Death
Maria 'Masha' Alyokhina (transcript from the Pussy Riot court appeal): "This trial is typical and speaks volumes. The government will feel embarrassment because of it for a long time to come. Each stage has embodied a travesty of justice. As it turned out, our performance - a small and somewhat absurd act - snowballed into an enormous catastrophe. This trial wears a grotesque mask. It is the face that the government wears when speaking to the people. To the prosecutors, our apologies, our "so-called" apologies. This insults me and causes me moral pain. Our apologies are sincere. So many words have been uttered and you still haven't understood. You're being devious when you don't accept them. What else do you need to hear? For me, this trial is a "so-called" trial. I am not afraid of you. I am not afraid of falsehood, of poorly disguised deception, or of the verdict of this "so-called" court. You can only deprive me of my "so-called" freedom. Nobody can take my inner freedom. It lives in the word. It will go on living because of glasnost and, when this is heard by thousands, this freedom lives in every person who is not indifferent and inside those who hear us in this country. For every person who recognises a piece of themselves on trial, as in the words of Franz Kafka and Guy de Bord, I believe that honesty and openness, the thirst for truth, will make us all a bit more free. We will see this"
Mash it up, Masha!
Bertolt Brecht: "Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it."
The Economist: "The Kremlin may want Alexei Navalny to die in prison."
Yanis Varoufakis on Julian Assange's arbitrary detention in Belmarsh Prison: "Let's be clear. The reason why he's there is, I think, best expressed by Mike Pompeo... He described WikiLeaks as a non-state hostile intelligence service. And, you know what, he's exactly right, that's what WikiLeaks is - it's a non-state hostile intelligence service, precisely that which every newspaper, every radio station, every television station ought to be but is not. This is what the BBC should be. This is what great newspapers should be - a non-state hostile intelligence service. But they are not and the reason why he's in there is because they are trying to kill him. It's really very simple."
Angela Richter: "I've been thinking about the differences between the Eastern European dissidents of the Cold War era and the Western dissidents today. It became clear to me that the Western dissidents - or let's call them 'digital dissidents' - like Assange and Snowden, but also Jeremy Hammond and Barrett Brown - are not even described as dissidents in the mainstream. Because to admit that we, in the supposedly 'free' West, have political prisoners, imprisoned for simply telling the truth, would be a threat to the very idea we have of ourselves as the 'free world'. It is striking that the story of Aaron Swartz only became known to a wider public after his tragic death."
Kim Dot Com: "Support a free press? Release Julian Assange you press freedom oppressing hypocrites. How dare you speak about press freedom while a journalist who reported US war crimes is your political prisoner."
Toussaint Louverture: "Freedom is a right given by Nature."
The language of power undermines the challenging of power structures and our fake media are more interested in the method of detection of truth than in the truth so sourced.
Julian Assange: "Noam Chomsky in 'The Common Good' wrote that 'the smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion but to allow a very lively debate within a narrow section of that spectrum'. We live in a Mediaocracy - what is politically possible is defined by the media environment. I started WikiLeaks because I understood this reality, the media frame defines the political possibility. So to bring about political change we have to enlarge the media frame. With WikiLeaks we've had significant successes in achieving this in some areas, but more needs to be done. The single greatest contributor to our expanding horizons is you. You telling your friends what's up, what you saw, what you believe, and who's full of it. Contrasting what appears in the Australian press to itself and to the world. You form part of the largest bullshit detecting machine the world has ever seen. That's why WikiLeaks has such support from people exposed to the internet. That's why we have such support from this generation because you're better informed. This is the best educated generation in the history of the world."
As we catalogue what neo-liberalism is doing to football, we shouldn't ignore the far more important impact that this system-based-on-corruption-and-Schurkenstaat is having on critical investigative journalism. As the Courage Foundation warned in July 2019: "Journalists in Britain are being threatened with the Official Secrets Act", a development they term the 'Assange precedent'. At the same time Jen Robinson of WikiLeaks voices concerns over the effective criminalisation of journalistic practices.
And the mainstream media bifurcates reality to suit hidden agendas of power.
So we have Jamal Khashoggi, Editor-in-Chief of Al-Arab News, Time Magazine Person Of The Year in 2018, whose mission was to expose injustice via a free press, being persecuted by the US government for journalism and self-exiled only to be murdered by the Saudi government in less than a day.
While Julian Assange, Editor-in-Chief of WikiLeaks, Time Magazine Person of the Year in 2010, whose mission was to expose injustice via a free press, is being persecuted by the US and UK governments for journalism, and continues to be slowly murdered by those governments for over more than a decade.
Paul Caruana Galizia linked corporate, political and state worlds together in a tweet: "Vomit-inducing photo of Lex Greensill and his lobbyist David Cameron in Mohammed bin Salman's tent, a year after the crown prince ordered Jamal Khashoggi's murder."
Simon Busuttil: "When power fuses with criminality, you have a mafia state."
Or rather a spy state that utilises mafia as part of its military strategy - Five Eyes are better than two after all, which is presumably how the British Labour Party came to be led by party-harmer Keir Starmer, a member of the Trilateral Commission - a neo-liberal body founded by bankers whose primary aim is to replace the nation state with something altogether more Davos.
