Washington DC — (Scheerpost) — Prosecutors representing the United States, whether by design or incompetence, refused — in the two-day hearing I attended in London in February — to provide guarantees that Julian Assange would be afforded First Amendment rights and would be spared the death penalty if extradited to the U.S.
The inability to give these assurances all but guaranteed that the High Court — as it did on Tuesday — would allow Julian’s lawyers to appeal. Was this done to stall for time so that Julian would not be extradited until after the U.S. presidential election? Was it a delaying tactic to work out a plea deal? Julian’s lawyers and U.S. prosecutors are discussing this possibility. Was it careless legal work? Or was it to keep Julian locked in a high-security prison until he collapsed mentally and physically?
If Julian is extradited, he will stand trial for allegedly violating 17 counts of the 1917 Espionage Act, which carries a potential sentence of 170 years. Another charge for “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion” carries an additional five years.
The court will permit Julian to appeal minor technical points — his basic free speech rights must be honored, he cannot be discriminated against on the basis of his nationality, and he cannot be under threat of the death penalty.
No new hearing will allow his lawyers to focus on the war crimes and corruption that WikiLeaks exposed, permit Julian to mount a public interest defense, or discuss the political persecution of a publisher who has not committed a crime.
The court, by asking the U.S. for assurances that Julian would be granted First Amendment rights in the U.S. courts and not be subject to the death penalty, offered the U.S. an easy out — give the guarantees and the appeal was rejected.
The hearing in February was Julian’s last chance to request an appeal of the extradition decision made in 2022 by the then British home secretary, Priti Patel, and many of the rulings of District Judge Vanessa Baraitser in 2021.
If Julian is denied an appeal, he can request an emergency stay of execution from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) under Rule 39, which is given in “exceptional circumstances” and “only where there is an imminent risk of irreparable harm.” But it is possible the British court could order Julian’s immediate extradition prior to a Rule 39 instruction, or decide to ignore a request from the ECtHR to allow Julian to have his case heard there.
Julian has been engaged in a legal battle for 15 years. It began in 2010 when WikiLeaks published classified military files from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — including footage showing a U.S. helicopter gunning down civilians, including two Reuters journalists, in Baghdad.
Julian took refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador in London for seven years, fearing extradition to the U.S. He was arrested in April 2019 by the Metropolitan Police, who were permitted by the Embassy to enter and seize him. He has been held for nearly five years in HM Prison Belmarsh, a high-security prison in southeast London.
The case against Julian has made a mockery of the British justice system and international law. While in the embassy, the Spanish security firm UC Global provided video recordings of meetings between Julian and his lawyers to the CIA, eviscerating attorney-client privilege.
The Crucifixion of Julian Assange | Mr. Fish
The Ecuadorian government — led by Lenin Moreno — violated international law by rescinding Julian’s asylum status and permitting police into their embassy to carry Julian into a waiting van. The courts have denied Julian’s status as a legitimate journalist and publisher. The U.S. and Britain have ignored Article 4 of their Extradition Treaty, which prohibits extradition for political offenses. The key witness for the U.S., Sigurdur Thordarson — a convicted fraudster and pedophile — admitted to fabricating the accusations he made against Julian in exchange for immunity for past crimes..
Julian, an Australian citizen, is being charged under the U.S. Espionage Act, although he did not engage in espionage and was not based in the U.S. when he was sent the leaked documents. The British courts are considering extradition, despite the CIA’s plan to kidnap and assassinate Julian, plans that included a potential shoot-out on the streets of London, with involvement by London’s Metropolitan Police.
Julian has been held in isolation in a high-security prison without trial, although his only technical violation of the law is breaching bail conditions after he obtained asylum in the Embassy of Ecuador. This should only entail a fine.
Finally, unlike Daniel Ellsberg, Julian did not leak the documents. He published documents leaked by U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning.
The judges accepted three of the nine legal grounds as potential points for appeal, and they denied the other six. The two-judge panel also rejected Julian’s lawyers’ request to present new evidence.
Julian’s legal team asked the court to introduce into the case the Yahoo! News report that revealed, after the release of the documents known as Vault 7, that the then-director of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, considered assassinating Julian. Julian’s lawyers also hoped to introduce a statement from Joshua Dratel, a U.S. attorney, who said that Pompeo’s use of the terms “non-state hostile intelligence service” and “enemy combatant” were phrases designed to give legal cover for an assassination. The third piece of evidence Julian’s lawyers hoped to introduce was a statement from a Spanish witness in the criminal proceedings underway in Spain against UC Global.
The CIA is the engine behind Julian’s extradition. Vault 7 exposed hacking tools that permit the CIA to access our phones, computers and televisions, turning them — even when switched off — into monitoring and recording devices. The extradition request does not include charges based on the release of the Vault 7 files, but the U.S. indictment followed the release of the Vault 7 files.
Justice Sharp and Justice Johnson dismissed the report in Yahoo! News as “another recitation of opinion by journalists on matters that were considered by the judge.” They rejected the argument made by the defense that Julian’s extradition would be in violation of Section 81 of the U.K. Extradition Act of 2003, which prohibits extraditions in cases where individuals are prosecuted for their political opinions. The judges also dismissed the arguments made by Julian’s attorneys that extradition would violate his protections under the European Convention of Human Rights — the right to life, the prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment, the right to a free trial and protections against punishment without law respectively.
The U.S. largely built its arguments on the affidavits of U.S. prosecutor Gordon D. Kromberg. Kromberg, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, has stated that Julian, as a foreign national, is “not entitled to protections under the First Amendment, at least as it concerns national defense information.”
Ben Watson, King’s Counsel, who represented the U.K. government during the two-day hearing in February, conceded that if Julian is found guilty under the Espionage Act, he could receive a death penalty sentence.
The judges urged the U.S. and the U.K. Secretary of State to offer the British court assurances on these three points by April 16.
If the assurances are not provided, the appeal will proceed.
If the assurances are provided, lawyers for both sides have until April 30th to make new written submissions to the court. At that point, the court will convene again on May 20 to decide whether the appeal can proceed.
The goals in this Dickensian nightmare remain unchanged. Erase Julian from the public consciousness. Demonize him. Criminalize those who expose government crimes. Use Julian’s slow-motion crucifixion to warn journalists that no matter their nationality, no matter where they live, they can be kidnapped and extradited to the U.S. Drag out the judicial lynching for years until Julian, already in a precarious physical and mental condition, disintegrates.
This ruling, like all of the rulings in this case, is not about justice. It is about vengeance.
London — (Craig Murray) — October 23 saw the most violent bombardment of Gaza until that point, notably concentrated on precisely the areas where Israel ordered the population to evacuate. I find it almost impossible to believe that this genocide is underway with the active support of nearly all Western governments.
I want to examine two questions — what will happen internationally, and what is happening in Western societies?
Israel is on the course of further escalation and intends to kill thousands more Palestinians. More than 2,000 Palestinian children alone have now been killed by Israeli aerial attacks in the last fortnight.
Gaza has no defense from bombs and missiles, and there is no military reason why Israel cannot keep this up for months and simply rely upon aerial massacre. We are perhaps within a week of thirst, starvation and disease, killing even more people per day than bombardment.
The population of Gaza is simply defenseless. Only international intervention can stop Israel from doing whatever it wishes, and those countries that have influence with Israel are actively abetting and encouraging the genocide.
The question is, what is Israel’s aim? Do they intend to reduce the Gaza Strip further, annexing half or more of it? Will starvation and horror enable the international community to force Egypt to accept the expulsion of the population of Gaza into the Sinai Desert as a “humanitarian” move?
That appears to be the end game: the expulsion of population and territorial expansion into Gaza.
That would require a ground invasion, but probably not until after even more intense aerial bombardment to eliminate all resistance.
This territorial ambition, of course, accords with the violent expansion of illegal settlement in the West Bank, which is currently underway, with the world paying almost no attention. It is challenging indeed to comprehend the passivity of Fatah and its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, at the moment.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political stock within Israel is so low that he can only recover by making a significant step towards the complete genocide of the Palestinian people and the achievement of Greater Israel.
Netanyahu now knows that there is no violence against Palestinians so extreme that the Western political elite will not support it under the mantra of “Israel’s right to self-defense.”
I do not see any salvation for Gaza coming from Hezbollah. If Hezbollah were to employ its vaunted missile strike capabilities, the moment to do it would be now when the Israeli armor is drawn up in massive parks outside Gaza, a perfect target even for longer-range missiles of limited accuracy. Once dispersed into Gaza, the armor would be far more challenging for Hezbollah to hit at range.
Hezbollah is better equipped now to fight a defensive war in Lebanon than when it defeated the Israeli advance in 2006. But it is not configured or equipped to fight an aggressive ground war in Israel, which would be a disaster.
It also has to worry about hostile militias at its rear. If Hezbollah can provoke an Israeli incursion into Southern Lebanon, it could inflict substantial casualties. Still, Israel will not do that in a way that detracts from its capabilities in Gaza.
Iran has dramatically improved its diplomatic position in the last year. The Chinese-brokered lessening of hostility with Saudi Arabia has the potential to revolutionize Middle Eastern politics, and Tehran will not lightly lay aside the benefits of this. Iran had also made real progress with the Biden administration in overcoming the blind hostility of the Trump years.
Iran has no desire to throw away these gains. That is why it seems highly improbable that Iran endorsed the October 7 attacks by Hamas. Iran is now restraining Hezbollah.
But there are limits to the patience of Iran. The extraordinary truth is that Iran is probably the only state under discussion here with a genuine humanitarian concern for the lives of Palestinians. If the genocide unfolds as horribly as I anticipate, Iran can be pushed too far.
That said, I offer just a cautionary footnote that Saudi Arabia is not, under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, quite the reliable U.S./Israeli puppet it has historically been. I do not have much time for MBS, as readers know, but his high opinion of the importance of the House of Saud and its leadership role among Arabs makes him a different proposition from his predecessor.
Saudi Arabia has leverage. The Biden administration has gone all in on regional domination, sending two aircraft carrier groups into a situation which, if it escalates, could send oil prices to highest-ever levels, with Russia blocked from the market. U.S. President Joe Biden risks a massive gas price hike in an election year.
Biden’s calculation, or that of his security services, is that nobody can or will intervene to save the Palestinians. They judge the genocide as containable. That is an extraordinary gamble.
There has been an extraordinary amount of vitriol aimed at Qatar by pro-Israel commentators for hosting the Hamas office and leadership. This is extraordinarily ignorant.
QATAR’S DIPLOMATIC VENUE
Qatar hosts Hamas, just as Qatar hosted the Taliban Information Office at the direct request of the United States. It provides a means of dialogue between the United States and Hamas (exactly as it did with the Taliban) both at a deniable level and through third parties, including, of course, the government of Qatar.
Thus, when U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Qatar one day and the Iranian foreign minister the next, these were, in fact, “proximity talks” involving Hamas.
How do I know? Well, at Julian Assange’s request, I visited Qatar about five years ago to discuss whether Julian and WikiLeaks might potentially relocate to Qatar, which Julian had described as “the new Switzerland” in terms of being a neutral diplomatic venue.
It was explained to me by the Qataris, at a very senior level, that Qatar hosted the Taliban Information Office and Hamas because the United States government had asked them to do so. Qatar hosted a significant U.S. military base and depended on U.S. support against a Saudi takeover.
I was told that they would do so if I could generate a request from then-U.S. President Donald Trump for Qatar to host WikiLeaks. Otherwise, no.
So, I know what I am talking about.
One tiny but good result of this brokering in Qatar was the release of two American national hostages. British diplomats have told me that discussions in Qatar have held back the Israeli ground offensive, but I am not convinced that Israel wishes to do this yet. They are having sadistic fun shooting children in a barrel.
Qatar has also been the origin of deals allowing a tiny amount of aid into Gaza, but this is so small as to be almost irrelevant. It is performative humanitarianism by the West.
CHINA AND RUSSIA
I have frequently praised China for the fact that its economic dominance has been unaccompanied by any aggressive desire for world hegemony, but this also has its downside. China sees no benefit in assisting the Palestinians in practice.
Hopeful reports of China sending warships refer simply to pre-planned exercises, largely in the Gulf. That China is carrying out such joint exercises with Gulf states is indeed part of a long-term increase of influence but is irrelevant to the immediate reality.
Russia, of course, has its hands full in Ukraine. It is allowing its Syrian bases to be used as a conduit following increased Israeli bombing of Syrian airports, but there is not a great deal more that it can do.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is genuinely furious at what is happening in Gaza but is struggling to find any way to apply pressure, barring linkage to Ukraine shipping issues (which Erdogan is considering).
That is a very rough and ready tour d’horizon, but the net effect is that I see no current hope for averting the atrocity unfolding before our horrified eyes.
Most of our eyes are indeed horrified. The gap between the Western political and media elites and their people on this issue is enormous.
Western leaders have not only failed to restrain Israel; they have almost unanimously egged Netanyahu on, with the continued repetition of the phrase “Israel’s right to self-defense” as justification for the mass bombing, removal and starvation of an entire civilian population.
The Western leadership’s glee in vetoing every attempt at a ceasefire resolution at the U.N. is astonishing.
