In Assange, the fight for justice by means of transparency confronts the greatest and most practiced assembly of sordid criminality and hypocrisy the world has ever seen

By John Pilger |
14 January 2011 | [print_link]
The attacks on WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, are a response to an information revolution that threatens old power orders in politics and journalism. The incitement to murder trumpeted by public figures in the United States, together with attempts by the Obama administration to corrupt the law and send Assange to a hell-hole prison for the rest of his life, are the reactions of a rapacious system exposed as never before.
    In recent weeks, the US Justice Department has established a secret grand jury just across the river from Washington in the eastern district of the state of Virginia. The object is to indict Assange under a discredited espionage act used to arrest peace activists during the First World War, or one of the “war on terror” conspiracy statutes that have degraded American justice. Judicial experts describe the jury as a “deliberate set up,” pointing out that this corner of Virginia is home to the employees and families of the Pentagon, CIA, Department of Homeland Security, and other pillars of American power.
    “This is not good news,” Assange told me when we spoke this past week, his voice dark and concerned. He says he can have “bad days – but I recover.” When we met in London last year, I said, “You are making some very serious enemies, not least of all the most powerful government engaged in two wars. How do you deal with that sense of danger?” His reply was characteristically analytical. “It’s not that fear is absent. But courage is really the intellectual mastery over fear – by an understanding of what the risks are and how to navigate a path through them.”
    Regardless of the threats to his freedom and safety, he says the US is not WikiLeaks’ main “technological enemy.” “China is the worst offender. China has aggressive, sophisticated interception technology that places itself between every reader inside China and every information source outside China. We’ve been fighting a running battle to make sure we can get information through, and there are now all sorts of ways Chinese readers can get on to our site.”
    It was in this spirit of “getting information through” that WikiLeaks was founded in 2006, but with a moral dimension. “The goal is justice,” wrote Assange on the homepage, “the method is transparency.” Contrary to a current media mantra, WikiLeaks material is not “dumped.” Less than one percent of the 251,000 US embassy cables have been released. As Assange points out, the task of interpreting material and editing that which might harm innocent individuals demands “standards [befitting] higher levels of information and primary sources.” To secretive power, this is journalism at its most dangerous.
    On 18 March 2008, a war on WikiLeaks was foretold in a secret Pentagon document prepared by the “Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch.” US intelligence, it said, intended to destroy the feeling of “trust,” which is WikiLeaks’ “center of gravity.” It planned to do this with threats to “exposure [and] criminal prosecution.” Silencing and criminalizing this rare source of independent journalism was the aim: smear the method. Hell hath no fury like imperial Mafiosi scorned.
    Others, also scorned, have lately played a supporting part, intentionally or not, in the hounding of Assange, some for reasons of petty jealousy. Sordid and shabby describe their behavior, which serves only to highlight the injustice against a man who has courageously revealed what we have a right to know.
    As the US Justice Department, in its hunt for Assange, subpoenas the Twitter and email accounts, banking and credit card records of people around the world – as if we are all subjects of the United States – much of the “free” media on both sides of the Atlantic direct their indignation at the hunted.

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RIGHT: Oxford educated mediacrat Bennett. She previously worked for the Guardian (UK).

