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From Jesus Christ to Julian Assange: When Dissidents Become Enemies of the State

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” — George Orwell

When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals.

In the current governmental climate, where laws that run counter to the dictates of the Constitution are made in secret, passed without debate, and upheld by secret courts that operate behind closed doors, obeying one’s conscience and speaking truth to the power of the police state can render you an “enemy of the state.”

That list of so-called “enemies of the state” is growing.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is merely the latest victim of the police state’s assault on dissidents and whistleblowers.

On April 11, 2019, police arrested Assange for daring to access and disclose military documents that portray the U.S. government and its endless wars abroad as reckless, irresponsible, immoral and responsible for thousands of civilian deaths.

Included among the leaked materials was gunsight video footage from two U.S. AH-64 Apache helicopters engaged in a series of air-to-ground attacks while American air crew laughed at some of the casualties. Among the casualties were two Reuters correspondents who were gunned down after their cameras were mistaken for weapons and a driver who stopped to help one of the journalists. The driver’s two children, who happened to be in the van at the time it was fired upon by U.S. forces, suffered serious injuries.

There is nothing defensible about crimes such as these perpetrated by the government.

When any government becomes almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to be fighting—whether that evil takes the form of war, terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity—that government has lost its claim to legitimacy.

These are hard words, but hard times require straight-talking.

It is easy to remain silent in the face of evil.

What is harder—what we lack today and so desperately need—are those with moral courage who will risk their freedoms and lives in order to speak out against evil in its many forms.

Throughout history, individuals or groups of individuals have risen up to challenge the injustices of their age. Nazi Germany had its Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The gulags of the Soviet Union were challenged by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. America had its color-coded system of racial segregation and warmongering called out for what it was, blatant discrimination and profiteering, by Martin Luther King Jr.

And then there was Jesus Christ, an itinerant preacher and revolutionary activist, who not only died challenging the police state of his day—namely, the Roman Empire—but provided a blueprint for civil disobedience that would be followed by those, religious and otherwise, who came after him.

Indeed, it is fitting that we remember that Jesus Christ—the religious figure worshipped by Christians for his death on the cross and subsequent resurrection—paid the ultimate price for speaking out against the police state of his day.

A radical nonconformist who challenged authority at every turn, Jesus was a far cry from the watered-down, corporatized, simplified, gentrified, sissified vision of a meek creature holding a lamb that most modern churches peddle. In fact, he spent his adult life speaking truth to power, challenging the status quo of his day, and pushing back against the abuses of the Roman Empire.

Much like the American Empire today, the Roman Empire of Jesus’ day had all of the characteristics of a police state: secrecy, surveillance, a widespread police presence, a citizenry treated like suspects with little recourse against the police state, perpetual wars, a military empire, martial law, and political retribution against those who dared to challenge the power of the state.

For all the accolades poured out upon Jesus, little is said about the harsh realities of the police state in which he lived and its similarities to modern-day America, and yet they are striking.

Secrecy, surveillance and rule by the elite. As the chasm between the wealthy and poor grew wider in the Roman Empire, the ruling class and the wealthy class became synonymous, while the lower classes, increasingly deprived of their political freedoms, grew disinterested in the government and easily distracted by “bread and circuses.” Much like America today, with its lack of government transparency, overt domestic surveillance, and rule by the rich, the inner workings of the Roman Empire were shrouded in secrecy, while its leaders were constantly on the watch for any potential threats to its power. The resulting state-wide surveillance was primarily carried out by the military, which acted as investigators, enforcers, torturers, policemen, executioners and jailers. Today that role is fulfilled by the NSA, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the increasingly militarized police forces across the country.

Widespread police presence. The Roman Empire used its military forces to maintain the “peace,” thereby establishing a police state that reached into all aspects of a citizen’s life. In this way, these military officers, used to address a broad range of routine problems and conflicts, enforced the will of the state. Today SWAT teams, comprised of local police and federal agents, are employed to carry out routine search warrants for minor crimes such as marijuana possession and credit card fraud.

Citizenry with little recourse against the police state. As the Roman Empire expanded, personal freedom and independence nearly vanished, as did any real sense of local governance and national consciousness. Similarly, in America today, citizens largely feel powerless, voiceless and unrepresented in the face of a power-hungry federal government. As states and localities are brought under direct control by federal agencies and regulations, a sense of learned helplessness grips the nation.

Perpetual wars and a military empire. Much like America today with its practice of policing the world, war and an over-arching militarist ethos provided the framework for the Roman Empire, which extended from the Italian peninsula to all over Southern, Western, and Eastern Europe, extending into North Africa and Western Asia as well. In addition to significant foreign threats, wars were waged against inchoate, unstructured and socially inferior foes.

Martial law. Eventually, Rome established a permanent military dictatorship that left the citizens at the mercy of an unreachable and oppressive totalitarian regime. In the absence of resources to establish civic police forces, the Romans relied increasingly on the military to intervene in all matters of conflict or upheaval in provinces, from small-scale scuffles to large-scale revolts. Not unlike police forces today, with their martial law training drills on American soil, militarized weapons and “shoot first, ask questions later” mindset, the Roman soldier had “the exercise of lethal force at his fingertips” with the potential of wreaking havoc on normal citizens’ lives.

A nation of suspects. Just as the American Empire looks upon its citizens as suspects to be tracked, surveilled and controlled, the Roman Empire looked upon all potential insubordinates, from the common thief to a full-fledged insurrectionist, as threats to its power. The insurrectionist was seen as directly challenging the Emperor.  A “bandit,” or revolutionist, was seen as capable of overturning the empire, was always considered guilty and deserving of the most savage penalties, including capital punishment. Bandits were usually punished publicly and cruelly as a means of deterring others from challenging the power of the state.  Jesus’ execution was one such public punishment.

Acts of civil disobedience by insurrectionists. Much like the Roman Empire, the American Empire has exhibited zero tolerance for dissidents such as Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning who exposed the police state’s seedy underbelly. Jesus branded himself a political revolutionary starting with his act of civil disobedience at the Jewish temple, the site of the administrative headquarters of the Sanhedrin, the supreme Jewish council. When Jesus “with the help of his disciples, blocks the entrance to the courtyard” and forbids “anyone carrying goods for sale or trade from entering the Temple,” he committed a blatantly criminal and seditious act, an act “that undoubtedly precipitated his arrest and execution.” Because the commercial events were sponsored by the religious hierarchy, which in turn was operated by consent of the Roman government, Jesus’ attack on the money chargers and traders can be seen as an attack on Rome itself, an unmistakable declaration of political and social independence from the Roman oppression.

