Listen to a reading of this article:
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Julian Assange once said, “The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security.”
As someone whose life’s work before his imprisonment was combing through documents of an often classified nature, he’d have been in a prime position to know. He’d have seen time and time again how a nation’s citizenry are not under the slightest threat from the secret information in the documents that had been leaked to him from around the world, but that it could damage the reputation of a politician or a government or its military.
As the persecution of the WikiLeaks founder continues to trudge on with the UK government’s granting the Biden administration permission to appeal a declined extradition request, claiming that it can safely imprison Assange without subjecting him to the draconian aspects of America’s prison system which caused the initial dismissal, it’s good to keep in mind that this is being done entirely for the purpose of controlling public access to information that is inconvenient for the powerful.
Desperate to Get Assange, US Promises No SAMS & Prison Time in Australiahttps://t.co/E0Aq22rFUp pic.twitter.com/OgpgqyS7TR
— Consortium News (@Consortiumnews) July 8, 2021
The prosecution of Julian Assange under the Espionage Act is being touted by the US government as a matter of national security; you can’t simply allow journalists to publish classified information about the things its military forces are doing in the nations they occupy, because that could endanger American lives.
Leaving aside the fact that the Pentagon already admitted years ago that it could not find a single instance of lives being lost due to the publications for which Assange is currently being prosecuted, this case is not and has never been about national security. This case has always been about narrative control.
The US government is not afraid that unauthorized publication of government secrets will lead to Americans being killed, it’s afraid it will lead to their knowing the truth. The powerful understand that narrative control is everything, and that an entire globe-spanning empire depends on keeping the masses from having a lucid perception of what’s really going on in the world. There is an unfathomable amount of power riding on their ability to continue doing this.
Assange isn’t in Belmarsh Prison for doing something wrong, but for doing something right. For trying to give the public information which will help them form a truth-based worldview so that they can make intelligent informed decisions about where they want to collectively steer society together. Because the oligarchic empire depends on the ability to manipulate the way people think, act and vote to benefit the powerful, this was like handing someone who’s being groomed by a sexual predator a guidebook of all of the psychological tactics that are being used.
This good deed could not go unpunished.
Nothing WikiLeaks published endangered the American people, it endangered a globe-spanning empire’s ability to control our understanding of what’s happening in the world. This was a most egregious offense as far as our rulers are concerned, and it could not be allowed to stand.
So an example is being made. In less polite times Assange would have been tortured and drawn and quartered in the town square while the king looked on sipping from a goblet of mead. In the days of polite liberal democracy our rulers must remain hidden, and they must publicly torture dissidents to death in the name of national security concerns.
Beneath all the spin and excuses, this is all being done to show everyone what happens to you if you reveal embarrassing truths about the most powerful people on earth. If you compromise their political security. It’s telling the world, “If you ever try to interfere in our control over the dominant narratives, this is what we will do to you.”
And, whether we fully understand what’s really happening or not, that’s the message that is being ingested here. Journalists who find themselves in a position to publish such things going forward will find themselves thinking thoughts about what happened to Julian Assange.
BREAKING: Julian Assange's fiancée @StellaMoris1 gives powerful statement outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London. "This case is the most vicious attack on global press freedom in history." #AssangeCase #FreeAssange pic.twitter.com/U5tq5fIMcA
— Free Assange – #FreeAssange (@FreeAssangeNews) July 7, 2021
This is why it’s so important that they don’t win this case. We cannot allow ourselves to be cowed away from the truth in this way, or else we’re flying blind. We’re unable to obtain information which will help us steer society in a truth-based direction.
The Assange case receives so much attention not because of interest in one man’s fate, but because of interest in everyone’s fate. If humanity is ever to turn away from its self-destructive patterns and create a healthy world, it will necessarily need to do so guided by the light of truth and transparency. As long as the powerful are able to keep us confused and deluded using propaganda and government secrecy, such a world will never come into being.
