Remembering the crimes of the powerful exposed by Assange (1)

Assange’s so-called “crime” was revealing deep, embarrassing, sometimes deadly, malfeasance by numerous actors, including the US government, the media, the Democratic Party-Clinton machine, and the illegal Zionist entity called Israel.

These were the remarks of Alison Weir, executive director of “If Americans Knew”, president of the Council for the National Interest, and author of the well-researched book “Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the US Was Used to Create Israel.”

Stay with us for excerpts from his article IAK site, titled: “Remembering the Crimes of the Powerful Exposed by Assange”.

Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange has finally been imprisoned, an objective long sought by powerful parties he helped to expose over the past dozen years. His supposed “crime” was revealing deep, embarrassing, sometimes deadly, malfeasance by numerous actors, including the US government, the media, the Democratic Party-Clinton machine, and Israel.

Wikileaks revealed the US government’s cover-up of torture, cruelty, the killing of civilians, spying on its own citizens and others. It exposed Democratic Party cheating and manipulation, the fraudulence of “Russiagate.” It unmasked Israeli plans to keep Gaza on the brink of collapse, to use violence against Palestinian nonviolence, to make war upon civilians.

Without Wikileaks’ exposés, many of these actions would quite likely have remained hidden from the general public, as the perpetrators hoped.

The actual charge against Assange is allegedly conspiring with Chelsea Manning “to commit computer intrusion,” violating a somewhat problematic law with what one expert terms “overly expansive wording.”

The US government seems to have resorted to this charge after the Justice Department had concluded in 2013 that it could not charge Assange for publishing the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs which revealed various US war crimes, because government lawyers said this would also require charging various US news organizations and journalists.

The Washington Post reported that Justice officials “realized that they have what they described as a ‘New York Times problem.’ If the Justice Department indicted Assange, it would also have to prosecute the New York Times and other news organizations and writers who published classified material, including The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper.”

Even the current charge, when examined closely, turns out to be problematic on free press grounds. As Glenn Greenwald notes: “Assange is charged with helping a source preserve anonymity, a common practice by investigative reporters.”

Assange is being held in a maximum-security prison in London that has been called the UK’s Guantanamo. It has been used to detain alleged terrorists, sometimes indefinitely.

Assange’s recent dramatic arrest in Britain has elicited excellent articles by a number of writers – including Chris Hedges, Jonathan Turley, Pepe Escobar, Ray McGovern and etc. Many of these were published by Consortium News, which, unlike mainstream media and journalism organizations, has been regularly covering the escalating persecution of Assange for his Wikileaks revelations.

This article will quote from these valuable articles and others, and will also present additional information about Wikileaks’ exposés on Israel, which have largely gone unmentioned.

Journalist Pepe Escobar writes that April 11th, the date of Assange’s arrest, “will live in infamy in the annals of Western ‘values’ and ‘freedom of expression.’ The image is stark. A handcuffed journalist and publisher dragged out by force from the inside of an embassy…The U.S. magically erases Ecuador’s financial troubles, ordering the IMF to release a providential $4.2-billion loan. Immediately after, Ecuadorian diplomats ‘invite’ the London Metropolitan Police to come inside their embassy to arrest their long-term guest.

“Let’s cut to the chase. Julian Assange is not a US citizen, he’s an Australian. WikiLeaks is not a US-based media organization. If the US government gets Assange extradited, prosecuted and incarcerated, it will legitimize its right to go after anyone, anyhow, anywhere, anytime.”

It will be the killing of journalism. Media attacks and the black propaganda campaign against Wikileaks are on the increase. Many others in addition to Pepe Escobar have noted that the persecution of Assange threatens all journalists. Yet, the media have a history of largely opposing or ignoring Assange.

As Chris Hedges reports: “Once the documents and videos provided by Manning to Assange and WikiLeaks were published and disseminated by news organizations such as The New York Times and The Guardian, the press callously, and foolishly, turned on Assange. News organizations that had run WikiLeaks material over several days soon served as conduits in a black propaganda campaign to discredit Assange and WikiLeaks.”

