"On The Beach" 2017 - The Beckoning Of Nuclear War

Paul Craig Roberts writes that the admirable and honorable truth-teller John Pilger warns us that nuclear war is closer than we think.

The 1957 book, On The Beach, introduced awareness that war in the nuclear age is terminable for life on earth. This realization explains President John F. Kennedy’s rejection of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff’s recommendation to launch a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union. Today as evidenced by the behavior of the US government, its European vassal states, and neoconservative pundits, this realization no longer informs US policy.

Pilger speaks of the lobotomy performed on each generation that removes facts from history. Pilger himself is a victim when he chooses to stress that Ronald Reagan defended the Vietnam war instead of emphasizing that Reagan worked with Gorbachev to reduce the threat of nuclear war. The lobotomy that has been performed on the Western world has destroyed knowledge that the US and Russia were on peaceful terms prior to the Soviet collapse.

These peaceful terms lasted a short time, only through the administration of President George H.W. Bush. With the advent of the Clinton regime, all peaceful agreements that were made have been consistently broken by Washington for 24 years throughout the two-term presidencies of three regimes, and now Congress is set on destroying what remains of the work of 20th century US administrations to remove the specter of nuclear armageddon. The defense authorization bill currently before Congress overturns the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. This treaty eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons and signaled the end of the Cold War.

John Pilger tells us of the certain consequences of the renewed nuclear arms race:

The US submarine captain says, "We"ve all got to die one day, some sooner and some later. The trouble always has been that you"re never ready, because you don"t know when it"s coming. Well, now we do know and there"s nothing to be done about it."

He says he will be dead by September. It will take about a week to die, though no one can be sure. Animals live the longest.

The war was over in a month. The United States, Russia and China were the protagonists. It is not clear if it was started by accident or mistake. There was no victor. The northern hemisphere is contaminated and lifeless now.

A curtain of radioactivity is moving south towards Australia and New Zealand, southern Africa and South America. By September, the last cities, towns and villages will succumb. As in the north, most buildings will remain untouched, some illuminated by the last flickers of electric light.

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper

These lines from T.S. Eliot"s poem The Hollow Men appear at the beginning of Nevil Shute"s novel On the Beach, which left me close to tears. The endorsements on the cover said the same.

Published in 1957 at the height of the Cold War when too many writers were silent or cowed, it is a masterpiece. At first the language suggests a genteel relic; yet nothing I have read on nuclear war is as unyielding in its warning. No book is more urgent.

Some readers will remember the black and white Hollywood film starring Gregory Peck as the US Navy commander who takes his submarine to Australia to await the silent, formless spectre descending on the last of the living world.

I read On the Beach for the first time the other day, finishing it as the US Congress passed a law to wage economic war on Russia, the world"s second most lethal nuclear power.  There was no justification for this insane vote, except the promise of plunder.

The "sanctions" are aimed at Europe, too, mainly Germany, which depends on Russian natural gas and on European companies that do legitimate business with Russia. In what passed for debate on Capitol Hill, the more garrulous senators left no doubt that the embargo was designed to force Europe to import expensive American gas.

Their main aim seems to be war - real war. No provocation as extreme can suggest anything else. They seem to crave it, even though Americans have little idea what war is. The Civil War of 1861-5 was the last on their mainland. War is what the United States does to others.

The only nation to have used nuclear weapons against human beings, they have since destroyed scores of governments, many of them democracies, and laid to waste whole societies - the million deaths in Iraq were a fraction of the carnage in Indo-China, which President Reagan called "a noble cause" and President Obama revised as the tragedy of an "exceptional people"He was not referring to the Vietnamese.

Filming last year at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, I overheard a National Parks Service guide lecturing a school party of young teenagers. "Listen up," he said. "We lost 58,000 young soldiers in Vietnam, and they died defending your freedom."

At a stroke, the truth was inverted. No freedom was defended. Freedom was destroyed. A peasant country was invaded and millions of its people were killed, maimed, dispossessed, poisoned; 60,000 of the invaders took their own lives. Listen up, indeed.

