Category Archives: Psy-ops

Facebook and YouTube remove posts naming CIA impeachment whistleblower

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By Kevin Reed

Source: WSWS.org

Multiple media sources reported on Friday that the social media platforms Facebook and YouTube were removing posts that identified by name the CIA whistleblower behind the Congressional impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump.

In an email statement, Facebook said, “Any mention of the potential whistleblower’s name violates our coordinating harm policy, which prohibits content ‘outing of witness, informant or activist’,” adding, “We are removing any and all mentions of the potential whistleblower’s name and will revisit this decision should their name be widely published in the media or used by public figures in debate.”

CNN also reported that YouTube issued a statement saying that it was using a combination of artificial intelligence software and human monitors to find and delete videos with the name of the “Ukrainegate” whistleblower. “The removals, the spokesperson added, would affect the titles and descriptions of videos as well as the video’s actual content,” the CNN report said.

The World Socialist Web Site has independently confirmed that Facebook is deleting posts containing the name of alleged CIA whistleblower Eric Ciaramella.

Facebook’s claim that any content posted on its platform naming Ciaramella constitutes “outing” the whistleblower is absurd. The alleged identity of the career CIA analyst who filed a complaint regarding the July 25 phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been known since October 30 when the pro-Republican Real Clear Politics website published his name.

When his name was published by Real Clear Politics, the whistleblower’s attorneys—in typical CIA fashion—said they could “neither confirm nor deny” that Ciaramella was their client.

Ciaramella is a plausible candidate for being whistleblower, given his background as a registered Democrat and CIA analyst with expertise in Ukraine and Russia. He worked under both Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice and Trump National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster. In mid-2017 he was sent back to the CIA amid accusations that he was leaking anti-Trump information to the media.

While Ciaramella’s name has been widely circulated by Republican political figures, right-wing news sites and former CIA analyst and Trump aide Fred Fleitz said, “everyone knows who he is,” the Democrats and their allies in the media at the New York Times, Washington Post and major television networks have not made his name public.

Even an article in the New York Times on Friday that reported on Facebook’s censoring of posts by the right-wing website Breitbart did not include Ciaramella’s name. By taking the step of scrubbing posts mentioning allegations that are widely shared and reported, Facebook and YouTube are now joining with these corporate media organizations and blocking the public from having access to important information.

The latest heavy-handed social media censorship—so obviously being carried out in the service of the Democratic Party impeachment inquiry and the CIA—actually helps the Trump administration, the Republican Party and the extreme right-wing political forces defending the White House, allowing them to adopt the false posture of advocating free flow of information, even as Trump continues to demonize the media as the “enemies of the people.”

The mass scrubbing of all social media content by Facebook and YouTube that mentions the name Eric Ciaramella is part of the broader censorship efforts by the technology monopolies, in collaboration with the intelligence state, and sets the stage for even more draconian attacks on freedom of expression.

This must be seen within the context of the drive by a substantial section of the ruling establishment for the social media platforms to “step up to the plate” and, as Hillary Clinton said last week, take down “false, deceptive or deliberately misleading content” or “pay a price.” Leading figures within the Democratic Party, including presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, have been campaigning for social media censorship that will block what they call “untruthful statements.”

As explained on the World Socialist Web Site, the increasing calls for censorship on social media are part of a protracted campaign by the US intelligence apparatus, under conditions of a growing movement of the working class and young people and increasing interest and support for socialism, to suppress left-wing, antiwar and progressive political viewpoints.

Furthermore, the WSWS has pointed out that what is determined as “fake” or “real” is not to be decided by the government or giant tech monopolies: “All the dishonesty of the campaign for internet censorship is contained in the failure to answer, much less consider, one central question: Who is to determine what is true and what is false?”

The publication of the name of the CIA analyst who submitted his complaint memo to the heads of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees in August is not a crime. In fact, his identity is of substantial consequence, given that his complaint became the starting point of an effort to remove a sitting president through impeachment.

How Far Will They Go?

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By James Howard Kunstler

Source: Kunstler.com

CBS-News carried another bucket of muddy water for the coup team Sunday night with a lead 60 Minutes agit-prop story on Maria Butina, an ambitious Russian cutie who worked the American NRA circuit in the most public manner imaginable to make herself into a sex-bomb celebrity at the exact moment in history when the US Deep State wished to reinforce the fantasy, as Lesley Stahl put it, that “Russia was interfering in our electoral process.”

Of course, Ms. Stahl and her shifty producers left out half the story: how Maria Butina was manipulated by her FBI-handler and sometime-boyfriend, Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO who had been employed by the Bureau over the years on other undercover assignments. They didn’t mention him or seek to understand his role in the operation. But they gave plenty of air-time to the DOJ lawyer, John C Demers, who prosecuted Ms. Butina, and never bothered to ask Demers why Butina was not charged with espionage — perhaps because nothing remotely like that occurred.

How media giants like Ms. Stahl can keep mouthing this malarkey designed to stoke a new cold war is one of the great mysteries of our national psychology these days. You’d think they’d learned something from the train wreck of the Mueller Investigation, the Brett Kavanaugh fiasco, and the current debacle of Adam Schiff’s imploding Ukraine whistleblower caper — namely, that spouting lies will eventually get you found-out and disgraced.

But the coup team is now dangerously stuck tripling and quadrupling down on its fairy tale narrative as the reckoning of its dark deeds approaches and its star players await their turns on the witness stand. Half the country has been waiting patiently for authorities-of-standing to put an end to this Hitchcockian campaign of seditious fog that has driven us close to the brink of a second civil war. That half of the country has actually been reading the evidence of this treason and sedition — underwritten by Hillary Clinton and her allies — on the back-channels of the Internet. None of that evidence has been posted through the main media outlets wholly owned by the coup team, gospel to the other half of America, and soon millions of credulous bystanders who got high on three years of CIA-issued RussiaGate Kool-Aid will get the surprise of their lives when they discover how deeply they were played.

The CIA and the FBI are in a fight for their lives now. The evidence shows pretty clearly that these rogue agencies conducted all the election “meddling” of 2016 and that the RussiaGate hysteria was an engineered smokescreen to hide their tracks and cover their asses when the certainty of a Hillary election triumph nauseatingly resolved unfavorably in the cold, gray dawn of 11/8/16. Despite the chatter about an “insurance policy,” they were quite unprepared for the exposure that loomed.

They also badly underestimated the resources of what is now a very sturdy alt.media which has managed to weave the real story of what happened over the past three years into a shocking tapestry of massive subversion and treachery. A big part of the true story is how amazingly incompetent the RussiaGate coupsters were. Did they really believe they could conceal the ties between their agencies and Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS operation, and its feckless front man, British ex-spy Christopher Steele, and the whole outfit’s connection to Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee? Did they suppose they could pass off Stephan Halper and Joseph Mifsud as Russian agents when the two have consorted with US and allied intelligence for decades? The US Department of Defense even holds Mr. Halper’s million-dollar pay stubs and Mr. Mifsud appears in photographs of every Western cloak-and-dagger cocktail get-together of spook officialdom for the last twenty years.

