In an Old Bailey courtroom in London over the past four weeks, lawyers for the US government have sought the extradition of Assange to the US to face 17 charges under the Espionage Act of 1917 and one charge of computer misuse. At the heart of their case is the accusation that in leaking a trove of classified US diplomatic and military cables in 2010, Assange and WikiLeaks endanger the lives of US agents and informants.
One of the many peculiarities in this strange case is that the evidence for any such thing is non-existent. The Pentagon has admitted that it failed to find a single person covertly working for the US who had been killed as a result of the WikiLeaks disclosures. This failure was not for lack of trying: The Pentagon had set up a special military task force, deploying 120 counter-intelligence officers, to find at least one death that could be blamed on Assange and his colleagues but had found nothing."
-->The US media is so lockstep in its condemnation of Assange, that we must go to a foreign press to read this opinion. First, Julian Assange revealed the war crimes of the American Empire in the Middle East. Now his trial is revealing the self censorship of the empire's media.
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+972 Magazine:
"The decision of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to withdraw from a memorial honoring Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin has rightly been seen by observers as evidence that Palestinian voices and perspectives are finally being taken seriously in progressive Democratic circles. But while some of AOC’s critics in the United States are using the incident to score political points, others seem genuinely confused by her decision.
A key reason for this bafflement is that many Americans’ memories of Rabin have long been colored by a relentless media narrative that deprived them of critical perspectives on his life and legacy. ... As samples, I examined two daily newspapers — The New York Times and The Washington Post — and two weekly news magazines — The New Republic and The Nation — over a 50-year period, from 1970 to 2019. ...
I had expected to find relatively few opinion pieces by Palestinians, and I was correct. But what surprised me was how much Palestinians have been talked about in major U.S. media outlets over the decades. ... This trend was especially striking in the daily press. In the New York Times, less than 2 percent of the nearly 2,500 opinion pieces that discussed Palestinians since 1970 were actually written by Palestinians. In the Washington Post, the average was just 1 percent."
https://www.972mag.com/us-media-palestinians/
-->The coverage of Palestine is another example of the complete unanimity of the US media. Is this what we are supposed to call a "free press"?
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The Guardian:
"A militia-promoting father and son duo of fake news publishers and a Trump-connected social media consultant are linked to pages which promote the idea of an American civil war with material presented in a way that appears to be an effort to sidestep Facebook’s fact-checking system.
Comments on their Facebook pages and other materials obtained by the Guardian show that some rank and file Donald Trump supporters are enthusiastically receiving the message that they should prepare for violence against their perceived political enemies in November.
Asked to comment on the site’s apparent reach, and the nature of its community, [Becca] Lewis, the extremism researcher [from Stanford University], said: 'This is not some dark corner of the internet, this is not a fringe thing, it’s mainstream Republicans that are stoking this.' ”
-->Our media, including the NYT, always soft pedals the real chance of armed conflict during this upcoming election. Like never talking about fascist movements in America, the mainstream media leaves us unaware and unprepared.
