It was reported in several major publications as well at the time.
> Wikileaks response:
> A representative of Wikileaks responded, ‘We have no further reports on this “rumour/issue”. Another Wikileaks representative told Index “obviously it is not approved”.
Following back the Guardian story linked in the above, there's this:
> Assange subsequently maintained he had only a "brief interaction" with Shamir: "WikiLeaks works with hundreds of journalists from different regions of the world. All are required to sign non-disclosure agreements and are generally only given limited review access to material relating to their region."
As far as I can tell, it looks like Wikileaks paid Shamir ~$2,000 for reviewing a batch of documents, but he maybe broke his NDA and tried to sell the docs (even the evidence for this, as far as I can see, is purely circumstantial).
It's all a far, far cry from "Assange gave cables to KGB". Small wonder this isn't even in the top 3 attempts to smear Assange as 'linked' to Russian agents (all of which have never had a shred of direct evidence btw).
Of course wikileaks/assange aren’t going to admit to doing something terrible. Whether or not it’s true, they’re going to give the same answer!
I haven’t looked into that Belarusian thing, so I don’t know what evidence there is but it doesn’t make sense to take Wikileaks at face value - it’s obvious confirmation bias. Even if one doesn’t want to accept that it’s confirmation bias, one should be aware that it comes off as it to everyone else.
The whole wikileaks thing was so annoying because it was 95% of the time of two different choirs preaching opposite sermons based only on faith not objective facts.
Notice also how I never said "Assange gave cables to KGB" but that his buddy did. Are you going to bicker over whom Shamir got the cables from?
