underscores existence of Deep State conspiracy
Though the Leftwing analysis below does not use the term Deep State, these socialists have always insisted on the existence of such an entity, if by other names. Please find Invisible Man's note on conservatives Rand and Ron Paul appended to the bottom of this post.
By OSCAR GRENFELL
World Socialist Web Site
Oct. 18, 2019
In a press briefing at the United Nations headquarters in New York on October 15, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer restated his assessment that WikiLeaks’ publisher Julian Assange has been subjected to an unprecedented campaign of persecution that amounts to “torture.”
The UN finding, first issued in May, and updated by Melzer at the briefing, should have provoked banner headlines in the major newspapers in the U.S., Britain and internationally.
Melzer’s warnings carry the weight and authority of a UN official and an internationally-respected legal expert. They concern Assange, the world’s most famous persecuted journalist, who has done more than any publisher to expose the brutal realities of imperialist war, diplomatic intrigue and pervasive CIA surveillance.
As it was, footage aired by the Russian-funded RT outlet showed a grand total of four people in the audience, surrounded by rows of empty chairs. To date, the RT article, and an accompanying video, appears to be the only report on the briefing by any media outlet in the world.
If Melzer had been condemning the persecution of journalists in Iran, Russia, China, or another country in the crosshairs of U.S. imperialism, he would have been surrounded by dozens of reporters from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and other conduits for the intelligence agencies. They doubtless would have published stories, warning in sombre tones of an assault on the media and insisting on the necessity to defend press freedom.
Because Assange is being targeted by the U.S. government and its allies, including Britain and Australia, for his role in revealing American war crimes, the establishment media simply did not show up.
The press boycott is all the more striking given that even corporate publications have acknowledged that if Assange is extradited from Britain to the U.S., it will establish a precedent for journalists anywhere in the world to be hauled before U.S. courts for the “crime” of publishing true and newsworthy information that the American government sought to conceal.
The New York Times and the Washington Post, moreover, have noted that the 17 Espionage Act charges that have been levelled against Assange by the Trump administration pose a direct threat to the U.S. Constitution’s press freedom protections, and could be used against other publications in the future—including their own.
The silence on Melzer’s remarks can therefore only be understood as a political decision, aimed at suppressing any public discussion on Assange’s persecution, in the lead-up to court hearings next February that will rule on his extradition from Britain to the U.S.
Melzer explained that when he visited Assange in May he was accompanied by two medical experts. “We came to the conclusion that he had been exposed to psychological torture for a prolonged period of time,” the UN rapporteur stated. “That's a medical assessment.”
The UN finding, first issued in May, and updated by Melzer at the briefing, should have provoked banner headlines in the major newspapers in the U.S., Britain and internationally.
Melzer’s warnings carry the weight and authority of a UN official and an internationally-respected legal expert. They concern Assange, the world’s most famous persecuted journalist, who has done more than any publisher to expose the brutal realities of imperialist war, diplomatic intrigue and pervasive CIA surveillance.
As it was, footage aired by the Russian-funded RT outlet showed a grand total of four people in the audience, surrounded by rows of empty chairs. To date, the RT article, and an accompanying video, appears to be the only report on the briefing by any media outlet in the world.
If Melzer had been condemning the persecution of journalists in Iran, Russia, China, or another country in the crosshairs of U.S. imperialism, he would have been surrounded by dozens of reporters from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and other conduits for the intelligence agencies. They doubtless would have published stories, warning in sombre tones of an assault on the media and insisting on the necessity to defend press freedom.
Because Assange is being targeted by the U.S. government and its allies, including Britain and Australia, for his role in revealing American war crimes, the establishment media simply did not show up.
The press boycott is all the more striking given that even corporate publications have acknowledged that if Assange is extradited from Britain to the U.S., it will establish a precedent for journalists anywhere in the world to be hauled before U.S. courts for the “crime” of publishing true and newsworthy information that the American government sought to conceal.
