يغيب ولا ينطفئ

 السبت 26 آب 2023

لو أنك كتبت أنت الرثاء وأعفيتنا جميعاً من هذا الحمل، لو أنك، أنت، قلت ما تحب أن يقال فيك، وأن يحجب عن اسمك ما كنت راغباً في محوه، لو أنك قلت لنا كيف تحب رسم صورتك في لحظة الغياب، لو أنك قلت دعكم من هذه الحكاية، وتلك الرحلة، ولا تقفوا عند هذا التل، وعودوا بي الى حيث رغبت في أن أكون في لحظة الوحدة. فمن منا يقدر على تخيّل ما كنت تفكر فيه أخيراً. لو فعلت ذلك لرسبنا جميعاً في امتحان الحديث عنك، وربما، لو أتيحت الفرصة لكل من يريد تذكّرك، أن تكشف فيه علامات الضعف إن قصّر أو بالغ في الكلام، وكان سيكون لضحكتك أن تسخر من كل ألاعيبنا. ونحن نحاول الآن، بعد فوات الأوان، التعرّف على ما كنت عليه أنت، في آخر الزمان. كنت ستمزق كل الأوراق التي كتبت، وربما احتفظت ببعضها، إن وجدت فيها الحب الذي تشتهيه، وكنت لعرفت من بيننا الأقرب الى عقلك أو قلبك أو من يقدر على الاقتراب من حقيقة أحلامك.

الراحل وحيداً

السبت 26 آب 2023

 ابراهيم الأمين

لو أنك كتبت أنت الرثاء وأعفيتنا جميعاً من هذا الحمل، لو أنك، أنت، قلت ما تحب أن يقال فيك، وأن يحجب عن اسمك ما كنت راغباً في محوه، لو أنك قلت لنا كيف تحب رسم صورتك في لحظة الغياب، لو أنك قلت دعكم من هذه الحكاية، وتلك الرحلة، ولا تقفوا عند هذا التل، وعودوا بي الى حيث رغبت في أن أكون في لحظة الوحدة. فمن منا يقدر على تخيّل ما كنت تفكر فيه أخيراً. لو فعلت ذلك لرسبنا جميعاً في امتحان الحديث عنك، وربما، لو أتيحت الفرصة لكل من يريد تذكّرك، أن تكشف فيه علامات الضعف إن قصّر أو بالغ في الكلام، وكان سيكون لضحكتك أن تسخر من كل ألاعيبنا. ونحن نحاول الآن، بعد فوات الأوان، التعرّف على ما كنت عليه أنت، في آخر الزمان. كنت ستمزق كل الأوراق التي كتبت، وربما احتفظت ببعضها، إن وجدت فيها الحب الذي تشتهيه، وكنت لعرفت من بيننا الأقرب الى عقلك أو قلبك أو من يقدر على الاقتراب من حقيقة أحلامك. لكن الحياة لا تسير على هذا النحو. هي قصة تعيد سرد ذاتها مع كل غياب. وليست عند البشر أدوات جديدة لقياس الإحساس بالألم أو لحظة ملامسة الموت. ليس عندهم سوى ما تخيّلوه من قبل، وهم يسيرون في جنازات الآخرين، حيث ينظرون الى الحسرة والتعب والإعياء على من بقي واقفاً ينتظر موعده الآتي. ولأن الجمع متى التمّ، سيذكرك كاتباً عن الآخرين ولأجلهم، فإن الجمع متى انفضّ يتخيّل أنه أخذ حصته منك، وفي حالتك، يأمل الخائفون أن تصيبهم العدوى منك، ولو كانت ألماً، لكن حظهم العاثر يعيدهم الى حقيقتهم، مجرد أنفس تخاف لحظة الرذاذ الأخير. ولأن الحياة تسير تاركة خلفها كل شيء، فإن الموت يمنح صاحبه فقط حظ السير غير ناظر الى الخلف أيضاً. لكنه موت لئيم، يلزم كل الباقين، بالنظر الى ما يتحرك من حولهم، لكنه لا يمنحهم فرصة التجربة. وبينما تمضي النساء باكيات على حيّ لا يقرأ في عقل من رحل، ويمضي الرجال حالمين براحل يعلمنا عن مكتشفه، ها نحن، وأنت الراحل وحيداً، وقد تركتنا جميعاً، ينظر بعضنا إلى بعض، ولا نعرف إن كنا نفحص صدق حزننا على من فقدناه أو على أنفسنا، قبل أن نبتعد غارقين في الأسى. في لحظتي القاسية هذه، أعود معك الى من كنت تهوى مآثره، ومن رغبت في أن تكون نديمه، ذلك الجواهري الحالم بمجده دوماً، وهو يعيد على مسامعنا درسه الأزلي: قدْ يقتُلُ الحُزنُ مَنْ أحبابهُ بَعُدوا عنه، فكيفَ بمنْ أحبابُهُ فُقِدوا!

من ملف : يغيب ولا ينطفئ

صاحبنا ورئيس تحريرنا… وداعاً!

نجيب نصر الله

إشكاليات الغياب وتعقيداته من إشكاليات الحضور ومشكلاته. والقول بتناقضهما فحسب ينطوي على تبسيط مخلٍّ، من شأن الاكتفاء به أن يفاقم الإشكاليات ولا يحلّها. علاقة الأول بالثاني كالعلاقة بين وجهَي العملة الواحدة. فترافقهما المستتر هو الأساس الذي ينبغي التوقف عنده أو الانطلاق منه. ففي بعض الغياب حضور، وفي بعض الحضور غياب. وكما أن الغياب، في بعض الحالات، لا يعني الموت، فإن الحضور أيضاً، وخصوصاً الصاخب منه، لا يدلّ على الحياة. والأرجح أنها واحدة من المعضلات التي لا حلول حاسمة لها.

فكم من غائب حاضر، وكم من حاضر ميت. وعليه، فقد يحصل الغياب ولا يحصل الموت. وقد يحصل الموت ويمتنع الغياب. وطلال سلمان، في غيابه الموجع اليوم، مثال عن الموت الصعب وتأكيد على تعذّره. فالرجل صاحب أثر. والأثر هذا مقيم وعابر. ولأنه كذلك، لا يمحى ببساطة ولا يزول بسهولة.
ومن علامات هذا الأثر وعناوينه، تحضر «السفير» كتجربة سياسية وثقافية ومهنية رائدة. تجربة غنية عبّرت عن بعض معاني زمنها الناصري الناهض بالأفكار والعابق بالهمم والأحلام والتطلّعات. فكانت المثل والمثال في دفاعها عن قضايا الأمة واحتضانها لخيار المقاومة وتصدّيها للاستعمار ولأدواته الرثّة التي مثّلتها قوى الرجعية العربية. والأرجح أن هذه التجربة الفريدة ما كانت لتقوم، ولا كانت لتنجح لولا مواصفات صانعها ومهندس رحلتها طلال سلمان. فكان أن ارتبط بها وارتبطت به حتى صارا واحداً. فالصانع المجتهد صار صنيعة الفكرة. والصنيعة أمست جزءاً عضوياً من الصانع. ومعهما صُنعت حكاية كبيرة عبرت الحدود وتجاوزت السدود، حكاية كتب حروفها مناضلون ومناضلات تعاقبوا على مدّها بالذخيرة المعرفية والنضالية والثقافية والمهنية طوال عقود أربعة حافلة. فعندما يذكر طلال سلمان، تحضر «السفير» ومعها كوكبة من الأسماء التي يصعب أن تتكرر والتي ربما كان يصعب أن تجتمع لولاه، كما يتعذّر أن تلتقي إلا حوله ومعه. وأول هذه الأسماء وأبرزها جوزف سماحة، بسعة عقله وواسع معرفته وصلابة التزامه الوطني والقومي، وبلال الحسن، وناجي العلي ومحيي الدين اللباد وحازم صاغية وجهاد الزين وإلياس خوري وعباس بيضون ومصطفى الحسيني… فضلاً عن كوكبة الجنود المجهولين الذين تقدّمهم ياسر نعمة بإخلاصه وتفانيه وحسن إدارته، فضلاً عن كثيرين… وهذا هو أثر طلال سلمان الذي يصعب أن يمحى ويتعذّر أن يزول. ففي قدرته على الجمع، أتاح لصوت العروبة التي حمل لواءها أن يعلو وأن يصدح في كامل الخريطة العربية.
طلال سلمان، وبحقّ لا مبالغة فيه، أحد أعلام الصحافة العربية. وبرحيله تخسر المهنة صحافياً مناضلاً عاصر الأحداث ورافق الوقائع وتجاوز تقلّباتها محافظاً على جوهر الفكرة التي حفّزته على المغامرة الجميلة التي خاضها من ألِف المهنة إلى يائها رئيساً لتحرير «السفير»، قبل أن يقرر، في غفلة عن الجميع، الانسحاب من المشهد العام، تاركاً للقلق المهني ولأسئلته أن تتوالد وتتوالد.
العزاء للصديقة هنادي وللأعزاء: أحمد وربيعة وعلي. والمواساة لفؤاد اللبان الذي أخلص لـ«الأستاذ» ما وسعه الإخلاص، ولديانا قوصان التي أدارت يوميات «الأستاذ» بحنكة تركت أثرها تنظيماً وتدبيراً… ولكثر غيرهم فازوا بفرصة المرور بحياة مناضل عربي حمل اسم طلال سلمان.

