John Pilger argues that the referendum result represents a deeper, more dynamic anger than the reasons rehearsed by politicians and the media and offers a glimpse of hope.

RT.COM DISPATCH

Assange writes open letter to Hollande, Paris rules out asylum

François Hollande: Another notorious non-left leftist.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he French government is under the command of Washington, Alain Corvez, former adviser to French Interior Ministry, told RT following news that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had been rapidly denied asylum by the Elysee Palace.

Julian Assange, the whistleblowing activist who has been living in the Ecuador Embassy in London for over three years, had written an open letter to France’s President Hollande, implying he would like to get political asylum in France. However, Paris quickly rejected the request.

RT spoke with Alain Corvez for his opinion on the decision and what it means for US-French relations.

RT: Julian Assange wrote a letter requesting asylum, which was published in Le Monde, but France’s rejection came very swiftly. Is there a reason for that?

RT: Would their response have been different had Assange chosen a different method of appealing to France?

AC: No, I think the answer would not have been different because it’s the will of the French government to refuse asylum to Julian Assange. I’m sure you know that our Minister of Justice some time ago was asked by journalists about this request by Assange. They asked her [Christiane Taubira] if Assange asked for asylum, what would you do? She said it was perfectly possible that we would answer positively to the request if this request was forthcoming. On a legal point, it was quite possible to accept this [request for] asylum. But I think the government was aware that this request could come and that’s why the answer was so quick – I think one hour after receiving the letter from Julian Assange.

RT: Do you think the revelations of NSA spying have damaged US-French relations?

AC: I think the NSA revelations had a big impact on French public opinion, but all the governments of the European Union – not the people, but the governments – are under the command of the United States. We understood the reaction of the French government would try its best to diminish the importance of these spying revelations. All the press in France was ordered not to emphasize the information that the Americans were spying on our three previous presidents. I think there is more and more a big gap between French opinion and the French government. But it’s the same in other European countries. I can tell you that… all the information that comes from different European countries is the same.

Look what is happening in Greece. The public opinion is manipulated by the media, by the press, because the press is in the hands of international finance.

Everything is done to avoid a quarrel, a fight, between the American government and the French government. It’s a shame for France to react as it did when we learned about this spying.

 

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT

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CREDIT: Reuters / Dado Ruvic

 A DISPATCH FROM RT.COM

[dropcap]Google’s [/dropcap]willingness to surrender the private emails of WikiLeaks staffers to the United States government amounts to an “attack on journalism,” a representative for the whistleblower group says.

Kristinn Hrafnsson, an Icelandic journalist who joined WikiLeaks as the group’s spokesman in 2010, said he’s “appalled” that Google gave up his personal correspondence and other sensitive details to the US government in compliance with a search warrant served to the tech giant, apparently in an effort to bring charges against the anti-secrecy organization and its editor, Julian Assange.

“I believe this is an attack on me. As a journalist for now almost 30 years, I think this is an attack on journalism,” Hrafnsson said Monday at a press conference in Geneva, Switzerland.

○ Left: Kristinn Hrafnsson, an Icelandic journalist who joined WikiLeaks as the group’s spokesman in 2010. | ○ Right: WikiLeaks’ Investigations editor Sarah Harrison.

Earlier that day, WikiLeaks announced that the Google accounts registered to three staffers – Hrafnsson, investigations editor Sarah Harrison and senior editor Joseph Farrell – had been the subject of federal search warrants served to the tech giant in March 2012.

READ MORE: WikiLeaks ‘astonished and disturbed’: Google gave its major staff data to US govt

According to Hrafnsson, the warrants compelled Google to give up the contents of the WikiLeaks staffers’ Gmail accounts, including deleted messages, draft emails, photo attachments and information about the IP addresses where those accounts had logged on from.

“I’m a little surprised to learn that Google keeps emails I have deleted,” Hrafnsson said. “That is what I read out of the documents.”

Michael Ratner, the US lawyer for WikiLeaks and Assange, said Monday that “essentially everything associated with the accounts of these three journalists” was seized by the government after Google was served in March 2012 and therefore ordered to give up all account data preceding that date by early April.

“The warrants acted like a huge vacuum cleaner,” he said. “It’s shocking that the US would do that to a journalist organization and to journalists working in that organization.”

WikiLeaks was not made aware of the search warrants until two-and-a-half years later on December 23, 2014, however, and, as of this week, the organization is publicly demanding answers from Google and the government.

Had Google been made aware of the warrants at the time, the group may have been able to fight back, according to Ratner.

“We don’t know if Google tried to litigate it or not, but that’s one of our requests,” Ratner said, adding that in a previous, similar situation, Twitter tried to fend off government requests for user data.