The New York Times and the Washington Post, moreover, have noted that the 17 Espionage Act charges that have been levelled against Assange by the Trump administration pose a direct threat to the U.S. Constitution’s press freedom protections, and could be used against other publications in the future—including their own.
The silence on Melzer’s remarks can therefore only be understood as a political decision, aimed at suppressing any public discussion on Assange’s persecution, in the lead-up to court hearings next February that will rule on his extradition from Britain to the U.S.
Melzer explained that when he visited Assange in May he was accompanied by two medical experts. “We came to the conclusion that he had been exposed to psychological torture for a prolonged period of time,” the UN rapporteur stated. “That's a medical assessment.”
Nils Melzer
Speaking of his recommendations, addressed to the U.S., British, Swedish and Australian governments, Melzer said: “We asked for involved states to investigate this case and to alleviate the pressure that is being placed on him and especially to respect his due process rights, which in my view have been systematically violated in all these jurisdictions.”
Melzer stated: “Unfortunately none of those states agreed to conduct an investigation, although that is their obligation under the convention on torture.”
In official letters to those governments in May and June, Melzer had meticulously documented the way in which each of them had trampled upon Assange’s democratic and legal rights.
The UN official reviewed the way in which bogus allegations of sexual misconduct were seized upon by the Swedish authorities to blacken Assange’s name and to create a pretext for his prolonged detention in Britain.
In his letter to the Swedish government, Melzer wrote: “For almost nine years, the Swedish authorities have consistently maintained, revived and fueled the ‘rape’-suspect narrative against Mr. Assange, despite the legal requirement of anonymity, despite the mandatory presumption of innocence, despite the objectively unrealistic prospect of a conviction, and despite contradicting evidence suggesting that, in reality, the complainants never intended to report a sexual offence…”
The rapporteur has condemned the British state for pursuing Assange relentlessly on the fraudulent pretext of a minor bail offense. Melzer has noted that since Assange’s illegal arrest by British police on April 11, the UK judiciary has denied his right to due process, as it prepares to hand the WikiLeaks’ founder over to his persecutors in the U.S.
Most recently, British judges have decreed that Assange will remain behind bars indefinitely, despite his custodial sentence on the bail offenses having expired on September 22. In other words, he is explicitly being held as a political prisoner at the behest of the Trump administration.
The ruling followed a warning from Assange’s father John Shipton that he fears his son may die in prison. Despite the deterioration of his medical condition, Assange has been held in conditions of virtual solitary confinement in the maximum-security Belmarsh Prison, without access to computers and legal documents necessary for preparing his defence.
Melzer has also warned that Assange has no prospect of a fair trial in the United States, under conditions in which senior U.S. politicians have called for his assassination for exposing American war crimes and global diplomatic conspiracies. He has denounced the Australian government for failing to defend Assange, despite the fact that he is an Australian journalist and citizen.
All of the governments involved responded to Melzer with evasive letters, blithely dismissing his charges and asserting that their pursuit of the Assange was entirely lawful. The response underscores the extent to which the protracted persecution of the WikiLeaks’ founder has involved the trampling on international norms and institutions.
The media censorship of Melzer’s press briefing further demonstrates that the corporate publications are complicit partners in the attacks against Assange. For years, they have trumpeted every slander against him that has been concocted by the U.S. government, its allies and the intelligence agencies.
In his report last May, Melzer noted that the corporate media bears its own share of responsibility for the torture inflicted on Assange, having enthusiastically participated in what the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture aptly described as “public mobbing.”
—————————————————————————————————————
The Invisible Man comments:
The libertarian Rand Paul, like his father Ron Paul, have affirmed their willingness to work with the Left on some issues, such as the Assange case, on the ending of undeclared "endless war" and on the perils of crony capitalism (which is at the heart of the Deep State). Of course, the Pauls and other libertarians are in complete disagreement with the Left on the solutions to most economic and social issues.
