The empire is going to do everything it can to hold on to its power. From Tom Luongo at tomluongo.me:
And down goes Julian Assange, right beside Brexit. If there was ever any doubt that The Powers That Be are unrelenting in their cruelty just look at the 24 hours starting on Wednesday.
First Theresa “The Snake Oil Lady” May kicks 17.4 million voters into the weeds.
And then she oversees the arrest and judging of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.
The timing of this is important beyond dovetailing it with her Brexit betrayal. They had to go after Assange now, because Theresa May’s time in office is ending.
A Jeremy Corbyn-led government would not grant the U.S. it’s prize.
Corbyn, for all of his faults, would be a breath of fresh air in the unraveling of the ‘special relationship’ between the U.S. and U.K. in foreign policy for as long as he lasted in office.
Still think Theresa works for anyone other than her owners?
A fortuitous, for the US government, string of legal technicalities may allow it to throw Julian Assange in jail. From Caitline Johnstone at medium.com:
Isn’t it interesting how an Ecuadorian “asylum conditions” technicality, a UK bail technicality, and a US whistleblowing technicality all just so happened to converge in a way that just so happens to look exactly the same as imprisoning a journalist for telling the truth?
Following the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, top UK officials all began simultaneously piping the following exact phrase into public consciousness: “No one is above the law.”
“This goes to show that in the United Kingdom, no one is above the law,” Prime Minister Theresa May told parliament after Assange’s arrest.
“Julian Assange is no hero and no one is above the law,” tweeted Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt.
“Nearly 7 years after entering the Ecuadorean Embassy, I can confirm Julian Assange is now in police custody and rightly facing justice in the UK. I would like to thank Ecuador for its cooperation and @metpoliceuk for its professionalism. No one is above the law,” tweeted Home Secretary Sajid Javid.
The Assange arrest is a direct assault on the freedom of the press. From Matt Taibbi at rollingstone.com:
Julian Assange gestures to the media from a police vehicle on his arrival at Westminster Magistrates court on April 11, 2019 in London, England. After weeks of speculation Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was arrested by Scotland Yard Police Officers inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in Central London this morning. Ecuador’s President, Lenin Moreno, withdrew Assange’s Asylum after seven years citing repeated violations to international conventions.
Jack Taylor/Getty Images
The WikiLeaks founder will be tried in a real court for one thing, but for something else in the court of public opinion
Julian Assange was arrested in England on Thursday. Though nothing has been announced, there are reports he may be extradited to the United States to face charges related to Obama-era actions.
Here’s the Washington Post on the subject of prosecuting Assange:
“A conviction would also cause collateral damage to American media freedoms. It is difficult to distinguish Assange or WikiLeaks from The Washington Post.”
The Post editorial of years back is still relevant because Assange is being tried for an “offense” almost a decade old. What’s changed since is the public perception of him, and in a supreme irony it will be the government of Donald “I love WikiLeaks”Trump benefiting from a trick of time, to rally public support for a prosecution that officials hesitated to push in the Obama years.
Much of the American media audience views the arrested WikiLeaks founder through the lens of the 2016 election, after which he was denounced as a Russian cutout who threw an election for Trump.
But the current indictment is the extension of a years-long effort, pre-dating Trump, to construct a legal argument against someone who releases embarrassing secrets.
Barack Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, said as far back as 2010 the WikiLeaks founder was the focus of an “active, ongoing criminal investigation.” Assange at the time had won, or was en route to winning, a pile of journalism prizes for releasing embarrassing classified information about many governments, including the infamous “Collateral Murder” video delivered by Chelsea Manning. The video showed a helicopter attack in Iraq which among other things resulted in the deaths of two Reuters reporters.
Julian Assange is in the trouble he’s in because he told the truth about the US government, period. From Seraphim Hanisch at theduran.com:
Tucker Carlson stands almost alone in telling the truth about Julian Assange, both what he did – and did not do.
