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https://scheerpost.com/2023/07/09/chris-hedges-journalists-abandoned-julian-assange-and-slit-their-own-throats/

Journalists Abandoned Julian Assange and Slit Their Own Throats

The failure by journalists to mount a campaign to free Julian Assange, or expose the vicious smear campaign against him, is one more catastrophic and self-defeating blunder by the news media.  

The persecution of Julian Assange, along with the climate of fear, wholesale government surveillance and use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, has emasculated investigative journalism. The press has not only failed to mount a sustained campaign to support Julian, whose extradition appears imminent, but no longer attempts to shine a light into the inner workings of power. This failure is not only inexcusable, but ominous. 

The U.S. government, especially the military and agencies such as the CIA, the FBI, the NSA and Homeland Security, have no intention of stopping with Julian, who faces 170 years in prison if found guilty of violating 17 counts of the Espionage Act. They are cementing into place mechanisms of draconian state censorship, some features of which were exposed by Matt Taibbi in the Twitter Files, to construct a dystopian corporate totalitarianism.  

The U.S. and the U.K. brazenly violated a series of judicial norms and diplomatic protocols to keep Julian trapped for seven years in the Ecuadorian Embassy after he had been granted political asylum by Ecuador. The CIA, through the Spanish security firm UC Global, made recordings of Julian’s meetings with his attorneys, which alone should invalidate the extradition case. Julian has been held for more than four years in the notorious Belmarsh high-security prison since the British Metropolitan Police dragged him out of the embassy on April 11, 2019. The embassy is supposed to be the sovereign territory of Ecuador. Julian has not been sentenced in this case for a crime. He is charged under the Espionage Act, although he is not a U.S. citizen and WikiLeaks is not a U.S.-based publication. The U.K. courts, which have engaged in what can only be described as a show trial, appear ready to turn him over to the U.S. once his final appeal, as we expect, is rejected. This could happen in a matter of days or weeks. 

On Wednesday night at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Stella Assange, an attorney who is married to Julian; Matt Kennard, co-founder and chief investigator of Declassified UK, and I examined the collapse of the press, especially with regard to Julian’s case. You can watch our discussion here. 

“I feel like I’m living in 1984,” Matt said. “This is a journalist who revealed more crimes of the world’s superpower than anyone in history. He’s sitting in a maximum-security prison in London. The state that wants to bring him over to that country to put him in prison for the rest of his life is on record as spying on his privileged conversations with his lawyers. They’re on record plotting to assassinate him. Any of those things, if you told someone from a different time ‘Yeah this is what happened and he was sent anyway and not only that, but the media didn’t cover it at all.’ It’s really scary. If they can do that to Assange, if civil society can drop the ball and the media can drop the ball, they can do that to any of us.” 

When Julian and WikiLeaks released the secret diplomatic cables and Iraq War logs, which exposed numerous U.S. war crimes, including torture and the murder of civilians, corruption, diplomatic scandals, lies and spying by the U.S. government, the commercial media had no choice but to report the information. Julian and WikiLeaks shamed them into doing their job. But, even as they worked with Julian, organizations such as The New York Times and The Guardian were determined to destroy him. He threatened their journalistic model and exposed their accommodation with the centers of power.

“They hated him,” Matt said of the mainstream media reporters and editors. “They went to war with him immediately after those releases. I was working for The Financial Times in Washington in late 2010 when those releases happened. The reaction of the office at The Financial Times was one of the major reasons I got disillusioned with the mainstream media.”

Julian went from being a journalistic colleague to a pariah as soon as the information he provided to these news organizations was published. He endured, in the words of Nils Melzer, at the time the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, “a relentless and unrestrained campaign of public mobbing, intimidation and defamation.” These attacks included “collective ridicule, insults and humiliation, to open instigation of violence and even repeated calls for his assassination.”

Julian was branded a hacker, although all the information he published was leaked to him by others. He was smeared as a sexual predator and a Russian spy, called a narcissist and accused of being unhygienic and slovenly. The ceaseless character assassination, amplified by a hostile media, saw him abandoned by many who had regarded him a hero. 

“Once he had been dehumanized through isolation, ridicule and shame, just like the witches we used to burn at the stake, it was easy to deprive him of his most fundamental rights without provoking public outrage worldwide,” Melzer concluded. 