“Google claims there was a gag order in order to prohibit them from telling our clients,” Ratner added. “But the question is: did Google litigate that gag order so it could tell its subscribers, or did it simply let the government suck up all of its subscriber information? We need to know that.”

Hrafnsson and Harrison acknowledged Monday that they have not used their Google accounts for any internal matters concerning WikiLeaks since joining the group, but the spokesperson said his inbox contained upwards of 35,000 emails when it was seized, and Ratner believes the total trove also includes privileged attorney-client correspondence sent between journalists and their counsel.

According to Ratner, the warrants against Hrafnsson, Harrison and Farrell “were done on the basis that the US asserted that the emails and other material from these journalists contained evidence in violation of the Espionage Act, conspiracy to commit espionage, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and other federal laws,” and comes in the midst of a federal investigation into the organization that was launched in 2010.

“In other words, somehow the US was putting together a conspiracy charge or espionage and perhaps more against WikiLeaks and the journalists associated,” Ratner said.

“This case shows the direction and the will and the breakdown of the legal process with the US government when it comes to WikiLeaks,” added Harrison, who made headlines in 2013 after she accompanied former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden from Hong Kong to Russia. Snowden, the 31-year-old former systems administrator now wanted in the US for espionage and theft, has since rallied for enhanced protections for journalists and sources.

“Laws are made to protect national security, not people working within national security agencies,” Hrafnsson said on Monday.

As tech firms are routinely caught cooperating with governments, though, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the communications of foreign journalists – be they in the national security realm or otherwise – are in danger of falling prey to federally-sanctioned eavesdropping.

“You cannot rely on any communications, either working with your sources of leaks or anybody, and assume it is secure unless it is heavily encrypted. Emails, chats, et cetera,” Hrafnsson said during Monday’s event in Geneva. “But this runs deeper than that. The implication is also that if you are working on a story that is deemed as unfavorable to the superpower on the other side of the Atlantic, you might be branded a terrorist. They might wave the Espionage Act of 1917…and other legal mechanisms to try to silence you. That is the real implication to all journalists.”

“This is yet another illustration of how far down the slippery slope our country has fallen,” said Ladar Levison, an online entrepreneur who shut down his email service, Lavabit, in 2013 after he was asked by the government to compromise the entire system for the sake of eavesdropping on a single customer who is largely presumed to be Snowden.

READ MORE: Spooked off the Net: Owner of Lavabit email blames US surveillance for closure

“It’s clear that surveillance capabilities intended for the pursuit of criminals have been used for a purely political purpose. How many times must evil be allowed to collaborate with time and corrupt a noble intent? If we allow these tools to exist, and be used in secret, then regardless of promises to the contrary, they will be used to further a malicious end,” Levison told RT’s Andrew Blake.

The latest revelations concerning the seized Google accounts also ring similar to an incident in which Herbert Snorrason and Smári McCarthy, two Icelanders both known publicly as one-time associates of WikiLeaks, learned only in June 2013 that their Google accounts had long been compromised by the US government pursuant to an investigation into the group. An American volunteer for WikiLeaks, Jacob Appelbaum, has previously seen his personal Twitter account, Google account and records from his Internet Service Provider seized by the US government, as well.

READ MORE: US government seizes Gmail of WikiLeaks volunteer

Chelsea Manning, the 27-year-old US Army private who provided WikiLeaks with classified military documents in 2009 and 2010, is currently serving a 35-year prison sentence for her role with the website. Chicago hacktivist Jeremy Hammond, 30, of Chicago, is serving a decade for his part in stealing private data from an intelligence firm that was later published by WikiLeaks. And last week, writer Barrett Brown, 33, was dealt a 5.5 year sentence, in part for aiding Hammond after the hack occurred.

On Monday, Ratner said a federal probe into WikiLeaks and Assange was still open, per a government admission, as of last May. Assange, 43, has resided within the Ecuadorian embassy in London for over two years awaiting safe passage to South America, where he has been granted asylum. The WikiLeaks editor has not been charged with a crime, but is wanted for questioning regarding allegations of sexual misconduct in Sweden.

“Google’s willingness to surrender the private emails of WikiLeaks staffers to the United States government amounts to an “attack on journalism,” a representative for the whistleblower group says.

Kristinn Hrafnsson, an Icelandic journalist who joined ‪#‎WikiLeaks‬ as the group’s spokesman in 2010, said he’s “appalled” that ‪#‎Google‬ gave up his personal correspondence and other sensitive details to the US government in compliance with a search warrant served to the tech giant, apparently in an effort to bring charges against the anti-secrecy organization and its editor, Julian Assange.

“I believe this is an attack on me. As a journalist for now almost 30 years, I think this is an attack on journalism,” Hrafnsson said Monday at a press conference in Geneva, Switzerland.

