The only media the U.S. government supports are those whose persecution can be politically leveraged and those who can be used to peddle propaganda, writes Caitlin Johnstone.
By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com
I will never get used to living in a world where our rulers will openly imprison a journalist for telling the truth and then self-righteously pontificate about the need to stop authoritarian regimes from persecuting them.
Just Wednesday U.S. State Department spokesman and C.I.A. veteran Ned Price tweeted disapprovingly about the Kyrgyz Republic’s decision to deport investigative journalist Bolot Temirov to Russia, where press freedom groups are concerned that the Russian citizen could face conscription to fight in Ukraine.
“Dismayed by the decision to deport journalist Bolot Temirov from the Kyrgyz Republic,” said Price. “Journalists should never be punished for doing their job. The Kyrgyz Republic has been known for its vibrant civil society — attempts to stifle freedom of expression stain that reputation.”
This would be an entirely reasonable statement for anyone else to make. If you said it or I said it, it would be completely legitimate. But when Ned says it, it is illegitimate.
Dismayed by the decision to deport journalist Bolot Temirov from the Kyrgyz Republic. Journalists should never be punished for doing their job. The Kyrgyz Republic has been known for its vibrant civil society — attempts to stifle freedom of expression stain that reputation.
— Ned Price (@StateDeptSpox) November 23, 2022
This is after all the same government that is working to extradite an Australian journalist from the United Kingdom with the goal of imprisoning him for up to 175 years for exposing U.S. war crimes.
Price says, “Journalists should never be punished for doing their job,” but that is precisely what the government he represents is doing to Julian Assange, who has already spent three and a half years in Belmarsh Prison awaiting U.S. extradition shenanigans.
This is on top of the seven years he spent fighting extradition from the Ecuadorian embassy in London under what a U.N. panel ruled was arbitrary detention.
A U.N. special rapporteur on torture determined that Assange has been subjected to psychological torture by the allied governments which have conspired to imprison him. Scores of doctors have determined that his persecution is resulting in dangerous medical neglect.
Yet he is being pulled toward the notoriously draconian prison systems of the most powerful government in the world, where he will face a rigged trial where a defense of publishing in the public interest will not be permitted.
All to establish a legal precedent that will allow the most powerful empire that has ever existed to extradite journalists from anywhere in the world for exposing inconvenient truths about it. But sure, Ned, “Journalists should never be punished for doing their job.”
No member of the press should be threatened, harassed, attacked, arrested, or killed for doing their job. On the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists, we vow to continue protecting and promoting the rights of a free press and the safety of journalists. https://t.co/qXYyVoVlbM
— Secretary Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) November 2, 2022
Earlier this month U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken posted a tweet of his own commemorating the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists, without the slightest trace of self-awareness.
“No member of the press should be threatened, harassed, attacked, arrested, or killed for doing their job,” Blinken said. “On the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists, we vow to continue protecting and promoting the rights of a free press and the safety of journalists.”
Two weeks later, the Biden administration shockingly granted Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman immunity from lawsuits regarding the gruesome assassination of U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi, thereby slamming the final door on all attempts to hold the tyrannical ruler responsible for his brazen assault on the press.
“No member of the press should be threatened, harassed, attacked, arrested, or killed for doing their job.”
Two weeks.
WASHINGTON (AP) – Biden administration moves to shield #SaudiArabia crown prince from lawsuits over his role in killing of #US-based journalist
— Matt Lee (@APDiploWriter) November 18, 2022
We are ruled by tyrannical, hypocritical freaks who do not care about truth and freedom; they care only about power and what they can use to obtain it.
The only press they support are those whose persecution can be politically leveraged, and those who can be used to peddle propaganda like the notorious AP editor who recently said she “can’t imagine” a U.S. intelligence official being wrong.
Pointing out hypocrisy is important not because hypocrisy is an especially terrible thing in and of itself, but because it draws attention to the fact that the hypocrite does not really stand where they claim to stand and value what they purport to value.
The rulers of the western empire care about press freedoms only exactly insofar as they can use them to concern troll foreign governments they don’t like to advance their global power agendas. And not one molecule further.
Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes. For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.
This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com and re-published with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Next week, the House of Representatives will be sitting for 4 days and the Senate will be sitting for 5 days.
