Press freedom groups have warned Assange's prosecution is a grave threat. The Biden DOJ ignored them, and today won a major victory toward permanently silencing the pioneering transparency activist.
We live in a country where George Floyd is a hero and near worshiped while Julian Assange is a villainous criminal. We live in a dystopian Alice in Wonderland world.
This looks like a continued testing of public gullibility, forever pushing the envelope.
The campaign is similar to those likely behind the most suspect of current alternative narratives: Moon-landing hoax, flat-earth, Q-Anon, and numerous other worldviews, are probably *actual* disinformation campaigns managed out of IC black boxes. The goal is to get most of the public to conflate *any* explanation that runs counter to the official one as being a dreaded "conspiracy theory".
It works similarly to being labeled a "racist" when one has unapproved points of view about that topic, no matter what those views are, who is saying them, or what their actual intent may be.
I'm worried that all of the focus on Julian Assange's poor mental health makes his "suicide" more likely. Like John McAfee or Jeffrey Epstein before him.
It should not surprise anyone if he is assassinated (Assanginated?) and it's called suicide. Locally, an MD who was running a large illegal opoid distibution racket a few years back with the paid assistance of a number of well-placed cops and firemen (union officials and officers; this was confirmed at the time of his arrest by the county DA) also committed "suicide" in jail awaiting trial. Magically, all of the investigations into his accomplices disappeared almost immediately after his death; no one else was ever indicted. This kind of bullshit is not so rare as you might like to believe...
Bad comparison, also talking about world goverments while praising police seems pretty catatonic, it's the executive arm of any power and their abuses are pretty well documented
“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” – George Orwell
Explain why you believe this. A bust of George Floyd is now displayed in NYC and a statue of the career criminal and drug addict now stands in New Jersey. Assange, on the other hand, is a journalist being persecuted by the One World Government.
Excellent point, and I couldn't agree more, but reality seems to have little place in America today. "Journalists" and the American people were not willing to look at the implications of turning Floyd into a martyr, turning police into villains, nor were they uncomfortable that the state awarded his family 27 million before his "killer" went to trial, which basically asserted Chauvin was guilty before his trial began, which sent the judicial system further down the toilet. Journalism today is all theater with little regard for truth, for justice, but what journalism does hold to be extremely relevant is to make lots, and lots of money no matter the consequences.
Chauvin was sacrificed on the alter of WOKENESS. Another disturbing fact about modern American "journalism" is that the Smollett verdict was not mentioned on MSNBC anytime between 8:00 PM - 11:00 PM on 12/9/2021.
Interesting way to put it. I never listen to MSNBC and for the reason you state. If they had an audience who were well informed they would be very aware of their slight of hand, so poor are they at manipulating truth.
There's an awesome article on MSNBC right now about how Trump supporters are somehow responsible for the Smollett verdict leading to an increased reluctance to instantly believe in hate crimes allegations. Such great journalism.
It's an opinion piece, but I do believe it reflects MSNBC's take on the verdict. My brother was gay, died of AIDS, and boy am I not buying this crap, and it infuriates me. The LBGTQ community has come a long way and no ones needs help from a self serving liar like Smollett
"The indisputable victims of hate crimes will now carry an even heavier burden of suspicion." He makes this statement yet doesn't hold Smollett accountable on any level, just the jury who felt their was sufficient evidence to convict him.
Did you watch the same video I did? That dude should have been off the force years ago and his behavior was horrid and criminal and directly resulted in that innocent until proven guilty man's death.
George Floyd is no hero, but Derek Chauvin is no police. That man is a criminal and we can debate on the level of his guilt if you'd like but I don't know anyone who watched that video and werent disgusted by that man's death.
Yes. I saw the video and there is no evidence that Chauvin placed any weight on the drug addict's throat. I agree that he should have simply left him cuffed on the ground, waited for the EMT's to arrive and stood to face the hostile crowd.
Chauvin has been relegated to a long jail sentence. Yet the tributes, statues and millions of dollars to the Floyd family are still out there. We will not be seeing any reality as to Floyds horrid criminal life and destruction that he had left in his wake.
Now that he has served his political purpose might we not keep hearing his name and acting like he was a latter day MLK? Like the Dems. always say never let a crises go to waste -- they sure exploited this manslaughter case for all it was worth.
>".. . Assange, on the other hand, is a journalist being persecuted by the One World Government."
No. Assange is being persecuted by the U..S. government. With a little help from the bloody British.
*the duties and obligations imposed by the United Nations charter (refer to it) upon *all* member states (i.e. the 'world') is the closest thing we have to 'one world gov.' chucky.
Don't call me Chucky, Hummer. I don't see how it is possible NOT to see that the United States is part of the One World Government when we allied ourselves with the World Economic Forum and communist China to create COVID.
Yes, humming, the United Nations seems most intent on sending its troops around the world to rape women. They do not seem involved in the depopulation program.
Only in amerikan! A few, very few black people who didn't deserve to die by Police cause riots in the streets. Remember obomber in 2007/8 kicking millions of black families out of their homes and making the banksters whole and then getting reelected with the black vote, I do. Did you see any rioting then; I didn't as the black families lost their homes and assets and the equity that would be worth a lot more now. And they elect biden, the guy who wrote the bill's to screw black people and put hundreds of thousands in jail, almost all plea bargaining because they're poor. Wake up amerikans, save yourselves!
Yes but they are conditioned from birth, first genetically programmed to believe stories, then the parents and peers pass on their conditioning, the schools and churches take it from there and you're well softened up for the real corporate and political propaganda. Up to now, it's just been basic indoctrination. Lately, they've added social media to the cauldron. Very few even realize what happened to them and that's the idea. Old saying.." one priest is better than 100 police or soldiers, cheaper and more effective"! Unless you're like Greta with Asperger's, you're subject to the indoctrination by stories.. it's been going on since before the Pyramids; how else could the tiny ruling classes control the masses?
"American prosecutors also agreed that they would consent to any request from Assange that, once convicted, he could serve his prison term in his home country of Australia rather than the U.S."
Once convicted? Isn't there supposed to be a fair trial? Keep your noses clean out there, people. Once the US security state becomes interested in you, unless you're a billionaire or hold incriminating videos of "too important to fail" politicos, you're well and truly fucked.
Yes yes and yes. They can even move in and fake your suicide in custody to protect their 6 ft tall hound dog bulbous nose ex pres who btw gwyneth was the first to use cigars as vaginal candles (TM)
We will know who the true "journalists" are by their response to and treatment of this news. Thank you, Mr. Greenwald, for upholding freedom of the press.
Yesterday I had NPR on in the car and they were talking about the censorship of the media and the creation of "misinformation" investigations. It sounded like real journalism for a minute there and then I realized they were talking about Hong Kong!
Yes!!! I know in retrospect that they have always been propaganda, but I really didn't realize that until the 2016 election cycle when they were the "All Hillary All the Time" station. In 2020, of course, they were the "Anyone Except Bernie Station."
I have to think Assange did something right given the rage the political elite & corporate media have toward him. Look at the deal the US cut with Britian - not "if" convicted, but "when" convicted. Just skip the kangaroo court and the sideshow it'll bring and lock the guy up now. We all know he's toast.
I know I sound like a whack job, but here goes (again): all the same corrupt people and systems of governments that just hung Assange out to dry are, as always, accountable to no one. They run the show to their own liking, making and taking shit tons of money while doing it. Pure fuckery. And they always get away with it. Always.
Assange, unfortunately, is the just the latest pinata to be busted up by these elites. There are others every day, he just happens to be of a higher profile.
He served overseas as a tech for that amount of time in Naples Italy. Unfortunately - sometimes there with little to do after the fascist defeat and as Germans were leaving, he got involved, as many young did, with teenage local female nationals. So don’t be such a smart ass BTFW.
This is essentially why my stepfather - married six times - always advised leaving at the first sign of trouble. Walk out, leave, don't come back. Remains wise advice today.
Sorry I thought this was a different poster. Still don’t assume someone does not know what they are talking about. I believe I said he served 5 years overseas during wW2 and it WAS a world war -not just the few years American entered.. We had ppl stationed there before and after for our (semi secret) allies. If I stated it incorrectly I apologize. The newspaper article in which we finally learned the truth about what happened to him (his Italian wife and sister were lying for 50 years) said he served overseas for 5 years.’ That’s when newspapers stated who what where when -only to be found now on microfilm or online.
So now we have an international precedent (from the Anglosphere, nonetheless) under which anyone anywhere in the world can be charged with crimes under any country's laws, even if they are not citizens of that country (Assange is an Australian) and their activities took place outside the country charging them (Assange was outside the US when he received the leaks and published them), and any country friendly to (or wishing to curry favor with) the charging country can arrest and extradite them for trial. I wonder, how will the US and UK will like it when this precedent is used against their own citizens by one of China, Iran, Russia or Belarus?
Not only that; the US can use piracy one land and the high seas. Currently stealing the oil and grain of Syria while occupying the country. Just sold the Iranian oil from the tankers it pirated by other means on the high seas. Like Israel; it kills and invades and occupies nation's with impunity around the world. Currently starving the children of Venezuela and Syria among many other places.
By publishing materials stolen illegally from the US he did, arguably, commit a crime against the US. At least that is the basis of the US charges.