Military-style arrests in the dead of night. Jesus’ arrest account testifies to the fact that the Romans perceived Him as a revolutionary. Eerily similar to today’s SWAT team raids, Jesus was arrested in the middle of the night, in secret, by a large, heavily armed fleet of soldiers.  Rather than merely asking for Jesus when they came to arrest him, his pursuers collaborated beforehand with Judas. Acting as a government informant, Judas concocted a kiss as a secret identification marker, hinting that a level of deception and trickery must be used to obtain this seemingly “dangerous revolutionist’s” cooperation.

Torture and capital punishment. In Jesus’ day, religious preachers, self-proclaimed prophets and nonviolent protesters were not summarily arrested and executed. Indeed, the high priests and Roman governors normally allowed a protest, particularly a small-scale one, to run its course. However, government authorities were quick to dispose of leaders and movements that appeared to threaten the Roman Empire. The charges leveled against Jesus—that he was a threat to the stability of the nation, opposed paying Roman taxes and claimed to be the rightful King—were purely political, not religious. To the Romans, any one of these charges was enough to merit death by crucifixion, which was usually reserved for slaves, non-Romans, radicals, revolutionaries and the worst criminals.
Jesus was presented to Pontius Pilate “as a disturber of the political peace,” a leader of a rebellion, a political threat, and most gravely—a claimant to kingship, a “king of the revolutionary type.” After Jesus is formally condemned by Pilate, he is sentenced to death by crucifixion, “the Roman means of executing criminals convicted of high treason.”  The purpose of crucifixion was not so much to kill the criminal, as it was an immensely public statement intended to visually warn all those who would challenge the power of the Roman Empire. Hence, it was reserved solely for the most extreme political crimes: treason, rebellion, sedition, and banditry. After being ruthlessly whipped and mocked, Jesus was nailed to a cross.

As Professor Mark Lewis Taylor observed:

The cross within Roman politics and culture was a marker of shame, of being a criminal. If you were put to the cross, you were marked as shameful, as criminal, but especially as subversive. And there were thousands of people put to the cross. The cross was actually positioned at many crossroads, and, as New Testament scholar Paula Fredricksen has reminded us, it served as kind of a public service announcement that said, “Act like this person did, and this is how you will end up.”

Jesus—the revolutionary, the political dissident, and the nonviolent activist—lived and died in a police state. Any reflection on Jesus’ life and death within a police state must take into account several factors: Jesus spoke out strongly against such things as empires, controlling people, state violence and power politics. Jesus challenged the political and religious belief systems of his day. And worldly powers feared Jesus, not because he challenged them for control of thrones or government but because he undercut their claims of supremacy, and he dared to speak truth to power in a time when doing so could—and often did—cost a person his life.

Unfortunately, the radical Jesus, the political dissident who took aim at injustice and oppression, has been largely forgotten today, replaced by a congenial, smiling Jesus trotted out for religious holidays but otherwise rendered mute when it comes to matters of war, power and politics.

Yet for those who truly study the life and teachings of Jesus, the resounding theme is one of outright resistance to war, materialism and empire.

What a marked contrast to the advice being given to Americans by church leaders to “submit to your leaders and those in authority,” which in the American police state translates to complying, conforming, submitting, obeying orders, deferring to authority and generally doing whatever a government official tells you to do.

Telling Americans to march in lockstep and blindly obey the government—or put their faith in politics and vote for a political savior—flies in the face of everything for which Jesus lived and died.

Ultimately, this is the contradiction that must be resolved if the radical Jesus—the one who stood up to the Roman Empire and was crucified as a warning to others not to challenge the powers-that-be—is to be an example for our modern age.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we must decide whether we will follow the path of least resistance—willing to turn a blind eye to what Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as the “evils of segregation and the crippling effects of discrimination, to the moral degeneracy of religious bigotry and the corroding effects of narrow sectarianism, to economic conditions that deprive men of work and food, and to the insanities of militarism and the self-defeating effects of physical violence”—or whether we will be transformed nonconformists “dedicated to justice, peace, and brotherhood.”

As King explained in a powerful sermon delivered in 1954, “This command not to conform comes … [from] Jesus Christ, the world’s most dedicated nonconformist, whose ethical nonconformity still challenges the conscience of mankind.”

We need to recapture the gospel glow of the early Christians, who were nonconformists in the truest sense of the word and refused to shape their witness according to the mundane patterns of the world.  Willingly they sacrificed fame, fortune, and life itself in behalf of a cause they knew to be right.  Quantitatively small, they were qualitatively giants.  Their powerful gospel put an end to such barbaric evils as infanticide and bloody gladiatorial contests.  Finally, they captured the Roman Empire for Jesus Christ… The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists, who are dedicated to justice, peace, and brotherhood.  The trailblazers in human, academic, scientific, and religious freedom have always been nonconformists.  In any cause that concerns the progress of mankind, put your faith in the nonconformist!

…Honesty impels me to admit that transformed nonconformity, which is always costly and never altogether comfortable, may mean walking through the valley of the shadow of suffering, losing a job, or having a six-year-old daughter ask, “Daddy, why do you have to go to jail so much?”  But we are gravely mistaken to think that Christianity protects us from the pain and agony of mortal existence.  Christianity has always insisted that the cross we bear precedes the crown we wear.  To be a Christian, one must take up his cross, with all of its difficulties and agonizing and tragedy-packed content, and carry it until that very cross leaves its marks upon us and redeems us to that more excellent way that comes only through suffering.

In these days of worldwide confusion, there is a dire need for men and women who will courageously do battle for truth.  We must make a choice. Will we continue to march to the drumbeat of conformity and respectability, or will we, listening to the beat of a more distant drum, move to its echoing sounds?  Will we march only to the music of time, or will we, risking criticism and abuse, march to the soul saving music of eternity?

How You Can Be Certain That The US Charge Against Assange Is Fraudulent

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

Julian Assange sits in a jail cell today after being betrayed by the Ecuadorian government and his home country of Australia. A British judge named Michael Snow has found the WikiLeaks founder guilty of violating bail conditions, inserting himself into the annals of history by labeling Assange “a narcissist who cannot get beyond his own selfish interest.” So that tells you how much of a fair and impartial legal proceeding we can expect to see from the British judicial process on this matter.

But the real reason that Assange has been surrendered by the Ecuadorian government, imprisoned by the British government, and ignored by the Australian government is not directly related to any of those governments, but to that of the United States of America. An unsealed indictment from the Trump administration’s District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, accompanied by an extradition request, charges Assange with “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for agreeing to break a password to a classified U.S. government computer” during Chelsea Manning’s 2010 leak of government documents exposing US war crimes.