On March 20, 2018, Sen. Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican, said , "Absolutely there is a Deep State because the deep state is that the intelligence communities do not have oversight." He continued, "There is no skeptic" among the four Republican and four Democratic senators "who are supposedly" providing oversight, so that the intelligence communities, "with their enormous power ... have become a Deep State." On Dec. 4, 2018, Paul, in commenting on the CIA director briefing only those eight senators rather than the entire Senate, added, "The Deep State wants to keep everyone in the dark. This is just ridiculous!" On Dec. 10, 2018, he said "The very definition of a 'Deep State’ is when the very people, congressional leaders – people who are elected by the people – are not allowed to hear the intelligence."
We see the media-intelligence nexus in the Assange case. Assange's publication of reputed CIA documents was used by then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo as a reason to tag Assange as a Russian agent (the same smear used against President Trump by intelligence system dupes), followed by a U.S. government drive to exact revenge by classing legal acts as illegal acts under a century-old U.S. secrets law that has never been used against journalists, except in the case of two men who passed defense information to the Israeli government -- though those charges were eventually dropped because of concerns about the impact on the rights of free press.
From the beginning, that case against the lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee was highly unusual. The two, Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, were charged under the World War I-era Espionage Act, accused of improperly providing to colleagues, journalists and Israeli diplomats sensitive information they had acquired by speaking with American policy makers.
Though the FBI was irked at the Justice Department's decision in 2009 to drop those charges, that decision came as no surprise in light as a series of adverse judicial decisions made successful prosecution increasingly dubious, according to the New York Times.
Still, it has been evident that a number of federal judges are in league with "the Resistance," and have been issuing activist, politically tainted rulings. In fact, the federal judiciary has for long been entangled with the Deep State. So we cannot be overly confident that the Espionage Act won't now be upheld as a useful tool against those deemed "enemies of the state."
A problem with the targeting of Assange, is that it gives segments of the Left and Right ammunition to charge that those associated somehow with foreign political influence are in better shape if the country in question is Israel, as opposed to Russia (though Assange has never been convincingly shown to have been in league with the Kremlin).
A large swathe of media has been derelict in its duty to defend the First Amendment for everyone. Some sectors are doubtless working directly with intelligence agencies, while others are in an alliance with these agencies based on a foolish desire of the limousine liberal media brass hats to exact revenge on Assange for possibly spoiling Hillary Clinton's chance to win by his publication of caches of emails of Democratic Party officials. The idea was that it was OK to seek his scalp because of his being a witting tool of the Kremlin. Of course, many of these media elite don't seem to understand that the working press, like cops (or even CIA agents) get important information from those with axes to grind. That's how it works. Go back to J school, guys.
Corbett: ABC's fake video news is tip of iceberg
https://d.tube/#!/v/corbettreport/2xvm22ggf4z
Alternative media commentator James Corbett said the establishment media system has no credibility to lose and mocked commentator Greta Van Susteren for lamenting ABC's lapse as coming from a hypocritical "liar."
Yahoo News barely pretends to be objective
I use Yahoo for one of my email accounts (Krypto783@yahoo.com) and so see Yahoo's home page frequently. Aside from playing up a lot of "women's interest" news, Yahoo can be relied upon to lead with anything that makes it look as though Trump is losing politically and the get-Trump crowd is prevailing.
We must attribute this attitude to the parent company, Verizon Media (which also owns the liberal HuffPost).
Example of slanted coverage
Verizon's CEO is Hans Vestberg, a Swedish businessman. Previously, Vestberg served as chief technical officer of Verizon. Before that he was CEO of the Swedish telecom Ericsson and was active in Swedish sports administration.
I searched Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo trying to find the name of Yahoo's top managers. But all that was available was the fact that Marissa Mayer was bounced from the CEO spot in 2017. Are the top bananas in hiding? What are they? La Cosa Nostra?