Meanwhile, according to the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, the murderer of journalist Jan Kuciak, Marian Kocner, paid one judge at least £150,000 to issue favourable rulings. He even gave the judge USB sticks containing the reasoning he should use to justify them.
Self-censorship is the norm, the only variable being the degree to which you redact or secrete or archive your output. Or the division you elect to make between the area of one's book that is based on fact and the other hybrid region of the publication relating to fiction-based-on-fact.
So-called fact.
We live, as Derrida would have it "... always on the edge of an impossible confidence" while remaining a happy-go-lucky ray of fucking sunshine...
The Grugq: "It was essential that none of you recognise me... so I cut off my face."
The universal is nobler and higher in rank than the particular but, when veiled, what is to be made of this hidden holistic?
So.
Although we know nothing, we know something of the nothing, and we share something of this something of the nothing, to isolationist thresholds.
Like the immense Coletivo Papa Reto, use strategy, bespoke code and networks, direct action and, wherever feasible, immersive investigative journalism.
A senior reporter at RTV-SLO in Slovenia states: "Only a few of us left are still being critical, but we're being silenced."
As the Collectiv cover up in Romania showed, the mainstream media is complicit in state and corporate crime - the needless deaths of many young Romanians was only exposed as malicious by the investigations by sports journalists at the Sports Gazette (Gazeta Sporturilor).
Alexander Nanau: "Being a citizen of a democratic country carries a responsibility that cannot be totally passed on to rightfully elected politicians. The power belongs to the people, to every single one of the people - and with it, the responsibility."
Stuxnet changed everything for everyone everywhere.
The Nitro Zeus malware used to infect Iran's nuclear infrastructure in Operation Olympic Games had its maliciousness disclosed after malicious forces in Israeli Unit 8200x maliciously acted maliciously disobeying their paymasters in the doing.
Now.
Current international law is that "you do whatever you can get away with".
The NSA was allegedly established for code-making and code-breaking but it is located in the same building as Cyber Command and is acquainted with the roles required to develop code for offensive operations e.g. Stuxnet.
Alice Walker: "Imagine it: Years from now people will say: Oh, if only I had known what we were losing when they abused this decent and courageous man [Assange]!"
Geoffrey Robertson: "American pride had been hurt by a pesky Australian, so they targeted him by grand jury proceedings and the military took out its anger on young Chelsea Manning, treating her abominably in prison until Hillary Clinton's press spokesman, P.J. Crowley, resigned in protest. Manning had been kept for eight months in solitary confinement, naked and without blanket or pillow, awoken every few minutes for a pretended 'suicide watch'. Her prosecutors hoped she would confess to being 'groomed' by Assange, and at one point, according to her lawyer, threatened her with the death penalty if she did not. Then came the CIA pressure on Paypal, Mastercard, and Visa, to which they succumbed, to stop receiving donations for WikiLeaks or Assange. (You can still buy Nazi uniforms and Ku Klux Klan outfits with your Visa card but you can't donate to WikiLeaks.) On what basis was Assange demonised? There is no doubt that the cables were of manifest public interest, revealing many examples of human rights violations and political corruption that American diplomats (with their CIA sources) were well aware of, but which had not been made public."
Micah Lee and Glenn Greenwald have explained in the Intercept that the things Assange is accused of doing are things journalists do all the time: attempting to help a source avoid detection, taking steps to try and hide their communications and encouraging sources to provide more material.
Sarah Harrison: "When you see news that you are directly involved in, it's shocking to see how the facts of the matter are not presented correctly; it's spun, and sometimes even outright lies are used."
Kellie Tranter: "The Assange petition calling for [Australian] government action is the largest ever tabled in the Australian parliament yet he remains incarcerated in intolerable conditions... Make no mistake our government is in a position to act in the Assange case and is making a choice not to act."
Sarah Harrison: "The public is actively encouraged to commend journalists for telling them less, for keeping information from them... We clearly can't rely on states to protect us; we need to create tools that will help us to protect ourselves."
Renata Avila: "It was very interesting to see you [Sarah Harrison] locked in one place with Snowden, while Julian was trapped in the Ecuadorean Embassy at the same time. And because of modern technology there was this interaction between these two isolated places. It was impressive to see that with the right tools, people can continue to have a powerful effect even under such conditions in what are, perhaps, the two most surveilled countries in the world - the UK and Russia. Seeing the possibilities for continuing to effect change under such conditions has quite a powerful demonstration effect in my opinion."
Antifa: "We are not passive, we are not civil, and we will not apologise."
One might even be tempted to agree with Grazhdanskaya Oberona: "Kill the state within yourself. Our truth, our faith, our deed is anarchy."
Martin Luther King: "In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."
