Category Archives: Media Literacy

The Martyrdom of Julian Assange

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By Chris Hedges

Source: Truthdig

The arrest Thursday of Julian Assange eviscerates all pretense of the rule of law and the rights of a free press. The illegalities, embraced by the Ecuadorian, British and U.S. governments, in the seizure of Assange are ominous. They presage a world where the internal workings, abuses, corruption, lies and crimes, especially war crimes, carried out by corporate states and the global ruling elite will be masked from the public. They presage a world where those with the courage and integrity to expose the misuse of power will be hunted down, tortured, subjected to sham trials and given lifetime prison terms in solitary confinement. They presage an Orwellian dystopia where news is replaced with propaganda, trivia and entertainment. The arrest of Assange, I fear, marks the official beginning of the corporate totalitarianism that will define our lives.

Under what law did Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno capriciously terminate Julian Assange’s rights of asylum as a political refugee? Under what law did Moreno authorize British police to enter the Ecuadorian Embassy—diplomatically sanctioned sovereign territory—to arrest a naturalized citizen of Ecuador? Under what law did Prime Minister Theresa May order the British police to grab Assange, who has never committed a crime? Under what law did President Donald Trump demand the extradition of Assange, who is not a U.S. citizen and whose news organization is not based in the United States?

I am sure government attorneys are skillfully doing what has become de rigueur for the corporate state, using specious legal arguments to eviscerate enshrined rights by judicial fiat. This is how we have the right to privacy with no privacy. This is how we have “free” elections funded by corporate money, covered by a compliant corporate media and under iron corporate control. This is how we have a legislative process in which corporate lobbyists write the legislation and corporate-indentured politicians vote it into law. This is how we have the right to due process with no due process. This is how we have a government—whose fundamental responsibility is to protect citizens—that orders and carries out the assassination of its own citizens such as the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son. This is how we have a press legally permitted to publish classified information and a publisher sitting in jail in Britain awaiting extradition to the United States and a whistleblower, Chelsea Manning, in a jail cell in the United States.

Britain will use as its legal cover for the arrest the extradition request from Washington based on conspiracy charges. This legal argument, in a functioning judiciary, would be thrown out of court. Unfortunately, we no longer have a functioning judiciary. We will soon know if Britain as well lacks one.

Assange was granted asylum in the embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden to answer questions about sexual offense allegations that were eventually dropped. Assange and his lawyers always argued that if he was put in Swedish custody he would be extradited to the United States. Once he was granted asylum and Ecuadorian citizenship the British government refused to grant Assange safe passage to the London airport, trapping him in the embassy for seven years as his health steadily deteriorated.

The Trump administration will seek to try Assange on charges that he conspired with Manning in 2010 to steal the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs obtained by WikiLeaks. The half a million internal documents leaked by Manning from the Pentagon and the State Department, along with the 2007 video of U.S. helicopter pilots nonchalantly gunning down Iraqi civilians, including children, and two Reuters journalists, provided copious evidence of the hypocrisy, indiscriminate violence, and routine use of torture, lies, bribery and crude tactics of intimidation by the U.S. government in its foreign relations and wars in the Middle East. Assange and WikiLeaks allowed us to see the inner workings of empire—the most important role of a press—and for this they became empire’s prey.

U.S. government lawyers will attempt to separate WikiLeaks and Assange from The New York Times and the British newspaper The Guardian, both of which also published the leaked material from Manning, by implicating Assange in the theft of the documents. Manning was repeatedly and often brutally pressured during her detention and trial to implicate Assange in the seizure of the material, something she steadfastly refused to do. She is currently in jail because of her refusal to testify, without her lawyer, in front of the grand jury assembled for the Assange case. President Barack Obama granted Manning, who was given a 35-year sentence, clemency after she served seven years in a military prison.

Once the documents and videos provided by Manning to Assange and WikiLeaks were published and disseminated by news organizations such as The New York Times and The Guardian, the press callously, and foolishly, turned on Assange. News organizations that had run WikiLeaks material over several days soon served as conduits in a black propaganda campaign to discredit Assange and WikiLeaks. This coordinated smear campaign was detailed in a leaked Pentagon document prepared by the Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch and dated March 8, 2008. The document called on the U.S. to eradicate the “feeling of trust” that is WikiLeaks’ “center of gravity” and destroy Assange’s reputation.

Assange, who with the Manning leaks had exposed the war crimes, lies and criminal manipulations of the George W. Bush administration, soon earned the ire of the Democratic Party establishment by publishing 70,000 hacked emails belonging to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and senior Democratic officials. The emails were copied from the accounts of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. The Podesta emails exposed the donation of millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, two of the major funders of Islamic State, to the Clinton Foundation. It exposed the $657,000 that Goldman Sachs paid to Hillary Clinton to give talks, a sum so large it can only be considered a bribe. It exposed Clinton’s repeated mendacity. She was caught in the emails, for example, telling the financial elites that she wanted “open trade and open borders” and believed Wall Street executives were best positioned to manage the economy, a statement that contradicted her campaign statements. It exposed the Clinton campaign’s efforts to influence the Republican primaries to ensure that Trump was the Republican nominee. It exposed Clinton’s advance knowledge of questions in a primary debate. It exposed Clinton as the primary architect of the war in Libya, a war she believed would burnish her credentials as a presidential candidate. Journalists can argue that this information, like the war logs, should have remained hidden, but they can’t then call themselves journalists.

The Democratic leadership, intent on blaming Russia for its election loss, charges that the Podesta emails were obtained by Russian government hackers, although James Comey, the former FBI director, has conceded that the emails were probably delivered to WikiLeaks by an intermediary. Assange has said the emails were not provided by “state actors.”