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34 responses to “The Assange Case Isn’t About National Security, It’s About Narrative Control”
Will Australia’s Parliament debate Julian Assange?
Contact your MP and demand that Parliament allow a full debate on Julian Hill’s motion for Julian Assange. Twice, so far, the Parliamentary Selection Committee has refused even to allow Julian Hill as little as 10 minutes in which arguments both for and against his Private Member’s Motion (PMM) for Julian Assange can be put. This is one reason why almost nothing has been said about Julian Assange in Australia’s Parliament for years.
The Americans who they fear will be killed are themselves, the elite, when everyone knows the truth and won’t put up with them any more.
My money is in a credit union. I carry no bank loans. I do no business with Amazon or PayPal. I do have a Visa debit card with my credit union so I am not perfect and I am still connected to the modern world. If everyone did that, it would be a different world.
You said it eloquently, Caity. I have nothing to add. However, it order to share your columns, I must go to this, the comment page. There is no option to share directly from the article as it arrives in my inbox. I do comment frequently, but not always – only when I have either something to add, or a new and different perspective on all or part of an article.
So, if you are seeing this and are able, or so inclined, perhaps you could have the software tweaked, so that we can share from the landing page as well as the comment page.
Caitlin Johnstone quoted:
> Desperate to Get Assange, US Promises No SAMS & Prison Time in Australia. (Consortium News, July 7, 2021)
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The US has a previous record of breaking this and other kinds of promises:
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“The afternoon witness was an attorney, Lindsay Lewis, who represents Abu Hamza, who is held at ADX Florence. . . . She said that Hamza, who has both forearms amputated, had been kept in solitary confinement under SAMs in the ADX for almost ten years. His conditions were absolutely inappropriate to his condition. . . . His other medical conditions including severe diabetes, hypertension and depression were not adequately treated.
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“Lewis said that the conditions of Hamza’s incarceration directly breached undertakings made by the US government to the UK magistrates’ court and High Court when they made the extradition request. The US had stated his medical needs would be fully assessed, his medical treatment would be adequate, and he was unlikely to be sent to the ADX. None of these had happened. . . .
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“But the one thing which struck me most was Lewis’s description of the incident that was used to justify the continued imposition of SAMs on Hamza.
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“Hamza is allowed to communicate only with two named family members, one of whom is one of his sons. In a letter, Hamza had asked this son to tell his one-year-old grandchild that he loved him. Hamza was charged with an illegal message to a third party (the grandson). This had resulted in extension of the SAMs regime on Hamza, which still continues. In cross-examination, Dobbin was at pains to suggest this ‘I love you’ may have been a coded terrorist message.”
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Your Man in the Public Gallery: Assange Hearing Day 20 – Craig Murray
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/09/your-man-in-the-public-gallery-assange-hearing-day-20/
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“The next witness was Joel Sickler. . . . expert in prison conditions . . .
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“ADX Florence in Colorado . . . He had one client in there who was not subject to SAMs but was still effectively in solitary confinement for twenty years, despite a clean conduct record. . . .
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“At the ADX, Assange would be kept in the SSU known as the H block. With or without SAMs, contact with other prisoners would be completely barred. Contact with the outside world would be extraordinarily limited. Any contact permitted with family would be monitored by the FBI. One 15-minute phone call was allowed per month. Post conviction, contact with lawyers was very limited.
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“Fitzgerald asked how you could appeal against SAMs or other prison conditions. Sickler replied that appealing even over minor administrative matters virtually never succeeds. . . . With SAMs there was effectively no chance. Solitary confinement could be indefinite in ADX – there was no upper limit.”
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Your Man in the Public Gallery: Assange Hearing Day 19 – Craig Murray
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/09/your-man-in-the-public-gallery-assange-hearing-day-19/
I’m almost positive Assange is being kept for “the saviour role”. There’s a reason his whole life has been on the msm. The anagram of his name is Angel Jesus. Anagram of Stella Morris is Rastrillimos… meaning to rake out the weeds, in Spanish or something like that. All planned I’m sure as they love to play with words symbols and numbers.