This charge is premised on a fraudulent and manipulative distortion of reality, and you may be one hundred percent certain of it. Let me explain.

You can be absolutely certain that this charge is bogus because it isn’t based on any new information. The facts of the case have not changed, the information hasn’t changed, only the narrative has changed. In 2010 the United States opened a secret grand jury in Virginia to investigate whether Assange and WikiLeaks could be prosecuted for the publication of the Manning leaks, and then-Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Obama administration was conducting “an active, ongoing criminal investigation” into the matter. The Trump administration has not turned up any new evidence that the Obama administration was unable to find in this active, ongoing criminal investigation (US government surveillance has surely acquired some new tricks since 2010, but time travel isn’t one of them), and indeed it does not claim to have turned up any new evidence.

“There’s a huge myth being misreported about today’s indictment of Assange,” journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted today. “The claim that Assange tried to help Manning circumvent a password to cover her tracks isn’t new. The Obama DOJ knew about it since 2011, but chose not to prosecute him. Story on this soon.”

“Holder chose not to prosecute Assange based on the same info Trump DOJ cited,” Greenwald added.

“The weakness of the US charge against Assange is shocking,” tweeted NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. “The allegation he tried (and failed?) to help crack a password during their world-famous reporting has been public for nearly a decade: it is the count Obama’s DOJ refused to charge, saying it endangered journalism.”

This is all information that the Obama administration had access to (journalist Tim Shorrock observed that the alleged 2010 correspondence between Assange and Manning “looks like it came straight from NSA surveillance” of the two), yet it chose not to do what the Trump administration is currently doing because it would endanger press freedoms. This means that nothing has changed since that time besides (A) the fact that there is now a more overtly tyrannical administration in place, and (B) the fact that the public has been paced into accepting the prosecution of Assange by years of establishment propaganda.

Last year, after it was revealed that the Trump administration was seeking Assange’s arrest, Greenwald wrote the following:

“The Obama DOJ – despite launching notoriously aggressive attacks on press freedoms – recognized this critical principle when it came to WikiLeaks. It spent years exploring whether it could criminally charge Assange and WikiLeaks for publishing classified information. It ultimately decided it would not do so, and could not do so, consistent with the press freedom guarantee of the First Amendment. After all, the Obama DOJ concluded, such a prosecution would pose a severe threat to press freedom because there would be no way to prosecute Assange for publishing classified documents without also prosecuting the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and others for doing exactly the same thing.”

Nothing has changed since 2010 apart from a more thoroughly propagandized populace and a more depraved US government, which means that this new charge that the Trump administration issued in December 2017 is based on nothing other than a diminished respect for press freedoms and an increased willingness to crush them. This makes it fraudulent and illegitimate, and the precedent that is being set by it should be rejected and opposed by everyone in the world who claims to support the existence of a free press which is capable of holding power to account.

So what are we left with? We’re left with the US government filing criminal charges against a journalist (and Assange is indisputably a journalist) for protecting his source and encouraging his source to obtain more material, both of which are things that journalists do all the time.

“While the indictment against Julian Assange disclosed today charges a conspiracy to commit computer crimes, the factual allegations against Mr. Assange boil down to encouraging a source to provide him information and taking efforts to protect the identity of that source,” said Assange lawyer Barry J Pollack in a statement today. “Journalists around the world should be deeply troubled by these unprecedented criminal charges.”

“There are parts of the indictment that are clearly designed to criminalize things journalists routinely do,” Greenwald told CNN. “Part of the accusation is that [Assange] encouraged Chelsea Manning to provide him with more documents than the original batch that she gave him, which is something that as a journalist I’ve done many times with my sources, that journalists do every day. They say ‘Oh thanks for this document, maybe you could get me this?’ They also say that he helped her to essentially cover her tracks by giving her advice about how to get this information without being detected. The only thing in the indictment, and it’s very vague, is a suggestion that he tried to help her circumvent a password; it didn’t seem to be successful, but it’s unclear whether that was designed to get documents or to simply help her cover her tracks. But either way it’s clearly a threat to the First Amendment, because it criminalizes core journalistic functions.”

In an article for Rolling Stone titled “Why the Assange Arrest Should Scare Reporters“, journalist Matt Taibbi writes that “The meatier parts of the indictment speak more to normal journalistic practices.”

“Reporters have extremely complicated relationships with sources, especially whistleblower types like Manning, who are often under extreme stress and emotionally vulnerable,” Taibbi writes. “At different times, you might counsel the same person both for and against disclosure. It’s proper to work through all the reasons for action in any direction, including weighing the public’s interest, the effect on the source’s conscience and mental health, and personal and professional consequences. For this reason, placing criminal penalties on a prosecutor’s interpretation of such interactions will likely put a scare into anyone involved with national security reporting going forward.”

The Espionage Act has not at this time been employed to prosecute Assange as many have speculated it might, and the computer crimes he’s been charged with carry a maximum sentence of five years. But this does not mean that further far more serious charges cannot be added once Assange is imprisoned on American soil, especially after his guilt in the Manning leaks has been made official government dogma following the conspiracy conviction.

“In my opinion this charging Assange with a lower-level crime (not espionage) is a trick that would allow the UK to extradite him to the US with ‘no threat of capital punishment’ only to have US prosecutors do what they always do: pile on charges,” tweeted Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Liberty Report, referring to assurances sought by the UK and Ecuador that Assange would not face the death penalty if extradited to the United States for the conspiracy charge.

Either way, this is a cataclysmic threat to press freedoms, and the time to act is now. The US government’s arbitrarily gifting itself the right to use fraudulent distortions to imprison anyone in the world who publishes facts about it will chill any attempts to do so in the future, and poses a far greater threat to press freedoms than anything we’ve seen in our lives. Anyone who sits idly by while this happens is signing over the sovereign right of every human being on this planet to hold power to account, and anyone calling themselves a journalist who does anything other than unequivocally oppose this move is confessing that they are a state propagandist. This is an intolerable plunge toward Orwellian dystopia, and is an assault on human dignity itself.

It’s time to shake the earth and refuse to let them cross this line. Enough is enough.

Roar, humans. Roar.

https://twitter.com/AssangeMrs/status/1116324906390523905

Julian Assange’s life is in danger

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By Eric London

Source: WSWS.org

Following Thursday’s arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in London, the governments of the US, Britain and Ecuador are engaged in a conspiracy to facilitate the whistleblower’s extraordinary rendition to the US. Julian Assange’s life and liberty is in imminent danger. It is necessary to mobilize all supporters of free speech to prevent him from falling into the hands of the American government.

