Antinuclear

Julian Assange: Free at last, but guilty of practicing journalism

Pepe Escobar, Strategic Culture Foundation, Wed, 26 Jun 2024, https://www.sott.net/article/492585-Julian-Assange-Free-at-last-but-guilty-of-practicing-journalism

The United States Government (USG) – under the “rules-based international order” – has de facto ruled that Julian Assange is guilty of practicing journalism.

Edward Snowden had already noted that “when exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals.”

Criminals such as Mike “We Lie, We Cheat, We Steal” Pompeo, former Trump Secretary of State, who had planned to kidnap and kill Julian when he was head of the CIA.

The indomitable Jennifer Robinson and Julian’s U.S. lawyer Barry Pollack sum it all up: the United States has “pursued journalism as a crime”.

Julian was forced to suffer an unspeakably vicious Via Crucis because he dared to expose USG war crimes; the inner workings of the U.S. military in their rolling thunder War Of Terror (italics mine) in Afghanistan and Iraq; and – Holy of Holies – he dared to release emails showing the Democratic National Committee (DNC) colluded with the notorious warmongering Harpy Hillary Clinton.

Julian was subjected to relentless psychological torture, and nearly crucified for publishing facts that should always remain invisible to public opinion. That’s what top-notch journalism is all about.

The whole drama teaches the whole planet everything one needs to know about the absolute control of the Hegemon over pathetic UK and EU.

And that bring us to the kabuki that may – and the operative word is “may” – be closing the case. Title of the twisted morality play: ‘Plead Guilty or Die in Jail’.

The final twist in the plot line of the morality play runs like this: the combo behind the cadaver in the White House realized that torturing an Australian journalist and publisher in a maximum security U.S. prison in an electoral year was not exactly good for business.

At the same time the British establishment was begging to be excluded from the plot – as its “justice” system was forced by the Hegemon to keep an innocent man and family father hostage for 5 years, in abysmal conditions, in the name of protecting a basket of Anglo-American intel secrets.

In the end, the British establishment quietly applied all the pressure it could muster to run towards the exit – in full knowledge of what the Americans were planning for Julian.

Life in prison was “fair and reasonable”

Cue to the kabuki this Wednesday in Saipan, the largest of the Northern Mariana Islands, unincorporated Pacific land administered by the Hegemon.

Free at last – maybe, but with conditionalities that remain quite murky.

Julian was ordered by this U.S. Court in the Pacific to instruct WikiLeaks to destroy information as a condition of the deal.

Julian had to tell U.S. judge Ramona Manglona that he was not bribed or coerced to plead guilty to the crucial charge of “conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified information relating to the national defense of the United States”.

Well, his lawyers told him he had to follow the ‘Plead Guilty or Die in Jail’ script. Otherwise, no deal.

Judge Manglona – in an astonishing brush aside of those 5 years of psychological torture – said, “it appears that your 62 months in prison was fair and reasonable and proportionate.”

So now the – oh, so benign and “fair” – USG will take the necessary steps to immediately erase remaining charges against Julian in the notoriously harsh Eastern District of Virginia.

Julian was always adamant: he stressed over and over again that he would never plead guilty to an espionage charge. He didn’t; he pleaded guilty to a hazy felony/conspiracy charge; was given time served; was set free; and that’s a wrap.

Or is it?

Australia is a Hegemon vassal state, intel included, and with less than zero capability to protect its civilian population.

Moving from the UK to Australia may not be exactly an upgrade – even with freedom included. A real upgrade would be a move to a True Sovereign. Like Russia. Yet Julian will need U.S. authorization to travel and leave Australia.Moscow inevitably will be a sanctioned, off-limits destination.

There’s hardly any question Julian will be back at the helm of WikiLeaks. Whistleblowers may be even lining up as we speak to tell their stories – supported by official documents.

Yet the stark, ominous message remains fully imprinted in the collective unconscious: the ruthless, all-powerful U.S. Intel Apparatus will go no holds barred and take no prisoners to punish anyone, anywhere, who dares to expose imperial crimes. A new global epic starts now: The Fight against Criminalized Journalism.

