Latest

#Iraq #Afghanistan #Pakistan 'War on Terror' - Body Count  - REPORT 101 page report, by Physicians for Social Responsibility PDF - Mar 2015, Interl Edition http://www.psr.org/assets/pdfs/body-count.pdf  COMPLIANT MEDIA - EVIDENCE James Clapper says:  untold damage Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper: #Snowden killed ‘important’ program in #Afghanistan / unnamed 'Intercept' country = Afghanistan http://pakobserver.net/detailnews.asp?id=272816 ---------------------- ꕤ  ----------------------  UPDATE It was the WikiLeaks follow-up identification of Afghanistan as country being surveilled that led to surveillance program closure: In March 2014, The Washington Post, citing documents provided by Snowden, reported on a program called MYSTIC, under which the NSA was collecting “every single” phone conversation in a foreign country. The Post, following requests by U.S. officials, withheld the country’s name. Two months later, the Intercept news site published a similar story about the NSA’s “secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation” in two nations. The site named the Bahamas as one country. It refrained from naming the other, citing concerns that doing so “could lead to increased violence.” Several days later, the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks reported that the country was Afghanistan. Soon after, “the program was shut down by the government of Afghanistan,” said Clapper, speaking at the Intelligence and National Security Summit in Washington. SOURCE https://archive.is/94N16 ---------------------- ꕤ  ---------------------- NO words for the suppression of truth by the corporate and 'alternate' corporate press: Washington Post The Intercept  It's anger provoking to see information denial, in black and white. WikiLeaks was the only publisher that gave the world:  the truth. #WikiLeaks #Snowden Hillary e-mails Rep. Mac Thornberry (R., Tex.) chair HAS Cttee /  "helped our primary adversaries" not a fan  /  funding increase ploy? http://freebeacon.com/national-security/house-armed-services-chief-intel-losses-including-clinton-emails-caused-serious-damage/ Why Murdoch Pushes for War ⟴ by Craig Murray  on September 7, 2015 1:33 pm EXTRACT Given the disgraceful Sun front page and middle spread urging war on Syria, and the all-out propaganda on Sky News, it is important to understand why Murdoch is pushing so hard for war. I therefore reproduce my article from February 2013. It is important to note that the links are to industry publications: this is very genuine, hard information.  Israel Grants Oil Rights in Syria to Murdoch and Rothschild Israel has granted oil exploration rights inside Syria, in the occupied Golan Heights, to Genie Energy. Major shareholders of Genie Energy – which also has interests in shale gas in the United States and shale oil in Israel – include Rupert Murdoch and Lord Jacob Rothschild.  [...] FULL AT SOURCE https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2015/09/why-murdoch-pushes-for-war/ #Syria ex US intel analysis Concurs with Assange  / US War on Syria author/journalist, Wayne Madsen US plans to topple Syria’s Assad go back to 9/11 http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2015/09/10/428634/Syria-Assange-US-Assad-Wayne-Madsen-911 WikiLeaks BOOK  http://www.versobooks.com/books/1931-the-wikileaks-files #Syria #WikiLeaks #ASSANGE US is an Empire 'US planned to oust Assad long before 2011 uprising' http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/foreign/10-Sep-2015/us-planned-to-oust-assad-long-before-2011-uprising EXTRACTS - UK SECRET DRONE BOMBING SYRIA / AGAINST PARLIAMENTARY VETO NEW direction: criminal law treated as 'global law' Cardiff jihadist: Jones informed of Syria drone strike Written by: iFreePress Prime Minister David Cameron said the attorney general had agreed there was a “clear legal basis” for targeting Khan. Prime Minister David Cameron was challenged to shed light on specific threats that led to the killing of Islamic State (IS) militants Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin in the Syrian city of Raqqa, which he declared “an act of self-defence”. He said: “These were terrorists who’d been planning a series of attacks on the streets of our country, some involving public events, there are other terrorists making similar plans and we have to do what we can to keep our streets safe”. [ ...] Last week The Washington Post revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency and US Special Operations forces have launched a “secret drone campaign” in Syria as part of a “targeted killing program that is run separately from the broader U.S. military offensive against the Islamic State”. What we are talking about are enemy combatants who have chosen to take up arms against the armed forces of their own country and its allies. [ ... ] “There was no other way of preventing the kind of armed attack they were involved in planning”, Fallon said, during an interview with ITV, cited by the Guardian. They say they will target ISIL fighters. Ministers said the decision had been taken on advice from the attorney general, Britain’s chief legal advisor. Now, he said, the USA “warlike paradigm” had been adopted instead. And may they assist finish the struggle in Syria or make it worse? When it was suggested that drone operators had targeted and taken out British individuals in Syria without the endorsement of the Commons, he said: “Put it like that, then that is wrong”. Phillipe Sands QC, professor of law at University College London, however, told the BBC’s Today program that Cameron’s line of argument represented a “new direction” for the United Kingdom, which had previously treated cases like this as matters for criminal rather than global law. http://www.ifreepress.com/cardiff-jihadist-jones-informed-of-syria-drone-strike/ ---------------------- ꕤ ---------------------- COMMENT News that caught my eye. Assange Transnational Security Elite, Carving Up the World Using Your Tax Money London  OCT8 Antiwar Mass Assembly (2011) Link  |  here ꕤ

Ukraine - Right-Wing Extremist US Coup Pawns Throw A Handgrenade & Corporate Press Blames Putin - Robert Parry Article