I believe that it is most urgent that every one of us who supports Julian Assange contact those 39 members (or 41 including Anthony Albanese and Barnaby Joyce) of “The Bring Julian Assange Home Parliamentary Support Group” (hxxps://www.assangecampaign.org.au/bring-julian-home-campaign/) and urge them to try, once more, to have a motion, similar to what Andrew Wilkie tried unsuccessfully, 12 months ago on 2 December 2021, put to Parliament. This time, should the necessary procedural motion be defeated, then a division should be called, so, that at least we can find out the names of those MPs and Senators who are both happy to allow the illegal imprisonment and torture of Julian Assange to continue and who are opposed to those who have opinions, which differs from theirs, from being being put to Parliament.
For more information, please see my article “Your Parliament won’t allow 39 members, who support Julian Assange, to speak – Why?” (27/11/22) at hxxps://candobetter.net/james-sinnamon/blog/6511/your-parliament-wont-allow-39-members-who-support-julian-assange-speak-why
Secretary Blinken would do well to read his mail. I sent the letter below earlier this year.
January 3, 2022
Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
I thought we had seen the epitome of hypocrisy on March 2, 2014, when Secretary of State John Kerry wagged his finger at the Russian Federation and said:
“You just don’t in the 21st century behave in a 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pre-text.”
Is not March 19, 2003 a date that falls within the 21st century?
Senator Kerry’s statement sat atop the pinnacle of hypocrisy until April 28, 2021, when, at a World Press Freedom Roundtable, you said that the United States is:
“[S]tanding for press freedom around the world, we would be hypocritical, and beyond hypocritical, we would not have-we would really not have a leg to stand on if we were doing the opposite at home.”
This statement was uttered as Julian Assange, who is both a journalistic source and a publisher, entered his tenth year of arbitrary detention while trying to escape the wrath of the United States, whose crimes he had exposed. A sentence of 175 years in prison would be a helluva way to stand for a person who has won numerous journalistic awards including the Martha Gellhorn Prize.
In your humility, you might insist that your statement is no more hypocritical than Mr. Kerry’s. But what pushes yours over the top Mr. Secretary, is the audacity to deny hypocrisy, not once, not twice, but three times within the same hypocritical statement.
Awesome.
Mike Madden
Saint Paul, MN
I feel physically ill when i see the face of Blinken or Price. These people are so disgusting. What do they say to their family when they come home after work. I wonder do they ever understand the consequences of their actions and words.
Of course i know that a personality disorder makes it impossible to feel empathy and understand. Can all of them be somehow mentally sick or just evil.
Everything that happens in the US Sphere of Influence, I personalize to blame Joe Biden. I do this because this is what is done to Putin, and while President Brain-dead is not peraonllay ordering every act, it balances the picture between Biden and Putin and treats them the same.
Two assassinations. Shireen Abu Akleh, was targeted with a sniper shot, fired into her head, and killed. She was wearing, as were the other journalist with her, bright blue gear with the word “Press” in large capital letters. There is little doubt that the sniper in the US Sphere of Influence saw this, and carefully aimed a shot into her head below the helmet she was wearing. The same sniper put another journalist into ICU with a 2nd shot.
This was the American citizen. Although, to the extent that American corporate press pays any attention, she is hyphenated into a Palestinian-America, which makes her assassination all A-OK in the USA. The hyphen makes an American a sub-human by its application.
The other was Darya Dugina, assassinated with a car bomb on the streets of Moscow. A political writer whom Joe Biden hates. The daughter of another famous and popular (in Russia) political writer. It was unclear whether the father or the daughter was the target in the execution of the journalist for the thought-crime of writing philosophy that Joe Biden does not agree with.
There was also a Joe Biden missile strike, fired from Joe Biden ‘himars’, using Joe Biden ammunition and Joe Biden intelligence and satelite data, that fired on a group of journalists who were crossing the river at Kherson on a civilian ferry, killing at least two of them.
Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. IIRC, Mexico, also deep in the US Sphere of Influence, is one of the most dangerous places in the world for a journalist to work, that is if they report the truth about gangs and corruption. Haiti, a place repeatedly invaded by the USA, and also deep in the US Sphere of Influence, is also a dangerous place for journalists.
Yep, Joe Biden really cares about “Press Freedom”. If you doubt this, perhaps you can ask him yourself at one of his frequent, open-to-all-questioners, press conferences? Or perhaps you can submit a question to his annual 3 to 4 hour long conversation with the American people where Joe Biden solicits questions from the nation and answers them?
