by Pepe Escobar (cross-posted with the Asia Times) by special agreement with the author)
The date – April 11, 2019 – will live in infamy in the annals of Western “values” and “freedom of expression.” The image is stark. A handcuffed journalist and publisher dragged out by force from the inside of an embassy, clutching a Gore Vidal book on the History of the US National Security State.
The mechanism is brutal. WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange was arrested because the United States demanded this from the Tory British government, which for its part meekly claimed it did not pressure Ecuador to revoke Assange’s asylum.
The US magically erases Ecuador’s financial troubles, ordering the IMF to release a providential $4.2-billion loan. Immediately after, Ecuadorian diplomats “invite” the London Metropolitan Police to come inside their embassy to arrest their long-term guest.
Let’s cut to the chase. Julian Assange is not a US citizen, he’s an Australian. WikiLeaks is not a US-based media organization. If the US government gets Assange extradited, prosecuted and incarcerated, it will legitimize its right to go after anyone, anyhow, anywhere, anytime.
Call it The Killing of Journalism.
Get me that password
The case by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) against Assange is flimsy at best. Everything has to do essentially with the release of classified info in 2010 – 90,000 military files on Afghanistan, 400,000 files on Iraq and 250,000 diplomatic cables spanning most of the planet.
Assange is allegedly guilty of helping Chelsea Manning, the former US Army intel analyst, to get these documents. But it gets trickier. He’s also allegedly guilty of “encouraging” Manning to collect more information.
There’s no other way to interpret that. This amounts, no holds barred, to all-out criminalization of journalistic practice.
For the moment, Assange is charged with “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion.” The indictment argues that Assange helped Manning to crack a password stored on Pentagon computers linked to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRNet).
In March 2010 chat logs obtained by the US government, Manning talks to someone alternatively named “Ox” and “press association.” The DoJ is convinced this interlocutor is Assange. But they must conclusively prove it.
Manning and this person, allegedly Assange, engaged in “discussions.” “During an exchange, Manning told Assange that ‘after this upload, that’s all I really have got left.’ To which Assange replied: ‘Curious eyes never run dry in my experience.’”
None of this holds up. US corporate media routinely publishes illegal leaks of classified information. Manning offered the documents he had already downloaded to both the New York Times and the Washington Post – and he was rejected. Only then did he approach WikiLeaks.
The allegation that Assange tried to help crack a computer password has been doing the rounds since 2010. The DoJ under Obama refused to go for it, aware of what it would mean in terms of potentially outlawing investigative journalism.
No wonder US corporate media, deprived of a major scoop, subsequently started to dismiss WikiLeaks as a Russian agent.
The nuclear option
The great Daniel “Pentagon Papers” Ellsberg had already warned back in 2017: “Obama having opened the legal campaign against the press by going after the roots of investigative reporting on national security – the sources – Trump is going to go after the gatherers/gardeners themselves (and their bosses, publishers). To switch the metaphor, an indictment of Assange is a ‘first use’ of ‘the nuclear option’ against the First Amendment protection of a free press.”
The current DoJ charges – basically stealing a computer password – are just the tip of the avalanche. At least for now, publishing is not a crime. Yet if extradited, Assange may be additionally charged with extra conspiracies and even violation of the 1917 Espionage Act.
Even if they must still seek consent from London to bring further charges, there’s no shortage of DoJ lawyers able to apply sophistry to conjure a crime out of thin air.
Jennifer Robinson, Assange’s very able lawyer, has correctly stressed his arrest is “a free speech issue” because it “is all about the ways in which journalists can communicate with their sources.” The invaluable Ray McGovern, who knows one or two things about the US intel community, has evoked a requiem of the fourth estate.
The full context of Assange’s arrest comes to light when examined as sequential to Chelsea Manning spending a month in solitary confinement in a Virginia jail for refusing to denounce Assange in front of a grand jury. There’s no doubt the DoJ tactic is to break Manning by any means available.