June 30, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media | Leave a comment

How the media facilitates Dutton’s nuclear lies

The fault is the media’s also. It entertains the nonsense, repeats it until it is real. It pretends there is debate where there is none. It leans too heavily on conflict. It mistakes credulity for balance.

It is in these false equivalences that Peter Dutton finds his purpose. Here, on these glib plains, he is reinvented as a politician. His lone policy announcement is given the status once reserved for an alternative government. 

In journalism, the answer to any question in a headline is almost always no. The hope is that a reader might settle for maybe. The question mark itself bends over in embarrassment.

Last week, the ABC used its leading news podcast to ask: “Could nuclear power really lead to cheaper bills?” Similar questions have been asked across the media. The answer is no, but the headline has already done its work. It has already lent credibility to a fantasy.

According to the latest Lowy polling, two thirds of Australians now support the use of nuclear power. As many as 27 per cent support it strongly. A decade ago the opposite was true: 62 per cent did not want nuclear as part of the energy mix.

The difference is not science. It is mischief. The case for nuclear has not grown stronger. The cost argument has not been won. Uranium has become no safer or less finite. All that has changed is the desperateness of the Coalition and the fecklessness of the press.

Peter Dutton cannot name the experts who advised on his policy. This is most likely because they do not exist. Imaginary reactors are the preserve of imaginary scientists. The policy is not costed and relies on developments that are presently illegal.

Findings from the Australian Energy Market Operator, published this week, make clear that the power grid would fail before even the most optimistic projections of when these reactors might be operational. They are not a solution. They are a distraction.

Cost is another lie. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation notes that nuclear power is twice as expensive to produce as renewables. These figures don’t allow for blowouts in construction and time, which are almost inevitable. If everything went right, the answer would still be wrong.

Dutton knows all this. So does the media that asks fallaciously if nuclear power could lead to cheaper bills. They have conspired to solve a problem that exists now with a solution that is never coming.

There is little enough being debated that this is taking up all the space. It is interrupting the inevitable shift to renewables. That is its sole intention.

Once again investment is being slowed. Once again the obvious is being treated as uncertain. This is played out as if it were a game, but it is not: the world is being pushed closer to catastrophe.

No wonder the question marks cower in their headlines, ashamed of their role in this whole sordid scam.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 29, 2024 as “The nuclear question mark”.

June 30, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media | Leave a comment

Julian Assange is finally free, but no thanks to the media

In this case, it was Assange. But the same media machine was rolled out against former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, another thorn in the establishment’s side. And as with Assange, the Guardian and the BBC were the two outlets that were most useful in making the smears stick.

JONATHAN COOK, 26 JUNE 2024 DeClassified UK

It was the media, led by the Guardian, that kept Assange behind bars. Their villainy will soon be erased because they write the script about what’s going on in the world.

“………………………………………………………………….Everything Assange had warned the US wanted to do to him was proved correct over the next five years, [from 2017] as he languished in Belmarsh entirely cut off from the outside world. 

No one in our political or media class appeared to notice, or could afford to admit, that events were playing out exactly as the founder of Wikileaks had for so many years predicted they would – and for which he was, at the time, so roundly ridiculed.

Nor was that same political-media class prepared to factor in other vital context showing that the US was not trying to enforce some kind of legal process, but that the extradition case against Assange was entirely about wreaking vengeance – and making an example of the Wikileaks founder to deter others from following him in shedding light on US state crimes.

That included revelations that, true to form, the CIA, which was exposed as a rogue foreign intelligence agency in 250,000 embassy cables published by Wikileaks in 2010, had variously plotted to assassinate him or kidnap him off the streets of London. 

Other evidence came to light that the CIA had been carrying out extensive spying operations on the embassy, recording Assange’s every move, including his meetings with his doctors and lawyers. 

That fact alone should have seen the US case thrown out by the British courts. But the UK judiciary was looking over its shoulder, towards Washington, far more than it was abiding by its own statute books.

Media no watchdog

Western governments, politicians, the judiciary, and the media all failed Assange. Or rather, they did what they are actually there to do: keep the rabble – that is, you and me – from knowing what they are really up to. 

