Post by TTPost by lo yeeOnThe United Nations has rejected a UK appeal against its previous
ruling in favor of Julian Assange as "inadmissible," thus requiring
both London and Stockholm to end the WikiLeaks founder's arbitrary
detention.
He's in self imposed detention, carrying on his criminal activities.
But that's not what the UN body has judged to be the case. And
Julian's stated fear is well recognized. And that's why Edward
Snowden made an odessey to Russia - as the last resort.
In Snowden's case, his recent appeal to Norway for a safe visit (to
accept a prize) was turned down.
It's widely accepted that the UK, Sweden, and virtually all other
western countries have been carefully toeing Washington's line -
accepting Uncle Sam's authority over little guys like Assange,
Manning, and Snowden.
But when you talk about "criminal activity" --- as if the publishing
by wikileaks of the sordid details of the Clinton machine was not
manifestly in the public interest --- you're doing nothing but
repeating the propaganda tooted by the Washington Post etc.
Not only is it not original, but no person with a discerning mind
would accept this BS about Assange putting himself in "self imposed
detention". No person with an ounce of intellectual honesty can fail
to see that Washington is the heavy in this case.
In a recent interview with the Australian journalist John Pilger, he
talked about missing the sunlight, missing his children (and they are
growing up missing their father). His face has in the past few years
started to distorted, suggesting a dental problem, typical of people
who are under long term detention.
Finally, Wikileaks is in the business of curating and publishing
submitted news that has the effect of encouraging governments to
conduct their business with transparency.
If corrupt business like what has been carried out in Washington is
not exposed, then the world will continue to find dictatorships like
Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey going around performing regime change on
countries on behalf of the neocons.
What Julian has been doing is courageous and noble. And maybe that
requires sacrifice. But don't spew the lie that his current state is
"self imposed".
Lastly, there is nothing but irony in the name 'Operation Enduring
Freedom' where we keep bombing Afghanistan to keep Bagram under
Washington's control.
We recruited the Taliban to drive the Soviet-backed, secular Afghan
government out of power. So the Taliban got their big break from us.
We then spread the propaganda that they are terrorists to justify our
invasion and occupation. For 15 years, not only did we not defeat
them, but rather more and more Afghans came to the conclusion that
they are legit - not those we've propped up.
If it were not for the fact that we have bombers and they don't, we
wouldn't remain in Afghanistan.
What Assange has done is nothing short of exposing the crimes
Washington has perpetrated around the world. And that's the only
rational explanation for what Assange has been subjected to and for
the ridiculous lines like "self-imposed detention" to circulate
around.
lo yeeOn
Assange: Clinton is a cog for Goldman Sachs & the Saudis
(JOHN PILGER EXCLUSIVE VIDEO & TRANSCRIPT)
Published time: 5 Nov, 2016 05:59 Edited time: 5 Nov, 2016 21:53
https://www.rt.com/news/365405-assange-pilger-full-transcript/
Whistleblower Julian Assange has given one of his most incendiary
interviews ever in a John Pilger Special, courtesy of Dartmouth Films,
in which he summarizes what can be gleaned from the tens of thousands
of Clinton emails released by WikiLeaks this year.
John Pilger, another Australian emigre, conducted the 25-minute
interview at the Ecuadorian Embassy, where Assange has been trapped
since 2012 for fear of extradition to the US. Last month, Assange had
his internet access cut off for alleged "interference" in the American
presidential election through the work of his website.
`Clinton made FBI look weak, now there is anger'
John Pilger: What's the significance of the FBI's intervention in
these last days of the U.S. election campaign, in the case against
Hillary Clinton?
Julian Assange: If you look at the history of the FBI, it has become
effectively America's political police. The FBI demonstrated this by
taking down the former head of the CIA [General David Petraeus] over
classified information given to his mistress. Almost no-one is
untouchable. The FBI is always trying to demonstrate that no-one can
resist us. But Hillary Clinton very conspicuously resisted the FBI's
investigation, so there's anger within the FBI because it made the FBI
look weak. We've published about 33,000 of Clinton's emails when she
was Secretary of State. They come from a batch of just over 60,000
emails, [of which] Clinton has kept about half - 30,000 - to herself,
and we've published about half.