SOURCE http://www.globalresearch.ca/maidan-2-0-ukraine-rightists-kill-police-putin-blamed/5473431 Maidan 2.0: Ukraine Rightists Kill Police; Putin Blamed By Robert Parry Global Research, September 02, 2015 Consortium News 1 September 2015 Region: Russia and FSU Theme: Intelligence, Media Disinformation, US NATO War Agenda In-depth Report: UKRAINE REPORT As I read the latest example of The New York Times’ propagandistic coverage of the Ukraine crisis on Tuesday, it struck me that if these same reporters and editors were around in 1953, they would have cheered the coup against Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh as a popular “revolution” putting the beloved and benevolent Shah back on the Peacock Throne. Similarly in 1954, these credulous journalists would have written about another people’s “revolution” in Guatemala removing President Jacobo Arbenz and restoring law and order behind well-regarded military commanders. The Times would have airily dismissed any suggestions of U.S. manipulation of events. And, for decades, that was how the Central Intelligence Agency wanted American journalists to write those stories – and the current crop of Times’ journalists would have fallen neatly into line. Of course, we know historically that the CIA organized and financed the disorders in Tehran that preceded Mossadegh’s removal and pulled together the rebel force that drove Arbenz from office. And, the evidence is even clearer that U.S. government operatives, particularly Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, helped orchestrate the 2014 coup that overthrew Ukraine’s elected President Viktor Yanukovych. Indeed, journalists knew more about the coup-plotting in Ukraine in real-time than we did about the coups in Iran and Guatemala six decades ago. In the Ukraine case, there was even an intercepted phone call just weeks before the Feb. 22, 2014 coup revealing Nuland handpicking the new Ukrainian leaders – “Yats is the guy,” she said referring to Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who would become the post-coup prime minister – as Pyatt pondered how “to midwife this thing” and Nuland dismissed the European Union’s less aggressive approach with the pithy remark, “F**k the EU!” Several months earlier, on Sept. 26, 2013, Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy (a U.S. government-funded operation that was financing scores of Ukrainian activists, journalists and business leaders), stated in a Washington Post op-ed that Ukraine was “the biggest prize” and would serve as a steppingstone toward eventually destabilizing Russia and removing Russian President Vladimir Putin. After Gershman’s op-ed pronouncement, Nuland and Sen. John McCain personally cheered on anti-government protesters in Kiev’s Maidan square. Nuland literally passed out cookies, and McCain, standing on stage with right-wing extremists from the Svoboda Party, told the crowd that the United States was with them in their challenge to the Ukrainian government. Meanwhile, Pyatt advised the coup-makers from the U.S. Embassy. The U.S. interference was so blatant that George Friedman, founder of the global intelligence firm Stratfor, called Yanukovych’s ouster “the most blatant coup in history.” Blatant to anyone, that is, who wasn’t part of the U.S. government’s propaganda team, which included the foreign desk of The New York Times and virtually every mainstream U.S. media outlet. Following the script of the State Department’s propagandists, the Times and the MSM saw only a glorious people’s “revolution.” Resistance to the Coup However, ethnic Russians from Crimea and eastern Ukraine, the key bases of support for Yanukovych, resisted the new order in Kiev. The people of Crimea organized a referendum in which 96 percent of the voters favored seceding from Ukraine and rejoining Russia, ties that went back to the Eighteenth Century. When Putin and Russia agreed to accept Crimea, the Times and the MSM announced a “Russian invasion,” although in this case the Russian troops were already stationed in Crimea under the Sebastopol port agreement. Ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine also rose up demanding independence or at least autonomy from the hostile regime in Kiev. The new government responded by labeling the dissidents “terrorists” and mounting an “Anti-Terrorist Operation,” which killed thousands and was spearheaded by neo-Nazi and Islamist militias. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine Merges Nazis and Islamists.”] Although the Times at times would acknowledge the key role played by the neo-Nazis and other ultra-nationalists, that troublesome information – along with the Nuland-Pyatt phone call and other evidence of the coup – would disappear into the Memory Hole when the Times was summarizing the Ukraine narrative or was decrying anyone who dared use the word “coup.” As far as the Times was concerned, what has happened since February 2014 was simply a glorious “revolution” with “pro-democracy” Ukrainian idealists on one side and propaganda-deluded ethnic Russian automatons on the other, depersonalized and ready for the killing. And behind all the bloodshed was the evil Putin. The Times reprised its propagandistic narrative on Tuesday in an article by Andrew E. Kramer, who tried to put the best face possible on a violent protest by neo-Nazis and other right-wing nationalists against a proposed constitutional change that would grant more autonomy to eastern Ukraine as part of the Minsk II peace agreement reached last February between German, French, Ukrainian and Russian leaders. Authorities identified a member of Sych, the militant arm of the right-wing Svoboda Party (John McCain’s old friends), as the person who threw a grenade that killed three police officers, but the Times made clear that the real villain was Vladimir Putin. As Kramer wrote: “The [autonomy] measure is fiercely opposed by Ukrainian nationalists and many others, who loathe any concession to Mr. Putin and see him as the driving force behind a civil war that has claimed more than 6,500 lives. President Petro O. Poroshenko had conceded the constitutional change, which is included in the text of the Minsk agreement, with a metaphorical gun to his head: thousands of Ukrainian soldiers surrounded by Russian-backed rebels near the Ukrainian railroad town of Debaltseve. “Supporters of the change say granting special status to the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk would co-opt the rebels’ major selling point, blunting the drive for separatism. Yet the war has angered Ukrainians to such an extent, opinion polls show, that members of Parliament are struggling to win support from voters for any concession.” While the Times’ narrative paints Putin as the instigator of all the trouble in Ukraine, it also portrays him as a villain who is on the run because his “aggression” led to Western sanctions, which along with lower oil prices, are collapsing the Russian economy. Kramer wrote: “Hopes for a peaceful settlement of the Ukraine crisis have been rising lately in Europe as oil prices have sunk, increasing financial pressure on Mr. Putin. With the Russian economy reeling, the thinking goes, he should be more willing to compromise on eastern Ukraine, the source of damaging Western economic sanctions. But that thinking was not shared by many in Ukraine. … “As Parliament approved the concessions, protesters outside the building scuffled with police, and shouted, ‘Shame! Shame!’ The demonstrators grew more agitated. Some tore helmets from the riot police and threw them on the paving stones. ‘They are trading in our blood and our corpses,’ said a veteran of the war in the east, Volodymyr Natuta, referring to members of Parliament who supported the measure. ‘They sold out Ukraine.’… “It [the right-wing killing of the first police officer on Monday] was the first death in politicized street violence in the capital since the 2014 revolution … Officially, the Russian government denies having any hand in propping up the two enclaves in eastern Ukraine. But Ukrainians — not to speak of virtually every Western government and NATO — universally reject that, holding Moscow responsible for all the carnage in the east.” So, having brushed aside the evidence of a U.S.-backed coup and ignoring the role of right-wing Ukrainian nationalists in both overthrowing an elected leader and launching attacks against ethnic Russians, the New York Times has settled on the only permissible view of the crisis: that it is all Vladimir Putin’s fault. Perhaps history will know better. Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here. SOURCE http://www.globalresearch.ca/maidan-2-0-ukraine-rightists-kill-police-putin-blamed/5473431 ---------------------- ꕤ ---------------------- COMMENT The corporate press is worthless and politicians are disgusting creatures. I'm beginning to think that Western governments are criminal organisations, like the mafia or something.  They're criminal gangs. Maybe someone should refuse them insurance.  lol ꕤ