George Orwell (1984): "The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
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George Orwell (1984): "The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
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I Carried My Dancing Shoes In My Gas Mask Case
Friedrich Nietzsche in 'Beyond Good And Evil': "Ultimately 'love of one's neighbour' is always something secondary, in part conventional and arbitrarily illusory, when compared with fear of one's neighbour. Once the structure of society seems to have been in general fixed and made safe from external dangers, it is this fear of one's neighbour which again creates new perspectives of moral valuation. There are certain strong and dangerous drives, such as enterprisingness, foolhardiness, revengefulness, craft, rapacity, ambition, which hitherto had not only to be honoured from the point of view of their social utility - under different names, naturally, from those chosen here - but also mightily developed and cultivated (because they were constantly needed to protect the community as a whole against the enemies of the community as a whole); these drives are now felt to be doubly dangerous - now that the diversionary outlets for them are lacking - and are gradually branded as immoral and given over to calumny. The antithetical drives and inclinations now come into moral honour; step by step the herd instinct draws its conclusions. How much or how little that is dangerous to the community, dangerous to equality, resides in an opinion, in a condition or emotion, in a will, in a talent, that is now the moral perspective: here again fear is the mother of morality. When the highest and strongest drives, breaking passionately out, carry the individual far above and beyond the average and lowlands of the herd conscience, the self-confidence of the community goes to pieces, its faith in itself, its spine as it were, is broken: consequently it is precisely these drives which are most branded and calumniated. Lofty spiritual independence, the will to stand alone, great intelligence even, are felt to be dangerous; everything that raises the individual above the herd and makes his neighbour quail is henceforth called evil; the fair, modest, obedient, self-effacing disposition, the mean and average in desires, acquires moral names and honours. Eventually, under very peaceful conditions, there is less and less occasion or need to educate one's feelings in severity and sternness; and now every kind of severity, even severity in justice, begins to trouble the conscience; a stern and lofty nobility and self-responsibility is received almost as an offence and awakens mistrust... 'we wish that there will one day no longer be anything to fear!'"
Friedrich Nietzsche in 'Beyond Good And Evil': "Ultimately 'love of one's neighbour' is always something secondary, in part conventional and arbitrarily illusory, when compared with fear of one's neighbour. Once the structure of society seems to have been in general fixed and made safe from external dangers, it is this fear of one's neighbour which again creates new perspectives of moral valuation. There are certain strong and dangerous drives, such as enterprisingness, foolhardiness, revengefulness, craft, rapacity, ambition, which hitherto had not only to be honoured from the point of view of their social utility - under different names, naturally, from those chosen here - but also mightily developed and cultivated (because they were constantly needed to protect the community as a whole against the enemies of the community as a whole); these drives are now felt to be doubly dangerous - now that the diversionary outlets for them are lacking - and are gradually branded as immoral and given over to calumny. The antithetical drives and inclinations now come into moral honour; step by step the herd instinct draws its conclusions. How much or how little that is dangerous to the community, dangerous to equality, resides in an opinion, in a condition or emotion, in a will, in a talent, that is now the moral perspective: here again fear is the mother of morality. When the highest and strongest drives, breaking passionately out, carry the individual far above and beyond the average and lowlands of the herd conscience, the self-confidence of the community goes to pieces, its faith in itself, its spine as it were, is broken: consequently it is precisely these drives which are most branded and calumniated. Lofty spiritual independence, the will to stand alone, great intelligence even, are felt to be dangerous; everything that raises the individual above the herd and makes his neighbour quail is henceforth called evil; the fair, modest, obedient, self-effacing disposition, the mean and average in desires, acquires moral names and honours. Eventually, under very peaceful conditions, there is less and less occasion or need to educate one's feelings in severity and sternness; and now every kind of severity, even severity in justice, begins to trouble the conscience; a stern and lofty nobility and self-responsibility is received almost as an offence and awakens mistrust... 'we wish that there will one day no longer be anything to fear!'"
Mint Press News: "Assange’s 'crime' was revealing deep, embarrassing, sometimes deadly, malfeasance by numerous actors, including the U.S. government, the media, the Democratic Party Clinton machine, and Israel."
Alfred de Zayas: "The US extradition request to the UK must be denied. Assange is a journalist who has done his work as a journalist. The extradition request contravenes the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights."
Jen Robinson believes that the raids against investigative journalists "... are about intimidating journalists and media organisations because of their truth-telling. They are about more than hunting down whistleblowers."
Afshin Rattansi: "No matter how the British, US, Australian, Swedish & Ecuadorian governments torture Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, people all around the world will never be able to "un-see" what he revealed of the barbarity of NATO-nation war crimes."
Caitlin Johnstone: "Isn’t it interesting how an Ecuadorian 'asylum conditions' technicality, a UK bail technicality, and a US whistleblowing technicality all just so happened to converge in a way that just so happens to look exactly the same as imprisoning a journalist for telling the truth?"
Nathaniel St Clair: "Imagine Tony Blair dragged from his multi-million pound Georgian home in Connaught Square, London, in handcuffs. By the standard of Nuremberg, Blair’s “paramount crime” is the deaths of a million Iraqis. Assange’s crime is journalism."
Oliver Stone: "Julian Assange is a publisher for truth. He’s done great work on behalf of mankind despite his inhumane treatment. This case is crucial to the survival of our right to know and our essential freedom against USA and UK oppression -- and now tyranny!"
Rania Khalek: "One reason corporate journalists and star pundits care so little about the danger prosecuting Assange poses to journalism is that none of them engage in actual journalism. They are stenographers who know they won’t ever be targeted by the state because they mostly serve its interests."