A lobotomy is performed on each generation. Facts are removed. History is excised and replaced by what Time magazine calls "an eternal present".

Harold Pinter described this as "manipulation of power worldwide, while masquerading as a force for universal good, a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis [which meant] that it never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn"t happening. It didn"t matter. It was of no interest."

Those who call themselves liberals or tendentiously "the left" are eager participants in this manipulation, and its brainwashing, which today revert to one name: Trump.

Trump is mad, a fascist, a dupe of Russia. He is also a gift for "liberal brains pickled in the formaldehyde of identity politics", wrote Luciana Bohne memorably. The obsession with Trump the man - not Trump as a symptom and caricature of an enduring system - beckons great danger for all of us.

While they pursue their fossilised anti-Russia agendas, narcissistic media such as the Washington Post, the BBC and the Guardian suppress the essence of the most important political story of our time as they warmonger on a scale I cannot remember in my lifetime.

On 3 August, in contrast to the acreage the Guardian has given to drivel that the Russians conspired with Trump (reminiscent of the far-right smearing of John Kennedy as a "Soviet agent"), the paper buried, on page 16, news that the President of the United States was forced to sign a Congressional bill declaring economic war on Russia. Unlike every other Trump signing, this was conducted in virtual secrecy and attached with a caveat from Trump himself that it was "clearly unconstitutional".

A coup against the man in the White House is under way. This is not because he is an odious human being, but because he has consistently made clear he does not want war with Russia.

This glimpse of sanity, or simple pragmatism, is anathema to the "national security" managers who guard a system based on war, surveillance, armaments, threats and extreme capitalism. Martin Luther King called them "the greatest purveyors of violence in the world today".

They have encircled Russia and China with missiles and a nuclear arsenal. They have used neo-Nazis to instal an unstable, aggressive regime on Russia"s "borderland" - the way through which Hitler invaded, causing the deaths of 27 million people.  Their goal is to dismember the modern Russian Federation.

In response, "partnership" is a word used incessantly by Vladimir Putin - anything, it seems, that might halt an evangelical drive to war in the United States. Incredulity in Russia may have now turned to fear and perhaps a certain resolution. The Russians almost certainly have war-gamed nuclear counter strikes. Air-raid drills are not uncommon. Their history tells them to get ready.

The threat is simultaneous. Russia is first, China is next. The US has just completed a huge military exercise with Australia known as Talisman Sabre. They rehearsed a blockade of the Malacca Straits and the South China Sea, through which pass China"s economic lifelines.

The admiral commanding the US Pacific fleet said that, "if required", he would nuke China. That he would say such a thing publicly in the current perfidious atmosphere begins to make fact of Nevil Shute"s fiction.

None of this is considered news. No connection is made as the bloodfest of Passchendaele a century ago is remembered. Honest reporting is no longer welcome in much of the media. Windbags, known as pundits, dominate: editors are infotainment or party line managers. Where there was once sub-editing, there is the liberation of axe-grinding clichés. Those journalists who do not comply are defenestrated.

The urgency has plenty of precedents. In my film, The Coming War on China, John Bordne, a member of a US Air Force missile combat crew based in Okinawa, Japan, describes how in 1962 - during the Cuban missile crisis - he and his colleagues were "told to launch all the missiles" from their silos.

Nuclear armed, the missiles were aimed at both China and Russia. A junior officer questioned this, and the order was eventually rescinded - but only after they were issued with service revolvers and ordered to shoot at others in a missile crew if they did not "stand down".

At the height of the Cold War, the anti-communist hysteria in the United States was such that US officials who were on official business in China were accused of treason and sacked. In 1957 - the year Shute wrote On the Beach - no official in the State Department could speak the language of the world"s most populous nation. Mandarin speakers were purged under strictures now echoed in the Congressional bill that has just passed, aimed at Russia.

The bill was bipartisan. There is no fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans. The terms "left" and "right" are meaningless. Most of America"s modern wars were started not by conservatives, but by liberal Democrats.