Some of the other digital brands under Verizon Media are AOL, Autoblog, Built By Girls, Engadget, Flurry, HuffPost, Kanvas, MAKERS Women, Rivals.com, RYOT, TechCrunch, Verizon Digital Media Services.
From CNN (another Trump-is-always-wrong-no-matter-what basher), we learn that the Top 10 Owners of Verizon Communications Inc. are
The Vanguard Group Inc., stake 7.70%
BlackRock Fund Advisors 4.88%
SSgA Funds Management, Inc. 3.93%
Wellington Management Co. LLP 2.90%
Geode Capital Management LLC1. 43%
Capital Research & Management Co. 1.43%
Northern Trust Investments, Inc. 1.30%
Norges Bank Investment Management 1.01%
Fidelity Management & Research Co. 0.98%
Capital Research & Management Co. 0.94%
Top 10 Mutual Funds Holding Verizon Communications Inc.:
Vanguard, stake 2.79%;
Vanguard 500 Index Fund 1.99%
SPDR S&P 500 ETF 1.10%
Vanguard Wellington Fund 1.08%
Government Pension Fund - Global 1.01%
Vanguard Institutional Index Fund 0.92%
Washington Mutual Investors Fund 0.92%
Fidelity 500 Index Fund 0.83%
iShares Core S&P 500 ETF 0.75%
American Funds Income Fund of America 0.72%
A tally of all the "Vanguard" entities shows a total stake of 14.48% in Verizon. If the Wellington fund is included, the total rises to 17.38%. In either case, it appears that Vanguard holds a controlling interest in Verizon, and hence Yahoo.
Mortimer J. Buckley is chairman and chief executive officer of Vanguard. Buckley joined Vanguard in 1991 and has held a number of senior leadership positions, including chief information officer. He has served as chairman of the board of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. He holds an A.B. in economics from Harvard College and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.
Melzer stated: “Unfortunately none of those states agreed to conduct an investigation, although that is their obligation under the convention on torture.”
In official letters to those governments in May and June, Melzer had meticulously documented the way in which each of them had trampled upon Assange’s democratic and legal rights.
The UN official reviewed the way in which bogus allegations of sexual misconduct were seized upon by the Swedish authorities to blacken Assange’s name and to create a pretext for his prolonged detention in Britain.
In his letter to the Swedish government, Melzer wrote: “For almost nine years, the Swedish authorities have consistently maintained, revived and fueled the ‘rape’-suspect narrative against Mr. Assange, despite the legal requirement of anonymity, despite the mandatory presumption of innocence, despite the objectively unrealistic prospect of a conviction, and despite contradicting evidence suggesting that, in reality, the complainants never intended to report a sexual offence…”
The rapporteur has condemned the British state for pursuing Assange relentlessly on the fraudulent pretext of a minor bail offense. Melzer has noted that since Assange’s illegal arrest by British police on April 11, the UK judiciary has denied his right to due process, as it prepares to hand the WikiLeaks’ founder over to his persecutors in the U.S.
Most recently, British judges have decreed that Assange will remain behind bars indefinitely, despite his custodial sentence on the bail offenses having expired on September 22. In other words, he is explicitly being held as a political prisoner at the behest of the Trump administration.
The ruling followed a warning from Assange’s father John Shipton that he fears his son may die in prison. Despite the deterioration of his medical condition, Assange has been held in conditions of virtual solitary confinement in the maximum-security Belmarsh Prison, without access to computers and legal documents necessary for preparing his defence.
Melzer has also warned that Assange has no prospect of a fair trial in the United States, under conditions in which senior U.S. politicians have called for his assassination for exposing American war crimes and global diplomatic conspiracies. He has denounced the Australian government for failing to defend Assange, despite the fact that he is an Australian journalist and citizen.