Media Lens: "Where is the outrage at the lies we have been served up for these past seven years? Where is the contrition at having been gulled for so long? Where is the fury at the most basic press freedom – the right to publish – being trashed?"
John Pilger: "The Vichy journalists of the mainstream media have finally taken fright that the monstrous US charges against Julian Assange are now a threat to them. Yet the cowards at the New York Times, the Guardian etc continue to smear this heroic man who shamed them by refusing to join their gatekeepers' club."
DIEM25: ""The whole idea behind WikiLeaks is to take the same technologies that allow the NSA, Google etc, to turn you into a source of data, and turn it against them to make you more opaque and them more transparent. This is why he's paying a price."
Thomas Drake states that what Assange “is accused of doing is exactly what professional journalists do every day - seeking, receiving and publishing important information."
Zerohedge: "How many times must Assange be proven right before people start listening?"
Stefania Maurizi: "I want to live in a society in which you can expose war crimes and mass surveillance without spending 7 years in jail as Chelsea Manning did, without being arbitrarily detained for 11 years as Julian Assange is, without being forced to escape to Russia as Ed Snowden did."
Mark Curtis: "Assange sentence raises serious issues. It dismisses the UN determination on arbitrary detention as 'not binding on this court' and containing 'misconceptions'. If UK judiciary has been captured by the state, that is the very definition of authoritarianism."
Sarah Abdallah: "Julian Assange exposes Hillary Clinton’s role in arming head-chopping Al-Qaeda jihadists both in Libya and Syria and faces up to 170 years in prison on 17 charges. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton roams free, does media, gets book deals and receives never-ending celebrity treatment."
Yanis Varoufakis: "Dan Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, thus turning public opinion against the US government's criminal pursuit of the Vietnam War, is now telling us: Julian Assange is his modern day equivalent."
The New Yorker: "The charges against Julian Assange are an attack on the freedom of the press and on whistleblowers who hold powerful institutions - including the U.S. government - to account."
Ali Abunimah: "Assange, WikiLeaks and Chelsea Manning did incalculable service, especially for oppressed peoples, by revealing US crimes and intrigues. They’re paying price for doing the job US regime journalists refuse to do. If you value press freedom as more than a slogan you must stand with them."
Hanna Jonasson: "Is [editor] Kath Viner comfortable that Guardian fake news about Assange is used to justify extradition? By failing to retract, Viner digs herself deeper into a bottomless hole."
The ACLU: "For the first time in the history of our country, the government has brought criminal charges under the Espionage Act against a publisher for the publication of truthful information. This is a direct assault on the First Amendment."
Renata Avila: "So the plan was always to first destroy Julian Assange's name, and turn his support base, progressives, against him, to then smoothly prosecute him for the crime of publishing the truth. Do it as slowly as possible, so people will forget the importance of WikiLeaks revelations."
Mark Daly: "You may not like Assange, but journalism and the right to report in the public interest are in the cross hairs here. Whistleblowers already risk much - to lob in Espionage Act or similar? It's an alarming lurch against freedom of expression which not only journalists should fear."
Glenn Greenwald: "There is so much driving the hatred many journalists harbor for Assange. But a huge part of it is professional jealousy: WikiLeaks broke more massive stories than most of these reporters will ever get close to in their lives, all without joining their insular journalism club."
James Goodale (the Pentagon Papers lawyer) says Julian Assange is being indicted "for publishing and gathering the news." He calls the charges "absolutely novel," adding that if the Justice Department finds Assange guilty, they will have "criminalised the news gathering process."
The Tribune: "Julian Assange remains incarcerated in a high-security prison for revealing the truth about wartime atrocities, despite never being convicted of a crime - his case makes a mockery of claims about press freedom."
John Pilger: "Matt Kennard's expose of the Guardian's collusion with Britain's Deep State is real journalism. A veneer of often facile gender promotion is not nearly enough to suppress the truth of a determined assault on democracy from within."
Yanis Varoufakis: "An atrocity against your right to know is unfolding. Julian Assange is about to be thrown into the US supermax gulag. Years of fake news is now whittled down to a simple act of revenge against the person who embarrassed our states by exposing to us crimes committed in our name."
Centre for Investigative Journalism: "WikiLeaks is a publisher. Charges now brought in connection with its material, or any attempt to extradite Assange to the United States for prosecution under the deeply flawed cudgel of the Espionage Act 1917, is an attack on all of us."
Julian Assange: ""I do not wish to surrender myself for extradition for doing journalism that has won many awards and protected many people."
WikiLeaks: "A democracy that imprisons publishers is not a democracy."
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The Navajo, Edelweiss Pirates And Roving Dudes
The Guardian's Direct Collusion With Media Censorship By Secret Services - Thomas Scripps:
Minutes of Ministry of Defence (MoD) meetings have confirmed the role of Britain’s Guardian newspaper as a mouthpiece for the intelligence agencies.
Last week, independent journalist Matt Kennard revealed that the paper’s deputy editor, Paul Johnson, was personally thanked by the Defence and Security Media Advisory Notice (or D-Notice) committee for integrating the Guardian into the operations of the security services.