As I understand it, I could be wrong, this is legally the same as a foreigner receiving stollen property such as a missile gyro taken from an Air Force depo or digital currency taken from a US bank..
The information he published exposed US govt abuse of power: atrocities & corruption committed during war time. That's the reason they've been pursuing him. If he'd stolen & published information from the US govt about Chinese corruption, they'd not be pursuing him at all.
Yes. I guess the person you are responding to would have felt the same way about the third reich minions, but omg I said the thing that may only be said by msnbc. I beg your forgiveness...
right. ultimately. But the.material published did not require classification. The "enemies of America " already knew all about this treachery. The group from which.this information was being withheld is the American citizenry. Critically important since the taxes extracted from them pay for all this corruption and carnage.
Wiki has biases, but the truth is out there. The real challenge is teaching readers to know the difference. The failed education system degrades that skill.
"teaching readers to know the difference" - first step is to avoid wiki. The keys themselves should be torn out of every keyboard. Wikileaks should change its name to just Leaks. Dot com.
The fact that Assange is not a US national, and that Wikileaks is not hosted domestically, are not elements of the crimes he is alleged to have committed. Originally I believe the Espionage Act, enacted against the backdrop of WWI, was aimed at US domestics. There is ZERO difference between what Assange did, and what the NYT and WaPo do on a regular basis. And for that matter what Glenn Greenwald did in publishing the classified NSA secrets provided to him by Snowden. The ONLY way the government can get away with this is to maintain, without evidence, that Assange is not protected by the First Amendment's press freedom, while established corporate media outlets like the NYT are so protected.
By the letter of the law in the Espionage Act I'm sure it criminalizes the journalism that Assange, the NYT and WaPo, do on a regular basis. But to the extent it does, it is unconstitutional and thus not enforceable. It remains to be seen whether the courts will stand up and find this. It will be really important that Assange get the issue in front of a court as soon as possible. Let's hope he lives long enough to do so.
I doubt that this has much to do with Julian Assange other than the perfidious mendacity of the empire needs to take it out on someone. The real reason IMHO is to let anyone who would dare to the sins of the empire what they can expect if they aren't the MSM, a part of the system of indoctrination along with the schools and churches etc. It really bug's the empire that China is eating their breakfast and eating more every day in every way and what used to be called the third world is already doing business with China and being treated much better than the perfidious evil empire and it's tool's, the IMF and WB. Of course China has the military muscle to defend itself. Russia doesn't have the economy to threaten the empire but they do have the muscle so US commits it's worse malevolence in small countries, starving through sanctions or occasionally invading but that hasn't worked so well lately except for the profits of the military industrial complex.
I don't doubt that there is truth in your analysis, but I think this entire prosecution is much more personal to Assange. The IC does not take well to bring embarrassed. In fact I think they are in this case being extremely vindictive. Clearly they view the leaking of the cables by Manning to be a lesser crime than the public disclosure by Assange, since they apparently didn't put up much of a fuss about pardoning Manning, but have persecuted Assange to the ends of the earth. Add to that the fact that Assange embarrassed the Democrat party and you've got one big revenge play. It's sickening.
Yes; I agree with you; it's personal and more than that, it's intimidating anyone who would dare to expose the crimes of the empire which it's people are indoctrinated to not believe.
The fact he is not a US national and that Wikileaks is not hosted in the US makes one wonder why US law applies at all. Organizers of drag queen story hours and authors of a number of children's books published in the US supportive of homosexuality (*Heather Has Two Mommies* springs to mind) are arguably in violation of Russia's law against the propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations to minors, but Russian law does not apply to them because they are neither Russian nationals nor in Russia. An awful lot of what happens in the US on a daily basis violates the Taliban government's interpretation of sharia, and thus current Afghan law, but Afghan law does not apply to us because we are neither Afghan nationals nor in Afghanistan. Explain again why US law applies to Assange at all.
This isn't about reason or even laws; that's a distraction.. this is about power. Hopefully the empire will loose much of it's power, sooner rather than later. All that's left is military and money and China and Russia among others is working their way off the dollars and the SWIFT bankstering system. The USA is no longer a society of production, rather a society of extraction and the giant fraud called the assets market's. When you're house or stock's go from $100K to $200K; what wealth was created, what useful service was performed? Exactly zero and that's what our Western economies are mostly producing zero. How long can the fraud last? How long did Bernie Madoff get away with it? Who knows, it's well past it's best before date now.
Except when those laws, like the Espionage Act, can be, and are, used against those they don't apply to (Assange is NOT a spy, and he did NOT perpetrate espionage). But, when it's "okay" to violate the constitution and international law(s) right and left, they can apply any law they want to anyone by twisting the interpretation of it around to suit them. Criminals are running the "justice" [sic(k)] system.
It isn't, actually. They can't come right out and say they are charging him for publishing material that they designated as classified, because it is well-settled that any law purporting to prohibit the publication of classified material is unconstitutional. Which is why they have concocted a charge of conspiracy to encourage and assist Manning.
Yeah, that's what I expected was being referred to. I'm sorry, but the collateral murder video just is not evidence of a war crime. A group of dozen or so Iraqi's, two red with Ak-47s and one with an RPG standing in a crowd. US military personnel described what they saw, asked for permission to engage, it was granted and they engaged. You are hearing their candid assessments of what they are seeing in real time. That two Reuters reporters were among the crowd is not known to the military personnel and no part of the video suggests it was known. It is not realistic to expect that such events will not occur in war zones. They will. They do. All the time.
Yes, that it the basis for the charges, but applying US secrecy laws extraterritorially against non-citizens is an affront to the sovereignty of both Australia and wherever it was that Assange was located when he got and published Manning's document dump. Again, now China can do the same to Americans.
All the US blather about "democracy" and "political prisoners" - there is no difference I can see in the Nazi-like treatment of Assange from Obama, Trump, and Biden. How much of the authoritarian US "Pandemic" response comes from these same security state actors? "Let no emergency go to waste."
Blather about "democracy" has always come from the authoritarian tendency within American politics. Until Woodrow Wilson (who imprisoned political opponents and had the federal government run a propaganda agency, the Committee on Public Information, which Goebbels said was the model for his own efforts on behalf of the Nazis) we were self-consciously a republic. Wilson and his "progressives" gave us direct election of Senators, who before had represented the interests of their state's governments in Washington, the income tax, and got us into WW I to "make the world safe for democracy".
Yes, that, too. And, I forgot, introducing Jim Crow into the Federal government, which had been fully integrated since Reconstruction. (Wilson is the only President in the 20th century to give the genocidal maniac Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan who made the Civil War inevitable, and Andrew Johnson who derailed Reconstruction a run for the money in the contest for worst POTUS ever.)
Presidents don't have much to do with it. There is no "man behind the curtain," evilly manipulating events. The villain is an entrenched hive of bureaucrats operating in concert and friendly competition to maintain the real power behind the throne. Unless we get control of the "deep state" it will naturally get worse. The best start is eliminating a lot of them. The deep state feeds on enormous government. There is a "critical mass" of government bloat which makes the bureaucrats unobservable and thus unstoppable. Smaller government is our only hope. It will be achieved, either voluntarily or by force. Usually it's forced.
100% spot on - unfortunately there is no outside force in the US political system that could clean up the deep state stables. All the wokism, identity politics, uncontrolled immigration etc. injected enough strife into body politics to ensure that no united political force emerges to act as a Hercules (which was exactly the point). The only chance is for the internal layers of the deep state become so thick, so ossified, so detached from outside reality, so unaccountable that they starts rotting from the inside, until the whole edifice collapses (and the symptoms of this are already visible). The only scary question how much life, freedom and possibly world peace will be impacted by it.
It's not over yet. I expect this case will degrade the authoritarian instinct to hide from the press, and will renew journalists' resolve to do their job correctly. Both the authorities and the journalists have been corrupted lately. This case will start reversing that destructive trend.
There is nothing wrong with Positive Thinking. Norman Vincent Peale's book would be excellent reading material, today. On the other hand, there is no indication that Assange will receive fair treatment by the US government and its subservient media.
Starving the beast is the best solution. It will work, but takes time. Putting a bounty on some deep state actors would also work, but that's not our way. Not yet.
Starving it would be great - but which wing of the corporate war party is going to undertake it? On the front of showing more unaccountable, no strings attached money their way they are on same page. Pentagon failed law-mandated audit 4 times in a row, and each time around they got many billions more.
They will when we demand it. I think it was Franklin who said the new (US) republic would last until the people learn they can vote themselves money. We might be part that point. It will have to get worse before it improves. Ten dollar gasoline might do it.
Don’t forget Newt Gingrich and a bunch of other assholes on the right who completely threw him under the bus, called him a hostile state intelligence service, a cyber terrorist, etc.
Has Newt Gingrich failed to adopt some position when it was beneficial to him financially? I must have missed that. The dude has the credibility of ...Goebbels had more credibility.
While the MSM are not reporting this, the irony of it coming on the heels of Biden's conference on nourishing democracy, which was widely reported, goes beyond anything Orwell imagined.