من ملف : يغيب ولا ينطفئ

صفحة تطوى من تاريخ الصحافة اللبنانية: طلال سلمان «يغيب ولا ينطفئ»

 نزار نمر

(أرشيف)

مَن عايش مرحلة الاقتتال الداخلي في لبنان وحروب الآخرين على أرضه، وكلّ ما سبقها وتلاها من حقبة ما بعد «الطائف» وتحرير الجنوب للوطن والانتفاضات الفلسطينية، وصولاً إلى «الخريف» العربي وأفول أنظمة عربية مع دولها وبدايات الحرب على سوريا، لا يسعه إلا أن يذكر طلال سلمان (1938 – 2023) و«جريدة لبنان في الوطن العربي وجريدة الوطن العربي في لبنان» التي أصدرها طوال 42 عاماً. ورغم غياب «السفير» مع وداع الساعة الأخيرة من عام 2016 بعد محاولة احتجاب سابقة تأجّلت أشهراً، إلّا أنّ الراحل أكمل مسيرته «على الطريق» حتى انطفأ أمس تحت وطأة المرض.

لا تبدأ الحكاية في 26 آذار (مارس) 1974 يوم صدرت «السفير»، لكنّ هذه المحطّة المفصلية أعطت للعودة إلى البدايات نكهةً مغايرة، وربّما استعادت تأريخ المحطّات السابقة وترسيخ المحطّات اللاحقة؛ فنتخيّل فتى بعلبكيّاً ريفيّاً من شمسطار يحزم طموحاته وتطلّعاته وعروبته في حقيبة أحلامه، والدنيا زمن مدّ ناصري بعد نكبة 1948 وما استنسلته من قضايا، وزمن دوَل عربية استقلت وأخرى تناضل للاستقلال، وزمن العدوان الثلاثي على مصر، وزمن الانقسام كالعادة على محورَين متضادَّين وربّما أكثر، وزمن حلف بغداد لـ«صدّ المدّ الشيوعي»، وزمن الـ 1958 بوحدة مصرية – سورية وثورتَين عراقية ولبنانية ووصول قائد الجيش اللبناني العلماني المعتدل فؤاد شهاب إلى سدّة الرئاسة خلفاً للرئيس كميل شمعون المحسوب على حلف بغداد والغرب…

في زمن النضال وإعادة صياغة الشرق والحوادث العنقودية هذا، يقصد فتى ريفي مدينة كوسموبوليتية حبلى بإرهاصات القضايا، ويباشر إقامة طويلة في مهنة المتاعب يستهلّها في أواخر خمسينيات القرن الماضي، مصحّحاً في جريدة «النضال»، فمراسلاً صحافيّاً في جريدة «الشرق»، ثمّ محرّراً وسكرتيراً للتحرير في مجلّة «الحوادث» لصاحبها الصحافي الشهيد سليم اللوزي الذي اغتيل عام 1980، فمديراً للتحرير في مجلّة «الأحد» التي أسّسها نقيب الصحافة الشهيد رياض طه سنة 1950، محقّقاً قفزة صحافية مميّزة بملاحقها وتبويبها. وقد اغتيل طه في 23 تموز (يوليو) 1980 أيضاً، في السنة ذاتها التي تعرّضت فيها مطابع «السفير» للتفجير في 1 تشرين الثاني (نوفمبر) 1980، قبل أن يتعرّض طلال سلمان، بسبب صلابة موقفه، لمحاولات لتفجير منزله «تُوّجت» في 14 تموز 1984 بمحاولة اغتياله أمام منزله في رأس بيروت، ما ترك ندوباً في وجهه وصدره، بالإضافة إلى ملاحقته من السلطات وسجنه مرّات عدّة بسبب آرائه ومواقفه الجريئة.

وضع الراحل الحجر الأساس في الإعلام العربي الحديث

في خريف 1962، غادر طلال سلمان لبنان إلى الكويت ليصدر مجلّة «دنيا العروبة» عن «دار الرأي العام» لصاحبها عبد العزيز المساعيد، إلا أنّ ذلك لم يدم أكثر من ستّة أشهر، عاد بعدها سلمان إلى بيروت ليعمل مديراً للتحرير في مجلّة «الصياد» لصاحبها سعيد فريحة، ومحرّراً في مجلّة «الحرية» الأسبوعية السياسية العربية التي كانت لسان حال حركة القوميّين العرب منذ 1959، وأصبحت بعد نكسة 1967 ناطقة باسم «الجبهة الشعبية لتحرير فلسطين» ثم باسم «الجبهة الديموقراطية لتحرير فلسطين» و«منظّمة العمل الشيوعي اللبناني» على إثر انشقاق 1969 في صفوف القوميّين العرب. هذه المجلّة انضمّ إليها الصحافي غسان كنفاني سنة 1961، وهو من بين شهداء الصحافة الجريئة الذين سقطوا أيضاً في بيروت وضواحيها، وقد اغتيل في 8 تموز 1972.

سنة 1974، وقد بلغ الشاب البعلبكي السادسة والثلاثين، أينعت تجربته التي بدأت أواخر الخمسينيات مغامرةً جريئة ستمتدّ حتى نهاية سنة 2016. ففي 26 آذار (مارس) 1974، أصدر العدد الأوّل من «السفير» في بيروت، ليبدأ بذلك النصف الآخر من حياته المهنية كما تجربة صحافية حدّثت معالم المهنة ومقارباتها. أُطلقت «السفير» على أنّها «يومية سياسية مستقلّة»، وحملت شعار «جريدة لبنان في الوطن العربي وجريدة الوطن العربي في لبنان» كما شعار «صوت الذين لا صوت لهم»، وحاول سلمان إظهار استقلاليتها قدر الإمكان. طوال أكثر من أربعة عقود، شكّلت الجريدة مرجعية إعلامية في الشؤون العربية واللبنانية تحظى بالتقدير وبالتأثير في الرأي العام. تضمّنت صفحاتها الأخبار والتغطية الميدانية للأحداث في السياسة والاقتصاد والثقافة والمجتمع والرياضة والترفيه، بالإضافة إلى التحقيقات الميدانية والعلمية والبيئية.

أعطت «السفير» أهمّية للأحداث اللبنانية التي لم يتناولها الإعلام المهيمن، كما للقضية الفلسطينية، واشتهرت بنشرها كاريكاتورات «حنظلة» للرسّام الفلسطيني الكبير ناجي العلي. واستمرّت في حمل لواء شخصية «حنظلة» ومبدعها بعد استشهاد ناجي العلي، كما في حمل لواء قضية فلسطين وقضايا العرب في افتتاحيات سلمان كل اثنين وفي كل ثنية من ثنايا الصحيفة.