WikiLeaks has done more to expose the abuses of power and crimes of the American Empire than any other news organization. In addition to the war logs and the Podesta emails, it made public the hacking tools used by the CIA and the National Security Agency and their interference in foreign elections, including in the French elections. It disclosed the internal conspiracy against British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn by Labour members of Parliament. It intervened to save Edward Snowden, who made public the wholesale surveillance of the American public by our intelligence agencies, from extradition to the United States by helping him flee from Hong Kong to Moscow. The Snowden leaks also revealed that Assange was on a U.S. “manhunt target list.”

A haggard-looking Assange, as he was dragged out of the embassy by British police, shook his finger and shouted: “The U.K. must resist this attempt by the Trump administration. … The U.K. must resist!”

We all must resist. We must, in every way possible, put pressure on the British government to halt the judicial lynching of Assange. If Assange is extradited and tried, it will create a legal precedent that will terminate the ability of the press, which Trump repeatedly has called “the enemy of the people,” to hold power accountable. The crimes of war and finance, the persecution of dissidents, minorities and immigrants, the pillaging by corporations of the nation and the ecosystem and the ruthless impoverishment of working men and women to swell the bank accounts of the rich and consolidate the global oligarchs’ total grip on power will not only expand, but will no longer be part of public debate. First Assange. Then us.

 

 

What Julian Assange’s Arrest Tells Us About Our World

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By Arjun Walla

Source: Collective Evolution

John Kiriakou, a CIA-anti-torture whistle-blower recently tweeted, “a fair trial in the Eastern District of Virginia, under Judge Leonie Brinkema, is utterly impossible. They don’t call the EDVA the ‘Espionage Court for nothing.’”

And it’s true. Julian Assange was just arrested and dragged out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in relation to an extradition warrant from the US that was issued in December of 2017 for conspiracy with Chelsea Manning in early 2010. To expect that he will receive a fair trial is a bit of a dream.

The New York Times is reporting:

“The United States has charged WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of conspiring to hack a computer as part of the 2010 release of reams of secret American documents, according to an indictment unsealed Thursday, putting him just one flight away from being in American custody after years of seclusion in the Ecuadorean embassy in London.”

Regardless of what the headlines are reading, the world knows why the hunt for Julian Assange has been ongoing for so long, and it’s because he leaked secrets and exposed those who keep them. He exposed the lies, corruption and deceit that represents the backbone of the Western military alliance and the American empire. He exposed, in the words of John F. Hylan, former Mayor of New York City, the “real menace of Republic”, the “invisible government, which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities, states and nation.” He exposes the ones “who virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes.” (source)(source)

JFK warned the citizenry about “an announced need for increased security” that would be “seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment.” Today, this is known as “national security,” and it’s a term used to justify unethical and enormous amounts of secrecy that do not protect the public, but protect those in power and their corporate, financial and political interests.

This is exactly what is being pinned on Julian Assange. And it’s done so under the guise of “national security.” As public relations professional Edward Bernays, who had many political clients, wrote:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in the democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.  (Propaganda, 1928)

Transparency Doesn’t Favor The Powerful

Transparency is what Julian Assange was all about, and the American empire, more so the global empire, has been desperate to keep its secrets and prosecute anyone or anything that threatens this transparency. That’s what this is all about. And they proved this with Chelsea Manning.

It’s not just people like Assange who are being demonized and hunted, it’s alternative media as well. The war on ‘fake news’ that has been happening for the last little while has had alternative media outlets presenting credible information and sources deemed as ‘fake.’ Any media outlet who even questions a controversial issue has been made out to be ‘wrong’ or ‘fake.’

Fake news watchdog NewsGuard aims to hold independent media accountable for their stories. Funded by Clinton donors and big pharma, with ties to the CFR, NewsGuard seems to have a clear agenda in favour of mainstream media. You can read more about that here.

The current vaccine discussion is another great example. Those who are currently concerned with vaccine safety are being completely shut down and silenced. Meanwhile, those who support vaccinations do not even address the concerns that are being made by people raising concerns, and instead are resorting to finger pointing, ridicule and name calling. The latest example would be the world’s leading expert on aluminum toxicology, professor Christopher Exley, who has been completely shut down with regards to his research efforts. You can read more about that here.

The mainstream media has so much control over the minds of the masses that they can actually convince a large chunk of the citizenry that this war on ‘fake news’ is completely justified, and the arrest of Julian Assange is completely justified, but is it truly? Are we asking the right questions? Or simply believing what we are told?

Again, national security is not being threatened here, what’s being threatened, and has been threatened here as a result of Julian Assange and multiple alternative media networks, is the ability for the global elite to control human consciousness. Quite simply, exposing the truth is a huge threat to the global elite and their heightened national security state that rivals what George Orwell wrote in 1984, the stripping of our rights and freedoms, and the justification to impose more measures on the populace under the guise of national security.

Truth Is The Culprit

Truth and free press threaten the ability of the global elite to create problems and at the same time propose the solution. Some of the biggest leaks WikiLeaks has made were detailing the connection between supposed terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda and ISIS to the western military alliance, more specifically the US government. We saw arms deals and the funding/support of terrorist organizations that the US claimed to be fighting against. This is a great example of funding and creating a problem in order to justify heightened national security measures back home, to protect people from ‘the war on terror’ and justify their infiltration of another country for ulterior motives.