This is a dark day for liberty. I light a candle for Assange and hope his bravery will illuminate the path for a million more to rise up in his footsteps, like the courageous souls I cite as examples in “Letter to a Colluder: Stop Enabling Tyranny” (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/letter-to-a-colluder-stop-enabling) 🕯
I can name almost a million (https://gbdeclaration.org/), including Dr. Reiner Fuellmich and everyone he and his Berlin Corona Investigative Committee have interviewed; all those I cited as examples in “Letter to a Colluder”; and RFK and everyone he listed in the Acknowledgments of “The Real Anthony Fauci.”
Here are just a few who come to mind off the top of my head (apologies to the many other heroes I inadvertently missed) in no particular order:
Plus every ordinary human being who chooses not to comply in the face of astronomical pressure and especially those who are brave enough to speak out against tyranny.
A friend of mine whose parents came here to escape the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia said to me today that his parents are genuinely worried at the similarities they see in today's Western "democracies".
Specifically, the self-policing of wrongthink, the massive propaganda and the internment camps.
If anyone would know what a hostile totalitarian takeover looks like, a Cambodian who escaped death camps would.
I think that’s an incredibly valuable perspective and one reason I mapped the Ten Stages of Genocide to today’s situation in the second part of my “Letter to a Holocaust Denier” (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/letter-to-a-holocaust-denier). Most people don’t even realize we’re already at Stage 10: Denial.
Very much agreed. In many cases, the powerlessness that "ordinary" human beings have brings them not only anonymity but greater punishment by cowardly TPTB. A crushingly lonely place.
No Steven Donziger? I'm glad he's been released from prison to serve his remaining term out on house arrest, but he's still been disbarred, and relentlessly hounded and smeared by the big boys.
and some more!: Paul Alexander, TrialSite News Staff, TCW, The Expose, Makia Freeman, Patrick Wood, Jordan Schachel, Dr. Sam Bailey, Jon Rappoport, Celia Farber, Justin Hart, Boriquagato, Jessica Rose, Charles Rixley, Paul Craig Roberts, Jonathan Otto, James Lyons-Weller, Mike Whitney, Karen Kingston.
That's why it's a myth there is no resistance. Globally.
I keep tabs on Google News every day (wiping the slate clean of cookies, IPaddr, ...) to keep track of the increasingly flailing and unhinged efforts by the elite.
Exactly. TPTB want us to think We’re few and isolated. We outnumber Them by an incalculable degree. Once We realize that, there will be no stopping the tsunami that hits Them.
Aha. Well, great to know, but when is that gonna happen? Just wondering, 'cause from where I stand, it looks like "They" are winning and will continue to do so.
As a footnote, it is sad that there is no viable competitor to GN for summarizing global headlines. I also scan those daily for the same reason as you, and also because I find it useful to know what various individual and collective authoritarians want me to think. I may at least have developed a method to deny Google the credit they believe they are entitled to receive for clicks on the GN links.
Ed is a hero. He publicly and poignantly put others before himself to be pardoned. His intelligence, humility and heart make him so. Putin this is your chance to make yourself a hero to us. You are the only power on earth able to fight Biden’s dentures and win
Putin may out-Judo a Siberian bear, but he is still no match for Biden's denture - it must be incredibly strong to be able to hold that rotten head together :-)
When all seems lost (and it does), we can at least silently protest the growing wave of fascism, the fascism, and the silencing of journalisms by purchasing and wearing t-shirts and sweatshirts sold by https://wikileaks.shop/
While not surprising, this is terrible news. The West is intent on a slow and torturous death for Assange, it seems, and for any who seek an alternative to the soul-crushing, Earth-destroying, Imperialist hell-scape they and their presstitutes are building. God help us all.
I hate it when people try to make lemonade out of lemons, but here I am trying, because, especially in this seemingly dark moment, Assange may yet be the hero who not only defeats The Empire (again), but the one whose nearly unbearable sacrifice will be the straw that breaks The Empire’s back.
While it seems there is no absurdist reality Americans won’t accept, no totalitarian effort we won’t embrace, I like to—I have to—believe there are limits even to our national collective cowardice. If Julian Assange has the herculean strength to survive his ordeal and keep his wits, he has the single best opportunity of any human on the planet to to expose The Empire for what it is, and, with our awakening support, to bring that Empire down in a final cloud of dust and ash.
The Imperials now flaunt their power. They act as if their power has no limits. But the one thing we know for certain about empires is they have a 100% failure rate. Hubris is a fatal flaw. The U.S. is a powder keg awaiting a spark, and that spark could be the American sham trial of Julian Assange—an unprecedented overreach with unprecedented, even Empire ending, blowback.
You are terribly naive. The vast majority of Americans have never even heard of Julian Assange, and if they were to learn about what he has endured, and why, they would not care at all.
The great majority of Americans are completely brainwashed, hypnotized idiots, fascists at heart, eager to embrace the most draconian, totalitarian strictures that our puppet government - controlled by multi-national corporations and global powers behind the scenes - chooses to impose on them.
If you want to truly understand what is happening in our country, there is one book above all you must read:
The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
You may think a book with this title could not be relevant to the case of Julian Assange, but you'd be wrong for thinking that, assuming you do. This monumental tome is the most important book of our time. It will shock you. It will horrify you. It will enrage you. It might overwhelm you. It will certainly enlighten you, as no other work can possibly do, to the reality of the fathomless evil which we are up against.
I totally agree, I’m reading this book now. With regard to Fauci, only Stalin, Hitler and Mao will have been responsible for killing more people in the 20/21 centuries than Fauci. This book is a must read.
Pol Pot only got 2 million. Congo got 5-8. So yes he beat Pol Pot (assuming it is eventually determined that the gain-of-function research he funded did result in Covid). But not quite yet the Congo. Probably by next year, though.
Don’t forget to add deaths directly attributed to the jabs. And the hundreds of thousands of severe adverse reactions. Jabs should have been stopped a year ago:
You don't have to try to turn Assange into a hero. In fact, you can believe he is an idiot with a completely juvenile ideology. It doesn't matter. You don't even have to believe that he published important secrets (I think he did, I just don't think Chelsea Manning's document dump was among them). None of it matters. We have a Constitution that prohibits the federal government from enacting any law abridging freedom of speech or the press. The tortured logic of the federal government's charges against Assange are an effort to get around the first amendment. I find paragraph 5 of the indictment particularly offensive as any law purporting to restrict a person from "receiving" classified information is plainly violative of the first amendment.
That started with 9/11, I'm afraid. Now it is exploding at an exponential rate. Time to put the "stakeholders" of the WEF on trial for crimes against humanity.
Unfortunately, I see this playing out differently. Once Assange is extradited and tucked away in a US prison, his case will be set for trial . . . well, sometime before the end of this century. The feds don't want him tried, they just want him imprisoned. And their most cherished hope is that he will die in prison before he ever sees the inside of a courtroom.
You have more faith in the American people than I do. We live in a selfish society where immediate self-gratification is so important that social responsibility and the long-term consequences of our actions get no attention.
> While it seems there is no absurdist reality Americans won’t accept,
Americans are some of the most incredibly dumb people I've ever met. They have a blind spot, apparently caused by suckling on a formula bottle - they have a blind faith in anything the government tells them regarding US enemies. Nothing, absolutely nothing the US government can do wrong.
Event the 'enlightened' liberals can't imaging FBI/CIA/NSA/ETC lying to them. They have no problem with torturing a journalist 'dealing in stolen goods' (a quote from one Democrat fanatic I know). This is really frightening. The most propagandized nation on the planet. Believing they are exceptional.
"Event the 'enlightened' liberals can't imaging FBI/CIA/NSA/ETC lying to them. They have no problem with torturing a journalist 'dealing in stolen goods' (a quote from one Democrat fanatic I know). "
The Enlightened Liberals(R) are fine with this, as long as they have the whip hand.
My contention is that the sane half is much smaller than 50% (that's a reference to a 'larger half' in Tolstoy's War and Peace; some wouldn't be too wrong by translating that title as War and World)
I wish you were right, but Assange has already exposed the Evil Empire, many times over, and where has it gotten him? Most people don't care what the government does in our names until it hits them upside the head and by then, it's usually too late.
I have several shirts with Assange's picture and the reactions I get are pretty depressing. Most people have no clue who he is and the ones who do are usually woefully uninformed. Some confuse him with Snowden, or think he's out of prison and there's always the idiot liberal who blames him for the election of Trump, which trumps (sorry) everything else. It's all so horrifying.
msnbc.com currently, no mention of Assange. foxnews.com has a short article under World. Both are leading with the Smollett nonsense which never should have been a story in the first place. I'll hold my breath.
thanks for the diligence. this is very disheartening for lovers of liberty.
Assange is being martyred right in front of us for the crime of exposing the lawlessness of those in power.
after seeing the herd kowtow to the short statured medical tyrants with covid, this is an unwelcome but unsurprising development- which i'd wager most US citizens are oblivious to or have bought the mainstream narrative that wikileaks is a stateless intelligence operation undermining the US Fed gov and its benevolence globally.
with restrictions on protests being implemented in various western EU states and further assaults on press freedoms -its open warfare on civil liberties by the nation states.
If he had published a complete membership/ supporters list, internal correspondence, etc., of Antfa, BLM, DSA, or some other progressive group would you feel the same outrage at the charge? If not, it is the groups he hurt that you disapprove of more than press freedom that is driving your outrage...