(أرشيف)

وكان لجيل الشباب إضاءة خاصّة، فحظي بملحق في الجريدة تحت اسم «شباب». الملحق الذي كان قوام فريق عمله شباباً جامعيّين، أعاد فتح النقاش حول قضايا منسيّة تتعلّق بالمهمّشين، منتجاً فورة في الأوساط السياسية والاجتماعية والاقتصادية. كما دأبت «السفير» لفترة على نشر ملحق «كتاب في جريدة» مع أعدادها، كان عبارة عن كتاب أسبوعي مجّاني ضمن سعيها لنشر الثقافة بيَد الجميع إيماناً منها بحقّ وصول مختلف طبقات المجتمع إلى المعرفة.
أفاق اللبنانيّون والعرب على عام 2017 من دون «السفير» بعد معاناتها من مشاكل جمّة، واعتبر ناشرها أنّها «تغيب… ولا تنطفئ». بعد مسيرة «السفير» الحافلة، خصّص وقته لخوض تجربة جديدة مع موقعه الإلكتروني الخاصّ الذي حمل اسمه، فنشر مع عدد من الزملاء وأصدقاء «السفير» مقالات أسبوعية تحت شعار «على الطريق»، واستمرّ في كتابة المقالات التحليلية حتّى الرمق الأخير. ويستمرّ الموقع تأكيداً على أنّ طلال سلمان يغيب ولا ينطفئ.
هكذا، تُطوى إحدى الصفحات الأخيرة لحقبة لن تعود من الصحافة اللبنانية والعربية. مع ذلك، وضع الراحل الحجر الأساس في الإعلام العربي الحديث، وسيبقى تأثيره حاضراً في أوساط المهنة مباشرةً أو مداورةً، بما ينفي نسبيّاً ما ذهبت إليه الجريدة في مانشيتها الأخيرة قبل احتجابها: «الوطن بلا السفير»، وينفي اليوم نسبيّاً ما قد يتبادر من تنويع على المانشيت المذكورة بالقول إنّ «الوطن بلا صاحب السفير».

من ملف : يغيب ولا ينطفئ

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URGENT APPEAL TO THE WORLD: STOP REPRESSION AGAINST JOURNALISTS IN SERBIA

February 17, 2023

Srbin Info Media

Media and personal freedom in Serbia have hit a new low over the last several days.

On February 15, a large citizens’ protest rally took place in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, around the statue of Czar Nicholas II. The assembled citizens were protesting against the ultimatum recently presented to the Serbian government by France and Germany to officially recognize and legally accept the secession of the NATO occupied southern Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija. They were using their constitutional right to voice their views and were urging the government to reject the ultimatum. The Serbian public believes that the ultimatum was conceived and written by the Biden Administration and that Britain and France were merely used as delivery boys.

A collateral issue is Serbia joining anti-Russia sanctions, which Western government have been pressuring and cajoling its government to do since the start of the Special Military Operation in the Ukraine a year ago. The Serbian government has been delaying compliance with these demands, but there are increasing signs that it is preparing to give in to US and EU pressure in the near future. On both issues, opinion polls show that the Serbian public are opposed to both recognizing Kosovo and joining anti-Russia sanctions by overwhelming majorities of between 85 to 90%.

The February 15 protest was covered by our media service, Srbin Info. Our editor, Dejan Petar Zlatanović also spoke at the rally to express his personal opposition to both the Kosovo ultimatum and the plan to introduce sanctions against Russia. In his remarks he stated that “whoever signs off on giving up Kosovo is a dead man.” The police, which monitored the rally, interpreted his remarks as a direct threat to assassinate Serbia’s President Alexander Vučić and promptly arrested Zlatanović. The violent arrest of our editor, who is 60 and also happens to be a person with a congenital disability, has been filmed and posted on Twitter. Take a listen to his screams as the regime police are taking him away:

Послушајте како је ухапшен новинар Дејан Златановић после протесте за Косово и Метохију. Ово нема ни у Северној Кореји. pic.twitter.com/5QuqYBlkBo

— Др Бранимир Несторовић (@DrBranimir) February 17, 2023

Serbian law provides for detention of no more than 48 hours, unless the prosecutor’s office can satisfy a judge that the detained person constitutes a danger to society, in which case the court can order a longer detention. As the 48 hour period was expiring and the authorities were facing a legal obligation to release Mr. Zlatanović, the prosecutor charged him with planning to violently overthrow the “constitutional order” and requested that the court approve detention of at least 30 days, pending an investigation. Our editor Zlatanović announced that he would begin a hunger strike if the prosecutor’s extended detention request were granted.

Along with Zlatanović the police also arrested human rights activist Damnjan Knežević. During the arrest, Knežević was beaten so badly that he had to be transferred from prison to a hospital to receive medical treatment.

The Serbian regime has managed to deceive a part of the Western public with the narrative that it would never knuckle under to Western pressure to recognize NATO occupied Kosovo as an independent state separate from Serbia and would not impose sanctions on Russia. It was lying on both counts. Now that the farce is falling apart and under Western threats and blackmail it is preparing to do both, it is trying to silence all truth tellers, as evidenced by the repression of opposition media and illegal detention of our editor, Dejan Petar Zlatanović. We ask all who believe in freedom of expression to write to the office of Serbia’s President Alexander Vučić to demand the immediate release of Mr. Zlatanović and Mr. Knežević and the dropping of all charges for legal and non-threatening speech that is protected by Serbia’s constitution and the European Declarations on Human Rights.

Please direct your appeal to:

Alexander Vučić

President of Serbia

www.predsednik.rs

Open reply of the Head of the Foundation to Battle Injustice to the slander of the founder of BellingCat about the investigation and activities of the Foundation

September 09, 2022

Source

by Mira Terada

Eliot Higgins, the leader of the BellingCat organization, an information dump overseen by Western intelligence agencies and known for its incompetent provocations against Russia, Russian citizens and organizations, spoke quite ambiguously about the materials of the July investigation of the Foundation to Battle Injustice. This investigation was devoted to the Ukrainian nationalist website “Myrotvorets” and the involvement of the BellingCat.

Higgins, in a manner peculiar only to British street thugs, attacked the Foundation to Battle Injustice and honest journalists who help our duty. The ridiculous accusation in propaganda is regarded by us as an attempt by Higgins to evade responsibility for the activities of BellingCat and the “Myrotvorets”. The statement that the article published by the journalists of the Monthly Review based on the materials of the Foundation to Battle Injustice was written on facts that were allegedly not verified does not relieve the responsibility of the head and employees of BellingCat for training and financing of the Ukrainian nationalist website “Myrotvorets”. If Higgins really is not involved in the creation of the “Myrotvorets” and wants to prove it, he should join the Foundation’s to Battle Injustice fight against the criminal website, and not engage in empty chatter and harassment of independent journalists.

I would like to mention that Mr. Higgins verbal incontinence on Twitter is the result of fear and panic. Many Russian investigative reporters, including recently killed Daria Dugina, began to find extremely successful evidence of the criminal activities of BellingCat and bring this group of international provocateurs to the surface. It remains to be hoped that sooner or later Eliot Higgins will come to his senses and show prudence, stop supporting nationalists and executioners and stand on the side of truth.

The hysterical reaction of the BellingCat creator about our investigation and the recent Conferences of the Foundation exposing the “Myrotvorets” website is the highest assessment of our work and evidence that we have hit the nail on the head.

An attempt to cover up and justify your activities with a three-year-old publication from Aric Toler, a BellingCat employee engaged in training Ukrainian nationalists, looks inappropriate and absurd, and does not prove your non-involvement in the activities of the “Myrotvorets”.

Mr. Higgins, the next time you decide to write a selective concentration of nonsense on your Twitter account, it would be much better to admit that you’ve just poop your pants.

Mira Terada is the head of the Foundation to Battle Injustice

The American Spring by American Spies: Fake News II

29 Mar 2022

Osama Eltrabolsi 

Source: Al Mayadeen Net

With some reading, eventually, you will see how they utilize big tech algorithms, fake news, and US spies who are good at lying even to their own citizens. 

The American Spring by American Spies: Fake News II

It’s amazing how fast the news cycles are in the USA. It seems as though telling the journalistic truth these days has become akin to the days of the prophets. How ironic it is that the great USA whose thumbprint is power is filled with people who are clueless and unaware of their inner spies… I described this strangeness in my first article. And for credibility sake and journalistic standards, I hold myself to the high standards of always telling the truth. If you practice this, it means that eventually the patterns, cycles, and people emerge from the unknown war machine with names, faces, and religions across the spectrums but all have one common goal: Money and Power.

Writing about the Democrats’ fake Russian Reset, I highlighted how Michael Sussman was exposed by the Americans in a government-authorized investigation. The Durham Report, which is currently in process, proved that Hillary Clinton paid for tech information while accusing Trump of espionage.