If the Australian government had any intestinal fortitude it could save Julian Assange.
That won’t happen.
Since the ‘removal’ of Whitlam in 1975, successive Australian governments have been snivelling, bootlicking, arse sucking, sycophants to US and European corporate interests.
Our leaders are not leaders, they are dog shit on the pages of history.
Caitlin Johnstone wrote:
> Julian Assange once said, “The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security.”
> As someone whose life’s work before his imprisonment was combing through documents of an often classified nature, he’d have been in a prime position to know. He’d have seen time and time again how a nation’s citizenry are not under the slightest threat from the secret information in the documents that had been leaked to him from around the world, but that it could damage the reputation of a politician or a government or its military.
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That’s right:
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“The point is the burden of proof is on the government. They have to show that there’s a reason to keep something secret. Other than that it should be open. I’ve spent a lot of time working on declassified documents — and they do get declassified after decades — you look at the record of declassified documents, and they are mostly concerned with keeping what the government does secret from its own population. It’s mostly defense of the power system from its own population. Very little is authentic security.”
— Noam Chomsky
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The Secret of Noam: A Chomsky Interview ⋆ BYT // Brightest Young Things
https://brightestyoungthings.com/articles/the-secret-of-noam-a-chomsky-interview
ZIO/US have created – armed – financed and trained EVERY terrorist group that has ever existed !
NATO is just the Rothschilds military arm whose sole purpose is to control and plunder the worlds resources !!
Russia has said ENOUGH and now the problems begin with the dying US Empire in absolutely no position to launch a meaningful attack on anybody !
‘SOMEBODY’ is bombing ZIO/US/NATO assets ( including US embassies ) almost daily at this stage in the ME and the ZIO/US/NATO has absolutely NO response !
According to Syrian estimates – since Russia was invited into Syria in 2015 – well – 350 THOUSAND ISIS terrorists ( radicalised – armed and trained by the ZIO/US ) have been turned into fertiliser – THAT’S how big it was !
The lying MSM paraded them all over the news claiming that ISIS was an independent STATE !
Of course we ( in the know ) were called ‘conspiracy’ theorists for even suggesting that ISIS was funded – trained and armed by the ZIO/US !
I started my search for truth and reason after the events of 9/11 and dismissed ALL western media as propaganda !
For those awakening to the LIES now – I fear – It is much too late – the brainwashing is strong !
I haven’t watched TV or read a newspaper in a decade and a half – the LIES aren’t new to me !!
The people that have believed the absolute SH!T that is the ‘synchronised’ MSM
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It’s remarkable how accurate a litmus test Assange’s case is. Opposing his immediate release, or embroidering and postponing demands for his freedom by hemming and hawing about this or that he might have done, attested to by someone the speaker cannot quite recall under circumstances that are invariably murky, is something only hacks do.
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I have yet to speak with even one person with an admirable record of supporting press freedoms who doesn’t also believe Assange must go free today. Now.
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—-This also reminds me that I’m very late in calling back a long-time friend. I’ve increasingly been thinking of this friend as fitting Milton Mayer’s definition of a ‘good German,’ in this case someone who studiously ignores what the U.S. is doing in Yemen; who believes that sanctions currently killing tens of thousands each year in Venezuela and Iran are somehow worthwhile, are “necessary evils; who cannot bring himself to condemn Israel’s behavior in Gaza on the basis that it’s impossible, finally, to him, to untangle who did what to whom and when.
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The worst of it might be that this fellow is far better read than 90% of the U.S. population. He follows politics, he thinks. He believes Chris Cuomo to be an able and entertaining journalist and commentator.
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Blair Schirmer:
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Oh well. Just call him if really is a friend. Long-time friends are hard to come by.
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Tell him what you think and let him stew on it. Let him speak his mind. At least then, you would have tried talking with an old-time friend.
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Thanks for sharing some personal sentiment. I can relate to what you typed.