This case and ones like it (Snowden and other anti-establishment whistleblowers), along with media censorship, are *the* most important challenges of our time -- greater than all the other emergent totalitarian abuse.
Open discourse is simply more fundamental than any thing else in a democracy. Competition among viewpoints are the only way to keep a tether on reality, not only for the public but for the elites leading it.
Or as Caitlin Johnstone keeps pointing out, "it's all about the narrative".
And I'm so sick of playing perpetual whack-a-mole with "scary" language, with punishment for ignorance of the current hip term, instead of seeking the speaker's meaning.
"Narrative" works just fine for me. The character string was in use with a consistent denotation for centuries before 20th century social sciences got to it, and there are far worse cases of lexical abuse. So I'll defend it.
Well If you want to remain even partially relevant, you need to keep up. It’s a pain, but you sound like the old folks in the 60’s - that is before they discovered divorce and weed and rock and roll in the 7o’s
"If you want to remain even partially relevant, you need to keep up."
Please read my name again.
FIFY:
"If the opposition to this and all the other other West-destroying sophistry wants to become a force for good again, we need to spread the word and resist, no matter how hopeless they want to make us feel."
I did not make myself clear (haha). I did read your name and respect it. But words matter and they evolve and change. You might even say they are propagandistic. So, you will resist post modernism - fine. But you won’t be listened to by many ppl - even us. An example is (by cringy chance) I heard Trump call in Ingram’s show last night about his new book. After he hyped his sales (eyeroll) he said, in all sincerity, it was ‘ a picture book’. FFS - not a photographic essay book but a picture book. Like for a toddler. Who on god’s earth could take that seriously? This is a man whose communication skills have not evolved since he was was adolescent. But by all means resist anti-hip. You be you.
"[N]ot a photographic essay book but a picture book. ..."
So?
"... Like for a toddler. Who on god’s earth could take that seriously?"
The only reason to come to that conclusion is to surrender to silly spin and class insecurities. "Photographic essay" heaps a dose of (to me, nauseating) pretension over the simply-conveyed "picture book", which *should* work as effectively for cognitively sophisticated as the cognitively simple.
As we both know, TPTB do that with with abandon to Trump, who is simply no match for the forces in media, gov, and elsewhere arrayed against him. Language that *could* work for all audiences is now poisoned by divisionists.
I once was embedded in that world. Thank goodness I've escaped classmongering. I now campaign against their alleged superior moral worth.
"Graphic Novels" have lamentably become big sellers, and are no different from what you describe: comic books. It disgusts me, and I avoid publications "written" to coddle illiterates, but that is where our culture is today...
My Spirit and sense of liberty and truth have been sent into a tailspin down into a very dark place on this development for Julian. My Heart and rational mind simply cannot 'stomach' the level of evil and corruption at the highest offices of the Executive Branch. WHY... is there not legal recourse for defenders of 1st Amendment Journalism, to take these criminals to task in an appropriate court of competent jurisdiction? Or am I just dreaming that there is no available avenue open to bring this matter to justice and into the public "Light of Day". I am horrified to KNOW..... that my military service oath "...to preserve, protect and defend..." has been rendered meaningless. Respectfully Regards,
couldn't stop the tears of frustration. The international conspiracy of suppression and cronyism will stifle his courageous stance, and he will break. How dare he expose the underbelly of their supposed selfless governing? The is an egregious international web of jingoistic deceit and I rue the day he is shipped here from his European ordeal. Shame, shame on our country's leaders
This is a great setting of the scene for why Assange is now a political issue and why true journalists all supported him from the beginning.
Next, I'd like to see a specific, actionable recommendation of what society should do next. One option is a jury trial in the US where he can argue to normal people the benefits of his journalist contributions against the espionage charges (I think Assange requested this); another is a deferred prosecution agreement; another is do nothing (a decision that only lasts 4 years).
I don't want to just read this reporting and feel good, nor to read it and hate the liberals; I want to read it and support the most consequential journalist of his generation in a way that is aligned with millions of other supporting people.
Reduce size of government. Bloated government feeds the bureaucracy. Government continues growing, even in occasional periods with vocal attempts to reduce the "deficit," which is our persistent growth. The feeble attempts to reduce the growth do nothing to reduce the size. Every extra dollar enhances the bureaucracies that control us. They have been unobservable and therefore uncontrollable since WWII. It will only get worse until we significantly reduce it.
Obesity in individuals causes covid and many other illnesses.
Debt is the government equivalent to carbs. Addictive and destructive. Atkins was always considered a kook by the carb addicts, Peter Schiff is considered a kook by the debt addicts. Go Schiff!
I don't expect DOJ would survive the discovery process. They'll more likely try to impose a plea deal, or kill him in custody, like epstein. Too many power centers don't want what Julian knows to be revealed.
We live in a country where George Floyd is a hero and near worshiped while Julian Assange is a villainous criminal. We live in a dystopian Alice in Wonderland world.
This looks like a continued testing of public gullibility, forever pushing the envelope.
The campaign is similar to those likely behind the most suspect of current alternative narratives: Moon-landing hoax, flat-earth, Q-Anon, and numerous other worldviews, are probably *actual* disinformation campaigns managed out of IC black boxes. The goal is to get most of the public to conflate *any* explanation that runs counter to the official one as being a dreaded "conspiracy theory".
It works similarly to being labeled a "racist" when one has unapproved points of view about that topic, no matter what those views are, who is saying them, or what their actual intent may be.
I'm worried that all of the focus on Julian Assange's poor mental health makes his "suicide" more likely. Like John McAfee or Jeffrey Epstein before him.
It should not surprise anyone if he is assassinated (Assanginated?) and it's called suicide. Locally, an MD who was running a large illegal opoid distibution racket a few years back with the paid assistance of a number of well-placed cops and firemen (union officials and officers; this was confirmed at the time of his arrest by the county DA) also committed "suicide" in jail awaiting trial. Magically, all of the investigations into his accomplices disappeared almost immediately after his death; no one else was ever indicted. This kind of bullshit is not so rare as you might like to believe...
Bad comparison, also talking about world goverments while praising police seems pretty catatonic, it's the executive arm of any power and their abuses are pretty well documented
“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” – George Orwell
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Explain why you believe this. A bust of George Floyd is now displayed in NYC and a statue of the career criminal and drug addict now stands in New Jersey. Assange, on the other hand, is a journalist being persecuted by the One World Government.
Excellent point, and I couldn't agree more, but reality seems to have little place in America today. "Journalists" and the American people were not willing to look at the implications of turning Floyd into a martyr, turning police into villains, nor were they uncomfortable that the state awarded his family 27 million before his "killer" went to trial, which basically asserted Chauvin was guilty before his trial began, which sent the judicial system further down the toilet. Journalism today is all theater with little regard for truth, for justice, but what journalism does hold to be extremely relevant is to make lots, and lots of money no matter the consequences.
Chauvin was sacrificed on the alter of WOKENESS. Another disturbing fact about modern American "journalism" is that the Smollett verdict was not mentioned on MSNBC anytime between 8:00 PM - 11:00 PM on 12/9/2021.
Interesting way to put it. I never listen to MSNBC and for the reason you state. If they had an audience who were well informed they would be very aware of their slight of hand, so poor are they at manipulating truth.
There's an awesome article on MSNBC right now about how Trump supporters are somehow responsible for the Smollett verdict leading to an increased reluctance to instantly believe in hate crimes allegations. Such great journalism.
It's an opinion piece, but I do believe it reflects MSNBC's take on the verdict. My brother was gay, died of AIDS, and boy am I not buying this crap, and it infuriates me. The LBGTQ community has come a long way and no ones needs help from a self serving liar like Smollett
"The indisputable victims of hate crimes will now carry an even heavier burden of suspicion." He makes this statement yet doesn't hold Smollett accountable on any level, just the jury who felt their was sufficient evidence to convict him.
Did you watch the same video I did? That dude should have been off the force years ago and his behavior was horrid and criminal and directly resulted in that innocent until proven guilty man's death.
George Floyd is no hero, but Derek Chauvin is no police. That man is a criminal and we can debate on the level of his guilt if you'd like but I don't know anyone who watched that video and werent disgusted by that man's death.
Yes. I saw the video and there is no evidence that Chauvin placed any weight on the drug addict's throat. I agree that he should have simply left him cuffed on the ground, waited for the EMT's to arrive and stood to face the hostile crowd.
Chauvin has been relegated to a long jail sentence. Yet the tributes, statues and millions of dollars to the Floyd family are still out there. We will not be seeing any reality as to Floyds horrid criminal life and destruction that he had left in his wake.
Now that he has served his political purpose might we not keep hearing his name and acting like he was a latter day MLK? Like the Dems. always say never let a crises go to waste -- they sure exploited this manslaughter case for all it was worth.
Charles,
I want you to know that my computer crashed. last month. I bought a new on immediately, but this is the first time I have found you on GG forum.
I last moderation of my blog, and now I am only writing a new substack newsletter,
Please write me an email at my new address: whittw47@gmail.com
New Substack:
https://williamw.substack.com/p/primary-documents-in-american-history
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@CollapseMMCC apparently collapsed.
Bad comparison.
>".. . Assange, on the other hand, is a journalist being persecuted by the One World Government."
No. Assange is being persecuted by the U..S. government. With a little help from the bloody British.
