Key witness in Julian Assange case was lying as an FBI informant to get off charges of sexual crime against kids

How the US handles legal issues, it lies, and tortures it's targets, and uses fraudulent witnesses to boost their case.

By Dark Politricks

Get the full article here on stundin.is

A major witness in the United States’ Department of Justice case against Julian Assange has admitted to fabricating key accusations in the indictment against the Wikileaks founder. The witness, who has a documented history with sociopathy and has received several convictions for sexual abuse of minors and wide-ranging financial fraud, made the admission in a newly published interview in Stundin where he also confessed to having continued his crime spree whilst working with the Department of Justiceand FBI and receiving a promise of immunity from prosecution.

The man in question, Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson, was recruited by US authorities to build a case against Assange after misleading them to believe he was previously a close associate of his. In fact he had volunteered on a limited basis to raise money for Wikileaks in 2010 but was found to have used that opportunity to embezzle more than $50,000 from the organization. Julian Assange was visiting Thordarson’s home country of Iceland around this time due to his work with Icelandic media and members of parliament in preparing the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, a press freedom project that produced a parliamentary resolution supporting whistleblowers and investigative journalism. 

The United States is currently seeking Assange’s extradition from the United Kingdom in order to try him for espionage relating to the release of leaked classified documents. If convicted, he could face up to 175 years in prison. The indictment has sparked fears for press freedoms in the United States and beyond and prompted strong statements in support of Assange from Amnesty International, Reporters without borders, the editorial staff of the Washington Post and many others. 

US officials presented an updated version of an indictment against him to a Magistrate court in London last summer. The veracity of the information contained therein is now directly contradicted by the main witness, whose testimony it is based on.

No instruction from Assange

The court documents refer to Mr Thordarson simply as “Teenager” (a reference to his youthful appearance rather than true age, he is 28 years old) and Iceland as “NATO Country 1” but make no real effort to hide the identity of either. They purport to show that Assange instructed Thordarson to commit computer intrusions or hacking in Iceland. 

The aim of this addition to the indictment was apparently to shore up and support the conspiracy charge against Assange in relation to his interactions with Chelsea Manning. Those occurred around the same time he resided in Iceland and the authors of the indictment felt they could strengthen their case by alleging he was involved in illegal activity there as well. This activity was said to include attempts to hack into the computers of members of parliament and record their conversations.

In fact, Thordarson now admits to Stundin that Assange never asked him to hack or access phone recordings of MPs. His new claim is that he had in fact received some files from a third party who claimed to have recorded MPs and had offered to share them with Assange without having any idea what they actually contained. He claims he never checked the contents of the files or even if they contained audio recordings as his third party source suggested. He further admits the claim, that Assange had instructed or asked him to access computers in order to find any such recordings, is false.

Nonetheless, the tactics employed by US officials appear to have been successful as can be gleaned from the ruling of Magistrate Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser on January 4th of this year. Although she ruled against extradition, she did so purely on humanitarian grounds relating to Assange’s health concerns, suicide risk and the conditions he would face in confinement in US prisons. With regards to the actual accusations made in the indictment Baraitser sided with the arguments of the American legal team, including citing the specific samples from Iceland which are now seriously called into question.

Other misleading elements can be found in the indictment, and later reflected in the Magistrate’s judgement, based on Thordarson’s now admitted lies. One is a reference to Icelandic bank documents. The Magistrate court judgement reads: “It is alleged that Mr. Assange and Teenager failed a joint attempt to decrypt a file stolen from a “NATO country 1” bank”.

Thordarson admits to Stundin that this actually refers to a well publicised event in which an encrypted file was leaked from an Icelandic bank and assumed to contain information about defaulted loans provided by the Icelandic Landsbanki. The bank went under in the fall of 2008, along with almost all other financial institutions in Iceland, and plunged the country into a severe economic crisis. The file was at this time, in summer of 2010, shared by many online who attempted to decrypt it for the public interest purpose of revealing what precipitated the financial crisis. Nothing supports the claim that this file was even “stolen” per se, as it was assumed to have been distributed by whistle-blowers from inside the failed bank.