The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais and Der Spiegel, all of which published WikiLeaks documents provided by Julian, published a joint open letter on Nov. 28, 2022 calling on the U.S. government “to end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets.” 

But the demonization of Julian, which these publications helped to foster, had already been accomplished.

“It was pretty much an immediate shift,” Stella recalled. “While the media partners knew that Julian still had explosive material that still had to be released, they were partners. As soon as they had what they thought they wanted from him, they turned around and attacked him. You have to put yourself in the moment where the press was in 2010 when these stories broke. They were struggling for a financial model to survive. They hadn’t really adapted to the age of the internet. You had Julian coming in with a completely new model of journalism.” 

There followed a WikiLeaks-isation of U.S. media outlets such as The New York Times, which adopted the innovations pioneered by WikiLeaks, including providing secure channels for whistleblowers to leak documents.

“Julian was a superstar,” Stella said. “He came from outside the ‘old boys’ network. He talked about how these revelations should lead to reform and how the Collateral Murder video reveals that this is a war crime.” 

Julian was outraged when he saw the heavy redactions of the information he exposed in newspapers such as The Guardian. He criticized these publications for self-censoring to placate their advertisers and the powerful.

He exposed these news organizations, as Stella said, “for their own hypocrisy, for their own poor journalism.”

“I find it very ironic that you have all this talk of misinformation, that’s just cover for censorship,” Stella said. “There are all these new organizations that are subsidized to find misinformation. It’s just a means to control the narrative. If this whole disinformation age really took truth seriously, then all of these disinformation organizations would hold WikiLeaks up as the example, right? Julian’s model of journalism was what he called scientific journalism. It should be verifiable. You can write up an analysis of a news item, but you have to show what you’re basing it on. The cables are the perfect example of this. You write up an analysis of something that happened and you reference the cables and whatever else you’re basing your news story on.”

“This was a completely new model of journalism,” she continued. “It is one [that] journalists who understood themselves as gatekeepers hated. They didn’t like the WikiLeaks model. WikiLeaks was completely reader-funded. Its readers were global and responding enthusiastically. That’s why PayPal, MasterCard, Visa and Bank of America started the banking blockade in December 2010. This has become a standardized model of censorship to demonetize, to cut channels off from their readership and their supporters. The very first time this was done was in 2010 against WikiLeaks within two or three days of the U.S. State Department cables being published.”

While Visa cut off WikiLeaks, Stella noted, it continued to process donations to the Ku Klux Klan. 

Julian’s “message was journalism can lead to reform, it can lead to justice, it can help victims, it can be used in court and it has been used in court in the European Court of Human Rights, even at the U.K. Supreme Court in the Chagos case here,” she said. “It has been used as evidence. This is a completely new approach to journalism. WikiLeaks is bigger than journalism because it’s authentic, official documents. It’s putting internal history into the public record at the disposal of the public and victims of state-sponsored crime. For the first time we were able to use these documents to seek justice, for example, in the case of the German citizen, Khalid El-Masri, who was abducted and tortured by the CIA. He was able to use WikiLeaks cables at the European Court of Human Rights when he sued Macedonia for the rendition. It was a completely new approach. It brought journalism to its maximum potential.” 

The claims of objectivity and neutrality propagated by the mainstream media are a mechanism to prevent journalism from being used to challenge injustices or reform corrupt institutions.

“It’s completely alien, the idea that you might use journalism as a tool to better the world and inform people of what’s happening,” Matt said. “For them it’s a career. It’s a status symbol. I never had a crisis of conscience because I never wanted to be a journalist if I couldn’t do that.”

“For people who come out of university or journalism school, where do you go?” he asked. “People get mortgages. They have kids. They want to have a normal life…You enter the system. You slowly get all your rough edges shorn off. You become part of the uniformity of thought. I saw it explicitly at The Financial Times.”

“It’s a very insidious system,” Matt went on. “Journalists can say to themselves ‘I can write what I like,’ but obviously they can’t. I think it’s quite interesting starting Declassified with Mark Curtis in the sense that journalists don’t know how to react to us. We have a complete blackout in the mainstream media.” 