Over 40 years ago, a Rand Corporation analyst Daniel Ellsberg provided the Washington Post with evidence regarding the US government’s illegal activity in the Vietnam War. Yesterday, Ellsberg issued the following statement:

It’s a very serious assault on the First Amendment. A clear attempt to rescind the freedom of the press…This is the first indictment of a journalist and editor or publisher, Julian Assange. And if it’s successful it will not be the last. This is clearly is a part of President Trump’s war on the press, what he calls the enemy of the state. And if he succeeds in putting Julian Assange in prison, where I think he’ll be for life, if he goes there at all, probably the first charge against him is only a few years. But that’s probably just the first of many.

The official pretext being used to extradite Assange is a transparent lie. In a previously-sealed indictment made public Thursday, the US Department of Justice charged Assange only with violating a federal law against conspiring to break passwords to government computers.

The fact that the crime carries only a 5-year sentence and does not fall under the Espionage Act provides all involved parties with a cover for handing Assange over to the Americans. In particular, the US-UK extradition treaty excludes transfer for “political offenses,” including espionage. Citing the Justice Department document, the British government will claim in courts that Assange’s extradition will not be prevented by this exclusion.

The Ecuadoran government, moreover, claims it could revoke Assange’s asylum because the indictment shows he will not face the threat of the death penalty.

In fact, once Assange is in the hands of the United States, he will quickly confront a series of additional charges, including espionage. The efforts to downplay the threat to the freedom of the press and understate the charge against Assange are aimed at sowing complacency in the population and distracting from the core free speech issues at stake.

The language of the indictment itself makes clear the government is targeting Assange for political reasons, despite the official charge at its conclusion. It asserts: “The primary purpose of the conspiracy was to facilitate [Chelsea] Manning’s acquisition and transmission of classified information related to the national defense of the United States so that WikiLeaks could publicly disseminate the information on its website.”

The indictment notes that the information WikiLeaks released to the public included “approximately 90,000 Afghanistan war-related significant activity reports, 400,000 Iraq war-related significant activities reports, 800 Guantanamo Bay detainee assessment briefs, and 250,000 U.S. Department of State cables. Many of these records were classified pursuant to Executive Order No. 13526,” signed by Barack Obama in 2009. The indictment claims these releases “reasonably could be expected to cause serious damage to the national security.”

This language mirrors the text of the Espionage Act, which bars releasing information “relating to the national defense.” The Espionage Act criminalizes anyone who “communicates, delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated, delivered or transmitted” such information.

Based on the language of the indictment, both Assange and Manning could face criminal persecution under this law. By announcing that Assange is being prosecuted based explicitly on Manning’s activity, the government is demonstrating her future is at risk as well. In fact, the first two words of the indictment are “Chelsea Manning.”

This language also confirms last year’s “inadvertent” release by prosecutors of documents arguing Assange should be extradited because there are “charges”—plural—against him. Prosecutors convened a secret grand jury to investigate Assange at least as far back as 2011, and the US government sought warrants to spy on WikiLeaks employees based on allegations of “espionage” in 2012.

Only the complicit or the naïve could accept that a secret grand jury spent over eight years to charge Assange with just one count of password manipulation.

The response of leading political figures in the US, as well as previous statements, makes clear that the ruling elite is eager to seize Assange and lock him up for life—if not impose worse punishments.

Democratic Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer tweeted, “I hope he will soon be held to account for his meddling in our elections on behalf of Putin and the Russian government.” Democratic Senator Mark Warner called Assange “a direct participant in Russian efforts to weaken the West and undermine American security. I hope British courts will quickly transfer him to U.S. custody so he can finally get the justice he deserves.”

Prosecuting Assange on the basis of the unfounded allegations of “meddling” would be charges of espionage.

Like a dungeonmaster who has been handed his latest victim, Democratic Senator Joe Manchin declared: “He is our property and we can get the facts and the truth from him.” On the basis of this statement, Assange is being transferred to the US for the purpose of interrogation—which would fall under the category of extraordinary rendition, not extradition.

Assange has also faced open death threats in the press and from the government over the past several years. Rightwing radio personality Rush Limbaugh called for Assange to receive “a bullet to the brain.” Former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly told Assange: “We’re going to hang you.” Former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich said, “Julian Assange is engaged in terrorism and should be treated as an enemy combatant.” Democratic Vice President Joe Biden called Assange a “high-tech terrorist.” Democratic operative Bob Beckel said, “this guy’s a traitor” and the US should “illegally shoot the son of a b***h.”

Another function of the indictment is to provide the corrupt and lying media with a cover for applauding Assange’s arrest. The New York Times and Washington Post have played a particularly criminal role in downplaying the indictment by claiming the use of a lesser charge means prosecuting Assange poses no threat to free speech.

In an editorial board statement yesterday, the New York Times wrote: “The government charged Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, not with publishing classified government information, but with stealing it, skirting—for now—critical First Amendment questions.”

The single count against Assange, the Times wrote, means the arrest does not pose “a direct challenge to the distinction between a journalist exposing abuse of power through leaked materials—something traditional newspapers like the Times do all the time—and a foreign agent seeking to undermine the security of the United States through theft or subterfuge… The administration has begun well by charging Mr. Assange with an indisputable crime.”

The Washington Post’s editorial is titled, “Julian Assange is not a free-press hero. And he is long overdue for personal accountability.”

The Post wrote, “Mr. Assange’s case could conclude as a victory for the rule of law, not the defeat for civil liberties of which his defenders mistakenly warn.” The Post labeled concerns over Assange’s safety as “pro-WikiLeaks propaganda.” The fact that the indictment does not charge Assange with violating the Espionage Act proves he “had no legitimate fears for his life, either at the hands of CIA assassins or, via extradition, the US death penalty.”

The Post explained that “Britain should not fear that sending him for trial on that hacking count would endanger freedom of the press” because Assange is “unethical” and not a “real journalist” because he “dumped material into the public domain without any effort independently to verify its factuality or give named individuals an opportunity to comment.”

Who are the New York Times and the Washington Post to lecture about “real journalism”? These statements expose the Times and the Post as nothing but government propaganda organs.

The Times is synonymous with peddling the Bush administration’s false claim of “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, and the Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, the billionaire CEO of Amazon, which recently reached a $600 million service contract with the Pentagon.

The conspiracy against Assange underscores the collapse of any constituency in the political establishment and corporate media for the defense of democratic rights. If Ellsberg approached the Post today with photocopies of Pentagon-commissioned Rand reports on the war, the Post would call the FBI and have him arrested for threatening “national security.”