Massive demonstrations have been taking place across Europe against this unspeakable massacre, and the knee-jerk reaction of politicians at their isolation from public opinion has been to try to make such shows of dissent illegal.
Almost every politician in power in the West is being forced to row back a little from their open pro-genocide position, because public opinion has terrified them. Really fascinating.
In the U.K., people have been arrested for displaying Palestinian flags. In Germany, pro-Palestinian demonstrations have been entirely banned. Something similar has been attempted in France, with predictable failure.
I have attended pro-Palestinian demonstrations in three countries, and the most striking thing on each occasion was the strong support of passers-by and the number of people spontaneously coming out to join the demo as it passed.
A wave of racism has been unleashed in the U.K. and elsewhere. I am astonished by the Islamophobia and racial hatred released online, with no apparent comeback.
U.K. ministers claim to be alarmed at the “terrorist sympathies” of pro-Palestinian demonstrators. Yet, it is perfectly legal to call for Palestinians to be exterminated, to compare them to different types of animals and vermin, and to suggest they should be driven into the sea. That does not horrify ministers at all.
It has also become dangerous to suggest that Palestinians, too, have a right to self-defense and may offer armed resistance to genocide — a right they enjoy beyond doubt in international law.
Remember, Israel has formally declared war. Is it the position in British law that the only belief it is legal to hold and express is that in this war, the Palestinians must simply line up quietly to be killed?
The step change in Western authoritarianism is likely to be met by blowback.
After 20 years, we had finally come through the vicious cycle of the “War on Terror,” where terrorism, repression and institutionalized Islamophobia all boosted each other across the Western world.
Outrage at the appalling genocide in Gaza is likely to result in isolated incidences of, also appalling, Islamist-inspired violence in Western countries, including the U.K., mainly because of the U.K.’s military support of Israel.
The political elite will cite that consequential terrorism in itself as justifying their stance. And so the vicious cycle will restart. This will, of course, be welcome to the agents of the security state, whose power, budgets and prestige will be boosted.
Once again, we must be on the lookout for radicalization and real terrorism, but also for agent-provocateur-led terrorism and false flag terrorism.
If we descend back into that nightmare again, the direct cause will be elite support for the genocide of the Palestinian people and the Islamophobic narrative. The primary cause of terrorism here is Israel, the terrorist apartheid state.
MY OWN ‘TERRORISM’ INVESTIGATION
My phone is not being returned to me by police as I am now formally under investigation for terrorism. Whether this relates to support for Palestine or WikiLeaks was not made clear.
💥INDEPENDENT JOURNALISTS
🔴"The treatment of @CraigMurrayOrg – and others – under the TERRORISM ACT concerns us greatly as independent journalists and should concern us all."
What follows is, unspun and unvarnished, my account of my interview under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act as given to my lawyers:
I arrived from Keflavik airport, Iceland, to Glasgow airport at about 10 a.m. on Monday, October 16. After passport control, I was stopped by three police officers, two male and one female, who asked me to accompany them to a detention room.
They seated me in the room and told me:
I was detained under Section 7 of the Terrorism Act”
I was not arrested but detained, and therefore had no right to a lawyer.”
I had no right to remain silent. I had to give full and accurate information in response to questions. It was a criminal offence to withhold any relevant information.”
I had to give up any passwords to my devices. It was a criminal offence not to do this.”
Credit | Craig Murray
They searched my baggage and my coat, going through my documents and taking my phone and laptop. They did not look at one document from Julian Assange’s lawyers that I told them was privileged.
They asked me about boarding cards for Brussels and Dublin they found and what I had been doing there. I replied I was at a debate at Trinity College in Dublin, while in Brussels, I had attended a human rights meeting focused on the case of Julian Assange.
They asked me to identify individuals on visiting cards I had from the Brussels meeting (one was a German member of Parliament).
They asked me the purpose of my visit to Iceland. I told them that I was attending a coordinating meeting of the campaign to free Julian Assange. I said I had also attended a pro-Palestinian rally outside the Icelandic Parliament, but that was not a prior intention.
They asked how I earn my living. I said from two sources: voluntary subscriptions to my blog and my civil-service pension.
They asked what organizations I am a member of. I said the Alba Party. I said I worked with WikiLeaks and the Don’t Extradite Assange campaign but was not formally a “member” of either. I was a life member of the FDA union [for professionals in public service]—no other organizations.
They asked if I received any money from WikiLeaks, Don’t Extradite Assange or the Assange family (separate questions). I replied no, except for occasional Don’t Extradite Assange travel expenses. In December, I had done a tour of Germany and received a fee from the Wau Holland Foundation, a German free speech charity.
They asked what other campaigns I had been involved in. I said many, from the Anti-Nazi League and Anti-Apartheid movement. I had campaigned for Guantanamo inmates alongside Caged Prisoners.
They asked why I had attended the pro-Palestine demo in Iceland. I said one of the speakers had invited me, Ögmundur Jónasson. He was a former Icelandic interior minister. I said I did not know what the speeches said as they were all in Icelandic.
They asked whether I intended to attend any pro-Palestinian rallies in the U.K. I said I had no plans but probably would.
They asked how I judged whether to speak alongside others on the same platform. I replied I depended on organizers I trusted, like the Palestine Solidarity Committee or Stop the War. It was impossible to know who everyone was at a big rally.
They asked if anyone else posted to my Twitter or blog. I replied no, it was all me.
They asked how considered my tweets were. I replied that those that were links to my blog posts were my considered writing. Others were more ephemeral, and like everyone else, I sometimes made mistakes and sometimes apologized. They asked if I deleted tweets, and I said very seldom.
The treatment of @CraigMurrayOrg – and others – under the Terrorism Act concerns us greatly as independent journalists and should concern us all. https://t.co/wgLSpeIaWf
I volunteered that I understood the tweet that worried them and agreed it could have been more nuanced. This was the limitation of Twitter, [now X]. It was intended to refer only to the current situation within Gaza and the Palestinian people’s right of self-defense from genocide.
That was more or less it. The interview was kept to exactly an hour, and at one point, one said to another, “18 minutes left.” They did not tell me why. At one point, they did mention protected journalistic material on my laptop, but I was too dazed to take advantage of this and specify anything.
They took my bank account details and copies of all my bank cards.
This is an enormous abuse of human rights. The abuse of process in refusing both a lawyer and the right to remain silent, the inquiry into perfectly legal campaigning, which is in no way terrorism-associated, the political questioning, the financial snooping and the seizure of material related to my private life, were all based on an utterly fake claim that I am associated with terrorism.
I have, to date, not been arrested and not charged. Contempt of court is therefore not in play, and you are free to comment on the case (although, in the current atmosphere, any kind of free thought is liable to vicious state action). I am safe and currently in Dublin. I intend to travel to Switzerland to discuss this with the United Nations.
My legal team has already submitted against this outrage to the United Nations Human Rights Committee and is looking at the possibility of judicial review in the U.K. We also have to prepare the defense against possible terrorism charges, ludicrous as that sounds.
I am afraid this all costs money. I am grateful for the unfailing generosity of people in what seems like a continual history of persecution.
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***
It was a short stint, involving a six-member delegation of Australian parliamentarians lobbying members of the US Congress and various relevant officials on one issue: the release of Julian Assange. If extradited to the US from the United Kingdom to face 18 charges, 17 framed with reference to the oppressive, extinguishing Espionage Act of 1917, the Australian founder of WikiLeaks risks a 175-year prison term.
Nationals MPBarnaby Joyce, Labor MP Tony Zappia, Greens Senators David Shoebridge and Peter Whish-Wilson, Liberal Senator Alex Antic and the independent member for Kooyong, Dr. Monique Ryan, are to be viewed with respect, their pluckiness admired. They came cresting on the wave of a letter published on page 9 of the Washington Post, expressing the views of over 60 Australian parliamentarians.
“As Australian Parliamentarians, we are resolutely of the view that the prosecution and incarceration of the Australian citizen Julian Assange must end.”
This is a good if presumptuous start. Australia remains the prized forward base of US ambitions in the Indo-Pacific, the spear pointed against China and any other rival who dares challenge its stubborn hegemony. The AUKUS pact, featuring the futile, decorative nuclear submarines that will be rich scrapping for the Royal Australian Navy whenever they arrive, also makes that point all too clear. For the US strategist, Australia is fiefdom, property, real estate, terrain, its citizenry best treated as docile subjects represented by even more docile governments. Assange, and his publishing agenda, act as savage critiques of such assumptions.
The following views in Washington DC have been expressed by the delegates in what might be described as a mission to educate. From Senator Shoebridge, the continued detention of Assange proved to be “an ongoing irritant in the bilateral relationship” between Canberra and Washington. “If this matter is not resolved and Julian is not brought home, it will be damaging to the bilateral relationship”.
Senator Whish-Wilson focused on the activities of Assange himself. “The extradition of Julian Assange as a foreign journalist conducting activities on foreign soil is unprecedented.” To create such a “dangerous precedent” laid “a very slippery slope for any democracy to go down.”
Liberal Senator Alex Antic emphasised the spike in concern in the Australian population about wishing for Assange’s return to Australia (some nine out of 10 wishing for such an outcome). “We’ve seen 67 members of the Australian parliament share that message in a joint letter, which we’ve delivered across the spectrum”. An impressed Antic remarked that this had “never happened before. I think we’re seeing an incredible groundswell, and we want to see Julian at home as soon as possible.”
On September 20, in front of the Department of Justice, Zappia told reporters that, “we’ve had several meetings and we’re not going to go into details of those meetings. But I can say that they’ve all been useful meetings.” Not much to go on, though the Labor MP went on to state that the delegation, as representatives of the Australian people had “put our case very clearly about the fact that Julian Assange pursuit and detention and charges should be dropped and should come to an end.”
A point where the delegates feel that a rich quarry can be mined and trundled away for political consumption is the value of the US-Australian alliance. As Ryan reasoned, “This side of the AUKUS partnership feels really strongly about this and so what we expect the prime minister [Anthony Albanese] to do is that he will carry the same message to President Biden when he comes to Washington.”
The publisher’s brother, Gabriel Shipton, also suggests that the indictment is “a wedge in the Australia-US relationship, which is a very important relationship at the moment, particularly with everything that’s going on with the US and China and the sort of strategic pivot that is happening.” Assange, for his part, is bound to find this excruciatingly ironic, given his lengthy battles against the US imperium and the numbing servility of its client states.
Various members of Congress have granted an audience to the six parliamentarians. Enthusiasm was in abundance from two Kentucky Congressmen: Republican Senator Rand Paul and Republican House Representative Thomas Massie. After meeting the Australian delegation, Massie declared that it was his “strong belief [Assange] should be free to return home.”
Georgian Republican House member Marjorie Taylor Greeneexpressed her sense of honour at having met the delegates “to discuss the inhumane detention” of Assange “for the crime of committing journalism,” insisting that the charges be dropped and a pardon granted. “America should be a beacon of free speech and shouldn’t be following in an authoritarian regime’s footsteps.” Greene has shown herself to be a conspiracy devotee of the most pungent type, but there was little to fault her regarding these sentiments.
Minnesota Democrat Congresswoman Ilhan Omar also met the parliamentarians, discussing, according to a press release from her office, “the Assange prosecution and its significance as an issue in the bilateral relationship between the United States and Australia, as well as the implications for freedom of the press both at home and abroad.” She also reiterated her view, one expressed in an April 2023 letter to the Department of Justice co-signed with six other members of Congress, that the charges against Assange be dropped.
These opinions, consistent and venerably solid, have rarely swayed the mad hatters at the Justice Department who continue to operate within the same church consensus regarding Assange as an aberration and threat to US security. And they can rely, ultimately, on the calculus of attrition that assumes allies of Washington will eventually belt up, even if they grumble. There will always be those who pretend to question, such as the passive, meek Australian Foreign Minister, Penny Wong. “We have raised this many times,” Wong responded to a query while in New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly. “Secretary [of State Antony] Blinken and I both spoke about the fact that we had a discussion about the views that the United States has and the views that Australia has.”
Not that this mattered a jot. In July, Blinken stomped on Wong’s views in a disingenuous, libellous assessment about Assange, reminding his counterpart that the publisher had been “charged with very serious criminal conduct in the United States in connection with his alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of our country.” The libel duly followed, with the claim that Assange “risked very serious harm to our national security, to the benefit of our adversaries, and put named sources at grave risk – grave risk – of physical harm, and grave risk of detention”. That gross falsification of history went unaddressed by Wong.
Thus far, Blinken has waived away the concerns of the Albanese government on Assange’s fate as passing irritants at a spring garden party. However small their purchase, six Australian parliamentarians have chosen to press the issue further. At the very least, they have gone to the centre of the imperium to add a bit of ballast to the effort.
*
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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a regular contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
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Hey everyone, I’m Mnar Adley, founder and director of MintPress News and editor of our video project “Behind the Headlines.”
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In the last year alone, MintPress was banned from PayPal with our balance seized, blocking donations to our website –and as leaked emails reveal, this took place with possible involvement of British intelligence and the U.S. government.
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Jessica Buxbaum is an investigative journalist based in Jerusalem. She is our Palestine correspondent who has spent the last five years uncovering how Israel works with Big Tech and NGOs to surveil and target Palestinian resistance to apartheid.
