Julian Assange Being Turned over to UK????
paulsurovell said:
Great article on the Manafort story:
http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/28/manafort-assange-drama-proves-media-will-buy-any-russia-conspiracy-story-no-matter-its-flaws/#.W_6R-aocoGE.twitter
She lost me at Devin Nunes's "tenacious digging." But as mentioned earlier, the story should be taken skeptically. After the initial run, it's mostly lost steam.
DaveSchmidt said:
paulsurovell said:A better interpretation, I think, can be gleaned from Aaron Maté’s tweet, which you liked, about the Manafort news: “I suggest waiting to see what Mueller accuses him of actually lying about, & his evidence.”
Well I think you support Assange's right to publish stolen documents and there's no reason to believe that he had anything to do with the thefts.
So a logical interpretation of your position could be: "I oppose the prosecution of Assange for publishing stolen documents unless it is proven that he was involved in the theft of those documents."
That's a response to an accusation that Manafort lied. In the case of Assange there's no accusation to respond to.
paulsurovell said:That's a response to an accusation that Manafort lied.
And mine’s a response to an assertion that Assange did nothing wrong. Two sides of the same coin.
(Which ridski is welcome to if he’s willing to settle.)
dave23 said:
paulsurovell said:She lost me at Devin Nunes's "tenacious digging." But as mentioned earlier, the story should be taken skeptically. After the initial run, it's mostly lost steam.
Great article on the Manafort story:
http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/28/manafort-assange-drama-proves-media-will-buy-any-russia-conspiracy-story-no-matter-its-flaws/#.W_6R-aocoGE.twitter
It has lost some steam thanks to protests from some reputable journalists who actually care about press freedom. Also, the story had zero evidence and evidence should not have been difficult to provide, given the surveillance and security around the embessy. The writer of this story, a former Guardian reporter discusses the probably deep state origin of this story and the irresponsibility and malice of the Guardian--a mouthpiece for the elite establishment. He compares the attack on Assange to the attack other anti-corporate leftists such as Jeremy Corbyin.
Guardian ups its vilification of Julian Assange
I worked for the Guardian for a number of years, and know well the layers of checks that any highly sensitive story has to go through before publication. In that lengthy process, a variety of commissioning editors, lawyers, backbench editors and the editor herself, Kath Viner, would normally insist on cuts to anything that could not be rigorously defended and corroborated.
And yet this piece seems to have been casually waved through, given a green light even though its profound shortcomings were evident to a range of well-placed analysts and journalists from the outset.
That at the very least hints that the Guardian thought they had “insurance” on this story. And the only people who could have promised that kind of insurance are the security and intelligence services – presumably of Britain, the United States and / or Ecuador.
It appears the Guardian has simply taken this story, provided by spooks, at face value. Even if it later turns out that Manafort did visit Assange, the Guardian clearly had no compelling evidence for its claims when it published them. That is profoundly irresponsible journalism – fake news – that should be of the gravest concern to readers.
Deeper malaise
What this misses is that the Guardian’s attacks on Assange are not exceptional or motivated solely by personal animosity. They are entirely predictable and systematic. Rather than being the reason for the Guardian violating basic journalistic standards and ethics, the paper’s hatred of Assange is a symptom of a deeper malaise in the Guardian and the wider corporate media.
Even aside from its decade-long campaign against Assange, the Guardian is far from “solid and reliable”, as Greenwald claims. It has been at the forefront of the relentless, and unhinged, attacks on Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn for prioritising the rights of Palestinians over Israel’s right to continue its belligerent occupation. Over the past three years, the Guardian has injected credibility into the Israel lobby’s desperate efforts to tar Corbyn as an anti-semite. See here, here and here.
Heroes of the neoliberal order
Equally, the Guardian has made clear who its true heroes are. Certainly not Corbyn or Assange, who threaten to disrupt the entrenched neoliberal order that is hurtling us towards climate breakdown and economic collapse.
Its pages, however, are readily available to the latest effort to prop up the status quo from Tony Blair, the man who led Britain, on false pretences, into the largest crime against humanity in living memory – the attack on Iraq.
That “humanitarian intervention” cost the lives of many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and created a vacuum that destabilised much of the Middle East, sucked in Islamic jihadists like al-Qaeda and ISIS, and contributed to the migrant crisis in Europe that has fuelled the resurgence of the far-right. None of that is discussed in the Guardian or considered grounds for disqualifying Blair as an arbiter of what is good for Britain and the world’s future.
