Why You Need to Know about Julian Assange of Wikileaks

What you need to know about Julian Assange on the Fourth Anniversary of his Imprisonment. On Glenn Greenwald's System Update, the Free Speech Alternative to YouTube.

An excerpt of the transcript of this show from Glenn's site at Locals:

There's, I think, a very good strong case to make that Julian Assange is definitely one of the most consequential and intrepid journalists of the last, say, 50 years, if not the single most important pioneering journalist of his generation. He has almost certainly broken more major stories than almost every single employee of the mainstream media outlet combined. They don't hate Julian Assange, despite the fact that he's broken so many stories. They hate him precisely because of that – in part because he shined. He holds up a mirror showing what they really are. He is what they pretend to be.

While the mainstream media constantly publishes stories that they dress up as leaks but in fact are nothing more than propaganda messaging tasks given to them by the CIA and the FBI and Homeland Security, which pick up the phone and pick their favorite reporter and tell them what to go plant in the newspaper to disseminate propaganda to the American people, Assange never does that and never had to and never would. He shows the American people and the world the secrets the CIA and the FBI and the Pentagon and Homeland Security don't want you to see. And that's why those agencies hate him. And that's why the employees and the media outlets that serve those agencies also hate him. That is the reason that he's in prison.

Almost every single employee of The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and NBC, on a daily basis – you can pick up those newspapers or if you have the misfortune to listen to those networks, you will hear or read them saying – “anonymous officials told us” X, Y, and Z, they publish classified information all the time. But they don't end up like Julian Assange or Jack Teixeira – the 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts National Guard was hunted this week by The New York Times and The Washington Post and then arrested yesterday by the FBI because he is accused of having leaked classified documents.

The difference between the mainstream media on the one hand and Assange and Jack Teixeira and people like Edward Snowden on the other is that the mainstream media publishes leaks that are authorized, that the U.S. Security State wants you to see because they're forms of propaganda and that's why they're never punished. That's why they don't end up in prison. They get book deals; they get put on television and they're applauded by the U.S. government. The people who end up in prison are those who show you the secrets they want to hide. That's the main difference. It's the difference between being a propagandist and being a journalist. Julian Assange is a journalist, and that's the reason he's in prison.

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Hollowed-Out

I propose this as a metaphor for a large country whose institutions are being hollowed out.

Continue ReadingHollowed-Out

Bad Leakers and Good Leaks.

A recent document leak on Discord shows that the U.S government is lying to Americans. The contents of this leak make it clear that U.S. troops are already on the ground in Ukraine, a situation that dramatically increases the risk of direct confrontation of the U.S. and Russia, which could be cataclysmic given the current situation, already hair-trigger dangerous. The U.S. corporate news is refusing to discuss the new revelations, both the White House dishonesty and the danger on the ground in Ukraine. Why? It's entire predictable.

When the corporate news media likes the content of a leak, they don't give a rat's ass about who leaked it. On other  occasions, the corporate news media finds the leak content inconvenient, in which case they zero in, laser-like, to destroy the reputation of the leaker, harping on the illegality of the leak and simultaneously suppressing the content of the leak. This protocol is in their standard playbook, as discussed by Glenn Greenwald in "The Same Establishment Playbook is Used to Malign the Character of Leakers and Distract Attention From the Substance of the Revelations."

On a virtually daily basis, one can find authorized leaks in The New York Times, The Washington Post, on CNN and NBC News: meaning stories dressed up as leaks from anonymous sources that are, in fact, nothing more than messaging assertions that the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security and the Pentagon have instructed these subservient media corporations to disseminate. When that happens, the leaker is never found or punished: even when the leaks are designated as the most serious crimes under the U.S. criminal code, such as when The Washington Post's long-time CIA spokesman David Ignatius in early 2017 published the contents of the intercepted phone calls between Trump's incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Most of Russiagate was constructed based on authorized leaks, a generous way of describing official propaganda from the U.S. Security State laundered in the American corporate press.

But when it comes to unauthorized leaks -- which result in the disclosure of secret evidence showing that the U.S. Security State lied, acted corruptly, or broke laws -- that is when the full weight of establishment power comes crashing down on the head of the leaker. They are found and arrested. Their character is destroyed. And now -- in a new and genuinely shocking escalation -- it is the largest media corporations themselves, such as the Times and the Post, that actually do the FBI's work by hunting down the leaker, exposing him, and ensuring his arrest.

This playback is always used in such cases and is easily recognized. The point is to shift attention from the substance of the embarrassing and incriminating disclosures onto the personal traits of the person who exposed them, so as to make the public forget about what they learned and come to see the leaker as so unlikeable that they want nothing to do with the disclosures themselves.

Glenn's System Update Episode #70 further explores the media's treatment of the Discord leaker.

Continue ReadingBad Leakers and Good Leaks.