More deceptive language emerges in the aforementioned judgment where it states: “...he [Assange] used the unauthorized access given to him by a source, to access a government website of NATO country-1 used to track police vehicles.”

This depiction leaves out an important element, one that Thordarson clarifies in his interview with Stundin. The login information was in fact his own and not obtained through any nefarious means. In fact, he now admits he had been given this access as a matter of routine due to his work as a first responder while volunteering for a search and rescue team. He also says Assange never asked for any such access.

Revealing chat logs

Thordarson spoke with a journalist from Stundin for several hours as he prepared a thorough investigative report into his activities that include never before published chat logs and new documents.

The chat logs were gathered by Thordarson himself and give a comprehensive picture of his communications whilst he was volunteering for Wikileaks in 2010 and 11. It entails his talks with WikiLeaks staff as well as unauthorized communications with members of international hacking groups that he got into contact with via his role as a moderator on an open IRC WikiLeaks forum, which is a form of live online chat. There is no indication WikiLeaks staff had any knowledge of Thordarson’s contacts with aforementioned hacking groups, indeed the logs show his clear deception. 

The communications there show a pattern where Thordarson is constantly inflating his position within WikiLeaks, describing himself as chief of staff, head of communications, No 2 in the organization or responsible for recruits. In these communications Thordarson frequently asks the hackers to either access material from Icelandic entities or attack Icelandic websites with so-called DDoS attacks. These are designed to disable sites and make them inaccessible but not cause permanent damage to content.

Stundin cannot find any evidence that Thordarson was ever instructed to make those requests by anyone inside WikiLeaks. Thordarson himself is not even claiming that, although he explains this as something Assange was aware of or that he had interpreted it so that this was expected of him. How this supposed non-verbal communication took place he cannot explain.

Furthermore, he never explained why WikiLeaks would be interested in attacking any interests in Iceland, especially at such a sensitive time while they were in the midst of publishing a huge trove of US diplomatic cables as part of an international media partnership. Assange is not known to have had any grievances with Icelandic authorities and was in fact working with members of parliament in updating Iceland’s freedom of press laws for the 21st century. 

On the FBI radar

Thordarson's rogue acts were not limited to communications of that nature as he also admits to Stundin that he set up avenues of communication with journalists and had media pay for lavish trips abroad where he misrepresented himself as an official representative of WikiLeaks.

He also admits that he stole documents from WikiLeaks staff by copying their hard drives. Among those were documents from Renata Avila, a lawyer who worked for the organization and Mr. Assange.

Thordarson continued to step up his illicit activities in the summer of 2011 when he established communication with “Sabu”, the online moniker of Hector Xavier Monsegur, a hacker and a member of the rather infamous LulzSec hacker group. 

In that effort all indications are that Thordarson was acting alone without any authorization, let alone urging, from anyone inside WikiLeaks.

Read the rest of the article at stundin.is.

By Dark Politricks

© 2021 Dark Politricks

Help Stop Clare's Law being a woman only law - make all UK Law equal to Men and Women by writing to your MP!

Help Stop Clare's Law being a woman only law - make all UK Law equal to Men and Women by writing to your MP!

By Dark Politricks

If you read my latest article you will know I was a bit annoyed about the new Clare's Law which was being brought into the UK nationwide.

This law would let women ask the local Police for any criminal history about their new partner. The new law would not apply to men who make up 40% of all domestic abuse victims.

The disturbing thing about this law is that it divides our judicial system into a sexist one where one law exists for men and another for women.

Also the police are able to give out "suspicions" and "allegations" to the inquisitive woman which might not be truthful or correct.

How many vindictive women are out there which would claim that their ex partner beat or abused them because they are upset or jealous that they split up?

I don't know, but I do know that we have had multiple recent court cases where women have been prosecuted and sometimes jailed for making false claims of rape against men. The most recent one being the case of Natasha Foster who was jailed for 3 years for making up a claim of rape against an ex boyfriend.

Therefore if you think this new law couldn't in any way affect you then think again.

Not only could your current partner lie and make a false claim of abuse but just by alleging an offence took place, even if it didn't result in a court case, it could still be treated as an "allegation" serious enough to be given out to future partners.

