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Rembrandt van RIjn A Woman Standing with a Candle c.1631

To be honest, I didn’t think it would ever happen, even though it’s been so obvious for so long. But all of a sudden, the conservative voices questioning the Russia collusion narrative and all the investigations that followed from it, are finally figuring out that those behind that narrative and all that resulted from it, are the same people who have been chasing down Julian Assange for many years.

And that to get to the bottom of the hunt for Trump by the DNC, Clinton campaign, US intelligence and last but not least the media in their pockets, the NYT, WaPo, MSNBC, CNN et al, they will have to take a much closer look at what happened to Assange. If they don’t they will never understand. How do we know it’s starting to dawn on them? Look at this illustration at the Last Refuge site yesterday. More on them later.

Note: the mostly left wing Assange supporters would do good to consider the same thing: they in turn must look into the RussiaRussia Trump collusion stories, much as they may not like the president. Because those stories are why Assange has been chased down like so much roadkill. And because the right win of America is their best chance at getting him pardoned/released. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, to put it bluntly. Sometimes you need blunt.

As I’ve pointed out countless times, the Mueller investigation of the Trump campaign -and presidency- may have come up glaringly empty, but the report they issued maintained that “13 Russians” and Julian Assange were responsible for hacking DNC emails. There is no proof of this, but since none of the “accused” can speak out, the report make the claim, and did.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Assange Extradition Hearing Resumes on Monday in London

September 7, 2020

Assange Extradition Hearing Resumes on Monday in London

If extradited to US, the WikiLeaks founder could face up to 175 years in prison

The extradition hearing for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is set to resume in London on Monday, September 7th. Assange is currently being held in Belmarsh Prison, and if extradited to the US, the publisher faces up to 175 years in prison.

The US has indicted Assange on 17 counts of espionage and one count of conspiring with a source to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The charges are related to WikiLeaks’ dissemination of a trove of documents released in 2010 that revealed classified information about the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the US prison in Guantanamo Bay.

The information was provided to WikiLeaks by former US Army soldier Chelsea Manning, who spent more almost seven years in prison for the leaks before President Obama commuted her sentence in 2017. Manning was jailed again in March 2019 for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, and was not released until March 2020.

If Assange, an Australian citizen, is extradited to the US and prosecuted, it will be the first time a journalist is tried under the 1917 Espionage Act, and it will set a grave precedent for press freedom in the US and around the world.

Throughout Assange’s lock-up at Belmarsh, the publisher’s family and experts have warned of his deteriorating health. Nils Melzer, a UN special rapporteur for torture, has likened Assange’s treatment to psychological torture.

How to follow the hearing:

Consortium News will be reporting on the hearing and live-tweeting throughout the process. Journalist Joe Lauria will be recapping each day on the CN Live! YouTube channel. The channel will also host a panel of experts every weekend while the hearing is ongoing; the trial is expected to last three to four weeks.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The USA’s Doll House: A Vast Tapestry of Lies and Illusions

February 11, 2020

The USA’s Doll House: A Vast Tapestry of Lies and Illusions

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 2005

While truth-tellers Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning sit inside jail cells and Edward Snowden lives in exile in Russia, the American people hole up in an illusionary dwelling constructed to reduce them to children afraid of the truth. Or is it the dark?

This is not new; it has been so for a very long time, but it has become a more sophisticated haunted doll’s house, an electronic one with many bells and whistles and images that move faster than the eye can see. We now inhabit a digital technological nightmare controlled by government and corporate forces intent on dominating every aspect of people’s lives.

This is true despite the valiant efforts of dissidents to use the technology for human liberation. The old wooden doll houses, where you needed small fingers to rearrange the furniture, now only need thumbs that can click you into your cell’s fantasy world. So many dwell there in the fabricated reality otherwise known as propaganda. The result is mass hallucination.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A New Kind of Tyranny: The Global State’s War on Those Who Speak Truth to Power

November 8, 2019

A New Kind of Tyranny: The Global State’s War on Those Who Speak Truth to Power

“What happens to Julian Assange and to Chelsea Manning is meant to intimidate us, to frighten us into silence. By defending Julian Assange, we defend our most sacred rights. Speak up now or wake up one morning to the silence of a new kind of tyranny. The choice is ours.”—John Pilger, investigative journalist

All of us are in danger.

In an age of prosecutions for thought crimes, pre-crime deterrence programs, and government agencies that operate like organized crime syndicates, there is a new kind of tyranny being imposed on those who dare to expose the crimes of the Deep State, whose reach has gone global.

