Caitlyn Johnstone: 'Newsweek-employed spy explains to us why Asssange should be prosecuted'
Posted by margo  on November 25, 2018, 4:41 pm
LINK https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/newsweek-employed-spy-explains-to-us-why-assange-should-be-prosecuted-4cb319533633?fbclid=IwAR2GzNG3Ha_u-Qu3u5IKNsZuqVGcGzljmYafUhgIh899wO_eIIqw6kyGH3g
Medium -- SO IT TURNS OUT it’s really really important for powerful people to be able to lie to us with impunity, you guys.
I know this because an actual, literal spy told me that that’s what I’m meant to believe in an article published by Newsweek yesterday.
If you were wondering how long it would take the imperial propagandists to ramp up their efforts to explain to us why it is good for the Trump administration to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange after we learned that sealed charges have been brought against him by the United States government, the answer is eight days. If you were wondering which of those propagandists would step forward and aggressively attempt to do so, the answer is Naveed Jamali.
To be clear, I do not use the word “propagandist” to refer to a mass media employee whose reliable track record of establishment sycophancy has propelled him to the upper echelons of influence within platforms owned by plutocrats who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, as I often mean when I use that word.
When I say that Jamali is a propagandist, I mean he is a current member of the United States intelligence community telling Newsweek’s readers that it is to society’s benefit for the US government to pursue a longstanding agenda of the US intelligence community in imprisoning Julian Assange.
Jamali is currently a reserve intelligence officer for the United States Navy, and is a former FBI asset and double agent. He is also like many intelligence community insiders an MSNBC contributor, and is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a think tank which has featured many prominent neoconservative war #####s like Donald and Frederick Kagan, Max Boot, and James Woolsey.
Any think tank with the words “foreign policy” in its title is nothing other than a group of intellectuals who are paid by plutocrats to come up with the best possible arguments for why it would be very good and smart to do things that are very evil and stupid, and Naveed Jamali sits comfortably there.
His Newsweek article, titled “Prosecuting Assange is Essential for Restoring Our National Security”, begins with the sentence “Full disclosure: I am not a fan of Julian Assange or Wikileaks,” and doesn’t get any better from there. The article consists of two arguments, the first being that since Assange is “not a journalist” he is not protected by the First Amendment from prosecution by the US government.
This argument is bunk because (A) this is a made-up nonsense talking point since neither the US Constitution nor the Supreme Court have made any distinction between journalists or any other kind of publisher in press freedom protections, and (B) WikiLeaks has won many awards for journalism. The second argument is that it is very important for the US government to be able to hide any kind of secrets it wants from the American people.
And really that’s the only thing these paid manipulators are ever telling you when they smear Assange or argue for his prosecution: powerful people need to be able to lie to you and hide information from you without being inconvenienced or embarrassed by WikiLeaks. If they say it often enough and in a sufficiently confident tone, some trusting, well-intentioned people will overlook the fact that this is an intensely moronic thing for anyone to believe.
Contrary to what US intelligence operatives would have you believe, the prosecution of Julian Assange by the United States government would indeed be disastrous for press freedoms around the world.
A good recent essay by Matt Taibbi for Rolling Stone titled “Why You Should Care About the Julian Assange Case” breaks down exactly why everyone should oppose this administration’s aggressive pursuit of Assange, even if they hate him and everything he stands for. In terms of speech protection there is nothing that legally distinguishes an outlet from WikiLeaks from outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post, both of whom have published secret documents and information which was taken through illegal means. If Assange is successfully prosecuted for doing the same thing other mainstream publications do to hold power to account, there will be little stopping the US government from going after those types of outlets all around the world for publishing its secrets.
After Taibbi published his article, he spent a couple hours on Twitter explaining to Democratic Party loyalists over and over and over and over again that the charges Assange is facing almost certainly have nothing to do with the 2016 WikiLeaks publications, and rather relate to much earlier publications of a far more classified nature than a few Democrats’ emails. He had to do this because Russiagate conspiracy theorists have been shrieking that it’s #MuellerTime ever since news broke about the sealed charges, and now you’ve got the strange scene of liberals everywhere cheering on a Trump administration agenda which threatens to cripple the free press they claim to be protecting from the very administration that they are cheering for. The concept that the prosecution of someone they’ve been trained to hate has nothing to do with the thing they hate him for is inconceivable from within the walls of the binary narrative matrix that these people have become trapped in by establishment manipulators like Jamali.
