Shockingly, Her Majesty’s Government of the United Kingdom is attempting to ‘murder’ political asylum in the potentially precedent-setting extradition trial of Julian Assange, the founding publisher of the whistle-blower web-platform, Wikileaks. In this special report, The Snoopman finds that it is now the intention of the sovereign parliament of the United Kingdom, in conspiracy with the United States Government, that persons are now extraditable for political offences, in spite of the Extradition Act, the UK-US Extradition Treaty and centuries of trans-Atlantic liberty. It turns out, this potentially precedent-setting trans-jurisdictional case boils down to a gambit to construct a global defacto-licensing system for journalists in a post-9/11 dystopian world where news gathering becomes make-believe ‘scoops’ authorized by governments in Police State territories.
The Snoopman
America’s Most Wanted
The Australian born founder of the whistle-blower web-platform, WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, is America’s most wanted man.
Shockingly, Assange stands accused by the governments of the United Kingdom and the United States for aiding and abetting in acts construed to be espionage, instead of journalism, and he is ultimately deemed to have assisted terrorists.
The prosecution is claiming that Assange not only harmed the national security of the United States for publishing material as a result of assisting US Army Private, Bradley Manning (who subsequently became Chelsea Manning), to intrude into government computers to gain classified material, on or around and between March 2 and March 10 2010, with the intention of disseminating such information on theWikiLeaks website.
The US Government and Her Majesty’s Government are also attempting to construe that Assange’s activities are not that of a journalist or a publisher with a legitimate political purpose to affect a change in government policy. In this attempt to deny Assange has a legitimate claim to political refuge, the US and UK governments have in essence, cast the WikiLeaks publisher as a reckless hacker who conspired ultimately to assist the enemies of the United States, whom perpetrate violent acts with the purpose of affecting political change, or terrorism.
The prosecution has not specifically stated Assange has aided and abetted in acts deemed to have assisted terrorists. But, in asserting that Assange cannot claim what he did was a ‘political offense’ as set out Article 4.1 of the US-UK Extradition Treaty, this stance insinuates that Assange is complicit in offences described in Article 4.2 which are all about participating, furthering or concealing violent acts to affect political objectives, which fits universal definitions of terrorism. After-all, no one has tried to construe that WikiLeaks is a huge money spinner and therefore that Assange’s motive is pecuniary gain. But there has been plenty of scuttle-butt accusing him of being an agent of another regime, or a political leader, a non-state actor who acts like an intelligence agency perpetrating espionage.
If the extradition request were determined to be politically motivated, the ‘Requested State’ can refuse extradition, as stated in Article 4.3. Indeed, the Requested State can also decline extradition if the offences are determined to be military ones if such acts were not considered offences under a country’s ordinary law, as stated in Article 4.4.
The prosecution, in choosing to advance Assange’s case to an extradition hearing, is trying to assert that there is no political motivation behind the US Government’s extradition request. In short, the DOJ’s 18 indictment counts talk around the central issue: are acts of unauthorized procurement, possession, and publication of classified, or other-wise secret, material of a state – actually espionage or journalism?
Assange is being scapegoated for being a politically motivated, mutinous free thinker.
America’s official stance is a denial of history because it has been United States’ policy – ever since it emerged from World War II as the dominant power – to de-stabilize the legendary Biblical lands of the Greater Middle East in order to better exploit the coveted oil, as Eugene Jarecki’s Academy Award-winning 2005 documentary, Why We Fight, showed (albeit without this sarcastic tone). This denial of US imperial history is necessary for the prosecution’s case to scapegoat Assange to resolve yet another crisis of the Anglo-American Establishment, as they seek to maintain their dominant position over rival combinations in the orbit of the Russian and Chinese Empires.
In order to better frame Assange with an enemy of the state casting, the US and UK governments advanced the position in last week’s extradition trial that even if he had not aided and abetted Manning, he is still liable for extradition because the Official Secrets Act of 1989 removed the ‘public interest’ argument as a defence and made unauthorized possession of an official secret a crime. Because the United Kingdom’s Official Secrets Act of 1989 is a similar law to the United States’s Espionage Act of 1917, the principle of dual criminality applies. This means in cases of extradition, an accused person can be extradited from one country to stand trial for breaking a second country’s laws only if a similar law exists in the extraditing country.
What Assange actually did was leak cables, documents, and video that revealed damning details of war crimes, widespread murder of civilians and corruption that the US Government is ultimately responsible for, in its wars against Afghanistan and Iraq.
Indeed, the war crimes exposed by WikiLeaks included torture, rape, and executions of prisoners of war, kidnapping rendition flights, and the infamous “Collateral Murder” video published by WikiLeaks on April 5th 2010, showing US forces killing two Reuters journalists and nine Iraqis from a hovering helicopter. This publication of this video made WikiLeaks world famous and demonstrated the whistle-blowing platform’s damaging reach. WikiLeaks has also exposed classified documents showing cover-ups of official casualty figures and body counts and the suppression of dire portraits warning the American war machine was wading deeper into catastrophe in Iraq and Afghanistan.
These are clearly public interest issues.
America’s war to liberate Afghanistan’s poppy fields, build bases and retard development cost the American Tax Herds $1 to $2 trillion dollars, depending on whose count you take, and consumed 150,000 Afghan and 2400 American soldiers’ lives, has ended as this special TIME Trouble Issue goes to print. Meanwhile, America’s Second War to liberate Iraq’s oil, build bases and retard development 2003-2011 has cost American Tax Herds $2.2 trillion dollars, and either total 190,000 lives lost on both sides or as many as 2.4 million Iraqi people and which left the war-torn country vulnerable to Civil War (2014-2017) and attack by the NATO-sponsored, ISIS.
This potentially precedent-setting trans-jurisdictional case boils down to a gambit to construct a defacto-licensing system for journalists in a post-9/11 dystopian world where news gathering becomes make-believe ‘scoops’ authorized by governments in Police State territories that come with the purview of category 1 and 2 territories of the UK Extradition Act of 2003. The Anglo-American Establishment is trying to make a totalitarian world of police states safe from unauthorized leaks, over an area larger than territories than those controlled by any of the Roman, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, British French and Russia empires.
The UK Extradition Act even includes Russia. However, the government of the “USA claims universal jurisdiction” over the world – as former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, put it in his round-up of Day 4 at this Kafka-esque trial, for crimes of publishing, or to put it in Orwellian terms, thoughtcrimes. In other words, the US and UK Governments are moving to gain buy-in from the world’s major media outlets to only publish or broadcast vetted material for which they have an official receipt of permission.