The Guardian also has an especial soft spot for blogger Elliot Higgins, who, aided by the Guardian, has shot to unlikely prominence as a self-styled “weapons expert”. Like Luke Harding, Higgins invariably seems ready to echo whatever the British and American security services need verifying “independently”.
Higgins and his well-staffed website Bellingcat have taken on for themselves the role of arbiters of truth on many foreign affairs issues, taking a prominent role in advocating for narratives that promote US and NATO hegemony while demonising Russia, especially in highly contested arenas such as Syria.
That clear partisanship should be no surprise, given that Higgins now enjoys an “academic” position at, and funding from, the Atlantic Council, a high-level, Washington-based think-tank founded to drum up support for NATO and justify its imperialist agenda.
Improbably, the Guardian has adopted Higgins as the poster-boy for a supposed citizen journalism it has sought to undermine as “fake news” whenever it occurs on social media without the endorsement of state-backed organisations.
The truth is that the Guardian has not erred in this latest story attacking Assange, or in its much longer-running campaign to vilify him. With this story, it has done what it regularly does when supposedly vital western foreign policy interests are at stake – it simply regurgitates an elite-serving, western narrative.
Its job is to shore up a consensus on the left for attacks on leading threats to the existing, neoliberal order: whether they are a platform like Wikileaks promoting whistle-blowing against a corrupt western elite; or a politician like Jeremy Corbyn seeking to break apart the status quo on the rapacious financial industries or Israel-Palestine; or a radical leader like Hugo Chavez who threatened to overturn a damaging and exploitative US dominance of “America’s backyard”; or social media dissidents who have started to chip away at the elite-friendly narratives of corporate media, including the Guardian.
The Guardian did not make a mistake in vilifying Assange without a shred of evidence. It did what it is designed to do.
At the end of the article he recommends the in-depth Gareth Porter piece I posted yesterday on why this hit piece is so important to those who want Assange jailed: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/u-k-and-ecuador-conspire-to-deliver-julian-assange-to-u-s-authorities/
DaveSchmidt said:
paulsurovell said:And mine’s a response to an assertion that Assange did nothing wrong. Two sides of the same coin.
That's a response to an accusation that Manafort lied.
(Which ridski is welcome to if he’s willing to settle.)
Earlier I suggested the following position for someone who supports the right to publish stolen documents, whether or not he/she believes that "Assange did nothing wrong."
"I oppose Assange's prosecution for publishing stolen documents, unless it is proven that he was involved in the theft of those documents."
Is there a reason why you could not take that position?
paulsurovell said:
Earlier I suggested the following position for someone who supports the right to publish stolen documents, whether or not he/she believes that "Assange did nothing wrong."
"I oppose Assange's prosecution for publishing stolen documents, unless it is proven that he was involved in the theft of those documents."
Is there a reason why you could not take that position?
Yes. It’s an Ouroboros, because the usual way to prove involvement in a theft is prosecution. I’ll stick with wait-and-see.
DaveSchmidt said:
paulsurovell said:Yes. It’s an Ouroboros, because the usual way to prove involvement in a theft is prosecution. I’ll stick with wait-and-see.
Earlier I suggested the following position for someone who supports the right to publish stolen documents, whether or not he/she believes that "Assange did nothing wrong."
"I oppose Assange's prosecution for publishing stolen documents, unless it is proven that he was involved in the theft of those documents."
Is there a reason why you could not take that position?
James Goodale, former NY Times general counsel who led the paper’s legal team in the Pentagon Papers case makes a similar suggestion for those concerned about "what they don't know:"
. . . The journalistic community should jump on board and support Assange with respect to his exercising his First Amendment rights — even if they intensely dislike him personally.
Now, if the journalistic community says that there may be other possible facts that make Assange less pure from a First Amendment perspective, that’s fair comment, but they don’t know that. Until they know that, they ought to support Assange’s First Amendment rights, since his rights are also theirs.
Twitter banned Julian Assange's lawyer so she could not defend him against the Guardian accusations: https://twitter.com/Ian56789/status/1067784743658422272
Julian Assange's lawyer defending him against the Guardian accusations on Twitter on Tuesday:
https://twitter.com/AssangeLegal/status/1067433048864509956
https://twitter.com/AssangeLegal/status/1067435292745854995
https://twitter.com/AssangeLegal/status/1067441528090570752
https://twitter.com/AssangeLegal/status/1067447220771921926
https://twitter.com/AssangeLegal/status/1067453127639646208
https://twitter.com/AssangeLegal/status/1067459466231205888
And earlier today:
a lot of people reported getting messages saying she had been temporarily banned.