When Obama left office, he presided over a record seven wars, including America"s longest war and an unprecedented campaign of extrajudicial killings - murder - by drones.

In his last year, according to a Council on Foreign Relations study, Obama, the "reluctant liberal warrior", dropped 26,171 bombs - three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day.  Having pledged to help "rid the world" of nuclear weapons, the Nobel Peace Laureate built more nuclear warheads than any president since the Cold War.

Trump is a wimp by comparison. It was Obama - with his secretary of state Hillary Clinton at his side - who destroyed Libya as a modern state and launched the human stampede to Europe. At home, immigration groups knew him as the "deporter-in-chief".

One of Obama"s last acts as president was to sign a bill that handed a record $618billion to the Pentagon, reflecting the soaring ascendancy of fascist militarism in the governance of the United States. Trump has endorsed this.

Buried in the detail was the establishment of a "Center for Information Analysis and Response". This is a ministry of truth. It is tasked with providing an "official narrative of facts" that will prepare us for the real possibility of nuclear war - if we allow it.

John Pilger Exposes White Helmets As “Propaganda Construct in Syria” (VIDEO)

By: Vanessa Beeley, 21st Century Wire |

Just prior to the 2016 announcement of the Nobel Prize I wrote to eminent author and filmmaker, John Pilger, about the NATO and Gulf State propaganda construct, the White Helmets, demonstrated to be nothing more than Nusra Front civil defence in Syria. In yesterday’s interview with RT’s  Going Underground, John Pilger outed the White Helmets as nothing more than a “complete propaganda construct in Syria”. WATCH ~

This was my email to John Pilger on the 27/9/2016. I have no idea if it had any influence upon the comments that Pilger made during his interview but the fact that such a respected and admired analyst has finally, publically exposed the White Helmets – as a primarily UK  funded, propaganda, shadow state construct, engineered to facilitate intervention in Syria, should be a powerful ally for independent media in their efforts to reveal the pivotal aspects of the dirty war being waged against Syria.

“I am writing to you as a journalist who believes in all the values you have represented to them for the years they have followed you.

I have, for some time, been working to expose, alongside many others, the “Dirty War on Syria“ .  I have recently returned from a 4 week journey around Syria, visiting Aleppo and meeting with President Assad, as part of the US Peace Council Delegation.  Three weeks of my trip were, however, as an independent journalist.

My main investigation has focused on the White Helmets, the phony NATO shadow state construct, masquerading as a Humanitarian NGO, an alleged first response unit saving civilians.

I will not go into huge detail in this email but suffice to say that this group are a multi million $ funded operation with  ties to private security firms and to deep state in both US and UK.

Their current funding amounts to well over £ 100m.  This is not funding for 2,800 civil defence workers, this is funding for an “army”.  Funding comes from UK, US, Japan and EU countries and now Qatar.  This suggests to me an Axis of intervention using these “humanitarians” as a cover for their nefarious military intervention.  Syria is the blueprint.  If Clinton is elected, who knows what kind of tool this blueprint will become in her war-hawk hands.

At the end of this email I will include links to the main body of my work, I have compiled them into one article titled “Who are the Syria White Helmets”.

During my time in Syria, I met with the REAL Syria Civil Defence that has been in existence for 63 years compared to the White Helmets for 3 years.  The REAL Syria Civil Defence is a member of the ICDO affiliated to the UN, WHO, Red Cross and OCHA to name a few.  It is operating across Syria in both terrorist held and government held areas rescuing civilians.

I spoke with crew members whose comrades had been massacred by the incoming terrorists who then became known as the White Helmets in East Aleppo for example but also in other areas, Raqqa, Deir Ezzor, Idlib.

None of this is being reported and now we are heading towards the abyss of war and this terrorist affiliated group has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

I appeal to you as someone with such standing and eminence in the media world, in the world at large, please would you highlight this story. If the White Helmets win the Nobel Prize it will bring with it such credibility, not only for the group, but for the entire illegal war effort and US hegemony globally.  The war against Syria is underpinned by the propaganda provided by this group of White Helmets, who knows what they will be used for in the future.

