This document provides the facts about Julian Assange’s situation. Mainstream reportage on Assange’s case is of a poor quality, with the result that many members of the public are misinformed on the most basic facts about his legal and factual situation. This document aims to remedy this situation.
Years before the Snowden exposés in 2013, internet-savvy activists knew full well of the surveillance possibilities of the web, and the necessity of online privacy protection for political groups (and indeed everyone). And despite the almost-utopian air which accompanied the arrival of some of the new internet behemoths – eg Google and Facebook – only the gullible couldn’t see that these might easily turn out to be surveillance apparatus of the kind Orwell couldn’t have dreamt of.
This film is radical. With over a dozen NHS insiders as my witnesses, I will tell the alarming story of how the health service as we know it is being quietly abolished. Almost without our noticing, it’s been replaced by a system modelled on the US in which care is delivered by profit-maximising companies that charge patients for treatment which is anyway to be restricted and reduced.
Sometimes a piece of propaganda is so glaring you almost have to splash cold water on your face to make sure your eyes are not deceiving you. Take a bow John Simpson, the grandly titled ‘World Affairs Editor’ of BBC News. You don’t earn a moniker like that by offending the global power elite. But is it really necessary to genuflect before US President Barack Obama as Simpson did in a recent article masquerading as informed commentary?
Central to an understanding of war, is the media campaign which grants it legitimacy in the eyes of public opinion. War has been provided with a humanitarian mandate under NATO’s “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P). The victims of U.S. led wars are presented as the perpetrators of war. Civilians in Ukraine, Syria and Iraq are responsible for their own deaths.
In truth, Jones is part of an Oxbridge, Guardian/Observer/Independent/New Statesman/BBC niche on the ‘liberal-left’ of the Establishment. It is acceptable because it indeed does not offer the kind of radical perspectives needed to question the very foundations of the status quo.
With impeccable timing, Henry Kissinger’s latest self-serving tome has just been released with its satirical title, “World Order”. In one fawning review, Kissinger is described as a “key shaper of a world order that remained stable for a quarter of a century”. Tell that to the people of Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Chile, East Timor and all the other victims of his “statecraft”. Only when “we” recognise the war criminals in our midst will the blood begin to dry.
Jonathan Cook, an ex-reporter for the UK Guardian, said that high profile journalists in the western media are “paid by the media corporations to limit our intellectual horizons.” Indeed, but they probably limit their own by insulating themselves, not just their audience, from facts and arguments that undermine an imperial worldview. Just stick to reading the corporate press and you’ll be very well insulated.
Eighteen years after it was published, “Dark Alliance,” the San Jose Mercury News’s bombshell investigation into links between the cocaine trade, Nicaragua’s Contra rebels, and African American neighborhoods in California, remains one of the most explosive and controversial exposés in American journalism.
Ever since serious protest broke out in Ukraine in February the Western mainstream media, particularly in the United States, has seriously downplayed the fact that the usual suspects – the US/European Union/NATO triumvirate – have been on the same side as the neo-Nazis. In the US it’s been virtually unmentionable. I’m sure that a poll taken in the United States on this issue would reveal near universal ignorance of the numerous neo-Nazi actions, including publicly calling for death to “Russians, Communists and Jews”. But in the past week the dirty little secret has somehow poked its head out from behind the curtain a bit.
This “report” is not worth the paper it is written on.
This is not surprising, because the Kiev Maidan government had to give their OK to what could be published.
The report leaves open everything which could actually contribute to an explanation. The MH 017 could have been hit by a missile, whether surface-to-air or air-to-air. It could have been shot down by a fighter jet or, sarcastically, according to the astrophysics or quantum physics terms, by a large number of “high-energy objects” that rained down on the cockpit from the far reaches of the universe.
Sounding much like the kind of man who cries wolf about the loss of men’s power at the first whiff of feminism, Mason argues the world order is in crisis: “The look on the faces of the politicians – Obama, Hague, Hollande – says it all: not much. Like [Humphrey] Bogart in Casablanca they have the look of people whose world is falling apart.”