The latest, and most desperate gambit is the UkraineGate whistleblower, a CIA employee blatantly playing errand-boy for his mentor John Brennan and deeply tied to 2016 election shenanigans emanating from Ukraine, featuring his former employer, ex-Vice-President Joe Biden. This shadowy figure, pegged as Eric Ciaramella, 33, may shortly find himself in a grand jury chamber answering for his role in this charade. Ciaramella has just been hung out to dry by his sponsor, Rep. Adam Schiff in a desperate attempt to dissociate himself from the huggermugger within his House Intel Committee that preceded the falsely blown whistle.

It’s not an overstatement to say that many of the figures behind this gigantic web of lies and deceit ought to answer charges up to and including treason. The question is whether Messers Barr & Durham have the cojones to cater the banquet of consequences that this huge cast of characters should be made to feast from. Another question is whether these desperate characters and the agencies they represent will go all the way now and attempt to enlist the military brass in an outright overthrow of the executive. There are already intimations of this. It would be answered by the kind of civil violence that has broken out in other parts of world where other Deep States have worn out their welcome — and their legitimacy.

Surviving on the Battlefield in the Information War

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By Tony Cartalucci

Source: New Eastern Outlook

There is undoubtedly an information war raging. There are intentional liars, people who witlessly repeat these lies, poor research, and opinions spun to look as if it is research. To sort the ever increasing amount of information from disinformation, there are a few simple methods people can use.

But above all, people must personally dedicate themselves to following the truth no matter where it brings them, having the courage to accept a reality that may not necessarily mesh with their current perception. The inability to do this will render moot all other means of determining the veracity of any given report or piece of analysis.

Find the Original Source

This is fundamental. When anyone, anywhere makes a claim, whether it is in a historical documentary or book, or regarding current events, one must find the original source. Where did this information come from? Is it a direct quote? If so, can this quote be verified? If the quote is “alleged” or “leaked” or otherwise second-hand information or the sources never revealed, it is impossible to verify and therefore impossible to consider as verified.

Often conversations relayed by second-hand sources serve as the basis of propaganda. It is essentially the process of placing words into the mouths of people who never said anything of the sort. Media that repeatedly uses quotes that are impossible to verify may be engaged in disinformation.

If the quote is confirmed, that alone does not mean that what was said was “true.” It simply means that someone made a statement – the veracity of which must be determined through other means. Finding the source of a claim often helps shatter long-held myths. This is particularly true in regards to historical matters.

Follow the Money

All protests, political movements, and armed struggles require immense amounts of resources to start, perpetuate, and most importantly to succeed.  They also require leadership. If one finds themselves reading reports of events that do not mention funding or the names of specific leaders, either those reporting on the events don’t have these facts and should make note that such information is both missing and essential to find, or misdirection and disinformation is at play.

Omitting these facts has been done intentionally across the Western media to obfuscate Western involvement particularly in “political uprisings” and “armed rebellions” that are made to appear spontaneous and indigenous but are in fact long-planned, foreign-backed conspiracies. The so-called “Arab Spring” is perhaps the most notorious example of this, where the Western media failed intentionally and repeatedly to identify the funding and individuals involved in both street protests and subsequent armed attacks on security agencies across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

Had the public carefully read through reports, and followed the money, they would have found a combination of US State Department money and the Anglo-American-backed Muslim Brotherhood behind each and every “uprising” across the Middle East, with Al Qaeda forming the subsequent armed groups that overran Libya and are currently leading attempts to overthrow the government of Syria.

Look at What People Do, Not at What They Say…

There are media reports, government press releases, op-eds, analysis, and policy papers of every kind. Many times, these various sources contradict each other. How does one go about determining which is true and which is disinformation? It is quite simple, don’t simply listen to what reporters, analysts, and policymakers say, look at what they and those they have influence over are doing.

The United States claims that it is fighting the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS) in Syria. However, if we “follow the money” and realize that it is impossible for ISIS to sustain its fighting capacity within Syria or Iraq alone, and requires an immense amount of resources from abroad to continue its operations, we realize those resources are undoubtedly passing through territory the US and its allies in fact control.

That the US is not interdicting these vital supplies, including additional fighters, weapons, and cash, is proof that claims in the media and amid government press releases that the US is “fighting ISIS” are false.

Conversely, in veteran journalist Seymour Hersh’s 2007 New Yorker article, “The Redirection,” he stated explicitly, citing US and Saudi officials, that the West and its regional allies planned to use sectarian extremists affiliated with Al Qaeda to wage a regional proxy war against Syria and Iran. This also so happens to be precisely what is now playing out across the MENA region. Hersh’s analysis can be tracked down through his sources, by following the money – as only state-sponsorship can explain Al Qaeda and ISIS’ fighting capacity in Syria, Iraq, and beyond – and by simply looking at what is now unfolding across the region.

None of what the current corporate media or government press releases say can be verified in a similar manner, and certainly, none of what is said by the West currently, matches what is actually happening on the ground.

Finally, let us consider policy papers released by corporate-funded think tanks like the Brookings Institution. Such policy papers have repeatedly laid out plans for arming extremists, incrementally invading and occupying Syria, and eventually toppling the Syrian government. This too, is precisely what we see happening on the ground, though the Western media and Western representatives claim the cause is not a  premeditated Western conspiracy, but a series of coincidences and unfortunate turns of fate.

Final Thoughts 

The truth is hard to arrive at, not only because people intentionally seek to fool others, but because often, many unintentionally fool themselves. Reality can be unpleasant. Watching a nation be destroyed can be heartbreaking and the desire to insulate oneself from the pain through cognitive dissonance can be overwhelming. However, one of the greatest maxims in human conflict is to truly know yourself and know your enemy. Truth isn’t just a matter of virtue, it is a factor that will make the difference between victory and defeat.

If victory over the forces of greed and hegemony is truly our goal, then we must face the facts no matter how unpleasant. Our failure to do so will cost us everything – and those driven by greed and hegemony know. That is why they have invested so much in clouding reality and obfuscating the truth. We must invest more in seeing through this clouded reality, and discover the truth, no matter how unpleasant.