Minutes of a meeting in 2018 read: “The Chairman thanked Paul Johnson for his service to the Committee. Paul had joined the Committee in the wake of the Snowden affair and had been instrumental in re-establishing links with the Guardian.”
D-Notices are used by the British state to veto the publication of news damaging to its interests. The slavish collusion of the mainstream media ensures that such notices function as gag orders.
Johnson joined the committee in 2014 and evidently excelled in his performance. A separate set of minutes from the first meeting attended by Johnson records the Guardian’s close collaboration with military officials.
Under a section detailing “advice” given by the intelligence agencies to the media, the document reads “most of the occurrences and requests for advice were related to further publications by The Guardian of extracts from the Snowden documents. The Secretary reported that the engagement of DPBAC [Defence Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee] Secretariat with The Guardian had continued to strengthen during the last six months, with regular dialogues between the Secretary and Deputy Secretaries and Guardian journalists.”
The secretary and deputy secretaries were Air Vice-Marshal Andrew Vallance CB OBE, Air Commodore David Adams and Brigadier Geoffrey Dodds OBE. The chairman was Peter Watkins CBE, the MoD’s director general of Strategy, Security and Policy Operations.
Under the direction of these military intelligence handlers, the Guardian played a role in bringing other newspapers internationally to heel. The minutes note, “because of an agreement between the Guardian and allied publications overseas to coordinate their respective disclosures of Snowden material, advice given to the Guardian has been passed on to the New York Times and others, helping guide the disclosures of these outlets.”
In September 2014, the Guardian allowed the former head of GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) Sir David Omand to publish an article titled, “Edward Snowden’s leaks are misguided—they risk exposing us to cyber-attacks.”
He declared, “Journalists are not best placed to identify security risks; we have to trust those who oversee the intelligence-gathering.”
In 2016, Paul Johnson used an unprecedented interview with a serving head of MI5, Andrew Parker, to propagandize for the antidemocratic, warmongering interests of British imperialism.
These facts are damning proof of the Guardian’s total integration into the propaganda wing of the MoD following its involvement in the WikiLeaks and Snowden files releases. Indeed, the work of WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange has served to expose and confirm the deep ties of the entire mainstream media to the military-intelligence complex.
The Guardian has been viewed historically as the voice of British liberal dissent, critical of the worst excesses of British capitalism at home and abroad. But it has always acted as a political policeman—filtering the news “responsibly” and channelling the resulting anger into impotent moral appeals to the state and other authorities. Its dealings with Assange and Snowden transformed political allegiance into direct subservience. Its liberal, critical pretensions unravelled in a matter of a few months.
When Assange looked to the Guardian and other papers internationally such as the New York Times to publish the Afghan and Iraq war logs and secret US diplomatic cables in 2010, the editors’ main concern was damage control. Within a month of an initial publication of documents, the Guardian had broken off relations with Assange—publishing an infamous December 17 editorial “WikiLeaks: the man and the idea.” It stated that the Guardian had only agreed to publish “a small number of cables” to control the political fall-out from the details of murder, torture, espionage and corruption they revealed and give it the opportunity of “editing, contextualising, explanation and redaction.”
The main purpose of the editorial was to support Assange’s extradition to Sweden on trumped-up allegations of sexual misconduct relating to a trip to that country a few months earlier.
In an op-ed piece published last month by former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, he assumes to take the moral high ground by claiming that WikiLeaks issued leaks unredacted, and wanted to continue this practise, in contrast with his “responsible” journalism. An editorial published immediately prior to Rusbridger’s article, again supporting Assange’s extradition to Sweden to face “charges” that don’t exist, stated, “The Guardian disapproved of the mass publication of unredacted documents ... and broke with Mr. Assange over the issue.”
This is a self-serving lie. WikiLeaks has pointed out that the editorial “conveniently leaves out” that it was the Guardian —through a book authored by David Leigh and Luke Harding—that disclosed the password to the digital file Assange had given them in confidence. The book was a hatchet job on WikiLeaks. The rights to it were sold, becoming the basis of a slanderous Hollywood movie.
When NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked files detailing blanket state surveillance of the world’s population in 2013, the Guardian set out to play the same “responsible” role. Asked afterwards if the paper had held back from publishing anything about GCHQ and UK security services because of “worries about national security,” the ever-pliant Mr. Rusbridger replied, “Yes, we’ve held back a great deal, we’ve published a small amount of what we have read.”
This time, however, the Guardian was told by the security services that even rigorously filtering the Snowden’s revelations was not good enough. It must stop publishing immediately.
The country’s top civil servant, Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood, called the Guardian’s offices to pass on the demands of then Prime Minister David Cameron that the Snowden material either be returned to the government or destroyed. Editors were threatened with legal action if they did not comply.
Rusbridger later explained, “The tone was steely, if cordial, but there was an implicit threat that others within government and Whitehall favoured a far more draconian approach.” This is a masterpiece of understatement. Emails obtained by the Associated Press in 2014 showed that this was an operation conducted in intimate collusion between the government, the British security services and the US National Security Agency, including then Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
In the end, two GCHQ security officials directly oversaw the Guardian’s destruction of its own material. Three Guardian staff members, including Paul Johnson himself, destroyed the hard drives in the Guardian’s possession with angle grinders and other equipment provided by GCHQ officials.