“There has been something really sinister that has happened in the last twenty years, particularly at The Guardian,” he said. “The Guardian is just state-affiliated media. The early WikiLeaks releases in 2010 were done with The Guardian. I remember 2010 when those releases were happening with The Guardian and The New York Times. I’d read the same cables being covered in The Guardian and The New York Times and I’d always thought ‘Wow, we’re lucky to have The Guardian because The New York Times were taking a much more pro-U.S. pro-government position.’ That’s now flipped. I’d much prefer to read The New York Times covering this stuff. And I’m not saying it’s perfect. Neither of them were perfect, but there was a difference. I think what’s happened is clever state repression.” 

The D-notice committee, he explained, is composed of journalists and state security officials in the U.K. who meet every six months. They discuss what journalists can and can’t publish. The committee sends out regular advisories. 

The Guardian ignored advisories not to publish the revelations of illegal mass surveillance released by Edward Snowden. Finally, under intense pressure, including threats by the government to shut the paper down, The Guardian agreed to permit two Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) officials to oversee the destruction of the hard drives and memory devices that contained material provided by Snowden. The GCHQ officials on July 20, 2013 filmed three Guardian editors as they destroyed laptops with angle grinders and drills. The deputy editor of The Guardian, Paul Johnson — who was in the basement  during the destruction of the laptops — was appointed to the D-notice committee. He served at the D-notice committee for four years. In his last committee meeting Johnson was thanked for “re-establishing links” between the committee and The Guardian. The paper’s adversarial reporting, by then, had been neutralized.

“The state realized after the war in Iraq that they needed to clamp down on the freedom in the British media,” Matt said. “The Daily Mirror under Piers Morgan…I don’t know if anyone remembers back in 2003, and I know he is a controversial character and he’s hated by a lot of people, including me, but he was editor at The Daily Mirror. It was a rare opening of what a mainstream tabloid newspaper can do if it’s doing proper journalism against the war, an illegal war. He had headlines made out of oil company logos. He did Bush and Blair with blood all over their hands, amazing stuff, every day for months. He had John Pilger on the front page, stuff you would never see now. There was a major street movement against the war. The state thought ‘Shit, this is not good, we’ve gotta clamp down.’”

This triggered the government campaign to neuter the press. 

“I wouldn’t say we have a functioning media in terms of the newspapers,” he said. 

“This is not just about Assange,” Matt continued. “This is about all of our futures, the future for our kids and our grandkids. The things we hold dear, democracy, freedom of speech, free press, they’re very, very fragile, much more fragile than we realize. That’s been exposed by Assange. If they get Assange, the levies will break. It’s not like they’re going to stop. That’s not how power works. They don’t pick off one person and say we’re going to hold off now. They’ll use those tools to go after anyone who wants to expose them.” 

“If you’re working in an environment in London where there’s a journalist imprisoned for exposing war crimes, maybe not consciously but somewhere you [know you] shouldn’t do that,” Matt said. “You shouldn’t question power. You shouldn’t question people who are committing crimes secretly because you don’t know what’s going to happen…The U.K. government is trying to introduce laws which make it explicit that you can’t publish [their crimes]. They want to formalize what they’ve done to Assange and make it a crime to reveal war crimes and other things. When you have laws and a societal-wide psyche that you cannot question power, when they tell you what is in your interest, that’s fascism.”

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https://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57655.htm

Western Media Prepping Nuclear False Flag… and Thermonuclear War?

Western media are conditioning the public for a false-flag attack on the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant (ZNPP) to blame Russia. That would then provide the United States and NATO a pretext to directly intervene in their proxy war to support the Kiev regime.

The Kiev regime’s month-old counteroffensive is failing miserably to push back Russian defense lines. Indeed, if anything, it seems that Russian forces are turning the tables to gain more territory in eastern Ukraine. The military situation is becoming a fiasco for the NATO-backed regime in Kiev.

Months of much-hyped counteroffensive are delivering nothing but defeat for the Ukrainian forces despite massive supplies of weapons from the U.S. and its NATO allies. Western governments and media can barely hide the reality that NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine against Russia is turning into a historic debacle. How long can the charade continue before the American and European public demand answers and accountability?