 
    In response to Bennett, the editor of the online Nordic News Network in Sweden, Al Burke, wrote to the Observer explaining, “plausible answers to Catherine Bennett’s tendentious question” were both critically important and freely available. Assange had remained in Sweden for more than five weeks after the rape allegation was made – and subsequently dismissed by the chief prosecutor in Stockholm – and that repeated attempts by him and his Swedish lawyer to meet a second prosecutor, who reopened the case following the intervention of a government politician, had failed. And yet, as Burke pointed out, this prosecutor had granted him permission to fly to London where “he also offered to be interviewed – a normal practice in such cases.” So, it seems odd, at the very least, that the prosecutor then issued a European arrest warrant. The Observer did not publish Burke’s letter.
    This record straightening is crucial because it describes the perfidious behavior of the Swedish authorities – a bizarre sequence confirmed to me by other journalists in Stockholm and by Assange’s Swedish lawyer Bjorn Hurtig. Not only that, Burke cataloged the unforeseen danger Assange faces should he be extradited to Sweden. “Documents released by WikiLeaks since Assange moved to England,” he wrote, “clearly indicate that Sweden has consistently submitted to pressure from the United States in matters relating to civil rights. There is ample reason for concern that if Assange were to be taken into custody by Swedish authorities, he could be turned over to the United States without due consideration of his legal rights.”
    These documents have been virtually ignored in Britain. They show that the Swedish political class has moved far from the perceived neutrality of a generation ago and that the country’s military and intelligence apparatus is all but absorbed into Washington’s matrix around NATO. In a 2007 cable, the US Embassy in Stockholm lauds the Swedish government dominated by the conservative Moderate Party of Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt as coming “from a new political generation and not bound by [anti-US] traditions [and] in practice a pragmatic and strong partner with NATO, having troops under NATO command in Kosovo and Afghanistan.”
    The cable reveals how foreign policy is largely controlled by Carl Bildt, the current foreign minister, whose career has been based on a loyalty to the United States that goes back to the Vietnam War when he attacked Swedish public television for broadcasting evidence that the US was bombing civilian targets. Bildt played a leading role in the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a lobby group with close ties to the White House of George W. Bush, the CIA and the far right of the Republican Party.
    “The significance of all this for the Assange case,” notes Burke in a recent study, “is that it will be Carl Bildt and perhaps other members of the Reinfeldt government who will decide – openly or, more likely, furtively behind a façade of legal formality – on whether or not to approve the anticipated US request for extradition. Everything in their past clearly indicates that such a request will be granted.” 

   In Britain, this trial has welcomed yet more eager prosecutors, with the BBC to the fore. There was no presumption of innocence in Kirsty Wark‘s “Newsnight” court in December. “Why don’t you just apologise to the women?” she demanded of Assange, followed by: “Do we have your word of honour that you won’t abscond?”

RIGHT: Scottish TV news presenter K. Wark. A Labour-leaning mediacrat, she, like Rachel Maddow in the US, seems eager to bludgeon Assange with feminist smears.

£ 150,000 a year, perhaps moderate compensation for the preposterous salaries of American media figures, but substantial for British standards. Like most self-made men (Humphrys barely finished high school), and operating in a terribly snobbish society, Humprhys is in the vanguard defending the status quo.

[2]^[3]  Since his early years as a war correspondent in Vietnam, Pilger has been a trenchant critic of the foreign policy of the West. He is particularly opposed to many aspects of United States foreign policy, which he regards as being driven by a largely imperialist agenda.

CROSSPOSTED WITH http://www.truth-out.org/the-war-wikileaks-john-pilgers-investigation-and-interview-with-julian-assange66847

NOTE: ALL IMAGES AND CAPTIONS COURTESY OF TGP EDITORS

Liberalism revisited, with same results.

It was perhaps more than just a coincidence that Air America, a radio network established in 2004 as a liberal alternative to Rush Limbaugh and company, announced that it was going out of business just two days after a Republican candidate won Ted Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts. In either case, you are dealing with the exhaustion of liberalism and more particularly as expressed by the Democratic Party.

For just about every on-air host, the agenda both under Bush and now under Obama has been to rail against the Republicans. Obviously when Bush was in office this kind of programming had more of an edge than it does today. Given Obama’s one year in office functioning as Bush’s third term, however, it makes little sense for “progressives” to keep harping on Sarah Palin. After all, it is not Sarah Palin who has escalated the war in Afghanistan or catered to the needs of Wall Street. In fact, it has been the cozy relationship between the White House and the financial community that has been partially responsible for the burgeoning “tea party” movement.

On the Air America website, the demise is explained in terms of an overall slump in radio, and more particularly the loss of ad revenue:

The very difficult economic environment has had a significant impact on Air America’s business. This past year has seen a “perfect storm” in the media industry generally. National and local advertising revenues have fallen drastically, causing many media companies nationwide to fold or seek bankruptcy protection. From large to small, recent bankruptcies like Citadel Broadcasting and closures like that of the industry’s long-time trade publication Radio and Records have signaled that these are very difficult and rapidly changing times.

BELOW: AL FRANKEN

One might wonder why Air America never explored the possibility of listener sponsorship, which combined with corporate and government support has enabled NPR to survive over the years. It is likely that the millionaires who launched Air America in the first place never thought in terms of that kind of grass roots empowerment since like most Democratic Party overlords they had no use for the people whose interests they were supposedly looking out for.