Phantom Performances – The Rise of the Spectacle

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By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Waking Times

ˈspɛktək(ə)l/

noun

a visually striking performance or display

an event or scene regarded in terms of its visual impact

“Now the death of God combined with the perfection of the image has brought us to a whole new state of expectation. We are the image.” ~John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards

“Magical thinking is the currency not only of celebrity culture, but also of totalitarian culture.” ~Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion

Welcome to the spectacle. Or perhaps I should say the kind of spectacle that has become the face of entertainment that pervades our westernized cultures. The way that the spectacle succeeds is that it isn’t so much about fooling us into believing its lies as real, but rather that it is we who ask to be fooled. We seek to suspend our sense of reality, to pursue a space of escape. The spectacle pulls us in because we lend our willingness to its agenda. If we are honest, in this post-truth age, we will admit to living in an age of spectacle. And it is from this that many of us receive our interpretation of reality. Since the middle of the 20th century onwards the ‘western spectacle’ has been in the form of media advertisement and propaganda. We may think that we’ve only recently arrived at the age of the spectacle, where Disneylandification is becoming the norm, and Super Bowls are interspersed with scantily-clad singers, and TV programs appear in the slots between advertisers. Yet the whole spectacle show has been a form of function creep ever since telecommunications first emerged as a social phenomenon. The image has been with humanity since the first dawn of our arising; from cave paintings to hieroglyphics to cuneiform clay tablets. The major difference is that today the spectacle of the image has not only gone global, but it has also gotten inside of our heads.

Western cultures especially (and the US specifically) have now made the image, the spectacle, and hence the illusion so grand, so vivid, and so persuasively realistic that they are becoming our basis of reality. We swing from one illusion to the alternative, which is still yet another grand spectacle; just as we swing from the political left to the right, believing each side is distinctly different. Yet each is a part of the same bubble that customizes our lives – they form a part of our news, our heroes, our tragedies, and our dreams. We now serve a mosaic of ideals carefully crafted as a patchwork of phantom performances. Nothing is ever real anymore except the painful extremes that pervade our daily existence: the violence, the suffering, the deprivation, the inequality, the disease. Only these fragments that create great pain become the real, and from these many of us seek refuge in a plenitude of diversions, distractions, and triviality.

Western civilization has chosen to be played out upon a grand stage where the performance – of invented storylines and scripts – runs the show. We move through social realities that are an entanglement of signs, virtual connections, and social media status. It’s all about who is going to be the next ‘influencer’? We are encouraged to project back into the world our entertainment-mediatized fantasies. People begin to act out their imaginary landscapes, often in violent and distorted ways, as young students massacre their classmates before going to eat at McDonalds. This is the hyperreal that distorts a stable reality, making it harder to gain a grounded perspective on things. People are increasingly being guided by the false totems of media-militarized-entertainment.

The media spectacle gives us our modern guiding images. This is similar to how in the Middle Ages images depicted in stained glass windows and paintings of religious torment or salvation acted to control and influence the social behavior of our ancestors. For many of us the white-bearded god above is dead, so we have media depictions of heroes, adventurers, McGyvers, celebrity-cosmetic makeovers, beauty pageants, talk shows and reality television to be our social guides. An illusory sensate reality has been erected that runs on pseudo-lives and phantom performances. Such phantom performances mask our personal failures and conveniently hide them behind a curtain of the unreal. People prefer to watch the rich and famous on television rather than face the domestic unhappiness of their own lives. Why have ice when you can have bubblegum-flavored ice-cream?

Luckily for those of us who live in the west we inhabit a world of easy-correction where we can make ourselves better if we buy certain products, ingest certain foods, and hang-out in the right yoga gyms. For every situation there is seemingly a commercial solution. We have not been abandoned, after all. In the realm of hyperreality, our fantasies are no longer an impediment to success. On the contrary, our fantasies are the portals through which we enter. All we need is for the world of the media to give us our dream. Everybody has talent, as the reality shows tell us – ‘Britain’s Got Talent,’ ‘America’s Got Talent:’ in fact, we’ve all got talent! We are all of us hidden unique performers, and the world ‘out there’ is begging for our arrival. This is not to be confused with the manipulation by greedy commercial enterprises that are ready to discard you as soon as your ‘talent’ no longer sells.

Yet the truth of the matter is that the spectacle of celebrity culture seeks commodities, not real individuals or souls. It doesn’t want that we seek for any form of transcendence, illumination, or real growth. It is a world that seeks only those that feed the phantom and encourage others to do the same. It is the ‘real’ that gets pushed into a black hole – to become a figment of the imagination, whilst imaginary dreams take its place. Celebrity culture thrives from the very lack of inner reflection. There is no ‘going within’ unless it is a form of medication going down our throats. If we are brutally honest, the celebrity spectacle is an ugly specter that can be as cruel as it is superficial.

The Spectacle of Celebrity Culture

No one achieves celebrity status on their own. It is a stage performance that requires a hoard of cultural enablers; from media, marketers, promoters, agents, handlers, and a host of hungry and gullible people. It is a veritable stage of actors, with each person in it to gain something for themselves. They either seek attention, satisfaction, fame, wealth, or a combination of these. Celebrity culture has come to dominate how many of us define our sense of belonging. It has come to define how we relate to the world around us, and in this respect has disfigured our notions of social belonging and community. Celebrity culture funds and feeds our own movies inside our heads as we invent our roles and behavior. It is a culture in which very few participants are even real for a day.

We idolize celebrities and often project them as idealized forms of ourselves. And yet through this substitution we move further away from any real self-actualization. The transcendent – the Real – does not do substitutes. By throwing our fantasies onto others we are diminishing our own power. In the words of one serious journalist,

We are chained to the flickering shadows of celebrity culture, the spectacle of the arena and the airwaves, the lies of advertising, the endless personal dramas, many of them completely fictional, that have become the staple of news, celebrity gossip, New Age mysticism, and pop psychology …in contemporary culture the fabricated, the inauthentic, and the theatrical have displaced the natural, the genuine, and the spontaneous, until reality itself has been converted into stagecraft. 1

We are subtly pushed through the well-structured stagecraft whilst all the time thinking that it is real. Our contemporary ‘death of the gods’ has been replaced by a divine adoration of celebrities and celebrity culture. Celebrity items, like holy relics, are paraded, idolized, and sold for vast sums. People rush for autographs, only to sell them later on eBay to make an unhealthy profit. Celebrity personal possessions are sold off at prestigious auction houses for astronomical prices, so aging people can wear the clothes of their idols. The glitzy suit that Elvis wore before dying in a Las Vegas toilet; or the dress that Marilyn Monroe wore to show her knickers to the world above a subway vent. Everything is up for grabs – the profane is made sacred, and then sacrificed as celebrity talismans. It all engenders a performance of hysteria, leading sometimes to stalking, or what is nowadays referred to as ‘trolling,’ as celebrity private photos are hacked and shared online. It’s happened to Emma Watson, Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Jessica Alba, Kate Hudson, Scarlett Johansson…and the list goes on, and on, and on.