I speak to you as a journalist, one who believes in presenting the truth not a two dimensional version of it that serves only to amplify state narratives….and to further reduce the brave and noble nation of Syria to ashes and rubble mingled with the blood of their people who would never have killed their country to improve it.

Another sovereign nation being torn apart but Syria is resisting and refusing to yield.  She needs us to stand by her. 

Please help me to prevent this travesty of justice and to prevent what is effectively Al Qaeda winning the Nobel Prize.  

I thank you in advance for your kind attention and look forward to hearing from you.”

Thank you John Pilger for what you said today.

Assange To Hannity: "Our Source Is Not The Russian Government"

It won"t be the first time Julian Assange was interviewed and asked whether the source of the hacked DNC and Podesta emails was Russia; however, it will be the first time everyone pays attention to his answer. Recall that the first such interview of Assange - when the question of who had sourced Wikileaks with the hacked emails came up - took place exactly two months ago, on November 3. Back then, in an interview televized by RT, John Pilger explicitly asked Asange where the emails in question had come from.

Assange"s response was straightforward: “The Clinton camp has been able to project a neo-McCarthyist hysteria that Russia is responsible for everything. Hillary Clinton has stated multiple times, falsely, that 17 US intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That’s false – we can say that the Russian government is not the source.”

That particular interview took place when Trump has losing badly in the polls, and as such few people paid attention: after all, what difference did it make who had leaked the Podesta emails: Hillary Clinton was assured to win (with a 90%+ probability according to the NYT and other "non-fake news" outlets).

Needless to say, the issue of Russian hacking has since come back with a vengeance, and culminated last week with Obama expelling 35 Russian diplomats in the greatest diplomatic escalation between the US and Russia in decades; an action which took place based on a flimsy 13-page DHS/FBI report which demonstrated that anyone could have hacked the DNC emails if only they spent a few dollars to purchase a piece of Ukranian PHP malware.

Which is why many more will pay attention to Assange"s next interview with Sean Hannity, which will air Tuesday on Fox News. According to a Fox News release, the two will discuss Russian hacking, the 2016 presidential election, and both the Obama and upcoming Trump administrations. It will air at 10 p.m. on Jan. 3, with additional portions of the interview airing throughout the week. As Variety adds, The interview will mark Assange’s first face-to-face cable news appearance. It is not, however, the first time he’s spoken publicly to Hannity. Most recently, in December, Assange called into Hannity’s radio show, in which the host gushed to Assange that “you’ve done us a favor” in exposing gaps in U.S. cybersecurity.

And while what Assange would say was rather predictable, as he would simply reiterate what he has said previously, courtesy of Real Clear Politics, we have an advance glimpse into the punchline, to wit:

HANNITY: Can you say to the American people, unequivocally, that you did not get this information about the DNC, John Podesta"s emails, can you tell the American people 1,000 percent that you did not get it from Russia or anybody associated with Russia?

ASSANGE: Yes. We can say, we have said, repeatedly that over the last two months that our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party... Obama is trying to say that President-elect Trump is not a legitimate President.

When asked if  WikiLeaks changed the outcome of the election, Assange replied "Who knows, it’s impossible to tell" but, he added, "if it did, the accusation is that the true statements of Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager, John Podesta, and the DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz, their true statements is what changed the election.”

Which is correct, however admitting as much would shift the blame away from the "Russians" and back to the failures of the Clinton campaign and the shortcoming of the Democrats, and the whole point of this scapegoating campaign is precisely the opposite.

As the Hill adds, Assange said there"s an "obvious" reason the Obama administration has focused on Russia"s alleged role in Democratic hacks leading up to Donald Trump"s electoral win.

“They’re trying to delegitimize the Trump administration as it goes into the White House.”

He then added that "our publications had wide uptake by the American people, they’re all true,” Assange continued. “But that’s not the allegation that’s being presented by the Obama White House.”