The Times and the Post may convince their affluent readers that Assange aided Russia by publishing evidence showing Hillary Clinton received hundreds of thousands of dollars secretly telling audiences of bankers and CEOs she would represent their interests if elected president. Meanwhile, the Democrats have made common cause with the leaders of the military and intelligence agencies responsible for the crimes Assange has revealed. The rightwing character of the Democrats’ opposition to Trump is exposed by the fact that they support his administration’s attacks on Assange.

The defense of Julian Assange, along with Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, is now a central political question that confronts the working class. Attitudes toward these whistleblowers break down largely upon class lines. As the ruling class cracks down on free speech and freedom of the press, class conflict is intensifying across the world.

The Socialist Equality Party and the World Socialist Web Site make the broadest appeal to all those who are serious about defending democratic rights to join the fight to defend Assange, Manning and Snowden. Workers and youth internationally must mobilize immediately to defend these class war prisoners. Their lives depend on it.

The fight for Assange’s freedom is the spearhead of the political struggle in defense of democratic rights, against imperialist militarism and capitalism. Only to the extent that the power of the working class can be harnessed can a defense of these whistleblowers be mounted.

As Socialist Equality Party (Australia) National Committee member Nick Beams said at Friday’s emergency rally in Sydney, “the attack on democracy is a symptom of a profound disease. There is no defense of democracy without tackling the problem at its source, that is, the profit system of global capitalism, a system in crisis that has played out its historic role and now has to tear up, trample, defile even the democratic rights that it once stood for. We have to begin as part of this struggle the part for a socialist perspective. Only then can the world be cleansed of all the horrors that it is conjuring up.”

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:

 

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.

When Are We Going to Tackle the For-Profit Monopolies Which Censored RussiaGate Skeptics?

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

We either take down Facebook and Google and turn them into tightly regulated transparent public utilities available to all or they will destroy what little is left of American democracy.

The RussiaGate Narrative has been revealed as a Big Con (a.k.a. Nothing-Burger), but what’s dangerously real is the censorship that’s being carried out by the for-profit monopolies Facebook and Google on behalf of the status quo’s Big Con.

This site got a taste of Facebook-Google-Big-Media’s Orwellian Authoritarian-Totalitarian censorship back in 2016 when a shadowy fake-news site called PropOrNot aggregated every major alt-media site that had published anything remotely skeptical of the coronation of Hillary Clinton as president and labeled us all shills for Russian propaganda.

Without any investigation of the perps running the site or their fake-news methodology, The Washington Post (Jeff Bezos’ plaything) saw fit to promote the fake-news on Page One as if it were journalistically legitimate. Why would a newspaper that supposedly values the integrity of its content run with such shameless fake-news propaganda? Because it fit the Post’s own political agenda and biases.

This is the essence of Facebook-Google-Big-Media’s Orwellian Authoritarian-Totalitarian censorship: sacrifice accepted journalistic practice, free speech and transparency to promote an absurdly obvious political and social agenda.

If there was any real justice in America, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai should be wearing prison jumpsuits for what Facebook and Google have done to American democracy. Both of these monopolies have manipulated news feeds, search results and what individuals are shown in complete secret, with zero public oversight or transparency.

The damage to democracy wrought by Facebook and Google is severe: free speech no longer exists except in name, and what individuals see in search and social media feeds is designed to manipulate them without their consent or knowledge–and for a fat profit. Whether Facebook and Google are manipulating users for profit or to buy off Status Quo pressures to start regulating these monopolistic totalitarian regimes or to align what users see with their own virtue-signaling, doesn’t matter.

What matters is that no one can possibly know how Facebook and Google have rigged their algorithms and to what purpose. The typical corporation can buy political influence, but Facebook and Google are manipulating the machinery of democracy itself in three ways:

1. They are secretly censoring alternative media and skeptics of the status quo narratives.

2. They are selling data and ads to anyone interested in manipulating voters and public opinion.

3. They are providing data to the National Security organs of the state which can then use this data to compile dossiers on “enemies of the people,” i.e. skeptics and dissenters who question the “approved” context and narrative.

That’s a much more dangerous type of power than buying political influence or manipulating public opinion by openly publishing biased “commentary.”

We all understand how America’s traditional Corporate Media undermines democracy: recall how every time Bernie Sanders won a Democratic primary in 2016, The New York Times and The Washington Post “reported” the news in small typeface in a sidebar, while every Hillary Clinton primary win was trumpeted in large headlines at the top of page one.

But this sort of manipulation is visible; what Google and Facebook do is invisible. What their algorithms do is invisible, and the shadow banning and other forms of invisible censorship cannot be easily traced.

A few of us can trace shadow banning because we have access to our site’s server data. Please consider the data of Google searches and direct links from Facebook to oftwominds.com from November 2016 and November 2018:

Nov. 2016: Google Searches: 36,779
Nov. 2016: links from Facebook: 9,888

Nov. 2018: Google Searches: 12,671
Nov. 2018: links from Facebook: 859

Oftwominds.com has been around since 2005 and consistently draws around 250,000 page views monthly (via oftwominds.com and my mirror site on blogspot, which is owned/operated by Google. Interestingly, traffic to that site has been less affected by shadow banning; Coincidence? You decide….).

Given the consistency of my visitor traffic over the years, it’s “interesting” how drastically the site’s traffic with Google and Facebook has declined in a mere two years. How is this shadow banning not Orwellian Authoritarian-Totalitarian censorship? It’s akin to China’s Orwellian Social Credit system but for private profit.

It wouldn’t surprise me to find my photo airbrushed out of group photos on Facebook and Google just as the Soviet propaganda organs did when someone fell out of favor in the 1930s.

Fortunately, oftwominds.com isn’t dependent on Facebook or Google for its traffic; other content creators who were skeptical of RussiaGate are not so fortunate. One of the implicit goals of shadow banning and filters is to destroy the income of dissenting sites without the content creators knowing why their income plummeted.

Strip dissenters of their income and you strip them of the ability to dissent. Yay for “free speech” controlled by for-profit monopolies!

Where’s the “level playing field” of free speech? As long as Facebook and Google are free to censor and filter in secret, there is no free speech in America. All we have is a simulacrum of free speech in which parroting “approved” narratives is promoted and dissent is censored/banned–but without anyone noticing or even being able to tell what’s been filtered, censored or banned.

So when are we going to tackle privately held monopolies which are selling user data to the highest bidder, obliterating free speech in secret and manipulating news feeds and search to promote hidden agendas? I’ve argued (see links below) that the solution is very simple:

1. Regulate Facebook and Google as public utilities. Ban them from collecting and selling user data to anyone, including federal agencies.