Assange - The Guardian - Forthcoming Opinion Piece - by US Guardian blogger and polemicist Jessica Valenti

Julian Assange Re:  The Guardian Forthcoming Opinion Piece by US Guardian blogger  & polemicist Jessica Valenti Earlier post regarding the above  |  here ---------------------- ꕤ ---------------------- Check this out ꕤ COPYRIGHT DISCLAIMER Copyright Disclaimer under section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education and research. source | here ---------------------- ꕤ ---------------------- Hello? Jessica Valenti was what, de facto, amounts to an early PR supporter of one of the alleged accusers (I say, 'alleged', because both women have publicly denied (& therefore discounted) Sweden police allegations - here). Check out the date of Valenti's post (above).  Dated 17th December 2010.  That's a mere 10 days following Assange's mass media covered, theatrical, state managed, & state exploited arrest in London. Bet the dust hadn't even settled. So much for The Guardian's proposed 'opinion' piece ... and their denial of right of reply to journalist, Julian Assange. ---------------------- ꕤ ---------------------- Please Support Julian Assange Under Siege Ecuador embassy London (3 Years) Detained 5 Years No Charge FAQ & Support https://justice4assange.com/ ꕤ

CANADA - Secret Saudi Arabia Arms Deal

SOURCE http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/harper-assured-details-of-saudi-arms-deal-would-stay-under-wraps/article26105853/ Harper assured Saudi Arabia details of arms deal would stay under wraps STEVEN CHASE OTTAWA — The Globe and Mail Published Wednesday, Aug. 26, 2015 3:00AM EDT Last updated Wednesday, Aug. 26, 2015 6:26AM EDT Ottawa is contractually obliged to keep secret the details of a controversial $15-billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia – a transaction that Stephen Harper personally assured the country’s monarch will be guaranteed by the Canadian government, documents say. Foreign Affairs e-mails obtained by The Globe and Mail under access-to-information law indicate the Saudis have made excess publicity about the sale of armoured fighting vehicles a deal-breaker. Officials were scrambling behind the scenes in January, after media coverage of the arms deal, to determine the consequences of publicly releasing the terms of the Saudi contract. Aliya Mawani, a Canadian diplomat based in Riyadh, the capital, told Foreign Affairs colleagues on Jan. 21 that “we [the government] would be breaking the terms of the contract” with Saudi Arabia if details were made public. “The contract is under a Canadian government guarantee in terms of fulfilment,” Ms. Mawani wrote in a Jan. 21 exchange with colleagues on why Ottawa couldn’t make the terms public. “This was confirmed in writing by our Prime Minister in his letters to the King,” she said, speaking of Mr. Harper and the late Saudi King Abdullah. A cloak of secrecy surrounds this agreement, first announced in 2014, with Ottawa refusing to divulge any substantial information on the vehicles Canada is selling to the Saudi regime – or how it justifies the sale to a nation known for human-rights abuses. A federal agency responsible for sales to foreign military, Canadian Commercial Corporation, is actually the “prime contractor” for the transaction even though it is General Dynamics Land Systems Canada in London that manufacturers the vehicles. Records obtained by The Globe offer a great deal of insight into Ottawa’s role in brokering the transaction, which supports more than 3,000 jobs in Canada. In another government e-mail exchange in January of 2015, Brigette Walenius, deputy director with Foreign Affairs' Middle East-Maghreb Commercial Unit, cited General Dynamics officials who spoke of a “confidentiality clause in their contract with the Saudis” and how Riyadh “could terminate [the] contract if too much info is released.” Nonetheless, senior Canadian officials were delighted at the deal behind the scenes, e-mails show. Mr. MacDonald, Canada’s envoy in Riyadh, gave Ottawa early notice that the deal was coming together as far back as 2012. In an October, 2012, e-mail with the subject line “GDLS lands the Big One,” Mr. MacDonald informed Foreign Affairs staffers, referring to General Dynamic Land Systems. The Canadian ambassador ends this e-mail with a jubilant expression “Gotta LOV the LAV!” but not before sketching out some bare-bones details. He wrote that General Dynamics “have been chasing” the contract since 2009 and it’s a boon for the plant in London, Ont., because the company’s work on LAVs for Canada’s mission in Afghanistan was wrapping up as the Canadian combat mission ended in 2011. These new orders will “replace the decline from Canada’s Afghanistan withdrawal,” Mr. MacDonald said in his e-mail. The ambassador wrote that the LAVs “are going to be ‘fully loaded,’” that they would be the “most advanced ever made” and that delivery would start 38 months after the contract was signed and last another 108 months, or nine years. A separate January 21, 2015, e-mail from an official in Foreign Affairs’s export-control division said documentation received from General Dynamics to date suggests the vehicles could possibly include turreted LAVs “equipped with automatic firearms.” The Canadian government is nevertheless taking care to play down the Saudi connection. In one case, Foreign Affairs appeared to have struck references to Saudi Arabia from speaking notes prepared for a cabinet minister’s media event at the request of the Canadian Commercial Corporation (CCC), which is handling the LAV deal. An official from the government agency previewed speaking notes for Minister of State Lynne Yelich before a January 9 media event to celebrate a Saskatchewan-based company’s role as a sub-contractor in the LAV sale. “Thanks for letting me know what the speaking notes are,” Lina Seto, then a CCC official, wrote Foreign Affairs. She asked for “the removal of one of the mentions of the buyer country,” adding this was “important to the supplier,” meaning General Dynamics. “We are sensitive to the Saudi Arabia references, due to confidentiality,” Ms. Seto explained in an e-mail to Foreign Affairs on January 7, 2015. A final version of these speaking notes obtained by The Globe under access-to-information law contains no reference to Saudi Arabia as the buyer. Several years ago, the Conservative government in Ottawa refocused international relations to make “economic diplomacy” in service of private industry the centrepiece of Canadian foreign policy. SOURCE http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/harper-assured-details-of-saudi-arms-deal-would-stay-under-wraps/article26105853/ ---------------------- ꕤ ---------------------- COMMENT Canada has dispensed with democracy, transparency, and accountability, in favour of "economic diplomacy" IN THE SERVICE OF PRIVATE INDUSTRY. Wow. This is huge. Canada is a corporate dictatorship. This article illustrates why the press generally, why whistleblowers, and why whilstleblower publishers/journalists like WikiLeaks, are so important to keeping government open, accountable, representative and therefore closer to democratic than government would otherwise be, were those in government permitted to run their own show, without question. ꕤ