The Guardian had been put in a position it never wanted. Its liberal reputation, and previous disclosures, had made it the newspaper of choice for WikiLeaks’ and Snowden’s revelations. But the scale of what had been uncovered threatened the fundamental interests of British and US imperialism. It therefore rolled over when the government told it to cease and desist, before taking its place alongside the rest of the right-wing media on the secret committee responsible for press censorship and propaganda dissemination.
One of Assange’s persecutors-in-chief, Luke Harding, enjoys the most intimate relations with the security services. His notorious November 2018 fabrication, claiming Assange held meetings with US President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort, was published in the Guardian just two weeks after Johnson was thanked for “re-establishing links” with the MoD. The story was widely cited and formed a keystone of the efforts, spearheaded by the Democrats in the US, to present WikiLeaks and “Russian interference” as the causes of Trump’s 2016 election victory.
Harding played a central role in silencing questions over the UK government’s bogus account of the Skripal affair in mid-2018. These events were the subject of at least one D-notice, issued while Paul Johnson was on the responsible committee.
An unintended but valuable consequence of the WikiLeaks exposures has been to explode the fraud of the Guardian’s claim to any critical independence from the state. The crimes of the major imperialist powers against the world’s population made available by WikiLeaks were so great that they could not be neutralised, even by the Guardian’s professional gatekeepers of the “truth.” Not a word published in this imperialist propaganda sheet can ever be taken at face value.
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Alexa, Fake My Death
Fyodor Dostoevsky in 'Notes From The Underground': "Power, power was what I wanted then, sport was what I wanted, I wanted to wring out your tears, your humiliation, your hysteria - that was what I wanted then."
Gore Vidal in 'History Of The National Security State': "I think everybody should take a sober look at the world about us, remember that practically everything that you're told about other countries is untrue; what we're told about ourselves and our great strength and how much loved we are - forget it. Our strength is there but it's the kind of strength that blows off your hand while you hold up the grenade; it's a suicidal strength as well as a murderous one. So here we are, and let us hope it is not the end of the road, even though there's every sign that it is not the yellow brick road up ahead."
Caitlin Johnstone: "A nation that cannot exist without nonstop warfare is not a real nation, it's an ongoing military operation that happens to have suburbs."
Katrin Axelsson and Lisa Longstaff (of 'Women Against Rape'): "When Julian Assange was first arrested, we were struck by the unusual zeal with which he was being pursued for rape allegations. It seems even clearer now that the allegations against him are a smokescreen behind which a number of governments are trying to clamp down on WikiLeaks for having audaciously revealed to the public their secret planning of wars and occupations with their attendant rape, murder and destruction."
Noam Chomsky: "The arrest of Assange is scandalous in several respects... These are efforts to silence a journalist who was producing materials that people in power didn't want the rascal multitude to know about. WikiLeaks was producing things that people ought to know about the people in power. But they don't like that, so therefore they have to silence it. This is the kind of scandal that unfortunately takes place over and over."
Slavoj Zizek: "So let's move on to the big question: Why now? I think one name explains it all: Cambridge Analytica - a name that stands for all Assange is about, for what he fights against: the links between the great private corporations and government agencies. Remember how big an obsession was the Russian meddling in US elections? Now we know it was not the Russian hackers (with Assange) who nudged the people toward Trump, but our own data-processing agencies who joined up with political forces... The biggest achievement of the new cognitive-military complex is that direct and obvious oppression is no longer necessary: individuals are much better controlled and 'nudged' in the desired direction when they continue to experience themselves as free and autonomous agents of their own life... Let a hundred WikiLeaks blossom. The panic and fury with which those in power - those who control our digital commons - reacted to Assange, is a proof that such activity hits a nerve. There will be many blows below the belt in this fight... but we should get used to it and learn to strike back with interest, ruthlessly playing one side against the other in order to bring them all down."
Edward Snowden: "Daniel Hale was charged under the Espionage Act for the 'crime' of exposing the classified fact that nearly 90% of those the government kills via drone are innocents and bystanders. 90%. Hale should be pardoned. Reality Winner should be pardoned. End the war on whistleblowers."
Al Wei Wei: ""He [Assange] has the right to stay, as a dissident person, to protect freedom of speech. I think it's a very sad day for Europe, for the West, to arrest someone like Assange."
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: "The journalist should be like a mosquito, which is there to irritate those in power, buzzing incessantly."
Howard Zinn: "“Historically, the most terrible things—war, genocide, and slavery—have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.”
Ed Snowden: "It is now undeniable that spies worldwide exploit the credulity of journalists to conceal their violation of human rights. This century will teach a harsh lesson: While terrorism is no existential threat to democracy, our political deference to intelligence agencies might be."
WikiLeaks: "When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are ruled by criminals."
Srecko Horvat: "The current system is more violent than any revolution."
Toussaint Louverture: "It is best I suffer but keep doing good things."
Renata Avila: "We live in a dangerous time in which everyone opposed to great political and financial powers might soon become a target, just like Assange... A Western publisher, a journalist, is gagged in Europe - a symbol of the collapse of the West. Silencing and torturing a journalist - in plain sight - is to cross a limit, and yet no-one rioted."