This means there will be even less jobs at news outlets and more like Winston Smith’s job at the Ministry of Truth, in George Orwell’s 1949 masterpiece dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. At the Ministry of Truth, or Minitrue, the bureaucracy is tasked with constantly rewriting the history of Oceania, one of the world’s three-super-states that he is a citizen of, as its official enemy changes to either Eurasia or Eastasia to match its switching alliances.
In week one of this Orwellian-Kafkaesque extradition trial, the prosecution was therefore focussed on attacking Assange’s credibility, while ignoring the boundary issues of an empire that will not bring itself to admit its an empire in public. Let alone, fully disclose the who and why of how exactly it has thus far achieved its secret agenda to forge a permanent universal empire – unless it is brought to heel.
Indeed, this is a strange extradition trial.
Neither side called any witnesses. You would have thought each side would want to pack the courtroom with star witnesses, who could come out punching. There’s a huge global market for this trial. There would be hundreds and hundreds of millions of the world’s Tax Cattle who would love to see the prosecution’s star witnesses metaphorically punching the living daylights out of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks in one corner, and the defence team’s star witnesses bruising and bloodying of Uncle Sam and Queen Elizabeth II in the other corner.
But, perhaps it’s too early in ‘the process’.
A Kafkaesque Trial in a Post-9/11 Universe
This, not incidentally, was the original title of Franz Kafka’s dystopian novel, The Trial, which became the more authentically totalitarian-looking, Der Prozess, when it was published in 1925 during the Halcyon Days of communist-fascist rivalry.Not incidentally, because Assange’s ‘case’ riffs off this esteemed work by Kafka.
In Kafka’s The Trial, the protagonist, Josef K, is arrested for an unspecified crime by a remote, inaccessible unspecified agency by two anonymous agents. Neither K, nor the reader, ever learn the nature of the alleged crime, but he remains ‘free’ as ‘the process’ will be supposedly processed by the Committee of Affairs. The court’s painter, Titorelli, shares his insights of the process, which K finds disturbing, not least because he learns that no one has ever been acquitted. While accompanying his lawyer’s client to the city’s cathedral, a priest tells K a parable, and explains it is an ancient text of the court and over many generations, court officials have imposed different interpretations of the ancient text. K is executed by two men who collect him from his apartment, lead him to a quarry outside the city where they kill him with a butcher’s knife. K’s utters his last words, “Like a dog!” as he realizes his predicament. [Editor’s Note: That dystopian novels such as The Trial are not read by every child before they leave the state’s Indoctrination Camps after 12 years, is indicative of the worldwide brainwashing, and it will become clearer why upon reading “The American Deep State’s Diabolical Quest to Make True Love Extinct” in this special “American Pivot to Dystopia” edition].
After the first day in court, Assange’s Queens Counsel Edward Fitzgerald reported in Woolwich Court his client was handcuffed 11 times, stripped twice, and moved between 5 holding cells, and his handwritten notes were seized by Her Majesty’s Belmarsh Prison staff. This was even beyond the theatrical sensibilities for the prosecution, James Lewis QC, who perhaps heard bells dinging in his head and saw a ‘Rail-Way/Crossing’ sign flash in his mind’s eye that declared ‘Mis-Trial/Biased Conductor Ahead’ instead.
Assange’s QC, Edward Fitzgerald, appealed several times through the week to Magistrate Vanessa Baraitser to have Assange released from a bullet-proof glass tank at the back of the court room. On Day 3 Baraitser blustered, saying the court would have no custody over Assange if she released him from the glass tank. Moreover, she claimed Fitzgerald would need to apply to court in writing and that new bail would need to be posted and ‘Group Four’ would need to conduct a risk assessment. The entity Group Four sounds like Kafka’s Committee of Affairs. Murray described the magistrate’s blustering as akin to a Darlek’s head spinning out of control as it blurted commands. Lewis evidently looked at Baraitser like a kindly uncle would during a family party when a favourite niece has just started drinking tequila straight – from the bottle.
From the glass tank, Assange complained, “I am as much a participant in these proceedings as I am at Wimbledon (tennis),” he told the judge. “I cannot communicate with my lawyers or ask them for clarifications.” Meanwhile, three US Department of Justice lawyers sit directly behind the UK Government’s prosecution lawyer James Lewis QC, and constantly communicate with him.
Outside the court, the accused’s father, John Shipton, emphasized the persecution of his son by way of summarised the captivity he has been subjected to. “Ten days solitary confinement in Wadsworth Prison. 18 months house arrest in Norich. Seven and a half years in the (Ecuadorian) Embassy. Ten months in Belmarsh maximum security. One year for an appeal for in future. Another appeal to the supreme court – two years. 13 years arbritary detention for a man who hasn’t committed a crime,” he told the news media after three days in Woolwich Crown Court.
The beginning of the trial’s first day set the tone for the unfolding theatre and was like a two-handed play between the prosecution lead counsel, James Lewis QC, and the prosecution’s ally representing Her Majesty’s Government, Magistrate Vanessa Baraitser. In his opening performance, James Lewis QC, did not direct his address to the magistrate but to the media, and according to Murray, it contained no legal argument.
Lewis twice stated he was addressing the media, whom were located in a separate room connected by video link, according to Murray’s account.
On the surface, Lewis was reassuring the news media that they were not on trial because Assange was not charged with publishing classified documents but only with publishing the names of informants, and with cultivating Bradley (later Chelsea) Manning and assisting him to attempt computer hacking, Lewis claimed. It was Assange who stood accused of these crimes, not the news media.
Fascinatingly, “Lewis then proceeded to read out a series of articles from the mainstream media attacking Assange, as evidence that the media and Assange were not in the same boat” – as Murray observed. Lewis appeared to be queuing the news media about what was the acceptable ‘journalism’, To support his political address, the media were handed printed copies of his opening statement, as well as electronic versions for easy Cut and Paste Journalism of the acceptable unfolding narrative.
Murray, who was a career diplomat in the UK Government, stated:
“It is completely out of order for a counsel to address remarks not to the court but to the media, and there simply could not be any clearer evidence that this is a political show trial and that Baraitser is complicit in that.”
And then Magistrate Baraitser’s complicity in becomes clearer after an adjournment.
She questioned the prosecution’s claim that newspapers were not vulnerable to prosecution since Assange is charged with “aiding and abetting” Bradley Manning in getting the material rather than merely publication of that material. The prosecution’s position appeared to be inconsistent with Lewis’ reading of the 1989 Official Secrets Act, which deemed that merely obtaining and publishing any government secret was an offence. Baraitser suggested newspapers whom published Manning’s leaks to WikiLeaks would be guilty of an offence.