Foreign Updates - Middle East, Asia, Random

Random #Diplomatic US press attaché Johann Schmonsees has denied reports embassy in Riyadh shut down over security concern http://www.arabianbusiness.com/us-saudi-embassy-denies-security-shutdown-603700.html Iran protests - UK embassy reopening - counter-revolutionary both to continue operating by charges d'affaires Iran critics say: UK embassy has record support for spying ops, organisation of street unrests & assassination of scientists http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/199789 New Chapter Tehran-London Ties: Iran’s Envoy all diplomatic activities to be gradually re-established http://www.tasnimnews.com/english/Home/Single/838016 #Lebanon Kuwaiti embassy issues Lebanon travel warning / Daily Star #Thailand #presse Hong Kong photojournalist detained at Bangkok airport for carrying bulletproof vest in luggage one of the highest gun homicide rates in Asia / on par with USA / pop 67 million 3.48 murders per 100,000 http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/hong-kong-photojournalist-detained-at-bangkok-airport-for-carrying-bulletproof-vest-in #Vietnam #Diplomatic #Spain NGO Pazy Desarrollo in co-operation with Spanish Embassy run gender equality project http://vietnamnews.vn/society/274879/project-promotes-gender-equality.html Michael Lynn - #Ireland fled Ireland in 2007 with debts of €80m extradition #Brasil #Brazil #LatAm http://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/michael-lynn-should-be-back-by-year-end-to-face-charges-lawyer-1.2326185 #Turkey Albayrak Group to operate Mogadishu Interl Port / re-opened in 2006 by Islamic Courts Union, who control South Somali / dailysabah USA Spirit Lake police chief TAKES job as a bomb-sniffing dog handler US embassy in #Iraq or #Afghanistan http://www.kboi2.com/news/local/Spirit-Lake-police-chief-steps-down-to-take-US-embassy-job-322627872.html #Afghanistan Kabul vehicle bombing 10 dead 60 injured Taliban fighting to overthrow foreign-backed govt http://www.dispatchtimes.com/at-least-10-dead-in-kabul-vehicle-bombing/59556/ #MiddleEast US Embassy Warns Against Travel to Upper Galilee & Golan Heights Rockets launched from #Syria territory #Israel: points finger at: "Iran-backed Islamic Jihad from territory under the control of the Assad regime" http://forward.com/news/breaking-news/319634/us-embassy-warns-citizens-against-travel-to-upper-galilee-and-golan-heights/ #Pakistan Removes 5,000 names from Exit Control List (ECL) Passports Directorate Blacklist contained 52,000 names http://tribune.com.pk/story/943345/nisar-announces-removal-of-5000-names-from-ecl-in-major-overhaul/ #Pakistan Intelligence agencies rescue: Chinese tourist kidnapped 2014 in an area close to insurgency-prone regions. Kidnapped China tourist rescue: faction of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan claimed responsibility http://tribune.com.pk/story/943345/nisar-announces-removal-of-5000-names-from-ecl-in-major-overhaul/ #Australia #Syria US request to extend campaign Julie Bishop says Australia is seeking legal advice on Syria strikes USA has asked for Aussie support manned strikes, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, air refuelling etc http://forexreportdaily.com/2015/08/24/7334-julie-bishop-says-australia-is-seeking-legal-advice-on-syria-strikes/ #Nigeria Zone 6 Police took delivery of #surveillance helicopter in Calabar / combat of militancy & kidnap http://nationalaccordnewspaper.com/2015/08/police-receives-surveillance-helicopter-to-boost-fight-against-militancy-in-cross-river/ ---------------------- ꕤ  ---------------------- COMMENT Names being removed from a travel blacklist in Pakistan is rather intriguing.  Don't really understand why they've got a blacklist.  Maybe this is normal?  A bad guy travel blacklist? Action hotting up Syria / Israel border, by look of things? Turkey might be a player in Somalia. Islamic Union control in south.   That's a look-up job; don't know what this is. Photojournalist arrested Thailand sounds interesting, but it's probably routine. Thailand no longer sounds safe.  Well, it never did to me; but I'm weird like that.  ;) Pakistan definitely doesn't sounds safe.  Thailand a better bet.  lol This just random stuff that caught my attention ... nothing exciting. ꕤ