Little known fact: If someone hasn't posted on Twitter within the past 24 hours, the police dispatch a detective to your home and business. Part of Twitter's EULA.
Never, Ever Forget The Guardian/Politico Psyop Against WikiLeaks
https://medium.com/…/never-ever-forget-the-guardian-politic…
We must never forget that this was done. We must keep bringing up the undeniable fact that the Guardian published false claims about a longtime target of western intelligence and defense agencies, then was backed up by a longtime insider from one of those agencies who was permitted to publish anonymously in an ostensibly unrelated outlet. This is one of those jaw-dropping glimpses behind the puppet stage we must never permit the world to forget, much like the time CNN knowingly staged a fake interview with a Syrian girl reciting scripted war propaganda. We must keep bringing this up at every opportunity in our efforts to give people glimpses behind the propaganda curtain, continuing to remind them next week, next month, next year, and ten years from now.
Forgiveness is overrated. Forgiveness is a key foundational element in most abusive relationships, wherein the abusee is manipulated or bullied into forgiving the abuser again and again, without ever holding a grudge. This is true of a battered spouse, and it is true of an oppressed populace. The ability to hold a grudge is therefore of paramount importance in fighting the propaganda machine on which our rulers have built their oppressive empire. Otherwise we will be shuffled forward in the news churn, just like the goldfish-brained Russiagaters who are moved along from one false story to the next into the amnesia of the endlessly spewing news churn.
Don’t forget. Remember this one. Remember it, and keep bringing it up.
paulsurovell said:
nan said:
a lot of people reported getting messages saying she had been temporarily banned.
Thanks for posting that. I saw that video but did not think to take a screen shot. Very clear that she was banned for some time.
nan said:
Thanks for posting that. I saw that video but did not think to take a screen shot. Very clear that she was banned for some time.
It was clear from the first tweet you linked to.
DaveSchmidt said:
nan said:It was clear from the first tweet you linked to.
Thanks for posting that. I saw that video but did not think to take a screen shot. Very clear that she was banned for some time.
Ok, good. Glad you were paying attention!
Lots of outrage about that fake news Guardian piece.
The Guardian’s Vilification of Julian Assange
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/12/03/the-guardians-vilification-of-julian-assange/
The emotional impact of The Guardian is to suggest that Assange is responsible for four years or more of Trump rule. But more significantly, it bolsters the otherwise risible claim that Assange is not a publisher – and thereby entitled to the protections of a free press, as enjoyed by The Guardian or The New York Times – but the head of an organization engaged in espionage for a foreign power.
The intention is to deeply discredit Assange, and by extension the Wikileaks organization, in the eyes of right-thinking liberals. That, in turn, will make it much easier to silence Assange and the vital cause he represents: the use of new media to hold to account the old, corporate media and political elites through the imposition of far greater transparency.
The Guardian story will prepare public opinion for the moment when Ecuador’s rightwing government under President Lenin Moreno forces Assange out of the embassy, having already withdrawn most of his rights to use digital media.
It will soften opposition when the UK moves to arrest Assange on self-serving bail violation charges and extradites him to the US. And it will pave the way for the US legal system to lock Assange up for a very long time.
For the best part of a decade, any claims by Assange’s supporters that avoiding this fate was the reason Assange originally sought asylum in the embassy was ridiculed by corporate journalists, not least at the Guardian.
Even when a United Nations panel of experts in international law ruled in 2016 that Assange was being arbitrarily – and unlawfully – detained by the UK, Guardian writers led efforts to discredit the UN report. See here and here.
Now Assange and his supporters have been proved right once again. An administrative error this month revealed that the US justice department had secretly filed criminal charges against Assange.
Statement by Fidel Narváez, first secretary at the Ecuadorian Embassy from 2010 to July 2018:
It is impossible for any visitor to enter the embassy without going through very strict protocols and leaving a clear record: obtaining written approval from the ambassador, registering with security personnel, and leaving a copy of ID. The embassy is the most surveilled on Earth; not only are there cameras positioned on neighbouring buildings recording every visitor, but inside the building every movement is recorded with CCTV cameras, 24/7. In fact, security personnel have always spied on Julian and his visitors. It is simply not possible that Manafort visited the embassy.
You're the only person on here discussing the Guardian story. Here's the latest Assange/Manafort piece that you SHOULD be discussing:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/03/us/politics/manafort-assange-wikileaks-ecuador.html
nan said:
Lots of outrage about that fake news Guardian piece.