Taibbi’s essay wraps up with the words, “Americans seem not to grasp what might be at stake. Wikileaks briefly opened a window into the uglier side of our society, and if publication of such leaks is criminalized, it probably won’t open again.”
He’s right. They don’t grasp it. Here’s hoping they do before it’s too late. |
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Re: Caitlyn Johnstone: 'Newsweek-employed spy explains to us why Asssange should be prosecuted'
Posted by dovetailjoint on November 25, 2018, 8:16 pm, in reply to "Re: Caitlyn Johnstone: 'Newsweek-employed spy explains to us why Asssange should be prosecuted'"
| How do they know what parts of the Trump world veiw they are supposed to endorse and what parts are absolutely awful? Don't they ever get worried or confused? The idea that they are 'smarter' than white Republicans is never examined. That the liberal media could be just as full of piles of steaming bullshit as the rightwing media, seems to be an alien concept to vast swathes of them. |
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Eric Alterman: "Count me among his demonizers."
Posted by Morrissey on November 26, 2018, 3:45 am, in reply to "Caitlyn Johnstone: 'Newsweek-employed spy explains to us why Asssange should be prosecuted'"
Al Jazeera's The Listening Post did a piece on Assange on Saturday night. It was "balanced" in the sense it featured two decent journalists and two weasels.
We also saw brief clips of CNN and BBC (the egregious Evan Davis) interviewers pushing the ludicrous false rape charges in the face of Assange and his lawyer, long after those false charges had been dropped.
Host Richard Gizbert: Now he's at the mercy of an Ecuadorian government that's running out of patience, and he may be running out of time. …. Even Julian Assange's supporters conceded that WikiLeaks' practices can be contentious, such as exposing material without redaction… releasing Hillary Clinton's emails has damaged WikiLeaks' journalistic standing and infuriated anti-Trump voices in America. … Assange also has issues with his new landlord. The Ecuadorian President who granted him asylum, Rafael Correa, has been succeeded by Lenin Moreno, who wants better relations with Washington. The new government hasn't evicted Assange, but his internet connection, his communications with the outside world, are now controlled by the embassy. With his health reportedly failing, and the lack of sunlight getting to him, Julian Assange cannot even go to a hospital for fear of being arrested. And Assange also has cause to feel aggrieved by the same news outlets that once feasted on the material that he handed to them on a plate. Not unlike his Ecuadorian hosts, many of those news organizations have turned against him...
Grauniad columnist James Ball: [smirking] There's nothing like a cock-up to make the truth come to li-i-i-iight. If you are in the embassy of a country, you should probably try and be a good house guest. He's also, on multiple times, acted against Ecuador's diplomatic interests, uh, he picked a fight with Spain, which is sort of one of their key European allies. He interfered in the U.S. election, and so-o-o-o-o, in the end, they will find something to get him ou-u-u-u-ut. Or Assange's patience will crack and he'll try and make a break for it.
The Nation reporter Eric Alterman: The left was very excited about WikiLeaks and excited about the fact that things that governments had traditionally kept secret were no longer going to be kept secret. It seemed to be part of this whole new wave of "nothing is secret any more in the age of the Internet. … It's true that Julian Assange used to be a lot more popular before SOMEBODY undermined American democracy with the help of, uh, the Russians, and gave us this President who is destroying democracy in the United States and threatening the entire world. I don't see Assange as a VICTIM any more, I see Assange as someone who helped to victimize American democracy. And if Julian Assange is being demonized for that, then count me among his demonizers. [smirks]
La Repubblica reporter Stefania Maurizi:They fear a dumbing effect. They realize that inside the U.S. intelligence community there are many people who have seen all sorts of abuses, they are terrified that there could be a hundred Chelsea Mannings, a thousand Edward Snowdens. They cannot kill Julian Assange, so all they can do is use legal cases against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, which they have done. … Thanks to my Freedom of Information Act requests in Sweden it was possible to reveal the crucial role of the U.K. authorities in creating this legal and diplomatic quagmire, for example, advising the Swedish prosecutors to question Julian Assange only after his extradition to Sweden. They write: "Please do not think that the case is being dealt with as just another extradition request." The press was running some stories like: "SWEDEN COULD DROPE CASE SAYS ASSANGE" and the U.K. authorities wrote to the Swedish prosecutors: "Don't you dare get cold feet."