However, as we said previously, since at the end of the day it is Assange"s word - unless Wikileaks does actually reveal its source, which would be professional suicide - against the word of Obama and 17 agenices who back him up, despite still having provided no actual evidence in the ongoing, and quite bizarre attempt to force a deterioration of US-Russian relations in the final days of the Obama administration, just so Trump can inherit a complete diplomatic mess and make closer relations with Putin more complicated, this latest interview with Assange will likewise resolve absolutely nothing.

When It Comes To Fake News, The U.S. Government Is The Biggest Culprit

Submitted by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth.”—Former New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg

Let’s talk about fake news stories, shall we?

There’s the garden variety fake news that is not really “news” so much as it is titillating, tabloid-worthy material peddled by anyone with a Twitter account, a Facebook page and an active imagination. These stories run the gamut from the ridiculous and the obviously click-baity to the satirical and politically manipulative.

Anyone with an ounce of sense and access to the Internet should be able to ferret out the truth and lies in these stories with some basic research. That these stories flourish is largely owing to the general gullibility, laziness and media illiteracy of the general public, which through its learned compliance rarely questions, challenges or confronts.

Then there’s the more devious kind of news stories circulated by one of the biggest propagators of fake news: the U.S. government.

In the midst of the media’s sudden headline-blaring apoplexy over fake news, you won’t hear much about the government’s role in producing, planting and peddling propaganda-driven fake news—often with the help of the corporate news media—because that’s not how the game works.

Why?

Because the powers-that-be don’t want us skeptical of the government’s message or its corporate accomplices in the mainstream media. They don’t want us to be more discerning when it comes to what information we digest online. They just want us to be leery of independent or alternative news sources while trusting them—and their corporate colleagues—to vet the news for us.

Indeed, the New York Times has suggested that Facebook and Google appoint themselves the arbiters of truth on the internet in order to screen out what is blatantly false, spam or click-baity.

Not only would this establish a dangerous precedent for all-out censorship by corporate entities known for colluding with the government but it’s also a slick sleight-of-hand maneuver that diverts attention from what we should really be talking about: the fact that the government has grown dangerously out-of-control, all the while the so-called mainstream news media, which is supposed to act as a bulwark against government propaganda, has instead become the mouthpiece of the world’s largest corporation—the U.S. government.

As veteran journalist Carl Bernstein, who along with Bob Woodward blew the lid off the Watergate scandal, reported in his expansive 1977 Rolling Stone piece, “The CIA and the Media”:

“More than 400 American journalists … in the past twenty?five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency... There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services... Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters... In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations.”

Bernstein is referring to Operation Mockingbird, a CIA campaign started in the 1950s to plant intelligence reports among reporters at more than 25 major newspapers and wire agencies, who would then regurgitate them for a public oblivious to the fact that they were being fed government propaganda.

In some instances, as Bernstein shows, members of the media also served as extensions of the surveillance state, with reporters actually carrying out assignments for the CIA.

Executives with CBS, the New York Times and Time magazine also worked closely with the CIA to vet the news. Bernstein writes: “Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps?Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald?Tribune.”

For example, in August 1964, the nation’s leading newspapers—including the Washington Post and New York Times—echoed Lyndon Johnson’s claim that North Vietnam had launched a second round of attacks against American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. No such attacks had taken place, and yet the damage was done. As Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon report for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, “By reporting official claims as absolute truths, American journalism opened the floodgates for the bloody Vietnam War.”

Fast forward to the early post-9/11 years when, despite a lack of any credible data supporting the existence of weapons of mass destruction, the mainstream media jumped on the bandwagon to sound the war drums against Iraq. As Los Angeles Times columnist Robin Abcarian put it, “our government … used its immense bully pulpit to steamroll the watchdogs… Many were gulled by access to administration insiders, or susceptible to the drumbeat of the government’s coordinated rhetoric.”

John Walcott, Washington bureau chief for Knight-Ridder, one of the only news agencies to challenge the government’s rationale for invading Iraq, suggests that the reason for the media’s easy acceptance is that “too many journalists, including some very famous ones, have surrendered their independence in order to become part of the ruling class. Journalism is, as the motto goes, speaking truth to power, not wielding it.”