Deo Confidimus!…everyone else, however, must submit to vigorous legal cross examination and independent, forensic auditing.
Otherwise, believe nothing that is written, said, or shown by our American MSM.* That is, believe nothing that is not also independently scrutinized, confirmed, and then verified by multiple independent news sources.
Disturbingly, what is seen or heard in the media these days is usually little more than approved government talking points. It is all so much of what the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan once called “boob bait for the bubbas.” Don’t be fooled.
Happy Thanksgiving!
[*See also: The US State Department, Pentagon, CIA, NSA, Hollywood, & Silicon Valley]
What you say is so obvious and true. What you usually say is so true and obvious. I as you must find it hard to see how fucked up and crazy it all is. Mark Twain said it best; When we understand we are all mad the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
A charade of democracy. A charade of rule of law. A charade of freedom. At home the American public is treated like cattle being prepared for slaughter. And abroad, more of the same. And so empires die, not primarily from external forces but from inner moral decay; loss of principles, loss of values and lots of why bother caring. America is now producing a product that nobody wants.
The leaders that a society or culture produce ultimately determine its fate. It seems we are now scraping the bottom of the barrel and the only choices that the American public have left are the dregs.
The hypocrisy is overwhelming. The statements by the totally useless Blinken and the swarmy idiot Ned Price only reveal how terribly out of touch they are with reality.
I am thankful for many things on this Thanksgiving, but one major thing I am contrastingly quite bitterly resentful of is what appears to be the real-time erasure of WikiLeaks from existence (in line with plans and efforts by organs of the US government in general, and its military-intelligence establishment in particular, that have been around fifteen years in the making – see David Kravets, “Secret Document Calls Wikileaks ‘Threat’ to U.S. Army,” WIRED, March 15, 2010).
This is a decisively devastating blow, following the apparent decline and fall of other invaluable online repositories and outlets such as History Commons, PandoDaily, Washington’s Blog, The Anti-Media, and Newsbud / Boiling Frogs Post, to name just a few that I have often followed and studied with some degree of intensity to supplement my info-diet from more mainstream sources. It sickens me to see the intellectual community being so systematically deprived of many unorthodox informational resources, as “doing one’s own research” becomes more and more calculatedly disparaged by those elites who seek to impose a top-down managerial model of society on the masses and reclaim the intellectual means of production (i.e., “The Theory and Practice of Ologarchical Collectivism”).
“For a period of time in the 2000s and 2010s, WikiLeaks was a name synonymous with whistleblowing. The non-profit organization’s website was the place on the internet for information that someone, somewhere didn’t want you to see. But now, much of that information appears to have vanished. WikiLeaks’ website is full of broken pages, error notices, and a noticeable dearth of the documents it once held—as first reported by the Daily Dot and confirmed by Gizmodo.
[…]
The organization claimed, on its 10th anniversary, that it had released 10 million documents onto the internet. However, only around 3,000 were still available on the site this week, according to Daily Dot.”
Source:
Lauren Leffer, “WikiLeaks’ Website Is Falling Apart,” Gizmodo, November 22, 2022
The information shared on WikiLeaks is avalible, if you know how and where to search.
Yes, of course. As is most, if not all, content from the other sites that I mentioned (e.g., Washington’s Blog’s articles were syndicated at Global Research and several other websites).
Nevertheless, the point that I made about this on a different “Consortium News” article on the temporary removal of the 2014 Nuland-Pyatt tape video from YouTube still stands:
“While people like you and I are familiar with web.archive.org, archive.ph, and similar resources for viewing lost or disappeared web content (albeit still depending on whether or not the automated web-capture mechanisms and/or individual users of those sites had the foresight to preserve it before it vanished), many casual internet users have no idea that this content exists in the first place, much less that those preservation resources exist.”
How do you tell if a politician is lying ?
Their lips move …
Yes, of course. As is most, if not all, content from the other sites that I mentioned (e.g., Washington’s Blog’s articles were syndicated at Global Research and several other websites).
Nevertheless, the point that I made about this on a different “Consortium News” article on the temporary removal of the 2014 Nuland-Pyatt tape video from YouTube still stands:
“While people like you and I are familiar with web.archive.org, archive.ph, and similar resources for viewing lost or disappeared web content (albeit still depending on whether or not the automated web-capture mechanisms and/or individual users of those sites had the foresight to preserve it before it vanished), many casual internet users have no idea that this content exists in the first place, much less that those preservation resources exist.”