I have one very simple reason not to trust Shamir, and that is the fact that in 1998 he was engaged in trying to sell documents stolen from Russian military intelligence (GRU) archives. To me, this means that he works for, or then worked for, some faction of Russian intelligence himself. It’s common for members of Russian intelligence to sell material from their own archives through front men. The story is here. In the article below, please note the accusation against Domscheit-Berg (highlighted), which is speculative but plausible – RB
BBC Joins Smear Campaign Against Assange and Wikileaks (extract)
Israel Shamir, Counterpunch, Feb 2 2011
I just received a letter from BBC Panorama producer John Sweeney, outlining the substance of the forthcoming Panorama programme on Julian Assange. It does not read like a television show, it reads like a criminal indictment. Every wild accusation is listed, and those without a shred of evidence are given pride of place. Most amazing of all, the Sweeney letter includes some lines lifted from a missive I had sent to Julian some time ago. The words were taken out of context and they were a misquotation of the original, but I recognise my prose. Some questions immediately spring to mind. How did the BBC get their hands on my private correspondence? Does the BBC actually steal private mail, or do they hire out? Ominously, this is not the first time this has happened to me. Another private letter of mine was (mis)quoted by the Guardian’s investigative editor David Leigh. Is it too conspiratorial of me to recognise a disturbing pattern? Could it be that three stolen laptops of Julian Assange found their last resting place at Leigh&Sweeney after a brief sojourn at Langley?
John Sweeney and David Leigh are cut from different cloth, but they both know how to play the journalism game. Leigh smoulders with jealousy. He plays the Salieri to Assange’s Mozart, but he thinks of himself as the unsung hero of Wikileaks. A hero? Rather, a villain. As Bill Keller of the NYT admitted it was Leigh who “concluded that these rogue leaks (he engineered them) released the Guardian from any pledge”. Since then, he’s started his own private war against Wikileaks. His liaison with Sweeney was a convenient one. Sweeney is a pit bull; he’s the sort of guy you assign to smear Mother Theresa. He has skated along thus far because only the very rich might contemplate suing the BBC, but he has been found by a court to be a criminal libeller at least one time. Sweeney’s lunatic outbursts of fury are calculated to intimidate interviewees and have been preserved for posterity. It is all too plain to me now why Assange and company refused to have anything to do with Panorama and its pre-planned outcome. It is all too obvious to me now why they came hunting for your humble narrator.
The Panorama programme on Wikileaks will run on Feb 7 2011, the very day that the trial of Julian Assange will be reopened. The result of the trial is unpredictable, not so the programme. Assange has more than a chance before the British courts, but if this Sweeney letter is anything to judge by, Panorama will leave no survivors. This is the British version of The Empire Strikes Back, the ultimate response to those who try to challenge mainstream corporate media’s hold over the public mind. In the meantime, the FBI and Scotland Yard have been keeping busy, making as many as 45 raids on various premises connected with Wikileaks, so that the alliance between the BBC and the Guardian is an ethereal mirror of some very earthy, if not subterranean, activity. I doubt we will see the BBC’s Panorama make any attempt to examine what was disclosed by Wikileaks. I’m sure they will neglect to include Julian Assange’s philosophy of clarity as the people’s weapon against conspiracies of powerful; nor will they discuss the wilful redacting of the cables by the Guardian, or their arbitrary use of misleading headlines. I do not think they will investigate the Guardian’s journalistic attempts to destroy Julian Assange, including publishing an anticipatory book about the fall of Wikileaks. I wonder if they will inquire into OpenLeaks, the Guardian-sponsored alternative to Wikileaks, and how their version of “transparency” might be used to unmask whistleblowers and deliver their leaks back to their masters.
The one thing I do expect to see: smears! Some of these smears will deal with the alleged rape. I am no prophet, but I am willing to bet they will not mention these salient facts: the fact that the alleged victim was seen enjoying the company of the alleged rapist the day after the alleged crime, and the breathless twitters sent by the alleged victim after the alleged crime about how “amazing” it was to hang out with Julian and the Wikileaks crew. They will certainly not bring up Karl Rove’s involvement in the entrapment, nor will they bring up the complainant’s connections to the CIA. I suspect they will not bother to interview the eminent Swedish judge Brita Sundberg-Weitman about why she thinks the extradition request is illegal, and why she thinks that the people behind the request are pursuing their own agenda. I doubt the programme will quote Swedish attorney Marianne Ny, who said that it is better to keep a man in jail even if he turns out to be innocent.