Earlier that day, WikiLeaks announced that the Google accounts registered to three staffers – Hrafnsson, investigations editor Sarah Harrison and senior editor Joseph Farrell – had been the subject of federal search warrants served to the tech giant in March 2012.

According to Hrafnsson, the warrants compelled Google to give up the contents of the WikiLeaks staffers’ Gmail accounts, including deleted messages, draft emails, photo attachments and information about the IP addresses where those accounts had logged on from.

“I’m a little surprised to learn that Google keeps emails I have deleted,” Hrafnsson said. “That is what I read out of the documents.”

WikiLeaks Tweet:

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/559738167184871424

Michael Ratner, the US lawyer for WikiLeaks and Assange, said Monday that “essentially everything associated with the accounts of these three journalists” was seized by the government after Google was served in March 2012 and therefore ordered to give up all account data preceding that date by early April.

“The warrants acted like a huge vacuum cleaner,” he said. “It’s shocking that the US would do that to a journalist organization and to journalists working in that organization.”

WikiLeaks was not made aware of the search warrants until two-and-a-half years later on December 23, 2014, however, and, as of this week, the organization is publicly demanding answers from Google and the government.

Had Google been made aware of the warrants at the time, the group may have been able to fight back, according to Ratner.

“We don’t know if Google tried to litigate it or not, but that’s one of our requests,” Ratner said, adding that in a previous, similar situation, Twitter tried to fend off government requests for user data.

“Google claims there was a gag order in order to prohibit them from telling our clients,” Ratner added. “But the question is: did Google litigate that gag order so it could tell its subscribers, or did it simply let the government suck up all of its subscriber information? We need to know that.”

Hrafnsson and Harrison acknowledged Monday that they have not used their Google accounts for any internal matters concerning WikiLeaks since joining the group, but the spokesperson said his inbox contained upwards of 35,000 emails when it was seized, and Ratner believes the total trove also includes privileged attorney-client correspondence sent between journalists and their counsel.

WikiLeaks Tweet:

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/559736756808196096

http://rt.com/usa/226415-wikileaks-geneva-levison-blake/

▬▬▬
COMMENTS (SAMPLE)

What is $1 a month to support one of the greatest publications on the Left?

[P]rotests against BBC coverage of Israeli military operation against the Palestinian refugee population in the Gaza strip are erupting across the UK, with thousands joining a call for fair, unbiased and contextual reporting of the events on the ground.

London, Manchester, Liverpool, and Newcastle saw marches to “protest at the BBC’s biased reporting”as well as to gather signatures for an open letter to the BBC Director General. London took the main stage of the protest movement.

Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Stop the War Coalition, Campaign against Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and many other organizations, in the letter to the publicly funded broadcaster, say that the company is “duty-bound to provide balanced reporting without bias.”

Instead, the organizers argue, the BBC’s reporting of Israel’s assault on Palestinians in the operation Protective Edge, fails to mention the years of occupation, deportations and siege Palestinians have lived through. “BBC’s reporting of these assaults is entirely devoid of context or background,” the organizers write.

The main protest point of a nationwide rally gathered huge crowds outside the BBC Broadcasting House in London.

Booing and demands for better coverage are just among some of the chants heard in the rallies across the UK, that reminded the BBC that “resistance to occupation is a right under international law.”

“When you portray Israel’s shelling of a civilian population as a ‘response’ or ‘retaliation’ to rocket strikes from Gaza, we would like to remind you that these events flow from the displacement of the overwhelming majority of the Palestinian people from their homes and communities,” the open letter reads.

In Liverpool, hundreds gathered outside the BBC Radio Merseyside to rally against Israeli attacks on Gaza and against biased reporting of the current situation. Organized by Liverpool Friends of Palestine and supported by Merseyside Stop the War Coalition, the event also became a venue to show solidarity with the Palestinian people and to call for peace and a ceasefire.

In Manchester “Stop the Bombing of Gaza” event also gathered a crowd. Organizers, in their call to action said that “Barack Obama, David Cameron and UK foreign secretary William Hague support“Israel’s right to defend itself” through killing “women, children and disabled people.” They gathered in Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester center to call for a change in Whitehall’s policy.

A vigil in memory of the Palestinian victims was also held in Newcastle. Similar anti-BBC demonstrations were also held on Sunday in the UK, including Glasgow and Edinburgh as well as Cambridge and Oxford. More protests are scheduled during the week.

By Pepe Escobar, RT.com 

AFP Photo / US Navy / MC2 Tony D. Curtis

US President Barack Obama now pledges to transfer the responsibility of the shadow ‘Drone Wars’ from the CIA to the Pentagon – so the US Congress is able to monitor it. 

