AMERICAN PROPAGANDA

MAX BLUMENTHAL—”The amount of information the intelligence agencies had sent shivers through one’s spine,” he said. “Imagine what it meant to know about atrocities in real time.”The records confirm that dozens of people who disappeared at the time were assassinated at the hands of the state. More than 1.500 former officials in the country have been put on trial for crimes including torture, thousands of forced disappearances and executions and the abduction of hundreds of babies. The records contain specific information that may help Argentina’s legal system close at least 400 pending investigations.The local Argentine outlet Pagina12 published an article Saturday detailing some of the findings its journalists uncovered from the declassified documents.

PHILIP A. FARRUGGIO—This writer’s favorite film of all time, right ahead of Seven Days In May and JFK is of course Casablanca. The film had it all, from WW2 suspense to old fashioned romance… with a good dose of twists and turns. In the film Paul Henreid plays Victor Laszlo, the Czech resistance leader, who has already escaped and eluded the Gestapo a few times. Laszlo has  been tortured on more than one occasion, yet told them nothing important. He comes to Casablanca in search of a way to leave North Africa and go to the USA to continue his important work. In a powerful scene near the end of the film Laszlo and Humphrey Bogart’s lead character Richard Blaine( AKA Rick of Rick’s Cafe Americain )discuss Laszlo’s work:

Rick:  Did you ever wonder if all of this is worth it?

Victor: You might as well question why we breathe. If we stop breathing we will die. We stop fighting our enemies and the world will die!

PATRICE GREANVILLE—Jimmy Fallon, on NBC’s Tonight Show, finds Assange’s imprisonment an event suitable for malicious jokes. The clueless audience, like a bunch of ignorant, well trained, monkeys, laughs on cue. A truly pathetic spectacle, showng the depths of ignorance carried by the ordinary person in America, but all too typical of the disgraceful political consciousness disseminated by the plutocrats’ media.A similar situation obtains at THE DAILY SHOW, a venue made famous by Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert.

JONATHAN COOK—Assange was reduced from one of the few towering figures of our time – a man who will have a central place in history books, if we as a species live long enough to write those books – to nothing more than a sex pest, and a scruffy bail-skipper.The political and media class crafted a narrative of half-truths about the sex charges Assange was under investigation for in Sweden. They overlooked the fact that Assange had been allowed to leave Sweden by the original investigator, who dropped the charges, only for them to be revived by another investigator with a well-documented political agenda.