*the duties and obligations imposed by the United Nations charter (refer to it) upon *all* member states (i.e. the 'world') is the closest thing we have to 'one world gov.' chucky.
Don't call me Chucky, Hummer. I don't see how it is possible NOT to see that the United States is part of the One World Government when we allied ourselves with the World Economic Forum and communist China to create COVID.
It's 'humming' .. . not Hummer.
The U.S. is part of the United Nations. Ironically, one of its founder members.
*nowadays, they just do whatever they want .. . Charles.
Yes, humming, the United Nations seems most intent on sending its troops around the world to rape women. They do not seem involved in the depopulation program.
Only in amerikan! A few, very few black people who didn't deserve to die by Police cause riots in the streets. Remember obomber in 2007/8 kicking millions of black families out of their homes and making the banksters whole and then getting reelected with the black vote, I do. Did you see any rioting then; I didn't as the black families lost their homes and assets and the equity that would be worth a lot more now. And they elect biden, the guy who wrote the bill's to screw black people and put hundreds of thousands in jail, almost all plea bargaining because they're poor. Wake up amerikans, save yourselves!
Yes but they are conditioned from birth, first genetically programmed to believe stories, then the parents and peers pass on their conditioning, the schools and churches take it from there and you're well softened up for the real corporate and political propaganda. Up to now, it's just been basic indoctrination. Lately, they've added social media to the cauldron. Very few even realize what happened to them and that's the idea. Old saying.." one priest is better than 100 police or soldiers, cheaper and more effective"! Unless you're like Greta with Asperger's, you're subject to the indoctrination by stories.. it's been going on since before the Pyramids; how else could the tiny ruling classes control the masses?
Doesn’t mean murdering Floyd was a righteous act.
Murder? No Floyd died from heart failure while stressed out on fentanyl. The officer was found guilty to avoid rioting in the streets.
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Who said it was?
Good comparison.
"American prosecutors also agreed that they would consent to any request from Assange that, once convicted, he could serve his prison term in his home country of Australia rather than the U.S."
Once convicted? Isn't there supposed to be a fair trial? Keep your noses clean out there, people. Once the US security state becomes interested in you, unless you're a billionaire or hold incriminating videos of "too important to fail" politicos, you're well and truly fucked.
The truth slipped out, guilty until proven innocent.
Bert this says it all. I WAS an Anglophile even considering their huge warehousing of NSA cabled data - but no more. Sad. I feel sick for JA
I hear you loud and clear. Reading this gave me a sinking feeling.
“Let the jury consider their verdict,” the King said, for about the twentieth time that day.
“No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first—verdict afterwards.”
“Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly. “The idea of having the sentence first!”
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Maybe Assange’s lawyers could use that statement from the prosecution to get the whole case thrown out!
Does DOJ ever lose a case? Do they ever even go to trial?
He’s toast because the US being ‘a nation of many assholian laws’ that are never revised, he will be spit out under espionage.
Excellent questions.
Yes yes and yes. They can even move in and fake your suicide in custody to protect their 6 ft tall hound dog bulbous nose ex pres who btw gwyneth was the first to use cigars as vaginal candles (TM)
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/conservatives-downplay-trump-epstein-lolita-express/
Ok maybe him too
We will know who the true "journalists" are by their response to and treatment of this news. Thank you, Mr. Greenwald, for upholding freedom of the press.
Yesterday I had NPR on in the car and they were talking about the censorship of the media and the creation of "misinformation" investigations. It sounded like real journalism for a minute there and then I realized they were talking about Hong Kong!
NPR is dominated by self righteous, pedantic, "woke" pieces of shit
Who are suckling on the Koch's tit.
Was that thinkpiece brought tonus by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or from the JD Rockeffeller Foundation?
Koch Industries?
When WE do it, then that makes it OK!
Known by ever soviet citizen ever. Guess we need to stop calling THEM the propagandists.
Where have you gone NPR; a nation turns its lonely eyes to you, woo woo woo
NPR has been a propaganda tool since at least 9/11, if not before. I can't believe I used to donate to them when I was a starving student.
NPR = National Propaganda Radio.
PBS = Public Brainwashing Service.
Yes!!! I know in retrospect that they have always been propaganda, but I really didn't realize that until the 2016 election cycle when they were the "All Hillary All the Time" station. In 2020, of course, they were the "Anyone Except Bernie Station."
Managerial Professional Class Radio.
I have to think Assange did something right given the rage the political elite & corporate media have toward him. Look at the deal the US cut with Britian - not "if" convicted, but "when" convicted. Just skip the kangaroo court and the sideshow it'll bring and lock the guy up now. We all know he's toast.
I know I sound like a whack job, but here goes (again): all the same corrupt people and systems of governments that just hung Assange out to dry are, as always, accountable to no one. They run the show to their own liking, making and taking shit tons of money while doing it. Pure fuckery. And they always get away with it. Always.
Assange, unfortunately, is the just the latest pinata to be busted up by these elites. There are others every day, he just happens to be of a higher profile.
"[S]kip the kangaroo court and the sideshow it'll bring and lock the guy up now. We all know he's toast."
Ironically, that's exactly what TPTB will try to do, because the last thing they want is any more exposure of what's going on.
it is long past time to bring pain and punishment to these elites or they will never have any incentive to stop
This should be in our history books
The NEW history books will record that modern history began on May 25, 2020.
Contemporary US History. Btw my father in law, a 5 yr veteran of
WW2, was unarmed and shot in the back at 2am by a cop in 1952 in a domestic dispute in GA
Sorry to hear about what happened to your father-in-law 70 years ago. Some believe that society has changed in the last seven decades.
Btw, the USA was not involved in WW2 for 5 years.
He served overseas as a tech for that amount of time in Naples Italy. Unfortunately - sometimes there with little to do after the fascist defeat and as Germans were leaving, he got involved, as many young did, with teenage local female nationals. So don’t be such a smart ass BTFW.
This is essentially why my stepfather - married six times - always advised leaving at the first sign of trouble. Walk out, leave, don't come back. Remains wise advice today.
I cannot keep up with urban slang. What does BTFW mean?
Sorry I thought this was a different poster. Still don’t assume someone does not know what they are talking about. I believe I said he served 5 years overseas during wW2 and it WAS a world war -not just the few years American entered.. We had ppl stationed there before and after for our (semi secret) allies. If I stated it incorrectly I apologize. The newspaper article in which we finally learned the truth about what happened to him (his Italian wife and sister were lying for 50 years) said he served overseas for 5 years.’ That’s when newspapers stated who what where when -only to be found now on microfilm or online.
So now we have an international precedent (from the Anglosphere, nonetheless) under which anyone anywhere in the world can be charged with crimes under any country's laws, even if they are not citizens of that country (Assange is an Australian) and their activities took place outside the country charging them (Assange was outside the US when he received the leaks and published them), and any country friendly to (or wishing to curry favor with) the charging country can arrest and extradite them for trial. I wonder, how will the US and UK will like it when this precedent is used against their own citizens by one of China, Iran, Russia or Belarus?
Not only that; the US can use piracy one land and the high seas. Currently stealing the oil and grain of Syria while occupying the country. Just sold the Iranian oil from the tankers it pirated by other means on the high seas. Like Israel; it kills and invades and occupies nation's with impunity around the world. Currently starving the children of Venezuela and Syria among many other places.
They will howl like stuck pigs at The Injustice Of It All.
Hypocrisy troubles a sociopath not a whit.
By publishing materials stolen illegally from the US he did, arguably, commit a crime against the US. At least that is the basis of the US charges.
As I understand it, I could be wrong, this is legally the same as a foreigner receiving stollen property such as a missile gyro taken from an Air Force depo or digital currency taken from a US bank..
The information he published exposed US govt abuse of power: atrocities & corruption committed during war time. That's the reason they've been pursuing him. If he'd stolen & published information from the US govt about Chinese corruption, they'd not be pursuing him at all.
Yes. I guess the person you are responding to would have felt the same way about the third reich minions, but omg I said the thing that may only be said by msnbc. I beg your forgiveness...
right. ultimately. But the.material published did not require classification. The "enemies of America " already knew all about this treachery. The group from which.this information was being withheld is the American citizenry. Critically important since the taxes extracted from them pay for all this corruption and carnage.
The Pentagon Papers case held that the First Amendment applie to the publication of stolen and classified materials.
"By publishing materials stolen illegally from the US he did, arguably, commit a crime against the US."
Please see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._United_States
Not that Wikipedia is the best source, of course. In fact, there is no such thing as a (single) best source. Wikipedia suffices to identify the case.
Wiki has biases, but the truth is out there. The real challenge is teaching readers to know the difference. The failed education system degrades that skill.
"teaching readers to know the difference" - first step is to avoid wiki. The keys themselves should be torn out of every keyboard. Wikileaks should change its name to just Leaks. Dot com.
"Wiki" is a term that predates "Wikipedia"
https://www.britannica.com/topic/wiki
Jimmy Wales blocked me on Twitter.
All information is useful, some informs us about the subject, some informs us about the source.