With a major NATO summit due to take place next week in Vilnius, Lithuania, on July 11-12, the battlefield disaster for the alliance’s Kiev proxy will be potentially an acute embarrassment. There will be severe political repercussions for Washington and the European Union which has funneled close to $200 billion in military support to the Kiev regime since the conflict erupted in February last year.

Blowing up the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant is one way of dramatically shifting the narrative – albeit an act of criminal desperation. The power station is Europe’s largest civilian nuclear installation. The radioactive fallout from a fatal missile strike on the ZNPP would engulf large swathes of Europe, including Russia, with potentially deadly contamination.

Russian forces took over the ZNPP last March, days after launching their special military operation in Ukraine on February 24. Since then, the power station has been routinely fired on by the Kiev regime using U.S. and NATO-supplied rockets. Moscow has presented categorical evidence of NATO missile fragments recovered from air strikes on the plant’s cooling ponds. The UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, has visited the ZNPP multiple times and will surely know from where the missiles are being fired, yet the IAEA is conspicuously reluctant to publicly identify the perpetrators. It confines itself to making vague statements expressing concern about security and public safety.

The Western media have shamelessly spun the Kiev regime’s narrative claiming that the ZNPP is being shelled by Russian forces despite the absurdity of such claims given that the Russian military controls the nuclear plant.

The situation is a repeat of the sabotage on the Kakhovka Hydro-electric Power Plant. The dam was blown up last month by the Kiev regime using U.S.-supplied HIMARS rockets. Yet the Western media immediately blamed and continue to blame Russia for that sabotage even though Moscow had been warning the United Nations Security Council for months that the Kiev regime was planning to strike the dam. And even though Russian forces were in control of the dam.

Incredibly, given that obvious precedent, a false-flag attack on the Zaporozhye nuclear plant is now being intensively prepped. The Kiev regime has stepped up public warnings that Russian forces have mined the ZNPP and are going to blow it up. Of concern is that Western media are amplifying these claims regardless of the fact that the IAEA inspectors have said they see no evidence that Russia has mined the nuclear station.

The British Times newspaper this week claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin is facing a “perilous moment” of internal dissent within Russia due to alleged war losses in Ukraine and the thwarted mutiny by private military boss Yevgeny Prigozhin. The Times is sowing the notion that “Putin might blow up the ZNPP to bolster his frayed authority”.

In that event, the Times urges, NATO should intervene directly with troops on the ground in Ukraine. “That would be the quickest way to end the cruel war and neutralize Putin’s corrupt regime,” intoned the newspaper with hypocritical reasoning.

The Western media propaganda machine is once again turning reality on its head. The Prigozhin mutiny on June 24 was an abject failure because the Russian armed forces and the Russian public resolutely spurned the half-baked plot, remaining loyal to President Putin’s leadership. There is strong evidence that the plot was a Western-intelligence-backed coup attempt orchestrated by Britain’s MI6, as Scott Ritter has comprehensively analyzed.

Having failed to destabilize Russia and overthrow Putin’s government, the CIA and Britain’s MI6 through their reliable Western media outlets are resorting to a consolation narrative that Putin’s authority is now facing a “perilous moment”. This is fabricating a prelude to blowing up the ZNPP.

But it won’t be Russia bombing a nuclear plant where its forces are stationed. It will be the Kiev regime using NATO munitions and U.S. and British targeting intelligence – as was the case in the sabotage of the Kakhovka dam on June 6.

The Kiev regime is ordering civilians to evacuate from areas near the ZNPP, while its intelligence and military chiefs are outlining “contingency plans” on how to deal with the fallout from an alleged Russian strike. All this is a tad too theatric, indicating orchestration.

The Western media have continually covered up or not reported on the Kiev regime’s habitual air strikes on the ZNPP over the past year. Instead, the media have audaciously twisted the narrative to implicate Russia. Now the Western media are prepping the coming false flag by trying to convince the public that Russia is losing the war in Ukraine and that Putin is losing authority among ordinary Russians.

Gaslighting the public is what the Western media do best, not “reporting”. That’s been the way for decades but never has the media function been so blatant than during the U.S.-led proxy war in Ukraine against Russia.

The shockingly corrupt Neo-Nazi Kiev regime is desperate to keep the war racket going at all costs as is the Western weapons industry and its bought-and-paid-for politicians. (Whether Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, they are all War Party.)