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Ken
It was always about the ” drug money “; nothing else matters!!
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When it comes to the American empire, Tacitus once again applies: “They have plundered the world, stripping naked the land in their hunger… They are driven by greed, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor…. They ravage, they slaughter, they seize by false pretenses, and all of this they hail as the construction of empire. And when in their wake nothing remains but a desert, they call that peace.”
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This great article can be read here:
A Saigon moment in the Hindu Kush By Pepe Escobar
https://thealtworld.com/pepe_escobar/a-saigon-moment-in-the-hindu-kush
All governments and rulers are corrupt. An idiosyncratic flaw exists within the Homo sapien genome guranteering “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Assange, daringly published data revealing the insidious wheeling-and-dealing within numerous governments–it’s a small world after all…..
Before Assange became a pariah to mainstream media news and other co-opted publications the Guardian in 2010 printed an article chronologizing Assange’s released cables entitled:
“WikiLeaks embassy cables: the key points at a glance”
“There are no fewer than 251,287 cables from more than 250 US embassies around the world, obtained by WikiLeaks. We present a day-by-day guide to the revelations from the US embassy cables both from the Guardian and its international media partners in the story. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/nov/29/wikileaks-embassy-cables-key-points
The cables reveal a rat’s nest of worldwide unscrupulous characters–an authentic Rogues Gallery.
As it turned out, a decade later Assange was betrayed by another swindler named Morena:
“The immediate context for the Ecuadorian government’s action is a raging corruption scandal implicating President Moreno and his family. The so-called INA Papers, an extensive set of documents, emails and other social media communications, have implicated Moreno in crimes ranging from official corruption to perjury and money laundering.
At the center of the scandal is a scheme in which the Chinese company Sinohydro, which built a hydroelectric dam in Ecuador, deposited $18 million in payoffs in an offshore company, which in turn transferred the money to a set of 10 shell companies that included INA Investments Corp, owned by Edwin Moreno, the president’s brother. The company’s name was taken from the common syllable in the names of the president’s three daughters, Irina, Cristina and Karina.”
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/04/12/ecua-a12.html
To sum it up, it would be unrealistically optimistic to expect an “assortment of dissolutes” to agree to release Assange from prison and to drop the US extradition, but you never know…….didn’t all your Liberal friends say: “vote for crony Joe he can be pushed to the dubious Left.”
Ya suppose the zionists are involved?
Sheldon Adelson is dead, what’s Biden’s excuse?
Good one.
To become an adult is to become fucked up. The adolescence crisis is the equivalent of the initiation rites in primitive societies and if you’re not killed by the red pill you have to swallow, you come out of that experience knowing that if you want to get anywhere in life, you won’t be able to think for yourself – which is where artists and philosophers fail the test. You’ll have to learn instead to unlearn what you spontaneously think in order to replace it with official “truths” that make you directly dependent on the masters of discourse at all time because you’ve got to get the keys to that reality from people higher up in the food chain.
Some of them want to use you, some of them want to be used by you, some of them want to abuse you, some of them want to be abused.
Sweet dreams are made of this, according to Eurythmics. Who am I to disagree?
That’s when you stop understanding the children’s questions because you’re “well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society” while children aren’t yet. One of the questions most frequently asked by children is: “Why do I have to go to bed when Mummy is tired?”
That’s logic, the famous Logos everyone is born out of, mistranslated from Greek in the Scriptures as “Word” for reasons difficult to understand. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was in God and the Word was God”. Don’t make no sense! Beware: scam! The Greek original says: “In the beginning was the Logos and the Logos was in God and the Logos was God”. The Logos is the Logic underlying the Creation (God), the Reason organizing the universe that the pre-Socratic philosophers like Pythagoras, Heraclitus or Democritus (who invented the concept of atom, smallest unbreakable particle) tried to understand and explain. Take out the Logos and the planes crash, the boats sink, the houses crumble and Mars and Venus take a vacation together in another galaxy. The Logos is the backbone that holds the universe together and produces all the complex phenomena that create life and maintain it healthy and sustainable.