MintPress also features regular columns by renowned documentary filmmaker and investigative journalist John Pilger, Israeli peace activist Miko Peled, and Palestinian academic Dr. Ramzy Baroud.
As for myself, Mnar Adley – the founder and director of MintPress News, I founded MintPress over ten years ago in an effort to revive the fourth estate in a post 9/11 world, when our first amendment was put on life support by the ever-growing military-industrial complex and its connections to the media. Since 2001, we saw major news outlets beat the drums of war to drive public support for the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that left millions dead and millions more as refugees.
Having lived under Israeli occupation and apartheid as a teenager, I witnessed firsthand the horrifying human rights abuses no child should have to see. From the New York Times to the Washington Post to MSNBC and CNN, every major news outlet has for decades whitewashed Israeli crimes and apartheid under the banner of “democracy and shared values” while dehumanizing Palestinians as mere terrorists, the same way our media dehumanizes the victims of our disastrous wars. This, of course, continues to this day.
Whether it’s war in Palestine, Yemen, Sudan or Somalia, economic sanctions against Iran, Venezuela or Cuba or the U.S. proxy war with Russia in Ukraine– it is clear that corporate media act as PR for weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon to justify military adventurism and economic warfare to fuel the military-industrial complex that drives our war economy.
Thus MintPress was born out of this need to provide the public with investigative journalism that holds the ruling class and military accountable where corporate media has failed.
Our journalism gives a voice and spotlight to the people of the Global South ravaged by economic sanctions.
We’re continuously covering regime change operations, military coups and wars imposed by the US military, NATO and their proxies. Policies that line the pockets of the executives at Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.
We’ve been amplifying the voices of those who are silenced by the media, like government whistleblowers and publishers like Julian Assange and Daniel Hale.
This is exactly why we’ve been targeted and why we can’t take MintPress to the next level without your support.
With the conflict raging in Ukraine, we’ve entered wartime and are living in an intellectual no-fly zone where online censorship of dissenting journalism has become the new norm and the sanctions regime has come to target independent journalists – but it’s up to us to change that reality.
We’re proud to have broken through this censorship over the years, but it has only been possible through your continued support.
No matter the war waged against us, we refuse to be backed into a corner and bullied by tech giants who have a deep relationship with weapons manufacturers who work hand in hand with NATO to profit off of the blood of millions of people around the world.
The only way forward is for us all to unite on a broader front of non-partisanship and help fund our own media. There are no governments or corporations who will move in to save us. We are completely dependent on you.
Join us in reviving the fourth estate and protecting our First Amendment. Join our campaign today – LIVE on Indiegogo.
Mnar Adley is founder and director of MintPress News and Behind The Headlines and is also a producer and host for both platforms.
Hey everyone, I’m Mnar Adley, founder and director of MintPress News and editor of our video project “Behind the Headlines.”
This decade has felt like a whirlwind, watching in real time the crackdown on independent journalism and alternative voices.
In the last year alone, MintPress was banned from PayPal with our balance seized, blocking donations to our website –and as leaked emails reveal, this took place with possible involvement of British intelligence and the U.S. government.
At the same time, GoFundMe took down our fundraisers and banned us from their platform.
Our journalists have been detained, interrogated, surveilled, canceled and lobbied against by national security agencies and special interest groups, including directly by the Israel lobby. Our Wikipedia page has been written and managed by a mafia of pro-NATO editors and Israeli lobby groups. This, in addition to aggressive algorithmic blacklisting by Google’s Project Owl and Big Tech giants, shadowbanning from the likes of Twitter, Facebook & TikTok, all of whom we’ve exposed to have a deep relationship with the military-industrial complex to control your newsfeed and ensure a pro-war narrative is dominant.
We wear this as a badge of honor.
This is just a taste of what we’ve faced as an independent media outlet that has been at the forefront of exposing the profiteers of the permanent war state – holding the military class accountable, as every journalism outlet should be doing as protected by our first amendment.
Journalism is being criminalized.
This is why we’re turning to our readers and supporters to help us sustain our watchdog journalism. While Big Tech ramps up its efforts to make our journalism algorithmically disappear, we’re ramping up our efforts to circumvent this censorship and provide our readers with the most hard-hitting journalism that empowers ‘we the people.’
But to continue to do this and keep our investigative journalism free and accessible without a paywall, we’re appealing to our readers for their financial support. Suffice it to say big governments and corporations are not exactly banging down our door to support us.
We just launched our annual fundraiser to help sustain us, and I hope that you will join us as we continue to fight against the war machine in this information war.
MintPress is one of a handful of independent investigative news outlets left in the United States, featuring some of the most important journalists and activists of our time.
This includes investigative journalist, Ph.D. and author Alan MacLeod who co-hosts the “MintCast” podcast with me. His investigative work has exposed the deep relationship between NATO, weapons manufacturers and the national security state within Big Tech as well as U.S. regime change operation mechanisms against the global south.
Rapper and activist for Palestinian human rights Lowkey hosts “The Watchdog” podcast on MintPress. His research and journalism have exposed how the Israel lobby, its intelligence and military have inserted themselves into Big Tech and NGOs to surveil and target pro-Palestine and antiwar dissent.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist whose work explores the role of intelligence services in shaping politics, perceptions and war policies in the U.S., UK and across NATO member nations.
Jessica Buxbaum is an investigative journalist based in Jerusalem. She is our Palestine correspondent who has spent the last five years uncovering how Israel works with Big Tech and NGOs to surveil and target Palestinian resistance to apartheid.
MintPress also features regular columns by renowned documentary filmmaker and investigative journalist John Pilger, Israeli peace activist Miko Peled, and Palestinian academic Dr. Ramzy Baroud.
As for myself, Mnar Adley – the founder and director of MintPress News, I founded MintPress over ten years ago in an effort to revive the fourth estate in a post 9/11 world, when our first amendment was put on life support by the ever-growing military-industrial complex and its connections to the media. Since 2001, we saw major news outlets beat the drums of war to drive public support for the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that left millions dead and millions more as refugees.
Having lived under Israeli occupation and apartheid as a teenager, I witnessed firsthand the horrifying human rights abuses no child should have to see. From the New York Times to the Washington Post to MSNBC and CNN, every major news outlet has for decades whitewashed Israeli crimes and apartheid under the banner of “democracy and shared values” while dehumanizing Palestinians as mere terrorists, the same way our media dehumanizes the victims of our disastrous wars. This, of course, continues to this day.
Whether it’s war in Palestine, Yemen, Sudan or Somalia, economic sanctions against Iran, Venezuela or Cuba or the U.S. proxy war with Russia in Ukraine– it is clear that corporate media act as PR for weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon to justify military adventurism and economic warfare to fuel the military-industrial complex that drives our war economy.
Thus MintPress was born out of this need to provide the public with investigative journalism that holds the ruling class and military accountable where corporate media has failed.
Our journalism gives a voice and spotlight to the people of the Global South ravaged by economic sanctions.
We’re continuously covering regime change operations, military coups and wars imposed by the US military, NATO and their proxies. Policies that line the pockets of the executives at Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.
We’ve been amplifying the voices of those who are silenced by the media, like government whistleblowers and publishers like Julian Assange and Daniel Hale.
This is exactly why we’ve been targeted and why we can’t take MintPress to the next level without your support.
With the conflict raging in Ukraine, we’ve entered wartime and are living in an intellectual no-fly zone where online censorship of dissenting journalism has become the new norm and the sanctions regime has come to target independent journalists – but it’s up to us to change that reality.
We’re proud to have broken through this censorship over the years, but it has only been possible through your continued support.
No matter the war waged against us, we refuse to be backed into a corner and bullied by tech giants who have a deep relationship with weapons manufacturers who work hand in hand with NATO to profit off of the blood of millions of people around the world.
The only way forward is for us all to unite on a broader front of non-partisanship and help fund our own media. There are no governments or corporations who will move in to save us. We are completely dependent on you.
Join us in reviving the fourth estate and protecting our First Amendment. Join our campaign today – LIVE on Indiegogo.
Mnar Adley is founder and director of MintPress News and Behind The Headlines and is also a producer and host for both platforms.
Just as the Alps and the Jordan divide for all time the Cis from the rest, so also in our own time do the mountains and rivers of honesty and truth divide the Creepy Joe Bidens and Mary Robinsons from the great and the good.
First off, hats off to young Hafez Bashar Assad, who recently aced aMaster’s degree in Pure Mathematics from Russia’s prestigious Moscow State University which has, in the course of its long and glorious history, produced several Fields Medals winners. May young Hafez go on to similarly great things.
Hafez was, some years back, the subject of oceans of ire when he represented Syria in the Math Olympics, a competition I have some familiarity with, as friends of mine represented Ireland in years gone by. And though those young Irishmen went on to be awarded PhDs from the world’s most prestigious universities and land jobs with mouth-watering salaries from the world’s most prestigious companies, like young Hafez, they got nowhere at the Math Olympics because they lacked the in-depth 24/7 tutoring the United States’ Ivy League Professors give the young (generally Chinese) charges, who compete under the Yankee flag.
So well done, young Hafez and congratulations, too, to your beautiful, urbane, cosmopolitan, multi-lingual, great and gracious mother, Asma Assad, who can be seen here,proudly hugging you after you were awarded your degree. I know of no current or former First Lady, who is in her league in terms of elegance, grace, brains or sheer good manners and your father, Syrian President Bashar Assad, certainly hit the jackpot when he landed that Damask Rose. He is a lucky and blessed man.
Moving from Moscow to Kiev, we see that former Irish President and serial grifter Mary Robinson and Swedish propagandist Greta Thunberg are on a jolly there to advise Clown Prince Zelensky on matters concerning the environment. As 20 year old Greta has only recently graduated High School, at an age when most others would be whistling through their undergraduate degrees, one wonders if this slow learner will stay as silent on NATO’s use of depleted uranium as she has been on the Nordstream terrorist attack, the greatest ecological crime of our era.
Not that I care as Greta, and Mary Robinson are, like Clown Prince Zelensky himself, media creations, all tinsel and no substance. NATO’s Zelensky regime must be really scraping the barrel if that is the best they can do.
But the bottom of the barrel is all NATO seems to have left. French dictator Macron spends his time attending Elton John 1970s’ retro concerts as France burns down around him. The best that Britain can do is to ban Nigel Farage from having a bank account and keep POW Julian Assange on ice for their American masters.
Stella Moris, Julian’s wife, was recently in Rome where, appropriately dressed, she met Pope Francis, who has also recently honoured British film-maker Ken Loach, who was recently expelled from the British Labour Party. Say what you like about Julian Assange and, irrespective as to whether the British will murder him or hand him over to the Yanks for further torture sessions, he is blessed to have such a woman standing foursquare beside him.
Although all of these singularities would have been noted in Washington, it is doubtful if they registered with Creepy Joe Biden, the Don Vittorio of the NATO organised crime gang. Don Vittorio, you may recall, is the senile Italian Mafia godfather, who appeared in The Sopranos a few seasons before fellow mafia mobster Junior also succumbed to dementia.
Although, as Biden claims Putin, in some parallel world, may be losing the war in Iraq, in this world Creepy Joe is most definitely losing the 2024 Presidential war to Donald Trump and Bobby Kennedy. Although Oddslotter still has him favourite to be re-elected, Biden’s place is in the dock as a war criminal and then off to an old folks’ home to be heard from no more.
The threats that Trump and Kennedy pose are not so much personal threats to Creepy Joe as they are to the gangster system he presides over. Trump is a threat because he says what others will not say: that the United States is a predatory state that robs and loots at will. And Kennedy is a threat because he points out the threats Big Pharma’s greed pose to all Americans and Big Pharma’s spokespersons like notorious narcissist Dr. Peter Hotez, won’t even debate him on Joe Rogan’s show for over $1 million in cash.
Although neither of these challengers criticise Israel, such criticisms are inconceivable because of the nature of NATO’s gangsterism. Palestinians are little more than plastic ducks at a shooting arcade and heaven help any “anti-Semite” who might argue otherwise.
But even argument itself is now haram in NATOstan. Donald Trump, remember, was banned from social media when he was POTUS, supposedly the world’s most powerful position. Germany’s Greens, perhaps trying to reconnect to their Nazis past, have persecuted their own citizens for not being sufficiently Russophobic and Australia, Canada and Vichy Ireland are, as part of NATO’s plans of world conquest, introducing the most draconian hate speech laws that have drawn the ire of Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk.
And there is the rub. Rogan, Carlson and Musk are forming the backbone of an opposition that believe in such things as free speech and free, open and honest debate and such things present an existential threat to Biden and his fellow-fraudsters.
In my earlier paeon to Asma Assad, I used an abundance of adjectives to try to give Syria’s First Lady her well-earned due. However, at days’ end, she is a wife, a mother and a woman, a wonderful adult female in other words and not a cisgender or a transgender, phrases that Biden’s handlers have shanghaied from the British and Roman Empires where Transjordan and Cisjordan were, still are and will always be divided by the Jordan River and Gaul and Cisgaul were, still are and will always be divided by the mighty Alps. You do not need Hafez Assad’s Master’s Degree in Pure Mathematics to know no such demarcations apply to sovereign womanhood and nor do you even need Greta Thunberg’s hard-earned High School diploma. What you need is a degree of honesty and common sense and, because they are attributes Creepy Joe and his whore-bonking son Hunter cashed in years ago, all of Creepy Joe’s dodgy deals are now coming home to roost.