FREE ASSANGE | 10 Reasons Assange Held 5 Years No Charge, London

TEN REASONS ASSANGE DETAINED 5 YEARS, NO CHARGE LONDON HERE Assange has been granted political asylum and is under siege in the Ecuador embassy because WikiLeaks have exposed US and allied war crimes.  The authorities who have deprived Assange of liberty for almost 5 years without charge on flimsy Sweden police allegations of 'sexual misconduct,' are themselves stained by blood of war crimes which were exposed by WikiLeaks. As evidenced by: a litany of atrocities and illegal abuses (exposed by WikiLeaks and others); and the subsequent, politically motivated, persecution of journalist, Julian Assange; the West is controlled by a coterie of corrupt, lying, increasingly totalitarian, corporate-serving, politician and intelligence representatives of unseen, modern-day 'kings' of what has become a single, corporate imperialist,  supranational state. Unseen and unelected, these usurping 'kings' of surrendered Western national democracies and their politician servants, have consistently shown contempt for democracy, democratic freedoms, civil liberties, transparency, accountability, justice, and both international and domestic law. Lip service is paid to 'freedom,' 'democracy' and 'values' by the politician puppets of the powerful, even while these same puppets sanction violation of principles upon which they claim to rely. These are the same principles that are routinely misused and violated in order to commission, and to conceal, crimes and attrocities committed all over the world. Detaining Assange for almost 5 years, based on flimsy Sweden police allegations has been engineered in order to extradite Julian Assange to the US, by authorities whose position of corrupt power was exposed and therefore challenged. War crimes, state criminality, CIA torture, mass surveillance, and many more violations have been exposed. As a ground-breaking whilstleblower publisher and journalist, Assange is facing US extradition and a life sentence, or the death penalty:  in a nominally democratic usurped American republic whose plutocrat-controlled and campaign-bought politicians rightfully have no mandate to silence journalism - nor jurisdiction over foreign journalism.    To that end, the US is making moves to redefine journalism as 'espionage' and 'terrorism.' Assange is under siege because his gaolers and the war criminals that WikiLeaks exposed are one and the same. Each day for almost 5 years, these guilty, colluding, partnered supranational coalition of powers have committed the injustice of detaining Julian Assange on politically and otherwise expedient, flimsy Sweden police allegations, while deceiving the public by claiming to uphold 'justice.' In reality, these authorities have no regard whatsoever for justice (see release of Pinochet (crimes against humanity) by Britain; Britian & other(s) sidestepping Tzipli Livni arrest warrant (see alleged war crimes, Israel), & more). Meanwhile, the corporate serving press that's supposed to be the pillar of this exalted 'democracy,' disseminates a diet of propaganda and smear to the uninformed public. M O C K E R Y Mouthpieces of a nation lulled into commission of: ⟴ War Crimes ⟴ ⟴ CIA Torture ⟴ ⟴ Massacres ⟴ DECLARE Julian Assange 'Terrorist' for revealing TRUTH And Call for Assassination of Assange MILLIONS OF POUNDS BRITAIN SPENDS to POLITICALLY PERSECUTE JOURNALIST JULIAN ASSANGE |   https://govwaste.co.uk/   |  Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zty2WxVnklI [ FREE ASSANGE - AUG 2015 - 'MANIFESTO' ] ꕤ

'Holed Up' Is Press-Speak for: Undemocratically Bailed Up

hole up 1. To hibernate in or as if in a hole. thefreedictionary 2. Informal To take refuge in or as if in a hideout. thefreedictionary

Lazy (or indifferent) writers are forever repeating the misleading and offensive phrase, 'holed up,' in articles regarding Julian Assange. Assange is an award-winning Australian journalist, who has published material that has exposed US and allied war crimes. Assange is the subject of an unprecedented investigation conducted by a number of US justice and security agencies. Assange is also the subject of a US Grand Jury secret probe, which remains sealed. The US has undoubtedly sought extradition of Assange, given that Britain refuses to release relevant documents (sought pursuant to Freedom of Information request), on the stated grounds that it would impact on Britain's  diplomatic relations with other states. Assange is clearly the subject of political persecution and has been granted political asylum by Ecuador, in accordance with international law. Every time this inaccurate, belittling, and insulting phrase is repeated by the press, Assange is cast as fugitive/gangster 'hiding out.' The press do both Assange and the public a disservice, by writing mindlessly and failing to make it clear to the public Julian Assange is the target of calculated political persecution. The undemocratic POLITICAL persecution of Julian Assange has been waged by legal manoeuvre, media propaganda, and by British government backed and authorised police siege that has cost MILLIONS of pounds. While imposing harsh austerity measures on pensioners, the disabled and the economically underprivileged, Britain rationalises this waste of public funds on what is clearly a  politically motivated siege of Julian Assange, on the basis of reliance upon nothing but flimsy and suspect Sweden police allegations that were tossed out by a senior prosecutor in Stockholm five years ago, before subsequently being revived in Sweden:  for political expediency. Corruption & Hypocrisy The British government is a party to war crimes exposed by Assange; the British government has released Chile dictator, Pinochet, wanted for crimes against humanity; and the British government shelters Israel's Tzipi Livni from a war crimes arrest warrant. British hypocrite authorities cast slurs on Ecuador and Assange in the guise of a demand for 'justice,' when these same hypocrites have a long history of contempt for law and justice (including commission of war crimes and sheltering alleged war criminals from arrest), and the corporate media lets corrupt, undemocratic, authorities get away with shameless lies in support of this travesty of justice. The detractors who attack Assange and WikiLeaks (and attack supporters by dismissively labelling supporters 'cultists'), do so cravenly - while hiding behind extraneous twin issues of 'female victimhood' and feminism.  These detractors are either misguided fools or wilfully ignorant -  hidden agenda serving - trolls, seeking to manipulate public perception and discourse, in favour of a corrupt government agenda that has proven contemptuous of human life, justice, and the law. Writers who resort to using the trite 'holed up' are generally the same writers that follow up by regurgitating the full-of-holes government narrative, without challenge. The negative spin cycle is then repeated like this on almost a daily basis, that has spanned years now. The authorities that have detained Julian Assange for close to 5 years for political reasons and without charge, must be delighted that the press permits them to commit this offence against a truth-telling journalist ... and that this press even obliges by making acts of political persecution easier to carry out. Please support journalist Julian Assange Under Siege Ecuador embassy, London (3 Years) Detained 5 Years No Charge FAQ & Support https://justice4assange.com/ ꕤ