Evidently, this ‘astute’ encoded threat posed as a question threw Lewis off guard and this Queen’s Counsel fumbled. It’s worth quoting Murray’s account, because it has only been reported in a few re-posts of his report, such as on the website of former Iran-Contra scandal scooping journalist Robert Parry, Consortium News, “ASSANGE EXTRADITION: Your Man in Public Gallery – Day No. 1”. Murray wrote:
“Lewis hummed and hawed, put his glasses on and off several times, adjusted his microphone repeatedly and picked up a succession of pieces of paper from his brief, each of which appeared to surprise him by its contents, as he waved them haplessly in the air and said he really should have cited the Shayler case but couldn’t find it.”
It’s fascinating that Lewis would mention “the Shayler case”, because it pertains to David Shayler who was a former member of the British Security Service, who was charged with breaches of the Official Secrets Act 1989 for supplying classified documents to the news media, and indeed writing an article for The Mail on Sunday’s 24 August 1997 edition, based on secrets of the British State. The ‘renegade’ MI5 officer skipped the country just prior to the publication, and lived in France for three years, during which time an attempt to extradite Shayler failed, as the House of Lords’ case file shows.
Therefore, are we to believe the prosecution team lacked a laptop and an internet connection to dial up ‘the Shayler case’ – which produced about 677,000 results in 0.62 of a second from The Snoopman’s news test facility beyond the sprawling urban limits of New Zealand’s 39th ranked global city, Auckland?
Lewis suddenly found his brain. He stated the Thatcher Government had passed the Official Secrets Act of 1989 removing the public interest as a defence and made unauthorized possession of an official secret a crime. Thus, this was how the prosecution’s argument – as presented above – took on a more sharpened focus. This was how the Woolwich Court heard about the principle of dual criminality – where Lewis stated that regardless of whether or not Assange had aided and abetted Manning, he was still liable for extradition.
In this way, the Kangaroo Court adjoined to Her Majesty’s Prison at Belmarsh heard that because the Iron Lady’s Official Secrets Act of 1989 is a similar law to the United States’s Espionage Act of 1917, the principle of dual criminality applies. Conveniently for the prosecution – which represents the Anglo-American Establishment – this means in cases of extradition, an accused politically-motivated mutinous person can be extradited from one country to stand trial for breaking the laws of the ‘Homeland’ of the United States of Empire’s when a similar law exists in the extraditing country.
On day four of the trial, Lewis claimed that political offences were behaviour intended “to overturn or change a government or induce it to change its policy.” Additionally, the objective was to affect policy change or government in the short term, rather than over an indefinite period, Lewis construed. He also asserted such offences had to have been made within the territory seeking the extradition. Moreover, Lewis argued that the UK Extradition Act of 2003 had not included the bar of political offence to block or obstruct extraditions.
Fitzgerald argued that the UK Extradition Act was the enabling act upon which the US-UK Extradition Treaty of 2007 came to be. Magistrate Baraitser made seventeen belittling, sarcastic interruptions during Fitzgerald’s counter-argument as a tactic to make it seem that the defence’s position was incoherent, lacking proper basis in law and to frustrate Assange’s QC getting his flow on.
The Magistrate stated the Extradition Treaty was not incorporated into English Law. Fitzgerald demolished the Magistrate’s attempt to disregard this crucial provision of the Extradition Treaty in this way, replying that the extradition request was made on the basis of Extradition Treaty and that it was an abuse of process and bizarre to subsequently claim that its provisions did not apply.
Fitzgerald went on to argue that Assange’s activities were political, because he was exposing war crimes and corruption and therefore were aimed at changing the government’s policy direction. Magistrate Baraitser interrupted again, stating that to expose government wrongdoing was not the same thing as to try to change government policy. Fitzgerald replied, with some exacerbation after so many interruptions, what other point would there be to publishing material that exposed government wrongdoing than to change the government policy?
Murray observed that it was Lewis whose arguments were illogical and yet he was interrupted “precisely once” for ‘clarification’ by the Magistrate. Cuttingly, Murray concluded his ‘Day 4’ report this way: “Baraitser’s comparative harassment of Fitzgerald when he had the prosecution on the ropes was straight out of the Stalin show trial playbook”.
This Kafkarian World in which background machinations of ‘the Process’ remains amorphous is applicable to the Deep State processes at play in the post-9/11 Universe. Particularly, since the principle authors, sponsors and engineers have never been formally indicted – as anyone who has read Kevin Ryan’s excellent, although unillustrated edition of Another Nineteen: Investigating Legitimate 9/11 Suspects – will well appreciate. This first part of a Kafka-esque show trial seeking to win a precedent-setting case to extradite a scapegoated citizen of a ‘Commonwealth nation’ that started out in life as a penal colony of the Third British Empire (1815-1945), is the tale of this Australian citizen who lost his political asylum.
This publisher of damning state secrets loses his political refugee status while holed-up in a South American Embassy in London, just one month after the Washington-based International Monetary Fund (IMF) finalized a $4.2 billion instalment of a $10 billion ‘loan’ deal signed in February 2019 with the president of a South American nation that, according to Bloomberg News, has only ever paid back one loan in two centuries. The US Department of Justice seeks to then fly this scapegoated Australian citizen to the home state of the CIA, Virginia, to face trial for informing the world about the war crimes of the US Government.
In this Kafkaesque tale, ‘The Trial’ took place in a Kangaroo Court located on a windswept marsh amid a maze of dual carriageways by the Thames River three squiggly bends away from the British Parliament in Westminster City, London, and, therefore, at a location less accessible to the Free Assange campaign’s supporters. Exquisitely – from the point of view of the Anglo-American Establishment – this Woolwich Royal Kangaroo Court is much closer towards the gaping maws of the English Channel, the Atlantic Ocean and US Code laws.
It turns out that extradition proceedings are supposed to be held at Westminster Magistrates Court, as the application is considered to be delivered to the government at Westminster, wrote Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, who queued from 6am for four hours amid the rain to get one of just sixteen public gallery seats on the first day.
Murray, who reported in “Your Man in the Public Gallery – Assange Hearing Day 1” – that this court of Her Majesty was “built on totally the opposite principle” of facilitating public transparency by the centuries-long practice of locating courthouses in the centre of towns. Instead, Belmarsh Magistrates Court, “is nothing but the physical negation of the presumption of innocence, the very incarnation of injustice in unyielding steel, concrete and armoured glass” because the court is “a part of the prison system itself, a place where you are already considered guilty and in jail on arrival”.
Assange’s Kafkaesque extradition hearing is deemed to be held at Westminster Magistrates Court, held by Westminster magistrates and Westminster court staff and is supervised by Westminster Chief Magistrate Lady Emma Arbuthnot, about whom Murray said he could not conceive how her involvement in this case could be more corrupt.
Lady Arbuthnot is married to Lord James Arbuthnot of Edrom, a former Conservative defence minister and Chairman of the Defence Select Committee (2005-2014), with extensive links to the very same British military and intelligence community that WikiLeaks exposed. Lord Arbuthnot was from 2016-17 a director of SC Strategy, a consultancy created by Sir John Scarlett, a former head of MI6 (2004 to 2009).