`Russian government not the source of Clinton leaks'
JP: The Clinton campaign has said that Russia is behind all of this,
that Russia has manipulated the campaign and is the source for
WikiLeaks and its emails.
JA: The Clinton camp has been able to project that kind of
neo-McCarthy hysteria: that Russia is responsible for everything.
Hilary Clinton stated multiple times, falsely, that seventeen
U.S. intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of
our publications. That is false; we can say that the Russian
government is not the source.
READ MORE: Assange: WikiLeaks did not receive Clinton emails from
Russian govt (JOHN PILGER EXCLUSIVE)
WikiLeaks has been publishing for ten years, and in those ten years,
we have published ten million documents, several thousand individual
publications, several thousand different sources, and we have never
got it wrong.
`Saudi Arabia & Qatar funding ISIS and Clinton'
JP: The emails that give evidence of access for money and how Hillary
Clinton herself benefited from this and how she is benefitting
politically, are quite extraordinary. I'm thinking of when the Qatari
representative was given five minutes with Bill Clinton for a million
dollar cheque.
JA: And twelve million dollars from Morocco ...
. . .
JP: In terms of the foreign policy of the United States, that's where
the emails are most revealing, where they show the direct connection
between Hillary Clinton and the foundation of jihadism, of ISIL, in
the Middle East. Can you talk about how the emails demonstrate the
connection between those who are meant to be fighting the jihadists of
ISIL, are actually those who have helped create it.
JA: There's an early 2014 email from Hillary Clinton, not so long
after she left the State Department, to her campaign manager John
Podesta that states ISIL is funded by the governments of Saudi Arabia
and Qatar. Now this is the most significant email in the whole
collection, and perhaps because Saudi and Qatari money is spread all
over the Clinton Foundation. Even the U.S. government agrees that
some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIL, or ISIS. But the dodge
has always been that, well it's just some rogue Princes, using their
cut of the oil money to do whatever they like, but actually the
government disapproves.
But that email says that no, it is the governments of Saudi and Qatar
that have been funding ISIS.
JP: The Saudis, the Qataris, the Moroccans, the Bahrainis,
particularly the Saudis and the Qataris, are giving all this money to
the Clinton Foundation while Hilary Clinton is Secretary of State and
the State Department is approving massive arms sales, particularly to
Saudi Arabia.
JA: Under Hillary Clinton, the world's largest ever arms deal was made
with Saudi Arabia, [worth] more than $80 billion. In fact, during her
tenure as Secretary of State, total arms exports from the United
States in terms of the dollar value, doubled.
JP: Of course the consequence of that is that the notorious terrorist
group called ISIl or ISIS is created largely with money from the very
people who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation.
JA: Yes.
JP:That's extraordinary.
`Clinton has been eaten alive by her ambition'
JA: I actually feel quite sorry for Hillary Clinton as a person
because I see someone who is eaten alive by their ambitions, tormented
literally to the point where they become sick; they faint as a result
of [the reaction] to their ambitions. She represents a whole network
of people and a network of relationships with particular states. The
question is how does Hilary Clinton fit in this broader network?
She's a centralising cog. You've got a lot of different gears in
operation from the big banks like Goldman Sachs and major elements of
Wall Street, and Intelligence and people in the State Department and
the Saudis.
She's the centraliser that inter-connects all these different cogs.
She's the smooth central representation of all that, and `all that' is
more or less what is in power now in the United States. It's what we
call the establishment or the DC consensus. One of the more
significant Podesta emails that we released was about how the Obama
cabinet was formed and how half the Obama cabinet was basically
nominated by a representative from City Bank. This is quite amazing.
JP: Didn't CityBank supply a list ...?
JA: Yes.
JP: ... which turned out to be most of the Obama cabinet.
JA: Yes.