'The dangerous cult of The Guardian' | Jonathan Cooke

source | @rixstepnews ꕤ SOURCE http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2011-09-28/the-dangerous-cult-of-the-guardian/  [Highlighted / stressed text below - not in original] The dangerous cult of the Guardian 28 September 2011 Counterpunch – 28 September 2011 There could be no better proof of the revolution – care of the internet – occurring in the accessibility of information and informed commentary than the reaction of our mainstream, corporate media. For the first time, Western publics – or at least those who can afford a computer – have a way to bypass the gatekeepers of our democracies. Data our leaders once kept tightly under wraps can now be easily searched for, as can the analyses of those not paid to turn a blind eye to the constant and compelling evidence of Western hypocrisy. Wikileaks, in particular, has rapidly eroded the traditional hierarchical systems of information dissemination. The media – at least the supposedly leftwing component of it – should be cheering on this revolution, if not directly enabling it. And yet, mostly they are trying to co-opt, tame or subvert it. Indeed, progressive broadcasters and writers increasingly use their platforms in the mainstream to discredit and ridicule the harbingers of the new age. A good case study is the Guardian, considered the most leftwing newspaper in Britain and rapidly acquiring cult status in the United States, where many readers tend to assume they are getting access through its pages to unvarnished truth and the full range of critical thinking on the left. Certainly, the Guardian includes some fine reporting and occasionally insightful commentary. Possibly because it is farther from the heart of empire, it is able to provide a partial antidote to the craven coverage of the corporate-owned media in the US. Nonetheless, it would be unwise to believe that the Guardian is therefore a free market in progressive or dissident ideas on the left. In fact, quite the contrary: the paper strictly polices what can be said and who can say it in its pages, for cynical reasons we shall come to. Until recently, it was quite possible for readers to be blissfully unaware that there were interesting or provocative writers and thinkers who were never mentioned in the Guardian. And, before papers had online versions, the Guardian could always blame space constraints as grounds for not including a wider range of voices. That, of course, changed with the rise of the internet. Early on, the Guardian saw the potential, as well as the threat, posed by this revolution. It responded by creating a seemingly free-for-all blog called Comment is Free to harness much of the raw energy unleashed by the internet. It recruited an army of mostly unpaid writers, activists and propagandists on both sides of the Atlantic to help brand itself as the epitome of democratic and pluralistic media. From the start, however, Comment is Free was never quite as free – except in terms of the financial cost to the Guardian – as it appeared. Significant writers on the left, particularly those who were considered “beyond the pale” in the old media landscape, were denied access to this new “democratic” platform. Others, myself included, quickly found there were severe and seemingly inexplicable limits on what could be said on CiF (unrelated to issues of taste or libel). None of this should matter. After all, there are many more places than CiF to publish and gain an audience. All over the web dissident writers are offering alternative analyses of current events, and drawing attention to the significance of information often ignored or sidelined by the corporate media. Rather than relish this competition, or resign itself to the emergence of real media pluralism, however, the Guardian reverted to type. It again became the left’s thought police. This time, however, it could not ensure that the “challenging left” would simply go unheard. The internet rules out the option of silencing by exclusion. So instead, it appears, it is using its pages to smear those writers who, through their own provocative ideas and analyses, suggest the Guardian’s tameness. The Guardian’s discrediting of the “left” – the left being a concept never defined by the paper’s writers – is far from taking place in a fair battle of ideas. Not least the Guardian is backed by the huge resources of its corporate owners. When it attacks dissident writers, they can rarely, if ever, find a platform of equal prominence to defend themselves. And the Guardian has proved itself more than reluctant to allow a proper right of reply in its pages to those it maligns. But also, and most noticeably, it almost never engages with these dissident writers’ ideas. In popular terminology, it prefers to play the man, not the ball. Instead it creates labels, from the merely disparaging to the clearly defamatory, that push these writers and thinkers into the territory of the unconscionable. A typical example of the Guardian’s new strategy was on show this week in an article in the print edition’s comment pages – also available online and a far more prestigious platform than CiF – in which the paper commissioned a socialist writer, Andy Newman, to argue that the Israeli Jewish musician Gilad Atzmon was part of an anti-semitic trend discernible on the left. Jonathan Freedland, the paper’s star columnist and resident obsessive on anti-semitism, tweeted to his followers that the article was “important” because it was “urging the left to confront antisemitism in its ranks”. I have no idea whether Atzmon has expressed anti-semitic views – and I am none the wiser after reading Newman’s piece. As is now typical in this new kind of Guardian character assassination, the article makes no effort to prove that Atzmon is anti-semitic or to show that there is any topical or pressing reason to bring up his presumed character flaw. (In passing, the article made a similar accusation of anti-semitism against Alison Weir of If Americans Knew, and against the Counterpunch website for publishing an article on Israel’s role in organ-trafficking by her.) Atzmon has just published a book on Jewish identity, The Wandering Who?, that has garnered praise from respected figures such as Richard Falk, an emeritus law professor at Princeton, and John Mearsheimer, a distinguished politics professor at Chicago University. But Newman did not critique the book, nor did he quote from it. In fact, he showed no indication that he had read the book or knew anything about its contents. Instead Newman began his piece, after praising Atzmon’s musicianship, with an assumptive reference to his “antisemitic writings”. There followed a few old quotes from