Whistleblowers jailed as US and UK attack press freedom
Julian Assange is in jail in London and Ms Chelsea Manning, formerly Bradley Manning, is in jail in Alexandria, Virginia.
Assange is an Australian-born journalist and founder of Wikileaks while Private first class Manning is a transgender American soldier, turned whistleblower.
Together they blew the lid on the war crimes of the US military, its contractors and the CIA in Iraq and Afghanistan, showing the world the barbaric reality of the imperialist invasion, occupation and devastation of independent nations of the Middle East and Central Asia.
In the past few days, the jailing of Assange and Manning has flushed out the rats, sell-outs and apologists of the mainstream capitalist media. Editors, columnists, commentators and journalists are falling over themselves to reach a microphone – any microphone – to pledge their loyalty to, and support for, the ferocious state persecution of Assange and Manning.
It is “rat time” in the media. If called to testify against left-wing colleagues, they would do so. If asked to dob in “Mussie lovers” in their workplaces, they would do so. If asked to name colleagues who are “against the government”, they would do so. If truth be known, many of them have already sold their grubby souls and named names under the cowardly guise of supporting “national security”.
Hollywood actors, producers and directors formed a queue in the 1950s to turn informers. Now the same professional cowardice is rampant in newsrooms across the Western world as former upholders of “press freedom” become narks.
Instead of strikes, protests and demonstrations, celebrations broke out when Assange was dragged out of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London and Ms Manning was arrested and bundled off to jail just down the road from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
Excuses for professional treason
Journalists invented lies and hypocrisies in an attempt to justify their apostasy:
- Assange and Manning aren’t “real” journalists (and therefore, presumably, not worth defending);
- They had endangered the lives of servicemen and women (but their revelations have not resulted in a single casualty among service personnel; the only injury suffered has been to politicians, military chiefs and intelligence liars in the US, UK, Israel, UN and Australia);
- Britain and the US have the best court systems in the “free world”, so let the law take its course (the courts and their political-appointed judges have a grotesque record of miscarriages of justice and infamous trial management. At his first London appearance District Court Judge Michael Snow, not previously known for any expertise in psychology, labelled Assange a “narcissist who cannot get beyond his own selfish interests”. As intended, the judge’s quote made headlines around the world. Please note that Judge Snow’s outrageously prejudicial remark came even before a trial, witnesses or legal arguments!);
- Assange and Manning have wealthy backers with cash to hire the best lawyers in the land (so let them defend themselves; why should we raise our voices?);
- They are a pair of dysfunctional “narcissists” who only have themselves to blame for their predicament (the ultimate cop-out because it ignores the elaborate state planning to try these two men for treason and throw them in jail as an example to journalists in Europe, America, Australia and elsewhere. The lesson is this: journalists and whistleblowers can run but they can’t hide from the long arm of capitalism’s deep state.)
Treachery has many forms
There has been a different tone to the professional treachery in Britain, America and Australia, representing different political interests.
In Britain, for example, Prime Minister Theresa May’s announcement of Assange’s arrest was welcomed in the Commons by cheering, hand-clapping and baying Tories. Many on the Labour side were cheering too. They were the remnants of Tony Blair’s right-wing New Labour, the very people who took Britain to war in the Middle East on the phoney CIA/Israeli pretext of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs).
The mass media embraced the change in discourse from Brexit by filling pages and airwaves with barking mad “experts” to vilify Assange.
The “rape” charge resurfaced (he has never been charged with rape and the Swedish government officially withdrew sex charges against him in August 2015). One of the women involved in original investigation demanded he been returned to Stockholm to face “rape” charges. Why her 2019 change of heart?
Predictably, The Guardian whose hate-filled inventions against Assange are now legendary among serious-minded people, weighed in with a long article headlined: “Failure to extradite Assange to Sweden would endorse ‘rape culture’, say women’s groups.” (14 April 2019).
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair “raped” Iraq by ramming a pack of lies through the Cabinet, Parliament and the Press to kick-start George Bush’s war. Yet he lives in plutocratic luxury in mansions in four countries and regularly ponders aloud about returning to politics to be the “saviour” of either Britain or the European Union.
America’s lynch mob
In the US, the enemies of Assange and Manning are cut from a quite different cloth. They are mainly Donald Trump supporters who hate Manning because she is a transgender heroine from the military.
She received a pardon from former President Barrack Hussein Obama in January 2016 days before Trump moved into the White House. Neo-fascist Trumpeteers, many of them hard core gun-toting white supremacists, regard Obama as a “negro” and a Moslem with a forged birth certificate.
From the other side of the aisle, recently registered socialist-minded Democrats from the Bernie Sanders movement regard Chelsea Manning with semi-religious awe. She is their very own Joan of Arc, Mother Theresa and Eleanor Roosevelt all rolled into one.
Bernie’s battlers are Manning’s chief defenders on the Democratic side of the aisle. The Clinton power clique want the pair of them silenced and locked away.
The former Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton destroyed a reported 33,000 private emails from her IT gadgets but that has never been investigated. Assange and Manning released 750,000 military emails exposing war crimes of the US-led military and as a consequence they have been carted off to jail with the whole drama captured by prime time television (tipped off in advance).
Assange and Manning are not criminals but political prisoners. They have earned their status as political prisoners through their courageous actions to inform public opinion. The cost to them and their families has been enormous.
Australia’s lost values
In the midst of a Federal Election campaign, leading media and political figures from the so-called Left and Right have taken time off to support the jailing of fellow Australian Julian Assange.
Predictably, Peter Greste has been spruiking his venomous views of Assange. Greste, the former Al-Jazeera reporter arrested in Egypt as a “spy”, is the Coalition’s favourite pro-American and anti-Assange voice, and he was given amazing space in the Sydney Morning Herald to rubbish Assange and lead the media’s charge. Canberra officialdom gave Greste unlimited legal and financial support during his jailing; will the same apply to Assange? Hell No!
What about some old-fashioned even-handedness with a piece in the Herald and Age by Australian journalist John Pilger?
In Australia the plight of Chelsea Manning has been largely ignored because her transgender status is a subject that media people would prefer to ignore.
But Assange is an Australian citizen. The outpouring of hate directed at him is doubly disgraceful. In the past, such venom was directed at journalists Wilfred Burchett and Francis James when they dared to criticise Australia’s war policy in Vietnam and China. Both visited Hanoi during the war and were denounced. Scott Morrison and Julie Bishop were in the communist capital a few weeks ago and they were hailed.
Remarkably, the same people who condemned war atrocities during the Vietnam war are now happy to see Assange and Manning jailed in 2019. What has happened?
Australian media ownership is concentrated in fewer hands, hundreds of newspapers have been closed and thousands of jobs lost. Accompanying this concentration of influence has been the wholesale importation of American militarism, neo-liberalism and slush culture.
Politicians and their media enablers will do anything to divert attention from the US cultural, economic and military takeover. NSW Attorney-General Mark Speakman captured headlines today with the “news” that Oliver and Charlotte are the most popular baby names in NSW for the fifth time since 2010. Is that “news”?
The US imperialist grip on the Australian media is so complete that one very senior journalist told me last week that it was now “impossible” to write a report detailing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s struggle against Washington’s illegal plotting for regime change.
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http://cometherevolution.com.au/the-weekly-notebook-96/
posted by Satish Sharma at
20:31
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