Crisis Update: Assange In Final Battle Against Extradition

Truth and disinformation are a hall of mirrors

Feb 21, 2024

∙ Paid

Gov lawyers claim he encouraged theft and hacking, deny case is political
If request for appeal denied, he will likely be dispatched to U.S.
Assage faces British lawyers with MI6 unintelligence connections
Wikileaks’ timing served Washington’s Arab Spring
Strangely silent on Israel, as Netanyahu himself declared
Assange’s own origins raise more than butterfly’s ripple
Censorship unleashed as military fears loss of control
Populace challenging globalist structures and national role
Response is control of ‘democratic institutions’ in place of democracy
NATO’s assault on free exchange of information is subversion of democracy
Foundation for Freedom campaigner Mike Benz exposes censorship state
Yet NBC’s Zadrozny opens hall of mirrors, attacking Benz in a limited hangout

(3,400 words or about a quarter hour of your company.)

Feb 21, 2024

The prosecution of Julian Assange is, as Glenn Greenwald wrote in 2019, a “blueprint for making journalists into felons.”

Wednesday’s hearing ended with dame Victoria Sharp and justice Jeremy Johnson — an MI6-vetted judge who has worked for the intelligence service — saying they would give their decision at a later date.

Greenwald wrote from the experience of being threatened with a similar prosecution, having been wiretapped talking to a source about the technicalities of preserving documents.

It’s not complicated: Assange is being prosecuted for the standard operating procedure of an investigative journalist.

Some suspect Assange’s origins, and there seems to be grounds. His work did prove useful to the regime. Wikileaks' revelations helped spark the Arab Spring, the broom with which president Barack Obama's Washington administration swept the region in 2010-12, clearing away governments that did not suit its interests.

These included Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, who was promoting an African gold dinar, and Mohamed Morsi of Egypt, aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood and likely to be difficult for Israel to influence.

The state corporate media made much of claims that this was the first digital revolution, made possible by a generation of "digital natives" brought up to communicate primarily through Facebook and Twitter.

Mike Benz of the Foundation for Freedom Online, and a former adviser to the U.S. State Department, also highlights the Arab Spring as the high water mark for internet freedom.

What Benz and Julian Assange steer clear of is anything critical of Israel from two directions: the country's dominant role in cyber snooping and the Zionist control of the media (very obvious in the coverage of Gaza) and the fact that Wikileaks never released information that embarrassed Israel.

“Diplomatic secrets published by the WikiLeaks group has not damaged Israel and in fact strengthened its position, Prime Minister Netanyahu said Monday. [1]

The information relating to U.S. killing of civilians, in particular the murder of Reuters journalists in Baghdad, Iraq, in a Jul 2007 airstrike, served to inflame the region at a moment when the Washington favoured instability, in order to move chess pieces and put new pawns into place.

Seen in this light the press did the governments' bidding: they released information when Washington wanted, and then they pilloried Assange, portrayed it as the act of a dangerous lone wolf.

On the pages of The Guardian Assange would go from hero to zero: unstable and untrustworthy, even as a rapist (an allegation the women involved would retract).

It later ran an unsubstantiated story that a Trump aide had visited Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy. Ecuador had offered Assange asylum at its London embassy during the time the British and Swedish police were seeking to extradite him to Sweden.

However Paul Manafort, the Trump aide who was eventually jailed on tax evasion charges, did not visit Assange, and The Guardian's Luke Harding made no attempt to provide evidence. [2]

It only proved how the state corporate media had become disinformation agents of the political police aka intelligence services.

These intel services did not "burn" Assange since they had scarcely made an effort to hide his origins.

He admitted to links with The Family, aka The Great White Brotherhood, led by Anne Hamilton-Byrne, who collected blonde children — and if not blonde, she bleached their hair — manipulating their personalities and will.

Appropriately enough The Guardian reported Julian's link but in the form of a denial.