If it was happening then, you can bet it’s still happening today, only it’s been reclassified, renamed and hidden behind layers of government secrecy, obfuscation and spin.

In its article, “How the American government is trying to control what you think,” the Washington Post points out “Government agencies historically have made a habit of crossing the blurry line between informing the public and propagandizing.”

Thus, whether you’re talking about the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the government’s invasion of Iraq based upon absolute fabrications, or the government’s so-called war on terror, privacy and whistleblowers, it’s being driven by propaganda churned out by one corporate machine (the corporate-controlled government) and fed to the American people by way of yet another corporate machine (the corporate-controlled media).

“For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it,” writes investigative journalist Nick Davies. “The sheer ease with which this machinery has been able to do its work reflects a creeping structural weakness which now afflicts the production of our news.”

But wait.

If the mass media—aka the mainstream media or the corporate or establishment media—is merely repeating what is being fed to it, who are the masterminds within the government responsible for this propaganda?

Davies explains:

The Pentagon has now designated “information operations” as its fifth “core competency” alongside land, sea, air and special forces. Since October 2006, every brigade, division and corps in the US military has had its own "psyop" element producing output for local media. This military activity is linked to the State Department"s campaign of "public diplomacy" which includes funding radio stations and news websites.

This use of propaganda disguised as journalism is what journalist John Pilger refers to as “invisible government… the true ruling power of our country.”

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we no longer have a Fourth Estate.

Not when the “news” we receive is routinely manufactured, manipulated and made-to-order by government agents. Not when six corporations control 90% of the media in America. And not when, as Davies laments, “news organizations which might otherwise have exposed the truth were themselves part of the abuse, and so they kept silent, indulging in a comic parody of misreporting, hiding the emerging scandal from their readers like a Victorian nanny covering the children’s eyes from an accident in the street.”

So let’s have no more of this handwringing, heart-wrenching, morally offended talk about fake news by media outlets that have become propagandists for the false reality created by the American government.

After all, as Glenn Greenwald points out, “The term propaganda rings melodramatic and exaggerated, but a press that—whether from fear, careerism, or conviction—uncritically recites false government claims and reports them as fact, or treats elected officials with a reverence reserved for royalty, cannot be accurately described as engaged in any other function.”

So where does that leave us?

What should—or can—we do?

I’ll close with John Pilger’s words of warning and advice:

Real information, subversive information, remains the most potent power of all — and I believe that we must not fall into the trap of believing that the media speaks for the public. That wasn’t true in Stalinist Czechoslovakia and it isn’t true of the United States. In all the years I’ve been a journalist, I’ve never known public consciousness to have risen as fast as it’s rising today…yet this growing critical public awareness is all the more remarkable when you consider the sheer scale of indoctrination, the mythology of a superior way of life, and the current manufactured state of fear.

[The public] need[s] truth, and journalists ought to be agents of truth, not the courtiers of power. I believe a fifth estate is possible, the product of a people’s movement, that monitors, deconstructs, and counters the corporate media. In every university, in every media college, in every news room, teachers of journalism, journalists themselves need to ask themselves about the part they now play in the bloodshed in the name of a bogus objectivity. Such a movement within the media could herald a perestroika of a kind that we have never known. This is all possible. Silences can be broken… In the United States wonderfully free rebellious spirits populate the web... The best reporting … appears on the web … and citizen reporters.

The challenge for the rest of us is to lift this subjugated knowledge from out of the underground and take it to ordinary people. We need to make haste. Liberal Democracy is moving toward a form of corporate dictatorship. This is an historic shift, and the media must not be allowed to be its façade, but itself made into a popular, burning issue, and subjected to direct action. That great whistleblower Tom Paine warned that if the majority of the people were denied the truth and the ideas of truth, it was time to storm what he called the Bastille of words. That time is now.

Assange: Clinton Represents Goldman Sachs & Saudi Arabia, She Will Win the Election

London — Intrepid, distinguished journalist John Pilger, in conjunction with Dartmouth Films, exclusively interviewed Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to glean imperative points revealed in past and ongoing leaks of emails from the accounts of Hillary Clinton — a presidential candidate Assange says has been “eaten alive” by hubristic ambitions.