The NATO ideologues are desperate to hide their debacle, which is in effect funded by impoverishing the Western public. Putin isn’t the one who is desperate. It’s the United States and its European satraps who are like the rats in a corner.

If these desperados blow up the Zaporozhye nuclear plant that’s tantamount to NATO dropping a dirty bomb on Russia.

And all the gaslighting by the Western media is unleashing thermonuclear catastrophe.

Here’s a proposal, just one among other possibilities: an antiwar campaign might consider the Western public avowedly and en masse turning off their TVs and toxic media channels. For rolling days, just turn off CNN, Fox, BBC, New York Times, Guardian, Times, and so on. In a concerted, synchronized protest. Turn it off! Before these crazies turn off the entire planet.

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/07/10/biden-keeps-lying-about-the-us-not-trying-to-surround-china/

Biden Keeps Lying About The US “Not Trying To Surround” China

President Biden had a recent interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria during which he defended his controversial decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine and suggested that the US can continually support Ukraine the way it supports Israel rather than adding it to the NATO alliance.

About halfway through the interview Biden said something about China that’s worth flagging, because the claim he makes is self-evidently false, and it’s not the first time he’s made it.

Describing the conversations he’s been having with China’s President Xi Jinping, Biden said the following:

“We’re going to put together the Quad which is India, Australia, the United States and Japan. I got a call from him [Xi] on that. He said why are you doing that. I said we’re not doing that to surround you, we’re doing that to maintain stability in the Indian Ocean and in the South China Sea. Because we believe the rules of the road about what constitutes international air space, international space and the water should be maintained.”

Biden uttered this same bogus talking point about not trying to surround China last month at the private fundraising event where he made headlines by calling Xi a “dictator”:

“But what he was really upset about was that I insisted that we — we reunite the Qu- — so-called Quad. He called me and told me not to do that because it was putting him in a bind. I said, All we’re doing — we’re not trying to surround you, we’re just trying to make sure the international rules with air and sea lanes remain open.”

Biden is lying. The US is deliberately surrounding China with war machinery and has been for years, and has rapidly escalated its efforts to do so during Biden’s term. There are currently no fewer than 313 US military bases in East Asia by the Pentagon’s own admission, with the Biden administration adding four new ones in the Philippines. Biden’s war machine has been busy instituting the AUKUS alliance which is specifically set up to menace China, moving nuclear-capable bombers to Indonesia, signing a military deal with Papua New Guinea, working to station missile-armed marines at Japan’s Okinawa islands, staging provocations in Taiwan, and getting into increasingly confrontational encounters with Chinese military vessels and aircraft off China’s coast as part of its dramatically increased military presence in the area.

So of course the US is trying to surround China, as evidenced by the mountains of US war machinery that are being moved into areas surrounding China. Biden can babble all he wants about wanting to secure sea lanes and protect international waters, but only a drooling idiot would believe the world’s most powerful empire is militarily surrounding its top geopolitical rival as an act of defense.

And Beijing is under no illusions about this. Xi said in a speech earlier this year that “Western countries — led by the U.S. — have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression against us, bringing unprecedentedly severe challenges to our country’s development.”

So Biden isn’t trying to fool the Chinese government with his “We’re not trying to surround you” schtick — he’s trying to fool you. He’s trying to fool the western public and the allies of the United States, who would get spooked if the US president openly admitted to a deliberate campaign of militarily encirclement against an economic superpower they all trade with extensively.

You simply cannot understand the geopolitics and major conflicts of the 2020s without understanding that the US empire has been actively amassing military threats in the immediate surroundings of its top two rivals — China and Russia — that it would never tolerate anyone else amassing anywhere near the United States. The single dumbest thing the US empire asks us to believe nowadays is that surrounding its two biggest foes with war machinery is a defensive action, rather than an act of extreme aggression.

The best advice I can offer about US-China tensions is to ignore the words and watch the actions. Ignore what officials say about wanting peace and not trying to surround China and supporting the One China policy etc, and just watch all the US war machinery that’s being rapidly added to that region. The US empire is better at international narrative manipulation than any power structure that has ever existed in human history, but what they can’t spin away is the concrete maneuverings of solid pieces of war machinery, because they are physical realities and not narratives.