Scarlett co-fabricated with Tony Blair’s Downing Street Director of Communications and Strategy, Alastair Campbell, the ‘September Dossier’, formerly titled, “Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government”, published on September 24th 2002 to justify the Blair and Bush regimes plans to attack Iraq on March 17th 2003. By Scarlett’s vicious framing, Iraq possessed WMD, including chemical weapons and biological weapons and had reconstituted its nuclear weapons programme.
In 2004, the Iraq Survey Group, found Iraq possessed only small stockpiles posing an insignificant threat. Therefore, the Bush Regime and the Blair Regime lied when they construed that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the world, as Why We Fight showed. Iraq did not even possess intercontinental ballistic missiles.
In other words, Westminster’s Chief Magistrate Lady Emma Arbuthnot is married to a former UK Defence Minister, who was overseeing Britain’s military engagements during the period that WikiLeaks exposed the Iraq and Afghan War Logs, and who subsequently was co-director for a year with the former head of MI6, who was the principle author of the fabricated ‘September Dossier’ used by the Blair and Bush regimes to justify the America’s War on Iraq.
With these Orwellian connections to the Anglo-American Big Brother, is it any wonder that Westminster’s Chief Magistrate Lady Emma Arbuthnot has not sought to have Sir John Scarlett or former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair indicted, or former US President George W. Bush extradited for war crimes?
Not surprisingly then, in February 2018, and while Assange was a political asylee in the Ecuadorian Embassy in Knightsbridge London, Lady Arbuthnot refused a request by Assange’s lawyers to have his British arrest warrant withdrawn for having skipped bail conditions when he sought asylum protection on June 19h 2012. At the time, Australian journalist Phillip Knightley, said, “He’s been treated terribly by the British and Swedish justice systems and I think he’s the victim of a conspiracy.” Knightley added, Assange had sought asylum only “after exhausting every other possible remedy”.
The Cameron Government placed the Ecuadorian Embassy under a siege Meanwhile William Hague’s Foreign Office threatened to violate the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, telling Ecuador that it had the power to revoke the embassy’s diplomatic status under the Diplomatic and Consular Premises Act 1987. (This act was passed by the UK Parliament following the Libyan embassy crisis three years before, when police officer Yvonne Fletcher was shot dead outside the Libyan Embassy in London in 1984). However, Hague’s threat to diplomatic inviolability of Ecuador’s Embassy to send the police in to get Assange triggered outrage across the world and forced the UK Government to back down.
In spite of Assange expressing concerns of being handed over to US authorities in the Swedish extradition proceedings, he was dismissed out of hand by Westminster Chief Magistrate. Lady Arbuthnot stated, “I do not find that Mr Assange’s fears were reasonable,” in the deceptively plain language of a calculating bureaucratic spider in the midst of weaving fresh silk in the Great Anglo-American New World Order Web. In effect, Lady Arbuthnot was escalating prior élite criminal behaviours, lest she trigger defections on the next moves, in accordance with hostage postings – as game theory could predict.
In this epic game of contrived ignorance, Lady Emma Arbuthnot performed a screening act when she ‘failed to see’ Assange was cleverly, callously and conspiratorially scapegoated in a long-game to kill off bona fide scoops, as this investigation shows. Screening actions are intentionally performed to avoid looking, whether institutionally, or individually, and when deftly executed at the right moments, they can very effectively sponsor subsequent unwitting misdeeds, as David Luban discussed in his 2007 book, Legal Ethics and Human Dignity, and as he modelled for in his paper “Contrived Ignorance”, published in The Georgetown Law Journal in 1999.
Luban argued the case for modelling the “Structure of Contrived Ignorance” by viewing screening actions and so-called unwitting misdeeds as a unitary whole rather than separated by time-frames. He proposed viewing the version of the self that wittingly performed screening actions to preserve her own oblivion as the principle actor, while the agent is the later self at the time of the unwitting misdeed, who effectively ratifies the earlier self’s choice to compartmentalize, or screen off, potential knowledge of wrongdoing. In other words, Lady Emma Arbuthnot February 2018-self was the principle actor to preserve her own oblivion, while her February 2020-self as Chief Magistrate of Westminster is the agent at the time of the unwitting misdeed of a Kangaroo Court show trial.
In making his point that, “in criminal law, wilful ignorance is ground for conviction, rather than acquittal,” Luban was in essence, laying out the gaps in catching and convicting group enterprises that contrive ignorance. A quote he draws from a U.S. trial seems apt for this case study of British Techno-Feudal state formation in a Kafka-esque Trial context: “Ostriches … are not merely careless birds.”
Fascinatingly, Lady Arbuthnot’s biased ruling of February 2018 took place roughly five years after the Obama Administration dropped the case.
The decision to initiate an investigation into Assange and WikiLeaks was actually made by President Barack Obama in late 2010. Assange caught wind of the secret criminal investigation, as CNN reported December 13 2010, in “Assange attorney: Secret grand jury meeting in Virginia on WikiLeaks”. This was the same day that TIME published the now infamously symbolic cover depicting state censorship with the Star and Stripes flag sealed over the mouth of Assange, whose stares forever at the viewer from a starkly-contrasted black and white photo. Attorney General Eric Holder had acknowledged in the first week of December 2010 that he had authorized a criminal investigation into WikiLeaks following its publication of U.S. diplomatic cables, starting November 28.
After this two-year US investigation was initiated, the DOJ in 2013 pointed out to President Barack Hussein Obama that Assange’s actions constituted journalism. Obama reluctantly dropped the case.
The Trump administration doubled-down to indict Assange by re-presenting the same evidence that the Obama Regime reluctantly dropped, as The Intercept reported in an April 2019 article, “The U.S. Government’s Indictment of Julian Assange Poses Grave Threats to Press Freedom”, upon Assange’s seizure from the Ecuadorian Embassy.
Specifically, “the Obama DOJ since at least 2011 was well-aware of the core allegation of the indictment — Assange tried to help Manning circumvent a password wall so she could use a different username — because that was all part of [Chelsea] Manning’s charges”, as The Intercept reported.
The DOJ’s key accusation to frame the WikiLeaks founder for conspiracy as a hacker – and not as a journalist – is that Assange attempted to help US Army Private, Bradley Manning, who subsequently became Chelsea Manning by helping the whistle-blower crack a password in order to cover his tracks. Assange is also accused of trying to help Manning log into the Department of Defence computers using another username to maintain anonymity in order to download documents for WikiLeaks to publish.
The core allegations, therefore, can be distilled down to attempting to criminalize what is standard operating procedure for journalists: encourage a potential source to gain secret information and to take steps to protect that source’s identity – as former constitutional lawyer and US citizen Glenn Greenwald reported for The Intercept.