There’s only so much man can fuck up in all this. When you look at the billions of stars in the sky from a desert, you realize his ambition of fucking it all up to shape it his own way is wildly unrealistic. However Lucifer (Light-bringer in Latin) tells him: “Come on man! Surely, you could pamper your ego by making all this stuff obey you! Bring progress front and center stage in the million year old crap laid out there by implanting electronic devices into people’s brains that will enable you to conduct the whole shebang out of your brilliant human intelligence instead of letting stupid Nature do it so clumsily!”
It’s the blind leading the blind but man gives it a shot out of pride and starts pulling wool over his contemporaries’ eyes to create an alternative reality. He manages to make them go along with the emperor’s fake new clothes until a kid who hasn’t gone through the FUR (Fucking Up Rites) yet, says: “Gimme a break! The emperor has no clothes! Get a grip!” That’s what Julian Assange is doing. There’s something childlike in his way of unleashing the truth on a “profoundly sick society”. Of course the Killary led adults, wrapped in their psychotic world after leaving the Logos behind during the FUR, hold on to their creation like mad. What do you mean the emperor has no clothes, you lowlife you? It turns out Assange was accused unjustly by a creep? Never mind that! You’re invoking the Logos again! This stuff has no currency in our world! The guy stays in jail because we say so, period. To paraphrase William Randolph Hearst, “you furnish the prison, we’ll furnish the reason”.
As Karl Rove once explained, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality, we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out”.
Of course this is leading the artificial empire to its destruction by the Logos as surely as two and two is four. It’s just the way things work and always have. Rise and fall… But in the meanwhile, do you expect them to free the boy who said the emperor had no clothes unless you put a gun to their heads? This would be metaphorically a strong public pressure and let’s hope Roger Waters is right when he says it’s building up. Hey, Biden, leave this kid alone!
John Lennon kinda summed all this up rather well actually:
I really appreciated the video….and the post.
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My plan is to end the FUR once and for all.
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Wish me luck. I’m a working class man.
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Ken
By the way, just like I thought Hunter Biden was a story that will be told, so do I think about this recent Tucker Carlson imbroglio (1.d and 2). That story, both of them, have legs. They are connected from the standpoint of attempted narrative control.
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BK
While you are distracted by Hunter Biden and Tucker Carlson…..
Nn – the purpose of your comment is what? Ridicule?
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A working class peasant understands that I reckon.
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There was no harm in what I said, it just a musing, so are you ridiculing it? Or do you not care for a muse.
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Ken
John Stockwell, one of the highest ranking CIA officers to go public, said that 1/3 of those working for him when he was running the Angola war, after we got out of Vietnam, were propagandists. Narrative control is the name of the game.
It is probably 2/3rds now. The game is on.
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May the best ideas resonate and may there be less waste in gubment.
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BK
The camps will hold many more than Julian. The comment section on all of our blogs was devised by the enemy for threat assessment. They call it Project Pogo and we are part of it now.
I suppose we will find out if Project Zyphr is for real before long. If one of us can be treated like this, why would other truth-tellers not get the same somewhere down the line?
All Stella Moris, Julian Assange’s fiancé wants from the British legal system is justice.
Whereas ‘just ice’ is all that the humanitarian US puppetmaster regime is offering!
The now shown to be fraudulent, false case against Julian Assange, must immediately be dropped, if global sanity is to reign on!
NEWS FLASH!!!!!!
Warning: With apologies to those who may be sensitive, some of the following imagery may be disturbing.
If Julian Assange, a person who has performed one of the greatest services to ‘freeing’ humanity from perpetual bondage, is permitted by historical British oligarchic infamy, to be extradited to the US, the only way he will ever make it to Australia is in a box, wrapped, for emphasis, addressed to the Australian government, in an Australian flag!