Look at William Binney, he’s a former high ranking intelligence official with the National Security Agency (NSA), and is one of the highest placed intelligence officials to ever blow the whistle on insider NSA ‘knowings.’ He made headlines when he resigned in 2001 after 9/11, having worked more than thirty years for the agency. He was a leading code-breaker against the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and was repelled by the United States’ massive surveillance programs.

Binney hasn’t stopped, one of the highest-level whistleblowers to ever come out of the NSA. He is now saying:

“At least 80% of fibre optic cables globally go via the US, this is no accident and allows the US to view all communication coming in. At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US. The NSA lies about what it stores. The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control.” (source)

Again, this is exactly why the hunt for Julian Assange has gone on like it has, as well as the crackdown on non mainstream journalism.

One final thing to address, those that feel this is all part of ‘the plan’ within the Q community, while it may be possible that his extradition could lead to his ultimate exoneration, the evidence does not yet seem to point to that. We should still be open, question and ultimately still discuss how this is an opportunity for us to wake up to truth.

The Takeaway

We’re at a point where anything the global elite, Shadow Government or Deep State does to silence anything that threatens their interest, will simply wake up more and more people as to what’s really going on. It’s exactly like 9/11, that tragic event woke up millions and millions of people around the world to deception they otherwise knew nothing about. Every move they make, like extraditing Julian Assange, simply makes it more obvious that they are trying to block the truth, and protect their own interests.

Below is a video from CE founder Joe Martino going in a little deeper and explaining what we can expect from all of this now.

Does it really make sense that we’re taking journalists, that we’re taking people and putting them in jail for bringing forward a story that is important for humanity to see, does this really make sense? – Joe Martino

 

Related Video:

 

Assange arrest: The turning point is here—don’t let them win

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Will we wait until they come for us because our homes are built atop resources they wish to plunder, because we shared information online they found objectionable, because we dared to question why madmen are in control of our country and much of the world?

By Whitney Webb

Source: Intrepid Report

LONDON—Yesterday morning, the London-based branch of Empire made good on its threat and boldly moved to begin dismantling the vestiges of democracy and press freedom that still remain, vestiges that have allowed people throughout the Western world to pretend that their government and politicians still respect their rights and the rule of law.

Julian Assange, the man who has helped expose a litany of crimes and the in-your-face corruption of the world’s most powerful people and governments, was pulled from the embassy of the country where he not only holds citizenship but had been granted asylum. The dangerous precedents Assange’s arrest has set—not just for journalism, but also for national sovereignty and international law—are staggering.

With Assange now in U.K. custody, his fate will mirror our own, as Assange’s fate and that of journalists around the world, as well as the public itself, are increasingly intertwined. After all, those who are after Assange and seek to rob him of his freedom—the U.S. Empire, the “deep state,” the shadow government, the global elite, etc.—are after our freedom as well.

If we remain silent as they jail, extradite, torture or even kill this man, we may expect a similar fate for ourselves. It will not come tomorrow. It will not come next week. It could be years away. But make no mistake, the global empire, whose core is the U.S. government, will now be empowered to charge and imprison anyone it deems a threat to its operations.

Those operations, including those that Assange helped to expose, often involve the mass murder of innocent civilians—untold numbers of children among them—in order to loot the resources of other sovereign nations. They also often involve the installation of puppet governments by either covert (e.g., election “meddling”) or overt (e.g., regime-change wars) means.

Those responsible for the most egregious violations of international law, for war crimes, for the slaughter of innocent life, are not imprisoned, degraded or tortured—they are rewarded and promoted. As we have seen today—and in recent weeks, particularly following Chelsea Manning’s imprisonment—those who seek to expose these crimes are the ones who are threatened, tortured and punished.

Like it or not, we are all already a part of this war

The world has known for years that Assange would meet this fate. Little was done. Now, the turning point is here. Will we continue to escape into the false realities of television, cinema, video games, and whatever we use to distract us and numb our pain while the actual world in which we live devolves into a technocratic, imperial dictatorship? Will we continue to ignore the obvious threats to our lives and our children’s lives because confronting these threats is uncomfortable and often difficult?

Will we wait until they come for us because our homes are built atop resources they wish to plunder, because we shared information online they found objectionable, because we dared to question why madmen are in control of our country and much of the world?

Such an eventuality may seem laughable to some, but those days are not far away and are already here for many people around the world, even in the West. Assange’s arrest is the first shot of a war to which all of us, like it or not, have already been drafted because it is a war for the very world in which we live—a war for our society, our planet, our livelihood, our right to self-determination. You can try to escape to the ends of the Earth, thousands of miles away from “the West” (as I myself did), only to find that there is no country anywhere in the world that is not currently under siege.

Never before in history has the global oligarchy been more powerful. The concentration of power and wealth in the hands of the few is unprecedented, worse even than in the Gilded Age or the final days of the Roman Empire. These people do not plan to cede any of this power to you. They do not want you to have control over your own lives. To them, we are already slaves. And those who are silent, especially now, are sending a signal to the elites that they embrace that servitude.

The revolution will not be televised and the war will not be won on social media

For too long, actions in defense of Assange, and more broadly in protest of Empire, have been focused in the virtual realm—that is, on the Internet and social media. While the Internet and social media are important tools for sharing information, their use for that end is being suppressed like never before and it will not be long before social media is entirely censored and devoid of dissent. If we wait until that day comes, and put all our eggs in the social media basket, we will have shot ourselves in the foot and it could well be a fatal blow.

We can no longer run from the world, escape into our remaining comforts—particularly those online—while the world burns. Assange may be the first journalist to be arrested and extradited under these circumstances, but he will not be the last. What we do now will determine how far they go.