All of the governments involved responded to Melzer with evasive letters, blithely dismissing his charges and asserting that their pursuit of the Assange was entirely lawful. The response underscores the extent to which the protracted persecution of the WikiLeaks’ founder has involved the trampling on international norms and institutions.
The media censorship of Melzer’s press briefing further demonstrates that the corporate publications are complicit partners in the attacks against Assange. For years, they have trumpeted every slander against him that has been concocted by the U.S. government, its allies and the intelligence agencies.
In his report last May, Melzer noted that the corporate media bears its own share of responsibility for the torture inflicted on Assange, having enthusiastically participated in what the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture aptly described as “public mobbing.”
—————————————————————————————————————
The Invisible Man comments:
The Pauls accept some Left criticism of Deep State
The libertarian Rand Paul, like his father Ron Paul, have affirmed their willingness to work with the Left on some issues, such as the Assange case, on the ending of undeclared "endless war" and on the perils of crony capitalism (which is at the heart of the Deep State). Of course, the Pauls and other libertarians are in complete disagreement with the Left on the solutions to most economic and social issues.
On March 20, 2018, Sen. Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican, said , "Absolutely there is a Deep State because the deep state is that the intelligence communities do not have oversight." He continued, "There is no skeptic" among the four Republican and four Democratic senators "who are supposedly" providing oversight, so that the intelligence communities, "with their enormous power ... have become a Deep State." On Dec. 4, 2018, Paul, in commenting on the CIA director briefing only those eight senators rather than the entire Senate, added, "The Deep State wants to keep everyone in the dark. This is just ridiculous!" On Dec. 10, 2018, he said "The very definition of a 'Deep State’ is when the very people, congressional leaders – people who are elected by the people – are not allowed to hear the intelligence."
We see the media-intelligence nexus in the Assange case. Assange's publication of reputed CIA documents was used by then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo as a reason to tag Assange as a Russian agent (the same smear used against President Trump by intelligence system dupes), followed by a U.S. government drive to exact revenge by classing legal acts as illegal acts under a century-old U.S. secrets law that has never been used against journalists, except in the case of two men who passed defense information to the Israeli government -- though those charges were eventually dropped because of concerns about the impact on the rights of free press.
From the beginning, that case against the lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee was highly unusual. The two, Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, were charged under the World War I-era Espionage Act, accused of improperly providing to colleagues, journalists and Israeli diplomats sensitive information they had acquired by speaking with American policy makers.
Though the FBI was irked at the Justice Department's decision in 2009 to drop those charges, that decision came as no surprise in light as a series of adverse judicial decisions made successful prosecution increasingly dubious, according to the New York Times.
Still, it has been evident that a number of federal judges are in league with "the Resistance," and have been issuing activist, politically tainted rulings. In fact, the federal judiciary has for long been entangled with the Deep State. So we cannot be overly confident that the Espionage Act won't now be upheld as a useful tool against those deemed "enemies of the state."
A problem with the targeting of Assange, is that it gives segments of the Left and Right ammunition to charge that those associated somehow with foreign political influence are in better shape if the country in question is Israel, as opposed to Russia (though Assange has never been convincingly shown to have been in league with the Kremlin).
A large swathe of media has been derelict in its duty to defend the First Amendment for everyone. Some sectors are doubtless working directly with intelligence agencies, while others are in an alliance with these agencies based on a foolish desire of the limousine liberal media brass hats to exact revenge on Assange for possibly spoiling Hillary Clinton's chance to win by his publication of caches of emails of Democratic Party officials. The idea was that it was OK to seek his scalp because of his being a witting tool of the Kremlin. Of course, many of these media elite don't seem to understand that the working press, like cops (or even CIA agents) get important information from those with axes to grind. That's how it works. Go back to J school, guys.
Corbett: ABC's fake video news is tip of iceberg
https://d.tube/#!/v/corbettreport/2xvm22ggf4z
Alternative media commentator James Corbett said the establishment media system has no credibility to lose and mocked commentator Greta Van Susteren for lamenting ABC's lapse as coming from a hypocritical "liar."
