The Death of Truth and Julian Assange

[Pharaoh]

This is from May 2013, but it bears repeating and it bears discussion......





By Chris Hedges

This interview is a joint project of Truthdig and The Nation magazine.





LONDON—A tiny tip of the vast subterranean network of governmental and intelligence agencies from around the world dedicated to destroying WikiLeaks and arresting its founder, Julian Assange, appears outside the red-brick building on Hans Crescent Street that houses the Ecuadorean Embassy. Assange, the world’s best-known political refugee, has been in the embassy since he was offered sanctuary there last June. British police in black Kevlar vests are perched night and day on the steps leading up to the building, and others wait in the lobby directly in front of the embassy door. An officer stands on the corner of a side street facing the iconic department store Harrods, half a block away on Brompton Road. Another officer peers out the window of a neighboring building a few feet from Assange’s bedroom at the back of the embassy. Police sit round-the-clock in a communications van topped with an array of antennas that presumably captures all electronic forms of communication from Assange’s ground-floor suite.

The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), or Scotland Yard, said the estimated cost of surrounding the Ecuadorean Embassy from June 19, 2012, when Assange entered the building, until Jan. 31, 2013, is the equivalent of $4.5 million.

Britain has rejected an Ecuadorean request that Assange be granted safe passage to an airport. He is in limbo. It is, he said, like living in a “space station.”


More...........

http://www.truthdig.com/dig/print/the_death_of_truth_20130505/

[matthews]

1. Good to see that Cameron has carried on the Blair tradition

of being our lick-spittle flunky.

[Vinnie From Indy]

2. Very powerful piece by Hedges

K&R

[Thinkingabout]

3. I watched an interview with Assange, he sure seems to have a very dry mouth when he is speaking,

Makes me wonder. . . . .

[rhett o rick]

4. This is the quote that got to me.

The world has been turned upside down. The pestilence of corporate totalitarianism is spreading rapidly over the earth. The criminals have seized power. It is not, in the end, simply Assange or Manning they want. It is all who dare to defy the official narrative, to expose the big lie of the global corporate state. The persecution of Assange and Manning is the harbinger of what is to come, the rise of a bitter world where criminals in Brooks Brothers suits and gangsters in beribboned military uniforms—propped up by a vast internal and external security apparatus, a compliant press and a morally bankrupt political elite—monitor and crush those who dissent. Writers, artists, actors, journalists, scientists, intellectuals and workers will be forced to obey or thrown into bondage. I fear for Julian Assange. I fear for Bradley Manning. I fear for us all.

[Pharaoh]

6. yes, that is a scary statement

and could become true. The trump card is the internet, and millions of people spreading and passing around information. It truly cannot be contained. It can be repressed through fear. That is what Empire is all about. Rule by fear. But we are many, they are few, we are legion, they are shitting their pants that we might all wake up to that fact.

[tex-wyo-dem]

10. This is the true reason the NSA program that Snowden helped...

Expose really exists, to monitor dissidents to the corporate oligarchy and destroy them. Terrorism is just a front.

[leftstreet]

5. DURec

[Catherina]

7. $4.5 million that shows us where their *austerity* priorities are

Meanwhile a war criminal like Tony Blair is the "special envoy to the Middle East" for peace. It's like the Clinton Bush Haiti Foundation.

Gawd, gag me now please.

[tex-wyo-dem]

11. No kidding, Catherina...

You can't make up this stunning level of irony and hipocracy.

[wildbilln864]

8. and a big k & R! eom.

[99th_Monkey]

9. K & R ~ nt

[Peace Patriot]

12. "part of the terrifying metamorphosis of the 'war on terror' into a wider war on civil liberties."

"The global assault—which saw Australia threaten to revoke Assange’s passport—is part of the terrifying metamorphosis of the 'war on terror' into a wider war on civil liberties. It has become a hunt not for actual terrorists but a hunt for all those with the ability to expose the mounting crimes of the power elite."--from the OP

"Haven’t they (reporters working in the 'old media&quot realized that this is a war by a global corporate elite not against an organization or an individual but against the freedom of the press and democracy?" --from the OP

Both of these quotes have the ring of truth. It is unmistakable when you hear it. The sound reverberates through bits of knowledge you may have, puzzles you have encountered, things you didn't understand, things that seemed like government jabberwocky, things that didn't add up, all sorts of things that you hear about and think about, and it provides FORM and MEANING to disparate facts and events that are, in truth, related, but whose relatedness you couldn't quite articulate to yourself. Why are Assange, and Manning, and Snowden, all three, in one kind of prison or another, when all they've done is to INFORM the public of illegal, horrible or highly questionable actions of government, corporate and military rulers?

There is a war on, and that war is USING "terrorism" to assert unprecedented and unconscionable power over all people and all social, economic and political systems. We, the ordinary people of the U.S. and the world, are "the enemy," and anyone who tries to inform us about the true nature of this war is "enemy no.1."

I have long thought that 9/11 was just too convenient to the ruling powers for making war on the Constitution, on the Geneva Conventions, on the UN Charter, on the Uniform Code of Military Justice and on numerous other laws, systems and traditions that protect human rights and human life. Just too, too convenient. So the question MUST be asked, as with the Reichstag Fire: Did they do it? And when you start turning to the evidence about that, all sorts of black holes appear where information should be.

Not to mention their robbing us blind. But deeper. Have they ravaged our very brains? Not that there aren't "terrorists" in the world. There are. And then you find out that the main "terrorist" group that is mentioned, Al Qaeda, was a creation of the CIA (in the U.S. secret war to drive Russia out of Afghanistan). Then you find out many other things, and their whole story about "terrorism" begins to unravel as a coherent tale that "justifies" vast spying, vast repression, hunting and torturing whistleblowers, drone bombing people all over the world without benefit of accusation or trial, and anyone else standing around, with no public accountability whatsoever, and all the rest. When someone speaks the truth, as Chris Hedges has done above, it vibrates like a church bell far, wide and deep.

The U.S. treatment of Assange, Manning and Snowden reverberates BACK to the beginning of this alleged "war on terror" and changes it meaning to: the USEFULNESS of "terror." What a boondoggle! And what a fascist wet dream!

[Pharaoh]

13. That was so beautifully put Peace Patriot

Yes, I think the ones shouting Terrorist terrorist! are actually the real terrorists. And yes, 911 was just too convenient, they already had all the apparatus in place. They just needed and excuse. So they created one themselves. Unfortunately, we are not allowed to discuss 911 out in the open. We must go to the 911 dungeon, where one cannot rec a thread to see the light of day. Sad but true.