The US extradition request to UK authorities was authorized by Sajid Javid, who was Britain’s Home Secretary from April 2018 to July 2019. It turns out, Javid was ensconced in the milieu of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a pro-US Empire think-tank that holds annual ‘World Forum’ conferences. Many ‘luminaries’ of Bush II Regime whom were the architects, enablers or supporters of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars have presented talks at the AEI forums. These war-mongering, conspiring élites, and their former official posts, included: Vice President Dick Cheney, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, CIA Director Michael Hayden; Air Force Space Commander William Shelton; and Governor of Florida Jeb Bush.
These wars were, in fact, consistent with the diabolical world domination vision of a little-known and now defunct think-tank called The Project for a New American Century (or PNAC). This Zionist-aligned Neo-Conservative think-tank was formed in 1997 and was riddled with élites such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, among others, whom became key figures in the Bush II Regime, as Why We Fight shows.
In a white paper titled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”, published in September 2000 by the Project for a New American Century, its authors argued that America had to be seen to be fighting two major wars simultaneously. If the US did not, the authors stated, then America would lose its sole superpower status and risk devolving into a no-war power. “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” advocated embarking on a ‘revolution in military affairs’, by which was meant a radical transformation of US military organization, war technologies and deployment. This transformation, the authors chillingly stated, would likely be a long one, “absent some catastrophic and catalysing event – like a new Pearl Harbor” – as the NewStatesmanAmerica reported in an article, “John Pilger reveals the American plan: a new Pearl Harbour” on 16 December 2002.
In other words, the rhetoric accusing Assange of recklessly risking US military lives in America’s Wars against Afghanistan and Iraq can only hold if the subterfuge remains intact that the United States Government’s viciously fraudulent justifications for those wars is forgotten. And, that the magistrates and judges presiding over the UK to US extradition proceedings advance the contrived ignorance game about the fact that the Anglo-American-NATO military empire needed these wars to inflict regime changes to get compliant governments on behalf of super-wealthy billionaire coalitions, as Professor Peter Phillips found while researching, Giants: The Global Power Elite.
The dirty secret of US national security interests is that the American Deep State is locked in to a rivalrous race against the other two super-powers, Russia and China, to secure carbon energy resources, minerals, drug production, and narcotics routes, infrastructure and territories for their Techno-Feudal corporate empires. Those imperial games entail destabilizing governments with coup d’états, dirty wars and strategies of tension and are accompanied by Shock Doctrine economic warfare.
Every empire needs an instrument of expansion, as Professor Carroll Quigley demonstrated in The Evolution of Civilization – An Introduction to Historical Analysis. The chip is the new instrument of expansion.
This revolution is displacing the credit revolution, which funded 500 years of European Maritime Empire-building, that began with the Venetian Empire. The credit revolution eventually displaced overt slavery as an instrument of expansion and funded more complex institutions, wage-labour and the rise of the machines.
Therefore, Westminster’s Chief Magistrate, Lady Arbuthnot’s ears are made of a multi-state and trans-corporate tin-alloy.
For one thing, Assange had said ever since the Swedish Authorities persisted with their fabricated rape allegations as a mechanism to gain his extradition or prolong his containment, that the real intent was to have him arrested and extradited to the United States to face a ‘show trial’ and lock him away for the rest of his life.
Incredibly, Swedish Authorities had never charged Assange with a crime, but instead had created the perception that he committed two rapes he was accused of in Stockholm in August 2010.
Therefore, it follows that Lady Arbuthnot’s ‘Tin Ears Ruling’ of February 2018 for an extradition to proceed could only have been made if she felt safe that the élite milieu she is embedded in, is a clique embroiled in a gambit so brazen, well-resourced and inter-connected that they believe they won’t ever end up in prison themselves.
The Relentless Persecution of Julian Assange
With such machinations laid bare, TIME readers will better appreciate what a pity it is the defence did not get to call the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer. This was indeed a shame, because the Assange campaign might have gotten a whiff of how to turn this show trial to their advantage – by investing a chunk of the donations in a Free Assange popcorn brand. They could have made a windfall to take their fight to the ‘next level’, by getting the Kafka-esque ‘Trial’ cancelled and sponsoring a production crew to film a web-cast of a trail of the Anglo-American Establishment in the House of Lords – in full uncensored HD-film-tape quality with R-18 empire-porn classification.
Like, next-level Frost vs Nixon.
Melzer could have educated the biased Magistrate Vanessa Baraitser about the Rule of Law Doctrine which requires just laws, fairness, and accountability, as well as timely due process with accessible, impartial disputes resolution, and a proper examination of the facts, rather than arbitrary applications of law – lest authorities aid or abet the formation of a totalitarian police state.
In a recent exclusive interview, Melzer told Republik magazine, that, “Julian Assange uncovered torture, has been tortured himself and could be tortured to death in the United States. Beyond that, the case is of symbolic importance and affects every citizen of a democratic country.”
Melzer, told Republik magazine that despite Assange exposing war crimes, torture and corruption, no one was punished while journalism was being re-classified as espionage.
Melzer stated Assange used his WikiLeaks platform to shine a spotlight on ‘the elephant in the room’ by exposing war criminals and corruption. After an initial shock, the exposed governments regroup, take hold of the spotlight and shine it on the accuser with their own accusations – in Assange’s case, the fabricated allegations of rape, for instance.
“It is a classic maneuver when it comes to manipulating public opinion. The elephant once again disappears into the darkness, behind the spotlight. And Assange becomes the focus of attention instead, and we start talking about whether Assange is skateboarding in the embassy or whether he is feeding his cat correctly.” – Republik
Indeed, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture, found that Assange had been persecuted by the Swedish authorities in a conspiracy with the United States, Britain and Australia, to punish him for exposing war crimes and corruption. Melzer said Assange was subjected to psychological torture. He told Republik magazine that the war crimes, torture and corruption that Assange had exposed did not result in anyone being punished and instead journalism was being re-classified as espionage, which led him to make the chilling statement that a “A murderous system is being created before our very eyes”.
As Australian super-blogger Caitlin Johnstone wrote, “Julian Assange started a leak outlet on the premise that corrupt and unaccountable power is a problem in our world, and that problem can be fought with the light of truth. Corrupt and unaccountable power responded by detaining, silencing and smearing him. His persecution has proved his own thesis about the world absolutely correct.”