The world of celebrity culture thrusts us into a moral void. People are valued by their appearance and their skin-deep beauty rather than their humanity. Such a culture focuses upon onanistic desires and ways for self-gratification. The cult of self ‘has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity, and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, and manipulation, and the inability to feel remorse or guilt.’2 The cult of self also promotes the right to get whatever we wish, and celebrity media plays into this, often at the cost of the celebrity who suffers from social media harassment and online trolling. Celebrity public life is not a sacred space; instead, it has become a theatre of performance that is open for all spectators. And those spectators who surround themselves with celebrity culture tend to live in the present, fed by an endless stream of packaged information. They live by credit promises, ignorant to the future prospect of unmanageable debt. They are hostage to a culture that keeps them enthralled, like a television commercial replete with pleasing jingles. They navigate their purchases through well-known brands, eyeing the famous logos as guides. It is an image-saturated reality, bright and tantalizing, offering comfort and satisfaction upon all levels – until the credit runs out. Then the person becomes an outlaw to the very system that fattened them up like foie gras ducks.

These are the trivial diversions that for many are necessary, and which exist in cultures that prize shallow entertainment above substance. We may wonder whether the consumerist celebrity culture is a compensation for the loss of our true freedom regarding the human spirit and our well-being. And celebrities too are often trapped within their own fairy-tale prisons. They are skillfully controlled by their handlers and pushed in front of the media – all this to compensate for the insatiable appetites of those thirsty spectators that swarm upon celebrity culture. We are tantalizingly shown that even us, the humble spectators, can triumph in fame through the lens of reality television. The celebrity machinery oils itself on the media-creation of third and fourth-rate celebrities that have their fifteen minutes of fame – crammed together on desert islands, stuffing insects into their mouths as they bad-mouth their once beloved ‘best-friend’ and vote them off the show. Reality survival, it seems, comes at a cost. And then when they finally emerge into the ‘real world’ of the hyperreal they throng and mingle with other reality-stars under the glare of media spotlight in the vain hope that together they can populate an illusory world of the celebrity.

The world of reality television is another limb on the body of phantom performance. In the last decade a multitude of reality shows have cropped up on our television screens; and they all have one thing in common – they involve being constantly watched. Popular shows such as Big Brother put strangers to live together with round-the-clock constant surveillance. These strangers are even videoed in their beds as they sleep or fondle and kiss with other contestants. Sex lives are ogled over alongside the tears and on-screen breakdowns. Then the television psychologists are wheeled out to offer ‘expert commentary’ on the contestant’s state for mass consumption. Yet underneath all this glamour and glitz is the subtle message that intrusive surveillance is a normal feature of contemporary societies. In fact, it even masquerades as something cool that can be shared online, and which can make us famous. However, the brute reality is that such reality shows normalize what would otherwise be blatant non-constitutional intervention. And yet such shows make surveillance not only routine but a potentially enjoyable part of our modern lives. We are being conditioned into monitoring and sharing our own lives for others to see. Our phantom performances can make any one of us into an enviable star.

Social media is now rife with home-grown videos where everyone from toddler to teenager to retiree is making their performances visible to the image-hungry collective. Selfies too are the new fashionable rage as we perform in front of ourselves. This trend has become so pervasive that each year the number of selfie-related deaths has been increasing. In 2015 more people died from taking selfies than from shark attacks.[i] A dedicated online Wikipedia page has been established to record some of the ongoing ‘selfie-deaths.’ Here are a few examples:

Two young men died in the Ural Mountains after they pulled the pin from a live hand grenade to take a selfie. The phone with the picture remained as evidence of the circumstance of their deaths. (Russia, January 2015)

An 18-year-old died when she attempted to take the “ultimate selfie”, posing with a friend on top of a train in the north-eastern Romanian city of Iași when her leg touched a live wire above which electrocuted her with 27,000 volts. (Romania, May 2015)

A 19-year-old from Houston died after trying to take an Instagram selfie while holding a loaded gun to his head. He accidentally fired the gun and shot himself in the throat. (USA, September 2015)

A 17-year-old student, Andrey Retrovsky from Vologda, Russia, fell to his death attempting to take a selfie while hanging from a rope from a nine-story building. The rope snapped. Retrovsky was known for taking ‘extreme’ selfies and posting them to his Instagram account. (Russia, September 2015)

Selfie deaths, it seems, are global – and not a rare occurrence. Our phantom performances come at a cost. In a world where the image is iconic, more and more people are losing themselves in a reality where a sense of achievement comes from catching the ‘ultimate selfie.’

The drive for inner fulfilment, transcendence, and growth has been wavered aside in favor of the pixilated image. We fear not being seen. We dread being anonymous. Even being a spectral ghost is preferable to being dead.

We Are the Image

The new perspective on the world is pixilated. We are awash with images without substance and which are routinely fetishized as iconic. Signs are lacking immanence; they are fleeting and transient like never before. That is why corporations spend millions trying to find an image logo that will stick around long enough to be implanted into our minds. Images are becoming signs to the disappearance of the real. Images are the new believable reality; now no one cares that the original behind the image has quietly slipped away. The world exists as if in a play of phantom appearances. The image has taken centerstage within the space of the new real. We are now the image.

Yet the danger here is that in being given the image with its glamour and glitz we are in return giving up our critical and intellectual tools that help us cope with a complex world. Where once we had the faculty of separating illusion from reality we now have a simplified hyperreal world where everything can be explained away by a platitude of post-truth phrases. Does it even matter anymore that Las Vegas with its illusion of France with the mock Eiffel Tower, or its pseudo-canals of Venice, are far from the reality of France or Venice? How many people care? Or that the fantasy worlds within the various Disney theme parks are merging with the entertainment-saturated lives outside? Would it truly matter if we were all living within a controlled environment as depicted within the film The Truman Show? Or maybe, just maybe, such films are actually trying to tell us something – to wake us up?

The danger now is that our cultural spectacles – our celebrity culture and spectral images – are making any other alternative seem dull to us. It may be that in an age of simplified gratification any complex reality is boring. What the ‘real’ presents us with may no longer be enough. In its place we are perhaps seeking a false magic.

We have lost touch with that essential something that can work like magic in our lives. As one thinker recently stated:

We live in changing times whereby humanity is undergoing a transformation…We need to understand phenomena at deeper levels, and not just accept what we are told, or what is fed to us through well-structured social institutions and channels. We must learn to accept that our thinking is a great tangible spiritual force for change. 2

The notion that our ideas, our vision, our projections onto the world can be a ‘great tangible spiritual force for change’ is eluding us. Never before has it been so important to trust in the power of the human spirit, and to put forth, with honesty and integrity, the innate human power. The alternative is that we slide into the slipstream of our own phantom performances – we become the image.

 

Extract from the book Bardo Times: hyperreality, high-velocity, simulation, automation, mutation – a hoax?

Endnotes 

1 Hedges, Chris. 2010. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. New York: Nation Books, p15

 2 Gulbekian, S.E. 2004. In the Belly of the Beast: Holding Your Own in Mass Culture. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads, p251

[i] See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/11881900/More-people-have-died-by-taking-selfies-this-year-than-by-shark-attacks.html

How Real Mind Control Works

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By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.com

When people are confronted with the idea of “mind control” they often think of something out of television or film media; a lone prisoner tortured, chemically dazed and conditioned into a hollow zombie as his captors squeeze information from him or use him to complete a task he would not normally do or morally accept. And while there is actually some truth to this kind of Hollywood depiction, as is evidenced in the exposure of government programs like MK Ultra, the most insidious forms of mind control are far more subtle.