Here’s Manning’s legal team: “The indictment against Julian Assange unsealed today was obtained a year to the day before Chelsea appeared before the grand jury and refused to give testimony. The fact that this indictment has existed for over a year underscores what Chelsea’s legal team and Chelsea herself have been saying since she was first issued a subpoena to appear in front of a Federal Grand Jury in the Eastern District of Virginia – that compelling Chelsea to testify would have been duplicative of evidence already in the possession of the grand jury, and was not needed in order for US Attorneys to obtain an indictment of Mr Assange.”
The Deep State attacks
The ball is now in a UK court. Assange will most certainly linger in prison for a few months for skipping bail while the extradition to the US dossier proceeds. The DoJ arguably has discussed with London how a “correct” judge may deliver the desired outcome.
Assange is a publisher. He leaked absolutely nothing. The New York Times, as well as The Guardian, also published what Manning uncovered. Collateral Murder, among tens of thousands of pieces of evidence, should always be at the forefront of the whole discussion – this is about war crimes committed in Afghanistan and Iraq.
So it’s no wonder the US Deep State will never forgive Manning and Assange, even as the New York Times, in another glaring instance of double standards, may get a pass. The drama will eventually need closure at the Eastern District of Virginia because the national security and intel apparatus has been working on this screenplay, full-time, for years.
As CIA director, Mike Pompeo did cut to the chase: “It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.”
What amounts to a de facto declaration of war underlines how dangerous WikiLeaks actually is, just because it practiced investigative journalism.
The current DoJ charges have absolutely nothing to do with the debunked Russiagate. But expect the subsequent political football to be bombastic.
The Trump camp at the moment is divided. Assange is either a pop hero fighting the Deep State swamp or a lowly Kremlin stooge. At the same time, Joe Manchin, a southerner Democrat Senator, rejoices, on the record, as an ersatz 19th-century plantation owner, that Assange is now “our property.” The Democrat strategy will be to use Assange to get to Trump.
And then there’s the EU, of which Britain may eventually not be part of, later rather than sooner. The EU will be very vigilant on Assange being extradited to “Trump’s America,” as the Deep State makes sure that journalists everywhere actually do have a right, to always remain silent.
TASS is reporting that for the crime of “skipping bail”, Assange has been sent to the nastiest, high-security UK prison known as “Britain’s Guantanamo”. Obviously the typical punishment for ‘bail jumpers’.
http://tass.com/world/1053521
Ecuador is an asset of the CIA. Where’s the surprise in all of this? Why the hysteria? Assange was in the embassy because he too, along with Wikileaks, is part of the CIA.
The police, everywhere, are enforcers for the 1%. Removed.
The news, all of it, is bogus.
Assange famously said (and I paraphrase) – 22 men with box cutters were responsible for 911 and all the conspiracy theorists were just getting in the way of bringing real issues to light.
Please stop attacking/trolling the site with comments with no facts to back them up. This is the 3rd day you have pushed this narrative.Mod.
The police, everywhere, are aiding and abetting criminals. They are called lawmakers.
The 1%, a euphemism for ‘international banking’, owns the legislature, the judiciary and the executive. The police are the enforcers.
Asserting one’s personal sovereignty is the way forward. This is not something one can delegate to another.
Yep, take them on all by your own personal, sovereign self. That is sure to work.
Actually, it is the opposite that is what is needed. Only mass collective action can take on such a powerful machine. Give up your precious personal sovereignty to become a part of a more powerful group. Or else I suppose you can be as powerful as the sovereign state of Liechtenstein.
Not only is all the news bogus, but so, too, are you, Nemo.
-Jennifer Robinson, the lawyer for Wikileaks is at this demonstration protesting the arrest of Julian Assange. Now Jennifer Robinson’s name appeared within the demise of another journalist, Michael Hastings.
So let us get this story straight. Michael Hastings the 33year old had been ‘sober’ for 14 years. He hadn’t done drugs or alcohol in Iraq, he hadn’t done drugs or alcohol in Afghanistan, and he hadn’t done drugs or alcohol whilst residing in New York.
What drugs had Michael Hastings ‘done’ as a 19year old student? How about Ritalin? But if Michael Hastings hadn’t ‘done drugs, then that would include marijuana regardless of whether he had PTSD or not!
