The reason for the indictment and persecution of Assange is that WikiLeaks published secret military documents, supplied by whistleblower Chelsea Manning, revealing US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as diplomatic cables embarrassing to the US State Department because they detailed US attempts to manipulate and subvert governments around the world.
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Useful Idiots? New Yorker Magazine Fails Litmus Test for Media Impartiality on Syrian War
ROBERT BRIDGE—Incidentally, this explains in a nutshell why the masters of the mainstream media universe are so terribly anxious to silence alternative media voices from the Internet. The existence of dissenting, unscripted voices throws into stark contrast just how biased, prejudiced and undemocratic the Western press has become. Better to manipulate the Internet algorithms than to risk Western audiences hearing voices that challenge the official narrative.
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Mehdi Hasan, beautiful soul, and his diatribe against the consequential Left
STEVEN GOWANS—Hasan and his coreligionist Eric Draitser, profess not to take sides. Instead, they claim to hover neutrally above the field of battle, siding only with such abstractions as “humanity,” as if humanity does not include contending forces, or, in Draitser’s case, with “the Syrian people”, as if the Syrian people does not include government forces, Islamist insurgents, and Kurdish fighters. Through a verbal sleight of hand they hope to conjure an artificial construct free from competing forces to which they can claim fealty and thereby avoid taking a side. This is a deception, and the position of cowards.
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What Are “Assad Apologists”? Are They Like Those “Saddam Apologists” Of 2002?
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—And that’s always how these arguments go. By pointing out that the US-centralized empire has been plotting regime change in Syria literally for generations, I’m not opposing dangerous regime change interventionism, I’m defending a dictator. By noting that the western empire has an extensive history of using lies, propaganda and false flags to manufacture support for military aggression, I’m not stating a well-documented and frequently admitted fact, I’m performing apologia on behalf of a despotic regime.
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A Tale of Two Atrocities: Douma and Gaza
DOUG NOBLE—The mainstream media once again have enthusiastically endorsed Donald Trump’s latest strike on Syria, pulled off without Congressional approval and in blatant violation of US and international law. Reporting in breathless detail the weapons used and the sites bombed, the mainstream media seem to agree with President Trump that Syrian President Bashar Assad is a “Gas Killing Animal” responsible for the ghastly deaths of Syrian innocents in a chemical attack, one which demands swift, forceful retaliation. This rush to judgment comes even as international organizations have yet to conduct any formal investigations into the evidence of what, if anything, happened in Douma and who is responsible.
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TOXIC MEDIA: Why Readers Shouldn’t Trust Staff Reporters
ERIC ZUESSE—Volunteer journalists (such as “bloggers”) can report these things; well-paid ‘journalists’ cannot and do not. In true George Orwell 1984 fashion, reporting these things is called ‘fake news’, by the actual fake-news masters — and unfortunately suckers believe them. Even on serious domestic-policy news, the prestigious ‘news’ media pump the aristocracy’s lies, and inculcate the desired (by the super-wealthy) misconceptions.
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British Propaganda and Disinformation: An Imperial and Colonial Tradition
WAYNE MADSEN—In 2013, April 2017, and April 2018, the Western media echo chamber blared out all the same talking points: “Assad killing his own people,” “Syrian weapons of mass destruction,” and the “mass murder of women and children.” Western news networks featured videos of dead women and children, while paid propagandists, known as “contributors” to corporate news networks – all having links to the military-intelligence complex – demanded action be taken against Assad.
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The Guardian Is Committing Journalistic Malpractice By Not Retracting This Claim
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—This is not healthy, and this is not acceptable. But in a way it’s good that these brazen war propagandists are exposing themselves so completely, because we can point at what they are doing and present clear evidence of a mass media campaign to manufacture support for a longstanding regime change agenda, thereby shattering the faith that people have placed in these deceitful institutions. Hopefully we can do it before they do much more harm.
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The New Yorker’s Days as Something to Look Up to Are Over
P. GREANVILLE—By running imperial shill Joshua Yaffa’s insidious screed, Russia’s “Madman” Routine in Syria May Have Averted Direct Confrontation with the U.S., For Now, and similar pieces, at a moment when humanity stands on the edge of the abyss of nuclear war, or at least an unthinkably devastating Word War 3, not to mention endorse the further sociopathic mutilation of a nation brutally attacked and already devastated by a conglomeration of powerful bullies, the New Yorker editors relinquished their enviable place in journalism’s high brow precincts and toppled their own publication off of the pedestal it sat, virtually unchallenged, for many years.
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Ecuador doing Washington’s bidding—treachery and shameless imperial arm-twisting at play
One last thought on this sordid affair. Assange was made an Ecuadorian citizen sometime at the end of 2017. (See here). So why hasn’t Ecuador gone to the UNO (or other international judicial venues) to protest British meddling and messing with one of its citizens? Probably because most of the UNO and international courts have been rendered useless and impotent by the US and its accomplices, and most countries represented there are too poor and vulnerable to Washington’s reprisals to do much more that turn their eyes away.
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Democrats escalate anti-Russia witch hunt with lawsuit linking Trump and Assange as Russian agents
BARRY GREY—The civil suit, seeking millions of dollars in damages, was filed in the US District Court in Manhattan. The Democratic Party’s 66-page legal complaint contains no new information about alleged Russian hacking or Trump campaign collusion. It simply repackages the official narrative based on the report issued in early January, 2017 by the CIA, the FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which provided no substantive evidence for its charges, with the addition of subsequent media revelations, such as reports on the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Trump campaign officials and Russian nationals. The lawsuit repeats the absurd narrative that Clinton lost the election because of Russian interference.
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