When
journalist Glenn Greenwald
was
charged in January 2020
by the Bolsonaro Government
in Brazil with the same prosecutorial angle used by the US to target
WikiLeaks
founder Julian Assange, Johnstone
observed
that America’s dominant position is under threat since China has
resisted being absorbed into the “imperial blob”. She added that
the American Empire has to consolidate its global control to stave
off being overtaken by rival powers, which means an escalation in
wars, coups and propaganda. the US military. But
before the US could escalate its plans, Johnstone
wrote:
“The empire is setting all these legal precedents against oppositional journalism because it fully intends to use those precedents in the future. It fully intends to use those legal precedents in the future because it knows it’s going to have to make things ugly.”
However, the Empire’s apparent attempt to set a legal precedent with Glenn Greenwald amazingly took a hike faster than you can say ‘facsimile’.
In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four there is a passage from an imagined non-fiction book titled, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein, who is the official enemy of Oceania. In The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, the character Goldstein ‘wrote’ that “[i]n the long-run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.” In other words, “the extremes between the wealthy and the poor are sustained by hierarchical power structures that have an interest in maintaining widespread ignorance about the purpose of ruling institutions”, stated the 2012 version of myself in my masters thesis, “It’s the Financial Oligarchy, Stupid”.
Winston Smith learns from reading Goldstein that the true purpose of military warfare, as inflicted by unseen super-rich oligarchs, is to waste the resources, productivity and creative energy of their own mass populaces, lest they overthrow the totalitarian oligarchies that rule them by stealth. It follows that economic warfare is pursued for the same purpose by all competing and allied regimes acting to an ‘unwritten code of statecraft conduct’.
With this insight into the American Deep State’s machinations, this is why the 2014 version of myself authored the fake version of Lorde’s Grammy Speech, in which I, The Snoopman, had the Queen Bee singer-songwriter, Ella Yelich-O’Connor, warn the world about the rapid militarization of the planet by major and significant states and their police forces. “Planet Earth,” said Lorde in The Snoopman’s Universe, “is run by psychopaths that hide behind slick marketing, ‘freedom’ propaganda and ‘economic growth’ rhetoric, while they construct a global system of corporatized totalitarianism”.
The idea underpinning the satirical speech and the supporting articles, that made speech seem plausible, was to educate innocent brainwashed kids zoned-out on their shiny things as it spread virally inside its celebrity-packaged Trojan Horse mechanism laden with references including the works of Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Naomi Klein, Chris Hedges, Daniel Estulin and William Engdahl. Although these names are known to the Establishment Media Missionaries, they are ignored. Because, to proactively inform their news audiences about deep state machinations would ruin the stealthy incrementalism required to complete the construction of the New World Order Utopia, as a “fifth objective” of the Gulf War that was brazenly announced from the pulpit of the US Congress on September 11th 1990 by President George Herbert Walker Bush.
This quest for a universal empire is the real reason why key insiders of the Swedish authorities really fabricated evidence to frame Assange for the rape allegations back in 2010. The witting conspiracy to inflict a malicious smear campaign that would fool much of the world into believing that Assange was a fugitive rapist, rather than a political refugee of several hostile western regimes, is really about front-footing a huge threat to the New World Order empire project: the whistle-blower enabling platform WikiLeaks.
The propaganda has been effective.
After-all, it took Nils Melzer until 2019 to realize that Assange had never actually been charged with rape. The UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture said he found Stockholm Police and a ring-in Swedish Prosecutor changed the testimonies of two women who had simply gone to a Stockholm Police station on August 20th 2010 to see if they could make Assange take a HIV test. The two women had had sex during separate sleeps with Assange while he was in Stockholm at a conference.
It turns out that the testimony of the first woman, S.W., had been altered against her will and without her knowledge. She never accused Assange of rape. The testimony of the second woman, A.A., was logically inconsistent about her claim that Assange deliberately broke a condom. That same August 20th, two hours after S.W. left the Stockholm Police station, a Swedish tabloid news outlet, Expressen, ran a frontpage headline claiming Assange was a wanted suspect for two rapes.
This frame-up job occurred without corroborating testimony or evidence, or even the legal authority to publish the name of the accused.
The original conspiracy began with ‘informal discussions’ between US and Swedish officials, as The Independent revealed in December 2010, says Australian journalist John Pilger in “The Persecution of Julian Assange” in CounterPunch Magazine.
This ‘meeting of minds’ occurred before August 20th 2010, when the allegation of two rapes was printed in Expressen.
Stockholm’s Chief Prosecutor, Eva Finne, immediately took over the investigation, cancelled the arrest warrant, then four days later closed the rape investigation, saying, “There is no suspicion of any crime whatsoever.” Next, Social Democratic Party Claes Borgstrom, a high profile politician and lawyer, announced he had found a public prosecutor with links to the Social Democrats, Marrianne Ny, from the Gothenberg City, and that Borgstrom knew well. Borgstrom said he was representing the two women.
On August 30, Julian Assange fronted up to a Stockholm Police station, gave a statement and answered all questions. Yet, two days later, Ny announced she was re-opening the case.
As game theory could predict, the same day that Ny announced she was re-opening the case, the head of Sweden’s military intelligence service (“MUST”) publicly denounced WikiLeaks in an article entitled “WikiLeaks [is] a threat to our soldiers.” Evidently, the Swedish intelligence service, SAP, had been threatened by its US counterparts that US-Sweden intelligence-sharing arrangements would be “cut off” if Sweden sheltered Mr Assange.
Ny advanced the game too.
Assange waited for five weeks as Ny’s new investigation appeared to take its Kafka-esque course. Assange’s Stockholm lawyer asked Ny if his client was free to leave Sweden and she expressed no objection, which in essence riffed of The Trial. Assange left for London to oversee the The Guardian publishing of the Iraq “War Logs” from WikiLeaks-cached documents. Upon leaving Sweden, Ny swiftly issued a European Arrest Warrant, which was a Global War on Terror product, and an Interpol “red alert” in five languages. This framing move, essentially, cast Assange in the same light as terrorists and dangerous criminals, which worked a treat to escalate the smear campaign of a fugitive ‘double-rapist’.
Amid the media spike of this malicious smear campaign, Assange reported to a Police Station in London, where he was arrested, electronically tagged like a retailer would do to high ticket products to deter shop-lifting, and subjected to a £340,000 bail-bond requiring he report to Police daily. Because the European Arrest Warrant had abolished the obligation on a petitioning state to provide any evidence of a crime, Assange was cast into a post-9/11 Universe legal-limbo.
In December 2010, The Independent revealed Sweden and US discussed Assange’s extradition to the US before the European Arrest Warrant was issued. Swedish prosecutor, Marianne Ny, has refused to come to London to question Assange about allegations of sexual misconduct in Stockholm in 2010.