Judging by Sweeney’s letter, there will be more than smears; there will be megasmears! Israel Shamir (that’s me) is a veritable lightning rod for smear jobs. Some folks can’t take the heat, and frankly, I don’t blame them. The Sweeney letter accuses me of being an “anti-Semite” and a “Holocaust denier”. Presumably it will be repeated in the broadcast. To ensure their case is fireproof, the BBC has hired expert “anti-Semitism fighter” Professor Richard Evans; the BBC spares no expense when the game is afoot. Evans was an expert witness in the David Irving libel trial, and walked away with seventy thousand pounds from the court and a grand total of a quarter of a million pounds altogether for “fighting” anti-Semitism. This windfall overexcited the Professor and, eager to repeat the coup, he tried to frame a feminist scholar Diane Purkiss for Holocaust denial as she expressed some unusual thoughts about… no, not Jews but witches in medieval England. This was a bridge too far, and he was forced to apologise grudgingly. Evans is no stranger to perjury: under cross examination, Evans, under oath, stated that he would not publish a book and thereby gain further profit from his participation in the trial. Yet of course he did publish a book, and yes, he profited from it. His enthusiasm is not hard to understand; he’s found a real gold mine! Without his reputation as an “anti-Semitism fighter”, his glumly unimaginative style … [that] makes Evans’s account like a long draft of flat beer” (as Walden said in Bloomberg) would leave him on the margins of life. I’ll be glad to refute Professor Evans’s insights, but let’s maintain a proper historical perspective. I’d reserve my comments until after the BBC hires Evans to analyse the anti-Semitism of George VI, Shakespeare, Eliot and Marx.
I wrote hundreds of pages on the topic, but for the benefit of the reader I’ll sum it up. Naturally, as a son of Jewish parents and a man living in the Jewish state and deeply and intimately involved with Jewish culture, I harbour no hate to a Jew because he is a Jew. I doubt many people do. However I did and do criticise various aspects of Jewish Weltanschauung like so many Jewish and Christian thinkers before me, or even more so for I witnessed crimes of the Jewish state that originated in this worldview. As for the accusation of “Holocaust denial”, my family lost too many of its sons and daughters for me to deny the facts of Jewish tragedy, but I do deny its religious salvific significance implied in the very term ‘Holocaust’; I do deny its metaphysical uniqueness, I do deny the morbid cult of Holocaust and I think every God-fearing man, a Jew, a Christian or a Muslim should reject it as Abraham rejected and smashed idols. I deny that it is good to remember or immortalise such traumatic events, and I wrote many articles against modern obsession with massacres, be it Jewish holocaust of 1940s, Armenian massacre of 1915, Ukrainian “holodomor”, Polish Katyn, Khmer Rouge etc. Poles, Armenians, Ukrainians understood me, so did Jews; otherwise I would be charged with the crime of factual denial which is known to the Israeli law. It took Evans and Sweeney to feign indignation.
I am not offended easily by morons. However, this ‘denier’ rhetoric keeps many of my erstwhile associates at arm’s length; no one likes being labelled, and I do not wish these labels to be rubbed off onto my friends, especially those like Julian Assange who never were interested in the subject. My Zionist opponents are obsessed with race and holocausts; I am not. Moreover, now I take time off my long involvement with the Jewish topic, involvement that began with translating the works of the Modern Hebrew writer S Y Agnon, moved on to translating the Medieval Hebrew works of Samuel Zacuto, and then finally had a go at undoing the crimes of Zionism. I do not renounce anything I’ve said or wrote, but there is life outside this subject. Wikileaks is the best example of this. Wikileaks has changed the face of the Middle East more radically than my ramblings ever could. Without Wikileaks, Al-Jazeera would never have published its Palestine Papers, and Tunisia and Egypt would not have begun their battle away from dictatorship and towards freedom.
These attacks on me have two reasons: one, to undermine Wikileaks and Julian Assange by association with me, “antisemite and denier”; two, to undermine my efforts to give you, readers, the cables unfiltered by the embedded media. This was confirmed by a new piece in the Guardian that provided foretaste of the forthcoming Panorama, like a 0.5″ tracer precedes payload. It repeats the same points: how anyone can have a view on Belarus that differs from that of Mr Leigh? The piece concludes: “while the newspapers hammered out a deal to handle the cables in a responsible fashion, Shamir’s backstairs antics certainly made WikiLeaks look rather less so”. Dear Guardian editors, your “responsible fashion” was analysed in Counterpunch and found wanting. Moreover, Bill Keller admitted that every publication of the cables was screened and vetted by “unsmiling men” from CIA and State Department. I have tried to free the cables from the cage you locked them in. I am responsible too, but to people, not to officialdom.
i see no particular reason to mistrust him either, without denying that he likely worked for russian intelligence – a russian jew pretty much had to work in one of the traditional fields, academia, art promotion or intelligence, since the other traditional fields like usury and oligarchy were unfairly closed off by the antisemitic state.
i gauge him by the plausibility of his views and more importantly, by legacy of self-contradicting statements and so far he seems to have maintained a clear course.
that said, i do maintain some cautionary distance from anything said by any jew, not for reasons of antijewism but simply because war by deception is so deeply ingrained in the culture – no shortage of venom in that crowd.
even hoarse voiced some doubt about genuineness of mordechai vanunu and i must grudgingly admit to his having that right, despite my 98% admiration for vanunu.
caveat goy!