Governments and the elitists behind them do not necessarily need to physically cage, drug and brutalize people in order to influence how they behave. All they need to do is manage their perceptions, expectation and assumptions. This can be accomplished with large portions of the public, rather than one person at a time.

The elites have always been fascinated with the idea of mass hypnotism. In the 18th century Franz Mesmer was famous for entertaining European royalty with displays of what he called “animal magnetism”, which included what we now know as hypnosis of individuals and groups. Mesmerism has since become synonymous with the attempt to befuddle people and dictate their actions while in a kind of trance. Hypnotism is still a very active subject in psychiatric circles and the US government took avid interest in hypnotism as a weapon during their MK Ultra experiments in the 1950s.

People involved in the field of hypnotism are quick to point out that a hypnotized person cannot be made to do something that goes against their code of ethics, but this is not exactly the whole story. A hypnotist makes suggestions that the subject chooses to follow (or refuses to follow) while in a trance state, however, what if they can be convinced (or fooled) through hypnosis into believing that a particular action is in their best interest in spite of their moral code or sense of self preservation?

This type of control over a subject can and has been accomplished in hypnotic therapy, and examples of “covert” hypnotherapy are also on record, including the example of an Ohio divorce attorney that used covert hypnotism against multiple female clients and is suspected of using it against some court employees to disarm their psyches and then rape them without memory of the incident.

About two thirds of any given population are capable of being hypnotized to varying degrees. Stanford University has been avidly searching for a brain pattern that acts as a fingerprint for those that are more prone to hypnotic influence, and they believe they have found certain factors involving areas of the brain that handle heightened focus and attention. Reduced peripheral awareness also helps to increase the subject’s vulnerability to hypnosis and vastly increases suggestibility.

These conditions can in fact be encouraged in large crowds of people. Consider this for a moment – What daily activity is the average person involved in that hyperfocuses their attention on a single point in space for long periods of time and removes almost all of their peripheral awareness? If you said “cell phone use” then you win a chicken dinner. Beyond creating an artificial and constant low dose of dopamine in the human brain leading to addiction, cell phones and other small electronic devices actually create the perfect conditions for a person to be hypnotized as they rip them away from all peripheral awareness and make them highly suggestible to those who know how to use covert methods.

To reiterate, a hypnotic state can be induced in large groups of people for extended periods of time with the correct long term stimulus. Watch here as mentalist Darren Brown hypnotizes or “brainwashes” an entire shopping mall of people into raising their hands exactly when he wants them to without them being aware of why they are doing it. Notice that around two thirds of the crowd complies.

Hypnotic suggestions last as long as the subjects continue to believe that the suggestions are correct. Hypnotism is essentially an agreement between the hypnotist and the persons being hypnotized that a particular belief is true (even if it is not). In the case of a victim of an attack, the person may want to believe that the traumatic event did not happen, and thus they can be convinced through hypnosis to forget it. In the case of a group of people, the hypnotist would have to identify an idea or fear that they all share and WANT to believe is real, and then exploit it.

I think some of the political applications of this are obvious.

The false left/right paradigm is a perfect Petri dish for obtaining or manufacturing the consent of the masses to be hypnotized. They WANT to believe that their team, which they have willingly joined, is the correct team and that the leadership of that team has their best interests at heart. They want to believe that the actions of their party, through legislation or direct means, are always rational and morally sound. And, even when the leaders of their party do things which are completely contrary to the beliefs and morals of the people who make up the party, those people still want to believe that there must be some logical reason behind these decisions that they do not yet grasp.

Beyond this, the threat of the “other party” or team is an ever constant stimulus in the form of fear.  We watch the scripted battles of these two fabricated teams play out in elaborate forms of Kabuki theater, yet nothing ever really changes except that the global elites grow more powerful.  Still, many people actually believe these battles to be real, and invest immense amounts of energy and focus into them as if the fate of the world is being decided within the antics of a political soap opera.

When people are afraid or hyperfocused on an outside threat, they once again become more suggestible. This is why mainstream political discussions focus less on understanding of the threat (the “How” and the “Why”) and more on perpetuating the threat.  With understanding of the enemy (or false enemy), the threat can be assessed and fear is reduced, even if the threat is real. Without understanding, fear only increases. Political powers seek to constantly remind us that threats exist without allowing us the benefit of context.  They do not want us to have an in-depth knowledge of the mechanics behind the threats.

We are told that our system works in a particular way that seems logical, but it only makes sense to us so long as we want to believe that the system functions as we were taught.  We have to have blind faith that what we were initially told was absolutely true.  The question is, why should we?  Isn’t it better to remain skeptical of most things and to study what is handed to us?  If we’re given a strange elixir by an utter stranger and we’re told to “drink up!”, would we not question what’s in the frothing brew and what it does?  Would we not investigate?

In the case of information and proclamations some people would not investigate, because it is more comfortable to believe the lies, or perhaps because they will be rewarded for going along with the status quo.  Only when we become willing to sacrifice comfort, when we stop wanting to accept everything we are told at face value and start questioning the reality that is handed to us, only then will the mass hypnosis we were once influenced by lose its power.

The hypnosis of the elites requires ever increasing forms of distraction and stimulation in order to keep the public entranced. The creation of fear and confusion is vital to the execution of mass mind control, and this is a factor that many people absolutely refuse to recognize or take into consideration. The idea that the elites would build a system only to then deliberately destroy it is just too much for many to fathom. But again, what better way to hyperfocus an entire population and make them malleable to suggestions that they would not normally consider otherwise?

In past articles I have outlined the incredible array of similarities between global elitist groups and the behaviors and character traits of narcissistic sociopaths (also known as narcopaths or psychopaths).  I have even theorized that globalists are actually a highly organized group of narcopaths who recruit other narcopaths into the fold. Many high-level narcopaths are intuitively knowledgeable on the dynamics of suggestibility and the human psyche. I would call this their primary survival trait.

Narcopaths are well known for creating confusion around them in order to gain control of the people in their lives or the people in a room. They are also known for being willing to build up certain routines and acclimating people around them to a particular environment, only to suddenly disrupt it all as a means to stun their victims and create subservience. It is important to realize that these people do NOT necessarily care about stability. In fact, they often will actively sabotage stability to obtain something they care about more – control.

The strategies that individual narcopaths exhibit on a small scale are simply magnified thousands of times when we talk about the behaviors of the global elitists. People who consider themselves rational are hard pressed to comprehend this kind of behavior, but there is a devious tactical logic to it. Mind control of others can be achieved by keeping those people infinitely off-balance. Conjuring moments of tenuous peace, and then striking with cycles of unpredictable crisis. Before we know it, many years of instability have gone by and the organized narcopaths in power have gained even more control.  We wonder where all that time went, and why we were not able to change things? It is because we have been hypnotized into inaction, or the wrong actions in the name of meaningless political stagecraft.