JP: So Wall Street decides the cabinet of the President of the United
States?
JA: If you were following the Obama campaign back then, closely, you
could see it had become very close to banking interests.
. . .
JA: So I think you can't properly understand Hillary Clinton's foreign
policy without understanding Saudi Arabia. The connections with Saudi
Arabia are so intimate.
`Libya is Hillary Clinton's war'
JP:Why was she so demonstrably enthusiastic about the destruction of
Libya? Can you talk a little about just what the emails have told us -
told you - about what happened there? Because Libya is such a source
for so much of the mayhem now in Syria: the ISIL, jihadism, and so
on. And it was almost Hillary Clinton's invasion. What do the emails
tell us about that?
JA: Libya, more than anyone else's war, was Hillary Clinton's
war. Barak Obama initially opposed it. Who was the person championing
it? Hillary Clinton. That's documented throughout her emails. She
had put her favoured agent, Sidney Blumenthal, on to that; there's
more than 1700 emails out of the thirty three thousand Hillary Clinton
emails that we've published, just about Libya. It's not that Libya
has cheap oil. She perceived the removal of Gaddafi and the overthrow
of the Libyan state -- something that she would use in her run-up to
the general election for President.
So in late 2011 there is an internal document called the Libya Tick
Tock that was produced for Hillary Clinton, and it's the chronological
description of how she was the central figure in the destruction of
the Libyan state, which resulted in around 40,000 deaths within Libya;
jihadists moved in, ISIS moved in, leading to the European refugee and
migrant crisis.
Not only did you have people fleeing Libya, people fleeing Syria, the
destabilisation of other African countries as a result of arms flows,
but the Libyan state itself err was no longer able to control the
movement of people through it. Libya faces along to the Mediterranean
and had been effectively the cork in the bottle of Africa. So all
problems, economic problems and civil war in Africa -- previously
people fleeing those problems didn't end up in Europe because Libya
policed the Mediterranean. That was said explicitly at the time, back
in early 2011 by Gaddafi: "What do these Europeans think they're
doing, trying to bomb and destroy the Libyan State? There's going to
be floods of migrants out of Africa and jihadists into Europe, and
this is exactly what happened.
`Trump won't be permitted to win'
JP: You get complaints from people saying, `What is WikiLeaks doing?
Are they trying to put Trump in the Whitehouse?'
JA: My answer is that Trump would not be permitted to win. Why do I
say that? Because he's had every establishment off side; Trump
doesn't have one establishment, maybe with the exception of the
Evangelicals, if you can call them an establishment, but banks,
intelligence [agencies], arms companies ... big foreign money ... are
all united behind Hillary Clinton, and the media as well, media owners
and even journalists themselves.
JP: There is the accusation that WikiLeaks is in league with the
Russians. Some people say, `Well, why doesn't WikiLeaks investigate
and publish emails on Russia?'
JA: We have published about 800,000 documents of various kinds that
relate to Russia. Most of those are critical; and a great many books
have come out of our publications about Russia, most of which are
critical. Our [Russia]documents have gone on to be used in quite a
number of court cases: refugee cases of people fleeing some kind of
claimed political persecution in Russia, which they use our documents
to back up.
JP: Do you yourself take a view of the U.S. election? Do you have a
preference for Clinton or Trump?
JA: [Let's talk about] Donald Trump. What does he represent in the
American mind and in the European mind? He represents American white
trash, [which Hillary Clinton called] `deplorable and irredeemable'.
It means from an establishment or educated cosmopolitan, urbane
perspective, these people are like the red necks, and you can never
deal with them. Because he so clearly -- through his words and
actions and the type of people that turn up at his rallies --
represents people who are not the middle, not the upper middle
educated class, there is a fear of seeming to be associated in any way
with them, a social fear that lowers the class status of anyone who
can be accused of somehow assisting Trump in any way, including any
criticism of Hillary Clinton. If you look at how the middle class
gains its economic and social power, that makes absolute sense.