Glenn Greenwald: If you go and challenge and threaten and undermine the world's most powerful institutions, as WikiLeaks has done, they are going to impose on you retaliation. It was actually a 2008 U.S. Army intelligence report that described WikiLeaks as an "enemy of the state" and talked about different ways that they could destroy the organization and we can read about that document because ironically it got leaked to WikiLeaks which then published it on its own website. …. What we've never seen any evidence for is that there's been any collaboration between WikiLeaks and the Russian government, even though for some reason now it's totally acceptable in Western media outlets to simply assert as though it's fact. … Whatever you think of Julian, whatever you think of WikiLeaks, what has been done to him over the last six to seven years is a very sustained, serious, and deliberate violation of his basic liberties, and yet that has been almost entirely disregarded by the Western media, instead the attempt is to make you view him with such disdain and contempt. It's incredibly insidious because essentially what they're doing is the dirty work of those who are violating Julian Assange's rights. Being turned over to the U.S. government, being prosecuted for journalism, for publishing documents has always been his principal worry, and it ought to be the worry of anyone who does journalism anywhere in the world.
"How to get rid of an unwanted housemate"---Juno Dawson, The Grauniad, 17 Oct. 2018
"Julian Assange, Cat Hater"---Lia Miller, The New York Times, 9 March 2011
"The only barrier to Julian Assange leaving Ecuador's embassy is pride"---James Ball, The Grauniad, 10 Jan. 2018
"WIKILEAKS' JULIAN ASSANGE IS A TERRIBLE HOUSEGUEST'---WIRED, 2 Nov. 2018
https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/listeningpost/2018/11/julian-assange-charges-trial-media-181124072357822.html
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Re: Eric Alterman: "Count me among his demonizers."
Posted by dovetailjoint on November 26, 2018, 7:43 am, in reply to "Eric Alterman: "Count me among his demonizers.""
| It still troubles me. Are some of these people really as stupid as they appear to be, or are they merely faking it? Our media seem to promote people like these, at the expense of real journalism, that doesn't automatically search for the 'entertaining' angle and crass humour. |
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Re: Eric Alterman: "Count me among his demonizers."
Posted by Morrissey on November 26, 2018, 10:47 am, in reply to "Re: Eric Alterman: "Count me among his demonizers.""
| I would love to see Alterman and Ball targeted and oppressed in a similar way to how Assange has been abused. I wonder how often either of them would smirk then. |
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Re: Eric Alterman: "Count me among his demonizers."
Posted by Raskolnikov on November 26, 2018, 11:36 am, in reply to "Re: Eric Alterman: "Count me among his demonizers.""
I volunteer to oppress James Ball the weaselly little shitbag. This worthless bootlicker tried to criticse John Pilger in this memorable twitter thread:
https://twitter.com/jamesrbuk/status/979691482373394432
Spoilers: it didn't end well for Ball.
These "journalists" exalting in JA's persecution are a disgrace. Bought and paid for mouthpieces one and all. Their names should be remembered for future reference. |
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Assange's lawyers prevented from seeing him this weekend
Posted by margo on November 26, 2018, 9:33 am, in reply to "Caitlyn Johnstone: 'Newsweek-employed spy explains to us why Asssange should be prosecuted'"
Wikileaks tweeted and posted on FB:
 Previous Message
Ecuador's government has refused Julian Assange's lawyers [UK lawyer @suigenerisjen & Spanish lawyer Aitor Martínez] access to him this weekend (although the embassy is manned 24/7) to prepare for his US court hearing on Tuesday. Background: https://justice4assange.com/Protection-Action.htmlFurther detail: the hearing is on Tuesday in the national security court complex at Alexandria, Virginia and is to remove the secrecy order on the U.S. charges against him.
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