The Deep State has embarked on a ruthless, take-no-prisoners, all-out assault on truth-tellers.

Activists, journalists and whistleblowers alike are being terrorized, traumatized, tortured and subjected to the fear-inducing, mind-altering, soul-destroying, smash-your-face-in tactics employed by the superpowers-that-be.

Take Julian Assange, for example.

Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks—a website that published secret information, news leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources—was arrested on April 11, 2019, on charges of helping U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning access and leak more than 700,000 classified military documents that portray the U.S. government and its military as reckless, irresponsible and responsible for thousands of civilian deaths.

Included among the leaked Manning material were the Collateral Murder video (April 2010), the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq war logs (October 2010), a quarter of a million diplomatic cables (November 2010), and the Guantánamo files (April 2011).

The Collateral Murder leak included gunsight video footage from two U.S. AH-64 Apache helicoptersengaged in a series of air-to-ground attacks while air crew laughed at some of the casualties.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Indictment of Julian Assange Under the Espionage Act Is a Threat to the Press and the American People

May 26, 2019

The Indictment of Julian Assange Under the Espionage Act Is a Threat to the Press and the American People

LONDON, ENGLAND - AUGUST 20: Placards are left by supporters of Julian Assange, the founder of the WikiLeaks whistle-blowing website, outside the Ecuadorian Embassy where Mr Assange has been living since June on August 20, 2012 in London, England. Several South American nations have declared their support for Ecuador's decision to grant asylum to Mr Assange whilst he faces extradition to Sweden over allegations of sexual assault. (Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images)

Placards left by supporters of Julian Assange outside the Ecuadorian Embassy on Aug. 20, 2012 in London, England.

Photo: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

A TRUE DEMOCRACY does not allow its government to decide who is a journalist. A nation in which a leader gets to make that decision is on the road to dictatorship.

That is why the new U.S. indictment of Julian Assange is so dangerous to liberty in America.

The Trump administration has charged Assange under the Espionage Act for conspiring to leak classified documents. The indictment, released yesterday, focuses on his alleged efforts to encourage former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to leak classified documents to him and WikiLeaks about a decade ago.

Many of those documents, including U.S. military reports and State Department cables, were later published by WikiLeaks, but they were also the basis of reporting by major news organizations like the New York Times and The Guardian, which published some of them. The Manning leaks helped reveal long-hidden truths about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the post-9/11 global war on terror. Among the most striking leaks were a classified video of U.S. military attack helicopters killing a dozen people, including two Reuters staffers, in Baghdad in 2007, as well as the more than 250,000 State Department cables, which continue to be an important reference for reporters and researchers studying U.S. foreign policy.

The Manning documents also turned WikiLeaks into a strange new player in the modern journalistic ecosystem. WikiLeaks would obtain materials from sources inside governments and other organizations and then disseminate them, either by publishing them itself or by sharing them with major news organizations. WikiLeaks served as an intermediary between sources and reporters.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Julian Assange Is Today’s Martin Luther King

May 19, 2019

Julian Assange Is Today’s Martin Luther King

Caravaggio **The seven works of mercy (Sette opere di Misericordia)** 1607

“Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop… And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”
– Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, one day before he was murdered

What Martin Luther King King won through many hard-fought battles, and in the end through sacrificing his own life, has to be won all over again: freedom, truth, justice. And this time it’s Julian Assange who stands in the frontline. With Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden by his side. But I know you’re not very likely to agree with that assessment.

For one thing, I picked the kind of headline that will probably make many people not read an essay. But I’m not kidding, and I’m not saying this for effect. Julian Assange is like Martin Luther King in many ways, and he deserves for people to recognize that.

Assange and Dr. King were born in different times, the former 3 years after the latter was murdered. But when anyone wants to talk King’s legacy, then Assange very much IS that legacy. It would be nice if people like Dr. King’s youngest daughter Bernice, who is very vocal on her father’s legacy, would acknowledge this. Her father certainly would have.

What Julian Assange and Martin Luther King have in common is a superior intelligence, combined with unwavering courage and an unrelenting drive for justice and truth. Both men were born so brave they realized that they might have to give their lives for their causes. And then brought that realization into practice. Both in their own way gave their lives for our sins.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why Everyone in the U.S. Who Counts Wants Julian Assange Dead

May 15, 2019

Why Everyone in the U.S. Who Counts Wants Julian Assange Dead

Before and after images of the van that came to pick up the bodies of eleven men shot to death by circling American helicopters in Iraq in 2007. Both children in the van were wounded. “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids to a battle,” said one of the pilots. “That’s right,” replies another. From the video Collateral Murder.