In
response to Marianne Ny’s refusal to do her job properly, Swedish
press published headlines such as: “Go to London, for God’s
sake.” Swedish authorities had not formally charged Assange, which
means Ny could construe she could avoid handing over documents and
she claimed she couldn’t formally charge him until she had
questioned him. The Swede Authorities would only allow Assange’s
Swedish lawyers to “review” the women’s SMS messages, which
meant they had to commit what they viewed to the memory of their soft
brain-ware. This meant the Defend Assange Campaign could not counter
the rape smears by tweeting to the world what the women actually said
to one another.
In December 2015, the Swedish Supreme Court ordered Marianne Ny’s boss – the Prosecutor General of Sweden Anders Perklev – to explain why Ny breached her duty by keeping Assange’s case in a state of suspended animation since late 2010 and defied the Court of Appeal. The next day, Ny announced she would now question Assange in London. But then she didn’t.
“Ostriches … are not merely careless birds.”
Ny
sent a deputy as screening
actor, without
bothering
to get Ecuador’s approval for the meeting. At the same time, her
office tipped off the Swedish tabloid newspaper Expressen,
which sent its London correspondent to wait outside Ecuador’s embassy
for “news”. Expressen
once
again acted as a vector for the transmission of lies,telling
the world it was
Ecuador’s
fault that Ny
was
forced to cancel the
appointment. The
inference that Assange
was
“unco-operative”. Another
unwitting misdeed, authored by the Swedish Ostriche, Marianne Ny.
The crescendo moment to this smear campaign came when Equador’s new President Lenín Boltaire Moreno Garcés claimed on the BBC that Assange smeared his cat’s faeces on the walls of embassy. The BBC interviewer failed to guffaw at this obvious smear tactic, perhaps because the chairman’s role at the BBC is approved by the Monarch. The Fourth Estate Media outlets dutifully reproduced this cat shit smear tactic throughout the global newschain, without offering any scepticism such as asking the Equadorian President, or its cleaning company, to supply evidence for what any sharp nine year-old learning about propaganda would quickly identify as a rudely nakedsmear tactic.
The American Deep State script-writers were essentially saying the writing is on the wall, ‘if you cross us, we can frame you in every newspaper, every news bulletin and every news website to make sure the shit sticks’. This display of spectacular power showed a reassertion of control of the narrative’.
The cat-shit smear is one surface artefact left behind by this network of Deep State actors. There is now an exquisite data-set revealing applied game theory, complete with players performing to hostage posting scripts, embedded with codified communications, signalling threats and rewards and signposting cues for the direction to take, as the American Deep State doubled-down like Wiley E. Coyote trying to capture, maim or kill the Roadrunner, Julian Assange. The crucial point to comprehend is that Hannah Barbara never disclosed who funded, supplied and trained Coyote to use the rockets, guns and explosive devices manufactured by ACME.
Equador’s President Lenín Boltaire Moreno Garcés advanced the game when he, in effect, accepted the role as the International Monetary Fund’s bounty-hunter. The Wild West Financial Press dutifully printed his country’s capture with the headline-grabbing $4.2 billion IMF ‘loan’ instalment of what was a $10 billion bounty.
“Ostriches … are not merely careless birds.”
The syntax of this ‘loan’ deal actually signalled hostage postings as state actors became form of bonds to stabilize the changing power structures moving closer toward full-blown totalitarian regimes, as game theory could predict. The bounty hunter, President Moreno, had accepted a $10 billion wanted note as a reward for turning over the exiled Australian WikiLeaks hacker on America’s Most Wanted Man espionage indictment list. Tellingly, Bloomberg reported Ecuador had only paid back one bond issue in its two-century history. Therefore, President Moreno’s subsequent appearance on the BBC was in effect, a SMEAR SCENE to rub in his collection of the $10 billion reward in an epic Hollywood multi-season news psy-op production that somehow never failed to censor the Bruce Wayne-esque mansion scene of billionaire bankers exercising a form of oligarchic wealth offence plotting to protect their interconnected trillionaire-transnational empires.
In a recent speech given by Caitlin Johnstone in Melbourne titled “Assange’s Persecution Has Exposed Media Depravity The World Over”, the Australian super-blogger slammed the news media for their character assassination attacks on WikiLeaks’ publisher Julian Assange. Johnstone wrote:
“The spotlight Assange’s persecution has thrown on the institution of journalism is one of the untold stories, mainly because the villains are the journalists. This corruption was unearthed not so much through leaked documents, but through what we have been witnessing as the media-driven public mobbing of Julian Assange the person.
If you pick up any recent story about Assange it will be littered with smears and lies. They’ll say offhand how he colluded with the Russians like that’s true, or that he was ‘charged’ with rape, or they’ll have a throwaway line about how he smeared poo on the walls of the embassy, or they will say the reason he was granted asylum by Ecuador was to flee rape charges (like that’s a thing).”
Johnstone pointed out that the Fourth Estate Media are culpable not only for ‘mobbing’ Assange with brazen lies, smears and a failure to supply context. She also called out the news media for avoiding publishing and broadcasting retractions.
The impact of the system-wide propaganda through the global news-chain had been so effective, even the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, admitted, in essence, he had been brainwashed. You could say, this brainwashing occurred by means of Orwellian ‘Two Minutes Hate’ broadcasts on the nightly ‘Bubble Gum TV News’ in two minute dirty political hit-piece news stories on Assange and WikiLeaks.
A clarion call to save the American Empire was sounded on October 29 2010 when a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Jonah Goldberg penned a dog-whistling piece “All Quiet on the Black-Ops Front” that appeared to called for Assange’s assassination. Numerous people, including the Mark Curtis, author of Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Foreign Policy, have reported Goldberg’s apparent call to have Assange ‘garroted’. Goldberg asked, “Why wasn’t Assange garroted in his hotel room years ago? It’s a serious question.” And missed Goldberg’s purpose. The AEI fellow was dog-whistling for an army of character assassins to scapegoat Assange. His rhetoric is a run-through American political life, claiming that WikiLeaks is the most serious risk to “American national security since the Rosenbergs gave the Soviets the bomb”.
As any smart AEI fellow would know, security risk assessments match the threat to risk of various ‘solutions’ that range across the spectrum from character assassination to actual assassination. Towards the end of his blog, he points out the CIA couldn’t whack Assange “without massive controversy”. Goldberg mentions liberals and conservatives, how they view intelligence agencies, and popular images of intrigue. He referred to liberals at The Nation who mock the CIA’s bungled attempts to kill Castro with an exploding cigar. Golderg said conservatives think the CIA wear London-fog trench-coats as a way to say Assange should have been food poisoned years before anyone had ever heard of him.
With poetic irony that would make Shakespeare cream his Levi jeans if he had quietly incarnated as a novelist some years back, Goldberg blamed that perennial American Deep State adjunct of White House Studios – Hollywood.