If it is good enough for the US “to allow (Julian Assange) to be imprisoned in Australia, IF convicted, why is it not good enough to send him directly home to Australia to be tried?
Answer: Because no other sane country would be that audacious to expose itself to further global ridicule, without even the blink of an eye; especially Australia!
“This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes.
Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.”
Hannah Arendt
Caitlin Johnstone wrote:
> Assange isn’t in Belmarsh Prison for doing something wrong, but for doing something right. . . .
> Beneath all the spin and excuses, this is all being done to show everyone what happens to you if you reveal embarrassing truths about the most powerful people on earth. . . .
> Journalists who find themselves in a position to publish such things going forward will find themselves thinking thoughts about what happened to Julian Assange. . . .
> The Assange case receives so much attention not because of interest in one man’s fate, but because of interest in everyone’s fate.
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Wish You Were Here — Free Julian Assange London Rally w/ Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters — 2019-08-29
Remember when a “War of Aggression” was initiated against Iraq based on absolute lies (“facts were being fixed around the policy”), completely shrouded deceptions, and preemptive “defense,” which bypassed The Nuremberg Principles? If they got away with that, it may as well have been codified – “in the name of national security.” Remember when The Geneva Conventions became “Quaint?” If they got away with that, it may as well have been codified – “in the name of national security.” Remember when it was revealed that everyone on the entire earth was under total surveillance, and nothing was done to stop it? If they got away with that, it may as well have been codified – “in the name of national security.” Now, we can remember when the complete basis for any charges against Assange fell through admissions of a lying, despicable “Key Witness” – and the British Court ignored it (as well as all coordinated MSM). They will get away with that – because, at this point, no matter how much truth is revealed, nothing else needs to be codified. https://seaclearly.com/2018/10/27/keepers-of-the-light
“The fix is in. This has nothing to do with the “rule of law ” which in itself is a total croc like money and religion; just another tool to protect the ruling classes from the working classes through mind control. Law’s are made by elites or their lackeys; they don’t come down from the mountain on stone tablets carved by God herself. In the usa Lower level judges may be elected by manufactured consent but the higher levels are appointed lackeys of ruling classes. My teacher’s? in Canada indoctrinated us that our undemocratic appointment system for picking judge’s was superior to the more democratic us one and I have no doubt that they believed what they taught “or, of course, they wouldn’t be there “. Secrets are secrets for a reason and, like in your own life, usually a nefarious reason.
The Real Crime of Julian Assange If the Constitution means anything. Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are innocent of any crime under US law. The First Amendment protects publishing and speech The 4th Amendment calls for due process. But Julian Assange is guilty of unwritten law. Julian has violated the code of those invisible powerful men referred to by FDR, Woodrow Wilson and in 1952 described by Justice Frankfurter as the real rulers in Washington exercising power from behind the scenes. The threat to those oligarchs is more serious than any imagined crime WikiLeaks and Assange may have committed. The evidence for this assertion is necessarily circumstantial but many a person has been convicted on less. Timing is telling. It may be the strongest evidence of the concerted effort to take down WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. The collateral murder tape was released in April 2010. The rest of the war logs were released by June. The result on the part of the government and the media echo chamber ran the gamut from nothing to thankfulness and affirmation to the call for hanging of a traitor. Manning was arrested because he could not keep his mouth shut and since he was in the military under a different legal system, if you can call it that, he was subjected to what seemed more like a Stalin era show trial. In August 2010 WikiLeaks published internal documents from the collapsed Icelandic bank Kaupthing actually resulting in the arrest of some of the officials involved. To my knowledge they are the only banksters arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced for financial crimes committed during the 2007-2010 financial rape and pillage of the 99% and their countries. These actions by the government of Iceland were the direct result of popular outrage and a change in government. Michael Moore humorously relates some of what happened in his movie “Where To Invade Next” but there was little coverage of those events in the media in the US. The crimes exposed in the war logs were the crimes of “little people” and few were reluctantly charged and convicted for those crimes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaupthing_Bank On Nov. 29 2010, well after the publication of the war logs, Forbes published an interview with Julian Assange. In the interview Assange reveals that WikiLeaks has massive amounts of documents from the business sector revealing illegal activity. Such releases as led to the conviction of the banksters in Iceland he said would begin to