Even the olives are bleeding as malicious non-democratic forces erode the lives of others.
Geoffroy de Lagasnerie: "WikiLeaks, the utopia we need... The principles upon which WikiLeaks is based are the very same principles that are needed today to create a new political culture: principles of transparency, anti-authoritarianism, internationalism, non-submission, and unconditionality... By defending Assange, we defend and protect the future of democracy. It could be that Assange embodies for the twenty-first century a character as important as Nelson Mandela was in the twentieth century."
Pamela Anderson
Skepticism is brewing -
The public know
when they are being misled -
Journalists tend to underestimate people.
There is wisdom on the streets. People can see through
The attempted smears.
Don’t be polite -
Gloves off !
Julian does not belong in prison.
The public know
when they are being misled -
Journalists tend to underestimate people.
There is wisdom on the streets. People can see through
The attempted smears.
Don’t be polite -
Gloves off !
Julian does not belong in prison.
The tortured guest of a gracious queen...
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Crime
Isabelle Allende: "What I fear most is power with impunity. I fear abuse of power, the power to abuse"
Football Index was a criminal construct that might be utilised as a example to demonstrate the corruptions underpinning the English game.
The Index was established as a pseudo-Ponzi construct working with talking heads (John Motson, Guillem Balague, Ralph Honigstein) and rogue media (the Guardian) to create player value markets that were to be gamed by insiders for proprietary profit.
Football Index didn't hold clients' monies in any protected account meaning that, when the Ponzi went belly up, there was nothing for investors to seek. It was all safely banked offshore.
The company issued new shares in footballers to attract mug bettors even when it was known internally that the platform was, in effect, liquidated.
For example, the exchange issued 2,400 new shares in Jadon Sancho to add to the 921,509 already in circulation. When the owners went into hiding, the value of Sancho plummeted to £0.72 from £7.52, having traded as high as £15 just months earlier.
Firstly customers had to put up with manipulated prices, no dividends and enlarged spreads but this soon evolved into an inability to deposit or withdraw funds as the planned for administration came to pass.
Football Index is the biggest ever failure of any British betting company and leads to questions about the role of government and the Gambling Commission who allegedly regulated this pyramid structure. It was essentially operating a fraction reserve banking system where only a small percentage of users' money was available to withdraw at any given time.
Some bettors had £250,000 invested in this newspaper-backed scam. It is estimated that £90 million was pocketed by insiders. Football Index were minting shares right up to the collapse of the platform in an odious display of criminalised marginal gains.
At the same time, an equivalent platform called Footstock also went into administration after the German techie owners ran off with the money. Chris Kamara, the television presenter, had been the public face of this entity, persuading punters to part with their cash with no hope of ever getting it back. Kamara is a serial scumbag.
Kamara: "Ever since gaining my lucky break being spotted playing for the Royal Navy, I've always embraced life's opportunities and working with Footstock is another exciting prospect. The game (!) allows football followers to utilise their knowledge in a fun and responsible way."
There's no fun like bankruptcy Kamara.
Football Is Fixed raised concerns about Football Index from its launch in 2015. Initially we expressed concern that it was a Ponzi scheme dependent on revenue from new customers to pay dividends owed to others further up the pyramid but then we realised that it was worse than a Ponzi - it was an orchestrated criminal enterprise featuring a number of the miscreants who we focus on in these books.
The entity should have been regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) not a captured body like the Gambling Commission. Even when the Gambling Commission eventually spluttered into action (way after the final whistle should have been blown), it elected to suspend the licence of BetIndex (the parent company) rather than revoking it.
A City of London trader states: "Many people in the City were completely astonished that Football Index was able to open and run a fully-blown market-making platform without any oversight from the FCA."
Having Ponzi characteristics, there was no downside protection and there was not sufficient liquidity and BetIndex removed the ability to instantly sell one's positions at the start of the covid-19 pandemic.
There is also a slither of difference between a Ponzi scheme - which serves out its abuses to a natural dynamic over a window of time (think capitalism, for example) and a mafia criminal enterprise that aims to shorten the time frame to optimise the shafting process so that the stolen money may be reinvested as soon as possible.
Due to the inputs of Sky Sports, BT Sport and the Guardian to the fake inputs of Football Index, we are dealing here with a criminal enterprise.
Jean-Francois Lyotard: "In every case, nature produces the least complex local morphology compatible with the initial local circumstances."
The Ponzi operates naturally. The criminal enterprise is orchestrated.
A spokesperson for the support group for those abused by Football Index states: "The things I've heard over the last few weeks beggar belief, and there will be thousands more out there who are suffering in silence."
The entire bookmaking sector requires a robust regulator as much as anything just to allow the basic reality of winning accounts - if bookies close winners down (and 99.9% of them do) then what is betting actually about? Without change more companies will abuse punters in the future safe in the knowledge that they can scuttle off to crown territories with their stolen largesse leaving the inept Gambling Commission to take the flak.