Even as he maintained the official JFK assassination conspiracy theory that Lee Harvey Oswald essentially possessed a magic bullet – that amazingly no military has ever been tempted to patent, mass-manufacture, and deploy – as he mocked “Oliver Stone types”. And by way of a circular argument he also claimed that the main evidence that the US Government had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center was that “no one has the ability to pull off a conspiracy like that”. And, besides, the spooks are too decent and patriotic. He actually said America’s spooks are too decent and patriotic to plot 9/11.
The Snoopman just heard Cody Snogres whisper, “Ostriches … are not merely careless birds,” in Colorado’s woods with his super-sonic hearing. Honest.
Reading the tea leaves of Goldberg’s “All Quiet on the Black-Ops Front”, there’s a detectable contrived sincerity deployed to pull off writing a warning that Assange had to be scapegoated in a very public, brutal and humiliating way to regain control of the narrative in Act I of a Hollywood news production to save the Empire. It also appears Goldberg was dogwhistling to an audience attuned to hearing message amid the fog, to deter further defections of Deep State insiders that could supply WikiLeaks with classified documents showing the stealth, cunning and evil of the American Deep State in plotting 9/11.
Perhaps the American Enterprise Institute felt vulnerable.
After all, one of Kevin Ryan’s key persons of interest in Another Nineteen: Investigating Legitimate 9/11 Suspects, is Donald Rumsfeld who was not only an active cell in the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). In the mid-1990s, he was also a trustee of American Enterprise Institute and at the war-planning think-tank that gave the world game theory – the Rand Corporation. Rumsfeld, had for three decades worked in Dick Cheney on Continuity of Government planning for catastrophic emergencies, dubbed ‘the Doomsday Project’ – as the professor who popularized the term ‘deep state’, Peter Dale Scott explored in The American Deep State.
Intriguingly, Rumsfeld joked in a US Congressional House Appropriations Committee hearing two months before 9/11 that the Comptroller of the Currency, Dov Zakheim, had “got a handle; it’s just a little hot” on an audit failure issue of figuring out where $2.3 trillion in missing transactions in the Department of Defence had gotten “snarled up”. Before joining the Bush II Administration, Zakheim, who was also member of the Project for a New American Century, had been CEO of System Planning Corporation (1987-2001), a company that developed Flight Termination Technology. This technology was successfully tested before 9/11, including the take-over of a Federal Express 727 jet. Flight Termination Technology made it possible to take over commercial airliners by remote control, effectively rendering pilots as helpless front-seat passengers. Ostensibly, the technology was developed to counter hijackings. This and other circumstantial evidence suggests that the ‘hijacked jets’ were replaced by remote-controlled jets as they flew over air-fields. The pair appeared with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Hugh Shelton, who had signed off on the Full Spectrum Dominance plan for a permanent American-led military empire during the Clinton Regime.
Indeed, in 2008, “a war on WikiLeaks and on Julian Assange was foretold”, wrote Australian journalist and prolific documentary-maker, John Pilger, “in a secret Pentagon document prepared by the ‘Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch’. It described a detailed plan to destroy the feeling of ‘trust’ which is WikiLeaks‘ ‘centre of gravity’.”
In a mega-blog post – “Debunking All the Assange Smears” – Caitlin Johnstone created a list with explanations and hyper-links on everything from, “He’s a Russian agent”, to He’s a Rapist”, to “He’s being prosecuted for hacking/espionage crimes, not journalism”, “He’s an antisemite”, “He’s a fascist”, “He was a Trump supporter”, “He’s got blood on his hands”, “He was a bad houseguest,”and all the way through to number 30, “He recklessly published unredacted documents.” But after 10 years of scapegoating no one has produced any evidence to support these allegations of what was actually an orchestrated smear campaign, which means no evidence exists.
At the end of 2019, Melzer told Republik magazine that he quickly realised that Assange had been subjected to a relentless smear campaign, but only after he relented to Assange’s lawyers attempts to get him to read the WikiLeaks’ founder’s case-file in 2019. Because the Swiss national is fluent in Swedish he was able to read the Stockholm police and Swedish public prosecutors’ files on Assange. To his surprise, Melzer, found that Julian Assange had been subject to nine years of a preliminary investigation for rape without charges ever having been filed against him.
Chillingly, in April, 2017, then CIA Director Mike Pompeo evinced“we have to recognize that we can no longer allow Assange and his colleagues the latitude to use free speech values against us.” Pompeo packaged his rhetoric to protect the national interest of the privileged prosperous propertied class with a threat: “To give them the space to crush us with misappropriated secrets is a perversion of what our great Constitution stands for. It ends now.” Pompeo’s stance was a reiteration of the attitude of the framers of the Constitution, whom crafted a framework to protect their position as a propertied class from working class white immigrants, African slaves and the indigenous Indian tribes, whose remaining lands they coveted – as Noam Chomsky explains in Requiem for an American Dream.
If Julian Assange is extradited to the United States, he will likely face a show trial grand jury in Virginia. US law requires juries be comprised of the demographics of the state. 80% of the Virginia’s population is employed by the government, in a state that is home to the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency.
“Ostriches … are not merely careless birds”.
In a speech given last week at an event to support Julian Assange, George Galloway said the church should have been “bulging with journalists” in defence of their profession and the persecuted hero – “the world historic figure, Julian Assange” – whose prisoner number A9379AY he read out.
Galloway recounted how the CIA had snooped on the Ecuadorian Embassy in Knightsbridge, London, with cameras and microphones. The bugging even extended to the perverted recording of the embassy’s toilet, meaning that his supporters, including Hollywood actress Pamela Anderson was recorded as she went for a pee. More importantly, Galloway said, the recording of Assange’s conversations with his legal representation would normally be enough to have the trial thrown out for such an outrageous breach of due process.
But in this dystopian pivot to totalitarianism, the game is to send Assange for the rest of his life into “the dungeons of the US injustice system – journalism, freedom, freedom of speech, democracy its will have been murdered on our watch. And that is why we are going to fight and fight and fight again to free Julian Assange.”
Shaking his raised fist, Galloway bellowed, “Free Julian Assange!”
The founder of WikiLeaks was sent to Her Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh for a term of 50 weeks precisely because he is a intelligent strategist whose highly organized brain updates across multiple files as it receives new information. The Anglo-American Establishment know their case would collapse if he were sitting with his legal team as the case unfolded and speak for himself directly to the magistrate, whose bias he could use to bind her malicious mouth and make her mushed mind go blind.
This is the point of no return when the protagonist considers giving up because he and his core supporters find out what is really going on. The situation is bleaker than they imagined. It is a scene that does not necessarily involve big action or a climax.
In a three Act story structure, it is the half way point, where the protagonist is forced to reassess their quest, formulate new more specific, focused goals. The protagonist takes commits to a new overarching goal totally in a way he cannot back out of, raising the stakes and escalating risks.
Action is character.