Real mind control and mass hypnosis requires, as already mentioned, our consent, but it is consent that is conned out of us. It is conned out of us by fake leaders with intentions and actions that do not match their promises. It is conned out of us by a system that breeds conformity of thought and tells us that those who think outside the widely accepted norm are aberrant and “crazy”. It is conned out of us by our own weaknesses – our desire to go along to get along, our fear of confronting the crowd and telling them they are wrong, our fear of losing what we think is stability, or our fear of being on our own.

Real mind control is not about torture and force, it is about quietly induced acceptance. We can remove our consent from the hypnotists anytime we wish, but we have to be willing to stop ignoring certain realities. We have to be willing to feel the pain that comes when we recognize we have been conned and controlled in the past, and we have to revel in our ability to refuse to conform. It must become a part of who we are – the people who do not take what we are told at face value. The people that question almost everything. The people who cannot be mesmerized.

Agents of Empire

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By Michael Krieger

Source: Liberty Blitzkrieg

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

– Arundhati Roy

Last week, Hillary Clinton called Tulsi Gabbard (and Jill Stein) Russian assets on a podcast. More specifically:

“I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on someone who’s currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians,” said Clinton, apparently referring to Rep. Gabbard, who’s been accused of receiving support from Russian bots and the Russian news media. “They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.” She added: “That’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she’s also a Russian asset. Yeah, she’s a Russian asset—I mean, totally. They know they can’t win without a third-party candidate. So I don’t know who it’s going to be, but I will guarantee you they will have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most needed.”

Tulsi subsequently responded to this slanderous accusation with a series of devastating blows.

Her tweets set off a firestorm, and even if you’re as disillusioned by presidential politics as myself, you couldn’t help but cheer wildly that someone with a major political platform finally stated without any hint of fear or hesitation exactly what so many Americans across the ideological spectrum feel.

Of course, this has far wider implications than a high profile feud between these two. The “let’s blame Russia for Hillary’s loss” epidemic of calculated stupidity driven by Ellen-Democrats and their mouthpieces across corporate mass media began immediately after the election. I know about it on a personal level because this website was an early target of the neoliberal-led new McCarthyism courtesy of a ridiculous and libelous smear in the Washington Post over Thanksgiving weekend 2016 (see: Liberty Blitzkrieg Included on Washington Post Highlighted Hit List of “Russian Propaganda” Websites).

This is when it became clear it wasn’t just political operatives pushing fake news about Russian influence, but that “respected” mass media would be leading the charge for them. The rest is pretty much history. MSNBC, CNN, The Washington Post, etc have been spewing outlandish Russiagate nonsense for three years straight, and despite the complete failure of special counsel Robert Mueller to find any evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, these agents of empire refuse to stop. The whole charade seems more akin to an intelligence operation than journalism, which shouldn’t be surprising given the proliferation of former intelligence agents throughout mass media in the Trump era.

Here’s a small sampling via Politico’s 2018 article: The Spies Who Came in to the TV Studio

Former CIA Director John Brennan (2013-17) is the latest superspook to be reborn as a TV newsie. He just cashed in at NBC News as a “senior national security and intelligence analyst” and served his first expert views on last Sunday’s edition of Meet the Press. The Brennan acquisition seeks to elevate NBC to spook parity with CNN, which employs former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director Michael Hayden in a similar capacity. Other, lesser-known national security veterans thrive under TV’s grow lights. Almost too numerous to list, they include Chuck Rosenberg, former acting DEA administrator, chief of staff for FBI Director James B. Comey, and counselor to former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III; Frank Figliuzzi, former chief of FBI counterintelligence; Juan Zarate, deputy national security adviser under Bush, at NBC; and Fran Townsend, homeland security adviser under Bush, at CBS News. CNN’s bulging roster also includes former FBI agent Asha Rangappa; former FBI agent James Gagliano; Obama’s former deputy national security adviser Tony Blinken; former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers; senior adviser to the National Security Council during the Obama administration Samantha Vinograd; retired CIA operations officer Steven L. Hall; and Philip Mudd, also retired from the CIA.

Americans like to sneer at more transparently unfree societies around the world, but when you think about the disturbing implications of former spooks delivering news to the public, one can’t help but conclude that mass media in 2019 looks like a gigantic propaganda campaign targeting U.S. citizens. Moreover, as can be seen by the recent attacks by Clinton and her allies in the media on Gabbard, they aren’t easing up.

Which brings us to the crux of the issue. Why are they doing this? Why is Clinton, with zero evidence whatsoever, falsely calling a sitting U.S. Congresswoman, a veteran with two tours in Iraq, and someone polling at only 2% in the Democratic primary a “Russian asset.” Why are they so afraid of Tulsi Gabbard?

It’s partly personal. Tulsi was one of only a handful of congressional Democrats to set aside fears of the Clintons and their mafia-like network to endorse Bernie Sanders early in 2016. In fact, she stepped down from her position as vice-chairman of the Democratic National Committee to do so. This is the sort of thing a petty narcissist like Hillary Clinton could never forgive, but it goes further.

Tulsi’s mere presence on stage during recent debates has proven devastating for the Ellen Degeneres wing of the Democratic party. She effectively ended neoliberal darling Kamala Harris’ chances by simply telling the truth about her horrible record, something no one else in the race had the guts to do.

In other words, Tulsi demolished Kamala Harris and put an end to her primary chances by simply telling the truth about her on national television. This is how powerful the truth can be when somebody’s actually willing to stand up and say it. It’s why the agents of empire — in charge of virtually all major institutions — go out of their way to ensure the American public is exposed to as little truth as possible. It’s also why they lie and scream “Russia” instead of debating the actual issues.

But this goes well beyond Tulsi Gabbard. Empire requires constant meddling abroad as well as periodic regime change wars to ensure compliant puppets are firmly in control of any country with any geopolitical significance. The 21st century has been littered with a series of disastrous U.S. interventions abroad, while the country back home continues to descend deeper into a neo-feudal oligarchy with a hunger games style economy. As such, an increasing number of Americans have begun to question the entire premise of imperial foreign policy.

To the agents of empire, dominant throughout mainstream politics, mega corporations, think-tanks and of course mass media, this sort of thought crime is entirely unacceptable. In case you haven’t noticed, empire is a third-rail of U.S. politics. If you dare touch the issue, you’ll be ruthlessly smeared, without any evidence, as a Russian agent or asset. There’s nothing logical about this, but then again there typically isn’t much logic when it comes to psychological operations. They depend on manipulation and triggering specific emotional responses.