Also old crimes that should be "spent" after a period of time under the 1974 Rehabilitation of Offenders Act will still be eligible for the Police to give out to future partners even if the crime happened many years ago. This goes against the whole point of the 1974 law as the crime is not even supposed to be on your record any more.

This turns the whole concept of our criminal justice act on its head. Supposedly, under this law, once you have spent your crime you are "rehabilitated" and therefore allowed to not mention it on job application forms of other legal documents that ask about criminal convictions.

This new Clare's Law, like the Criminal Records Bureau checks before it, have totally negated the nature of the 1974 Rehabilitation of Offenders Act and could throw any chance of rehabilitation away for ex-offenders.

For example if you had a fight with a man 20 years ago this should supposedly be "spent" and no longer on your record. You should be able to apply to jobs and not even mention the event.

However under Clare's Law the police could give this information out if they felt it was "relevant". This in itself is leaving a very important matter up to a low-level Police officer rather than a Judge or Magistrate.

Here is what is "supposed" to happen when you have committed a crime and then "spend" it by passing a specified length of time which is dependant on the seriousness and nature of the offence.

I quote directly from the Home Offices own page on the law:

Subject to subsection (2) below, where an individual has been convicted, whether before or after the commencement of this Act, of any offence or offences, and the following conditions are satisfied, that is to say—

(a)he did not have imposed on him in respect of that conviction a sentence which is excluded from rehabilitation under this Act; and

(b)he has not had imposed on him in respect of a subsequent conviction during the rehabilitation period applicable to the first-mentioned conviction in accordance with section 6 below a sentence which is excluded from rehabilitation under this Act;

then, after the end of the rehabilitation period so applicable (including, where appropriate, any extension under section 6(4) below of the period originally applicable to the first-mentioned conviction) or, where that rehabilitation period ended before the commencement of this Act, after the commencement of this Act, that individual shall for the purposes of this Act be treated as a rehabilitated person in respect of the first-mentioned conviction and that conviction shall for those purposes be treated as spent.

Read the full law here: The Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974.

Therefore after my earlier rant I wrote to my local MP about this matter and I got a response back telling me that he will raise the matter with the Home Secretary.

Here is the letter I received:

 

Dear Mr ....

Thank you for your email in which you pose some interesting questions which I shall submit to the Home secretary.  I shall let you know when I have a reply.

Best wishes

Sir Gerald Howarth MP Member of Parliament for Aldershot House of Commons London SW1A 0AA

 

Therefore I suggest anyone else, male or female, who is concerned about our whole criminal justice system being split into two - one for men and another for women, complain to their MP, or directly to the Home Secretary ASAP.

You can find your local MP and contact them directly online here > http://findyourmp.parliament.uk/

Here is the letter I sent to my own MP. If you cannot think of your own version feel free to copy it and change wording as you see fit.

Dear [YOUR MP's NAME],

Can I enquire about the introduction of the new "Clare's law" which is apparently going to be rolled out across the country.

From the news reports it seems that this law is only going to apply to women even though a reported 40% of victims of domestic violence are now men.

I quote directly from a report made from Home Office statistics which was reported in the Observer > http://www.theguardian.com/society/2010/sep/05/men-victims-domestic-violence

"About two in five of all victims of domestic violence are men, contradicting the widespread impression that it is almost always women who are left battered and bruised, a new report claims.

Men assaulted by their partners are often ignored by police, see their attacker go free and have far fewer refuges to flee to than women, says a study by the men's rights campaign group Parity.

The charity's analysis of statistics on domestic violence shows the number of men attacked by wives or girlfriends is much higher than thought. Its report, Domestic Violence: The Male Perspective, states:

"Domestic violence is often seen as a female victim/male perpetrator problem, but the evidence demonstrates that this is a false picture."

Data from Home Office statistical bulletins and the British Crime Survey show that men made up about 40% of domestic violence victims each year between 2004-05 and 2008-09, the last year for which figures are available. In 2006-07 men made up 43.4% of all those who had suffered partner abuse in the previous year, which rose to 45.5% in 2007-08 but fell to 37.7% in 2008-09."

Therefore can I ask you the following questions:

-Will men be able to find out if potential new female partners are violent and in this age of supposed equality surely any law should be equally applicable to men and women?