John Pilger describes this campaign: “ In 2008, a plan to destroy both WikiLeaks and Assange was laid out in a top secret document dated 8 March, 2008. The authors were the Cyber Counter-intelligence Assessments Branch of the US Defence Department. They described in detail how important it was to destroy the “feeling of trust” that is WikiLeaks’ “centre of gravity”.

This would be achieved, they wrote, with threats of ‘exposure [and] criminal prosecution’ and a unrelenting assault on reputation. The aim was to silence and criminalise WikiLeaks and its editor and publisher. It was as if they planned a war on a single human being and on the very principle of freedom of speech.

Their main weapon would be personal smear. Their shock troops would be enlisted in the media — those who are meant to keep the record straight and tell us the truth.”

Pilger writes in a more recent article: “Assange’s principal media tormentor, The Guardian, a collaborator with the secret state, displayed its nervousness this week with an editorial that scaled new weasel heights. The Guardian has exploited the work of Assange and WikiLeaks in what its previous editor called ‘the greatest scoop of the last 30 years.’ The paper creamed off WikiLeaks’ revelations and claimed the accolades and riches that came with them.

With not a penny going to Julian Assange or to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie. The book’s authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, turned on their source, abused him and disclosed the secret password Assange had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing leaked US embassy cables.

When Assange was still trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy, Harding joined police outside and gloated on his blog that “Scotland Yard may get the last laugh.”

Media watchdog FAIR reports that virtually all the mainstream media, from left to right, have cheered Assange’s recent incarceration, concluding: “It seems clear he shares virtually nothing in common with those in positions of influence in big media outlets, who have been only too happy to watch his demise.”

The Onion, which satirizes the tone and format of typical news outlets, summarizes Assange’s real “crime” in an article entitled “Media Condemns Julian Assange For Reckless Exposure Of How They Could Be Spending Their Time”. The piece includes an imaginary quote from Fred Hiatt, Washington Post editorial page editor: “It’s abundantly clear that Mr. Assange was focused on exposing documented evidence of U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan without so much as a thought for the journalists who faithfully parroted the US military’s talking points when we could have been investigating information that ran contrary to that narrative—does he realize how that makes us look?”

British journalist Jonathan Cook lays out the media’s sins of omission and commission. He writes: “For seven years, we have had to listen to a chorus of journalists, politicians and ‘experts’ telling us that Assange was nothing more than a fugitive from justice and that the British and Swedish legal systems could be relied on to handle his case in full accordance with the law. Barely a ‘mainstream’ voice was raised in his defense in all that time.

“From the moment he sought asylum, Assange was cast as an outlaw. His work as the founder of Wikileaks – a digital platform that for the first time in history gave ordinary people a glimpse into the darkest recesses of the most secure vaults in the deepest of Deep States – was erased from the record.

“Assange was reduced from one of the few towering figures of our time – a man who will have a central place in history books, if we as a species live long enough to write those books – to nothing more than a sex pest, and a scruffy bail-skipper.

The political and media class crafted a narrative of half-truths about the sex charges Assange was under investigation for in Sweden. They overlooked the fact that Assange had been allowed to leave Sweden by the original investigator, who dropped the charges, only for them to be revived by another investigator with a well-documented political agenda.

They failed to mention that Assange was always willing to be questioned by Swedish prosecutors in London, as had occurred in dozens of other cases involving extradition proceedings to Sweden….”

Cook concludes: “This was never about Sweden or bail violations, or even about the discredited Russia-gate narrative, as anyone who was paying the vaguest attention should have been able to work out. It was about the US Deep State doing everything in its power to crush WikiLeaks and make an example of its founder.”

What caused the US government and others to desire Assange and Wikileaks’ destruction? Let’s look at what they revealed.

Assange’s Wikileaks exposed the crimes of the Zionist regime. Wikileaks published a number of diplomatic cables and emails that exposed Israeli plans and actions, and US collusion, that Israel and its partisans wished to keep hidden. Below are some of them.