2. Allow a modest profit to each firm via display adverts that are shown equally to every user.

3. Require any and all search/content filters and algorithms be made public, i.e. published daily.

4. Any executive or employee of these corporations who violates these statutes will face criminal felony charges and be exposed to civil liability lawsuits from users or content providers who were shadow-banned or their right to free speech was proscribed or limited by filters or algorithms.

There is no intrinsic right for privately held corporations to establish monopolies that can manipulate and filter free speech in secret to maximize profits and secret influence. We either take down Facebook and Google and turn them into tightly regulated transparent public utilities available to all or they will destroy what little is left of American democracy.

I recently addressed these invisible (but oh-so profitable) mechanisms in a series of essays:

How Far Down the Big Data/’Psychographic Microtargeting’ Rabbit Hole Do You Want to Go?

Is Profit-Maximizing Data-Mining Undermining Democracy?

Should Facebook, Google and Twitter Be Public Utilities?

Should Facebook and Google Pay Users When They Sell Data Collected from Users?

Are Facebook and Google the New Colonial Powers? September 18, 2017

The Demise of Dissent: Why the Web Is Becoming Homogenized November 17, 2017

Addictions: Social Media & Mobile Phones Fall From Grace November 24, 2017

The Blowback Against Facebook, Google and Amazon Is Just Beginning April 27, 2018

Shadow Banning Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg: We’re All Digital Ghosts Now October 27, 2018

Hell Hath No Fury Like a Liberal Scorned: The Media Turns on Facebook and Google November 19, 2018

Facebook Wants You to Know if You’re Getting Your News From the Wrong Government

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By Jim Naureckas

Source: FAIR

There’s a famous polling experiment that asked people in the Cold War-era US:

Do you think the United States should let Communist newspaper reporters from other countries come in here and send back to their papers the news as they see it?

When this question was posed on its own, only 36 percent of respondents said yes. But a separate sample was first asked:

Do you think a Communist country like Russia should let American newspaper reporters come in and send back to America the news as they see it?

When the questions were asked together—reminding people that restrictions on press freedom could be placed on their own country’s journalists, as well as on those of an official enemy—support for allowing access to Communist reporters doubled to 73 percent. (Ninety percent said that US reporters should be allowed to report freely from Russia—suggesting that only a relatively narrow slice of the population openly subscribed to the principle of free speech for me but not for thee.)

I thought of this experiment when Rania Khalek (who’s written for FAIR) told me that the viral video company she works for, In the Now, was taken off Facebook because of its indirect connection to the Russian government. (A majority stake in In the Now’s parent company, Maffick Media, is owned by a subsidiary of RT—a Moscow-based media group that, although organized as a private entity, is funded by the Russian government.)

Facebook suspended the page of In the Now, along with three other pages run by Maffick—the current affairs channel Soapbox, the environment-oriented Waste-Ed and the history-focused BackThen—after the social media giant was asked about the RT-connected pages by CNN. CNN (2/18/19), in turn, reported it was tipped off to the In the Now/RT connection by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a group based at US government–funded German Marshall Fund.

In the Now is back on Facebook again—after a ten-day suspension—and returned with this rather user-unfriendly description:

In the Now is a brand of Maffick which is owned and operated by Anissa Naouai and Ruptly GmbH, a subsidiary of RT.

That’s not particularly helpful if you want to know what In the Now does, of course, but disclosure is good, right? For the goose but not the gander, apparently: Among the US-funded institutions with Facebook pages are, well, the German Marshall Fund. Its description just reads, “Strengthening Transatlantic Cooperation.” Will that page be taken down until the Fund acknowledges where its money comes from?

How about the PBS NewsHour, also funded by the US government? No mention of that on Facebook: Just, “On air and online, the PBS NewsHour provides in-depth analysis of the issues that matter to you.”

NPR’s Facebook page seems to go out of its way to conceal the fact that it’s US government–supported, calling itself “a privately supported, not-for-profit membership organization.” Maybe the P stands for “Private”?

Even straightforward propaganda outlets of the US government don’t have to identify themselves as such on Facebook. Take Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, set up at the height of the Cold War to broadcast the US government’s version of reality behind the Iron Curtain—and still going strong almost 70 years later. Its “About” on Facebook reads:

Uncensored news. Responsible and open debate. Specialized coverage of Russia, Ukraine, Central Asia, Caucasus, Iran, Balkans, South Asia, Eastern Europe.

For those who go the extra mile and click on “See More” under “Who We Are,” you do get this misleading semi-acknowledgement:

RFE/RL is registered with the IRS as a private, nonprofit Sec. 501(c)3 corporation, and is funded by a grant from the US Congress through the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM) as a private grantee. RFE/RL‘s editorial independence is protected by US law.

Yes, RFE/RL is organized as a private entity—just like RT is. But just as the head of RT is also the head of the Russian state international news agency, the head of RFE/RL is appointed by the head of the USAGM—a government official picked by the president. That’s a funny kind of “independence.”

The Facebook page of Voice of America, the US government’s main broadcast outlet, is even squirrelier. There doesn’t seem to be any acknowledgement at all that VoA is connected to the US government—just the slogan, “The news may be good or bad. We shall tell you the truth”; the claim that it has “the world’s most interesting stories”; and information on how you can “have the best of VoA News delivered directly to your inbox each day.”

If you’re thinking that Facebook—90 percent of whose customers are not in the United States—should treat Russian-backed outlets differently than US-backed outlets because the US supports peace and democracy, or doesn’t use social media to try to manipulate other nations…. Well, this is why it’s important to get your information from a variety of sources.

But it’s not just US outlets that get to conceal their government funding on Facebook. The BBC doesn’t mention that it’s controlled and funded by the British government—only that its “mission is to enrich your life. To inform, educate and entertain.”

At Al Jazeera English’s Facebook page, you learn, “We are the voice of the voiceless”—not that they are owned by the monarchy of Qatar.

Facebook needs to have one rule for whether government-funded outlets need to disclose their connections. And it needs to apply that rule consistently.

 

How CNN Led Facebook To Censor Pages Of Russia-Backed Video Company And Manufactured News Story

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Disclosure: Kevin Gosztola co-hosts the “Unauthorized Disclosure” podcast with Rania Khalek, who is a contributor for Maffick Media’s Soapbox. “Unauthorized Disclosure” is entirely listener-funded. Shadowproof is member-supported and funded by reader donations.