Below is a full video version of Collateral Murder, the 2007 war footage that was leaked in 2010 to Wikileaks by Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning. This version was posted to the Wikileaks YouTube channel with subtitles. It will only take about 15 minutes of your life to view it.

It’s brutal to watch, but I challenge you to do it anyway. It shows not just murder, but a special kind of murder — murder from the safety of the air, murder by men with heavy machine guns slowly circling their targets in helicopters like hunters with shotguns who walk the edges of a trout pond, shooting at will, waiting, walking, then shooting again, till all the fish are dead.

The film also shows war crimes that implicate the entire structure of the U.S. military, as everyone involved was acting under orders, seeking permission to fire, waiting, then getting it before once more blasting away. The publication of this video, plus all the Wikileaks publications that followed, comprise the whole reason everyone in the U.S. who matters, everyone with power, wants Julian Assange dead.

They also want him hated. Generating that hate is the process we’re watching today.

“Everyone” in this case includes every major newspaper that published and received awards for publishing Wikileaks material; all major U.S. televised media outlets; and all “respectable” U.S. politicians — including, of course, Hillary Clinton, who was rumored (though unverifiably) to have said, “Can’t we just drone this guy?”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Warning Mr. Trump

April 5, 2019

Warning Mr. Trump

President Donald J. Trump
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20500.

Mr. President,

I write to you because I’m seeing something unfold that concerns you, and I have no way of knowing if you’re aware of it, nor have I seen anyone else mention it. That is, sir, you are being set up, a trap is being set for you, and unless you are aware of it, you may well walk into that trap eyes wide open.

It may not be in your briefing this morning, but the WikiLeaks organization has reported that high-ranking Ecuadorean state officials have told them Julian Assange will be expelled from their London embassy in a matter of “hours to days”. Now, I don’t know what your personal opinion is of Mr. Assange, maybe you think he deserves punishment for leaking secret files to the public.

Your personal opinion of Mr. Assange, however, is not the most important issue here, no offense. What’s most important to your own situation, as well as that of Mr. Assange, is that the people who are after him are the very same people who have been after you for 3 years, and who will double their efforts after suffering a huge loss due to Robert Mueller’s No Collusion report.

What the trap set for you consists of is that if you let these -largely anonymous- deep state actors get their hands on Mr. Assange, you will greatly empower them (even further). But, sir, his enemies inside US intelligence are the same as yours, and empowering one’s enemies is not the way to do battle.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Refusing to “Snitch,” Whistleblower Chelsea Manning Becomes Two-Time Political Prisoner

March 10, 2019

Refusing to “Snitch,” Whistleblower Chelsea Manning Becomes Two-Time Political Prisoner

“I will not participate in a secret process that I morally object to, particularly one that has been historically used to entrap and persecute activists for protected political speech.” — Chelsea Manning

ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA — Chelsea Manning was thrown in jail on Friday for refusing to comply with a grand jury subpoena related to sealed charges against WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange. She is ordered to be held until she complies with the subpoena or the grand jury process concludes, which could be more than a year from now.

The whistleblower has already spent more than seven years behind bars for her activism — in that case, for blowing the whistle on U.S. war crimes in Iraq.

In a statement, Manning said the following of her remanding:

I will not comply with this, or any other grand jury. Imprisoning me for my refusal to answer questions only subjects me to additional punishment for my repeatedly-stated ethical objections to the grand-jury system.
The grand jury’s questions pertained to disclosures from nine years ago, and took place six years after an in-depth computer forensics case, in which I testified for almost a full day about these events. I stand by my previous public testimony.
I will not participate in a secret process that I morally object to, particularly one that has been historically used to entrap and persecute activists for protected political speech.”