-What actual information will be given out to women enquiring about their partner?

-How does this new law effect the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 in which convictions are supposedly "spent" after a number of years. For example if I was arrested and convicted for a street fight against another man when I was 18 will that information be given out?

-What about if a women had made a false claim of rape against me which led to no charge or conviction? From the reporting it seems that even "accusations" true or not can be given out. How would that effect men who have been falsely accused of rape or other violent crimes.

-How are you going to handle "deliberate" misleading reports of domestic abuse by former partners who are upset that their relationships have broken up. I can see no better way for an annoyed ex to get back at me than claim to the Police that I hit or abused her and therefore ensure any future partner I might have could be told about it. It could potentially ruin relationships and allow manipulative women to purposefully ruin lives.

Also I would like to state that in a country where we are all supposedly innocent until found guilty the only way guilt is proven is by a conviction in a court of law.

Therefore giving out "accusations" and "rumours" goes against a supposed long standing maxim of our country that all are equal under the law until proven guilty.

Can you please ask the Home Secretary how she can claim we live under the rule of law when it is not applied equally to all?

Surely in this day and age of female equality when websites exist that let women brag about beating men up > http://www.likelike.com/pollcommentary/2408 we should all be equal under the law, rather than having two sets of laws dependant on the sex you are born as.

Yours sincerely,

[YOUR NAME]

 

Hopefully if enough of us can get questions raised in Parliament or MP's actually thinking about the consequences of their new laws they may think again.

I have no problem with sensible measures to protect women from horrible domestic abuse.

However any law in a democratically country should be equally applied and it should not negate previous laws in doing so.

Please help our politicians understand this.  

View the original article on Clare's Law an unfair law to be rolled out across the country here on the main site www.darkpolitricks.com

Read the The response from my MP to Clare's Law on my main site: http://www.darkpolitricks.com

Farewell to a brave whistle blower - Bradley Manning

Private Bradley Manning, gave up his life to expose war crimes

By Dark Politricks

With the news today that Bradley Manning has been convicted of 19 out of 21 offenses, the only good news is that he had not been charged with the more serious charge of "aiding the enemy" plus he wasn't found guilty of espionage for showing the war crimes revealed in the infamous “Collateral Murder” video.

However even without the most serious charges unless the Judge is very lenient with his sentencing Bradley Manning is looking at a very long stretch for daring to speak to truth to the most powerful military force on the planet.

For that he must be admired. Anyone willing to give up their life, which is what Manning has basically done by pleading guilty to crimes that could see him spend the best years of his life in prison, should be praised for that sacrifice.

Yes we all knew that the US forces in Iraq were slaughtering innocent civilians. That Xe/Blackwater employees had engaged in massacres on multiple occasions that were covered up.

That British forces were prepared to raid Iraqi prisons to release soldiers suspected of staging false flag terror attacks, and that torture was a daily occurrence by all allied forces from UK bases to the Abu Ghraib prison.

However when WikiLeaks released the Collateral Murder video it revealed the extent of the callousness that US soldiers showed towards the Iraqi population.


The US neo-con talking heads, COINTELPRO and Agent Mockingbird placed government mouths shouted "treason" and demanded WikiLeaks be shut down. They even managed to get Amazon, PayPal and hosting companies to block services that WikiLeaks were legally entitled to. They saw this act of whistleblowing not for what it was, an attempt to reveal US war crimes but high treason.

Remember that President Obama had promised on the campaign trail, before being elected, to provide more protection for people willing to blow the whistle on government crimes. He promised the following:

Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled as they have been during the Bush administration. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process.

However, as expected, he did a full 360 and instead has gone down in history as the POTUS who has gone after more whistleblowers than any other President in history.

In fact the Obama administration has prosecuted twice as many cases under the Espionage Act as all other administrations combined. Under the President, the Justice Department has prosecuted six cases regarding national security leaks. Before he took office, federal prosecutors had used the Espionage Act in only three cases.

This is a President who promised the world, hope and change. The world was so drunk on his promises and so willing to believe that he would be so much different from the neo-con, pro-war, Bush administration that they even gave him a Nobel Peace prize days into his administration.

I wonder how foolish those people feel now?

