In an analysis of the Vault 7 leak published in the DC paper, nothing is explained about what the disclosure specifically contains, or what this massive government overreach indicates. Instead, the piece leads with bizarre questions about whether Russia was involved, despite WikiLeaks asserting that the information came from an “isolated, high-security network” at the CIA Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virginia.
“The intelligence community previously reported direct links between WikiLeaks and Russia, in relation to the DNC hack. A WikiLeaks news release on March 7 suggests these documents were obtained from a contractor and have been in circulation for some time,” Brandon Valeriano, the author of the piece, asserted. “While a third-party contractor is likely the source of this information, with the great majority of successful attacks against U.S. targets coming through third parties, this also does not preclude Russia’s involvement, given their previous relationship with WikiLeaks.”
The Post “analysis” infers that the Vault 7 revelations are intended as a distraction from Donald Trump’s alleged ties to Russia, again, without providing evidence to back up their claims.
“A key point here is that this document trove shifts the narrative away from the hacking of the DNC and Russia’s relationship with Trump and toward a focus on the malfeasance allegedly committed by the CIA,” Valeriano opines. “Instead, we must consider where the information came from and the lack of credibility WikiLeaks has as a news source.”
Unlike the Washington Post, a media outlet that has spread multiple outright falsehoods in recent months, WikiLeaks boasts a 100-percent record for accuracy. Publisher Julian Assange has stated that the Vault 7 information was not obtained by means of a hack. There has been no evidence that Russia was involved in either obtaining or releasing the documents contained in Vault 7.
It is important to note that the paper’s change of heart about WikiLeaks, and Assange, came after Bezos, who has extensive CIA contracts, purchased the outlet.
In 2013, it was revealed that Bezos, who also owns retail behemoth Amazon, secured a contract for $600 million with the CIA. The contract came just four months after Bezos purchased the newspaper.
“News media should illuminate conflicts of interest, not embody them. But the owner of the Washington Post is now doing big business with the Central Intelligence Agency, while readers of the newspaper’s CIA coverage are left in the dark,” Norman Solomon wrote for AlterNet. Despite requests to disclose its affiliations, the Washington Post has repeatedly refused to publicly reveal its owner’s business ties with the agency.
Bezos has been previously criticized for using his companies to do the bidding of the intelligence community. Shortly after Wikileaks published US State Department cables, the website was kicked off of Amazon’s web-hosting service.
“WikiLeaks was booted from Amazon’s web-hosting service AWS. So at the height of public interest in what WikiLeaks was publishing, readers were unable to access the WikiLeaks website,” media watch group FAIR noted.
The 8,761 documents contained within WikiLeaks’ Vault 7 release expose the CIA’s global covert hacking program, its malware arsenal and “dozens of zero day weaponized exploits” which appear to prove that the government has been infringing on the right to privacy, a right enshrined in the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution.
Apparently, that is of no consequence to Bezos or his Washington Post, or to CNN, who has now picked up the absurd and baseless narrative.
In October, during the height of the controversy surrounding the Podesta emails, CNN host Chris Cuomo also falsely claimed that it is illegal for anyone but the media to read WikiLeaks — in a strange attempt to seemingly keep the American public from digging into the files without the mainstream pundit commentary to direct their opinions.