Durham’s filing says university researchers mined internet data to establish “an inference” and a “narrative” tying Trump to Russia and that they “were seeking to please certain ‘VIPs’.” Durham identified these VIPs as individuals at Sussmann’s law firm called Perkins Coie, where Sussman was a partner. The Clinton campaign was on that VIP list. Durham’s filing alleged that Trump’s residences and the White House were spied on by a tech executive aligned with the Democratic Party…”

What this implies is that, according to the West itself, there is a wide range of political schemes happening even to the American people, and those schemes look like the Arab Spring. How big a claim but only through a steady dose of truth-filled journalism can one begin to see. As a lawyer and independent journalist, with some reading and following these articles, eventually, you will see how they utilize big tech algorithms, fake news, and American spies who are good at lying even to their citizens. 

WHY IT MATTERS TO US

It matters to us because a masterful strategic identity game is played in American politics, and like a torch in an Olympic game being handed over to a teammate, these American decision-makers hand over revolutions and wars. It is important to know about the American Spring and to understand their hostile powers, their military, and their intelligence capabilities, as well as what their latest scandal affords in the chess game of politics. Did Biden forfeit a massive war machine or did he hand it to the Taliban? These consistently destructive failures have devastating consequences and what we see with US mass media, now including social media, is in direct collusion with who they claim is a terrorist. 

It means the media is flagrantly and sinister in their deflection. But In order to understand, one has to first understand this is a network of closely linked individuals who share a common goal: personal power at the expense of the whole.

In an American Spring, one would see nothing less than the complete destruction of American culture and influence. This has long happened since the days of Obama whose shady Presidency succumbed to a future promising president Hillary Clinton or President Donald J. Trump. Trump won in 2020 as a result of this decaying American influence. It sounds shocking and unbelievable, but essentially Hillary, Obama, and their allies have been positioning themselves to be the Lenin and Stalin of our time. They adopted the principles of their former enemies and have years of contradictions to prove it. How do principles change with such flexibility? They don’t. News cycles change, not values. 

This American Spring is two-fold: the subversion of American culture and its replacement with socialist values, and soon we will be seeing a weaponization of Takfirists Islamic groups again to create instability, division, and ultimately regime changes. 

The Americans are either too unaware of the dirty politics or their media are too proud to admit this. You heard the name Sussman from my writing and later confirmed by the Durham Report. However, Durham is a Special Counsel assigned to investigate the truth about the Russian Democrat-led disinformation campaign which means he is an exception and the US intelligence is no longer credible. Who are they and how do they sleep at night?

To prove my point that the intelligence apparatus of the US has failed, I digress with a NY Post article that calls a list of 51 names of intelligence officers and media pundits spies who lie: 51 ‘intelligence’ experts refuse to apologize for discrediting true Hunter Biden story. These experts chose to cover for Hunter Biden, who lost a computer which has been dubbed as the laptop from hell in which he sold “introductions to his father for 10 million dollars.” The same current news cycle and its major components are happening as we speak but in multiple areas of criminal political activity. 

Let’s look at how this intelligence scandal of the 51 is no different from what we see around the world where the US invokes regime changes and how it relates to us specifically.

Front and Center Left, John Brennan 

Remember that US officials are rotated and cycled through various government institutions distancing them from suspicion or conflicts of interest. Brennan​ in 2010 stated, “And during a 25-year career in government, I was privileged to serve in positions across the Middle East — as a political officer with the State Department and as a CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia, I saw how our Saudi partners fulfilled their duty as custodians of the two holy mosques of Mecca and Medina. I marveled at the majesty of the Hajj and the devotion of those who fulfilled their duty as Muslims by making that privilege — that pilgrimage.” 

This tells us two things we need to know. As he claimed:

1) Brennan admits to being a ‘political officer’ with the State Dept while simultaneously the Jeddah Station chief. The second thing here to note is 

2) Brennan has an affection and admitted pro-Islamic bias. As a political officer for the Dept of State, Brennan would be granted authority to issue visas from his CIA station.

In the West, Brennan has always been questionable by his opponents even so far as rumors claiming that Brennan converted to Islam​. It’s similar to Lawrence of Arabia, but without the charm.

As a journalist, I know what it means for a laptop to be discredited by 51 lying spies and then proven to be true, which calls the spies’ integrity into question.

The American Spring continues under the strange leadership of Biden after a very long history of race-baiting and war-mongering. The laptop being denied isn’t the main story, rather it is what is on the laptop which is the true story, and here again, we see the same characters.

The same John Brennan who was located in Pakistan with Brezinsky, Obama’s university professor, and Carter’s CIA director, who would become a main face in the Arab Spring, is now again here before us. 

History is in fact repeating itself because, despite their promises to avoid history’s mistakes, they continue to commit them. 

Front and Center Right, James Clapper 

Remember that US officials are rotated and cycled through various government institutions distancing them from suspicion or conflicts of interest. The New York Post is asking Clapper to renounce the accusation that was undergirded by fake news and American Spies as they call them. 

President Bill Clinton created a task force to study the Khobar Towers bombing and assess all threats. The Assessment Task Force was led by General Downing, and a retired Air Force Lieutenant named General James Clapper served as the head of the intelligence assessment team. The task force was not asked to do a criminal investigation but only to report instances of malfeasance to the chain of command. 

Downing reported​ that the chain of command “did not provide adequate guidance and support to the commander” who “was ill-served by the intelligence arrangement within his command…” 

Not ironically, from 1999 to 2000, he was the Chief of Staff to then-CIA Director George Tenet. 

Could the whole Russian Hoax have been to protect these people from being exposed for all their ‘malfeasance’ through their appointed careers? With Trump promising to end endless wars, this could be the only path forward. All Biden had to do was win what Hillary lost: Power & Control. Yet, as Obama warned his Democratic accomplices, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to F*** things up.” 

If it’s an American Spring, Trump would now have to be seen as heroic as the Left made Zelenski, no different than how the Egyptians see Sisi.

This American Spring very well may be interrupted if the Americans realize they do have spies amongst them and Biden’s seat of power squeaks with rust as it is upheld by them. 

The Past

To understand the Middle East today, we must know some history. The intelligence scene is very much the fuel behind these conflicts, so consider another person of question. Louis Freeh

George H.W. Bush appointed him a judge for the US District Court for the Southern District of New York in 91. Two years later, he answered a call from President Bill Clinton, and he became the fifth director of the FBI in 93.

Freeh was the FBI Director during the Khobar Towers, the Unabomber, the Centennial Olympic bombing, Ruby Ridge, and Waco investigations. The Oklahoma City bombing happened under his watch.

He served from September 1993 to June 25, 2001, and was succeeded by Robert Mueller who reappears from the past to investigate Trump with the wasteful 3-year sham investigation which led to minimal prosecution compared to what was promised: Espionage. 

As it relates to the Russian Hoax, Freeh is connected to the Russian-owned money laundering firm ‘Prevazon’. Prevazon hired Louis Freeh to help settle a major money-laundering case with the US government for roughly $5.9 million. 

Prevazon is also represented by Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who met with top Trump campaign officials in June 2016 at Trump Tower to lobby for repealing the 2012 Magnitsky Act. This would be the meeting that was planned and orchestrated against Trump. 

Louis Freeh wasn’t used by the Democrats to ensnare Trump but is an intelligence officer with a past that Trump threatened to expose and end. 

With official charges and Trump being acquitted over and over, the loser is the American people because although no charges were brought, this infamous Trump Tower meeting “with Russians” solidified the fake narrative of unproven espionage. Did Freeh have anything to be concerned about? 

Leading us to another worthy note: Natalia Veselnitskaya was indicted for her connection to Kremlin- tied Prevazon, and American mainstream media still has no interest in correcting their false lies regarding the fake and obviously orchestrated Trump Tower meeting. Join me next week as we explore how these men have impacted the Middle East and our lives. And since the Western Media cannot expose it, I invite you to journey as we get to know who the American Spies are and how they have meticulously organized in a stealthy manner what will soon be known in the history books as the American Spring.

The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.

Related

• Fake news & refugees: Democrats recruiting mercenaries
• Who’s fighting whom & who’s cheating?
• Russian Reset

John Pilger: Justice for Assange is Justice for All

November 01st, 2021

Julian Assange is a truth-teller who has committed no crime but revealed government crimes and lies on a vast scale and so performed one of the great public services of my lifetime.