And, just as the Alps and the Jordan divide for all time the Cis from the rest, so also in our own time do the mountains and rivers of honesty and truth divide the Creepy Joe Bidens and Mary Robinsons from the great and the good, from Stella Moris, Gonzalo Lira, Hafez and Asma Assad, all of whom affirm the words of Irish martyr Terence MacSwiney that “it is not those who can inflict the most, but those who can endure the most, who will prevail”.
And, it is because of good, great and immortal people like Asma Assad that Damascus itself has prevailed against Biden’s Beast of the Apocalypse. Let us, as we conclude, recall Mark Twain’s recollections of that eternal city: “We shall remember…… Damascus, the Pearl of the East, the pride of Syria, the fabled garden of Eden, the home of princes and genii of the Arabian Nights, the oldest metropolis on Earth, the one city in all the world that has kept its name and held its place and looked serenely on while the Kingdoms and Empires of four thousand years have risen to life, enjoyed their little season of pride and pomp, and then vanished and been forgotten.”
And, as Eternal Damascus and her eternally gallant allies prepare to consign Biden, NATOstan’s faux Little Caesar, to the trash bin of history, let us salute not only Hafez and Asma Assad on their recent fortune but all of the great and good people of Syria, Palestine, Serbia, China and Russia who, at great cost, defied NATO and carried the banners of humanity not only for the Assange and Lira families but for all of us in the face of the butchers Biden, Macron and Zelensky sent against them. May God bless them and their protectors, the heroic men and women of the Syrian Arab Army, now and forever.
US presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr criticizes all walks of life within the US, underlining his opposition to how it conducts its foreign policy.
Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks during a campaign event on April 19, 2023, in Boston (AP)
US Democratic Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vehemently and extensively criticized the United States on Monday during a speech before the Free State Project, where he touched on numerous issues, from the war in Ukraine to bioweapons, US bases on foreign soil, and the cases of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.
Operation Paperclip, the CIA’s first project, aimed to bring Nazi scientists to the United States after World War II. These scientists were employed to work on developing missiles, nuclear weapons, and bioweapons at high-security labs such as Fort Dietrich, as well as other facilities across the nation, the Democratic candidate revealed.
He also revealed that the CIA sought to enlist Japanese scientists, known for their use of bioweapons during World War II, to participate in the development of a pilot weapons program.
“It’s to begin developing a pilot weapons program and to get the Japanese scientists who are the only ones who would ever use actually use bioweapons against the Chinese and kill many, many tens, hundreds of thousands of Chinese before and during World War II with bioweapons,” he underlined.
Kennedy also highlighted how then-US President Richard Nixon unilaterally announced the end of the bio-weapons program in 1969, when he went to Fort Dietrich and announced the program’s end.
“The American government was going to stop developing bioweapons no matter what anybody else in the world did […] Nixon closed the Fort Dietrich. They turned it over to NIH (National Institutes of Health) right before that, and they destroyed all the bioweapons before they went destroyed it. The CIA went in and got cultures of all of them and moved them to warehouses in New York and elsewhere,” he revealed.
Biolabs and biological weapons are of utmost importance in the current state of affairs, as it was discovered that the United States has been helping with the construction of biolabs in Ukraine. Initially, Washington refused to admit the existence of US Biolabs in Ukraine, however, later in time Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland did.
“Russian troops have secured over 20,000 documents, reference, and analytical materials, and interviewed eyewitnesses and participants in American military-biological programs,” since the start of the Ukraine war, Russian Radiological, Chemical, and Biological Defense chief Igor Kirillov said earlier this year.
US provocations to blame for Ukraine war
Turning to the conflict in Ukraine, he said recent revelations indicate that President Putin and President Zelensky signed an agreement in April 2022, which outlined the withdrawal of Russian troops from around Kiev, adding that they were complying with the agreement’s stipulations. However, he alleged that then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, acting on behalf of the White House, attempted to undermine the accord in question.
“That’s not the first time we’ve we’ve done that […] all the nations like France, Germany, and Russia all agreed to the Minsk accords earlier on,” he underlined.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky admitted in February that he had previously told German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron that the Minsk agreements were “impossible”, and he did not plan on implementing them.
Weeks before the Ukraine war broke out, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Russia was yet to hear Ukraine’s words about readiness to swiftly start the implementation of the Minsk agreements during the meeting between Macron and Zelensky.
Ex-German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was in office from 2005 to 2021 said in an interview published in early December that the Minsk Accords were signed to “give Ukraine time” to strengthen itself.
Merkel said “The 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give time to Ukraine. It also used this time to become stronger as can be seen today. The Ukraine of 2014-2015 is not the modern Ukraine.”
Man of peace
The Ukrainian people, yearning for peace, elected President Zelensky, a comedian and actor, based on his promise to sign the Minsk Accords, Kennedy underlined, highlighting that Zelensky broke his promise to the people of Ukraine. Yet, pressure from individuals like Victoria Nuland, in tandem with ultranationalist factions within Ukraine, pushed the government to pivot away from these agreements, he divulged.
The war in Ukraine has claimed the lives of an estimated 350,000 young men. While acknowledging the brutality and illegality of the conflict, the role of external provocations, including those by the United States since 1997, should also be looked into as a reason for the outbreak of the brutal war, Kennedy said.
“He ran as the peace candidate. You guys, this is a guy who is a comedian and an actor […] he was not a politician, a veteran politician. Why did people vote for him? They voted for him because he was the peace candidate, and the Ukrainian people wanted peace,” he said.
“I think it’s going to be quite easy to get out of the war in Ukraine,” the Democrat candidate added.
US military presence abroad
Another significant aspect he touched on was the excessive military expenditures of the United States. Despite promises of a peace dividend following the end of the Cold War, the country currently maintains approximately 800 military bases worldwide, surpassing other nations by a significant margin.
The exorbitant defense budget, now reaching $1.3 trillion dollars, far exceeding the original projection of $200 billion dollars, has impacted the economy, national strength, and the well-being of the middle class.
“The Chinese have one and a half bases. I don’t know if the Russians have any now, you know, outside of the Ukraine. I don’t know if they have any. And we have each one of those bases as a platform for a future war,” the presidential candidate highlighted.
“We were told we were going to get a peace dividend [after the collapse of the Soviet Union]. We were told that we would stop investing billion of dollars in bombers that can’t fly in the rain. And then we would bring that money home to build schools and roads and infrastructure and help it lower taxes and help, you know, help farmers convert to regenerative agriculture […] But none of that happened,” the nephew of former US President John Kennedy said.
RFK had previously explained that Russia made it clear what its demands were before the war began and that the US should have given in to its demands. He explained that the US and NATO continued to move eastward after agreeing with the dismantled Soviet Union in 1991 that they would not do so.
“We spend three times what China spends. It’s not good for our economy. It’s not good for our national strength. And it has not helped American security or safety,” he added, arguing that the US, instead, was in “much more danger” due to its military “adventures” abroad.
He proposed winding down military ventures and redirecting resources towards rebuilding the country’s industrial base and fostering entrepreneurial opportunities for Americans. This, he argues, would allow for a more secure and prosperous future.
Furthermore, he pledged that if he were to become president, he would wind down the country’s military spending and start instead rebuilding its industrial base.
Assange, Snowden to be pardoned
Finally, in a bold and shocking statement, Kennedy pledged to pardon both Julian Assange and Edward Snowden if he were to be elected as president, highlighting the lack of support from the American press and publishers for Assange’s release. Kennedy emphasized the importance of recognizing Assange’s role as a publisher and stressed the significance of his actions in exposing classified information to the public.
Moreover, he turned his attention to Edward Snowden, asserting that Congress has effectively made a case for his pardon. He referred to the revelations Snowden brought to light, revealing extensive surveillance practices by the intelligence apparatus. Kennedy highlighted the unlawful collection and archiving of personal data, which came as a shock to both the public and Congress itself. Subsequently, Congress passed legislation aimed at safeguarding citizens against such encroachments on privacy.
Kennedy maintained that Snowden’s actions aligned with deeply held American values, including the pursuit of personal courage and the defense of democratic ideals. By exposing the mass surveillance programs, Snowden contributed to the ongoing debate surrounding privacy rights and government transparency.
His public support for pardoning both Assange and Snowden underscores the growing recognition of their impact on public awareness and the need to reassess the treatment of whistleblowers in the United States.
Assange has been at the Belmarsh prison in London for more than 1,500 days. He was unlawfully charged in the US with 17 counts of “espionage” and one count of computer misuse, connected to him leaking tens of thousands of military and diplomatic documents that exposed US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Assange is currently facing prosecution in the United States under the Espionage Act, which marks a new precedent, as the legislation was never utilized against classified information being made public.
In Assange’s case, he’s been unlawfully charged in the US with 17 counts of “espionage” and one count of computer misuse, connected to him leaking tens of thousands of military and diplomatic documents that exposed US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The journalist faces a 175-year prison sentence following the approval of extradition to the US by the UK High Court in December 2021.
Kennedy has long been vocal against the Ukraine war and the way the US government handles domestic issues and its foreign policy, and he is making a bid for the presidency on a democratic platform.
Julian Assange could face the remainder of his life behind bars for exposing US war crimes.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has expressed serious concern over the decision of the UK High Court to reject Julian Assange‘s appeal of his extradition order, making his possible extradition a possibility closer than ever before.
Assange could spend the rest of his life in prison for publishing the Wikileaks documents in 2010.
One justice dismissed all eight grounds of Assange’s appeal against the extradition order signed by then-UK Home Secretary Priti Patel in June 2022 in a judgment delivered on June 6.
This means the defense has five days left to appeal to a panel of two judges that will hold a public hearing.
Further appeals will be barred at the local level, but Assange may take his case to the European Court of Human Rights.
Rebecca Vincent, the RSF’s Director of Campaigns called the decision “absurd,” adding that this could impact the climate for journalism around the world.
“The historical weight of what happens next cannot be overstated; it is time to put a stop to this relentless targeting of Assange and act instead to protect journalism and press freedom. Our call on President Biden is now more urgent than ever: drop these charges, close the case against Assange, and allow for his release without further delay.”
Stella Assange, Julian’s wife, tweeted that he would renew his application to the High Court and that they would “remain optimistic that we will prevail and that Julian will not be extradited to the United States where he faces charges that could result in him spending the rest of his life in a maximum security prison for publishing true information that revealed war crimes committed by the U.S. government.”
Statement:
On Tuesday next week my husband Julian Assange will make a renewed application for appeal to the High Court. The matter will then proceed to a public hearing before two new judges at the High Court and we remain optimistic that we will prevail and that Julian will not…
— Stella Assange #FreeAssangeNOW (@Stella_Assange) June 8, 2023
Assange has been at the Belmarsh prison in London for more than 1,500 days. He was unlawfully charged in the US with 17 counts of “espionage” and one count of computer misuse, connected to him leaking tens of thousands of military and diplomatic documents that exposed US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Julian Assange's lawyer recently cited suicide as a possible outcome if the Australian is extradited to the #US on his espionage charges. Here's a timeline of some key dates from Assange’s life.#JulianAssange#FreeAssangepic.twitter.com/FTSGibxwQO
RSF Secretary-General Christophe Deloire and Director of Campaigns Rebecca Vincent were unfairly denied access to Assange at Belmarsh jail, while RSF continues to push for Assange’s release on a worldwide scale.
In RSF’s 2023 World Press Freedom Index, the United Kingdom is placed 26th out of 180 nations, while the United States is ranked 45th.
El Pais reported on Monday that the owner of the Spanish security company UC Global, S.L. that spied on Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, David Morales, stored his files for the work he did for the CIA on his laptop.
The former marine and Spanish soldier spied on the meetings that Assange and his lawyers conducted at the Embassy of Ecuador in the UK, stored the data in a folder marked ‘CIA’, and sent them to the US intelligence agency.
This comes after The Sydney Morning Herald wrote on Wednesday that US authorities are attempting to gather new evidence about Assange in an apparent effort to strengthen their case against him even as hopes grow among his supporters that a diplomatic breakthrough will soon see him released from prison.
May 06, 2023: Information Clearing House— ON THE coronation of my liege, I thought it only fitting to extend a heartfelt invitation to you to commemorate this momentous occasion by visiting your very own kingdom within a kingdom: His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh.
You will no doubt recall the wise words of a renowned playwright: ‘The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath.’
Ah, but what would that bard know of mercy faced with the reckoning at the dawn of your historic reign? After all, one can truly know the measure of a society by how it treats its prisoners, and your kingdom has surely excelled in that regard.
Your Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh is located at the prestigious address of One Western Way, London, just a short foxhunt from the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich. How delightful it must be to have such an esteemed establishment bear your name.
It is here that 687 of your loyal subjects are held, supporting the United Kingdom’s record as the nation with the largest prison population in Western Europe. As your noble government has recently declared, your kingdom is currently undergoing ‘the biggest expansion of prison places in over a century’, with its ambitious projections showing an increase of the prison population from 82,000 to 106,000 within the next four years. Quite the legacy, indeed.