The U.S. and its allies are prepping for several wars, many of them against countries much larger than Iraq, and such wars could make Iraq and Afghanistan look like skirmishes by comparison. The people behind Assange’s arrest and perpetual imperial wars do not care about your tweets or Facebook posts. They want your focus to remain on the virtual world and away from the real one over which they are consolidating their control.

Now is the time to resist. Now is the time to insist. Now is the time to take to the streets, to talk to your neighbors, family and co-workers of the dangers facing us all. Your voice and your actions matter. The longer we wait, the worse things will become. The turning point is here. Don’t let them win.

 

Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.

Big Government and Big Tech versus the Internet and everyone

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By Thomas L. Knapp

Source: Intrepid Report

Governments around the world began trying to bring the Internet under control as soon as they realized the danger to their power represented by unfettered public access to, and exchange of, information. From attempts to suppress strong encryption technology to the Communications Decency Act in the US and China’s “Great Firewall,” such efforts have generally proven ineffectual. But things are changing, and not for the better.

The European Parliament recently passed a “Copyright Directive” which, if implemented, will force Internet platforms to actively monitor user content instead of putting the burden of proving copyright infringement on those claiming such infringement. The directive also includes a “link tax” under which publishers will charge aggregation platforms for traditionally “fair use” excerpts.

The US government’s Committee on Foreign Investment is attempting to force the sale of Grindr, a gay dating app, over “national security” concerns. Grindr is owned by a Chinese company, Beijing Kunlun. CFIUS’s supposed fear is that the Chinese government will use information the app gathers to surveil or even blackmail users in sensitive political and military jobs.

Those are just two current examples of many.

Big Governments and Big Tech are engaged in a long-term mating dance.

Big Governments want to regulate Big Tech because that’s what governments do, and because, as with Willie Sutton and banks, Big Tech is where the Big Tax Money is.

Big Tech wants to be regulated by Big Governments because regulation makes it more difficult and expensive for new competitors to enter the market. Facebook doesn’t want someone else to make it the next MySpace. Google doesn’t want a fresh new face to send it the way of Yahoo.

It’s a mating dance with multiple suitors on all sides.

The US doesn’t like Grindr or Huawei, because FREEDUMB.

The Chinese don’t want uncensored Google or Twitter, because ORDER.

The EU is at least honest about being sexually indiscriminate: It freely admits that it just wants to rigorously screw everyone, everything, everywhere.

Big Tech wants to operate in all of these markets and it’s willing to buy every potential Big Government as many drinks as it takes to get them all into the sack.

Everybody wins, I guess. Except the public.

Governments and would-be monopolists are fragmenting what once advertised itself as a Global Information Superhighway into hundreds of gated streets.

Those streets are lined by neatly manicured lawns per the homeowners’ association’s rigorously enforced rules, and herbicide is sprayed on those lawns to kill off the values that made the Internet the social successor to the printing press and the economic successor to the Industrial Revolution.

As Stewart Brand wrote, “Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. … That tension will not go away.”

Big Tech and Big Government are both coming down, increasingly effectively, on the side of “expensive” and on the side of Ford’s Model T philosophy (“you can have any color you want as long as it’s black”).

They’re killing the Internet. They’re killing the future. They’re killing us.

 

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism. He lives and works in north central Florida.

Did the NY Times Violate Its Own Code of Ethics to Feature Child of Venezuelan Coup Plotter?

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After the New York Times was slammed for obscuring comedian Joanna Hausmann’s family ties to the Guaido shadow regime, her coup-plotting father appeared online to defend her with a stream of insults.

By Anya Parampil

Source: The Grayzone

When the New York Times approached me seeking permission to use video I recorded of the Washington DC “Hands Off Venezuela” protest on March 16, I hoped that somebody at the paper was seeking to atone for the Gray Lady’s demonstrably one-sided coverage of the US coup attempt against the internationally recognized Maduro government. Maybe, just maybe, the editors had had a rare bout of self-reflection and decided to produce something that gave voice to the many Americans who rejected the Trump administration’s brazen regime change operation against Venezuela.

But on April 1, I woke up to learn that my footage had been used to demonize the protesters as useful idiots by a YouTube comedian born to one of the family dynasties of Venezuela’s opposition.

The comedian in question was Joanna Hausmann, and her appearance in the supposed newspaper of record was far from funny. How could the paper justify selecting Hausmann as an authoritative voice on the situation in Venezuela when she was so closely connected to central players in the Trump administration’s coup attempt? The answer is that it couldn’t, so it simply neglected to mention her glaring conflict of interest.

I took a deep dive into Hausmann’s family history in a March 10th article for MintPress, highlighting the role Joanna’s father, Ricardo Hausmann, played in the neoliberalization of Venezuela’s economy throughout the 1980s and ’90s as an academic and eventual member of the repressive Carlos Andrés Pérez administration.

The piece was inspired by Joanna Hausmann’s Youtube harangue, “What’s Happening in Venezuela.” Despite promising “a video dedicated to ‘just the facts,’” Hausmann failed to mention that her father was serving as a top advisor to Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó while she argued in support of his self-declared “presidency.”

Ricardo Hausmann’s function within the coup government crystalized shortly following the release of Joanna’s Youtube explainer, when Guaidó selected the Harvard professor to represent his shadow regime at the Inter-American Development Bank. The Times took no issue with the fact Hausmann’s family stood to benefit from the same coup she was urging viewers to support, and like Joanna herself, neglected to disclose this ostensibly relevant information.