By John Pilger

Source

When I first saw Julian Assange in Belmarsh prison, in 2019, shortly after he had been dragged from his refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy, he said, “I think I am losing my mind.”

He was gaunt and emaciated, his eyes hollow and the thinness of his arms was emphasised by a yellow identifying cloth tied around his left arm, an evocative symbol of institutional control.

For all but the two hours of my visit, he was confined to a solitary cell in a wing known as “healthcare”, an Orwellian name. In the cell next to him a deeply disturbed man screamed through the night. Another occupant suffered from terminal cancer. Another was seriously disabled.

“One day we were allowed to play Monopoly,” he said, “as therapy. That was our healthcare!”

“This is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” I said.

“Yes, only more insane.”

Julian’s black sense of humour has often rescued him, but no more. The insidious torture he has suffered in Belmarsh has had devastating effects. Read the reports of Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, and the clinical opinions of Michael Kopelman, emeritus professor of neuropsychiatry at King’s College London and Dr. Quentin Deeley, and reserve a contempt for America’s hired gun in court, James Lewis QC, who dismissed this as “malingering”.

I was especially moved by the expert words of Dr. Kate Humphrey, a clinical neuropsychologist at Imperial College, London. She told the Old Bailey last year that Julian’s intellect had gone from “in the superior, or more likely very superior, range” to “significantly below” this optimal level, to the point where he was struggling to absorb information and “perform in the low to average range”.

At yet another court hearing in this shameful Kafkaesque drama, I watched him struggle to remember his name when asked by the judge to state it.

For most of his first year in Belmarsh, he was locked up. Denied proper exercise, he strode the length of his small cell, back and forth, back and forth, for “my own half-marathon”, he told me. This reeked of despair. A razorblade was found in his cell. He wrote “farewell letters”. He phoned the Samaritans repeatedly.

At first he was denied his reading glasses, left behind in the brutality of his kidnapping from the embassy. When the glasses finally arrived at the prison, they were not delivered to him for days. His solicitor, Gareth Peirce, wrote letter after letter to the prison governor protesting the withholding of legal documents, access to the prison library, the use of a basic laptop with which to prepare his case. The prison would take weeks, even months, to answer. (The governor, Rob Davis, has been awarded an Order of the British Empire).

Books sent to him by a friend, the journalist Charles Glass, himself a survivor of hostage-taking in Beirut, were returned. Julian could not call his American lawyers. From the start, he has been constantly medicated. Once, when I asked him what they were giving him, he couldn’t say.

At last week’s High Court hearing to decide finally whether or not Julian would be extradited to America, he appeared only briefly by video link on the first day. He looked unwell and unsettled. The court was told he had been “excused” because of his “medication”. But Julian had asked to attend the hearing and was refused, said his partner Stella Morris. Attendance in a court sitting in judgement on you is surely a right.

This intensely proud man also demands the right to appear strong and coherent in public, as he did at the Old Bailey last year. Then, he consulted constantly with his lawyers through the slit in his glass cage. He took copious notes. He stood and protested with eloquent anger at lies and abuses of process.

The damage done to him in his decade of incarceration and uncertainty, including more than two years in Belmarsh (whose brutal regime is celebrated in the latest Bond film) is beyond doubt.

But so, too, is his courage beyond doubt, and a quality of resistance and resilience that is heroism. It is this that may see him through the present Kafkaesque nightmare – if he is spared an American hellhole.

I have known Julian since he first came to Britain in 2009. In our first interview, he described the moral imperative behind WikiLeaks: that our right to the transparency of governments and the powerful was a basic democratic right. I have watched him cling to this principle when at times it has made his life even more precarious.

Almost none of this remarkable side to the man’s character has been reported in the so-called “free press” whose own future, it is said, is in jeopardy if Julian is extradited.

Of course, but there has never been a ”free press”. There have been extraordinary journalists who have occupied positions in the “mainstream” – spaces that have now closed, forcing independent journalism on to the internet.

There, it has become a “fifth estate”, a samizdat of dedicated, often unpaid work by those who were honourable exceptions in a media now reduced to an assembly line of platitudes. Words like “democracy”, “reform”, “human rights” are stripped of their dictionary meaning and censorship is by omission or exclusion.

Last week’s fateful hearing at the High Court was “disappeared” in the “free press”. Most people would not know that a court in the heart of London had sat in judgement on their right to know: their right to question and dissent.

Many Americans, if they know anything about the Assange case, believe a fantasy that Julian is a Russian agent who caused Hillary Clinton to lose the presidential election in 2016 to Donald Trump. This is strikingly similar to the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, which justified the invasion of Iraq and the deaths of a million or more people.

They are unlikely to know that the main prosecution witness underpinning one of the concocted charges against Julian has recently admitted he lied and fabricated his “evidence”.

Neither will they have heard or read about the revelation that the CIA, under its former director, the Hermann Goering lookalike Mike Pompeo, had planned to assassinate Julian.  And that was hardly new. Since I have known Julian, he has been under threat of harm and worse.

On his first night in the Ecuadorean embassy in 2012, dark figures swarmed over the front of the embassy and banged on the windows, trying to get in. In the US, public figures – including Hillary Clinton, fresh from her destruction of Libya – have long called for Julian’s assassination. The current President Biden damned him as a “hi-tech terrorist”.

The former prime minister of Australia, Julia Gillard, was so eager to please what she called “our best mates” in Washington that she demanded Julian’s passport be taken from him – until it was pointed out to her that this would be against the law. The current prime minister, Scott Morrison, a PR man, when asked about Assange, said, “He should face the music.”

It has been open season on the WikiLeaks’ founder for more than a decade. In 2011, The Guardian exploited Julian’s work as if it was its own, collected journalism prizes and Hollywood deals, then turned on its source.

Years of vituperative assaults on the man who refused to join their club followed. He was accused of failing to redact documents of the names of those considered at risk. In a Guardian book by David Leigh and Luke Harding, Assange is quoted as saying during a dinner in a London restaurant that he didn’t care if informants named in the leaks were harmed.

Neither Harding nor Leigh was at the dinner. John Goetz, an investigations reporter with Der Spiegel, actually was at the dinner and testified that Assange said nothing of the kind.

The great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg told the Old Bailey last year that Assange had personally redacted 15,000 files. The New Zealand investigative journalist Nicky Hager, who worked with Assange on the Afghanistan and Iraq war leaks, described how Assange took “extraordinary precautions in redacting names of informants”.

In 2013,  I asked the film-maker Mark Davis about this. A respected broadcaster for SBS Australia, Davis was an eyewitness, accompanying Assange during the preparation of the leaked files for publication in The Guardian and The New York Times. He told me, “Assange was the only one who worked day and night extracting 10,000 names of people who could be targeted by the revelations in the logs.”

Lecturing a group of City University students, David Leigh mocked the very idea that “Julian Assange will end up in an orange jumpsuit”. His fears were an exaggeration, he sneered. Edward Snowden later revealed that Assange was on a “manhunt timeline”.

Luke Harding, who co-authored with Leigh the Guardian book that disclosed the password to a trove of diplomatic cables that Julian had entrusted to the paper, was outside the Ecuadorean embassy on the evening Julian sought asylum. Standing with a line of police, he gloated on his blog, “Scotland Yard may well have the last laugh.”

The campaign was relentless. Guardian columnists scraped the depths. “He really is the most massive turd,” wrote Suzanne Moore of a man she had never met.

The editor who presided over this, Alan Rusbridger, has lately joined the chorus that “defending Assange protects the free press”. Having published the initial WikiLeaks revelations, Rusbridger must wonder if the Guardian’s subsequent excommunication of Assange will be enough to protect his own skin from the wrath of Washington.

The High Court judges are likely to announce their decision on the US appeal in the new year. What they decide will determine whether or not the British judiciary has trashed the last vestiges of its vaunted reputation; in the land of Magna Carta this disgraceful case ought to have been hurled out of court long ago.

The missing imperative is not the impact on a collusive “free press”. It is justice for a man persecuted and willfully denied it.

Julian Assange is a truth-teller who has committed no crime but revealed government crimes and lies on a vast scale and so performed one of the great public services of my lifetime. Do we need to be reminded that justice for one is justice for all?