Fox News’ Tucker Carlson offered his own analysis regarding the arrest of Julian Assange. Mr. Assange was arrested yesterday, April 11, 2019, after the Ecuadoran Embassy agreed to evict him from their building in London where he lived over the last seven years, a refugee from the American and Western European governments.
This was extensively reported by the mainstream press, but it was done so dishonestly. Tucker Carlson puts the facts back into the equation with his presentation:
Probably the central comment and the central truth of Mr. Assange’s life and work is summed up at [01:54], and we reprint it here:
First, Julian Assange embarrassed virtually everyone in power in Washington. He published documents that undermined the official story of the Iraq War and Afghanistan. He got Debbie Wasserman-Schulz fired from the DNC. He humiliated Hillary Clinton by showing that the Democratic primaries were, in fact, rigged.
Pretty much everyone in Washington has reason to hate Julian Assange. Rather than just admit that straightforwardly, “he made us look like buffoons, so now we are sending him to prison!”
However, those who are not in Washington have every reason to praise this man for revealing such truths.
However, as Mr. Carlson goes on to say, the use of the two-year “Russian interference / collusion / conspiracy / (add your own term here)” narrative had its blank filled in here with “Julian Assange was a Russian agent.”
This is simply not true. And of course, who better to spread a lie than Senator Richard Blumenthal, who is known as “Da Nang Dick” because he lied to make himself appear to have served in Viet Nam, rather than the truth, which was that his five deferments prevented him from going overseas, and he served his time in the Marines as a Reservist in Washington D.C. and Connecticut, never actually fighting in the war.
In the video we see him at his customary wordplay, spinning more falsehoods about Mr. Assange.
The entirety of Mr. Carlson’s video is remarkably accurate and honest. It is good to know that there is at least one pretty decent journalist operating in the the US. However, the spin doctors have been in control for a long time, and it is apparent from this development that “Russian collusion” or any of its spinoffs are going to be with us for a long, long time.
The government is getting its full measure of revenge against two people who told the truth about it. From Craig Murray at lewrockwell.com:
Tonight both Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange are in jail, both over offences related to the publication of materials specifying US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, and both charged with nothing else at all. No matter what bullshit political and MSM liars try to feed you, that is the simple truth. Manning and Assange are true heroes of our time, and are suffering for it.
If a Russian opposition politician were dragged out by armed police, and within three hours had been convicted on a political charge by a patently biased judge with no jury, with a lengthy jail sentence to follow, can you imagine the Western media reaction to that kind of kangaroo court? Yet that is exactly what just happened in London.
District Judge Michael Snow is a disgrace to the bench who deserves to be infamous well beyond his death. He displayed the most plain and open prejudice against Assange in the 15 minutes it took for him to hear the case and declare Assange guilty, in a fashion which makes the dictators’ courts I had witnessed, in Babangida’s Nigeria or Karimov’s Uzbekistan, look fair and reasonable, in comparison to the gross charade of justice conducted by Michael Snow.
If the US extradites, tries, and imprisons Julian Assange, the First Amendment as we knew it will be dead. From Nozomi Hayase at antiwar.com:
On Thursday, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested by the UK police inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he was granted political asylum in 2012. This termination of asylum by Ecuador in violation of international law comes a week after WikiLeaks warned the public it had received information from two high level Ecuadorian government sources about a US-backed plan for the Ecuadorian government to expel Assange from its embassy.
Assange’s lawyer confirmed he has been arrested under a US extradition warrant for conspiracy to publish classified information with whistleblower Chelsea Manning revealing government war crimes in 2010. Specifically, this relates to WikiLeaks’ publication of the collateral murder video, documents concerning the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the US Diplomatic Cables.
In making a statement outside Westminster Magistrate’s Court in London, the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks Kristinn Hrafnsson told reporters that Assange’s arrest marks a “dark day for journalism”. This prosecution of Assange is recognized by experts on free speech rights as an attack on freedom of the media everywhere.