Yahoo News barely pretends to be objective
I use Yahoo for one of my email accounts (Krypto783@yahoo.com) and so see Yahoo's home page frequently. Aside from playing up a lot of "women's interest" news, Yahoo can be relied upon to lead with anything that makes it look as though Trump is losing politically and the get-Trump crowd is prevailing.
We must attribute this attitude to the parent company, Verizon Media (which also owns the liberal HuffPost).
Example of slanted coverage
In an Oct. 19 lead Yahoo story by Sharon Bernstein about a war of words between Democratic presidential aspirant Tulsi Gabbard and Hillary Clinton, the reporter repeatedly tags Gabbard as a "favorite" of Russian state media and "its surrogates," whoever they are. This in fact is Clinton's accusation.
The Hawaii congresswoman and military veteran is fuming over these charges. While it is fair to report on Clinton's accusations, it is nothing but a smear to repeat them as known facts. How would Bernstein like to be characterized as a "favorite" smear artist for the Deep State? Not.
Branding someone a Russian puppet because she favors a U.S. military drawdown in Syria -- as does Russia -- promotes the idea that Russia is now in control of what Americans may say. Thank you Hillary and your Reuters ally, Sharon.
Even worse, in the eyes of the Reuters reporter, some people at Fox News are giving Tulsi a partial thumbs up. Hence, that makes her a Russian puppet and Fox icon -- meaning that Hillary's ally Sharon is trying to help Hillary delegitimize Tulsi as a proper Democrat. And the Yahoo editor agrees.
Verizon's CEO is Hans Vestberg, a Swedish businessman. Previously, Vestberg served as chief technical officer of Verizon. Before that he was CEO of the Swedish telecom Ericsson and was active in Swedish sports administration.
I searched Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo trying to find the name of Yahoo's top managers. But all that was available was the fact that Marissa Mayer was bounced from the CEO spot in 2017. Are the top bananas in hiding? What are they? La Cosa Nostra?
Some of the other digital brands under Verizon Media are AOL, Autoblog, Built By Girls, Engadget, Flurry, HuffPost, Kanvas, MAKERS Women, Rivals.com, RYOT, TechCrunch, Verizon Digital Media Services.
From CNN (another Trump-is-always-wrong-no-matter-what basher), we learn that the Top 10 Owners of Verizon Communications Inc. are
The Vanguard Group Inc., stake 7.70%
BlackRock Fund Advisors 4.88%
SSgA Funds Management, Inc. 3.93%
Wellington Management Co. LLP 2.90%
Geode Capital Management LLC1. 43%
Capital Research & Management Co. 1.43%
Northern Trust Investments, Inc. 1.30%
Norges Bank Investment Management 1.01%
Fidelity Management & Research Co. 0.98%
Capital Research & Management Co. 0.94%
Top 10 Mutual Funds Holding Verizon Communications Inc.:
Vanguard, stake 2.79%;
Vanguard 500 Index Fund 1.99%
SPDR S&P 500 ETF 1.10%
Vanguard Wellington Fund 1.08%
Government Pension Fund - Global 1.01%
Vanguard Institutional Index Fund 0.92%
Washington Mutual Investors Fund 0.92%
Fidelity 500 Index Fund 0.83%
iShares Core S&P 500 ETF 0.75%
American Funds Income Fund of America 0.72%
A tally of all the "Vanguard" entities shows a total stake of 14.48% in Verizon. If the Wellington fund is included, the total rises to 17.38%. In either case, it appears that Vanguard holds a controlling interest in Verizon, and hence Yahoo.
Mortimer J. Buckley is chairman and chief executive officer of Vanguard. Buckley joined Vanguard in 1991 and has held a number of senior leadership positions, including chief information officer. He has served as chairman of the board of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. He holds an A.B. in economics from Harvard College and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.
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