I wonder if President Obama can even stomach to look at the prize or does he actually believe that he has brought the hope and change he bribed the public with into office?

In reality the only change was the colour of the skin of the President and Obama took Bush policies and rammed them full of steroids.

He has kept the Constitution killing PATRIOT ACT and added another Bill of Right destroying piece of legislation to it, the NDAA, that authorises him to lock up and even kill American citizens on his say so alone.

The sad thing is that so many people still voted for him for a second term. Did they really believe he would change his spots because he didn't have to run for office again?

Maybe he is scared of ending up like MLK or JFK.

Maybe he is being bribed by more powerful string pullers who know the truth of his sex and drugs past.

Maybe he is just too weak to stand up to the real power brokers.

Or maybe he was just a bare-faced liar who didn't realise that people would actually expect him to do as he promised once elected.

Nothing shows how illiberal the Democratic President of the United States is than his treatment of the US public over recent privacy invasions by the NSA and Prism. And nothing shows how much he want's these state crimes to remain secret than his lust for punishment to those who dare reveal the nature of the Governments lurch towards a police state, people such as Snowden and Assange, Sibel Edmonds and Thomas Drake to name a few.


The ACLU has accused the US government of "seeking to intimidate" anyone who might consider becoming a whistleblower in the future by prosecuting Bradley Manning under the Espionage Act.

Here's the ACLU's full statement commenting on the Manning verdict:

While we're relieved that Mr. Manning was acquitted of the most dangerous charge, the ACLU has long-held the view that leaks to the press in the public interest should not be prosecuted under the Espionage Act," said Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. "Since he already pleaded guilty to charges of leaking information – which carry significant punishment – it seems clear that the government was seeking to intimidate anyone who might consider revealing valuable information in the future.

It is clear from the President's words, his NSA heads words and all the talking heads that parrot the National Security point of view that they believe that they are doing nothing wrong by illegally wiretapping millions of people without warrants.

They apparently don't see anything wrong with the mass searching and storing of emails, instant messages, photos, videos, phone calls and other telecommunications for later analysis.

Not only does this breach the supposed law of the land, the US constitution, but it is immoral and devious behaviour that treats every US and NON US citizen as a potential terrorist to be monitored and watched. Then again I have been saying for years that the war on terror was not designed to catch terrorists.

How could it be when our supposed enemy al-Qaeda was created by the CIA to fight the Soviets and has been used by both the CIA and MI6 to destabilise countries and fight proxy wars in Kosovo, Libya and now Syria. The most gagged woman in history, Sibel Edmonds, revealed that bin-Laden and al-Qaeda has close links with the CIA right up to 9.11!

With such close ties to our supposed enemy it was always clear that the real role of the war on terror was to roll back civil liberties and increase the possibility of implementing a high-tech surveillance state by using the threat of terrorism as an excuse.

People are more likely to be killed by lightning or in a plane crash than to be killed by a terrorist attack. Therefore we are fooling ourselves if we think this massive billion dollar spy industry is for own benefit. We have allowed ourselves to walk into a surveillance society by just doing nothing.

Just by allowing Facebook, Google, Microsoft and other Internet companies to store, sell and milk our private information for fun it makes it so much harder to draw the line when those companies then link up with the Government and do it "for our security".

However if the recent Manning, Snowden, Assange and NSA stories are anything they are warning signs that our Government cares little for our thoughts and wishes.

As we say farewell to Bradley Manning, a brave whistleblower who is going to prison for a long time, it is far too late to blow the whistle on this new surveillance state. The train left the platform years ago and we all stood and waved goodbye.

View the original article Bradley Manning, whistleblowers, Obama and the NSA on the main website darkpolitricks.com.

When does a whistle blower become a traitor?

By Dark Politricks

This week saw Private Bradley Manning finally getting his first of many days in court. It must be a relief to put some different clothes on after the many months he has spent in solitude, sometimes naked and depressed with only his thoughts to occupy his time. Some people have called his treatment a form of torture.

Whatever the outcome, and I think we all know what that will be - his fate has been decided many moons ago, the question will remain when does whistle blowing constitute traitorous activity?

If you work for a government body of any kind and you find out that someone or some group within that organisation is breaking either national law or international law by their actions should you speak out?