"Assange admitted that a man who was his mother’s boyfriend in the late 1970s had been a member of the cult. The man had been “a sinister presence” who sought to have “a certain psychological power” over his family, Assange said, and they eventually went on the run from him. But he said he never met Hamilton-Byrne or had any direct contact with the group as a whole."[3]

It was one of those cults that the CIA in particular cultivates, if you'll excuse the pun, to produce people it can manipulate. Look up The Finders, another New Age movement that collected children. It was run by a former U.S. Air Force sergeant Marion Pettie. [4]

An intel connection would explain why Washington is so desperate to silence Assange, holding him in solitary confinement. His supposed offences were an embarrassment but they do not seemingly justify the punishment, unless he has something further to expose.

If Assange was complicit the U.S. would have an interest in hiding that. It would not be the first time that milit intel portrayed an asset as a lone wolf, then destroyed him.

History of leaks

Wikileaks published 250,000 classified US diplomatic cables, and over a million government documents, 750,000 of them released by then US Army private Bradley Manning, who was court martialed and imprisoned from 2010-17, a sentence commuted by president Obama.

Many related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the holding of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba.

It was the largest leak of military documents since the Pentagon Papers were exposed by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971.

Yet even the Pentagon Papers have been reassessed in some quarters. The revelation in The New York Times that the military knew it could not win the Vietnam war provided the pretext to bring it to a close.

Something similar happened in Afghanistan. In Dec 2019 The Washington Post reported: “U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it, an exclusive Post investigation found.” [5]

The Trump administration began reducing forces in Feb 2020, and president Joe Biden’s administration brought the curtain down on two decades of war with a chaotic withdrawal in Aug 2021.

It happened again in Ukraine, in Apr 2023, when a low-level employee on a US military base obtained highly sensitive US government information, well above his pay grade. It cast doubt on the much heralded Ukraine-NATO spring offensive against the Russian front line. [6]

In each case the leaks did not reveal anything that a keen observer did not already know. But they did provide the shunt in the rear to make the bureaucracy jump tracks.

Propaganda is not aimed at the general population. Its purpose is to instruct officialdom in the latest change of narrative.

The information also provided concrete evidence to policy analysts and historians, placing events beyond the contention of even well-informed speculation.

Bad wolf

Thus we can see how the media and political class continues to manipulate the Wikileaks story.

On the one hand the media tells us that Wikileaks was an isolated episode; the work of a troubled individual. At the same time the U.S. military and intelligence complex portrays it as an unprecedented attack on the international community and the institution of government.

This is not to say, listen to no-one. Please subscribe.

Yet if the leaks were mostly lacking in substance, they were a blow to U.S. propaganda, the “soft power” by which NATO seeks to wage hybrid war — as much on its own population as on foreign enemies.

Most damaging in the public eye were the cold-blooded execution of Reuters journalists by a helicopter crew, and details of torture, rape and murder by soldiers in Iraq, and “Gitmo files” or memos from Guantánamo prison.

However many images associated in the public mind with Wikileaks came from elsewhere. The notorious photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were released by CBS News in 2004. The 20 men in orange jumpsuits on their knees in Guantánamo was the authorised image of a U.S. Navy photographer in 2002. [7]

This underlines that narrative that Assange is being scapegoated for embarrassing Washington or the U.S. military. More likely he is being silenced.

Case study

On an ethical level, Wikileaks revealed the collusion of U.S. government officials and multinational corporations to destabilise and undermine countries; for example Nigeria, a country with huge oil and gas reserves and a history of colonial domination.

Former vice president Dick Cheney’s oil services company Halliburton paid up to $180 million in bribes to Nigerian officials. The African government dropped charges in return for a settlement. [8]

Leaked cables revealed that the private intelligence agency of Shell had infiltrated every level of government in the capital Abuja and offered to share its inner workings with U.S. officials.

Wikileaks revealed that Pfizer was trying to find evidence against Nigeria’s attorney general to pressure him to drop a case, which led to Pfizer paying over $75 million in compensation for testing a meningitis drug on Nigerian children without parental consent.

Most cables presented a slice-of-life view of diplomatic activity and since Wikileaks sifted them in advance, we don’t know what proportion they represent.

The U.S. claim that Wikileaks damaged national security is misleading. Wikileaks redacted all sensitive information and contacted U.S. authorities to be sure. On one occasion Assange even called Hillary Clinton, though he was not connected.

Blame it on Assange

If Assange is not being prosecuted for embarrassing Washington or the U.S. military, what is the motive?

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