The Times appeared to have underestimated the intelligence of its viewers, and was subsequently bombarded with criticism for its decision to obscure Hausmann’s background.

One reader who described himself as “a Venezuelan, [who agrees] with everything [Hausmann] has to say,” complained in the comments section of the Hausmann video that the omission amounted to “an ethical error,” arguing “it should be noted that her father has a lot to gain politically and professionally should regime change happen.” The comment forced a response from the segment’s executive producer, Adam Ellick, who claimed that, while the Times was “aware of her father’s biography before publication,” it opted not to acknowledge it because “Ms. Hausmann is an independent adult woman who has built a popular following on her own.”

Ellick’s response failed to satisfy the commenter, who emphasized that “the issue here isn’t one of independence, it’s one of shared outcomes.” According to Ellick’s logic, it would be journalistically ethical to ignore Ivanka Trump’s relation to the President on the basis she is “an independent adult woman” with a fashion line of her own. Does the Times actually think we are stupid?

The backlash against Joanna’s NYT debut grew so intense, it eventually compelled her father to respond to the controversy. Following the video’s release, I tweeted criticism of the paper for its failure to disclose that “Hausmann is the daughter of Guaidó advisor Ricardo Hausmann,” linking to my article which explained that he “was instrumental in neoliberalizing and destroying Venezuela’s economy in the 90s and wants to do it again.”

The factual statement apparently outraged Professor Hausmann, who charged that my “tweet surely deserves at least an honorary mention among the year’s most sexist comments,” adding, “since Joanna is my daughter, she is not entitled to her own opinion. She must be speaking on behalf of some male figure that tells her what to say. Seriously?”

Yes, seriously! Joanna does not appear to have her “own opinion” — she has precisely the same opinion as her father, who happens to be participating in the very coup for which she was advocating. Yet even if we accept the notion that Joanna formed opinions independent from her father’s influence, the Times still had an ethical obligation to disclose her family ties – especially considering that Professor Hausmann is not her only relative actively working to achieve regime change in Caracas.

Joanna’s mother, Ana Julia Jatar, has worked for the US-funded Súmate organization, which in 2004 tried and failed to oust President Hugo Chávez via popular referendum. As I reported for MintPress, Jatar hails from a political family herself.

Jatar’s father, Braulio Jatar Dotti, was once described by an independent Chilean news site “as having been ‘in charge of eliminating the leftist groups’ in Venezuela” in the 1960s, as the government sought to violently repress the armed Revolutionary Left Movement. Jatar Dotti even published a manual called, “Disabling the Extreme Left” in 1963. With her grandfather’s history in mind, it’s no wonder that Joanna now spends her time attacking the US left for organizing to oppose war on Venezuela. Apparently, the family that attacks the left and fails to overthrow governments together stays together.

While it is important to understand the full extent to which regime change and resentment of “the left” runs through Joanna Hausmann’s veins, her father’s participation in the current coup alone should have disqualified her to pose as a neutral voice on Venezuela. The Times’ decision to ignore her background is not only offensive to viewers, but may have also violated the paper’s own ethics code. According to that code, “staff members must be sensitive that perfectly proper political activity by their spouses, family or companions may nevertheless create conflicts of interest or the appearance of conflict.” The Hausmann scandal undeniably created such a scenario for the paper.

Joanna has largely kept quiet amid the deluge of criticism, and is quick to block those who question her. (She blocked me on Twitter after I noted her father’s prominent role in the Guaidó shadow regime.) Why a grown woman professing her total independence needed her father to come to her defense should be a mystery, as RT Español reporter Helena Villar observed.

One Twitter user named Vanessa Salas, who describes herself as “a personal friend” of Joanna, recommended that I “get to know” the comedian before making “unfounded statements.” Salas insistedthat her pal was “SMART, THOUGHTFUL, and FEARLESS.” Indeed, Joanna Hausmann was so fearless that she had to rely on her friends, family, and an army of trolls to deflect from her wanton journalistic malpractice.

Joanna did eventually muster up one non-answer to critics. When a Twitter user named @unnaband asked why she neglected to mention that her “father was personally appointed by the very opposition leader” she promoted in her video, the Youtube comedian hit back: “I am proud of my dad.”

He is surely proud of her too. And among the Times editors who presided over her ethically dubious video rant, there appears to be no shame.

 

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The Surrealism of the Information War

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By Gilbert Mercier

Source: News Junkie Post

The flow of knowledge and information is commonly considered the main vector of humanity’s progress through history. One would think that in our era, which is rightly called the time of the information super-highway, the sheer mass of information available to all humans, anywhere at any given time, would have exponentially increased our understanding of our world and each other. This is, however, not the case. As a matter of fact, paradoxically, one can easily argue that an overload of information has made the majority of people not more but less knowledgeable, less critical, more isolated, and more alienated from themselves and each other. The control and manipulation of narrative in the era of the information war has created a universal malaise that reaches even basic human issues such as masculine-feminine identities.

Well-compensated propagandists package information and ideas like products for mass consumption. The advance of technology was supposed to free mankind; instead it has created invisible chains. The fact of being constantly wired is an assault on our free will and cognitive functions, which behavioral information warriors study and harvest, to put them in giant blenders where all comes out inoffensive and predictable. The goal is to turn the rich and diverse human experience into a tasteless and colorless intellectual mush, and then make it palatable with artificial additives. Foie gras is considered a French gastronomic delicacy. It is nevertheless a form of cultural perversity. In the process, the geese are force-fed, to provoke a cirrhosis of their liver. In many ways, the gatekeepers of mainstream information use the same force feeding technique with people’s brains.