But what exactly does this mean? “a brother was due to join another family member in urging Hastings to go to detox.” Michael Hastings had a small amount of amphetamine in his blood and traces of marijuana as well, but in insufficient amounts for the coroner to believe that they had affected the ‘accident’. Thus why would the family believe that Michael Hastings needed to go to ‘detox’? Overkill perhaps?
So just exactly what does Michael Hastings do on the Monday when he returns home from his visit to New York? He doesn’t do any tweets although that is apparently his main choice of communication. Just after midday he sends an email which is disclosed by his old time army friend S/Sgt Joe Biggs.
Then after midnight he contacts the Wikileaks lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, what for we are not told. He then visits his neighbour, Jordanna Thigpenn and asks if he may borrow her Volvo as he doesn’t trust his Mercedes Benz. He is also supposedly entertaining his older brother Jonathon Hastings, and has passed out due to an intake of medically prescribed marijuana, marijuana that is not detected in any great quantity in the Coroner’s Toxicology examination.
Approximately four hours later, at 4.23am on Tuesday the 18th of June, 2013, we are informed that Michael Hasting’s Mercedes Benz coupe was involved in a singular vehicle accident when travelling on North Highland Ave in Hancock Park, a suburb of Los Angeles. This event was filmed by Scott Lane of Loud Lab news, as well as being partially captured on the security CCTV camera at a local Pizza shop and witnessed by a local worker, Jose Rubalcava at a doughnut shop. Scot Lane of Loud Lab News was the only news agency to cover this event.
A Mercedes Benz ended up on the medium strip with the rear wheels against the kerb and in a fireball. Mercedes Benz motor vehicles do not burst into a fireball after even the most horrific of crashes. Not unless a fire accelerant is added.
So Julian Assange is not the first, Michael Hastings was. And of course there have been other less known journalists, and there will be many more.
And Gary Webb?
I’m sorry, but I never studied the demise of Gary Webb. I have his book, but I never studied his demise.
Another journalist though endeavouring to inform the people.
🤔
Did it ever cross your mind he is used to see how far they can push and your reaction is precisely what they want and need?
Please take of your blinders and see a bigger picture, they are literally fucking the 1A and press freedom in the arse…
Never mind who he is, look at what it means and what principles it establishes.
You/me/us are being divided so we are conquered more easy.
None in the establishment or its gatekeepers should be trusted, yet their actions have real world consequences for us serfs, our newly born free “press” and current/future whistleblower/journalist relationships..
(I never believed J.A was a heroic truth teller either btw)
So you don’t believe this?
“Collateral Murder”
https://collateralmurder.wikileaks.org/
But what happens if you are right? Then Edward Snowden would be of the same ilk and Webster Tarpley was correct after all. Even Ari ben Menashe even fits the bill.
And then I go back all the way to Lee Harvey Oswald, and why he had to be terminated.
But all of this is irrelevant to the main argument; the total destruction of investigative journalism, and that is what we are all witnessing here.
Of course. It is a common tactic to try to distract an opposition from concentrating on the important points and organizing around them.
You need to go back to John Wilkes Booth, an ‘agent’ of the Rothschilds, so I’ve been assured. And I’ve heard rumours that Cain was on the pay-roll when he topped Abel. Just between us, of course. Dangerous knowledge.
No, no Mulga, Lee Harvey Oswald is a much better example, after al,l John Wilkes Booth was simply a paid assassin, which Oswald never was.
Somebody told me that to understand the JFK assassination one first had to understand the role played by Officer JD Tippit, which was extremely difficult until another name popped up; Edward Lansdale. L. Fletcher Prouty alleged that Lansdale can be seen in one of the “three tramps” photographs that were taken near the Texas School Book Depository.
Edward Lansdale the former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Special Operations, Staff Member of the President’s Committee on Military Assistance, retired from that office on the 1st November 1963, just three weeks prior to the assassination of JFK.
However an email that came from Brae Antcliffe stated that both George Bush and Edward Lansdale were at Dallas on the day, and once I saw the photograph of Edward walking past the ‘three tramps’ everything fell into place. Two teams, one piggy-backing on the other.
Neither team were ever identified, but part of Lansdale’s team were apprehended; the ‘three tramps’, and Lansdale walked past them, just to let them know he was aware of the situation. Of course the ‘three tramps’ vanished into oblivion once they were released names unknown by the local FBI supervisor Hosy.