“Accept whatever you bring upon me”

MintPress News spoke with Manning and members of her support team on Wednesday as she fought the subpoena in court, and has also examined how the timing of Manning becoming the target of a grand jury comports with the larger U.S. push to have Assange extradited from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

State Secrets and the National-Security State

January 16, 2019

STATE SECRETS AND THE NATIONAL-SECURITY STATE

Inadvertently released federal documents reveal that U.S. officials have apparently secured a secret indictment against Julian Assange, the head of WikiLeaks who released secret information about the internal workings of the U.S. national-security establishment. In any nation whose government is founded on the concept of a national-security state, that is a cardinal sin, one akin to treason and meriting severe punishment.Mind you, Assange isn’t being charged with lying or releasing false or fraudulent information about the U.S. national-security state. Everyone concedes that the WikiLeaks information was authentic. His “crime” was in disclosing to people the wrongdoing of the national-security establishment. No one is supposed to do that, even if the information is true and correct.

It’s the same with Edward Snowden, the American contractor with the CIA and the NSA who is now relegated to living in Russia. If Snowden returns home, he faces federal criminal prosecution, conviction, and incarceration for disclosing secrets of the U.S. national-security establishment. Again, his “crime” is disclosing the truth about the internal workings of the national-security establishment, not disseminating false information.

Such secrecy and the severe punishment for people who disclose the secrets to the public were among the things that came with the conversion of the federal government to a national-security state.

Recall that when the U.S. government was called into existence by the Constitution, it was a type of governmental structure known as a limited-government republic. Under that type of governmental structure, the federal government’s powers were extremely limited. The only powers that federal officials could lawfully exercise were those few that were enumerated in the Constitution itself.

Under the republic form of government, there was no enormous permanent military establishment, no CIA, and no NSA, which are the three components of America’s national-security state.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Assange Prosecution Will Focus On Chelsea Manning Era Releases, Not DNC Emails

November 26, 2018

November 25, 2018 Elizabeth Vos

It seems that the shades have finally been ripped off of the persecution of Julian Assange. Fallen by the wayside is the pretense used to justify his arbitrary detention: allegations of sexual misconduct, of Russian involvement, and of aiding Trump’s ascension to the Presidency.

Gone is the pretense that it is not the rabid wolves of the US and UK military state baying, slavering for Assange’s blood. Former intelligence assets in the guise of “journalists” openly call for Assange’s arrest.

Recent reports have indicated that formerly secret charges pending against Julian Assange will focus on material relating to Chelsea Manning and the earliest releases published by WikiLeaks. Alternatively, on WikiLeaks’ Vault7 releases in March 2017 or on the help he and his organisation gave to Edward Snowden to get the NSA whistleblower to safe asylum.

This latest news directly counters allegations published by Russiagate hysterics, who suggested the charges would relate to WikiLeaks’ 2016 publications of the DNC and John Podesta emails. Nonetheless, we can assume that in the coming days and months, establishment hacks will pivot and attack Assange just as loudly and abhorrently as they always have. Few of them will bother to remind their readers that the campaign emails of a political party are not US Government documents, are not classified Secret or Top Secret, and are therefore not going to be the subject of a federal prosecution in the Alexandria Division of the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA), where the jury pool is selected from a population with the highest concentration of US intelligence and defence industry employees in the United States.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Self-Censorship: Where The Real Damage Is Being Done

October 15, 2018

Self-Censorship: Where The Real Damage Is Being Done

I was going to write another article today about a different topic, but I backed down because I didn’t think I could deliver the kind of fiery, forceful, unmitigated argument it would need to be without risking getting banned from social media and blogging platforms.

The article I was planning on writing, which you’ll just have to imagine now, would have been titled ” ‘Assange Can Leave Whenever He Wants!’ No, Idiot, He Can’t.” The feature image was going to be a screen shot of a blue-checkmarked empire loyalist named Greg Olear tweeting the infuriatingly dopey argument that Assange is free to just waltz out the embassy doors whenever he wants, so therefore he isn’t actually being imprisoned by an Orwellian power establishment for publishing authentic documents about powerful people. Never mind the fact that you can say exactly the same thing about literally anyone under political asylum; they are all free to leave the political asylum they’ve been granted at any time, and pointing this out is just describing the thing that political asylum is. Never mind the fact that a UN panel ruled that Assange is being arbitrarily detained by the threat of imprisonment. Never mind that the same US government which tortured Chelsea Manning is currently openly pursuing Assange’s arrest because of his publications, making the assertion that he’s “free to leave” the same as saying he’s “free” to jump off a cliff. People don’t want to believe that their government imprisons journalists, so whenever Assange is in the news you see this argument making the rounds.