As a political prisoner, held at Your Majesty’s pleasure on behalf of an embarrassed foreign sovereign, I am honoured to reside within the walls of this world class institution. Truly, your kingdom knows no bounds.
During your visit, you will have the opportunity to feast upon the culinary delights prepared for your loyal subjects on a generous budget of two pounds per day. Savour the blended tuna heads and the ubiquitous reconstituted forms that are purportedly made from chicken. And worry not, for unlike lesser institutions such as Alcatraz or San Quentin, there is no communal dining in a mess hall. At Belmarsh, prisoners dine alone in their cells, ensuring the utmost intimacy with their meal.
Beyond the gustatory pleasures, I can assure you that Belmarsh provides ample educational opportunities for your subjects. As Proverbs 22:6 has it: ‘Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.’ Observe the shuffling queues at the medicine hatch, where inmates gather their prescriptions, not for daily use, but for the horizon-expanding experience of a ‘big day out’ — all at once.
You will also have the opportunity to pay your respects to my late friend Manoel Santos, a gay man facing deportation to Bolsonaro’s Brazil, who took his own life just eight yards from my cell using a crude rope fashioned from his bedsheets. His exquisite tenor voice now silenced forever.
Venture further into the depths of Belmarsh and you will find the most isolated place within its walls: Healthcare, or ‘Hellcare’ as its inhabitants lovingly call it. Here, you will marvel at sensible rules designed for everyone’s safety, such as the prohibition of chess, whilst permitting the far less dangerous game of checkers.
Deep within Hellcare lies the most gloriously uplifting place in all of Belmarsh, nay, the whole of the United Kingdom: the sublimely named Belmarsh End of Life Suite. Listen closely, and you may hear the prisoners’ cries of ‘Brother, I’m going to die in here’, a testament to the quality of both life and death within your prison.
But fear not, for there is beauty to be found within these walls. Feast your eyes upon the picturesque crows nesting in the razor wire and the hundreds of hungry rats that call Belmarsh home. And if you come in the spring, you may even catch a glimpse of the ducklings laid by wayward mallards within the prison grounds. But don’t delay, for the ravenous rats ensure their lives are fleeting.
I implore you, King Charles, to visit His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh, for it is an honour befitting a king. As you embark upon your reign, may you always remember the words of the King James Bible: ‘Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy’ (Matthew 5:7). And may mercy be the guiding light of your kingdom, both within and without the walls of Belmarsh.
Your most devoted subject,
Julian Assange
Views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
John Pilger has twice won Britain’s highest award for journalism and has been International Reporter of the Year, News Reporter of the Year and Descriptive Writer of the Year. He has made 61 documentary films and has won an Emmy, a BAFTA the Royal Television Society prize and the Sydney Peace Prize. His ‘Cambodia Year Zero’ is named as one of the ten most important films of the 20th century. This article is an edited version of an address to the Trondheim World Festival, Norway. He can be contacted at www.johnpilger.com
John Pilger
This is an abridged version of an address by John Pilger in Sydney on 10 March to mark the launch in Australia of Davide Dormino’s sculpture of Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, ‘Figures of Courage’.
I have known Julian Assange since I first interviewed him in London in 2010. I immediately liked his dry, dark sense of humour, often dispensed with an infectious giggle. He is a proud outsider: sharp and thoughtful. We have become friends, and I have sat in many courtrooms listening to the tribunes of the state try to silence him and his moral revolution in journalism.
My own high point was when a judge in the Royal Courts of Justice leaned across his bench and growled at me: ‘You are just a peripatetic Australian like Assange.’ My name was on a list of volunteers to stand bail for Julian, and this judge spotted me as the one who had reported his role in the notorious case of the expelled Chagos Islanders. Unintentionally, he delivered me a compliment.
I saw Julian in Belmarsh not long ago. We talked about books and the oppressive idiocy of the prison: the happy-clappy slogans on the walls, the petty punishments; they still won’t let him use the gym. He must exercise alone in a cage-like area where there is sign that warns about keeping off the grass. But there is no grass. We laughed; for a brief moment, some things didn’t seem too bad.
The laughter is a shield, of course. When the prison guards began to jangle their keys, as they like to do, indicating our time was up, he fell quiet. As I left the room he held his fist high and clenched as he always does. He is the embodiment of courage.
Those who are the antithesis of Julian: in whom courage is unheard of, along with principle and honour, stand between him and freedom. I am not referring to the Mafia regime in Washington whose pursuit of a good man is meant as a warning to us all, but rather to those who still claim to run a just democracy in Australia.
Anthony Albanese was mouthing his favourite platitude, ‘enough is enough’ long before he was elected prime minister of Australia last year. He gave many of us precious hope, including Julian’s family. As prime minister he added weasel words about ‘not sympathising’ with what Julian had done. Apparently we had to understand his need to cover his appropriated posteria in case Washington called him to order.
We knew it would take exceptional political if not moral courage for Albanese to stand up in the Australian Parliament — the same Parliament that will disport itself before Joe Biden in May — and say:
‘As prime minister, it is my government’s responsibility to bring home an Australian citizen who is clearly the victim of a great, vindictive injustice: a man who has been persecuted for the kind of journalism that is a true public service, a man who has not lied, or deceived — like so many of his counterfeit in the media, but has told people the truth about how the world is run.’
‘I call on the United States,’ a courageous and moral Prime Minister Albanese might say, ‘to withdraw its extradition application: to end the malign farce that has stained Britain’s once admired courts of justice and to allow the release of Julian Assange unconditionally to his family. For Julian to remain in his cell at Belmarsh is an act of torture, as the United Nations Raporteur has called it. It is how a dictatorship behaves.’
Alas, my daydream about Australia doing right by Julian has reached its limits. The teasing of hope by Albanese is now close to a betrayal for which the historical memory will not forget him, and many will not forgive him. What, then, is he waiting for?
Remember that Julian was granted political asylum by the Ecuadorean government in 2013 largely because his own government had abandoned him. That alone ought to bring shame on those responsible: namely the Labor government of Julia Gillard.
So eager was Gillard to collude with the Americans in shutting down WikiLeaks for its truth telling that she wanted the Australian Federal Police to arrest Assange and take away his passport for what she called his ‘illegal’ publishing. The AFP pointed out that they had no such powers: Assange had committed no crime.
It is as if you can measure Australia’s extraordinary surrender of sovereignty by the way it treats Julian Assange. Gillard’s pantomime grovelling to both houses of the US Congress is cringing theatre on YouTube. Australia, she repeated, was America’s ‘great mate’. Or was it ‘little mate’?
Her foreign minister was Bob Carr, another Labor machine politician whom WikiLeaks exposed as an American informant, one of Washington’s useful boys in Australia. In his published diaries, Carr boasted knowing Henry Kissinger; indeed the Great Warmonger invited the foreign minister to go camping in the California woods, we learn.
Australian governments have repeatedly claimed that Julian has received full consular support, which is his right. When his lawyer Gareth Peirce and I met the Australian consul general in London, Ken Pascoe, I asked him, ‘What do you know of the Assange case.’
‘Just what I read in the papers,’ he replied with a laugh.
Today, Prime Minister Albanese is preparing this country for a ridiculous American-led war with China. Billions of dollars are to be spent on a war machine of submarines, fighter jets and missiles that can reach China. Salivating war mongering by ‘experts’ on the country’s oldest newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Melbourne Age is a national embarrassment, or ought to be. Australia is a country with no enemies and China is its biggest trading partner.
This deranged servility to aggression is laid out in an extraordinary document called the US-Australia Force Posture Agreement. This states that American troops have ‘exclusive control over the access to [and] use of’ armaments and material that can be used in Australia in an aggressive war.
This almost certainly includes nuclear weapons. Albanese’s foreign minister, Penny Wong, ‘respects’ America on this, but clearly has no respect for Australians’ right to know.
Such obsequiousness was always there — not untypical of a settler nation that still has not made peace with the Indigenous origins and owners of where they live — but now it is dangerous.
China as the Yellow Peril fits Australia’s history of racism like a glove. However, there is another enemy they don’t talk about. It is us, the public. It is our right to know. And our right to say no.
Since 2001, some 82 laws have been enacted in Australia to take away tenuous rights of expression and dissent and protect the cold war paranoia of an increasingly secret state, in which the head of the main intelligence agency, ASIO, lectures on the disciplines of ‘Australian values’. There are secret courts and secret evidence, and secret miscarriages of justice. Australia is said to be an inspiration for the master across the Pacific.
Bernard Collaery, David McBride and Julian Assange — deeply moral men who told the truth – are the enemies and victims of this paranoia. They, not Edwardian soldiers who marched for the King, are our true national heroes.
On Julian Assange, the Prime Minister has two faces. One face teases us with hope of his intervention with Biden that will lead to Julian’s freedom. The other face ingratiates itself with ‘POTUS’ and allows the Americans to do what they want with its vassal: to lay down targets that could result in catastrophe for all of us.
Will Albanese back Australia or Washington on Julian Assange? If he is ‘sincere’, as the more do-eyed Labor Party supporters say, what is he waiting for? If he fails to secure Julian’s release, Australia will cease to be sovereign. We will be little Americans. Official.
This is not about the survival of a free press. There is no longer a free press. There are refuges in the samizdat, such as this site. The paramount issue is justice and our most precious human right: to be free.
Pink Floyd rock legend Roger Waters made an impressive and impassioned plea for peace at the UN Security Council this week. The English-born singer-songwriter was invited by Russia to address the specially convened forum on the prospects of finding a peaceful resolution in Ukraine.
Waters spoke eloquently and from the heart for over 14 minutes via a video link to the gathering at the United Nations’ headquarters in New York. Much respect is due to him for his strident call for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine as well as for his general anti-war message on behalf of the world’s “voiceless majority”.
The 79-year-old artist has been a life-long advocate for peace and human rights, and many people around the world admire not only his musical creations but also his integrity and indefatigable defense of human rights. As he noted during his speech, his own father was killed in action during the Second World War when he was just an infant in 1944, and so he has been “touched by war”.
To his eternal credit, Waters has not taken megastar retirement in luxurious, mindless oblivion. He has remained as politically active and outspoken as when he was a younger artist, critical of exploitative corporate capitalist power and imperialist warmongering. With fierce integrity and poignant compassion, he has championed the cause of the Palestinian people and the freedom of publisher Julian Assange locked up in a British prison, among other causes. His music and artistry are a holistic expression of his pathos and politics.
He may have been invited by Russia to address the UNSC this week, but Waters showed himself to be no “apologist” for Moscow. During his speech, he claimed that Russia had “illegally invaded” Ukraine in February 2022, and he forthrightly condemned that. He is entitled to his opinion.
Nevertheless, he also condemned the provocations by the United States and NATO in building up Ukraine with armaments in the years before the conflict erupted last February. He denounced the war profiteering by Western powers from their relentless and reckless supplying of weapons to Ukraine which, he said, was risking a nuclear apocalypse if it spiralled into a bigger all-out confrontation.
The reactions to this noble intervention by Roger Waters were telling. While he spoke to the UNSC, the envoys from Ukraine fiddled on their phones, showing contemptible disrespect. Following his speech, the Ukrainian and the American representatives mocked Waters for peddling “Russian propaganda”.
There was little reporting in the Western media of his words. Some reportage tried to undermine his sincere calls for peace and his blistering critique of the warmongering capitalist system by focusing on what they claimed was his justification for Russian military action in Ukraine after he had said the war was “not unprovoked”.
Hardly surprising. Western mainstream news media have become so debased as propaganda channels that anyone who dares to discuss the historical context of the conflict is immediately smeared as a “Kremlin stooge”. Their media function is to prevent any intelligent, truthful understanding of how this conflict manifested or what is really at stake. The same goes for other conflicts and in particular, the next one Washington is fomenting with China.
Waters deserves immense praise for his courageous, unstinting calls for peace and for a broader understanding of the nature and causes of the conflict in Ukraine. But the dismissive response to his supplications illustrates clearly that the Western warmongers and their NeoNazi regime in Kiev have no intention or will to find a just peace. They are, to quote that classic song by Pink Floyd, “comfortably numb” to any feeling of justice and peace.
Thus, lamentably, his demands for an immediate ceasefire are naive. While many people around the world will admire the call for peace, it is misleading to not fully realize how the conflict in Ukraine came about and why it is being pursued by Western powers. Such appeals will not prevail against the war fundamentalists. Indeed, any ceasefire without resolving the root causes of the war would only prolong the conflict by allowing a rearming of the NATO-sponsored Kiev regime against Russia. Besides, Washington and its Western lackeys are “agreement incapable” and have no integrity.
The most effective immediate way to end the conflict is for Western powers to stop fueling it with the madcap armaments they are piling up in Ukraine. Washington and its European allies are embarking on endless rounds of supplying more offensive weapons. They have already committed to deploying battlefield tanks and this week there was more talk of supplying advanced NATO fighter jets as well as long-range missiles that can hit deep inside Russian territory. The lavish indulgence this week by Britain, France, Germany and the rest of the European Union towards Kiev’s incessant demands for more weapons shows that there is no interest in a genuine diplomatic dialogue for a peaceful settlement.