There’s a reason people like Hillary Clinton and her minions just yell “Russia” whenever an individual with a platform criticizes empire and endless war. They know they can’t win an argument if they debate the actual issues, so a conscious choice was made to simply avoid debate entirely. As such, they’ve decided to craft and spread a disingenuous narrative in which anyone critical of establishment neocon/neoliberal foreign policy is a Russia asset/agent/bot. This is literally all they’ve got. These people are telling you 2+2=5 and if you don’t accept it, you’re a traitorous, Putin-loving nazi with a pee pee tape. And these same people call themselves “liberal.”

Importantly, it isn’t just a few trollish kooks doing this. It’s being spread by some of the most powerful people and institutions in the country, including of course mass media.

For example:

https://twitter.com/ibrahimpols/status/1185571046738579456

This inane verbal vomit is considered “liberal” news in modern America, a word which has now lost all meaning. Above, we witness a collection of television mannequins questioning the loyalty of a U.S. veteran who continues to serve in both Congress and the national guard simply because she dared call out America’s perpetually failing foreign policy establishment.

To conclude, it’s now clear dissent is only permitted so long as it doesn’t become too popular. By polling at 2% in the primary, it appears Gabbard became too popular, but the truth is she’s just a vessel. What’s really got the agents of empire concerned is we may be on the verge of a tipping point within the broader U.S. population regarding regime change wars and empire. This is why debate needs to be shut down and shut down now. A critical mass of citizens openly questioning establishment foreign policy cannot be permitted. Those on the fence need to be bullied and manipulated into thinking dissent is equivalent to being a traitor. The national security state doesn’t want the public to even think about such topics, let alone debate them.

Ultimately, if you give up your capacity for reason, for free-thought and for the courage to say what you think about issues of national significance, you’ve lost everything. This is what these manipulators want you to do. They want you to shut-up, to listen to the “experts” who destroy everything they touch, and to be a compliant subject as opposed to an active, empowered citizen. The answer to such a tactic is to be more bold, more informed and more ethical. They fear truth and empowered individuals more than anything else. Stand up tall and speak your mind. Pandering to bullies never works.

How To Defeat The Empire

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

One of the biggest and most consistent challenges of my young career so far has been finding ways to talk about solutions to our predicament in a way that people will truly hear. I talk about these solutions constantly, and some readers definitely get it, but others will see me going on and on about a grassroots revolution against the establishment narrative control machine and then say “Okay, but what do we do?” or “You talk about problems but never offer any solutions!”

Part of the difficulty is that I don’t talk much about the old attempts at solutions we’ve already tried that people have been conditioned to listen for. I don’t endorse politicians, I don’t advocate starting a new political party, I don’t support violent revolution, I don’t say that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction and the proletariat will inevitably rise up against the bourgeoisie, and in general I don’t put much stock in the idea that our political systems are in and of themselves sufficient for addressing our biggest problems in any meaningful way.

What I do advocate, over and over and over again in as many different ways as I can come up with, is a decentralized guerrilla psywar against the institutions which enable the powerful to manipulate the way ordinary people think, act and vote.

I talk about narrative and propaganda all the time because they are the root of all our problems. As long as the plutocrat-controlled media are able to manufacture consent for the status quo upon which those plutocrats built their respective empires, there will never be the possibility of a successful revolution. People will never rebel against a system while they’re being successfully propagandized not to. It will never, ever happen.

Most people who want drastic systematic changes to the way power operates in our society utterly fail to take this into account. Most of them are aware to some extent that establishment propaganda is happening, but they fail to fully appreciate its effects, its power, and the fact that it’s continually getting more and more sophisticated. They continue to talk about the need for a particular political movement, for this or that new government policy, or even for a full-fledged revolution, without ever turning and squarely focusing on the elephant in the room that none of these things will ever happen as long as most people are successfully propagandized into being uninterested in making them happen.

It’s like trying to light a fire without first finding a solution to the problem that you’re standing under pouring rain. Certainly we can all agree that a fire is sorely needed because it’s cold and wet and miserable out here, but we’re never going to get one going while the kindling is getting soaked and we can’t even get a match lit. The first order of business must necessarily be to find a way to protect our fire-starting area from the downpour of establishment propaganda.

A decentralized guerrilla psywar against the propaganda machine is the best solution to this problem.

By psywar I mean a grassroots psychological war against the establishment propaganda machine with the goal of weakening public trust in pro-empire narratives. People only believe sources of information that they trust, and propaganda cannot operate without belief. Right now trust in the mass media is at an all-time low while our ability to network and share information is at an all-time high. Our psywar is fought with the goal of using our unprecedented ability to circulate information to continue to kill public trust in the mass media, not with lies and propaganda, but with truth. If we can expose journalistic malpractice and the glaring plot holes in establishment narratives about things like war, Julian Assange, Russia etc, we will make the mass media look less trustworthy.

By decentralized I mean we should each take responsibility for weakening public trust in the propaganda machine in our own way, rather than depending on centralized groups and organizations. The more centralized an operation is, the easier it is for establishment manipulators to infiltrate and undermine it. This doesn’t mean that organizing is bad, it just means a successful grassroots psywar won’t depend on it. If we’re each watching for opportunities to weaken public trust in the official narrative makers on our own personal time and in our own unique way using videos, blogs, tweets, art, paper literature, conversations and demonstrations, we’ll be far more effective.

By guerrilla I mean constantly attacking different fronts in different ways, never staying with the same line of attack for long enough to allow the propagandists to develop a counter-narrative. If they build up particularly strong armor around one area, put it aside and expose their lies on an entirely different front. The propagandists are lying constantly, so there is never any shortage of soft targets. The only consistency should be in attacking the propaganda machine as visibly as possible.

As far as how to go about that attack, my best answer is that I’m leading by example here. I’m only ever doing the thing that I advocate, so if you want to know what I think we should all do, just watch what I do. I’m only ever using my own unique set of skills, knowledge and assets to attack the narrative control engine at whatever points I perceive to be the most vulnerable on a given day.

So do what I do, but keep in mind that each individual must sort out the particulars for themselves. We’ve each got our own strengths and abilities that we bring to the psywar: some of us are funny, some are artistic, some are really good at putting together information and presenting it in a particular format, some are good at finding and boosting other people’s high-quality attacks. Everyone brings something to the table. The important thing is to do whatever will draw the most public interest and attention to what you’re doing. Don’t shy away from speaking loud and shining bright.

It isn’t necessary to come up with your own complete How It Is narrative of exactly what is happening in our world right now; with the current degree of disinformation and government opacity that’s too difficult to do with any degree of completion anyway. All you need to do is wake people up in as many ways as possible to the fact that they’re being manipulated and deceived. Every newly opened pair of eyes makes a difference, and anything you can do to help facilitate that is energy well spent.

Without an effective propaganda machine, the empire cannot rule. Once we’ve crippled public trust in that machine, we’ll exist in a very different world already, and the next step will present itself from there. Until then, the attack on establishment propaganda should be our foremost priority.