I’m on a ‘hit list’ Kiev allows to silence dissent & journalism. That’s all you need to know about Ukrainian ‘democracy’

June 12, 2021, RT.com

Address issues which Ukraine, the West’s client state, does not like and you could end up on a ‘hit list’. Because that’s apparently how flourishing democracies roll…

Last week, photojournalist Dean O’Brien participated in a United Nations meeting to give his perspective on the war in Donbass, Ukraine’s breakaway region in the east. Shortly after the discussion, O’Brien came under fire from the Ukrainian embassy in the UK.

However, smears from Ukrainian officials are nothing compared to what the controversial ‘enemies of Ukraine’ database, the Mirotvorets (Peacekeeper) website, could bring.

In May, O’Brien and I discussed this hit list, noting that we were both on it, with photos of us published on the witch-hunt website.

“It’s a website called ‘Peacemaker.’ It’s anything but, really. It seems to be a hit list, a target for journalists or anybody that goes against the grain in Ukraine. If you’re reporting on them, they see you as some kind of threat and put you on this list,” he said. 

The platform was created in 2014, shortly after Crimea was reabsorbed by Russia and the Kiev government’s military campaign in eastern Ukraine was launched. As TASS noted in 2019, Mirotvorets “aims to identify and publish personal data of all who allegedly threaten the national security of Ukraine. In recent years, the personal data of journalists, artists or politicians who have visited Crimea, Donbass, or for some other reason have caused a negative assessment of the authors of the site, have been blacklisted by Peacemaker.”

Talking about the horrors that Donbass civilians endure under Ukrainian shelling is, according to this rationale, a threat to Ukraine’s national security. As is going to Crimea, maintaining that Crimeans chose to be a part of Russia (or, as many in Crimea told me, to return to Russia) and criticising the influence neo-Nazis wield in Kiev.

“The most worrying thing is that they seem to be able to get a hold of people’s passports, visas,” O’Brien told me. “The fact that they can get ahold of your passport photo, your visa photocopies, these can only come from official government offices in Ukraine. This is a governmental website, it’s been discussed in parliament, to close it down. They’re not interested in closing it down. This website is kind of like a hit list, really.”

That might seem like an exaggeration, but people listed on Mirotvorets have been targeted and even killed.

A report by the Foundation for the Study of Democracy titled “Ukrainian War Crimes and Human Rights Violations (2017-2020)” gave the example of a Ukrainian journalist assassinated in 2015 after his personal details were published on the website.

“A few days before his death, Oles Buzina’s details, including his home address, had been posted on the Canadian-based Mirotvorets website, created with the initiative of Anton Gerashchenko, the Ukrainian deputy minister of internal affairs. The people listed on it are recommended for liquidation and arrest, and the total number of people listed are in the tens of thousands.

According to many experts, it was the listing on the site and the publication of the home address that prompted the murder of Oles Buzina, Oleg Kalashnikov, and many other opposition figures by members of the Ukrainian ‘death squads’.

Back in 2015, Georgiy Tuka, who participated in the creation and operation of the site, stated that, of the people listed on the site, “more than 300 were either arrested or destroyed,” the report states. 

When in April 2015 the Ukrainian parliament’s Commissioner for Human Rights Valeriya Lutkovskaya launched an effort to shut the list down, the then-adviser to Minister of Internal Affairs Anton Gerashchenko threatened her position and stated that the work of the site was “extremely important for the national security of Ukraine.” He said that “anyone who does not understand this or tries to interfere with this work is either a puppet in the hands of others or works against the interests of national security.” 

So the website remains active, with Ukraine’s security service reportedly stating that it did not see any violations of Ukrainian law in the activities of the Mirotvorets website.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, too, has refused to have the website shut down, ironically claiming that it’s wrong to interfere with the work of websites and the media.

Let’s remember that in Ukraine, untold numbers of journalists, activists and civilians have been imprisoned, and killed, for their crimes of voicing criticism of the government and neo-Nazi groups.

Ukraine isn’t the only country to host such a hit list. Although Stop the ISM (International Solidarity Movement) – the project of crazed US-based journalist, Lee Kaplan – named activists, including myself, for our crimes of reporting on Israel’s brutal bombardment of Gaza in 2008/09, the website has since changed format and is far less detailed. But cached versions show the extent of its insanity, including a clear call for our murders:

“ALERT THE IDF MILITARY TO TARGET ISM

“Number to call if you can pinpoint the locations of Hamas with their ISM members with them. Help us neutralise the ISM that is now definitely a part of Hamas since the war began.”

Others on the kill list were named for their crimes of reporting Israel’s systematic abuse and killing of Palestinians. Their personal details, including passport information, were published.

An article on this heinous website noted: “The dossiers are openly addressed to the Israeli military so as to help them eliminate ‘dangerous’ targets physically, unless others see to it first.”

Although arguably that website was the project of one lunatic and their allies, the fact that for many years it stayed active and called for the murders of international peace activists speaks volumes on America’s own values.

I’m sure these two hit-list examples are not isolated ones. Quite likely, there are similar lists targeting journalists reporting on the crimes of other countries. But they are the height of absurdity, and fascism: targeting people whose reporting aims to help persecuted civilians.

Meanwhile in Donbass, Ukraine reportedly continues its shelling of civilian areas. Recently in Gorlovka, a northern city hammered by Ukrainian bombing over the years, a mine blew off part of a woman’s leg as she gathered mushrooms.

This is the woman who was earlier blown up by a mine in Gorlovka. She had her left leg torn off when the mine exploded whilst she was innocently picking mushrooms. Yet again, another innocent victim caught up in this brutal conflict. #Donbass pic.twitter.com/DBQGD2h8J9— Dean O’Brien – BA (Hons) (@DeanoBeano1) June 6, 2021

In spite of the hit list, journalists, rightly, continue to report on these war crimes.

Related:

–Seven years after Maidan divided country, Ukraine intensifies shelling of Donbass to sound of deafening silence from Western media

–Donbass War Diary Feature photo Donbass War Diary Under Fire from Ukraine and Misperceived by the West, The People of the DPR Share Their Stories

–Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) playlist

–Accused of Treason and Imprisoned Without Trial: Journalist Kirill Vyshinsky Recounts His Harrowing Time in a Ukrainian Prison

Dean O’Brien on Ukraine’s “Kill List” and on Reporting From the Donbass

May 7, 2021

Eva Bartlett

The other day I spoke with Dean O’Brien, a UK photojournalist, on his reporting from the Donbass.

With World Press Freedom Day only having recently passed, our conversation about the Ukrainian “kill list” (essentially), which includes journalists who have reported from the Donbass and/or Crimea, was appropriately timed.

Both Dean and myself are on that list, for our crimes of reporting on how Ukraine’s shelling of frontline villages is terrorizing mostly elderly civilians, destroying their homes, and is generally ignored by Western corporate media and politicians.

Eva Bartlett is an independent writer and rights activist with extensive experience in Syria and in the Gaza Strip, where she lived a cumulative three years (from late 2008 to early 2013). She documented the 2008/9 and 2012 Israeli war crimes and attacks on Gaza while riding in ambulances and reporting from hospitals. In 2017, she was short-listed for the prestigious Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. The award rightly was given to the amazing journalist, the late Robert Parry [see his work on Consortium News]. In March 2017, she was awarded “International Journalism Award for International Reporting” granted by the Mexican Journalists’ Press Club (founded in 1951). Co-recipients included: John Pilger and political analyst Thierry Meyssan. She was also the first recipient of the Serena Shim award, an honour shared with many excellent journalists since. She has visited Syria 14 times, the last time being from March to late September, 2020. All of her writings and videos on which can be found here: and here: A more detailed account of her activism and writings can be found here:

Please consider supporting Dean’s journalism:

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RELATED LINKS:

–Ukrainian parliament speaker rejects UN call to close Mirotvorets website

–Liliya Nikon Interview

–Anna Tuv Interview

–Under Fire from Ukraine and Misperceived by the West, The People of the DPR Share Their Stories

–DPR playlist

Julian Assange trial: the mask of Empire has fallen

Source

September 18, 2020

By Pepe Escobar with permission from the author and first posted at Asia Times

The concept of “History in the making” has been pushed to extremes when it comes to the extraordinary public service being performed by historian, former UK diplomat and human rights activist Craig Murray.

Murray – literally, and on a global level – is now positioned as our man in the public gallery, as he painstakingly documents in vivid detail what could be defined as the trial of the century as far as the practice of journalism is concerned: the kangaroo court judging Julian Assange in Old Bailey, London.