The European elite political class like their masters in Washington have dangerously distorted the conflict in Ukraine into one of absolute necessity for defeating alleged Russian aggression and “defending democracy”.
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky – whose regime in Kiev is up to its eyes in corruption from the arms bazaar in that country as well as infested with Nazi-adulating paramilitaries – was feted in Europe this week with the preposterous claim that Ukraine was defending European values from Russian barbarity. The echo of Third Reich ideology and Russophobic propaganda here is truly astounding.
This war is an existential one. On the one hand, the defeat of Russia is being painted (falsely) as the ultimate challenge to supposed Western civilization. The West has made it a zero-sum contest based on false premises. On the other hand, a real existential issue is that the war is all about preserving American hegemony and propping up the floundering Western imperial global order. “Unipolar world domination,” as Roger Waters put it.
The blockbuster report this week by veteran journalist Seymour Hersh revealing well-founded allegations that the U.S. military blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines from Russia to Germany last September demonstrates that this war in Ukraine is only a part of a bigger geopolitical conflict. The Western media’s relative silence over what is ostensibly a staggering act of international terrorism by the Americans and their European minions is as damning as it is instructive.
Hersh credibly claims that the plot to sabotage the pipelines – signed off by the Biden administration – predated the Russian intervention in Ukraine. When added to ignominious admissions by European leaders that there was no intention of honoring the 2014-15 Minsk peace agreements because the tacit objective was always to weaponize Ukraine for an eventual showdown against Russia, then we begin to understand that the intrinsic agenda for war makes a mockery of the Western narrative about “defending Ukraine from Russian aggression”.
Appeals like that of Roger Waters – albeit principled and well-intentioned – are in the final analysis naive and, regrettably, futile. Such appeals presuppose that Western elites and their warmongering system are capable of peaceful and moral reasoning. They are not.
Russia had a legal and moral duty to defend the ethnic Russian people of former Ukraine from eight years of NATO-backed aggression after the CIA-backed coup d’état in Kiev in 2014. That NATO aggression will not be stopped now by moralistic appeals. For we are talking about a system that is tantamount to a rabid dog that needs to be put down. And we are not talking about a system that is limited to the vile Kiev regime. We are talking about the entire U.S.-led capitalist system and its imperialist war machine. A system that has ravaged the world for eight decades since the end of World War Two.
Or to put it another way by way of taking issue with a contradiction in Roger Water’s speech: you can’t appeal to a “bully” to do the right thing. You have to punch the bully in the face.
On the bigger historical picture, it can be increasingly seen now in this present time that the Second World War did not bring about an end to Nazism, fascism and imperialism, especially as Western history books would narrate. The end of that horrendous war was only a respite from the disease. There will be no peace in Ukraine or anywhere else until that disease is terminated – once and for all.
In an interview with the World Socialist Web Site, renowned Australian investigative journalist John Pilger has warned that the “US is close to getting its hands on” the courageous WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.
Last month, British Home Secretary Priti Patel approved Assange’s extradition to the US, where he faces 175 years imprisonment under the Espionage Act for publishing true information exposing American war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. As Pilger explains, Patel’s order will be the subject of a further appeal, but the British judiciary that will adjudicate has facilitated Assange’s persecution every step of the way. This underscores the urgency of a political fight to free Assange, based on the powerful struggles of the working class that are emerging all around the world.
Pilger began his media career in the late 1950s. His first documentary, The Quiet Mutiny, exposed aspects of the US war in Vietnam in 1970. Since then, Pilger has produced more than 50 documentaries, many of them feature-length and centering on revealing the crimes of the major imperialist powers.
In a 2012 Rolling Stone interview, Assange was asked: “Who has been your most critical public supporter?” He replied: “John Pilger, the Australian journalist, has been the most impressive.”
Pilger has been unwavering in his defence of the WikiLeaks publisher. In 2018 and 2019, he addressed Socialist Equality Party rallies, demanding that the Australian government use its diplomatic and legal powers to free Assange.
Because of his principled defence of Assange and opposition to war, Pilger is hardly ever referenced in Australia’s official media, despite being one of the country’s most well-known and respected journalists.
WSWS: After Patel’s announcement allowing extradition, where is the Assange case up to? Are the dangers he confronts of a greater urgency than previously?
John Pilger: It is a dangerous, unpredictable time. Since the Home Secretary signed the extradition order, a provisional appeal has been filed by Julian’s lawyers. ‘Provisional’ is part of the tortuous process of appeal. The lawyers must submit what are known as ‘perfected grounds of appeal’ in the next few weeks, then the US and the Home Secretary file their responses. Only after that does it go to a judge (not sitting in a court) to decide whether or not he will accept it. It may sound meticulous but, having observed it, it looks to me like a finely spun blanket of obfuscation over a profoundly biased system.
Until the High Court hearing last year, I believed the country’s senior judges would reject the US appeal and reclaim something of the mythologised notion of British justice if only for the system’s survival, which partly depends on “face” within the arcane reaches of the British establishment. This show of “independence” in support of justice has happened in the past. In Julian’s case, the facts are surely too outrageous—no properly constituted court would even consider it—yet I was wrong. The decision by the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales last October that the US in effect had the right to fabricate and belatedly introduce “assurances” that had not even been part of previous due process was quite shocking. There was no justice, no process; the guile and ruthlessness of US power was on show. Might is right.
Today, the US knows it is close to getting its hands on Julian. Unlike previous parliaments at Westminster, there is not a single voice speaking up for him. In spite of a tenacious campaign emphasising the threat Julian’s extradition poses to a “free press,” he is barely acknowledged in the media, which remains intensely hostile to him. Journalists have never been as compliant as they are today, and Julian’s case is a reminder—to some—of what they ought to be. He shames them.
WSWS: You have consistently defended Julian for more than ten years. Over that period have you been shocked by the intensity with which he has been pursued?
JP: Perhaps not shocked; as a journalist, I have had my own taste of state ruthlessness. Remember the pursuit of Julian is a measure of his achievements. He informed millions about the deceptions of governments too many trusted; he respected their right to know. It was a remarkable public service.
WSWS: Do you think this is bound up with a broader assault on democratic rights?
JP: Yes, it’s the latest stage of the abandonment of what used to be called “social democracy.” The “rollback” of rights in the US and UK is in reaction to the uprising, in the 1960s an 1970s, of people and their conscientiousness and of ideas of equity. This was an historical “moment” when society was becoming more enlightened; minority and gender rights were gaining acceptance; workers were fighting back. At the same time, the so-called “information age” was launched. It was only partly about information; it was a media age, with the media establishing a ubiquitous, controlling place in people’s lives. One of the most influential books of the time was The Greening of America. On the cover were the words: “There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual.” The message of its author, a young Yale academic, Charles Reich, was that truth-telling and political action had failed and only “culture” and introspection could change the world.
Within a few years, driven by new opportunities of profit, the cult of “me-ism” had subverted people’s sense of acting together, their sense and language of social justice and internationalism. Class, gender and race were separated; class as a way of explaining society became heresy. The personal was the political, and the media was the message. The propaganda was that something called globalism was good for you. Corporatism, its specious language and its authoritarianism, appropriated much about the way we lived, ensuring what the economist Ted Wheelwright called a “Two Thirds Society”—with the bottom third beholden to debt and poverty while an unrecognised class war uprooted and destroyed the power of labour. In 2008, the election of the first black president in the land of slavery and the fabrication of a new cold war completed the political disorientation of those who, 20 years earlier, would have formed a critical opposition and an anti-war movement.
WSWS: Is there a relationship with the escalation of war, including the US-led confrontations with China and Russia?
JP: Events today are the direct result of plans laid in the 1992 Defence Planning Guidance, a document that laid out how the US would maintain its empire and see off any challenges, real and imagined. The aim was US dominance at any cost, literally. Written by Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney, who would play key roles in the administration of George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq, it might have been written by Lord Curzon in the 19th century. They formed “The Project for a New American Century.” America, it boasted, “would oversee a new frontier.” The role of other states would be as vassals or supplicants, or they would be crushed. It planned the conquest of Europe, and Russia, with all the zeal and thoroughness of Hitler’s imperialists. The roots of NATO’s current war on Russia and provocations of China are here.
WSWS: What do you think of the role being played by the Albanese Labor government? Can you comment on the Declassified Australia report, with internal briefings for Attorney-General Dreyfus, which indicated that the only focus of the Labor government is a hypothetical prison transfer, after Assange has been extradited to the US and convicted of Espionage Act charges there?
JP: The Albanese Labor government is as right-wing and compliant as any Australian Labor government—only the Whitlam government in 1972–75 broke the mould, and it was got rid of. It was the Labor government of Julia Gillard that initiated Australia’s collusion with the US to silence Assange. The “prison transfer” idea may be seen as a weasel way of satisfying support for Julian in his homeland. Whatever happens, the US will decide and the Albanese government will do as it’s told.
WSWS: We are raising the need for workers and young people to come to Assange’s defence, as the spearhead of the fight against war and authoritarianism. Why do you think ordinary people should take up the struggle to free Assange?
JP: Julian Assange is the courageous embodiment of a struggle against the darkest, most oppressive forces in our world; and people of principle, young and old, should oppose it as best they can; or one day it may touch their lives, and worse.
The more you grow up, the more you realise that the world is unfair. When the war in Donbass began eight years ago, few could have imagined that instead of the peaceful country of Ukraine, its authorities would make it miserable and torn apart, with a fierce hatred of the inhabitants towards each other. But it happened. That Ukraine – with Russian literature, great achievements and normal attitude towards each other – will never be the same again. Just as there will not be the West, which is the stuff of legends: with history, freedom and people to believe in and strive to be like them. Musicians, actors, presenters, politicians… they are all the same. The world itself is changing. Television replaces your walks in the rain and the Internet replaces your books. Why read when you can watch a movie? Why be literate at all? Just know how to count to 100 and put an X. It’s been done before. And it’s probably a very comfortable world for some. But not for those who remember what IT is like to ask the right questions. Because asking them can destroy the cardboard world that we are encouraged to think is real. Such was the case with Julian Assange, who has become an example to many. He is one of those who has not been afraid to openly declare that people have a right to know the truth, shattering the known and so familiar illusion. He broke through the breach in this painstakingly built-up cardboard wall at the cost of his “normal” life. Let it not be in vain and others who wish to live in truth push that breach from horizon to horizon. And I will keep trying to push that breach to my horizon in Donbass…
Good afternoon Mr. Assange!
I have been thinking for a long time how to start this letter… I have written many letters over the years to presidents, politicians and artists in Europe and the USA. Even to the Pope. I was ignored and dismissed, except for the clerks and small officials who answered with formal replies. But I kept writing and begging. It was all about one thing: to help stop the war in Donbass and to influence Ukraine not to kill children in Donetsk and Lugansk, Makeyevka and Pervomaisk. Many people said I was doing it for nothing. Just wasting my time. But listening to them, I remembered you because you were and are an example to me. You could have said nothing to the world about what America was doing and simply remained silent and lived quietly, as many journalists did. But the truth is necessary. And the easiest and the most difficult thing at the same time is to tell it to people.
You have become an example for many, including me. Thank you for your honesty, for your strength of will and for not breaking under the blows of fate. Thank you for the fact that you were able to give strength to fight injustice. May God bless you and your family.
Those that are not familiar with Faina’s work, please do a search on the right hand bar for Faina Sevankova
All told, the swap of the century is a win-win for Russia in all respects. It could indeed be such for the US and UK too if their governments are mindful enough of global perceptions and especially domestic ones to seriously consider this pragmatic proposal, but their ideologically driven hatred of everything that Assange represents might blind them to this reality.
WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange is in deteriorating health and will almost certainly die in prison upon his “extradition” from the UK to the US where he’s facing 175 years behind bars on trumped-up charges after exposing American war crimes through his platform. This global icon of free speech and independent journalism engenders sympathy across the world from all but the most radical unipolar liberal-globalists, which is why it’s incumbent to free him at all costs. While it’s a long-shot, the only realistic chance of this happening might be for Russia to offer the swap of the century whereby it publicly proposes trading detained Western mercenaries from the US and UK for Assange.
Two Brits were already just sentenced to death while it can’t be ruled out that the two Americans who were just captured will face the same fate following their upcoming trials. These four figures in and of themselves aren’t anyone anywhere near as important as Assange is, but the fact that they might all face the firing squad has generated global attention and prompted a lot of controversy in their home countries. The Anglo-American Axis is known for its ruthlessness, especially in terms of how it exploits its citizens as pawns only to discard them once their strategic utility has expired like those four foreign fighters’ already has. Nevertheless, many of their compatriots passionately detest this cold approach.
By publicly proposing the swap of the century – these four detained Western mercenaries in exchange for Assange – Russia would simultaneously accomplish several strategic objectives. First, it would make the most realistic attempt yet to free this global icon of free speech and independent journalism. Second, this would powerfully counteract the false claims from the US-led Western Mainstream Media (MSM) that Russia is a so-called “dictatorship” that doesn’t sincerely support everything that Assange represents. Third, it could inspire peaceful protests organized in accordance with American and British laws in support of this proposal, which could put grassroots pressure upon them to agree to this.