By Kevin Gosztola

Source: Shadowproof

CNN went in search for a story about a Russian-funded digital media project that produces viral videos aimed at undermining American democracy. When CNN journalists could not find what they were looking for, they effectively manufactured the news by giving Facebook a pretext for removing the project’s pages used to share videos. Now, the cable news network had their story.

Four CNN journalists worked on the report, “Russia is backing a viral video company aimed at American millennials.” It appeared online late in the day on February 15 and broke the news that Maffick Media had their Facebook pages for three video channels suspended.

Maffick also produces In The Now, which Facebook took down as well.

Facebook never required pages to include information about their parent companies nor has the social media company ever labeled state-sponsored media, which CNN acknowledged. Yet, since the project involves funding from Russian state media, CNN believed Facebook may want to require the pages to disclose such details.

CNN contacted Facebook on February 13, and Facebook informed CNN they were “contemplating doing something about labeling state-funded media,” according to Donie O’Sullivan, a CNN reporter who worked on the story. The media organization held their story until Facebook took action.

Maffick produces three video channels—Backthen, which explores the history of Western imperialism, Waste-Ed, which covers environmental issues, including climate change, and Soapbox, which covers politics and current events.

As O’Sullivan said during an interview on CNN, “The content was pretty critical of the U.S government, of U.S mainstream media, but nothing that would be totally out of the ordinary necessarily.” Videos made a “lot of legitimate arguments,” and they “weren’t necessarily really hiding their Russian ties.”

“If you were to start Googling these pages, you could quickly work it back to see,” O’Sullivan added.

Journalist Rania Khalek, who produces videos for Soapbox, was interviewed by CNN, along with Maffick Media chief operating officer J. Ray Sparks. The interview took place in Berlin on February 11. However, CNN did not initially contact them.

“CNN was contacting peripheral employees, some of the people in the U.S., one of the camera people that I worked with. They contacted her,” Khalek shared. “And they actually lied to [this person] and told her they had already spoken to me, when they had not.”

According to Khalek, CNN seemed to be interested in whether any Maffick employees were difficult to work with, whether employees or contractors were paid decently, and whether they were leery of the stories they were asked to cover.

J. Ray Sparks contacted CNN to inform them that they were aware the news network was attempting to dig up dirt. Maffick made CEO Anissa Naouai, Khalek, and Sparks available to CNN in the interest of transparency, even though it was clear journalists were looking for material for a hit piece on the project.

Shadowproof was provided with a copy of the unedited interview that CNN conducted with Khalek and Sparks.

More Like An Interrogation By Intelligence Agents Than An Interview

The interview was conducted by CNN correspondent Drew Griffin. In February 2018, Griffin went to the home of a woman in Florida, a private citizen who supported Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and insisted she was duped by Russia when she ran the “Team Trump Broward County” Facebook page.

The page’s events were reportedly promoted by Russia’s Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-linked troll farm operated out of St. Petersburg.

“I don’t go with Russians, c’mon, give me a break,” the woman insisted, while Griffin tried to take away her independence as a campaign supporter and shame her for something out of her control.

The questions asked by Griffin collectively amounted to an interrogation. He went out of his way not to engage with answers to his questions that conflicted with the story CNN was chasing.

Also, Griffin was fishing for very private details involving the business model of Maffick that would help CNN attack the project. Sparks provided answers, despite the fact that the questions were invasive, and the vast majority of U.S. news media outlets would probably refrain from sharing such information with the public.

CNN misquoted Sparks twice. In the print report, they said Sparks claimed it was “standard business practice” not to disclose who owned a Facebook page. That made it seem like Sparks was specifically referring to Maffick and that he was exhibiting a flippant attitude to the question of who funds Maffick. However, Sparks said “standard industry practice” and was making a general point about CNN holding Maffick to a standard most media organizations throughout the world do not follow.

Griffin asked why Maffick tells employees and contractors they are funded by the Russia government but not their audience. “There’s no mention of Russia or Ruptly on the Facebook pages. Why is that?”

“Because that’s standard industry practice,” Sparks replied. “We get this question a lot, and it’s a funny question to me because why does Great Big Story not put CNN on their Facebook page? Why does CNN not put Time Warner on their Facebook page? The audience is not interested in these things.”

Sparks added, “I worked for Comedy Central for many years. No one ever knew that Comedy Central was owned by MTV, and that MTV was owned by Viacom. These were things that you had to discover as a more esoteric audience within the industry. The general audience never is interested in these things, and the standard practice is to just simply not mention them because the audience is not interested.”

Whether Sparks is right or not is insignificant. CNN used a different word so it better suited their story.

[Note: CNN later issued a correction during the weekend after Shadowproof published this report:

“The original version of this article incorrectly quoted Sparks as saying it is ‘standard business practice’ for a media outlet not to disclose its ownership on its Facebook page. He actually referred to ‘standard industry practice’ and ‘standard practice.’”]

Baselessly Accused Of Boosting ‘Kremlin Narratives’

Although Khalek and Sparks detailed their editorial independence at Maffick extensively, Griffin remained incredulous at the reality that officials working at the Kremlin are not dictating what specific stories should be covered. CNN quoted Ben Nimmo, a “senior fellow for information defense at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab,” to undermine their assertions.

“They routinely boost Kremlin narratives, especially those which portray the West negatively,” Nimmo stated.

He added Maffick’s pages are “broadly anti-U.S. and anti-corporate. That’s strikingly similar to RT’s output. Maffick may technically be independent, but their tone certainly matches the broader Kremlin family.”

The Atlantic Council is a militaristic think tank that receives funding from the U.S. government. In particular, Nimmo holds himself out as some bot hunter, who is an expert at exposing “Kremlin influence networks.” Yet, as journalist Max Blumenthal highlighted in 2018, Nimmo misidentified “several living, breathing individuals as Russian bots or Kremlin ‘influence accounts.’ Nimmo’s victims included Mariam Susli, a well-known Syrian-Australian social media personality, the famed Ukrainian concert pianist Valentina Lisitsa, and a British pensioner named Ian Shilling.”

Khalek told Griffin why her journalism challenges U.S. foreign policy and the power of U.S. corporations.

“I’m an American, right? My priority and my responsibility is to challenge destructive policies [of] the government that I pay tax dollars to. And that’s what I focus on in my videos,” Khalek declared. “I challenge war. I challenge corporate ownership of our government and of our political system. And this is one of the few places that I have where I can actually do that with complete editorial control.”

“Now, if CNN would like to give me a job to spend my time challenging the war industry and corporations, I’d be happy to do that. But that’s just not the case.”

