The glimpse of Julian Assange being dragged from the Ecuadorean embassy in London is an emblem of the times. Might against right. Muscle against the law. Indecency against courage. Six policemen manhandled a sick journalist, his eyes wincing against his first natural light in almost seven years.
LONDON (Opinion) — This morning, the London-based branch of Empire made good on its threat and boldly moved to begin dismantling the vestiges of democracy and press freedom that still remain, vestiges that have allowed people throughout the Western world to pretend that their government and politicians still respect their rights and the rule of law.
ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA — After getting her life back less than two years ago following her release from prison in March 2017, alleged WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning was remanded back into custody this past Friday for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury. A subpoena sent to Manning earlier this year bore the same case number as that of a WikiLeaks grand jury convened over eight years ago in the Eastern District of Virginia, an indication that the U.S. government wants her to testify against WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange.
This latest admission by White House legal counsel, Rudy Giuliani, is certain to send shock waves through the corridors of the deep state in both Washington and London. For years, the Anglo-American establishment has been trying to frame Julian Assange and WikiLeaks for a crime which was nonexistent. Once again, as the Russiagate narrative starts to disintegrate, common sense is beginning to fill the vacuum left by the hemorrhaging credibility of the political media establishment.
Wendi Winters, a reporter and editor with the Capital Gazette, in Annapolis, Md., was one of three female journalists murdered this year worldwide, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The Gazette was attacked on June 28 by a gunman who also killed four others in the ambush. Winters, who was 65, was a mother of four children who apparently charged the gunman, thus saving others’ lives.
TEL AVIV – In the “only democracy” in the Middle East, military censors are working overtime to control the content of reporting and keep certain stories hidden from the public.
Carl Bernstein, the journalist famous for exposing details related to the Watergate scandal, was on MSNBC and described the United States Justice Department’s seizure of phone records of reporters as a “matter of policy” that went all the way up to the president.
“The object of it is to try and intimidate people who talk to reporters, especially on national security matters. National security is always the false claim of administrations trying to hide information that people ought to know,” Bernstein added.
Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility. — Professor Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Discourse in the Age of Show Business
I am here to make a case that India, which is known as the world’s so-called largest democracy is currently going through an era of self-imposed media censorship under a right wing Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) government. This has not only made the working environment of journalists in India extremely challenging, but the problem has spilled over[Read More...]