Unless people tightly lock themselves mentally into the delusions of dogmas, either religious or ideological, and seek comfort in a universe of magical thinking, the truth is never an absolute. This being said, in order to allow an acceptable level of conviviality in human society, thinkers should seek truth in the subjective reality while knowing that the holy grail of pure truth is the ultimate lie. If one would be so naive or foolish enough to think he has found the absolute truth, looking at it would be like staring straight into the sun at midday, without shields and with eyes wide open, for a full hour. In the process, the believer of absolute truth would go blind.

For anyone who is neither blind nor fully color blind, the distinction between a red object and a green one is not only instantaneous but also unquestionable. The difference between green and red is not open to interpretation or debate. It is in the rare realm of tangible facts.

Staying in the field of the color spectrum: all hues of green in the natural world are a secondary color that can be obtained by mixing the primary colors yellow and blue. Green can be argued endlessly to contain more yellow than blue, or vice versa, as well as a fraction of black, white, or brown to alter the shades and tones. In nature or on an artist’s palette, there are countless shades of green and our perception of these shades, while it can be analyzed and quantified scientifically, is largely subjective.

Colors, just like words, have an emotional impact. Hospital walls and other medical facilities are often painted in light tones of greenish-blue, for their soothing effect on people. Bright red has the opposite impact. It is used to attract maximum attention either from traffic lights, bull fights or firetrucks. And so greens are the calming hues of nature and relaxation, whereas reds are synonymous with alarm, blood, excitement, and sometimes the anger and urgency of an adrenaline rush, as illustrated by the popular expression “seeing red.”

The near-infinite range of the color spectrum is similar to the countless narratives expressed by languages. In linguistics, words and their clumsy or astute associations are used to convey information or emotions. Like colors, words carry messages, fragments of information that impact people differently and cannot be objectively quantified. It’s all “in the eye of the beholder.”

One can make an analogy between the false notion of an absolute truth and the vanishing point in a perspective drawing. A vanishing point is an optical illusion, just like the concept of pure truth is a cognitive illusion. In our surreal predicament of fake-news for some, which are true-news for others, it is as if we have moved into an absurd and nightmarish three-dimensional drawing with a multitude of vanishing points designed by the generals of the global information wars.

The people who conduct the information war are numerous. They can be the global media moguls like Rupert Murdoch; the journalists employed by corporate entities or governments; the policymakers who build a considerable influence within countless so-called think-tanks; the elected politicians and their cohorts of advisers and lobbyists; the super-rich businessmen, philanthropists in their own eyes, such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Bob Mercer, George Soros and Pierre Omidyar, who want to impact world affairs; and even show-business celebrities. All have deep pockets and want maximum impact in the fight to shape the discourse and steer public opinion, often globally, in the directions that suit their specific needs.

Unless they are ideologues, the information warriors are mercenaries. Therefore it is money that shapes the global mainstream discourse in television, radio, newspapers and social media. Independent or dissident narratives are generally squashed by a lack of public exposure. The money talks and writes as the viewer-readers, hypnotized by a multitude of screens, become mere consumers to be sold, convinced, or subliminally seduced into a specific mindset. The job of the information warriors is to observe, condition, and predict behaviors. In this massive brainwash of the public, big money is at the same time the washing machine and laundry detergent.

Gates and Soros openly sponsor the prime fake-left publication, The Guardian; Bezos owns The Washington Post; and the Murdoch press empire’s crown jewel is Fox News. Other information warriors who claim to know the truth are on the fringe, at least in appearance. This is the case for media provocateur Alex Jones, who has claimed in court to be a performance artist, but who is nonetheless adulated by millions worldwide and treated like a Guru of truthful information. Jones runs, with his trademark manic energy, the raucous populist far-right conspiracy-theory laced Infowars. Mercer’s money gave birth to the populist far-right site Breitbart. Meanwhile Omidyar sponsors the soft-left, so-called progressive publication, The Intercept. All these lead information warriors want to take as many people as will follow them to their own vanishing points, on a journey towards their illusionary truth.

In their confusion and thirst for truth, people get caught like flies on tasty propaganda glue. The intricate labyrinths built by the information warriors prevent the real discourse, which should be about how to survive the imminent systemic collapse of global capitalism. It cannot be otherwise when global corporate imperialism itself controls the discourse worldwide. Hypnotized by a myriad of vanishing points, humans might be on a course to vanish.

Mueller Report Ends a Shameful Period for the Press

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By Chris Hedges

Source: Truthdig

The Mueller report’s categorical statement that Donald Trump and his campaign did not collude with Russia ends one of the most shameful periods in modern American journalism, one that rivals the mindless cheerleading for the Iraq War by most of the press. It further erodes and may prove fatal to the credibility of a press that has steadfastly rendered most of the country invisible and functions as little more than an array of gossiping courtiers to the elites.

“ ‘[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,’ ” the report by special counsel Robert Mueller says, according to a direct quotation given in an official letter by U.S. Attorney General William Barr.

The charge that Russia stole the 2016 presidential election, that Vladimir Putin has secret “pee tapes” of Trump cavorting in a Moscow hotel with prostitutes or that Trump has been a longtime “Kremlin agent,” repeated by reporters whose work I admired in the past, is demagoguery as pernicious as the vile taunts and racist tropes that come out of the White House. The press endlessly repeated such allegations while ignoring the expanding social inequality and suffering of a country where half the population lives in poverty, as well as the collapse of our democratic institutions. These facts, not Russian manipulation, saw enraged American voters elect a demagogue who at least belittles the elites, including those in the press, who sold them out. The charge that Trump was a tool of Russia is entertaining. It attracts billions in advertising dollars. It allows the press to posture as a moral crusader. But over the past three years this obsession blotted out most of the real crimes committed by this administration and the reality most Americans endure.

