One of the stranger bits of fallout from the Wikileaks cable dump is the information that shows the Obama administration spying on UN diplomats in an apparent effort to get whatever leverage they could before the Copenhagen climate orgy in December, 2009. This has lead to the mistaken impression on some people’s part that Wikileaks is on the side of climate transparency.
On the one hand, Assange falsely claimed to have broken the original Climategate file dump (in fact, the file was offered to him, and he refused it).
Assange falsely claimed that the Climategate emails were broken by WikiLeaks. This is obviously untrue as CA readers know. I can date WikiLeaks’ entry by contemporary comments. The first notice of the emails at WikiLeaks was 2009/11/21 at 2.50 AM Eastern (12:50 AM blog time). The emails had been downloaded by many people (including me) from a Russian server on Nov 19 and had been downloaded by WUWT moderators on Nov 17. A contemporary comment in a CA thread says that WikiLeaks was down and refers people to megauploads. WikiLeaks has not even been a major reference for Climategate – that belongs to eastangliaemails.com (originally anelegantchaos.org) which was up on Nov 20 and provided a searchable database.
On the other hand, he claims later that the Russians did it (I seem to recall some other nutball named Johnson proffering a similar theory).
Assange asserted that UK newspapers had close involvement with UK intelligence, that he had supposedly been told by UK reporters that they had received the dossier from the FSB (presumably FSB, the Russian intelligence) just three days before the Copenhagen conference. Assange then proclaimed that the UK intelligence tried to “frame us as a conduit for the FSB – absolutely outrageous”.
Yyyyyyyyeah. And to goof things up even worse, he also goes on (again like that other nutball Johnson) about how “Mike’s trick” simply meant the zenith of cleverness:
Assange adopted Gavin Schmidt’s disinformation about the “trick… to hide the decline”. While the term “trick” can be used to denote a sophisticated mathematical method, it can also denote something as simple and unscrupulous as deleting adverse data. It is necessary to investigate the facts of the matter and the context. In the example of interest, the Climategate correspondents did not use a sophisticated mathematical method; they simply deleted data that didn’t accord with their expectations. The “investigations” ought to have denounced/renounced such methods and their failure to do so is to their shame.
It would appear that this asshat doesn’t even know what’s on his own site. In response to this video,
Ross McKitrick summed up at ClimateAudit:
What a pair of blowhards. They were obviously unnerved by the question. They evidently like leaks that embarrass their political opponents, but in this case they found themselves tagged with a leak that had damaged the side they like; and since it seems to be more about political warfare against governments they dislike than some impartial ideal of transparency and freedom of information, they were stuck scrambling to make up a story about how it really served some nobler purpose. Of course they should simply have said that they weren’t the source of the leak, that it was in full circulation long before anyone looked to them for a copy and they didn’t know much about the details of what followed. But that would have been too humble, especially in front of a room full of simpering hero-worshippers. So they pretended to be insiders and proceeded to deliver a few minutes of sheer drivel.
While I was in the UK last fall, there was brief interest by the UK tabloids in the Russian angle, and an article appeared in the Daily Mail speculating that Russian intelligence officials had hacked the UEA and stolen the emails. But nobody took that line seriously and the story died within 48 hours. If Assange has a shred of evidence to support his lunatic theory he should release it. What’s with these secret communications between him and UK intelligence: out with it, Mr Wikileaks! Bloody poser.
On this issue at least they are nothing but fakes and cretins. Saying that UEA released all the background emails and whatnot to provide the full context is beyond idiocy; and Assange’s discussion of the “trick” is just painful to watch.
Liar, liar, pants on fire. Maybe he and Johnson should get a room.
