Nah you're overthinking it, probably CNN first found a leaked photo with their watermark and assumed they were the original leakers. The original leakers are in the white house. Not sure why these dumbasses watermarked their leaks.
Also not sure why that channel is being super defensive about this, look at Rybar, getting hunted by FBI, they didn't respond at all.
View attachment 137519
had to post like more than 10+ messages denying their leaks, looks like some arabic/iranian kid in a western country runs this account. If the Feds wanted him, no amount of denials would help.
You are right about the watermark. That was a big slip, but I'm not overthinking it at all. They wait for people to slip, then use it against them, such as in the case of Middle East Spectator. They are going after every independent journalist that publishes articles that embarrass the US, go against pro war Western narratives, and bring awareness to the Western public regarding how their money gets spent to slaughter innocent civilians world wide. The US is cooking their population to hate everyone from China and Russia to Mexico and Venezuela. Dictator this Terrorist that. When your agenda is non-stop wars and sanctions, you simply cannot allow alternative opinions to thrive. They need their people to go along with what is happening, so real journalism is a real threat to the endless war agenda.
We know platforms such as Google and Meta will do anything the US government asks them to, but in the case of platforms such as Telegram and Rumble that resist government orders, they first need to frame the entity they are after as dangerous foreign interference, or terrorist affiliated etc. in order to gain legal leverage to force these platforms to cooperate with them.
The pattern here is pretty obvious. They are going after people like Garland Nixon and Syrian Girlpartisan by deleting their videos, throttling their steams by unsubscribing people and not sending notifications to their subscribers, Rachel Blevins who's Youtube channel just got deleted for "hate speech", Scott Ritter who's residence got raided and all his work related items got confiscated, Brian Berletic who I believe was using a pen name and was getting doxxed and was forced to reveal his identity, Jeremy Loffredo who just got arrested in Israel and the US probably gave the order, Gonzalo Lira who was detained, tortured, and killed by Ukraine and the US gave exactly zero shits about him, made zero attempts to bring him home and buried all articles about him, because they probably gave the orders to have him killed. These are only the people I'm aware of. God knows how many more there are that I am not aware of.
It is clear to me that:
1. People inside the US are protected by the first amendment, so alternative methods have to be employed in order to shut them down, and most of these methods involve summoning social media platforms to do the job. In the case of Ritter, he was travelling back and forth to Russia, so that gave them a good reason to harass him without looking like they are violating the first amendment. In the case of Rachel Blevins, Youtube told her that any channel that hosts her will also be sanctioned, so that narrows her path and other channels' even further.
2. For people who are outside the US, but inside the West, there is no first amendment to protect them, so they can get arrested for opinions. Take the UK for example. They are on a roll arresting journalists left and right. One Google search of "UK journalist arrested in the UK" and you can see what I mean. They are being arrested by the tens, if not hundreds. Richard Medhurst got arrested for terrorism, because he is pushing pro Palestinian opinions.
3. For people who are outside the US and the West, the list of options for dealing with them are practically endless, and can involve absolution with any blowback what so ever.
4. For anonymous publishers, their identities have to be revealed first, then they are dealt with using either of the three methods above. In the case of the Middle East Spectator, I think they fall in the Assange category.