“I have complete editorial control over my work on Soapbox,” Khalek said, prior this comment. “I get to tell the truth about war and corporations, which you don’t get to hear much about in corporate outlets, like CNN, where people oftentimes even get fired for being antiwar. You know, I’d ask, you where was Marc Lamont Hill’s editorial freedom when CNN fired him for telling the truth about Israeli occupation of Palestine?”

Griffin plowed forward as if he was oblivious to what happened to the former CNN contributor, and at no point did Griffin offer any examples, where specific Russian policies were mindlessly championed by Khalek or other Maffick contractors to boost the Kremlin.

Succumbing To Russophobia

It was the German Marshall Fund, which brought records on the ownership of Maffick to the attention of CNN. They also were the source CNN used to back up the notion that Facebook should require Maffick to disclose its ownership.

Bret Schafer, a social media analyst at the German Marshall Fund, said “that he believes most people who see content from the pages on Facebook have no idea it could be tied to Russia.”

“It should be clearly labeled,” he told CNN, “and when they don’t label them, they need to be called out on that.”

The German Marshall Fund receives funds from the U.S. government, and as it states on its website, the fund was founded in 1972 as “a non-partisan, nonprofit organization through a gift from Germany as a permanent memorial to Marshall Plan assistance.”

“GMF maintains a strong presence on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition to its headquarters in Washington, D.C., GMF has offices in Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Belgrade, Ankara, Bucharest, and Warsaw. GMF also has smaller representations in Bratislava, Turin, and Stockholm.”

The Marshall Plan was a foreign policy strategy adopted in 1947 to expand American dominance in the world. It aimed to expand access to European markets for U.S. businesses and fend off the rise of communism in countries like Italy and France.

One of the German Marshall Fund’s projects is the Alliance For Securing Democracy. It was far more strident in its assessment of Maffick than CNN.

The project’s advisory council includes Michael Chertoff, former Homeland Security Department chief, Bill Kristol, who was a board member of the Project for the New American Century, which pushed for the invasion of Iraq, Rick Ledgett, former NSA deputy director, Mike McFaul, former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Mike Morell, former acting CIA director, John Podesta, former chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, Mike Rogers, former congressman and chair of the House Intelligence Committee, James Stavridis, a former admiral who led European Command, and Jake Sullivan, former national security advisor to Vice President Joe Biden. (Journalist Glenn Greenwald further detailed the “marriage of convenience” between establishment Democrats and neoconservatives.)

It is the Alliance For Securing Democracy that developed Hamilton 68, a “tracker” it claimed could unearth Russian influence operations. But the individuals involved with Hamilton 68 have refused to share their methodology. They follow accounts “run by people around the world who amplify pro-Russian themes either knowingly or unknowingly,” which means any dissent deemed to be “anti-American” can draw their attention to hashtags worth tracking.

James Carden, a contributor for The Nation, wrote, “Projects like Hamilton 68 are the opposite of what one would expect in an open society like the United States: In essence, it seeks to police and narrow the scope of acceptable political discourse. The implicit message is that Americans should ignore unpleasant news so long as it comes from foreign outlets, regardless of the veracity of the story.”

“That the well-regarded German Marshall Fund has succumbed to the Russophobia now so in vogue across the political spectrum is cause for both sadness and concern,” Carden added.

“Completely In Line With What We’re Hearing From The Kremlin”

Twice Griffin pressed Khalek on her views. He maintained they are “completely in line with what we’re hearing from the Kremlin, especially on Venezuela.”

“Okay, do you have a specific criticism about what I said about Venezuela?” Khalek replied. “The U.S. right now under Trump—the president that CNN is very much against—is currently attempting to launch a right-wing coup in Venezuela and what I see from the mainstream press in the U.S., across the board, is support for that.”

“What I’m interested in is accurate reporting in Venezuela about what’s happening and what the U.S. is doing there,” Khalek continued. “And you know, that might align with this entity or that entity, but that’s not what I care about. What I care about is telling the truth. And I would like to know why CNN isn’t telling the truth about what’s happening in Venezuela.”

Khalek further outlined why this notion of “views aligning with the Kremlin” is dangerous.

Say I’m antiwar. Say that Trump right now is threatening a military intervention against Venezuela. If I oppose that, which the Russian government I think does—and so do other governments in the world. They also oppose it. But if I oppose U.S. war, does that automatically mean I’m going to be accused of being aligned with the Kremlin? And with this Russia hysteria that we’re experiencing now, I feel like this is a very, very dangerous McCarthyist tactic to start saying that leftist views, antiwar views are just the Kremlin government’s talking points.

Immediately following this statement from Khalek, Griffin said, “Business model folks and others who think there’s so much negative publicity surrounding a Russian label, especially in the world of journalistic freedom, that your company is probably purposely distancing itself from any kind of public or branding related to Russia.”

“Is that true? In terms of trying to grow this company and grow these channels, it would be wise that you did not have any kind of connection with Russia available to the public?”

Either Griffin has a lot of gall or is plainly ignorant. Khalek, Naouai, and Sparks granted unprecedented access to their work. Because it did not conform to widespread notions of state-funded media bandied about in Russia investigation coverage, Griffin and others at CNN discounted what was shared.

Griffin stuck to hyping the danger of Russian-funded media so CNN can keep profiting off the panic. So, it is stories like this one that drive media and journalists with ties to Russia underground and pushes them to engage in secrecy for their survival.

***

The key issue, which CNN deliberately avoids, is one that has been prevalent since 2014, when Abby Martin was an anchor for RT America and spoke out against Russian military aggression in Crimea. She went on Piers Morgan’s show on CNN and told Morgan that RT was no different than any other corporate media station in America.

“We’re talking about six corporations that control 90 percent of what Americans see, hear, and read, lead up to the Iraq War parroting exactly what the establishment said. I mean, you could reflect the exact same criticism on all the corporate media channels,” Martin contended.

As she put it, “RT toes a perspective of the Russian foreign policy just as the entire corporate media apparatus toes the perspective of the U.S. establishment.”

“Why do I have to work for RT to tell the truth about corporations and the U.S. government?” Martin asked. “I mean, seriously, you guys are beholden to advertisers that you cannot criticize.” That is why Martin was working for RT, not CNN.

Until journalists at U.S. media outlets, like CNN, quit projecting images on the cave wall for citizens in order to help the U.S. government maintain its global dominance and insulate government officials from scrutiny, particularly on matters of war, there will always be Americans who seek out jobs with foreign media outlets. They will seek out companies like Maffick to produce dissident journalism, which establishment media organizations refuse to support.

UPDATE: The report was updated on February 18 to reflect details from an interview with Donie O’Sullivan on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” and to include the correction CNN printed after Shadowproof published this report.