Sheldon Drobny, a Chicago venture capitalist who had been a major donor to the Democratic Party, thought up the idea for a liberal radio network in 2003. As the February 17, 2003 N.Y. Times reported, the initial investment group formed by Drobny saw it as just another venture capital project:

The group said it was prepared to go it alone, selling its programming to the individual radio stations rather than go through a middleman. It has an initial investment of $10 million, which radio analysts said was enough to start up. Ms. Drobny said the cash would be placed in a fund that she hopes to grow to at least $200 million within the next year, which she hopes to use to finance other media ventures like the acquisition of radio stations and television production.

The initial investment group included Drobny and his wife Anita, Jon Sinton, an Atlanta-based radio entrepreneur, and Javier Saade, a hedge fund operator. In other words, the same kind of people running the Democratic Party today.

I tried listening to Air America when it first went on the air but found it boring. It consisted mostly of people calling in to complain about how bad George W. Bush was. I suppose that there was a ready-made audience for that sort of thing, but I found it unsatisfying even as entertainment. While I cannot bear to listen to Rush Limbaugh for more than 15 minutes, he was much more of a master of the medium than somebody like Al Franken.

The documentary next takes up Franken’s stint at Air America, a radio station funded by wealthy liberals that is intended to counteract rightwing radio. We see Franken and his staff celebrating after they get the news that their ratings are better than Rush Limbaugh’s, whose show airs at the same time as Franken’s. However, despite listener approval, the network did not achieve the same kind of commercial success as the rightwing competition. We see Franken looking glum over news that the Chicago and Los Angeles outlets were forced off the air. Perhaps Air America’s difficulties have something to do with the fact that bashing the Republican Party is not exactly pushing the envelope nowadays. A radio listener can tune into Don Imus any weekday morning and hear people like Frank Rich or Imus himself stick it to Bush. If one objects that Air America’s approach is more progressive than Don Imus’s, then I’d have to recommend listening to the station more frequently as much of it consists of the same sort of low level insult found on rightwing stations, but with different targets. It can be fun, but it grows tedious after a while.

While I never had strong feelings one way or another about Air America, that all changed when I learned of on-air host Randi Rhodes’s (left) treatment of Ralph Nader.

While the interview speaks for itself, I can only add that Rhodes epitomizes the “anybody but Bush” stupidity that is offered up as a substitute for political analysis across the liberal spectrum. Rhodes eventually got fired from Air America after calling Geraldine Ferraro “a fucking whore” at an event sponsored by an Air America affiliate. The poor thing did not understand that such abuse is only tolerated when it is directed at leftist politicians operating outside of the Democratic Party.

Despite its ambition to make money, the station was not very good at it. So much so that it was forced to declare its first bankruptcy in 2006 after which it was reorganized under the ownership of the Green brothers. Stephen L. Green heads a company that controls 27 million square feet of real estate with a market capitalization of $12 billion. His brother Mark is a long-time New York City politician with liberal pretensions.

When Mark Green was serving as Public Advocate, he did virtually nothing to rally against the rent increases that were devastating the very public whose interests he was elected to defend. Since 12 percent of the nearly 6 million dollars he used in his campaign came from his brother, some raised the question of special interests including the liberal Village Voice that wrote:

In other words, just the kind of person who you would expect to own and run Air America.

Last year I finally found a program on Air America that I could listen to, if not actually enjoy. Ron Kuby, the New York attorney and long-time critic of Israel who used to work with Bill Kunstler, had an afternoon show that was fairly lively. Kuby used to co-host a talk show on WABC (Limbaugh’s network) with a cretin by the name of Curtis Sliwa who had founded the Guardian Angels, a police auxiliary. They operated under the same guidelines as Sean Hannity/Alan Colmes or any of a number of shows that derived some entertainment value by having liberal and conservative co-host’s bickering with each other.

As a trained attorney, Kuby obviously knew how to think and talk on his feet, a must for anybody running a talk radio show. But he also had a way of mocking himself in a way that most of the sanctimonious hosts of Air America could never achieve. Around two months into the Obama administration, that Kuby initially supported as the second coming of FDR, he decided that he had been conned and began making that clear on his show to my delight, but not to Mark Green’s. He was fired on June 22^nd.