The Guardian’s Vilification of Julian Assange
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46434707?fbclid=IwAR3zfOV8aPkTvhp8pcJyYbRvdKsTmUQuxidMq3ScNFMlNVRASGX1-6CBCtM
The emotional impact of The Guardian is to suggest that Assange is responsible for four years or more of Trump rule. But more significantly, it bolsters the otherwise risible claim that Assange is not a publisher – and thereby entitled to the protections of a free press, as enjoyed by The Guardian or The New York Times – but the head of an organization engaged in espionage for a foreign power.
The intention is to deeply discredit Assange, and by extension the Wikileaks organization, in the eyes of right-thinking liberals. That, in turn, will make it much easier to silence Assange and the vital cause he represents: the use of new media to hold to account the old, corporate media and political elites through the imposition of far greater transparency.
The Guardian story will prepare public opinion for the moment when Ecuador’s rightwing government under President Lenin Moreno forces Assange out of the embassy, having already withdrawn most of his rights to use digital media.
It will soften opposition when the UK moves to arrest Assange on self-serving bail violation charges and extradites him to the US. And it will pave the way for the US legal system to lock Assange up for a very long time.
For the best part of a decade, any claims by Assange’s supporters that avoiding this fate was the reason Assange originally sought asylum in the embassy was ridiculed by corporate journalists, not least at the Guardian.
Even when a United Nations panel of experts in international law ruled in 2016 that Assange was being arbitrarily – and unlawfully – detained by the UK, Guardian writers led efforts to discredit the UN report. See here and here.
Now Assange and his supporters have been proved right once again. An administrative error this month revealed that the US justice department had secretly filed criminal charges against Assange.
Here's the actual link to that piece. BBC News link above it is about yellow vest protests in France.
https://original.antiwar.com/cook/2018/11/30/guardian-escalates-its-vilification-of-julian-assange/
ridski said:
nan said:Here's the actual link to that piece. BBC News link above it is about yellow vest protests in France.
Lots of outrage about that fake news Guardian piece.
The Guardian’s Vilification of Julian Assange
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46434707?fbclid=IwAR3zfOV8aPkTvhp8pcJyYbRvdKsTmUQuxidMq3ScNFMlNVRASGX1-6CBCtM
The emotional impact of The Guardian is to suggest that Assange is responsible for four years or more of Trump rule. But more significantly, it bolsters the otherwise risible claim that Assange is not a publisher – and thereby entitled to the protections of a free press, as enjoyed by The Guardian or The New York Times – but the head of an organization engaged in espionage for a foreign power.
The intention is to deeply discredit Assange, and by extension the Wikileaks organization, in the eyes of right-thinking liberals. That, in turn, will make it much easier to silence Assange and the vital cause he represents: the use of new media to hold to account the old, corporate media and political elites through the imposition of far greater transparency.
The Guardian story will prepare public opinion for the moment when Ecuador’s rightwing government under President Lenin Moreno forces Assange out of the embassy, having already withdrawn most of his rights to use digital media.
It will soften opposition when the UK moves to arrest Assange on self-serving bail violation charges and extradites him to the US. And it will pave the way for the US legal system to lock Assange up for a very long time.
For the best part of a decade, any claims by Assange’s supporters that avoiding this fate was the reason Assange originally sought asylum in the embassy was ridiculed by corporate journalists, not least at the Guardian.
Even when a United Nations panel of experts in international law ruled in 2016 that Assange was being arbitrarily – and unlawfully – detained by the UK, Guardian writers led efforts to discredit the UN report. See here and here.
Now Assange and his supporters have been proved right once again. An administrative error this month revealed that the US justice department had secretly filed criminal charges against Assange.
https://original.antiwar.com/cook/2018/11/30/guardian-escalates-its-vilification-of-julian-assange/
Thanks so much for catching that--I fixed it in the post. Here is the link I was supposed to use from the original source:
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/12/03/the-guardians-vilification-of-julian-assange
So, I forgot to mention that this mainstream fake news about Julian Assange just keeps getting worse. Politico published some fake news from a CIA agent with a fake name to say that the fake news story printed in the Guardian was from the Russians. I kid you not, but my head is spinning. Jimmy Dore can explain it better than I can.
When you use the far right's language (deep state, fake news), you give yourself away.
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Great article on the Manafort story:
http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/28/manafort-assange-drama-proves-media-will-buy-any-russia-conspiracy-story-no-matter-its-flaws/#.W_6R-aocoGE.twitter