The fact that Assange is not a US national, and that Wikileaks is not hosted domestically, are not elements of the crimes he is alleged to have committed. Originally I believe the Espionage Act, enacted against the backdrop of WWI, was aimed at US domestics. There is ZERO difference between what Assange did, and what the NYT and WaPo do on a regular basis. And for that matter what Glenn Greenwald did in publishing the classified NSA secrets provided to him by Snowden. The ONLY way the government can get away with this is to maintain, without evidence, that Assange is not protected by the First Amendment's press freedom, while established corporate media outlets like the NYT are so protected.
By the letter of the law in the Espionage Act I'm sure it criminalizes the journalism that Assange, the NYT and WaPo, do on a regular basis. But to the extent it does, it is unconstitutional and thus not enforceable. It remains to be seen whether the courts will stand up and find this. It will be really important that Assange get the issue in front of a court as soon as possible. Let's hope he lives long enough to do so.
I doubt that this has much to do with Julian Assange other than the perfidious mendacity of the empire needs to take it out on someone. The real reason IMHO is to let anyone who would dare to the sins of the empire what they can expect if they aren't the MSM, a part of the system of indoctrination along with the schools and churches etc. It really bug's the empire that China is eating their breakfast and eating more every day in every way and what used to be called the third world is already doing business with China and being treated much better than the perfidious evil empire and it's tool's, the IMF and WB. Of course China has the military muscle to defend itself. Russia doesn't have the economy to threaten the empire but they do have the muscle so US commits it's worse malevolence in small countries, starving through sanctions or occasionally invading but that hasn't worked so well lately except for the profits of the military industrial complex.
I don't doubt that there is truth in your analysis, but I think this entire prosecution is much more personal to Assange. The IC does not take well to bring embarrassed. In fact I think they are in this case being extremely vindictive. Clearly they view the leaking of the cables by Manning to be a lesser crime than the public disclosure by Assange, since they apparently didn't put up much of a fuss about pardoning Manning, but have persecuted Assange to the ends of the earth. Add to that the fact that Assange embarrassed the Democrat party and you've got one big revenge play. It's sickening.
Yes; I agree with you; it's personal and more than that, it's intimidating anyone who would dare to expose the crimes of the empire which it's people are indoctrinated to not believe.
The fact he is not a US national and that Wikileaks is not hosted in the US makes one wonder why US law applies at all. Organizers of drag queen story hours and authors of a number of children's books published in the US supportive of homosexuality (*Heather Has Two Mommies* springs to mind) are arguably in violation of Russia's law against the propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations to minors, but Russian law does not apply to them because they are neither Russian nationals nor in Russia. An awful lot of what happens in the US on a daily basis violates the Taliban government's interpretation of sharia, and thus current Afghan law, but Afghan law does not apply to us because we are neither Afghan nationals nor in Afghanistan. Explain again why US law applies to Assange at all.
This isn't about reason or even laws; that's a distraction.. this is about power. Hopefully the empire will loose much of it's power, sooner rather than later. All that's left is military and money and China and Russia among others is working their way off the dollars and the SWIFT bankstering system. The USA is no longer a society of production, rather a society of extraction and the giant fraud called the assets market's. When you're house or stock's go from $100K to $200K; what wealth was created, what useful service was performed? Exactly zero and that's what our Western economies are mostly producing zero. How long can the fraud last? How long did Bernie Madoff get away with it? Who knows, it's well past it's best before date now.
The only way The Empire can regain primacy is war. There will be war.
Stop quoting laws, we carry weapons! - Pompey
The UK is an Empire client state where orders are orders.
Power matters. Laws? Not at all.
Except when those laws, like the Espionage Act, can be, and are, used against those they don't apply to (Assange is NOT a spy, and he did NOT perpetrate espionage). But, when it's "okay" to violate the constitution and international law(s) right and left, they can apply any law they want to anyone by twisting the interpretation of it around to suit them. Criminals are running the "justice" [sic(k)] system.
Or they will just suicide him like they did Epstein. Message sent.
Are you sure that you read Glenn Greenwald?
Yes, I love reading smart people even if I don't always agree!
I guess that applies to WAPO and THE NYT also. They are the ones who published it.
It isn't, actually. They can't come right out and say they are charging him for publishing material that they designated as classified, because it is well-settled that any law purporting to prohibit the publication of classified material is unconstitutional. Which is why they have concocted a charge of conspiracy to encourage and assist Manning.
And the classified material was evidence of war crimes.
Can you please point me to that part?
Google 'collateral murder'
Yeah, that's what I expected was being referred to. I'm sorry, but the collateral murder video just is not evidence of a war crime. A group of dozen or so Iraqi's, two red with Ak-47s and one with an RPG standing in a crowd. US military personnel described what they saw, asked for permission to engage, it was granted and they engaged. You are hearing their candid assessments of what they are seeing in real time. That two Reuters reporters were among the crowd is not known to the military personnel and no part of the video suggests it was known. It is not realistic to expect that such events will not occur in war zones. They will. They do. All the time.
btw, what was wrong with jfkjr?
It's not important.
Yes, that it the basis for the charges, but applying US secrecy laws extraterritorially against non-citizens is an affront to the sovereignty of both Australia and wherever it was that Assange was located when he got and published Manning's document dump. Again, now China can do the same to Americans.
The 1st Amendment calls, wants your attention.
All the US blather about "democracy" and "political prisoners" - there is no difference I can see in the Nazi-like treatment of Assange from Obama, Trump, and Biden. How much of the authoritarian US "Pandemic" response comes from these same security state actors? "Let no emergency go to waste."
Blather about "democracy" has always come from the authoritarian tendency within American politics. Until Woodrow Wilson (who imprisoned political opponents and had the federal government run a propaganda agency, the Committee on Public Information, which Goebbels said was the model for his own efforts on behalf of the Nazis) we were self-consciously a republic. Wilson and his "progressives" gave us direct election of Senators, who before had represented the interests of their state's governments in Washington, the income tax, and got us into WW I to "make the world safe for democracy".
And League Of Nations tho? Or am I tripping
Yes, that, too. And, I forgot, introducing Jim Crow into the Federal government, which had been fully integrated since Reconstruction. (Wilson is the only President in the 20th century to give the genocidal maniac Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan who made the Civil War inevitable, and Andrew Johnson who derailed Reconstruction a run for the money in the contest for worst POTUS ever.)
Don't forget that Wilson authored US entry into the infantile bloodbath known as WWI, without any actual justification.
You’re correct
Presidents don't have much to do with it. There is no "man behind the curtain," evilly manipulating events. The villain is an entrenched hive of bureaucrats operating in concert and friendly competition to maintain the real power behind the throne. Unless we get control of the "deep state" it will naturally get worse. The best start is eliminating a lot of them. The deep state feeds on enormous government. There is a "critical mass" of government bloat which makes the bureaucrats unobservable and thus unstoppable. Smaller government is our only hope. It will be achieved, either voluntarily or by force. Usually it's forced.
100% spot on - unfortunately there is no outside force in the US political system that could clean up the deep state stables. All the wokism, identity politics, uncontrolled immigration etc. injected enough strife into body politics to ensure that no united political force emerges to act as a Hercules (which was exactly the point). The only chance is for the internal layers of the deep state become so thick, so ossified, so detached from outside reality, so unaccountable that they starts rotting from the inside, until the whole edifice collapses (and the symptoms of this are already visible). The only scary question how much life, freedom and possibly world peace will be impacted by it.
For the sake of argument, what is the current state of "life, freedom, and world peace"?
Pretty abysmal on all account. And the case of Assange is an inflection point indicating all are about the get worse.
It's not over yet. I expect this case will degrade the authoritarian instinct to hide from the press, and will renew journalists' resolve to do their job correctly. Both the authorities and the journalists have been corrupted lately. This case will start reversing that destructive trend.
There is nothing wrong with Positive Thinking. Norman Vincent Peale's book would be excellent reading material, today. On the other hand, there is no indication that Assange will receive fair treatment by the US government and its subservient media.
Always in jeopardy, defended by a few, but still relatively intact in most places.
Starving the beast is the best solution. It will work, but takes time. Putting a bounty on some deep state actors would also work, but that's not our way. Not yet.
Starving it would be great - but which wing of the corporate war party is going to undertake it? On the front of showing more unaccountable, no strings attached money their way they are on same page. Pentagon failed law-mandated audit 4 times in a row, and each time around they got many billions more.
They will when we demand it. I think it was Franklin who said the new (US) republic would last until the people learn they can vote themselves money. We might be part that point. It will have to get worse before it improves. Ten dollar gasoline might do it.
Easy when you create the "emergency."
In a lab, off-shoring a highly illegal bioweapon.
Welcome to the COVID War.
Don’t forget Newt Gingrich and a bunch of other assholes on the right who completely threw him under the bus, called him a hostile state intelligence service, a cyber terrorist, etc.
When it comes to being exposed as the deep state toilet that DC is, the GOP and DNC become allies pretty quickly.
Has Newt Gingrich failed to adopt some position when it was beneficial to him financially? I must have missed that. The dude has the credibility of ...Goebbels had more credibility.
While the MSM are not reporting this, the irony of it coming on the heels of Biden's conference on nourishing democracy, which was widely reported, goes beyond anything Orwell imagined.
Biden's hypocrisy and unconstitutional authoritarianism is matched only by his incoherence and senility.
It's also International Human Rights Day.😟
The NYT isn’t MSM???
C.I.A.