Fourth, those two governments’ likely refusal to comply with the terms of Russia’s swap of the century would expose their fiery hatred of the two things that Assange represents, free speech and independent journalism. And fifth, the US and UK would basically be admitting to their own citizens that they’d rather that they be put to death by firing squad in Donbass than save their lives by trading them for Assange. That final outcome would be the last nail in the coffin of their reputation in the public eye since people would now know that their authorities can’t be counted upon to save their lives if they get captured and sentenced to death for fighting in the same proxy war that the US and UK are waging against Russia.
All told, the swap of the century is a win-win for Russia in all respects. It could indeed be such for the US and UK too if their governments are mindful enough of global perceptions and especially domestic ones to seriously consider this pragmatic proposal, but their ideologically driven hatred of everything that Assange represents might blind them to this reality. Be that as it may, there’s no harm in trying, which is why Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zakharova should consider floating this proposal during one of her upcoming press conferences. It would irreversibly shape global perceptions about her country and those two, not to mention possibly even saving the lives of five people, one of whom is indisputably innocent.
Filed under: Russia, USA | Tagged: Free Press, Julian Assange | Comments Off on The Swap Of The Century: Russia Should Offer To Trade Western Mercenaries For Assange
Assange will battle on now with an appeal against the UK decision to extradite him to the U.S. It’s time now for his own team to play the same dirty game which they have fallen victim to and forget about the foibles of journalists and the media
Is Julian Assange a journalist or a publisher? It’s a divisive question which usually draws the wrath of an entire legion of on-line haters, mainly in Australia, who assume the author is attacking the founder of Wikileaks and so rationale is lost to nationalistic vitriol and score settling. The so-called supporters usually fail to see how if that energy was put into campaigning rather than just letting off steam on Twitter against total strangers, then Assange might have a chance of attaining something akin to justice.
A gripping interview recently between George Galloway and the former UK ambassador Craig Murray, who I seem to recall on Twitter once used to call himself a journalist based simply on writing blog posts, is worth a watch. Murray points out like an erudite hack he yearns to be, a number of pertinent issues which might have escaped the attention of media who are apparently incapable in the UK of reporting on the Assange affair diligently – namely that the U.S. spied on Assange while he was in the Ecuadorian embassy and then, amazingly, stole all of his evidence which he was keeping with him, the moment the UK police went in and arrested him. This alone he argues, would be enough for any court in the free world to throw the case out. He also argues that in the past decade or so the relationship between the British press and the establishment – read intelligence community – has never been so partisan which is another reason why Assange’s case is not being treated correctly. Yet Murray refers to Assange as a “publisher and a journalist” which is interesting as the case against Assange, if he is to be deemed a journalist, will have wide ranging implications to regular journalists if won by the U.S. – i. e that the Americans win their legal battle in the UK to extradite him on what they believe are essentially spying charges. If Assange is to be called a journalist by his supporters, then does it follow that the legal basis against him will be one of a journalist who has brought the profession into disrepute? Shouldn’t the journalists on the Guardian who published the polemic material that Assange and Wikileaks gave them, also be facing U.S. extradition for being partisan to publishing material, which in a third world country, would no doubt be deemed “likely to threaten the stability of the state”.
But the U.S., although a young country, is not a poor one and we are led to believe a great democracy. The case against Assange, no matter how vile it is, we should not forget is about his role in obtaining and disseminating state secrets. Journalists will no doubt follow the case with eagerness as many will wonder if they will face the same treatment if they handle a document which is protected by the UK’s official secrets act, which is why so many are part of the hue and cry about it being a dark day for journalism. They will reflect on how they will be arrested and extradited if they handle such ‘documents’ even if they are British subjects living in the UK.
Yet the case against Assange is surely about more than merely publishing the incendiary cables which exposed America’s dirty wars but in the role that he played in assisting Chelsea Manning in obtaining them. It is also about point scoring with Russia as the U.S. believes that Assange also leaked the Clinton emails, which played a decisive role in Trump winning the U.S. presidential race in 2016 against the odious former First Lady and Secretary of State.
The problem that Assange – or his supporters have – with the ‘journalist’ argument which points out the harm the case will do towards the fourth estate is flawed twofold. Firstly, the fear has already been installed by the UK and U.S. governments towards journalists who handle contentious documents which reveal state secrets about conflict, for example. And secondly, the respect and reverence that people placed on the profession of journalism is so little that it is hardly surprising the shameful role that the UK press has played recently in failing to rally behind Assange.
Assange’s people almost put the final boot in, when it comes to destroying the credibility of the press by calling him a journalist (out of respect) when even his own wife calls him a publisher. The distinct ubiquitous lack of respect towards bona fide journalists and their work, which is more often than not tedious, repetitive and pretty mundane, perhaps is linked to a more modern idea that anyone with a laptop who writes a blog can call themselves a journalist – and underlines the lack of credibility that media has in general, which we can see when its workers come under fire.
Of course the arrest of Assange in the first place is wrong on so many levels. As one of his many journalism awards he won by media institutions points out though he is not a journalist but more an enfant terrible of the media bubble who delivers the explosive brown envelope with the grainy photographed photocopies of documents which can easily bring down a government or even the neo-liberal new world order. It is more about the thief who breaks into the house and cracks the safe, rather than the actual items he has taken, in the U.S. mindset.
Institutions which dish out press awards often give them to non-journalists. It’s the fashion. But when you glance at the awards themselves, it’s not hard to see the political ardour behind them. Many of his awards are for “contribution towards journalism”, “activism”, “human rights” or even “defenders of the right to information” etc and only confirm his important role is supplying journalists with the material that they couldn’t lay their hands on themselves. Perhaps this makes him a subject of jealously and vitriol, which might explain how the Guardian stabbed him in the back when he wanted to share his work with the New York Times or when their editors clashed with him when he (Assange) wanted to scan documents to blank out names to protect those whose lives could be threatened once going to press, if we are to believe Murray’s claims (there are equally a great many who claim that Wikileaks compromised lives by not protecting identities with the rush to publish).
We should never forget though that the U.S. and UK government both have an impressive loathing of journalists and so if this narrative of being one and exercising free speech etc is sustained, many will argue that it is a dead end and will only end badly – perhaps this is why his wife referred to him in a BBC interview as a “publisher”. Assange may well be a genius, but he never sat down and wrote a regular article for publication with his own explosive material in front of him. Perhaps he never had the patience for journalism or the time. We should follow his wife Stella Moris’ lead and call him a “publisher” and leave the whole journalism and free speech debate alone as, in reality, hardly anybody these days gives a shit about such notions – except politicians who harp on about them but then turn their back on such lofty ideas the moment a journalist digs up some shit on them. One tends to think of labour leaders like Neil Kinnock in the past. These days however few politicians even jump on this bandwagon as they know that hardly anybody really cares about this subject, although it is interesting that the current Labour leader Keir Starmer has an odd obsession with Assange whose revelations tarnish Tony Blair and his labour party’s time in power.
Perhaps Assange’s team and his supporters should spend more time absorbing themselves with the notion of the politics of his case as surely therein lies the heart of his extradition being annulled. Every time I see an article in the UK press about the implications of the Assange against journalists, I want to cry as this is the conscious reckoning which journalists and politicians effect to kid themselves that they have done something to help Assange, when in reality they are merely helping the Americans with their dirty game to get Assange to a jail in the U.S. where almost certainly he will be assassinated just as Epstein was in his cell. The only way Assange can hope to get a really fair trial with his appeal is if politicians like Boris Johnson and others feel that they will lose their support and the history books will be unkind to them. Politics is a dirty game and no one knows that more than Assange. Such a shame that there aren’t enough supporters who are prepared to play the same dirty game. Or not even one journalist in Fleet Street who is prepared to lose his job and be singled out for putting his weight behind an online campaign from the media itself which would spook the political establishment.
They were shooting directly at the journalists: New evidence suggests Shireen Abu Akleh was killed in targeted attack by Israeli forces”. Thus read a CNN headline on May 26, 2022, for an article describing what may have been a “targeted killing,” – that is, assassination – of Al Jazeera journalist Shirleen Abu Akleh, a 51-year-old highly esteemed Palestinian-American journalist who had covered Israeli repression of the Palestinian population for about 25 years before she was killed.
With this killing and its aftermath, one knows that it is all hands on deck for an Israeli government cognitive campaign in the perpetual cognitive war Israel wages against the world, as will be explained below.
According to the CNN article, Abu Akleh was killed by a bullet to the head at around 6:30 a.m. on May 11, while standing with a group of journalists near the entrance of Jenin refugee camp as they covered an Israeli raid. “We stood in front of the Israeli military vehicles for about five to ten minutes before we made moves to ensure they saw us. And this is a habit of ours as journalists; we move as a group and we stand in front of them so they know we are journalists, and then we start moving,” a Palestinian reporter, Shatha Hanaysha, told CNN, describing their cautious approach toward the Israeli army convoy before the gunfire began.
Video recordings of the surrounding area showed the killing shots could have come only from the Israeli soldiers in specially designed “sniper” vehicles that were in direct line-of-fire positions to Abu Akleh that morning. Eyewitnesses told CNN that they “believed Israeli forces on the same street fired deliberately on the reporters in a targeted attack. All of the journalists were wearing protective blue vests that identified them as members of the news media.”
“LAWFUL TARGETS” IN A “COGNITIVE WAR”
The “blue vests” might have been what ensured the journalists would be targeted by Israeli forces, if Israeli forces see journalists as “lawful targets” in the war they continue to wage against the Palestinians, in what is in fact a continuation of the 1967 War. That is, an unrelenting military occupation in violation of international law, which constitutes a continuation of the “war.” And the evidence shows Israeli military/intel forces do see journalists as “lawful targets,” as part of the “Cognitive War” they wage against the Palestinians, but more particularly against the global population in an attempt to legitimize their military oppression of the Palestinians in their ongoing effort of “population expulsion” of the Palestinians from Palestinian territory. As Benjamin Netanyahu’s father, Benzion, proclaimed shortly before he died, this is the objective of Israel Zionists like him.
In fact, while Abu Akleh was the only journalist killed that day by Israeli forces, she wasn’t the only Palestinian journalist shot. A group of four Palestinian reporters was fired upon as well, with one also injured in the gunfire. That was not because Israeli forces had an obstructed view; footage showed a direct line of sight between the reporters and the Israeli convoy. That only one of the four was hit, besides Abu Akleh, is probably taken by military superiors as a sign that their marksmanship must be improved.
A firearms expert told CNN: “The relatively tight grouping of the rounds indicate Shireen was intentionally targeted with aimed shots and not the victim of random or stray fire.”
But an indication of how the Israeli military sees journalists, other than “reliable” Israeli press, was revealed on the day of the shooting by an Israeli military spokesperson, Ran Kochav. Kochav told Army Radio that Abu Akleh had been “filming and working for a media outlet amidst armed Palestinians. They’re armed with cameras, if you’ll permit me to say so.” And if they are “armed,” they are “lawful targets” in “war.”
In fact, the killing of journalists has been openly called for in the “flagship publication” of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, The Journal of International Security Affairs, by retired U.S. Army Officer Ralph Peters. The odious 2009 article – potentially a war crime in itself – stated: “Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts, and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media.”
THE POWER OF “COGNITIVE WARFARE”
The Israeli military said it was conducting an investigation into the killing of Abu Akleh, and added, “assertions regarding the source of the fire that killed Ms. Abu Akleh must be carefully made and backed by hard evidence. This is what the IDF is striving to achieve.” In fact, obfuscating that is what the IDF and its Cognitive Warfare component must be seen as “striving to achieve” – at least if Israeli Cognitive War theorists, one of whom is quoted at length below, are to be believed.
Leaving it to those few journalists who report honestly to provide more facts on this assassination – as Abu Akleh would have, giving motive to Israeli forces to particularly target her with lethal fire – “Cognitive Warfare” should be explained further.
The best source for understanding the concept is Israel’s own doctrinal statements about the “cognitive domain” of warfare. A clue to that was presented when an Israeli lawyer filed a lawsuit alleging that “Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs [is] carrying out a global propaganda campaign on behalf of the Israeli government that violates human rights and is acting without authority to do so… Attorney Schachar Ben Meir’s petition demands that the High Court of Justice order a halt to the activities carried out by the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, headed by Gilad Erdan.”
The substance of the claim was that the Israeli government had approved the payment of NIS 128 million ($38 million) to a private organization called Kela-Shlomo to carry out “mass consciousness activities” within the framework of what the Ministry of Strategic Affairs calls “extra-governmental discourse.” That is, publication of government propaganda on social networks and newspapers often carried out through private businesses and non-profit organizations operating in Israel and abroad.
But to determine the correct “messages” to promote or counter requires “surveilling citizens and conducting illegal operations intended to influence and manipulate public opinion.” That is what constitutes “mass consciousness activities” – a fascist type of governmental activity if there ever was one, but “updated” to utilize “private contractors” to conduct operations, in addition to governmental military/intel assets. This explains the proliferation of “private Israeli intelligence/influence” firms.
THE MUSINGS OF A COGNITIVE WARFARE THEORIST
The current Minister of Diaspora Affairs, Nachman Shai, who in the past was a spokesperson for the Israeli military, explained and promoted the higher level to which cognitive warfare has been taken from its origins as mere “propaganda” or “hasbara,” in his book “Hearts and Minds: Israel and the Battle for Public Opinion.”