Their job is to build narratives suggesting that they know best, that we must trust them, that their crimes, such as those they are supporting right now in Gaza, are actually not what they look like, but are, in fact, efforts in very difficult circumstances to uphold the moral order, to protect civilisation. 

For this reason, there is a special need to identify the critical role played by the media in keeping Assange locked up for so long.

The truth is, with a properly adversarial media playing the role it declares for itself, as a watchdog on power, Assange could never have been disappeared for so long. He would have been freed years ago. It was the media that kept him behind bars. 

The establishment media acted as a willing tool in the demonising narrative the US and British governments carefully crafted against Assange.

Even now, as he is reunited with his family, the BBC and others are peddling the same long-discredited lies. 

Those include the constantly repeated claim by journalists that he faced “rape charges” in Sweden that were supposedly dropped. Here is the BBC making this error once again in its reporting this week. 

In fact, Assange never faced more than a “preliminary investigation”, one the Swedish prosecutors repeatedly dropped for lack of evidence. The investigation, we now know, was revived and sustained for so long not because of Sweden but chiefly because the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service, then led by Sir Keir Starmer (now the leader of the Labour party), insisted on it dragging on. 

Starmer made repeated trips to Washington during this period, when the US was trying to find a pretext to lock Assange away for political crimes, not sexual ones. But as happened so often in the Assange case, all the records of those meetings were destroyed by the British authorities. 

The media’s other favourite deception – still being promoted – is the claim that Wikileaks’ releases put US informants in danger. 

That is utter nonsense, as any journalist who has spent even a cursory amount of time studying the background to the case knows. 

More than a decade ago, the Pentagon set up a review to identify any US agents killed or harmed as a result of the leaks. They did so precisely to help soften up public opinion against Assange. 

And yet a team of 120 counter-intelligence officers could not find a single such case, as the head of the team, Brigadier-General Robert Carr, conceded in court in 2013.

Despite having a newsroom stuffed with hundreds of correspondents, including those claiming to specialise in defence, security and disinformation, the BBC still cannot get this basic fact about the case right. 

That’s not an accident. It’s what happens when journalists allow themselves to be spoon-fed information from those they are supposedly watching over. That is what happens when journalists and intelligence officials live in a permanent, incestuous relationship. 

Character assassination

But it is not just these glaring reporting failures that kept Assange confined to his small cell in Belmarsh. It was that the entire media acted in concert in his character assassination, making it not only acceptable but respectable to hate him.

It was impossible to post on social media about the Assange case without dozens of interlocutors popping up to tell you how deeply unpleasant he was, how much of a narcissist, how he had abused his cat or smeared his walls in the embassy with faeces. None of these individuals, of course, had ever met him.

It also never occurred to such people that, even were all of this true, it would still not have excused stripping Assange of his basic legal rights, as all too clearly happened. And even more so, it could not possibly justify eroding the public-interest duty of journalists to expose state crimes.

What was ultimately at stake in the protracted extradition hearings was the US government’s determination to equate investigative national-security journalism with “espionage”. Whether Assange was a narcissist had precisely no bearing on that matter.

Why were so many people persuaded Assange’s supposed character flaws were crucially important to the case? Because the establishment media – our supposed arbiters of truth – were agreed on the matter.

The smears might not have stuck so well had they been thrown only by the rightwing tabloids. But life was breathed into these claims from their endless repetition by journalists supposedly on the other side of the aisle, particularly at the Guardian. 

Liberals and left-wingers were exposed to a steady flow of articles and tweets belittling Assange and his desperate, lonely struggle against the world’s sole superpower for the right not to be locked away for the rest of his life for doing journalism. 

The Guardian – which had benefited by initially allying with Wikileaks in publishing its revelations – showed him precisely zero solidarity when the US establishment came knocking, determined to destroy the Wikileaks platform, and its founder, for making those revelations possible.

For the record, so we do not forget how Assange was kept confined for so long, these are a few examples of how the Guardian made him – and not the law-breaking US security state – the villain.