Let’s focus on three of Murray’s reports this week – with an emphasis on two intertwined themes: what the US is really prosecuting, and how Western corporate media is ignoring the court proceedings.

Here, Murray reports the exact moment when the mask of Empire fell, not with a bang, but a whimper:

“The gloves were off on Tuesday as the US Government explicitly argued that all journalists are liable to prosecution under the Espionage Act (1917) for publishing classified information.” (italics mine).

“All journalists” means every legitimate journalist, from every nationality, operating in any jurisdiction.

Interpreting the argument, Murray added, “the US government is now saying, completely explicitly, in court, those reporters could and should have gone to jail and that is how we will act in future. The Washington Post, the New York Times, and all the “great liberal media” of the US are not in court to hear it and do not report it (italics mine), because of their active complicity in the “othering” of Julian Assange as something sub-human whose fate can be ignored. Are they really so stupid as not to understand that they are next?

Err, yes.”

The point is not that self-described paladins of “great liberal media” are stupid. They are not covering the charade in Old Bailey because they are cowards. They must keep their fabled “access” to the bowels of Empire – the kind of “access” that allowed Judith Miller to “sell” the illegal war on Iraq in countless front pages, and allows CIA asset and uber-opportunist Bob Woodward to write his “insider” books.

Nothing to see here

Previously, Murray had already detailed how “the mainstream media are turning a blind eye. There were three reporters in the press gallery, one of them an intern and one representing the NUJ. Public access continues to be restricted and major NGOs, including Amnesty, PEN and Reporters Without Borders, continue to be excluded both physically and from watching online.”

Murray also detailed how “the six of us allowed in the public gallery, incidentally, have to climb 132 steps to get there, several times a day. As you know, I have a very dodgy ticker; I am with Julian’s dad John who is 78; and another of us has a pacemaker.”

So why is he “the man in the public gallery”? “I do not in the least discount the gallant efforts of others when I explain that I feel obliged to write this up, and in this detail, because otherwise the vital basic facts of the most important trial this century, and how it is being conducted, would pass almost completely unknown to the public. If it were a genuine process, they would want people to see it, not completely minimize attendance both physically and online.”

Unless people around the world are reading Murray’s reports – and very few others with much less detail – they will ignore immensely important aspects plus the overall appalling context of what’s really happening in the heart of London. The main fact, as far as journalism is concerned, is that Western corporate media is completely ignoring it.

Let’s check the UK coverage on Day 9, for instance.

There was no article in The Guardian – which cannot possibly cover the trial because the paper, for years, was deep into no holds barred smearing and total demonization of Julian Assange.

There was nothing on The Telegraph – very close to MI6 – and only a brief AP story on the Daily Mail.

There was a brief article in The Independent only because one of the witnesses, Eric Lewis, is one of the directors of the Independent Digital News and Media Ltd which publishes the paper.

For years, the process of degrading Julian Assange to sub-human level was based on repeating a bunch of lies so often they become truth. Now, the conspiracy of silence about the trial does wonders to expose the true face of Western liberal “values” and liberal “democracy”.

Daniel Ellsberg speaks

Murray provided absolutely essential context for what Daniel “Pentagon Papers” Ellsberg made it very clear in the witness stand.

The Afghan War logs published by WikiLeaks were quite similar to low-level reports Ellsberg himself had written about Vietnam. The geopolitical framework is the same: invasion and occupation, against the interests of the absolute majority of the invaded and occupied.

Murray, illustrating Ellsberg, writes that “the war logs had exposed a pattern of war crimes: torture, assassination and death squads. The one thing that had changed since Vietnam was that these things were now so normalized they were classified below Top Secret.”

This is a very important point. All the Pentagon Papers were in fact Top Secret. But crucially, the WikiLeaks papers were not Top Secret: in fact they were below Top Secret, not subject to restricted distribution. So they were not really sensitive – as the United States government now alleges.

On the by now legendary Collateral Murder video, Murray details Ellsberg’s argument: “Ellsberg stated that it definitely showed murder, including the deliberate machine gunning of a wounded and unarmed civilian. That it was murder was undoubted. The dubious word was “collateral”, which implies accidental. What was truly shocking about it was the Pentagon reaction that these war crimes were within the Rules of Engagement. Which permitted murder.”

The prosecution cannot explain why Julian Assange withheld no less than 15,000 files; how he took a lot of time to redact the ones that were published; and why both the Pentagon and the State Dept. refused to collaborate with WikiLeaks. Murray: “Ten years later, the US Government has still not been able to name one single individual who was actually harmed by the WikiLeaks releases.”

Prometheus Bound 2.0

President Trump has made two notorious references to WikiLeaks on the record: “I love WikiLeaks” and “I know nothing about WikiLeaks”. That may reveal nothing on how a hypothetical Trump 2.0 administration would act if Julian Assange was extradited to the US. What we do now is that the most powerful Deep State factions want him “neutralized”. Forever.

I felt compelled to portray Julian Assange’s plight as Prometheus Bound 2.0. In this poignant post-modern tragedy, the key subplot centers on a deadly blow to true journalism, in the sense of speaking truth to power.

Julian Assange continues to be treated as an extremely dangerous criminal, as his partner Stella Moris describes it in a tweet.

Craig Murray will arguably enter History as the central character in a very small chorus warning us all about the tragedy’s ramifications.

It’s also quite fitting that the tragedy is also a commentary on a previous era that featured, unlike Blake’s poem, a Marriage of Hell and Hell: GWOT and OCO (Global War on Terror, under George W. Bush, and Overseas Contingency Operations under Barack Obama).

Julian Assange is being condemned for revealing imperial war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet in the end all that post-9/11 sound and fury signified nothing.

It actually metastasized into the worst imperial nightmare: the emergence of a prime, compounded peer competitor, the Russia-China strategic partnership.

“Not here the darkness, in this twittering world” (T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton). An army of future Assanges awaits.

Pilger, Burchett and Assange: Three Extraordinary Australian Journalists That Spoke Truth to Power

By Rick Sterling

Source

Australia has produced extraordinary journalists across three generations:  Wilfred Burchett (deceased in 1983), John Pilger (80 years old but still active) and Julian Assange (48 years old, currently in London’s Belmarsh prison).

Each of these journalists made unique contributions to our understanding of the world. Although Australia is part of the western world, each of these journalists exposed and criticized Western foreign policy.

Wilfred Burchett

Wilfred Burchett lived from 1911 to 1983. He was a farm boy and his experience in the depression shaped his dislike of oligarchs and preference for the poor.  He went to Europe trying to volunteer for Republicans in the Spanish Civil War but that did not work out.  Instead, he assisted Jews escaping Nazi Germany.

Burchett became a journalist by accident. Having seen the reality in Germany, he started writing many letters to newspaper editors. One of the editors took note of his fluid writing style and intensity. They contacted him to ask if he would like to report for them. Thus began a forty year writing career.

He covered WW2, first stationed with British troops in India then Burma. Then he covered the Pacific campaign stationed with U.S. troops.  He was the first international journalist to report on Hiroshima after the atomic bomb. He evaded US military restrictions to go to Hiroshima and see reality for himself. In his story “The Atomic Plague”, published in the London Daily Express, Burchett said,  “I write this as a warning to the world” and “Doctors fall as they work”.   Immediately the US launched a campaign to smear his reputation and deny the validity of his story. The US military was intent on preventing people from knowing the long term effects of nuclear radiation.

Burchett’s report from Hiroshima was broadcast worldwide and called the “scoop of the century”. It exemplified his career based on first-hand observation and experience.

Over his 40 year career, he reported the other side of the story from the Soviet Union, China, Korea and Vietnam. He wrote thousands of articles and over 35 books.  On China, he wrote “China’s Feet Unbound” in 1952. Two decades later he wrote (with Rewi Alley) “China: The Quality of Life”.

Burchett wrote “Vietnam: The Inside Story of a Guerrilla War” (1965) “My War with the CIA: The Memoirs of Prince Norodom Sihanouk”(1974), “Grasshoppers and Elephants: Why Vietnam Fell” (1977) and then “Catapult to Freedom: The Survival of the Vietnamese People” (1978).

