Snowden in Moscow by Israel Shamir - Counterpunch

[DevonRex]

14. Woah. He claimed Pssy Riot is a weapon by The West to hurt Putin.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Israel_Shamir
"Work with WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson confirmed in a Swedish radio interview that Shamir works with the group, along with "a lot of journalists that are working with us all around the world" who "have different roles in working on [the] project." [15] Shamir describes himself as an "accredited" freelancer for WikiLeaks, distributing the group's batch of leaked U.S. cables to Russian news organizations. Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a dissident former member of WikiLeaks, cited Shamir's involvement as one of the reasons he left the group; he described Shamir as a "famous Holocaust denier and anti-Semite" and claimed that Julian Assange wanted him to contribute under a pseudonym as to avoid "unwarranted attention." Shamir's son, a journalist named Johannes Wahlström — who himself has been accused of Anti-Semitism — is one of WikiLeaks' spokespersons in Sweden, producing a documentary on the group that aired on Swedish public television.[16][17]
Naturally, Shamir has backed Assange in his extradition dispute with the British and Swedish governments. In September 2010, he co-authored an article on CounterPunch suggesting that one of the Swedish women who had accused Assange of rape was involved in a CIA plot to frame him for the alleged crime.[18] Despite Shamir's background, and the fact that his story couldn't hold up to plausibility[19], the article was held up by the likes of Keith Olbermann[20], Bianca Jagger, and the liberal blog FireDogLake[21] as proof that the U.S. was trying to extradite Assange from Britain through Sweden. It was only after the story shot through the Internet like a bullet and potentially slandered the accuser that anybody bothered to look into who had written it. Once information about Shamir's Jewish obsession came out, Olbermann sheepishly tweeted, "If the author of that article is a holocaust denier, I repudiate him and what he wrote, and apologize for retweeting the link."
Despite his work with WikiLeaks and his reportedly-close friendship with Assange, it appears that Shamir has done more harm for the group than good — and not just with his Anti-Semitic polemics. Russian journalists have accused Shamir of fabricating some of the cables he distributed in order to cast Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a sympathetic light. Others have accused Shamir of passing along sensitive cables to the dictatorial government of Belarus, potentially endangering opposition activists there.[22] Assange reportedly refused to investigate the matter, though a WikiLeaks spokesman said that Shamir's actions were "obviously unapproved." Blogger Richard Bartholomew has noted that Shamir's aforementioned rants against Pussy Riot stand in stark contrast to Assange's stated support for Pussy Riot."