be released in early 2011. Among those soon to be published was said to be a copy of the hard drive of the CEO of a major too big to fail bank speculated by Time Magazine to be The Bank of America. When asked of the significance of the documents, Assange said they could take down a big bank or two. The price per share of B of A stock dropped by 2/3 at the end of 2010 and began a dramatic quintupling of price in 20122018 after Assange was safely in asylum. I am sure there are other factors in that fluctuation but the WikiLeaks documents were probably a major part of it. https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/11/29/an-interview-with-wikileaksjulian-assange/#d3566172c27c I imagine the concern that spread across the financial communty on Wall Street caused the scrotums of many to lodge under their Adam’s Apples and much indigestion. The response was immediate. On Dec. 1, 2010 Amazon, that served as the host for WikiLeaks’ web site kicked that dangerous publisher out of its service. Most of Amazon’s profits come from government contracts including with the CIA. It is curious that more than 7 months after the release of the war logs but only 2 days after the Forbes article, Amazon chose to follow the desires of the US deep state and kick WikiLeaks off of its web servers. WikiLeaks quickly found other hosts among the Scandinavian countries including Iceland. Problem solved. On Dec. 2, 2010 PayPal refused to allow their services to be used to donate money to WikiLeaks. https://www.wired.com/2010/12/paypal-wikileaks/
On Dec. 3, 2010 Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Western Union followed suit. WikiLeaks had quickly been left to wither in a financial desert. All these financial institutions cited pressure from the US government as the reason for their actions. The US government probably had been pressuring these same companies since the war logs were released and before to no avail, yet within days of the publication of the Forbes interview these institutions responded in unison to financially eviscerate WikiLeaks. https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/12/07/visa-mastercardmove-to-choke- On Dec. 10, 2010 Assange was arrested in London on an Interpol warrant issued by Sweden. Assange had been in Sweden to arrange for the hosting of WikiLeaks’ site on a secure bank of underground vaulted servers. WikiLeaks staff probably knew that having Amazon as a host was problematic and had been searching for another host for a while. While released on bail, in January of 2011 CBS News filmed an interview with Assange conducted by Steve Kroft. During the interview Assange was asked about the financial crime documents that WikiLeaks were going to release. It is the only time during the interview that Assange appeared flustered. He did not reveal anything about those documents during the interview. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/julian-assange-the-2011-60-minutes-interview/
While Assange was out on bail in London, he participated in a public discussion that I saw on Free Speech TV or LinkTV. During the question and answer segment a person from the audience asked about the business documents that were supposed to be released in early 2011. Assange’s response was that he was not at liberty to discuss that issue and added that the audience could imagine why. I imagine that Assange, various others and families were threatened with death if the business documents were released and WikiLeaks responded that if anything whatsoever happened to those threatened, the documents would be released. Everybody involved knew that there was no way that any government, corporation or agency could stop the release of the documents. They would have been stored electronically in many places away from WikiLeaks and there may even be paper copies stored in strategic places. Stalemate accomplished. Enter Ecuador and the asylum granted, or should we say, forced on Assange. Assange’s son and the mother of his son were already underground either in a witness protection like program or just hidden there is little information that I could find on that, but I am sure the deep state knew where they were and wanted to keep them safe. The discussions that preceded the granting of asylum by Ecuador were in secret and will probably never be known barring a whistleblower. Rafael Correa, the president of Ecuador, had a reputation as a defier of American imperialism and Wall Street and was considered part of what was called the “Pink Wave” of social reform in South America. All were incorrect or if at one time correct were no longer. To support this part of the argument, I will have to give a little history. In 1999 Wall Street attacked the Ecuadorian currency, the Sucre, and crashed the economy. In response Ecuador wisely abandoned the Sucre and took the US dollar as their currency. Wall Street does not attack the USD as that is where they hold their assets. Ecuador used gold and oil revenues to purchase hard currency for circulation and created bookkeeping currency by counterfeiting it just like BofA and the rest of the private banks in the US do. The central bank also payed public employees and contractors by transferring money digitally into their accounts just like the Federal Reserve transfers money. Using money created in this manner the government of Ecuador stimulated the economy at 4-7% annually for 14 or more years. It spent much of it on increasing infrastructure, especially roads, water and hydroelectric plants and production. When I came here in 2014 I was reminded of the massive amounts of infrastructure building and general construction that I witnessed in California in the 60s.