`US attempting to squeeze WikiLeaks through my refugee status'
JP: I'd like to talk about Ecuador, the small country that has given
you refuge and [political asylum] in this embassy in London. Now
Ecuador has cut off the internet from here where we're doing this
interview, in the Embassy, for the clearly obvious reason that they
are concerned about appearing to intervene in the U.S. election
campaign. Can you talk about why they would take that action and your
own views on Ecuador's support for you?
JA: Let's go back four years. I made an asylum application to Ecuador
in this embassy, because of the U.S. extradition case, and the result
was that after a month, I was successful in my asylum application. The
embassy since then has been surrounded by police: quite an expensive
police operation which the British government admits to spending more
than #12.6 million. They admitted that over a year ago. Now there's
undercover police and there are robot surveillance cameras of various
kinds -- so that there has been quite a serious conflict right here in
the heart of London between Ecuador, a country of sixteen million
people, and the United Kingdom, and the Americans who have been
helping on the side. So that was a brave and principled thing for
Ecuador to do. Now we have the U.S. election [campaign], the
Ecuadorian election is in February next year, and you have the White
House feeling the political heat as a result of the true information
that we have been publishing.
WikiLeaks does not publish from the jurisdiction of Ecuador, from this
embassy or in the territory of Ecuador; we publish from France, we
publish from, from Germany, we publish from The Netherlands and from a
number of other countries, so that the attempted squeeze on WikiLeaks
is through my refugee status; and this is, this is really intolerable.
[It means] that [they] are trying to get at a publishing organisation;
[they] try and prevent it from publishing true information that is of
intense interest to the American people and others about an election.
JP: Tell us what would happen if you walked out of this embassy.
JA: I would be immediately arrested by the British police and I would
then be extradited either immediately to the United States or to
Sweden. In Sweden I am not charged, I have already been previously
cleared [by the Senior Stockholm Prosecutor Eva Finne]. We were not
certain exactly what would happen there, but then we know that the
Swedish government has refused to say that they will not extradite me
to the United States we know they have extradited 100 per cent of
people whom the U.S. has requested since at least 2000. So over the
last fifteen years, every single person the U.S. has tried to
extradite from Sweden has been extradited, and they refuse to provide
a guarantee [that won't happen].
JP: People often ask me how you cope with the isolation in here.
JA: Look, one of the best attributes of human beings is that they're
adaptable; one of the worst attributes of human beings is they are
adaptable. They adapt and start to tolerate abuses, they adapt to
being involved themselves in abuses, they adapt to adversity and they
continue on. So in my situation, frankly, I'm a bit institutionalised
-- this [the embassy] is the world -- it's visually the world [for me].
JP: It's the world without sunlight, for one thing, isn't it?
JA: It's the world without sunlight, but I haven't seen sunlight in so
long, I don't remember it.
JP: Yes.
JA: So , yes, you adapt. The one real irritant is that my young
children -- they also adapt. They adapt to being without their
father. That's a hard, hard adaption which they didn't ask for.
JP: Do you worry about them?
JA: Yes, I worry about them; I worry about their mother.
-----
John Richard Pilger (born 9 October 1939) is an Australian
journalist based since 1962 in the United Kingdom.
Pilger has been a strong critic of American, Australian and British
foreign policy, which he considers to be driven by an imperialist
agenda. Pilger has also criticised his native country's treatment of
indigenous Australians.
His career as a documentary film maker began with The Quiet Mutiny
(1970), made during one of his visits to Vietnam, and has continued
with over fifty documentaries since then. Other works in this form
include Year Zero (1979), about the aftermath of the Pol Pot regime in
Cambodia, and Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy (1993). Pilger's
many documentary films on indigenous Australians include The Secret
Country (1985) and Utopia (2013). In the British print media, Pilger
worked at the Daily Mirror from 1963-86,[6] and wrote a regular column
for the New Statesman magazine from 1991 to 2014.
Pilger has twice won Britain's Journalist of the Year Award. His
documentaries have gained awards in Britain and worldwide. The
practices of the mainstream media are a regular subject in Pilger's
writing.