Burchett’s life, experiences and observations are brilliantly recorded in his autobiography “At the Barricades: Forty Years on the Cutting Edge of History” (1980). They reveal the hardscrabble youth and early years, the leftist sympathies, the decades of journalistic work based on first-hand observations.

Burchett was vilified by the establishment political leaders in Australia. His Australian passport was taken, the government refused to issue him a new one and he was barred from entering Australia. Even his children were denied their Australian citizenship. Finally, after 17 years, Wilfred Burchett’s citizenship and passport were restored when Gough Whitlam became Prime Minister in 1972.

With his unassuming and affable manner, Wilfred Burchett became friends with leaders such as Ho Chi Minh, Norodom Sihanouk,  and Chou en Lai.   Bertrand Russell said, “One man, Wilfred Burchett, alerted Western public opinion to the nature of this war and the struggle of the Vietnamese people.”

This interview gives a glimpse into the character and personality of Wilfred Burchett.

John Pilger

John Pilger is another extraordinary Australian journalist.  After starting journalism in the early ’60s,  he became a war correspondent covering Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Biafra. He worked 25 years at London’s Daily Mirror and then had a regular fortnightly column for 23 years at the New Statesman.

His first documentary, “The Quiet Mutiny”, depicted US soldiers in Vietnam resisting their officers and the war. In 1974, when Palestine was often unmentionable, he produced “Palestine is Still the Issue”. Nineteen years later, he wrote the second part and described how  Palestine is still the issue.

John Pilger has written/edited over ten books and made over 50 films. He told the story of atrocities in Pol Pot’s Cambodia with “Year Zero“.  He exposed Indonesia’s stranglehold on East Timor in “Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy”.  In a four year investigation, he showed how working-class victims of the drug thalidomide had been excluded from a settlement with the drug company.

John Pilger exposed uncomfortable truths about his home country and its treatment of aboriginal people. He did this through films including “The Secret Country: First Australians Fight Back” (1985),  “Welcome to Australia” (1999), and “Utopia: An Epic Story of Struggle and Resistance” (2013).  He gives more history and detail in the book “A Secret Country” (1992).

In 2002 Pilger produced and movie and book titled “The New Rulers of the World”  revealing the grotesque inequality in this “globalized” world where a few individuals and corporations have more power and wealth than entire countries.

In 2016 Pilger came out with the urgent and prescient video “The Coming War with China”.

More recently he produced “The Dirty War on the NHS” which documents the stealth campaign to privatize the UK’s National Health System. Many of John Pilger’s films can be seen at his website johnpilger.com .

In the 1960s and ’70s, Pilger’s brave and bold journalism received many awards and he was twice recognized as Journalist of the Year.  But in recent years, there has been less acceptance as media has become more homogenized and controlled.  In 2018 Pilger said, “My written journalism is no longer welcome – probably it’s last home was The Guardian, which three years ago got rid of people like me and others in pretty much a purge …”  

Harold Pinter, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, says “John Pilger unearths, with steely attention, the facts, the filthy truth. and tells it like it is.

Julian Assange

The third extraordinary Australian journalist is Julian Assange. He was born on 3 July 1971.  He became a skilled computer programmer and hacker as a teenager. Later he later studied mathematics and physics at Melbourne University. According to one of his math teachers he was an exceptional student but he clearly had other tasks and priorities.

Assange has edited or co-authored at least four books. For three years he worked with Australian journalist and co-author Suelette Dreyfus to write “Underground : Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession in the Electronic Frontier”.  First published in 1997, the Sydney Morning Herald called it “astonishing”. Rolling Stone described it as “An entirely original focus on the bizarre lives and crimes of an extraordinary group of teenage hackers.” 

In 2012, Assange produced the TV series “The World Tomorrow”. Over 12 segments, he interviews Ecuador President Rafael Correa, the current President of Pakistan Imran Khan, the leader of Hezbollah Hasan Nasrallah, leaders in the Occupy movement, Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali and many more.

In 2013, Assange and WikiLeaks produced the movie Mediastan. It shows WikiLeaks’ global travels to meet publishers of the secret documents.  In 2014 OR Books published “When WikiLeaks met Google”. It consists of a discussion between Julian Assange and Google founder Eric Schmidt plus two companions. Assange writes a 51-page introduction which puts the discussion in context: how Google and other internet giants have become part of  US foreign policy establishment.

In 2015 Assange edited “The WikiLeaks files: the world according to the US Empire” and in 2016 the book “Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet” was published. Assange and three other computer experts discuss the future of the internet and whether computers will emancipate or enslave us. One reviewer says, “These guys are really getting at the heart of some very big issues that practically no one (outside of Cypherpunk circles) is thinking about.”

But what makes Assange extraordinary is his work as editor in chief and publisher of WikiLeaks.  Following are a few examples of information they have conveyed to the public:

* Corruption by family and associates of  Kenyan leader Daniel Arap Moi.

* Corruption at Kaupthing Bank in the Iceland financial crisis

* Dumping of toxic chemicals in Ivory Coast.

* Killing of  Reuters journalists and over 10 Iraqi civilians by US Apache attack helicopter in “Collateral Murder” video.

* 92,000 documents on the war in Afghanistan (and civilian casualties previously hidden)

* 400,000 documents on the war in Iraq (including reports showing the US military ignoring torture by their Iraqi allies)

* corruption in Tunisia (helping spark the Arab Spring)

* NSA spying on German leader Merkel, Brazilian leader Roussef, French presidents (Sarkozy, Hollande, Chirac) and more.

* secret agreements in the proposed Trans Pacific Partnership

* emails and files from the US Democratic National Committee

* CIA spying and other tools  (“Vault 7”).

Julian Assange has received much recognition: Sam Adams Award, Time’s Person of the Year, Le Monde Person of the Year,  Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, Sydney Peace Foundation Gold Medal, Serena Shim Award and others.

But Assange has incurred the wrath and enmity of the US government. The “Collateral Damage” video and war logs exposed the brutal reality of US aggression and occupation.  Kofi Annan, former Secretary-General of the United Nations, said the US invasion of Iraq violated international law. But there has been no accountability.

In response to WikiLeaks’ revelations, the United States has ignored the crimes and gone after the messenger who revealed the crimes. Thus Julian Assange was confined to the Ecuador Embassy for 7 years and is now in Belmarsh maximum-security prison.  The US wants him extradited to the US where he has been charged with 18 counts of  “Illegally Obtaining, Receiving and Disclosing Classified Information”.  The extradition hearing is scheduled to begin on 24 February 2020.

Across Three Generations

Australia should be proud of these exceptional native sons. Each one has made huge contributions to educating the public about crucial events.

Wilfred Burchett reported from the “other side” when the West was waging war on Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and China. He was demonized and even called “Public Enemy Number One” during the Cold War.  But those who read his reports and many books found an accurate and objective writer. His many books stand the test of time.

From the 60s to today, John Pilger has told stories that were never or rarely told.  He has exposed facts and drawn conclusions which shame or should shame powerful forces, whether in the U.K., U.S.A. or Australia. He has documented the real heroes who are otherwise ignored.

Julian Assange is from the new generation. He has reported and published secret information about military-political power on “this side”. He has revealed truths that powerful forces do not want the public to know, even when it is being done in their name.

Now Assange is in prison and in danger of being extradited to the United States. If this is allowed to happen, it will mark a crushing setback and perhaps the death of independent investigative journalism.

John Pilger is a major supporter of Julian Assange. So is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer. In a blockbuster interview, he says “I have never seen a comparable case….The Swedish authorities … intentionally left him in limbo. Just imagine being accused of rape for nine-and-a-half years by an entire state apparatus and the media without ever being given the chance to defend yourself because no charges have ever been filed.” He goes to describe reading the original Swedish documents, saying “I could hardly believe my eyes…. a rape had never taken place at all…. the woman’s testimony was later changed by the Stockholm police… I have all the documents in my possession, the emails, the text messages.”  

Melzer describes the refusal of governments to comply with his requests. He sums up what is happening and the significance. “A show trial is to be used to make an example of Julian Assange….. Four democratic countries joined forces – the U.S., Ecuador, Sweden, and the U.K. – to leverage their power to portray one man as a monster so that he could be later burned at the stake without any outcry. The case is a huge scandal and represents the failure of Western rule of law. If Julian Assange is convicted, it will be a death sentence for freedom of the press.”

The three extraordinary Australian journalists were all rebels and all international. They all depended on freedom of the press which is now at stake.