Marina Hyde in the Guardian in February 2016 – four years into his captivity in the embassy – casually dismissed as “gullible” the concerns of a United Nations panel of world-renowned legal experts that Assange was being “arbitrarily detained” because Washington had refused to issue guarantees that it would not seek his extradition for political crimes.

Long-time BBC legal affairs correspondent Joshua Rozenberg was given space in the Guardian on the same day to get it so wrong in claiming Assange was simply “hiding away” in the embassy, under no threat of extradition (Note: Though his analytic grasp of the case has proven feeble, the BBC allowed him to opine further this week on the Assange case).

Two years later, the Guardian was still peddling the same line that, despite the UK spending many millions ringing the embassy with police officers to prevent Assange from “fleeing justice”, it was only “pride” that kept him detained in the embassy.

Or how about this one from Hadley Freeman, published by the Guardian in 2019, just as Assange was being disappeared for the next five years into the nearest Britain has to a gulag, on the “intense happiness” she presumed the embassy’s cleaning staff must be feeling. 

Anyone who didn’t understand quite how personally hostile so many Guardian writers were to Assange needs to examine their tweets, where they felt freer to take the gloves off. Hyde described him as “possibly even the biggest arsehole in Knightsbridge” while Suzanne Moore said he was “the most massive turd.”

The constant demeaning of Assange and the sneering at his plight was not confined to the Guardian’s opinion pages. The paper even colluded in a false report – presumably supplied by the intelligence services, but easily disproved – designed to antagonise the paper’s readers by smearing him as a stooge of Donald Trump and the Russians. 

This notorious news hoax – falsely claiming that in 2018 Assange repeatedly met with a Trump aide and “unnamed Russians”, unrecorded by any of the dozens of CCTV cameras surveilling ever approach to the embassy – is still on the Guardian’s website. 

This campaign of demonisation smoothed the path to Assange being dragged by British police out of the embassy in early 2019.

It also, helpfully, kept the Guardian out of the spotlight. For it was errors made by the newspaper, not Assange, that led to the supposed “crime” at the heart of the US extradition case – that Wikileaks had hurriedly released a cache of files unredacted – as I have explained in detail before. 

Too little too late

The establishment media that collaborated with Assange 14 years ago in publishing the revelations of US and UK state crimes only began to tentatively change its tune in late 2022 – more than a decade too late.

That was when five of his former media partners issued a joint letter to the Biden administration saying that it should “end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets”.

But even as he was released this week, the BBC was still continuing the drip-drip of character assassination. A proper BBC headline, were it not simply a stenographer for the British government, might read: “Tony Blair: Multi-millionaire or war criminal?” 

For while the establishment media has busily fixed our gaze on the supposed character flaws of Assange, it has kept our attention away from the true villains, those who committed the crimes he exposed: Blair, George W Bush, Dick Cheney and many more. 

We need to recognise a pattern here. When the facts cannot be disputed, the establishment has to shoot the messenger. 

In this case, it was Assange. But the same media machine was rolled out against former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, another thorn in the establishment’s side. And as with Assange, the Guardian and the BBC were the two outlets that were most useful in making the smears stick.

Sadly, to secure his freedom, Assange was compelled to make a deal pleading guilty to one of the charges levelled against him under the Espionage Act. 

Highlighting the enduring bad faith of the Guardian, the same paper that so readily ridiculed Assange’s years of detention to avoid being locked away in a US super-max jail, ran an article this week, as Assange was released, stressing the “dangerous precedent” for journalism set by his plea deal.

Washington’s treatment of Assange was always designed to send a chilling message to investigative journalists that, while it is fine to expose the crimes of Official Enemies, the same standards must never be applied to the US empire itself.

How is it possible that the Guardian is learning that only now, after failing to grasp that lesson earlier, when it mattered, during Assange’s long years of political persecution? 

The even sadder truth is that the media’s villainous role in keeping Assange locked up will soon be erased from the record. That is because the media are the ones writing the script we tell ourselves about what is going on in the world.

They will quickly paint themselves as saints, not sinners, in this episode. And, without more Assanges to open our eyes, we will most likely believe them.  https://www.declassifieduk.org/julian-assange-freedom-this-time-no-thanks-to-the-media/

June 30, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media | Leave a comment