Atzmon, long enough to be intriguing but too short and out of context to prove his anti-semitism – except presumably to the Guardian’s thought police and its most deferential readers. The question left in any reasonable person’s mind is why dedicate limited commentary space in the paper to Atzmon? There was no suggestion of a newsworthy angle. And there was no case made to prove that Atzmon is actually anti-semitic. It was simply assumed as a fact. Atzmon, even by his own reckoning, is a maverick figure who has a tendency to infuriate just about everyone with his provocative, and often ambiguous, pronouncements. But why single him out and then suggest that he represents a discernible and depraved trend among the left? Nonetheless, the Guardian was happy to offer its imprimatur to Newman’s defamation of Atzmon, who was described as a conspiracy theorist “dripping with contempt for Jews”, despite an absence of substantiating evidence. Truly worthy of Pravda in its heyday. The Atzmon article appeared on the same day the Guardian carried out a similar hatchet job, this time on Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks. The paper published a book review of Assange’s “unauthorised autobiography” by the Guardian’s investigations editor, David Leigh. That Leigh could be considered a reasonable choice for a review of the book – which he shamelessly pilloried – demonstrates quite how little the Guardian is prepared to abide by elementary principles of ethical journalism. Leigh has his own book on the Guardian’s involvement with Wikileaks and Assange currently battling it out for sales in the bookshops. He is hardly a disinterested party. But also, and more importantly, Leigh is clearly not dispassionate about Assange, any more than the Guardian is. The paper has been waging an all-but-declared war against Wikileaks since the two organizations fell out over their collaboration on publishing Wikileak’s trove of 250,000 classified US embassy cables. The feud, if the paper’s talkbacks are to be believed, has finally begun to test the patience of even some of the paper’s most loyal readers. The low point in Leigh’s role in this saga is divulging in his own book a complex password Assange had created to protect a digital file containing the original and unedited embassy cables. Each was being carefully redacted before publication by several newspapers, including the Guardian. This act of – in the most generous interpretation of Leigh’s behavior – gross stupidity provided the key for every security agency in the world to open the file. Leigh has accused Wikileaks of negligence in allowing a digital copy of the file to be available. Whether true, his own role in the affair is far more inexcusable. Even given his apparent ignorance of the digital world, Leigh is a veteran investigative reporter who must have known that revealing the password was foolhardy in the extreme. Not least, it clearly demonstrated how Assange formulates his passwords, and would provide important clues for hackers trying to open other protected Wikileaks documents. His and the Guardian’s recklessness in disclosing the password was compounded by their negligent decision to contact neither Assange nor Wikileaks before publication of Leigh’s book to check whether the password was still in use. After this shabby episode, one of many from the Guardian in relation to Assange, it might have been assumed that Leigh was considered an inappropriate person to comment in the Guardian on matters related to Wikileaks. Not so. Instead the paper has been promulgating Leigh’s self-interested version of the story and regularly impugning Assange’s character. In a recent editorial, the paper lambasted the Wikileaks founder as an “information absolutist” who was “flawed, volatile and erratic”, arguing that he had chosen to endanger informants named in the US cables by releasing the unredacted cache. However, the paper made no mention either of Leigh’s role in revealing the password or of Wikileaks’ point that, following Leigh’s incompetence, every security agency and hacker in the world had access to the file’s contents. Better, Wikileaks believed, to create a level playing field and allow everyone access to the cables, thereby letting informants know whether they had been named and were in danger. Leigh’s abuse of his position is just one element in a dirty campaign by the Guardian to discredit Assange and, by extension, the Wikileaks project. Some of this clearly reflects a clash of personalities and egos, but it also looks suspiciously like the feud derives from a more profound ideological struggle between the Guardian and Wikilieaks about how information should be controlled a generation hence. The implicit philosophy of Wikileaks is to promote an ever-greater opening up and equalisation of access to information, while the Guardian, following its commercial imperatives, wants to ensure the gatekeepers maintain their control. At least Assange has the prominent Wikileaks website to make sure his own positions and reasons are hard to overlook. Other targets of the Guardian are less fortunate. George Monbiot, widely considered to be the Guardian’s most progressive columnist, has used his slot to attack a disparate group on the “left” who also happen to be harsh critics of the Guardian. In a column in June he accused Ed Herman, a leading US professor of finance and a collaborator on media criticism with Noam Chomsky, and writer David Peterson of being “genocide deniers” over their research into events in Rwanda and Bosnia. The evidence was supposedly to be found in their joint book The Politics of Genocide, published last year, and in an online volume, The Srebrenica Massacre, edited by Herman. Implying that genocide denial was now a serious problem on the left, Monbiot also laid into journalist John Pilger for endorsing the book and a website called Media Lens that dedicates itself to exposing the failings of the corporate media, including the work of the Guardian and Monbiot. Media Lens’ crime was to have argued that Herman and Peterson should be allowed to make their case about Rwanda and Bosnia, rather than be silenced as Monbiot appeared to prefer. Monbiot also ensnared Chomsky in his criticism, castigating him for writing a foreword to one of the books. Chomsky, it should be remembered, is co-author (with Herman) of Manufacturing Consent, a seminal book arguing that it is the role of the corporate media, including liberal media like the Guardian, to distort their readers’ understanding of world events to advance the interests of Western elites. In Chomsky’s view, even journalists like Monbiot are selected by the media for their ability to manufacture public consent for the maintenance of a