Dear Mr Assange,
You may have seen Israel Shamir’s Counterpunch piece, in which he makes a number of unfounded and untrue attacks on Panorama, including falsely accusing the BBC of stealing his private correspondence. One of his accusations concerns our position relating to interviewing you. Shamir writes: ‘They were producing a program about Wikileaks, but they had no plans to interview Julian Assange.’
Let’s be clear, we have made repeated requests to interview you, by emails to Kristinn, Sarah and Vaughan, and I asked at the Frontline Club in front of your lawyer. We note that you have not replied to our requests, but we would still like to interview you.
I am copying this emailed letter to Mr Shamir.
John Sweeney, reporter
Well, Mr Sweeney, Shamir is right to the extent that there is a coordinated campaign of personal attacks on Assange’s character going on at the moment, presumably timed to coincide with his upcoming court appearance. But Shamir has always been a bit of a loose cannon, and it may not have been wise of WikiLeaks to allow him the discretion in handling their eastern European affairs that they did.
By the way, has it struck you that the so-called ‘Cablegate’ trove does not include any Top Secret cables? Wired magazine featured among their many supposed revelations from Adrian Lamo the claim that Pfc Manning had accessed not only the SIPRNET but also the Top Secret JWICS network, but I have seen no evidence of this at all, and I think it is probably not true.
moreover, weighing in on the above exchange, i note in shamir’s article the following:
Sweeney’s lunatic outbursts of fury are calculated to intimidate interviewees and have been preserved for posterity. It is all too plain to me now why Assange and company refused to have anything to do with Panorama and its pre-planned outcome.
hello … and John Sweeney is the producer of BBC Panorama.
like i said, my game is always searching for inherent contradictions and so far shamir is pretty clean.
He skews things around, and I admit, so do I. But let me give you one example, which was his last Counterpunch piece, where he accused the Guardian of censoring the cables they were publishing, without mentioning that the versions on WikiLeaks’ own site had exactly the same omissions. It is entirely possible that Assange never “refused to have anything to do with Panorama” and that Shamir is just creating trouble. He has effectively appointed himself spokesman for WikiLeaks, and now via Counterpunch he is reaching a substantial audience under that guise, and it is completely gratuitous, and inflammatory, and something I feel quite certain Assange & Co did not request him to do and do not welcome him doing. We already have a horde of so-called ‘Anonymous’ hackers starting web wars supposedly on behalf of WikiLeaks, and there too I do not think WikiLeaks wanted this or intended it or welcomes it. One could even interpret it as a ‘Black Bloc’ style provocateur phenomenon.
No, I don’t trust Shamir. I just don’t know what to make of him. It struck me straight off as downright weird that he was chosen as the wiki-conduit for Russia; you know, the Guardian, the NYT, Israel Shamir – spot the odd one out.
Off topic. If you remember the books mentioned, in that first MacNair piece, on non-Marxist accounts of historical trends; one was Michael Mann’s ‘Sources of Social Power’ which is intended to be a 3-volume survey, but only the first 2 volumes have appeared so far. It seems to be the state of the art thinking on the matter, in consultation with just about everybody, and also seems decently readable.
You can ‘look inside’ volume 1 on Amazon here
http://tinyurl.com/4e3krt7
Anyway, the point is that both volumes are usually massively expensive, but if you’re interested, there is a new copy of volume 1 available on ABebooks for about £15 just now: http://tinyurl.com/4l7equ2
The other non-Marxist book he mentioned John A. Hall’s ‘Powers and Liberties’, I got very cheap, and it is thankfully short and seems very readable and very interesting.
As one who accuses Wikileaks of having an agenda, a zionist agenda aimed at discrediting current and past US administrations, then to my mind, Shamir’s support for the Wikileaks scam doesn’t enhance his credibility.
Shamir: … Wikileaks has changed the face of the Middle East more radically than my ramblings ever could. Without Wikileaks, Al-Jazeera would never have published its Palestine Papers, and Tunisia and Egypt would not have begun their battle away from dictatorship and towards freedom. …
I think that anyone who considers the recent turmoil in the region to be “all good” is at best premature and superficial in their analysis. Shamir’s observation merely reinforces my feeling that he is yet another disinformation disseminator.
