Guardian Newspaper Initiates WikiLeaks Ass Kicking Party while Circling the Wagons to Protect its own Butt!
We are ten years into a war on Aghanistan, 20 years into a war on Iraq and 250+ daze into the confinement without charge of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange who has done so much to expose the true nature of these wars. Wars that have no end date, no popular support and presently little visible opposition.
Assange remains the target of powerful forces and has been largely left hung out to dry by both the legitimate voices of dissent and those who continue to prosecute these wars and isolate and crush any resistance to them. In the U.K. a lot of this isolation can be put down to the Guardian newspaper in its role as the Pravda of the liberal left (their niche market if not their personal politics of those who run the newspaper.) The Guardian sets the party line for the liberal left on which wars to support, oppose or tolerate and which dissidents are worth our sympathy or should be abandoned to the state.
The roots of the Guardian's animosity towards Assange and WikiLeaks is not clear. Whether it is borne of class tensions (the Guardian's public schoolboy journalists dislike of a hippy kid who does not know his place), cultural disdain (an antipodean rocking the boat in London town) or an economic and status fear (journalists like being the "guardian"/ gatekeepers of secrets... along comes WikiLeaks and short circuits them...."here's the cables from the horses mouth - you work it out!"). Who knows what their motives are, but there has clearly been a vitriolic campaign by the Guardian boys against Assange, a campaign that has demobilised sectors of support as he is pursued by the forces running the war.
Last week, WikiLeaks was forced to announce that the full stock of U.S. embassy cables were already out on the internet. This was not by strategic design but a combination of actions taken at a high stress time for WikiLeaks workers (not Guardian employees) when Julian Assange was imprisoned (where the British state hope to keep him...opposing bail in December 2010). This was a time when the stress free Guardian was working on its book attacking Assange and busy selling the movie rights to Spielberg. The Guardian's book included the password that could access the remaining embassy cables that had been secretly placed on Bit Torrent by a WikiLeaks worker at this time.
Caught between a rock and hard place, WikiLeaks decided to formally announce the state of play and publish the remaining cables this past week.
In the past daze, acting to type, the Guardian have published a number of articles in the lead-up to the ruling on Assange's July 2011 High Court appeal against extradition to Sweden, which is expected some time soon.
Here the Guardian tell us that they condemn WikiLeaks. They share this condemnation with the U.S. military and the five previous media partners – the Guardian, New York Times, El Pais, Der Spiegel and Le Monde – which had previously worked with WikiLeaks publishing carefully selected and redacted documents.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/02/wikileaks-p...ables
Here they show how you can become a real serious journalist with a real newspaper and be taken really seriously if you jump ship......
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/02/why-i-had-t...leaks
Here they devote an editorial condemning (one more time now, with feeling!) Julian Assange and WikiLeaks
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/02/lea...lease
And here they rejoice that even if Julian should win his appeal, he's lost - the Australians are going to get him.....
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/02/julian-assa...leaks
These article are to make the liberal left in the U.K. feel relaxed and comfortable as Julian Assange is shafted in London and shunted to a U.S. prison via Stockholm or Sydney. This process mirrors the mainstream media's role throughout these long years of war, to keep us silent and sedated as the government wreak terror and destruction on the people's of Iraq and Afghanistan. The warmaking state, whether run by neocons or liberals, no longer requires our proactive suppport for their brutality inflicted on enemy poplations or domestic dissidents who have touched a nerve.
Here is some rebuttal..........
NYT on WikiLeaks: Move Along, No Atrocity to See Here
by Peter Hart
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/09/02-2
Facts and Myths in the WikiLeaks/Guardian Saga
by Glenn Greenwald
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/09/02-7
Schnews take
LEAKY ARGUMENTS
http://www.schnews.org.uk/archive/news7864.php
20 years into a war on the people of Iraq, 10 years into a war on the people of Afghanistan, with millions dead, maimed, displaced and orphaned, civil infrastructure destroyed, WikiLeaks has confronted us with the nature of this war... the ongoing butchery of civilians. The powers that be, from the masters of war to the manufacturers of consent, want us to avert our gaze.