But then Officer JD Tippit stuffed everything up by going to the safe house at 410 East Tenth Street to check up as to why Harry Olsen hadn’t answered the phone and ran into a character I call the Penguin due to his compulsive cigar smoking. JD Tippit being totally unaware of what was happening made the error of trying to draw his service revolver on ‘The Penguin’ and the Penguin shot him dead to rights and made certain of it by placing the final shot in the head which would explain the Penguin’s words of “Poor dumb cop.”.
JD Tippit’s mistake caused heaps of repercussions including the deaths of LHO, Jack Ruby and most of the witnesses including the security outside the ‘safe house’.
As Robbie Burns wrote; “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men, Gang aft agley” and it certainly did for Edward Lansdale’s team members including Oswald and Ruby and any other who could have identified ‘The Penguin’.
And once a person comprehends the placing of ‘agents’ and double agents or even triple agents as Sergei Skripal appears to have been, then one would also understand the roles played by Lee Harvey Oswald under Edward Lansdale. And for this reason it would not be wise to underestimate the thinking of Webster Tarpley.
Was the long-term CIA asset, Oswald, not meant to die all along, as the ‘patsy’?
I doubt it. Remember the pilot Ferrie?
Also the Carcano is another major clue. A bolt action WW2 rifle of very limited capacity, which would have been used to explain the ‘misses’ on JFK, and Lansdale’s team did ‘miss’ their supposed target, but Harvey’s team didn’t, they were spot on and very good. The only problem was that the recorded ‘three shots’ couldn’t have come from the Carcano as the second and third shots were too close together.
I believe that LHO was to flee to South America, and then possibly to Cuba to repudiate the claims against him.
And then there were RFK’s comments that evening that squashed any blame on Cuba, which had to have raised the question, ‘how did he know?’ Naughty boy Robert, he should have kept his mouth closed.
And then we have Edward Lansdale resigning from his position on the 1st of November, just three weeks prior, but at a time when everything was in place and set to go. Lansdale would also have been involved with the planning of the Bay of Pigs, and like Harvey and Angleton would never have forgotten or forgiven that treachery.
And then finally the comments overheard at Fort Bragg in regard to the JFK assassination. Yes, once one considers Dealey Plaza, it was almost perfect, but then the JD Tippit episode occurred and that’s where so much went wrong.
Have you read ‘JFK and the Unspeakable’? What think you of it? I must say the notion of Oswald fleeing to Cuba to set up an excuse for invading Cuba makes sense.
It was Guatemala that Oswald was going to. Ferrie to fly him there a few days later.
But AMG’s assessment of Lansdale isnt entirely right. A triad of groups was involved.
The tramps were there to clean the picket fence area and it was they who took the disassembled rifle away when marched off (note their oversized clothes).
And there was a Penguin running amok that day but he never realized there is proof of him leaving the crime scenes with the C & A (2Hs). A source told me that a foreign tourist there snapped some very damaging photographs that were developed back home and have not publically surfaced yet. And there was a backup-backup team watching everything within 200m of Tenth Street with cameras also (RFK got some of the snaps hence 68).
Overall it was a amateurish effort by second rate operatives who required a massive effort by the WC and others to coverup their clown like conduct to get away with it for a few years.
That the site does not link to Dr Judy Wood’s site is a matter of fact. Nuff said.
Innocently, or knowingly, it’s true.
If you give the devil his due, he will take everything you have.
Pepe, I hope you are right and Europe does indeed get vigilant on Assange being extradited to the US…
I think that the EU vigilance is directed to ensuring that they are not tainted in any way by association with the treatment of Assange; vigilance to mitigate his fate in any way, not so much.
All this is part of the Western demise. It is inevitable.
The terror their elite have been unleashing unto others these past decades is now being unleashed on their own people. It is part of their degradation and weakening of their values and institutions. It is inevitable, if not necessary for their demise.
What is facinating really is how fast the the West is eroding, relatively speaking from a historical perspective. The developments can be seen yearly.