Lafayette, he says, “A general account of societies, their structure and their history can best be given in terms of the interrelations of what I will call the four sources of social power: ideological, economic, military and political relationships. These are overlapping networks of social interaction, not dimensions, levels or factors of a single social totality.” This may be a good stance if you wish to provide thick historical description and avoid reductionistic or dogmatic hypotheses, because it prevents analysis of causes and search for explanations altogether. But surely his attempt to re-write the whole of world history to illustrate the autonomy of these four sets of relationships is a complete waste of time.
Let me put it this way; the most useful guide to current geopolitical realities that I am aware of is P D Scott. This is not because he has a theory of history; he doesn’t. In so far as his ideological views can be discerned, he is a non-revolutionary but leftish religious idealist. He ignores ideology completely in his books — so completely that you don’t at first notice its absence. This leads to certain weaknesses in his analysis (notably a reluctance to focus on religion as a reactionary force), but his strength is not in analysis anyway but in historical research, and unearthing documentary evidence of what appears to be almost universal collusion among economic, military, political and criminal networks worldwide, with the CIA at the centre of most of them. So the moral I draw is, it is not worth looking for the perfect theoretician. Look for the facts, and assemble your own theories as best you can.
Yes, I know what you mean. I actually bought it myself maybe in a moment of madness, but the theory side of it doesn’t interest me – it apparently doesn’t contain that much. I studied sociology – not very diligently – years ago, and back then it was already glutted with theory for the sake of theory; and that was before all the pomo stuff. What attracted me was that he has consulted with just about everyone on his historic facts, so the book is a handy catalogue of current mainstream wisdom, to at least keep up with what they’re talking about for the next 10 years or so.
I know what you mean about his ’4 sources of power’. What you said there: “… it prevents analysis of causes and search for explanations altogether” That is what I fear, because ultimately that’s what establishment academics do – find diplomatic ways of avoiding biting the hand that feeds them. I note that it’s described somewhere as owing more to /Weber’s ’5-class’ model (or something) than to Marx; this is something I’ve noticed cropping up here and there, and I normally associate it with right-wing academics trying to AVOID talking about real power. This counterposing of Marx and Weber has the feel to me of a manufactured opposition whose objective is as usual to misrepresent Marx, but I couldn’t swear to that because I’m not up to speed on sociology.
However, the source of power DOES deeply interest me, and it sounds a more substantial attempt than anything Marxists have produced for a long time, even if you find his model faulty (I find Arnold Toynbee’s ‘models’ very flimsy, but still find his writing fascinating). How did the Senators and the landowners get the Roman generals to do their will? How did a few thousand Englishmen control India? How come 8 out of the 9 oligarchs who ended up owning Russia, and the entire board of the US federal reserve, the IMF … you guessed it. I’m not looking for a discussion of the last one from Mann. But obviously it’s down to strategic alliances and mutual advantage – I hope to find a lot of exploration of all the ramifications of that.
Yes, I think you’re right about P.D. Scott, in short. He DOES have a ‘model’ – the proliferation of extra-legal, supra-national interests as a big factor in ‘what’s going on’ to put it very crudely. Somewhere ‘models’ and theories have to be connected with objective provable facts at some point, and I think he does that better than anyone, on the big picture. Another case of what seems to me a manufactured opposition is one that’s often brought up re Scott – the ‘conspiracy model’ (which is a laughable description of what Scott does anyway) as opposed to Chomsky and Herman’s ‘propaganda model’ or ‘structural’ explanations . Very obviously these are just different focuses of attention, rather than being mutually exclusive.
Anyway, no sweat if you don’t fancy it – at least it’s cheaper than Banaji.
I think this is where historians score over so-called social scientists. Writing history is an art, like biography, not a science. As such, it is subjective, and so is your decision as to whether you find a particular historian convincing. But ‘scientific method’ with ‘hypotheses’ is not the way good historians proceed, any more than it is the way good biographers, or other artists of any sort, proceed. Artists who follow ‘theories’ are bad artists, innit. Funnily enough, P D Scott expressed great interest in one of his forewords as to how the Roman imperial secret service worked:
Information on this would be purely anecdotal, and to some extent one could compare different anecdotes in order to gauge their credibility, which is a sort of detective’s art; again, not a science. He also expressed an interest in the rival systems of Freemasonry of the late 17th/early 18th centuries (Jacobites vs Hanoverians), and he was fascinated to hear about Marsha Schuchard’s books on these (which incidentally are not only anecdotal but excessively speculative).