He explained that, in the expected 21st-century wars of Israel and the United States, the “principal effort will be the battle for consciousness.” He explained further:
[There] are various terms to describe the battle for consciousness. In Britain, it is called the fight for hearts and minds. The U.S. military uses the expressions psychological warfare, perception management, influence management, and information operation. The idea speaks about consciousness: the strategy of limited conflict is to win a decision of consciousness in the society with the help of military means. The battle is for the society’s consciousness and for national resilience.”
Furthermore, according to Shai: “Consciousness is not a natural and inherent concept but rather a structured process, continually shaped by interested parties and by those who wield wealth and power.” How this is done in its current terminology is described in a publication of the Israeli “Institute for National Security Studies” entitled: “The Cognitive Campaign: Strategic and Intelligence Perspectives.” Its Preface states:
It is important to distinguish between cognition and the cognitive campaign. Cognition is the set of insights that an individual or individuals have regarding the surrounding reality and the way they want to shape it, derived from the set of the values and beliefs through which they examine and interpret their environment and work to confront its inherent challenges, and even to change it. In contrast, the cognitive campaign involves the actions and tools that entities that are part of a certain campaign framework use to influence the cognition of target audiences or to prevent influence on them. The purpose of the cognitive campaign is to cause target audiences to adopt the perception of reality held by the side wielding the effort, so that it can more easily advance the strategic and/or operational objectives that it sees as critical. The cognitive campaign can be negative, that is, prevent the development of undesirable cognitive states, or positive, with an attempt to produce the desired cognition.
That the “cognitive campaign can be negative, that is, prevent the development of undesirable cognitive states,” is why Julian Assange has been imprisoned for years now, with no likelihood he will ever be freed by the U.S. government and why Edward Snowden was forced to take refuge in a foreign country to avoid the same fate. The U.S. must silence them and other dissidents, lest an “undesirable cognitive state” develops in the U.S. population – as one eventually developed over the Vietnam War, and eventually forced the U.S. out of Vietnam.
Thus it is reasonable to believe that is why Israel has targeted so many journalists over the last couple of decades – as has the U.S. It would be foolish and/or naïve not to believe that when retired military officers openly call for “targeted killings” of journalists, that they aren’t already being targeted!
MAKING OUR OWN REALITY
When Karl Rove was alleged to have said how the United States is now “an empire, we make our own reality,” he was not just making a hubristic statement. Rather, it can be seen as an indication that he was aware of how powerful a “cognitive campaign” is. In fact, such campaigns were always how the CIA conducted post-World War II coups, and it can be speculated that “cognitive campaigns” were introduced into U.S. political campaigns by Arthur Finkelstein and his “Six-Party Theory” in the 1972 Nixon campaign, down to the 2016 Trump campaign, based upon cognitive warfare principles drawn from CIA coups and the Israeli military occupation.
The cognitive campaign is not new, and it is an inseparable aspect of every strategic and military conflict. In recent years, this struggle has played a much more important role than in past conflicts; at times it takes place without a direct military context and is not even led by military bodies. The cognitive campaign is a continuous campaign; thus, its prominence is greater in the period between wars (as a part of the “campaign between wars).”
In fact, as these authors know, there is no such thing as “between wars” in Israel or the United States, with both countries in “Perpetual War” regardless of the level of aggressive kinetic war they are waging at any given moment.
Carl von Clausewitz wrote in “On War” that two different motives make men fight one another: hostile feelings and hostile intentions. Inciting those “feelings” is done by both Israel and the U.S. continuously, by multifarious networks to “condition” their populations with “hostile feelings and hostile intentions.” As has been done in the U.S. to incite hatred of Russia, China, Iran, et al., so that a war with either one, or all, can explode at any moment. Israel does the same against Iran and the Palestinians. Mission Accomplished!
The President of Mexico has now again offered full asylum to Julian Assange.
“Mexico opens the doors to Assange,” the president declared.
It is good to remember that AMLO spoke to Trump and offered asylum and he is now promising to speak to Biden, to again offer asylum.
AMLO’s briefing to journalists included playing the ‘collateral murder’ clip.
Ben Norton of Multipolarista.com has the detail of AMLO’s briefing, full of fire, as well as the history of shame of those that bleat democracy, protection of human rights, or freedom of expression, without applying these values to themselves, but using them as a stick to beat others.
In a blow to press freedom around the world, London bows to US pressure and approves the extradition request for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.
A dark day for press freedom: UK approves Assange’s extradition to US
UK Home Secretary Priti Patel has approved the US government’s request to extradite Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange, according to her department.
The interior minister “must sign an extradition order if there are no grounds to prevent the (extradition) order from being made,” and the courts had found none. Assange has 14 days to file an appeal, according to the Home Office.
A dark day for press freedom
In a tweet, WikiLeaks wrote that his extradition is a “dark day for press freedom and for British democracy The decision will be appealed.”
BREAKING: UK Home Secretary approves extradition of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange to the US where he would face a 175 year sentence – A dark day for Press freedom and for British democracy The decision will be appealedhttps://t.co/m1bX8STSr8pic.twitter.com/5nWlxnWqO7
International concern forced the Ukrainian Security Service to show that 🇨🇱/🇺🇸 reporter Gonzalo Lira, whom the nationalists detained on April 15, is alive!
However, he doesn’t have access to his cellphone and social media accounts, gagged on what he can say publicly, and not allowed to leave Kharkov.
In a way, he got “lucky”. A number of his fellow journalists, who received “the Ukrainian treatment of the free press”, will never be seen again.
Ed Note: It does not matter what you think of Gonzalo Lira personally. He may not be perfect as a human being, and are there any of us that are perfect? The man has become an Icon and a Testimony of what one imperfect man with a phone, computer, and internet connection can do. The Geneva MFA states that International Concern in this case, and so far, was effective. All of us should be mindful of what we can do! Keep up the pressure for his release, and the pressure on the release of Julian Assange.
Cancel culture is inbuilt in the techno-feudalist project: conform to the hegemonic narrative, or else. Journalism that does not conform must be taken down.
Utter insanity, @Twitter has suspended @RealPepeEscobar, one of Eurasia's top journalists and geopolitical analysts, with 35 years experience in the field. Twitter, kindly RESTORE this account and verify him. @elonmuskpic.twitter.com/5gSzvA7tuu
This month, several of us – Scott Ritter, myself, ASB Military News, among others – were canceled from Twitter. The – unstated – reason: we were debunking the officially approved narrative of the Russia/NATO/Ukraine war.
As with all things Big Tech, that was predictable. I lasted only seven months on Twitter. And that was long enough. Contacts in California had told me I was on their radar because the account grew too fast, and had enormous reach, especially after the start of Operation Z.
I celebrated the cancelation by experiencing an aesthetic illumination in front of the Aegean Sea, at the home of Herodotus, the Father of History. Additionally, it was heart-warming to be recognized by the great George Galloway in his moving tribute to targets of the new McCarthyism.
In parallel, comic relief of the “Mars Attacks” variety was provided by expectations of free speech on Twitter being saved by the benign intervention of Elon Musk.
Techno-feudalism is one of the overarching themes of my latest book, Raging Twenties – published in early 2021 and reviewed here in a very thoughtful and meticulous manner.
Cancel culture is inbuilt in the techno-feudalist project: conform to the hegemonic narrative, or else. In my own case regarding Twitter and Facebook – two of the guardians of the internet, alongside Google — I knew a day of reckoning was inevitable, because like other countless users I had previously been dispatched to those notorious “jails”.
On one Facebook occasion, I sent a sharp message highlighting that I was a columnist/analyst for an established Hong Kong-based media company. Some human, not an algorithm, must have read it, because the account was restored in less than 24 hours.
But then the account was simply disabled – with no warning. I requested the proverbial “review”. The response was a demand for proof of ID. Less than 24 hours later, came the verdict: “Your account has been disabled” because it had not followed those notoriously hazy “community standards.” The decision was “reviewed” and “it can’t be reversed”.
I celebrated with a Buddhist mini-requiem on Instagram.
My hit-by-a-Hellfire missile Facebook page clearly identified for the general public who I was, at the time: “Geopolitical analyst at Asia Times”. The fact of the matter is Facebook algorithms canceled a top columnist from Asia Times – with a proven record and a global profile. The algos would never have had the – digital – guts to do the same with a top columnist from The New York Times or the Financial Times.
Asia Times lawyers in Hong Kong sent a letter to Facebook management. Predictably, there was no response.
Of course becoming a target of cancel culture – twice – does not even remotely compare to the fate of Julian Assange, imprisoned for over three years in Belmarsh under the most appalling circumstances, and about to be dispatched for “judgment” in the American gulag for the crime of committing journalism. Yet the same “logic” applies: journalism that does not conform to the hegemonic narrative must be taken down.
Conform, or Else
At the time, I discussed the matter with several Western analysts. As one of them succinctly put it, “You were ridiculing the U.S. president while pointing out the positives of Russia, China and Iran. That’s a deadly combination”.
Others were simply stunned: “I wonder why you were restricted as you work for a reputable publication.” Or made the obvious connections: “Facebook is a censorship machine. I did not know that they do not give reasons for what they do but then they are part of the Deep State.”
NEW: Former Intelligence Officials, Citing Russia, Insist That Big Tech's Monopoly Power is Vital to U.S. National Securityhttps://t.co/Man3HGfBR7
A banking source that usually places my columns on the desks of selected Masters of the Universe put it New York-style: “You severely p****d the Atlantic Council”. No question: the specimen who oversaw the canceling of my account was a former Atlantic Council hack.
Ron Unz in California had the account of his extremely popular website Unz Reviewpurged by Facebook on April 2020. Subsequently, readers who tried to post their articles met with an “error” message describing the content as “abusive”.
When Unz mentioned my case to renowned economist James Galbraith, “he really was quite shocked, and thought it might signal a very negative censorship trend on the Internet.”
The “censorship trend” is a fact – for quite a while now. Take this U.S. State Department 2020 report identifying “pillars of Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem.”
State Dept. Directive
The late Pompeo-era report demonizes “fringe or conspiracy-minded” websites who happen to be extremely critical of U.S. foreign policy. They include Moscow-based Strategic Culture Foundation – where I’m a columnist – and Canada-based Global Research, which republishes most of my columns (but so does Consortium News, ZeroHedge and many other U.S. websites). I’m cited in the report by name, along with quite a few top columnists.
The report’s “research” states that Strategic Culture – which is blocked by Facebook and Twitter – is directed by the SVR, Russian foreign intel. This is ridiculous. I met the previous editors in Moscow – young, energetic, with enquiring minds. They had to quit their jobs because after the report they started to be severely threatened online.
So the directive comes straight from the State Department – and that has not changed under Biden-Harris: any analysis of U.S. foreign policy that deviates from the norm is a “conspiracy theory” – a terminology that was invented and perfected by the C.I.A.
Couple it with the partnership between Facebook and the Atlantic Council – which is a de facto NATO think tank – and now we have a real powerful ecosystem.
It’s a Wonderful Life
Every silicon fragment in the valley connects Facebook as a direct extension of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s LifeLog project, a Pentagon attempt to “build a database tracking a person’s entire existence.” Facebook launched its website exactly on the same day – Feb. 4, 2004 – that DARLA and the Pentagon shuttered LifeLog.
No explanation by DARPA was ever provided. The MIT’s David Karger, at the time, remarked, “I am sure that such research will continue to be funded under some other title. I can’t imagine DARPA ‘dropping out’ of such a key research area.”
Of course a smokin’ gun directly connecting Facebook to DARPA will never be allowed to surface. But occasionally some key players speak out, such as Douglas Gage, none other than LifeLog’s conceptualizer: “Facebook is the real face of pseudo-LifeLog at this point (…) We have ended up providing the same kind of detailed personal information to advertisers and data brokers and without arousing the kind of opposition that LifeLog provoked.”
So Facebook has absolutely nothing to do with journalism. Not to mention pontificating over a journalist’s work, or assuming it’s entitled to cancel him or her. Facebook is an “ecosystem” built to sell private data at a huge profit, offering a public service as a private enterprise, but most of all sharing the accumulated data of its billions of users with the U.S. national security state.
The resulting algorithmic stupidity, also shared by Twitter – incapable of recognizing nuance, metaphor, irony, critical thinking – is perfectly integrated into what former C.I.A. analyst Ray McGovern brilliantly coined as the MICIMATT (military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think tank complex).
In the U.S., at least the odd expert on monopoly power identified this neo-Orwellian push as accelerating “the collapse of journalism and democracy.”
Facebook “fact-checking professional journalists” does not even qualify as pathetic. Otherwise Facebook – and not analysts like McGovern – would have debunked Russiagate. It would not routinely cancel Palestinian journalists and analysts. It would not disable the account of University of Tehran professor Mohammad Marandi – who was actually born in the U.S.
I received quite a few messages stating that being canceled by Facebook – and now by Twitter – is a badge of honor. Well, everything is impermanent (Buddhism) and everything flows (Daoism). So being deleted – twice – by an algorithm qualifies at best as a cosmic joke.
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 