What is remarkable here is that the US is demanding the extradition of Assange who is not a US citizen and who never committed any crime in the US. On the basis of what international law ? This means the US is applying an imperial attitude, demanding the right to arrest anyone, anywhere whom it does not like. And this will be tolerated ?
It won’t just be tolerated by the political vermin running the UK, and the other stooge regimes of the West-it will be fully supported. Or else.
This reminds me of the ‘arrest’ of the Australian, Fredrick Tobin at Heathrow many years ago on a trumped up German warrant. Once perfidious, always perfidious Albion.
Have you read ‘Inglorious Empire’ by Shashi Tharoor, concerning the rape of India by the ‘British Empire? It is estimated that England ripped several tens of trillions, in today’s lolly, out of India over the centuries of their malign misrule. And caused the deaths of tens of millions in a series of Great Famines that are examined in ‘Late Victorian Holocausts’ by Mike Davis. The last of which was in the 40s, in Bengal, and ‘which was deliberately worsened by that thug, Churchill.
That’s two books you’ve mentioned that I have not read, Mulga.
But really, where on earth did the English/Dutch Bankers get their lolly from anyway? Definitely not from digging coal in England. From piracy with the likes of Drake to the Bankers of Holland setting up William and Mary.
I have a couple of silver rupees dated 1841 with a young Queen Victoria’s head on the front and the ‘British East India Company’ on the reverse. That simply means that England never ruled the sub continent but rather London’s East India Company, who also ruled ‘Great Britain’, and Victoria got her 10% cut for simply being the ‘figurehead’ and Parliamentary secretary.
And of Churchill, that ‘threat to the younger boys at Sandhurst’, the warrior who fought the Boer war as a journalist, who was so rank that even the Boers let him escape, and of course never a mention of the invention of the concentration camps that killed thousands of men, women and children both black and white, in the bankers bid to win the gold of the ‘Orange Free State’
I heard a good story about Menzies and his wise decision to avoid the horror of WW1. Some enemy of his, possibly Eddie Ward if I remember right, used to compliment Menzies on ‘…his brilliant military career, so tragically cut short by war’.
John Lennon’s career was also cut tragically short – Im sure you could enlighten us all about who was really behind that.
With typically slimy hypocrisy, the Guardian sewer, which has attacked Assange mercilessly for years, now whines that he should not be extradited to the USA for his ‘legal’ lynching. But at the same time they are giving great prominence to a rabble of feminazi man-haters, demanding that Assange be renditioned to Sweden to face the transparently fraudulent ‘charges’ concocted there by the Swedish Right.
The feminazis, and the Clinton Harpies, still full of bile, venom and hatred that their blood-soaked demi-Goddess was defeated by the loathsome Trump, and blaming Assange for revealing Clinton and the DNC’s corruption, routinely describe these phony accusations as ‘charges’, which they never were, and ‘rape’, which it never was. Today the Guardian sewer even had one zealot from a campaign against ‘Violence’ against women, ignoring the fact that even in their most lurid fabrications, Assange was never accused of using any violence, whatsoever. But in a milieu of man-hating extremism (and I will not deny for a second that many, many, men are, indeed, hateful-but is Assange?)where even ‘seduction’ is construed as ‘violence’, this sinister slander is repeated ad nauseam. Meanwhile real violence, assault and murder inflicted on less politically useful female victims, goes unaddressed, as a celebrity villain attracts all the zealots’ attention.
And, naturally, this being the Guardian sewer, Ground Zero for hatred of Corbyn, and the ‘bright sun-lit upland’ of revanchist Blairism, the Assange lynching is being used against Corbyn. The Blairites, led by the odious Jess Phillips, the new Messiah of the Blairite reaction, are leading the charge to shanghai Assange to Sweden because they know that his rendition to the US Gulag will be that much easier from there. And their hatred of Assange, such a mark of their groveling obeisance to Thanatopolis DC, has been mobilised to attack Corbyn’s principled defence of Assange and press freedom.