The mainstream press, owned by the corporations that have extinguished the democratic state and are fleecing the public, as well as destroying the ecosystem on which we depend for life, does not hold its employers to account. The empty chatter about Russia, including in The New York Times, exposes the bankruptcy of the U.S. media. MSNBC and CNN, which long ago abandoned journalism for entertainment, have breathlessly clogged the airwaves with ridiculous conspiracy theories and fantasies and used them to justify a faux crusade.

Don’t expect any of this to change. Rachael Maddow, like Jack Tapper or any other fatuous news celebrity, will not be held to account for slogging through this fiction night after night. Maddow will still collect her $10-million-a-year salary. And the handful of reporters who exhibited journalistic integrity—Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Aaron Maté, Robert Scheer, Max Blumenthal and Katrina vanden Heuvel—will continue to remain on the margins of the media landscape. The press is an arm of the corporate-funded burlesque that has replaced the country’s political life and turned civic debate into a vast reality show.

The more the big news outlets try to spin this report, arguing that they need to see the full report rather than the attorney general’s summary, or that Jared Kushner sought to use the communications systems of Russian diplomats, the more credibility they will lose. And they do not have much credibility left. The lurid details of the president’s alleged sexual relations with a porn star and a Playboy bunny, and of “Russiagate,” have replaced journalism. These stories have nothing to do with the lives of most Americans. This descent into the inane and the tawdry gives immunity to Trump. In attacking the press he attacks an institution most Americans loath. And with good reason. The press, unwittingly, enhances a president it seeks to destroy. And its decline, accelerated by its collaboration with liberal Democratic elites who scapegoat Russia to avoid confronting their responsibility for trashing the country in the service of corporate oligarchs, will get worse. Little the press says about Trump will now be believed.

There was, of course, massive interference in our election by a foreign power—Israel. But try saying this naked truth out loud and you will suffer the character assassination, chanted by the unified chorus in the press and the political hierarchy of both parties, that was unleashed on Rep. Ilhan Omar. The engine driving our animosity toward Russia comes from the arms industry, which with the expansion of NATO up to Russia’s border—despite assurances given upon the unification of Germany that this would not happen—is making billions of dollars selling weapons to countries in Eastern Europe. The situation is also exacerbating tensions between two of the world’s biggest nuclear powers. But this is just one more suppressed truth.

The Trump administration has carried out policies that, rather than serve Russian interests, have further antagonized our relationship with Moscow. It has imposed sanctions. It is openly attempting to overthrow the government of a country that Russia supports, Venezuela. It is attempting to block the sale of Russian natural gas to Europe. It has sold weapons to Ukraine, a foe of the Kremlin. It has armed insurgents in Syria and carried out airstrikes, even as Russian troops seek to prop up the Syrian regime. It has withdrawn from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. But facts matter little to Russian-conspiracy theorists.

It is not only Trump who has obliterated the line between fact and fiction. It is the press. It hyped and reported allegations it never investigated or confirmed. And by doing this, repeating failures of the kind that appeared in its coverage of the invasion of Iraq, it has committed suicide. A nation that lacks a functioning press becomes a tyranny. This is not Trump’s fault, but our own.

Mueller’s Sideshow Closes – But it has Served its Purpose

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in Washington, DC on April 14, 2004. Robert Mueller named special prosecutor for Russia probe, Washington DC, USA – 17 May 2017 (Rex Features via AP Images)

By Kit Knightly

Source: Off Guardian

To state my position clearly – I never believed, for a second, that the Mueller investigation would find any evidence of “Russian collusion”. And not simply because there isn’t any. I mean, let’s be honest, the powers that be “find evidence” of things that never happened all the time.

They “found” photos of Lee Harvey Oswald holding a rifle, and they “found” Satam al-Suqami’s passport in the rubble of the World Trade Center. They produced “evidence” the Russians shot down MH17 and poisoned the Skripals. There is “evidence” Assad gassed his own people. There was “evidence” Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that could be here in 45 minutes. (Mueller himself testified to that).

The Deep State have made it more than clear that objective fact does not matter to them. When the CIA, the FBI or the Pentagon want the evidence, they invent find it.

No, I was sure they wouldn’t find Russian collusion, because they didn’t really want to.

Firstly, it’s dangerous. However mad many of the leaders of the US deep state are, there are some who recognise that going to war with Russia is a bad idea. Publicly stating that Russia performed a coup in your country could lead to an international incident, a civil war, or even a nuclear holocaust. That’s not good for business.

Secondly, it’s an admission of weakness. The bedrock of Imperial power has always been an unwillingness to admit its own limitations. Finding that Russia had installed Trump would be admitting to a major defeat. They can’t afford to lose that much face.

Thirdly, and most importantly, they can’t take down one of their own. Trump might be crude, unpredictable, politically incorrect and lacking class…but at the end of the day he’s a billionaire son of a millionaire. He has been mixing with the elites all his life. He’s one of them, and sending down a member of the in crowd for corruption (or anything else) sets too dangerous a precedent. Trump has to be exonerated, it’s simply a matter of the system’s immune response protecting itself. (Not to mention he’s been President of the United States for over two years now, you take him to trial and who knows what he might start saying).

No, Trump was never going to be charged, let alone convicted. Mueller’s investigation has ended the way it was always intended to end – with a whimper, not a bang.