The political and economic waters of the US are crystal clear compared to muddy waters of Ecuador so through chance or fate I met a person who was a former employee of the IRS and the Ministry of the Environment. She is very smart and ethical, so ethical that she was denied promotion because her personality profile test showed her unable to be cruel enough for the job. Because of her inside view I learned that among the first things Rafael Correa did was to pass a law forbidding the Central Bank of Ecuador from printing money. I could give many more examples to prove that from the start of his presidency, Rafael Correa was a minion and mercenary of Wall Street and no socialist. Here again timing is telling. When Assange was evicted from the Ecuadorian Embassy into the custody of the British police, the probable crimes revealed in the Wikileaks trove of documents had passed their statute of limitations. So even if there are financial crimes revealed ever, no one is going to be prosecuted, fined or sent to jai. Thus it will be business as usual on Wall Street and their scrotums can relax and they can continue bribing legislatures to make what was once illegal, legal. They will continue torturing and imprisoning Assange. The .00001% want to make sure that potential whistleblowers will quell their consciences and not risk releasing sensitive information and publishers will hesitate to publish what the whistleblowers release. The international finance connection with the asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy is most evident in timing. On the very hour of the day of the ejection from the embassy the IMF made available 4.5 billion dollars to the Ecuadorian government. And on that same day Ola Bini a friend of Assange who was in Ecuador was arrested by the Ecuadorian government and kept in custody without charge for over 2 months. I could go on and on providing evidence to support this argument. Perhaps in a later article, I will explore the evidence further. On an upbeat note that the international banksters are not in complete control an Icelandic court found Visa guilty of illegally blocking payments to WikiLeaks. So little Iceland is the only country to be brave enough to face up to the banksters and hold them to the rule of law. https://grapevine.is/news/2019/04/25/valitor-sentenced-to-pay-1-2-bill
OK, so you are indisputably right about everything. Now what? (Whining is not an action plan.)
Move your money and loans to a credit union. Do no business with Amazon or PayPal. If you have student loans, do not pay. Use a debit card issued by your credit union. Push for postal banking and other public bankin. Join Public Banking Institute. If most did that it would be a different world. I do all that and still manage to be engaged in the world.
“Nothing WikiLeaks published endangered the American people”
Even if it did, exactly who would it be that created the risk? The risk would have been there before Julian discovered it. I find every single explanation of why Julian is in prison too bizarre to fathom. So obviously contradictory my head just can’t go there. But it can fathom that the Sociopaths In Charge don’t adhere to any rational reasonable ethical discipline. That sane behavior should NEVER be expected from them. Sanity displayed by them would be a shock.
There is a reason they lock the pilots door as he steers the ship to its intended destination. We are just passengers on board. We have no control of the ship and cannot affect its course whatsoever. To attempt such would require mutiny. However without sufficient arms and a way to breech a reinforced door, this would be extremely difficult. Also half the passengers would probably try to actively stop ua from taking control. They let us choose a new captain from time to time but the crew remains the same. The guy who told us the truth about the ship of fools is in the brig under heavy guard. The captain just told us to return to our cabins for our own safety. Stormy waters ahead and rations are running low.
I think this inspiring column is the clearest and most powerful statement of the most recent battle between truth and lies. Thank you Caitlin Johnstone!