Israel planned to keep Gaza on “brink of collapse”. In 2008 Wikileaks published a cable from the US Embassy in Tel Aviv to Washington, that Israel had designated Gaza as a “hostile entity.”

The cable said: “As part of their overall embargo plan against Gaza, Israeli officials have confirmed [to US officials] on multiple occasions that they intend to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge.”

The US cable, classified “secret,” recommended that the US try to persuade Israel to abandon this policy. The cable said that the US should encourage Israel to “review its present policies (as  requested by the Office of the Quartet Representative and the PA) while pressing the Israelis to approve as much funding each month as possible under security constraints…”

Israel used control over Palestinian money to control Gaza. The leaked cable also described how Israel used its control over Palestinian currency to control Gaza. The cable said Israel’s “monetary policy towards Gaza is consistent with its declaration that Gaza is a ‘hostile entity.’

The cable reported that Israel “believes that maintaining the shekel as the currency of the Palestinian Territories is in Israel’s interests”. It reported that Israel “treats decisions regarding the amount of shekels in circulation in Gaza as a security matter.” Requests by Palestinian banks to transfer shekels into Gaza are approved or denied by the National Security Council (NSC), an organ of the Israeli security establishment, not by the Bank of Israel.

The cable reported that Israel’s NSC “has the final say in permitting new liquidity into Gaza” and used this power to suppress Gaza’s economy. The cable reported that Israel had decided “that Gaza should receive just enough money for the basic needs of the population but it is not interested in returning the Gazan economy to a state of normal commerce and business.”

Israel colluded with Palestinian Authority and Fatah. A 2007 US diplomatic cable, also marked secret, revealed the way in which Israel was using the Palestinian Authority and Fatah, the party of President Mahmoud Abbas.

The cable, from the US embassy, reported information given the by Israeli Security Agency (ISA) Head Yuval Diskin to US officials. Diskin was concerned that Fatah’s weakness compared to Hamas “bodes ill for Israel,” especially since Israel had “established a very good working relationship” with the Palestinian Authority. He said that PA security agencies were sharing almost all the intelligence they collected with Israel. Diskin said: “They understand that Israel’s security is central to their survival in the struggle with Hamas in the West Bank.”

Israel planned violence against Palestinian nonviolence. A 2010 US cable published by Wikileaks was entitled: “Israel military forces plan harsher methods with the West Bank Demonstrations.”

The cable, again from the US embassy, reported that Israel was greatly concerned by Palestinian nonviolence. A diplomat wrote: “Less violent [Palestinian] demonstrations [were] likely to stymie the Israeli Armed Forces. As MOD Pol-Mil chief Amos Gilad told USG interlocutors recently, “we don’t do Gandhi very well.”

The cable reported that an official “expressed frustration with ongoing demonstrations in the West Bank.” He said that the Israeli military forces would start to be “more assertive in how it deals with these demonstrations, even demonstrations that appear peaceful.”

The cable reported that the official said Israel would “start sending trucks with ‘dirty water’ to break up these protests, even if they are not violent… (NOTE: dirty water is reference to the Israeli military forces illegal stay in Syria). Israeli forces basically treated water that duplicates the effects of skunk spray).

The cable reported that Israeli officials had threatened the Palestinian security force commanders “that they must stop these demonstrations or the Israeli army will.”

Israel’s nuclear monopoly, helping Israel by opposing President Bashar al-Assad. Wikileaks posted an email memo to Hillary Clinton saying: “What Israeli military leaders really worry about — but cannot talk about — is losing their nuclear monopoly.

The memo recommended: “The best way to help Israel deal with Iran’s growing nuclear capability [sic] is to incite the people of Syria to overthrow Bashar Assad.” It reported: “Israel’s leadership understands well why defeating Assad is now in its interests.”

The 2012 memo was apparently by James P. Rubin, assistant secretary of state during the Bill Clinton administration (and husband of CNN’s Christiane Amanpour). Rubin emailed it to Hillary Clinton, who then forwarded it to her aide to print out for her.

EA/SS