This is a dark day for liberty. I light a candle for Assange and hope his bravery will illuminate the path for a million more to rise up in his footsteps, like the courageous souls I cite as examples in “Letter to a Colluder: Stop Enabling Tyranny” (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/letter-to-a-colluder-stop-enabling) 🕯
these days, there no bravery and there are no heroes.
I can name almost a million (https://gbdeclaration.org/), including Dr. Reiner Fuellmich and everyone he and his Berlin Corona Investigative Committee have interviewed; all those I cited as examples in “Letter to a Colluder”; and RFK and everyone he listed in the Acknowledgments of “The Real Anthony Fauci.”
Here are just a few who come to mind off the top of my head (apologies to the many other heroes I inadvertently missed) in no particular order:
• Dr. Mike Yeadon
• CJ Hopkins
• Dr. Robert Malone
• Dr. Peter McCullough
• Dr. Vladimir Zelenko
• Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche
• Dr. Jessica Rose
• Steve Kirsch
• Dr. David Martin
• Dr. Wolfgang Godard
• Dr. Tess Lawrie
• Dr. Ryan Cole
• Mark Crispin Miller
• Tessa Lane
• Peter Doshi
• Dr. Byram Bridle
• Dr. Meryl Nass
• Dr. Dolores Cahill
• Mathew Crawford
• Dr. Toby Rogers
• Dr. Colleen Huber
• Julius Ruechel
• Alex Berenson
• bad cattitude
• eugyppius
• Igor Chudov
• Aaron Siri
• Edward Snowden
• Laura Dodsworth
• Glenn Greenwald :-)
Plus every ordinary human being who chooses not to comply in the face of astronomical pressure and especially those who are brave enough to speak out against tyranny.
A friend of mine whose parents came here to escape the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia said to me today that his parents are genuinely worried at the similarities they see in today's Western "democracies".
Specifically, the self-policing of wrongthink, the massive propaganda and the internment camps.
If anyone would know what a hostile totalitarian takeover looks like, a Cambodian who escaped death camps would.
I think that’s an incredibly valuable perspective and one reason I mapped the Ten Stages of Genocide to today’s situation in the second part of my “Letter to a Holocaust Denier” (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/letter-to-a-holocaust-denier). Most people don’t even realize we’re already at Stage 10: Denial.
Truth
Very much agreed. In many cases, the powerlessness that "ordinary" human beings have brings them not only anonymity but greater punishment by cowardly TPTB. A crushingly lonely place.
You are not alone 🙌
I’m starting to feel guilty about all the ones I’ve left out. It is impossible to name them all, but here are a few glaring omissions:
• Prof. Mattias Desmet
• Vera Sharav
• Catherine Austin Fits
• Paul Schreyer
• Kit Knightly
• Cory Morningstar
• Robin Monotti
• Neil Oliver
• Edward Curtin
• Naomi Wolf
• Lew Rockwell
• Robert Gore
• Marianne von Rosen
• Marian Turski
• Dr. Joseph Mercola and the rest of the “Disinformation” Dozen ;-)
• Dr. Mobeen Syed
• Gemma O’Doherty
• John Waters
• James Howard Kunstler
• Charles Eisenstein
• Dr. Sherri Tenpenny
• Rand Paul
• Ron Paul
• Tulsi Gabbard
• James Patrick and everyone involved in Planet Lockdown (https://planetlockdownfilm.com/full-interviews/)
• The OvalMedia team
• COVID Revealed team
• Academy of Ideas
• AfterSkool
And more!
• Whitney Webb
• Iain Davis
• Derrick Broze
• Michel Chossudovsky
• Fernando Andacht and the eXtramuros team
• Slobodan Despot/Antipresse
• Nevermore Media
• Left Lockdown Sceptics
• Paul Cudenec/Winter Oak Press
• Architects for Social Housing
• Denis Rancourt
• John Duffy
OMG, I keep trying to stop, but I can’t leave these out:
• James Corbett
• Bjørn Andreas Bull-Hansen
• Max Igan
• John Bush
• Catte Black
No Steven Donziger? I'm glad he's been released from prison to serve his remaining term out on house arrest, but he's still been disbarred, and relentlessly hounded and smeared by the big boys.
There are so many I keep forgetting, but thanks for adding Steven. Anyone else feel free to add others :-)
and some more!: Paul Alexander, TrialSite News Staff, TCW, The Expose, Makia Freeman, Patrick Wood, Jordan Schachel, Dr. Sam Bailey, Jon Rappoport, Celia Farber, Justin Hart, Boriquagato, Jessica Rose, Charles Rixley, Paul Craig Roberts, Jonathan Otto, James Lyons-Weller, Mike Whitney, Karen Kingston.
Who knew there are so many?
That's why it's a myth there is no resistance. Globally.
I keep tabs on Google News every day (wiping the slate clean of cookies, IPaddr, ...) to keep track of the increasingly flailing and unhinged efforts by the elite.
Exactly. TPTB want us to think We’re few and isolated. We outnumber Them by an incalculable degree. Once We realize that, there will be no stopping the tsunami that hits Them.
Aha. Well, great to know, but when is that gonna happen? Just wondering, 'cause from where I stand, it looks like "They" are winning and will continue to do so.
Don't wipe the cookies. Make sure they know they're being countersurveiled.
OK, well I and others could stand to be more technically sophisticated about this. If you know of good primers please point us to them. Thanks
That's right. Don't wipe them, sprinkle them instead.
As a footnote, it is sad that there is no viable competitor to GN for summarizing global headlines. I also scan those daily for the same reason as you, and also because I find it useful to know what various individual and collective authoritarians want me to think. I may at least have developed a method to deny Google the credit they believe they are entitled to receive for clicks on the GN links.
Yes but to be fair the poster was only making a rhetorical point and it was made without malevolent intent I think
Ed is a hero. He publicly and poignantly put others before himself to be pardoned. His intelligence, humility and heart make him so. Putin this is your chance to make yourself a hero to us. You are the only power on earth able to fight Biden’s dentures and win
Putin may out-Judo a Siberian bear, but he is still no match for Biden's denture - it must be incredibly strong to be able to hold that rotten head together :-)
When all seems lost (and it does), we can at least silently protest the growing wave of fascism, the fascism, and the silencing of journalisms by purchasing and wearing t-shirts and sweatshirts sold by https://wikileaks.shop/
While not surprising, this is terrible news. The West is intent on a slow and torturous death for Assange, it seems, and for any who seek an alternative to the soul-crushing, Earth-destroying, Imperialist hell-scape they and their presstitutes are building. God help us all.
Exactly, and well said.
You forgot to say that allegations the emails were stolen by Russia are without evidence.
I hate it when people try to make lemonade out of lemons, but here I am trying, because, especially in this seemingly dark moment, Assange may yet be the hero who not only defeats The Empire (again), but the one whose nearly unbearable sacrifice will be the straw that breaks The Empire’s back.
While it seems there is no absurdist reality Americans won’t accept, no totalitarian effort we won’t embrace, I like to—I have to—believe there are limits even to our national collective cowardice. If Julian Assange has the herculean strength to survive his ordeal and keep his wits, he has the single best opportunity of any human on the planet to to expose The Empire for what it is, and, with our awakening support, to bring that Empire down in a final cloud of dust and ash.
The Imperials now flaunt their power. They act as if their power has no limits. But the one thing we know for certain about empires is they have a 100% failure rate. Hubris is a fatal flaw. The U.S. is a powder keg awaiting a spark, and that spark could be the American sham trial of Julian Assange—an unprecedented overreach with unprecedented, even Empire ending, blowback.
You are terribly naive. The vast majority of Americans have never even heard of Julian Assange, and if they were to learn about what he has endured, and why, they would not care at all.
The great majority of Americans are completely brainwashed, hypnotized idiots, fascists at heart, eager to embrace the most draconian, totalitarian strictures that our puppet government - controlled by multi-national corporations and global powers behind the scenes - chooses to impose on them.
If you want to truly understand what is happening in our country, there is one book above all you must read:
The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
You may think a book with this title could not be relevant to the case of Julian Assange, but you'd be wrong for thinking that, assuming you do. This monumental tome is the most important book of our time. It will shock you. It will horrify you. It will enrage you. It might overwhelm you. It will certainly enlighten you, as no other work can possibly do, to the reality of the fathomless evil which we are up against.
I totally agree, I’m reading this book now. With regard to Fauci, only Stalin, Hitler and Mao will have been responsible for killing more people in the 20/21 centuries than Fauci. This book is a must read.
You mean he beats both Pol Pot and the last eight years of Leopold II's atrocities in the Congo? Wow.
absolutely, Pol Pot "only" killed a few million Cambodians.
Pol Pot only got 2 million. Congo got 5-8. So yes he beat Pol Pot (assuming it is eventually determined that the gain-of-function research he funded did result in Covid). But not quite yet the Congo. Probably by next year, though.
Don’t forget to add deaths directly attributed to the jabs. And the hundreds of thousands of severe adverse reactions. Jabs should have been stopped a year ago:
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/12/vaers_data_indicates_the_covid_vaccines_have_killed_at_least_140000_americans.html
Would you please marry me?!
Don't forget to include those who couldn't have their 'regular' illnesses addressed due to the plandemic.
Reading it right now and feel sick to my soul knowing this evil is upon us.