For all intents and purposes a political prisoner, ultimately of the United States, living in asylum inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, Assange spared no niceties in revelations provided by released documents:

“I actually feel quite sorry for Hillary Clinton as a person because I see someone who is eaten alive by their ambitions,  tormented literally to the point where they become sick,” as in the fainting episode during a 9/11 memorial, Assange told Pilger.

Nevertheless, “She represents a whole network of people and a network of relationships with particular states. The question is how does Hillary Clinton fit in this broader network?  She’s a centralising cog. You’ve got a lot of different gears in operation from the big banks like Goldman Sachs and major elements of Wall Street, and Intelligence and people in the State Department and the Saudis.

“She’s the centraliser that inter-connects all these different cogs.  She’s the smooth central representation of all that, and ‘all that’ is more or less what is in power now in the United States. It’s what we call the establishment or the DC consensus.”

When asked whether or not Trump will win the election, Assange responded by noting that Clinton can rig the election in her favor.

“My answer is that Trump would not be permitted to win.”

Although the United States government and any number of enraged politicians caught up in the fury of their own anti-Russian propaganda have claimed with increasingly shrill overtones Wikileaks is acting on behalf of the old Cold War foe, Assange rightly deems the accusation baseless nonsense.

Criticism, and the accusation of Russian ties, centers on Wikileaks publishing a voluminous quantity of documents concerning the Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton, and her campaign chair, John Podesta — and none on Donald Trump, and critics have said, none concerning Russia.

But that argument falls flat, considering the publisher cannot release documents on Trump it doesn’t yet have — and further, Wikileaks has, in fact, published countless documents on Russia.

“We have published about 800,000 documents of various kinds that relate to Russia,” Assange intoned. “Most of those are critical; and a great many books have come out of our publications about Russia, most of which are critical. Our [Russia] documents have gone on to be used in quite a number of court cases: refugee cases of people fleeing some kind of claimed political persecution in Russia, which they use our documents to back up.”

But, the Obama administration, with plenty of assistance from the irreparably-damaged Clinton campaign, continue fruitless attempts to link Assange and Wikileaks to some murky Russian operation. Considering the utter lack of proof linking Russian actors to the leaks, a far more feasible motivation comprises Clinton’s and Obama’s desire to deflect from the gravity of the documents’ contents — and for good reason.

Assange explained:

“There’s an early 2014 email from Hillary Clinton, not so long after she left the State Department, to her campaign manager John Podesta that states ISIL is funded by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Now this is the most significant email in the whole collection, and perhaps because Saudi and Qatari money is spread all over the Clinton Foundation. Even the U.S. government agrees that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIL, or ISIS. But the dodge has always been that, well it’s just some rogue Princes, using their cut of the oil money to do whatever they like, but actually the government disapproves.

“But that email says that no, it is the governments of Saudi and  Qatar that have been funding ISIS.”

That email certainly provided proof not only the Saudi and Qatari governments were actively funding the Islamic State, but the government of the United States apparently knew that for an extended time, while plowing ahead with billion-dollar arms and weapons sales to Saudi Arabia.

Pres. Obama has not been spared by Wikileaks, who makes a point on transparency by not filtering the information it publishes, as emails also revealed the same Big Banking mechanisms in which Clinton is an active cog also turn his administration’s gears.

“One of the more significant Podesta emails that we released was about how the Obama cabinet was formed and how half the Obama cabinet was basically nominated by a representative from CitiBank,” Assange noted. “This is quite amazing.”

Pilger then discussed the fact a list had been produced by Citibank of appointees to the future president’s cabinet it felt would be most appropriate, asking Assange, “So, Wall Street decides the cabinet of the President of the United States?”

“If you were following the Obama campaign back then, closely,” he responded, “you could see it had become very close to banking interests.”