Judge Denies Assange Extension on Extradition Hearing

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Protestors line up at courthouse Monday morning. (Gordon Dimmack)

A judge at a hearing in London has denied the WikiLeaks’ publisher more time to prepare his defense, while a group of Australian politicians coalesce around a demand to return Julian Assange home.

By Joe Lauria

Source: Consortium News

The judge in Julian Assange’s extradition process on Monday denied his lawyer’s appeal for more time to prepare his case as the imprisoned WikiLeaks publisher weakly told the court he was unable to “research anything” in the conditions under which he is being held in high-security Belmarsh Prison.

Assange appeared in person at Westminster Magistrate’s Court in London Monday morning for a case management hearing on the request by the United States for Assange to be sent to Virginia to face 18 charges, including allegedly violating the U.S. Espionage Act for possessing and disseminating classified information that revealed prima facie evidence of U.S. war crimes.

Mark Summers, Assange’s lawyer, told the court the charges were “a political attempt” by the U.S. “to signal to journalists the consequences of publishing information.” The Espionage Act indictment against Assange by the Trump Administration is the first time a journalist has been charged under the 1917 Act for publishing classified material.

“It is legally unprecedented,” Summers told Judge Vanessa Baraitser. He argued that President Donald Trump was politically motivated by the 2020 election to pursue Assange.

Summers also argued before Baraitser that the U.S. “has been actively engaged in intruding into privileged discussions between Assange and his lawyers.” It was revealed this month that the Central Intelligence Agency was given access to surveillance video shot by a private Spanish company of all interactions Assange had with lawyers, doctors and visitors.

“This is part of an avowed war on whistleblowers to include investigative journalists and publishers,” Summers said. “The American state has been actively engaged in intruding on privileged discussions between Mr Assange and his lawyer.”

Because of this surveillance, including “unlawful copying of their telephones and computers” as well as “hooded men breaking into offices,” Assange’s lawyers needed more time to prepare his defense, Summers argued. But Baraitser refused the request, and ordered Assange back in court for a second management hearing on Dec. 19. The full extradition hearing is scheduled to begin on Feb. 25 next year.

Not Equitable

As the hearing ended Monday, Baraitser asked Assange if he understood what had just transpired. “Not really. I can’t think properly,” he said.

“I don’t understand how this is equitable. This superpower had 10 years to prepare for this case and I can’t access my writings. It’s very difficult where I am to do anything but these people have unlimited resources. They are saying journalists and whistleblowers are enemies of the people. They have unfair advantages dealing with documents. They [know] the interior of my life with my psychologist. They steal my children’s DNA. This is not equitable what is happening here.”

The Guardian quoted WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Kristinn Hrafnsson as saying that Assange’s case should be thrown out because of interference with preparing his defense. “Not only is it illegal on the face of the treaty, the U.S. has conducted illegal operations against Assange and his lawyers which are the subject of a major investigation in Spain,” Hrafnsson said.

According to witnesses in the courtroom, Assange appeared physically and mentally enfeebled after months in isolation in prison. Tristan Kirk, correspondent for the London Evening Standard, tweeted: “Julian Assange struggled to say his own name and date of birth as he appeared in the dock. He claimed to have not understood what happened in the case management hearing, and was holding back tears as he said: ‘I can’t think properly.’”

In response to Kirk’s message, Assange’s mother, Christine Assange, tweeted: “This breaks my heart! They are breaking my beautiful bright, brave journalist son, the corrupt bastards!”

https://twitter.com/AssangeMrs/status/1186254253481811970

Supporters Outside

Assange’s supporters swarmed the van in which Assange was driven away from the courthouse back to his dreary isolation in the hospital ward at Belmarsh.

https://twitter.com/matthabusby/status/1186239398385504256

Speaking outside the courthouse after the hearing, journalist John Pilger called the legal assault on Assange a “deliberate action of a rogue state, a state that ignores its own laws and international law.”

“There were people crying in the gallery,” said Assange supporter Emmy Butlin. “He is like a ghost. He could hardly talk. He’s dying.”

Australian MPs Back Assange

Meanwhile in Assange’s native Australia, members of Parliament have demanded that Assange be returned to his country.

MP Andrew Wilkie told the House of Representatives last week that Assange is “an Australian citizen and must be treated like any other Australian. He was not in the U.S. when he provided evidence of U.S. war crimes in Iraq. He can’t possibly have broken their laws.”

If Assange is extradited, Wilkie said he

“faces serious human rights violations including exposure to torture and a dodgy trial. And this has serious implications for freedom of speech and freedom of the press here in Australia, because if we allow a foreign country to charge an Australian citizen for revealing war crimes, then no Australian journalist or publisher can ever be confident that the same thing won’t happen to them. Put simply, he must be allowed to return to Australia.”

Wilkie, an Australian former intelligence officer who resigned because of the falsehoods about WMD in Iraq before the 2003 invasion, is reportedly working to set up a parliamentary committee that crosses party lines to demand that the Liberal government of Prime Minister Scott Morrison opposes Assange’s extradition.

The Australian TV program “The Project” reported on Sunday that up to 10 politicians were ready to join the committee.

“It’s important that parliamentarians learn the facts of this matter,” Wilkie told the program. “There’s so much naiveté and ignorance and disinformation swirling around that it’s no wonder that a lot of people are wary or even dislike Julian, but I reckon that when people find out the facts of the matter they will get behind him.

“This is about the right of person not to be extradited to another country based on a whim or the politics of it. The whole thing stinks quite frankly, I think he should be allowed to come to Australia.”

Wilkie called the ability for Morrison to stand up to Trump, with whom he’s said to be close, “a test for the prime minister.”

“It’s one thing to be mates with someone, but it’s another thing entirely to agree to do something which is entirely improper. I mean ScoMo is the prime minister of Australia, he’s not the vice president of the United States I hope. And this is an opportunity for Australia to say we stand for the rule of law and we stand behind people who stand up and speak about war crimes. Australian politicians kowtow to the U.S. all the time without realizing that our alliance would be even stronger if sometimes we said, ‘No.’ Because if ScoMo just rolls over on this and is happy for Julian Assange to be extradited from Belmarsh Prison in the UK to the U.S., well that just means Australia can be taken for granted. You actually lose leverage bizarrely by having a really close relationship that Scott Morrison seems to have with Donald Trump. Rather than putting Australia in a better position it can put Australia in a weaker position because the U.S. knows it can be taken for granted.”

Wilkie joined right-wing MP Barnaby Joyce who the previous week came out in Assange’s defense. “Whether you like a person or not, they should be afforded the proper rights and protections and the process of justice,” Joyce said.

Wilkie told “The Project,” “When someone like Barnaby Joyce thinks there’s an issue here then people should pay attention.”

 

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Sunday Times of London and numerous other newspapers. He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on Twitter @unjoe .