system of Western political and economic dominance. Possibly as a result of these ideas, Chomsky is a bete noire of the Guardian and its Sunday sister publication, the Observer. He was famously vilified in 2005 by an up-and-coming Guardian feature writer, Emma Brockes – again on the issue of Srebrenica. Brockes’ report so wilfully mischaracterised Chomsky’s views (with quotes she could not substantiate after she apparently taped over her recording of the interview) that the Guardian was forced into a very reluctant “partial apology” under pressure from its readers’ editor. Over Chomsky’s opposition, the article was also erased from its archives. Such scurrilous journalism should have ended a young journalist’s career at the Guardian. But ridiculing Chomsky is standard fare at the paper, and Brockes’ career as celebrity interviewer flourished, both at the Guardian and the New York Times. Nick Cohen, another star columnist, this time at the Observer, found time to mention Chomsky recently, dismissing him and other prominent critical thinkers such as Tariq Ali, the late Harold Pinter, Arundhati Roy and Diana Johnstone as “west-hating”. He blamed liberals and the left for their “Chomskyan self-delusion”, and suggested many were “apologists for atrocities”. Monbiot’s article followed in the same vein. He appeared to have a minimal grasp of the details of Herman and Peterson’s books. Much of his argument that Herman is a “genocide belittler” depends on doubts raised by a variety of experts in the Srebrenica book over the figure of 8,000 reported executions of Bosnian Muslims by Serb forces at Srebrenica. The authors suggest the number is not supported by evidence and might in fact be as low as 800. Whether or not the case made by Herman and his collaborators is convincing was beside the point in Monbiot’s article. He was not interested in exploring their arguments but in creating an intellectual no-go zone from which critical thinkers and researchers were barred – a sacred genocide. And to achieve this end, it was necessary to smear the two writers as genocide deniers and suggest that anyone else on the left who ventured on to the same territory would be similarly stigmatised. Monbiot treatment of Herman and Peterson’s work was so slipshod and cavalier it is hard to believe that he was the one analysing their books. To take just one example, Monbiot somehow appears to be unable to appreciate the careful distinction Herman’s book makes between an “execution” and a “death”, a vital differentiation in evaluating the Srebrenica massacre. In the book, experts question whether all or most of the 8,000 Bosnian Muslims disinterred from graves at Srebrenica were victims of a genocidal plan by the Serbs, or casualties of bitter fighting between the two sides, or even some of them victims of a false-flag operation. As the book points out, a post-mortem can do many things but it cannot discern the identities or intentions of those who did the killing in Srebrenica. The authors do not doubt that a massacre, or massacres, took place at Srebrenica. However, they believe we should not accept on trust that this was a genocide (a term defined very specifically in international law), or refuse to consider that the numbers may have been inflated to fit a political agenda. This is not an idle or contrarian argument. As they make clear in their books, piecing together what really happened in Rwanda and Bosnia is vital if we are not to be duped by Western leaders into yet more humanitarian interventions whose goals are far from those claimed. The fact that Monbiot discredited Herman and Peterson at a time when the Guardian’s reporting was largely cheering on the latest humanitarian intervention, in Libya, was all the more richly ironic. So why do the Guardian and its writers publish these propaganda articles parading as moral concern about the supposedly degenerate values of the “left”? And why, if the left is in such a debased state, can the Guardian’s stable of talented writers not take on their opponents’ ideas without resorting to strawman arguments, misdirection and smears. The writers, thinkers and activists targeted by the Guardian, though all of the left, represent starkly different trends and approaches – and some of them would doubtless vehemently oppose the opinions of others on the list. But they all share a talent for testing the bounds of permissible thought in creative ways that challenge and undermine established truths and what I have termed elsewhere the “climate of assumptions” the Guardian has helped to create and sustain. It hardly matters whether all or some of these critical thinkers are right. The danger they pose to the Guardian is in arguing convincingly that the way the world is presented to us is not the way it really is. Their very defiance, faced with the weight of a manufactured consensus, threatens to empower us, the reader, to look outside the restrictive confines of media orthodoxy. The Guardian, like other mainstream media, is heavily invested – both financially and ideologically – in supporting the current global order. It was once able to exclude and now, in the internet age, must vilify those elements of the left whose ideas risk questioning a system of corporate power and control of which the Guardian is a key institution. The paper’s role, like that of its rightwing cousins, is to limit the imaginative horizons of readers. While there is just enough leftwing debate to make readers believe their paper is pluralistic, the kind of radical perspectives needed to question the very foundations on which the system of Western dominance rests is either unavailable or is ridiculed. Reading the Guardian, it is possible to believe that one of the biggest problems facing our societies – comparable to our compromised political elites, corrupt police authorities, and depraved financial system – is an array of mainly isolated dissidents and intellectuals on the left. Is Atzmon and his presumed anti-semitism more significant than AIPAC? Is Herman more of a danger than the military-industrial corporations killing millions of people around the globe? And is Assange more of a menace to the planet’s future than US President Barack Obama? Reading the Guardian, you might well think so. SOURCE http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2011-09-28/the-dangerous-cult-of-the-guardian/ ---------------------- ꕤ  ---------------------- Worthwhile keeping the above observations in mind when checking out The Guardian opinion pieces and articles regarding Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. On Forthcoming Opinion Piece 18 August 2015 23:00 BST https://justice4assange.com/On-forthcoming-opinion-piece.html 'Right of Reply' Denied ꕤ