No matter what you think of Bradley Manning's actions it has been clear from many leaked documents and videos that war crimes have been committed by US troops during their many years of imperialistic activity.

We have had the Abu Ghraib incidents in which detainees, many who were innocent of any crime, were forced to perform humiliating and sexually degrading acts for the camera wielding jailers who claimed they were just following orders from above. Scape goats a many.

We have had the claims of torture at Gitmo in which detainees were water boarded, sometimes multiple times a day. An act the current president of the United States, US and International law calls Torture.

We have had "rouge" groups of US troops commit murder for fun. In Afghanistan a "secret kill team" went on a rampage killing several men and collecting their fingers as trophies. I doubt this was the only group doing this but it took a brave whistle blower to tell the tale.

We had the famous WikiLeaks helicopter attack on a group of Iraqi men, two of which were journalists, which shocked the world when it was released. It showed the "Playstation mentality" of the pilots who seemed to treat the massacre as nothing more than a video game where real human beings and ambulances were just targets to be shot at to gain extra points.

And the list could go on across many more years, wars and armies as atrocities are not just committed by the USA but by UK troops, Russian soldiers in Chechnya, Bosnian Serbs, Turkish and Israeli armies. No countries army is immune from the horrors and excesses of war. War crimes are committed on a daily basis and no doubt clever and influential people in the West are plotting and planning as I write trying to create plans to delay the imminent rise to dominance of China.

However we have seen what happens to people who dare to stick their head over the parapet and accuse their own government of wrong doing.

Daniel Ellsberg felt the full force of US law when he brought to the US populations attention the excesses of the Vietnam war in the Pentagon papers and Mordechai Vanunu found out what happens when you mess with the Israeli establishment who were secretly building nuclear weapons at their Dimona nuclear plant.

Ex British Spy David Shayler was jailed for his revelations that the MI6 were funding Al-Qaeda linked terrorists in a plot to kill Col Gaddafi and after 9.11 numerous whistle-blowers including the "most gagged person in history" Sibel Edmonds were prevented from telling the world what they knew about the US governments pre-knowledge of the attacks on the country.

Therefore it seems that it does not pay to be a truth teller when the goverment you serve is more interested in telling lies.

You risk a lot by going public with evidence of wrong doing when the organisation you work for treats whistle blowing as official secrets to be kept, even when they know those secrets are illegal, immoral and wrong.

We can see now how Julian Assange is being treated for daring to open a website up that allowed whistle-blowers to pass information on secretly. If the government in question can't get you then it will use it's corporatist nature and it's overseas allies to hurt you by shutting down your site, blocking funding and bank accounts and possibly even going as far as concocting false accusations of sexual molestation so that you can be character assassinated in the public domain.

To many it is clear that our supposedly free, western liberal democratic governments are nothing of the sort. The continuous swapping of power between similar political parties run or backed by millionaires and big business every few years is nothing more than the illusion of democracy being played out for the watching populous.

We can see it now in Egypt and Libya. Two countries who are supposedly now free of their tyrannical leaders and who are supposed to be embracing democracy with open arms.

In Egypt people are voting in pointless elections for a government with no power whilst the military still controls the country.

In Libya the old dictator has been replaced by a grouping of his old deputies, "ex" terrorists and other regime linked cronies who seem to be loathe to hand power back to the people.

Right now in Benghazi people are protesting about the countries interim government, the National Transitional Council, who they feel are being too slow to affect any meaningful change.

They also believe that the NTC leader Mustafa Abdul-Jalil who was the ex Minister for Justice under Gaddafi is far too willing to forgive ex colleagues and Gaddafi supporters. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that as Minister for Justice he was probably personally responsible for many of the human rights abuses and crimes that went on under the old regime.

Same faces, different name. That is the game we are all playing as the world spins in turmoil and we watch protesters from Wall Street to Europe to the Middle East all try and affect change in their lives whilst our real rulers, the bankers and their cohorts shuffle the deck of politicians and make us all believe the impossible.

As Bradley Manning goes to court today, whether you agree with his actions or not, I wonder how many of us in this current climate of fear would dare to stand up and say "No", if they knew the punishment that faced them for doing so.

Would you?