reveal secrets about the United States and its allies. They also established the group as a major player on the international stage, bringing it in for a level of scrutiny it had never received before.

One of the things reporters uncovered was the strange past of one WikiLeaks employee: a professional anti-Semite named Israel Shamir.

Shamir, who has gone by six names over the course of his life, was born Izrail Schmerler, in Russia. He converted from Judaism to the Greek Orthodox Church later in life, and turned viciously on his former co-religionists. He has denied the Holocaust, called Jews “a virus in human form,” and, in 2010, published a book titled Breaking the Conspiracy of the Elders of Zion.

Shamir was also a longtime friend of Julian Assange, who tasked him with helping to disseminate WikiLeaks documents in his native Russia in early 2010.

“Shamir has a years-long friendship with Assange, and was privy to the contents of tens of thousands of US diplomatic cables months before WikiLeaks made public the full cache,” James Ball, a former WikiLeaks staffer, wrote at the Guardian the next year. “Shamir aroused the suspicion of several WikiLeaks staffers — myself included — when he asked for access to all cable material concerning ‘the Jews,’ a request which was refused.”

The first thing Shamir did with the documents was hand some off to Russian Reporter magazine, a Kremlin-friendly newsweekly. He then offered to sell access to them to the highest bidder, David Leigh and Luke Harding write in the book Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy.

But what he did next was exceptionally curious. Shamir traveled to Belarus, a country ruled by dictator Alexander Lukashenko and perhaps Putin’s staunchest ally in Europe. Shamir was a fan of Lukashenko; in a 2010 piece, he called Belarus “the Shangri-la of the post-Soviet development.”

In Belarus, Shamir shared State Department cables pertaining to the country with government officials — in unredacted, unedited form.

In January 2011, Belarusian state-run media began publishing what it said were US diplomatic cables from Shamir’s cache, alleging that Lukashenko’s opponents were funded abroad. According to several Belarusian dissidents who spoke to Tablet, the names in the cables were also used to identify lower-level dissidents.

“The extent to which WikiLeaks and Israel Shamir have endangered the lives of pro-democracy activists in Belarus will become chillingly clear as innocent men and women continue to disappear,” Kapil Komireddi, author of the Tablet piece, writes.

WikiLeaks issued a weak public disavowal of Shamir’s Belarusian caper in February 2011, saying “obviously it is not approved.” But according to Ball, the internal discourse on Shamir was somewhat different.

“Assange shamefully refused to investigate [the Belarus incident],” Ball recalled in his Guardian piece. “The two [Shamir and Assange] remain close.”

This isn’t a direct link between Assange and the Kremlin, per se. But it established what would soon become a clear pattern: Assange and WikiLeaks providing cover to authoritarians, especially those allied with Putin.

Assange claims to be a radical opponent of authoritarianism and state oppression. But he allowed Shamir to hand off documents to a pro-Kremlin publication, exclusively, and then use his documents to aid a state-sponsored crackdown on dissidents. Assange showed no meaningful remorse afterward.

Assange was literally paid by the Russian government

With links - https://www.vox.com/world/2017/1/6/14179240/wikileaks-russia-ties

See also:

Here's something to chew on:

Quote:

Even more disconcerting was Assange’s expanding relations with official Russia. In October 2010, just before WikiLeaks reached the acme of its influence with the release of the State Department cables, Assange vowed that WikiLeaks would expose the secrets not just of the United States but of all repressive regimes, including that of Russia. In an interview with Izvestia, a formerly state-controlled daily, he explained, “We have [compromising materials] about your government and businessmen.” The same day, Kristinn Hrafnsson of WikiLeaks told a reporter, “Russian readers will learn a lot about their country.”

Unlike the Americans, though, the Russians put WikiLeaks on notice. The day after Hrafnsson’s interview appeared, an anonymous official from Russia’s secret police, the FSB, told the independent Russian news website LifeNews.ru, “It’s essential to remember that given the will and the relevant orders, [WikiLeaks] can be made inaccessible forever.”

Then, something strange happened: A few days after Assange was arrested on sexual assault charges, Kremlin officials emerged as some of his most vocal defenders. The Moscow Times reported that Vladimir Putin himself had condemned Assange’s arrest: “If it is full democracy, then why have they hidden Mr. Assange in prison? That’s what, democracy?” Putin’s indignation was echoed by other top Russian politicians, including State Duma Deputy Gennady Gudkov, who observed, “The real reason for his arrest is to find out by any means who leaked the confidential diplomatic information to him and how.”

Within weeks, contacts commenced between WikiLeaks and elements favorable to Putin’s ruling party. The promised damning documents about Russia never saw the light of day. The Moscow Times article also recounted how the Russian Reporter, a Putin-friendly publication, had gained “privileged access” to “hundreds of [American diplomatic] cables containing Russia-related information.”

These contacts began when, according to The Guardian, Assange made batches of the State Department cables available to Israel Shamir, a Russian-born Israeli journalist who was involved with WikiLeaks. After Shamir took the cables to Moscow, he traveled to Belarus. There, he met aides to the dictator Alexander Lukashenko, who was then campaigning in a sham election. (Shamir, a controversial figure within WikiLeaks, has evolved into a vociferous Holocaust denier, obsessed with Jewish power.) Not long after Shamir arrived, according to accounts published by the Index on Censorship and the American online magazine Tablet, local news outlets started reporting that the official media was preparing to publish secret documents about the Belarusian opposition
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and in reply, Maria56, and all -- that one in full first item at/see (linked in),
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=98132549
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