In the aftermath of the collapse of Football Index, more than 40 MPs and peers have demanded a public inquiry to investigate the roles of the Gambling Commission and the Department of Culture Media and Sport (DCMS). The signatories are demanding to know why the Gambling Commission ignored numerous warnings about Football Index and "by negligence or design" allowed Football Index to overstate its financial position, reassuring its users to attract more investment and new money into the platform. Our political representatives conclude that the "scandal has brought into sharp focus regulation that is not fit for purpose and mechanisms for consumer redress that are nonexistent."
Of course, the British football media is rancid to the core merely offering staged entertainment extravaganzas for illicit offshore tax-evaded wealth creation - the smiling faces on your television screens are the assassins of your sport. Football has become show business welded onto a betting market.
The Football Index trading model is also increasingly present in financial markets.
One such example is Cadre, an alternative asset entity that allows people to trade in buildings like a digital stock market. Cadre finds investment opportunities with a life of around five to seven years and lists it on its platform. Investors can buy pieces of it and every quarter rental income is paid out. By offering low fees at a quarter of the rates charged by traditional alternative-asset manager, Cadre attracts the befuddled to its platform.
Or take Tether, a so-called stablecoin whose issuer has long claimed that Tethers are backed one-to-one by dollars.
The Economist: "Doubts have long swirled around Tether's claim to be a sort of digital dollar. Critics say the one-to-one backing looks flaky."
There are also suspicions that Tether is being used to manipulate markets and worries exist over the degree of control that Tether's owners have over supply.
New York's attorney-general Letitia James branded the firm fraudulent in February 2021.
The Economist: "Ms James's charge-sheet is damning. Tether, she says, lied about its dollar backing. Its 'self-proclaimed verification' was allegedly a sham... Moreover, Bitfinex [a crypto-currency exchange owned largely by Tether] was not upfront about hundreds of millions of dollars that went missing through a third-party payments processor reportedly based in Panama."
JP Morgan Chase: "Were any issues to arise that could affect the willingness or ability of both domestic and foreign investors to use Tether, the most likely result would be a severe liquidity shock to the broader crypto-currency market."
Tether is only different to Football Index in its business architecture in that it is tied into the wider crypto-currency universe whereas Football Index was pretty much a sole provider of shares in footballers. This, of course, allowed extended possibilities for price manipulation and abuse.
The government was keen for any inquiry into Football Index to be overseen by the DCMS who hold some responsibility for the scam - the defendant should always be the blinkered self-prosecutor in the eyes of the PM Psycho Monster.
The Guardian attempted to display mock apoplexy over the Football Index shenanigans - shenanigans that their 'journalists' helped to fuel.
The Guardian simply offers Vichy journalism - a paper where the unscrupulous meet the unwise.
Over a two month period between August 3rd 2020 and October 6th 2020, the Guardian newspaper provided the following headlines relating to Jadon Sancho.
In this window, the value of Sancho on the Football Index platform went through the roof as desperate punters sought to get a piece of the action before the player joined one of the world's biggest clubs.
Sancho was hot.
Except that he was not.
In the first 11 Bundesliga matches that he played for Borussia Dortmund in season 2020/21, Sancho failed to score a single goal, indeed his first Bundesliga goal of the season came after the New Year. He failed to score in 6 England internationals but did manage a couple of goals against lesser teams in the Champions League group stages.
All in all, two goals in 22 games - not exactly 250 million euro territory then.
Ed Aarons & Fabrizio Romano (August 3rd 2020): "Manchester United in advanced talks with Dortmund over £90m Sancho"
Ed Aarons, Fabrizio Romano & Jamie Jackson (August 4th 2020): "Manchester United close to £90 million deal with Dortmund after Sancho agrees terms"
Jamie Jackson (August 10th 2020): "Borussia Dortmund insist Jadon Sancho will not leave this summer"
Reuters (August 13th 2020): "Jadon Sancho happy to help 'special young players' develop at Dortmund"
Ed Aarons & Fabrizio Romano (September 9th 2020): "Manchester United make progress in pursuit of Dortmund's Jadon Sancho"
Jamie Jackson (September 9th 2020): "Jadon Sancho, a street player with the potential to be England's Neymar"
Jonathan Liew (September 19th 2020): "Manchester United need time more than money or Jadon Sancho"
Fabrizio Romano (September 29th 2020): "Dortmund tell Manchester United 90 million euros is nowhere near enough for Jadon Sancho"
Jamie Jackson (October 6th 2020): "Manchester United abandoned Jadon Sancho bid as it would cost 250 million euros"
The Guardian output should have been investigated as part of the inquiry into Football Index as the newspaper was complicit in fleecing Football Index punters via fake news.
After the price of Sancho on the Football Index platform was inflated by this pseudo-journalism, the value of Sancho had declined 95% at the time of administration.
Still, money for the boys on the newsdesk.
On February 8th 2021, one of the worst examples of fake-journalist at the Guardian, the lop-sided Barry Glendenning wrote: "Gambling affordability checks by control freaks would be a threat to civil liberties" - hardly surprising that Guardian 'journalists' who receive and bet on inside information and who manipulate markets are complaining about some external monitoring of the illicit revenues they develop through their contacts with those corrupting our sports.
No era football, era fraude.
Otro futbol es posibil.
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Mourid Barghouti
After the death of the horseman
The homeward-bound horse
Says everything
Without saying anything
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© 2024 Football is Fixed
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