I bet your fun at parties....
You don't have to try to turn Assange into a hero. In fact, you can believe he is an idiot with a completely juvenile ideology. It doesn't matter. You don't even have to believe that he published important secrets (I think he did, I just don't think Chelsea Manning's document dump was among them). None of it matters. We have a Constitution that prohibits the federal government from enacting any law abridging freedom of speech or the press. The tortured logic of the federal government's charges against Assange are an effort to get around the first amendment. I find paragraph 5 of the indictment particularly offensive as any law purporting to restrict a person from "receiving" classified information is plainly violative of the first amendment.
The last 18 months has proven that our constitution is Charmin.
That started with 9/11, I'm afraid. Now it is exploding at an exponential rate. Time to put the "stakeholders" of the WEF on trial for crimes against humanity.
Unfortunately, I see this playing out differently. Once Assange is extradited and tucked away in a US prison, his case will be set for trial . . . well, sometime before the end of this century. The feds don't want him tried, they just want him imprisoned. And their most cherished hope is that he will die in prison before he ever sees the inside of a courtroom.
They won’t care as long as he is tried in McLean, Virginia by a jury of his peers. (CIA)
That's already happened, in absentia.
You have more faith in the American people than I do. We live in a selfish society where immediate self-gratification is so important that social responsibility and the long-term consequences of our actions get no attention.
> While it seems there is no absurdist reality Americans won’t accept,
Americans are some of the most incredibly dumb people I've ever met. They have a blind spot, apparently caused by suckling on a formula bottle - they have a blind faith in anything the government tells them regarding US enemies. Nothing, absolutely nothing the US government can do wrong.
Event the 'enlightened' liberals can't imaging FBI/CIA/NSA/ETC lying to them. They have no problem with torturing a journalist 'dealing in stolen goods' (a quote from one Democrat fanatic I know). This is really frightening. The most propagandized nation on the planet. Believing they are exceptional.
"Event the 'enlightened' liberals can't imaging FBI/CIA/NSA/ETC lying to them. They have no problem with torturing a journalist 'dealing in stolen goods' (a quote from one Democrat fanatic I know). "
The Enlightened Liberals(R) are fine with this, as long as they have the whip hand.
My contention is that the sane half is much smaller than 50% (that's a reference to a 'larger half' in Tolstoy's War and Peace; some wouldn't be too wrong by translating that title as War and World)
I wish you were right, but Assange has already exposed the Evil Empire, many times over, and where has it gotten him? Most people don't care what the government does in our names until it hits them upside the head and by then, it's usually too late.
I have several shirts with Assange's picture and the reactions I get are pretty depressing. Most people have no clue who he is and the ones who do are usually woefully uninformed. Some confuse him with Snowden, or think he's out of prison and there's always the idiot liberal who blames him for the election of Trump, which trumps (sorry) everything else. It's all so horrifying.
msnbc.com currently, no mention of Assange. foxnews.com has a short article under World. Both are leading with the Smollett nonsense which never should have been a story in the first place. I'll hold my breath.
Bet Tucker will cover it. He might invite Glenn on to discuss it!
I can't wait to see both his and Judy Woodruff's takes tonight!
I’ve often wondered if he and Wikileaks have a dead man’s switch?
The Empire will remain intact until they lose reserve currency status and the food stamps get cut off.
Well said.
Let us hope and pray you are correct.
thanks for the diligence. this is very disheartening for lovers of liberty.
Assange is being martyred right in front of us for the crime of exposing the lawlessness of those in power.
after seeing the herd kowtow to the short statured medical tyrants with covid, this is an unwelcome but unsurprising development- which i'd wager most US citizens are oblivious to or have bought the mainstream narrative that wikileaks is a stateless intelligence operation undermining the US Fed gov and its benevolence globally.
with restrictions on protests being implemented in various western EU states and further assaults on press freedoms -its open warfare on civil liberties by the nation states.
If he had published a complete membership/ supporters list, internal correspondence, etc., of Antfa, BLM, DSA, or some other progressive group would you feel the same outrage at the charge? If not, it is the groups he hurt that you disapprove of more than press freedom that is driving your outrage...
This case and ones like it (Snowden and other anti-establishment whistleblowers), along with media censorship, are *the* most important challenges of our time -- greater than all the other emergent totalitarian abuse.
Open discourse is simply more fundamental than any thing else in a democracy. Competition among viewpoints are the only way to keep a tether on reality, not only for the public but for the elites leading it.
Or as Caitlin Johnstone keeps pointing out, "it's all about the narrative".
So sick of narratives. It was created to make humanity and Lit professors on US campuses feel they had a bigger d**k.
And I'm so sick of playing perpetual whack-a-mole with "scary" language, with punishment for ignorance of the current hip term, instead of seeking the speaker's meaning.
"Narrative" works just fine for me. The character string was in use with a consistent denotation for centuries before 20th century social sciences got to it, and there are far worse cases of lexical abuse. So I'll defend it.
Well If you want to remain even partially relevant, you need to keep up. It’s a pain, but you sound like the old folks in the 60’s - that is before they discovered divorce and weed and rock and roll in the 7o’s
"If you want to remain even partially relevant, you need to keep up."
Please read my name again.
FIFY:
"If the opposition to this and all the other other West-destroying sophistry wants to become a force for good again, we need to spread the word and resist, no matter how hopeless they want to make us feel."
I did not make myself clear (haha). I did read your name and respect it. But words matter and they evolve and change. You might even say they are propagandistic. So, you will resist post modernism - fine. But you won’t be listened to by many ppl - even us. An example is (by cringy chance) I heard Trump call in Ingram’s show last night about his new book. After he hyped his sales (eyeroll) he said, in all sincerity, it was ‘ a picture book’. FFS - not a photographic essay book but a picture book. Like for a toddler. Who on god’s earth could take that seriously? This is a man whose communication skills have not evolved since he was was adolescent. But by all means resist anti-hip. You be you.
"[N]ot a photographic essay book but a picture book. ..."
So?
"... Like for a toddler. Who on god’s earth could take that seriously?"
The only reason to come to that conclusion is to surrender to silly spin and class insecurities. "Photographic essay" heaps a dose of (to me, nauseating) pretension over the simply-conveyed "picture book", which *should* work as effectively for cognitively sophisticated as the cognitively simple.
As we both know, TPTB do that with with abandon to Trump, who is simply no match for the forces in media, gov, and elsewhere arrayed against him. Language that *could* work for all audiences is now poisoned by divisionists.
I once was embedded in that world. Thank goodness I've escaped classmongering. I now campaign against their alleged superior moral worth.
"Graphic Novels" have lamentably become big sellers, and are no different from what you describe: comic books. It disgusts me, and I avoid publications "written" to coddle illiterates, but that is where our culture is today...
Honorable Glen,
My Spirit and sense of liberty and truth have been sent into a tailspin down into a very dark place on this development for Julian. My Heart and rational mind simply cannot 'stomach' the level of evil and corruption at the highest offices of the Executive Branch. WHY... is there not legal recourse for defenders of 1st Amendment Journalism, to take these criminals to task in an appropriate court of competent jurisdiction? Or am I just dreaming that there is no available avenue open to bring this matter to justice and into the public "Light of Day". I am horrified to KNOW..... that my military service oath "...to preserve, protect and defend..." has been rendered meaningless. Respectfully Regards,
You are a hero to question the authority vested in you and I salute you and thank you for your service Sir
couldn't stop the tears of frustration. The international conspiracy of suppression and cronyism will stifle his courageous stance, and he will break. How dare he expose the underbelly of their supposed selfless governing? The is an egregious international web of jingoistic deceit and I rue the day he is shipped here from his European ordeal. Shame, shame on our country's leaders
Yes I am right there with you Alex
This is a great setting of the scene for why Assange is now a political issue and why true journalists all supported him from the beginning.
Next, I'd like to see a specific, actionable recommendation of what society should do next. One option is a jury trial in the US where he can argue to normal people the benefits of his journalist contributions against the espionage charges (I think Assange requested this); another is a deferred prosecution agreement; another is do nothing (a decision that only lasts 4 years).
I don't want to just read this reporting and feel good, nor to read it and hate the liberals; I want to read it and support the most consequential journalist of his generation in a way that is aligned with millions of other supporting people.
Reduce size of government. Bloated government feeds the bureaucracy. Government continues growing, even in occasional periods with vocal attempts to reduce the "deficit," which is our persistent growth. The feeble attempts to reduce the growth do nothing to reduce the size. Every extra dollar enhances the bureaucracies that control us. They have been unobservable and therefore uncontrollable since WWII. It will only get worse until we significantly reduce it.
Obesity in individuals causes covid and many other illnesses.
Obesity in government causes tyranny.
Go Atkins!
Debt is the government equivalent to carbs. Addictive and destructive. Atkins was always considered a kook by the carb addicts, Peter Schiff is considered a kook by the debt addicts. Go Schiff!
I agree that an open trial in the US would be best. Let a jury weight the competing arguements!
His trial will be in McLean, VA and all the jurists will be CIA.
Take it to the bank.
I don't expect DOJ would survive the discovery process. They'll more likely try to impose a plea deal, or kill him in custody, like epstein. Too many power centers don't want what Julian knows to be revealed.
Well said.