Until virtually yesterday the Obama administration did not even recognize in public the existence of the shadow ‘Drone Wars’.

The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) at the Pentagon – which would then be in charge of the‘Drone Wars’ – is bound to remain secret.

And the Pentagon is not exactly yearning to retouch its definition of a “militant”, a prime candidate to be‘target-assassinated’; “any military-aged male in a strike zone”. “Muslim” male, it goes without saying.

Obama’s rhetoric is one thing. His administration’s ‘Drone Wars’ are another thing entirely.

The President now insists GWOT is no longer a “boundless global war”.

That’s rhetoric. For the Pentagon, the “entire globe is a battlefield”.

That is the operative concept since the beginning of GWOT, and inbuilt in the Pentagon’s Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine.

And if the entire globe is a battlefield, all its causes and consequences are interconnected.

The rules of the game

What’s the difference between a British soldier (the UK is attached to GWOT via the “special relationship”), stationed at an army barracks, gruesomely hacked to death with a meat cleaver in a London street and a Syrian soldier beheaded/disemboweled/cannibalized in “rebel”-held territory by a mercenary Sunni jihadi?

The difference is that the Nigerian-British killer in London is a terrorist, and the jihadi in Syria is a freedom fighter.

What’s the difference between an alleged – never conclusively – proven Chechen-American principally responsible for the Boston bombing and a little Pashtun girl killed by a US drone in Waziristan?

The difference is that the Chechen-American is a terrorist, and the Pashtun girl is not even acknowledged by the Pentagon (and even if she was, she’d go down as “collateral damage”.)

And what if the “collateral damage” is a US citizen, as in Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the 16-year-old son of Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, ‘target-assassinated‘ by a US drone in Yemen in October 2011?

It will take 19 months for the administration to admit he was “terminated” – but still with no justification attached.

GWOT’s rules of the game won’t change – no matter how soaring Obama’s rhetoric.

When the US – or “the West” – kills or ‘target-assassinates’ Muslim civilians, that’s never terrorism.

When Muslims supported by “the West” kill other Muslim civilians – as in Syria – they are not terrorists; they are Reaganesque “freedom fighters”.

When Muslims kill Western soldiers – as in London – they’re terrorists.

When Muslims happen to come from regime-changeable Iran and Syria’s government, not to mention Hezbollah, they are by definition terrorists.

And when Muslims are lingering in Guantanamo just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time when the US invaded a Muslim country, they remain terrorists – the umpteenth Obama promise to close Guantanamo notwithstanding.

U.S. President Barack Obama listens as Medea Benjamin, an activist from the organization called Code Pink, shouts at him while he speaks at the National Defense University May 23, 2013 in Washington, DC (Win McNamee / Getty Images / AFP)

Pick your favorite blowback

Take a look at the trailer of Dirty Warsfeaturing Jeremy Scahill’s investigation of Washington’s shadow war. Pay attention to what a Pashtun peasant says: “If the Americans do this again, we are ready to shed our blood fighting them”.

That’s blowback. And not only Pashtuns are ready – but pan-Arabs and Muslims born and bred in “the West”.
The new “lone wolf” catchphrase/hysteria barely identifies the future proliferation of Muslim individuals whose anger finally explodes.

They may not be affiliated with any al-Qaeda-style franchise or copycat. What they do embody is the notion that if “the West” can get away with killing Muslim civilians, there will be a price to pay.

That’s 1, 2, 3, one thousand blowbacks.

And reasons for a thousand blowbacks are piling up.

The Bush administration’s ‘Shock and Awe’ over Baghdad 10 years ago was Western terrorism inflicted on Iraq’s civilian population.

The ‘Drone Wars’ are Western terrorism inflicted on civilian populations from Yemen to Pakistan’s tribal areas.
The sanctions packages imposed for years on Iraq and later on Iran are slow-motion Western terrorism inflicted on civilian populations to “prepare” them for regime change.

Meanwhile “the West” simply won’t quit its ability to fabricate more blowbacks.

NATO’s war “liberated” Libya and turned it into a failed state. The result is Sahelistan; northern and western Africa on fire.

Suicide bombers in Niger have just attacked a military camp and a uranium mine operated by French company Areva.

Responsibility was claimed by Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a former leader of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) who late last year formed the splinter group Signatories in Blood, then led the attack on a natural gas plant in Ain Amenas in Algeria last January, and later may – or rather may not – have been killed.

The bottom line is that the entire globe will remain a battlefield – a self-fulfilling Pentagon prophecy.

So many Belmokhtars to fight, so many Syrian jihadis to support, so many “al-Qaeda” to target-assassinate, so many Muslim lone wolves to track.

Obama’s rhetoric is just a show. GWOT is bound to remain a serpent biting its own tail, eagerly feeding itself till the end of time.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.