The so-called deep state seems to have won. Don’t they realize that this is just one more instance of the US throwing its weight around as far as any other country can see? US credibility was in the cellar, and now our idiot ‘leaders’ are pushing it lower. This is an example of making America grate again. [ NOTE: yes, I meant ‘grate’ as in grating … ]
It is as I feared then. The UK lawyers are completely on their back foot regarding the arrest and indictment of Julian Assange. The indictment is NOT under the Espionnage Act, as we all feared, against which the First Amendment/Freedom of Speech/ provides the strongest protection, but under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act i.e. Assange is accused of hacking government computers! This has obviously taken them by surprise since Jennifer Robinson is still talking about freedom of speech..This far more subtle and dangerous indictment rather than the one they thought were getting!.
Here is an interesting article from the Pentagon Paper lawyers who discusses these legal subtleties and extradition to the US.. .https://www.thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/438709-pentagon-papers-lawyer-indictment-of-assange-snare-and-delusion%3famp
Seems to me the government is playing a kind of ‘copyright’ on the truth play here. If you don’t get the official BS version as presented by the MSM and appointed apparatchicks but get the information straight from the governments own accounts then that is not valid information. This is a play to stop whistleblowing itself.
https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/438709-pentagon-papers-lawyer-indictment-of-assange-snare-and-delusion
This link is the same as posted above, but this one works.
Similarly, the arrest of Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou in Canada, and her impending extradition to the US is also based on some flimsy Trumped Up charges.
Meng was kidnapped, nothing more, nothing less, in an operation long planned by the USA AND Canada, despite Trudeau’s lying denials.
The claim may be made that the US is the new Rome with all the ambition Rome ever had. Its control of the Mediterranean Basin by conquest and alliance put in place over several centuries seems to be a forerunner of US action around the world. Once again a series of conquests and alliances formed over the last two centuries culminating in a state on the margins of world rule.
Eventually Putin will be gone, Russia has stumbled before, and China may make a serious mistake. It would seem that all the US need do is keep pushing, keep its losses small, and strike again when the advantage lies with it to eventually claim the world.
Cases like Assange are milestones on the way to world rule. This is not just an attack on Journalism and the first Amendment. It is an open claim to extraterritoriality. The US and its law trump (intended pun) all other law on the planet. This case is an open claim to world authority. International law? There is no such thing. The law of the world is the law of the US as stated by Washington. The Empire owns the world.
All states are provinces of the US. Those that refuse to acknowledge this are rebel provinces to be dealt with in the fullness of time.
oh God, I hope not, that the US is the new Rome! We have enough troubles internally now, without still trying to rule the world. If enough rivers overflow, and dams break and bridges collaps, we will not be the country we were 30 years ago. Our ‘politicians’ don’t realize this. Both Dems and Pubs seem oblivious. they want to rule the world while failing to govern our own nation. God help us!
Very well said Pepe. But it appears you have missed the main meaning, substance and message: that Washington arrogates to itself jurisdiction over the whole world.
Legal jurisdiction over a person is limited to the territory of a state or its vessels in international space. Outside national borders, no state has the legal authority/power to interfere or impose its laws. Assange has not broken any law within the USA’s jurisdiction, therefore he has no case to answer, fullstop.
Except that here we are not dealing with a normal state. It calls itself an “exceptional” one, therefore it possesses “exceptional” planet-wide (and even extraplanetary – with the flag on the Moon and SpaceCommand and all that) jurisdiction.
When the USA has the gall to claim the right to declare who the president or a government of another country should be, then no wonder any person on this Earth is a USA’s subject and liable to its laws.
What a load of crap from US and UK. They are shit scared of the ways their despicable actions are being exposed. Like all new technology, they want to control it. It’s been done before
Jamal Khashoggi no consequences even after undisputed proof the Saudi Prince was behind it…Assange no consequences even though the death of press freedom and truth have had the final nail on their coffin. Meanwhile without proof or cause Russia keeps getting slammed with sanctions. For how much longer can the masters of the universe kee getting away with this injustice, murder and blatant violation of I international laws. We only have ourzelves to blame because we just stand by and watchit ‘ll happen. Our freedoms, international laws…justice and evrything else are being ignored…but no one is really willing to do anything…so look in the mirror and blame only yourselves if you just atand by and watch it all play out.
Fact is: If you don’t want investigative reporting to go after you, stop doing nasty things about people! But of course the perps never learn, they just keep on perping even when they are exposed.
and what about all those contributions to Ecuador now?