It would have been a firecracker of an article, but when it came time to write it, I backed down. I’d generally rather scrap an article than write something tepid and boring that won’t make any impact, so the risk of losing access to my platforms outweighed my desire to write what I’d planned on writing.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Be Prepared To Shake The Earth If Julian Assange Is Arrested

July 21, 2018

Be Prepared To Shake The Earth If Julian Assange Is Arrested

Today British foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt repeated the tired old canard that WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange “is free to walk out of the doors of the Ecuadorean embassy any time he wishes,” despite the fact that the US government has been increasingly open about its desire to arrest Assange, and that the UK government has for six years refused to say whether it has received a US extradition request from the government which tortured Chelsea Manning. He’s as free to leave as a man with a gun pointed at his head after being told “Don’t move or I’ll shoot.”

“Serious charges have been laid against him and we want him to face justice for those charges but we are a country of due process,” Hunt said of Assange. “At any time he wants to he is free to walk out onto the street of Knightsbride and the British police will have a warm welcome for him.”

Hunt didn’t specify what those “serious charges” are, which is weird, because as far as the public record goes, there are none. Assange was never charged in the notorious Swedish sexual assault investigation, and that investigation was dropped months ago. The closest thing to a charge on the record is a warrant for an alleged bail violation which was absurdly filed a full 12 days after he applied for asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy, and any charge arising therefrom would not be “serious” by any stretch of the imagination.

So we have a UK official publicly stating that there is an agenda to arrest Assange on mysterious “serious charges” right before a visit to the UK by Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno, who recently met with US Vice President Mike Pence and reportedly discussed Assange.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

I Am Julian Assange

May 17, 2018

I Am Julian Assange

Carl Spitzweg The raven 1845

Julian Assange appears to be painfully close to being unceremoniously thrown out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London. If that happens, the consequences for journalism, for freedom of speech, and for press freedom, will resound around the world for a very long time. It is very unwise for anyone who values truth and freedom to underestimate the repercussions of this.

In essence, Assange is not different from any journalist working for a major paper or news channel. The difference is he published what they will not because they want to stay in power. The Washington Post today would never do an investigation such as Watergate, and that’s where WikiLeaks came in.

It filled a void left by the media that betrayed their own history and their own field. Betrayed the countless journalists throughout history, and today, who risked their lives and limbs, and far too often lost them, to tell the truth about what powers that be do when they think nobody’s looking or listening.

Julian is not wanted because he’s a spy, or even because he published a number of documents whose publication was inconvenient for certain people. He is wanted because he is so damn smart, which makes him very good and terribly effective at what he does. He’s on a most wanted list not for what he’s already published, but for what he might yet publish in the future.

He built up WikiLeaks into an organization that acquired the ultimate trust of many people who had access to documents they felt should be made public. They knew he would never betray their trust. WikiLeaks has to date never published any documents that were later found out to be false. It never gave up a source. No documents were ever changed or manipulated for purposes other than protecting sources and other individuals.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Harvard University Bends the Knee to the CIA

September 16, 2017

Harvard University Bends the Knee to the CIA

Let’s get caught up real quick. On Wednesday, Harvard University announced that Chelsea Manning — who leaked evidence of U.S. war crimes in Iraq to Wikileaks and was incarcerated for seven years before being pardoned by Barack Obama — had been named a visiting fellow. I disagree with almost everything Obama did as president, but his pardoning of Manning is something I applaud. Then the CIA complained.

The complaint was swift and two-pronged. First, former acting director of the CIA, Michael Morell, wrote a letter by which he resigned in protest. Then the current CIA director, Michael Pompeo wrote a note of his own, which included support for Morell. Morell’s letter is absolutely incredible if you know some of this guy’s history. I suggest reading the entire thing.

Towards the end of the letter, Morell has the nerve to write:

“I have an obligation to my conscience — and I believe to the country — to stand up against any efforts to justify leaks of sensitive national security information.”

Let’s now take a moment to review this man’s well documented conscience.

Nice cufflinks by the way.

Remarkably, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Michael Morell. Let’s review some highlights from something I posted back in January.

Didn’t Trump’s own lawyer, Michael Cohen, meet in Prague with a Kremlin agent in August 2016? And isn’t this final proof of the ongoing secret liaisons between the tycoon and the tyrant? ‘Fraid not. But it is déjà vu. Fifteen years ago, Morell vetted and took to the White House, a preliminary report that 9/11 hijacker, Mohamed Atta, met with an Iraqi intelligence officer, Ahmad Samir, Al-Ani at the Iraqi embassy in Prague on April 9, 2001. Both reports have turned out to be bogus.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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