[mpyne]

"The last forty years have seen a huge proliferation of think tanks and political NGOs whose purpose, beneath all the verbiage, is to execute political agendas by proxy."

This one is especially ironic, given that WikiLeaks has been reduced by now to a proxy political action arm for the Kremlin. The world is still waiting for the WikiLeaks "secrets on Moscow" that Assange threatened to release in 2010.

RT at least got smart and finally stopped "The Julian Assange show" (http://rt.com/tags/the-julian-assange-show/) so that the connection isn't quite so obvious, but it is there, even today.

[Zigurd]

"WikiLeaks has been reduced by now to a proxy political action arm for the Kremlin"

Seriously?

[mpyne]

Yes, seriously. Assange himself stated bluntly that he told Snowden to go to Russia (not Cuba, nor any of the leftist South American nations).

DDB left WikiLeaks due in part to the ongoing association of WikiLeaks with authoritarian figures like Israel Shamir.

WikiLeaks could choose to start today and bring "transparency" to an increasingly opaque Russian situation, especially since Russia has recently passed laws requiring all media outfits to have no more than 20% foreign ownership, passed laws requiring bloggers to register themselves with central authorities, passed laws legalizing Internet surveillance even more extensive than is legal in the U.S. (and even U.K.) and much more.

WikiLeaks could do this today, there are half a million civil liberties organizations in the Western world focusing on the Western democracies and seemingly no powerful groups in Russia.

But despite their stated pro-transparency aims, WikiLeaks refuses to do this.

If it's because Russia has threatened WikiLeaks with actual physical harm (something the U.S. government has never done) then WikiLeaks shouldn't have acted as collaborators with Russia by telling Snowden to go there instead of South America.

But I don't think it's a physical threat at all, the cooperation of WikiLeaks with Russia since 2010 has gone on for so long (and Assange has been cooped up in Ecuador for so long) that one would think the physical threat has subsided, at least enough for WikiLeaks to quietly stay away from Russia instead of actively assisting them, as they did in 2013.

The most charitable explanation for all of this is that a common enemy (for WikiLeaks and Russia) makes strange bedfellows... but that doesn't change the fact that WikiLeaks has been actively collaborating with the Kremlin

[lawnchair_larry]

And people call Assange the conspiracy theorist...

I guess that's why you made a good soldier.