Do NOT make the mistake of thinking this makes it a failure.

Think about how our reality has been shaped by this investigation.

One, it has established as a “certain fact” in the mainstream media, that “Russian interference” is a thing that happened, even though to this date there is NOT A SINGLE PIECE of publicly available evidence to support this. The often cited “Russian troll factory”, the Internet Research Agency, is a small viral marketing firm that published anti-Trump ads. The “experts” tracking Russian “influence operations” are small-time paranoiacs with nothing but homemade infographics to back up their theories. The “research fellows” of the Atlantic Council are reduced to pointing to real people – be they retirees from England or internationally renowned concert pianists – and claiming they are “Russian bots”, because they cannot find any real ones.

The idea that Russia “hacked” the election, or launched a “campaign in support of Trump” is not even close to being proven, but if we embrace the Mueller report, then we are tricked into accepting that version of reality.

Two, there is the very idea of “collusion”. “Collusion” has no meaning under US law. It simply is not a thing, and yet we’ve all been talking about it for years. Letting “collusion” stand as a concept is a big victory for the establishment. It has no meaning, which means it can have any meaning they want it to have. Tulsi Gabbard can have “colluded” with Assad or Modi by defending them on US TV. Jill Stein can commit “collusion” with Russia by attending a meeting. They have invented an imaginary crime, that can be used to tar anti-establishment figures whenever they want.

If we embrace the Mueller report, we hand the corporate media more power to smear any political candidate, independent journalist or an ordinary citizen.

Three, if we accept Mueller, then we accept the concomitant affirmation of the idea that US institutions are trustworthy, that the FBI is inherently honest, that “Gary Cooper types” like Robert Mueller are the beating heart of US democracy. The narrative is running now that an accusation was made, a special counsel investigated and got to the bottom of it.

If we embrace the Mueller report, we lend credibility to a US system that deserves none. We put our trust in a body that has betrayed the public trust a thousand different times, and we accept the lie that the system is working as intended.

Four, Mueller has been a tremendous distraction. Don’t underestimate the value of that. Most of you will be familiar with the Karl Rove quote: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”, but just as important is the less well-known end to that thought: “And while you’re studying that reality —judiciously, as you will— we’ll act again, creating other new realities.”.

“Russiagate” has consumed hundreds of hours of television, thousands of column inches. It has cost millions and returned nothing but sound and fury. It’s a chew toy, a scratching post. Something to get our claws and teeth into while our owners are busy.

And how busy they have been.

Think about all the issues knocked off the front-pages by “Russiagate” rumours and totally fictitious “smoking guns”. Venezuela inches closer to destruction every day. France is a couple of street clashes away from a second 1789. Trump has slashed infrastructure and welfare budgets, and increased military spending. Again. While every anchor in the country was talking about “the walls closing in”, the US has pulled out of an arms treaty and announced they have already built the weapons that the treaty banned. While the media hammer out the propaganda message that Trump is in Putin’s pocket, the US deep state has been winding the Doomsday clock up to 1 minute before midnight.

Finally, much like the “antisemitism crisis” in the Labour party, “Russian collusion” now exists as a concept that keeps everyone in check. Trump now can’t afford to meet with Putin, not without a chorus of “AHA!” from the punditry. Other political figures, those on the actual fringe (not the fake Trump fringe), have even more to lose. There’s no doubt that “Russian collusion”, or the like, will be used to file down a crowded Democrat primary field. Gabbard, Sanders, maybe even Warren, will doubtless face charges of being “soft on Putin” in one form or other. These McCarthyite smears force the Overton window closed. They control what people feel comfortable saying, even thinking.

All in all, Mueller has been very, very useful to the status quo. He’s a controlled reaction, like in a nuclear power plant, keeping public anger available as an energy to harness, whilst making sure it never boils over into a chaotic meltdown.

There is an understandable feeling of glee throughout the alternative media, emotions are high and “We told you so” always feels good to say. Those of us who have been dismissed as bots, Putin-apologists, useful idiots and “Trumptards” have been officially vindicated.

…but do we want vindication from a corrupt establishment? Should we take any value at all in an admission of “truth” from institutions who been shown to hold the very concept of truth in contempt?

The Mueller distraction has run its course, to the only the end it was ever going to reach. The Liberal cheerleaders who thought that OrangeManBad would be dragged out of the White House in chains might be tearful and angry, and in some ways that feels like a victory, but it’s only on the surface. Maddow and Harding et al might be temporarily humiliated, but their bosses are perfectly fine.

Every step of the way Mueller has been an exercise in narrative control, and every step of the way it has worked. And it is still working now.

They have reinforced convenient myths, stoked controversies from non-stories. Put “evidence” out into the public domain that was nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

They have shown that they have total control over the vast majority of public discourse. They can set the agenda. They can dictate terms. They can invent concepts, scenarios, even entire events, and we’ll happily argue over the details of something that never even happened.

“We’re an Empire now, and we act we create reality”. When we accept the Mueller report we are letting them create reality, we shouldn’t be tempted down that path because it feels like we scored some points for the little guy. If we buy into the hype around the announcement, if we let the myth survive that the US government has any interest in objective truth, then we’re playing their game.

I called the Mueller report a sideshow, and that’s just what it is. A fixed ring-toss game, with prizes that seem attainable but are always kept just out of reach. Hustlers always let you win the first one, to make the game look fair. Don’t fall for it. Pick up your money and walk away from the table.

It might FEEL like the good guys won, but that’s only because they let us. Next time they might not. The only real way to win is not to play.