Pilger concluded his interview with the needlessly-maligned founder of Wikileaks by asking about his current residence inside the Ecuadorian Embassy — noting points often mischaracterized or even blatantly ignored by the coporo-government media.

Assange has become a political refugee due to threats of extradition to the United States or Sweden for criminal prosecution; but there are several issues he called into focus.

“In Sweden I am not charged, I have already been previously cleared [by the Senior Stockholm Prosecutor Eva Finne]. We were not certain exactly what would happen there, but then we know that the Swedish government has refused to say that they will not extradite me to the United States we know they have extradited 100 per cent of people whom the U.S. has requested since at least 2000,” he explained. “So over the last fifteen years, every single person the U.S. has tried to extradite from Sweden has been extradited, and they refuse to provide a guarantee [that won’t happen].”

Additionally, although the United Nations has questioned the legality of Assange’s political imprisonment, calling the U.K., Sweden, and the U.S. to task for its witch hunt, the media also ignores his refugee status in favor of touting tired propaganda about Wikileaks.

“Here we have a case,” he continued, “the Swedish case, where I have never been charged with a crime, where I have already been cleared [by the Stockholm prosecutor] and found to be innocent, where the woman herself said that the police made it up, where the United Nations formally said the whole thing is illegal, where the State of Ecuador also investigated and found that I should be given asylum.”

While Clinton and Obama, politicians from each side of the duopoly, and corporate media presstitutes continue denigrating Julian Assange and Wikileaks, it would be impossible to ignore the persecution the U.S. has imposed on a person for doing the job of a journalist — exposing the inner workings of a government so rife with corruption it boggles anyone’s mind.

Julian Assange Ends The Suspense: “The Source Of Hacked Emails Is Not Russia”

November 3, 2016   |   admintam

(ZHE) With countless hours of media, and Clinton campaign, speculation and accusations that the source of hacked Wikileaks Democratic emails including the Podesta files, is none other than Russian president Vladimir Putin, either directly or indirectly, Julian Assange has decided to close the book on that particular loose end, and as RT reports, in a John Pilger Special, to be broadcast by RT on Saturday courtesy of Dartmouth Films, Assange categorically denied that the troves of US Democratic Party and Clinton work and staff emails released this year have come from the Russian government.

“The Clinton camp has been able to project a neo-McCarthyist hysteria that Russia is responsible for everything. Hillary Clinton has stated multiple times, falsely, that 17 US intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That’s false – we can say that the Russian government is not the source,” Assange told the veteran Australian broadcaster as part of a 25-minute interview.

Assange spoke with Pilger at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been for four years, and accused the US presidential candidate of being a pawn of behind-the-scenes interests, and voiced doubts about her physical fitness to take charge of the White House.

“Hillary Clinton is just one person. I actually feel quite sorry for Hillary Clinton as a person, because I see someone who is eaten alive by their ambitions, tormented literally to the point where they become sick – for example faint – as a result of going on, and going with their ambitions. But she represents a whole network of people, and a whole network of relationships with particular states.”

Over the past nine months, WikiLeaks uploaded over 30,000 emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email server, while she was Secretary of State. This was followed by nearly 20,000 emails sent to and by members of the US Democratic National Committee, exposing the party leadership’s dismissive attitude to Bernie Sanders, and his outsider primaries campaign.

Finally, last month, WikiLeaks posted over 50,000 emails connected to John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, and a close associate of the current presidential frontrunner.

A preview of the upcoming interview below. The Homeland Security Department and Office of the Director of National Intelligence posted a joint statement in October, claiming they were “confident” that the Russian government “directed” this year’s leaks. Moscow has rejected the accusation, with presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov calling the claims “nonsense,” while Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the “public bickering with Russia” before the US election is probably a “smokescreen” to draw the voters’ attention away from serious domestic issues.

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This article (Julian Assange Ends The Suspense: “The Source Of Hacked Emails Is Not Russia”) by Tyler Durden originally appeared on ZeroHedge.com and was used with permission. Tune in! Anti-Media Radio airs Monday through Friday @ 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. Help us fix our typos: edits@theantimedia.org.