Refuse to be distracted! View once again the collateral murder footage
http://www.collateralmurder.com/ and refocus.
Support Bradley Manning in chains accused of leaking this footage, Julian Asssange tagged and pursued for distributing this footage and Michael Lyons presently imprisoned for refusing to deploy to Afghanistan after viewing this footage.
*** YOUTUBE (16 mins) Julian Assange conference after UK court hearing (15-Jul-11)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOcCWAQQ-bs&feature=related
**YOUTUBE (4 mins) - Solidarity Singing "I Shall be Released" as Julain leaves High Court (Jul-11)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqBjeeF7QKs
*YOUTUBE (6 mins) 'Assange Subterranean Homesick Blues'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGb9pqcz3_Y
Comments
Article with working Guardian links, youtbes also posted here...
Article with working Guardian links, youtbes also posted here...
http://wiseupforbradleymanning.wordpress.com/2011/09/05/on-recent-wikile...
The Last Whistleblower by Paul Craig Roberts
The Last Whistleblower
by Paul Craig Roberts
Bob and Darin were on a panel together discussing banalities in generalities, as is the usual case. If either had said anything meaningful on the subject, the moderator would have cut him off.
Bob didn’t know Darin. He was introduced as a former CIA official. Bob had heard back in those days when he was on the Congressional Budget Committee staff that Darin had once had a limited oversight position – budget Bob seemed to remember it was – over a black op CIA group. When the moderator closed the panel, the two looked at one another and raised their eyebrows.
Bob took advantage of the eyebrow connection to suggest that they have a drink. To his surprise Darin agreed.
Darin was remote and distant at first, but found the conversation to his liking as the two discussed the moderator’s skill in avoiding delicate issues. In an abrupt change of subject, Bob asked Darin if the US government would assassinate Julian Assange.
"Yes," Darin replied.
Bob followed up quickly with a question, which as he was asking it he realized he should not be asking: "Does the CIA have an in-house assassination group or does the agency contract it out?"
Darin replied, "The CIA doesn’t need to physically assassinate Assange. Washington will use the PATRIOT Act to override the First Amendment and bring a spy case against him. Currently, the British are going through their pretense that they have a rule of law, but if in the end law doesn’t require that the Brits extradite Assange to Sweden, whose government will sell him to Washington, Washington will bring an extradition case based on charges that are being concocted in a grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia."
ARTICLE CONTINUED...
http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts322.html
United States and its European allies are trapped in a quagmire
September 7, 2011
“Grand Strategy” after 9/11
Perpetual War
by TARIQ ALI
‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception,’ Carl Schmitt wrote in different times almost a century ago, when European empires and armies dominated most continents and the United States was basking underneath an isolationist sun. What the conservative theorist meant by ‘exception’ was a state of emergency, necessitated by serious economic or political cataclysms, that required a suspension of the Constitution, internal repression and war abroad.
A decade after the attentats of 9/11, the United States and its European allies are trapped in a quagmire. The events of that year were simply used as a pretext to remake the world and to punish those states that did not comply. And today while the majority of Euro-American citizens flounder in a moral desert, now unhappy with the wars, now resigned, now propagandized into differentiating what is, in effect, an overarching imperial strategy into good/bad wars, the US General Petraeus (currently commanding the CIA) tells us: “You have to recognize also that I don’t think you win this war. I think you keep fighting. It’s a little bit like Iraq, actually . . .. Yes, there has been enormous progress in Iraq. But there are still horrific attacks in Iraq, and you have to stay vigilant. You have to stay after it. This is the kind of fight we’re in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids’ lives.” Thus speaks the voice of a sovereign power, determining in this case that the exception is the rule.
ARTICLE CONTINUED....
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/09/07/perpetual-war/