Stella Assange: ‘Corrupting the System at Every Level’

“I think there are some people within the U.S. and U.K. governments who understand how cancerous this whole affair is,” the wife of the imprisoned publisher tells Matt Kennard in a wide-ranging interview. 

Stella Assange. (DeclassifiedUK)

By Matt Kennard
Declassified UK

  • “I think they keep him in Belmarsh because they can get away with it. It’s the most effective way of silencing him.”
  • “I’m convinced Julian cannot survive under the conditions the US will put him in. The only reason he’s surviving now is because he’s able to see me and the children.”
  • “If the UK press had reported fairly and critically about this case, would Julian be in Belmarsh prison today? I don’t believe so.”
  • “These concepts of independence and fairness are the only thing that stand between us and a complete darkness of raw power where they can just crush you.”

“Julian is fighting for his survival and he’s going through hell, that’s the best way to put it,” Stella Assange says when I ask how he’s doing.

The wife of the world’s most famous political prisoner is speaking to Declassified as part of her relentless battle to save her husband’s life.

“Sometimes it’s been really, really very difficult for him, and sometimes when he’s able to see the children, when he’s with the children, when there’s progress in the case, then he’s energised,” she adds. “And he’s energised by all the support that he sees out there for him. He gets letters of support and expressions of support constantly.”

One thing immediately noticeable when talking with Stella is that she has the same unusual intensity and focus as her husband. For anyone who has met Julian, the similarities are striking.

He has now been in Belmarsh maximum-security prison in London for three and a half years. He was initially put in there ostensibly because of a bail violation after he was given political asylum by the Ecuadorian government.

In 2012, U.K. courts had ordered Assange’s extradition to Sweden to face questioning over sexual assault allegations. The case was dropped [for the third time] in August 2019, soon after Assange was put in Belmarsh. He is now being held as a remand prisoner at the behest of the U.S. government.

“Belmarsh has about 800 prisoners, and it’s a very harsh regime because it has very serious offenders,” Stella says. “It also has people on remand for non-serious offences. And it has people who are like Julian, where there’s some kind of political aspect to it. Everyone is treated as if they were a serious offender. This is what distinguishes Belmarsh from other prisons.”

“When Julian calls, for example, we only get 10 minutes at a time,” she adds. “The explanation for this is that they’re surveilling the phone calls and there’s a technical limitation to how they can surveil the phone calls. So that’s incredibly frustrating: to have just 10-minute chunks of phone calls.”

She continues: “Julian’s in his cell for over 20 hours a day, but it varies from day to day. During lockdown, it was for a critical week where there was an outbreak of Covid in his wing, it was 24/7 for several days in a row.”

Last month, Assange tested positive for Covid and was in solitary confinement in his cell for 10 days. He has a chronic lung condition. 

“It’s not like you imagine prison like you see on TV,” Stella says. “The prisoners don’t sit together when they eat. They have to queue up to collect their food and then they have to eat in their own cell. Isolation is the norm. Sometimes they’re allowed out to collect medication, to collect food, to go to the yard, which should be once a day for an hour, but in practice it’s less. Social visits and legal visits, the visits occur a few times a week, if that. Sometimes visits get cancelled, like with the death of the queen.”

Inside Belmarsh

Poster near Belmarsh Prison in London, February 2020. (HOGRE, Flickr)

The regime in Belmarsh is a purposefully harsh one. “You’re basically not in control of your environment — or anything,” Stella says. “You’re not in control of the routine. You’re not in control of what you eat, how you eat. Other people have control over your physical environment and over your person.”

In 2020, Declassified published a story showing Assange was one of just two inmates at Belmarsh, which then housed 797 prisoners, being held for violating bail conditions.

The figures showed that more than 20 percent of the prison population was held for murder, while nearly two-thirds  —  or 477 people  — were imprisoned for violent offences. A further 16 inmates were held for offences related to terrorism, including four people who planned to carry out terrorist attacks. Assange himself has never been charged with a violent offence.

“I think they keep him in Belmarsh because they can get away with it, because it’s the most effective way of silencing him, precisely because of this extreme regime that Belmarsh is known for,” Stella says.

“It’s a punishment in itself. The very fact that he is in prison for having exercised his right to seek and actually obtain asylum … that’s a right that’s enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That is a long-recognised right that every person has. And it violated a technicality, and it’s usually treated as a technicality if there is a sufficient reason for violating the bail. In this case, there undeniably was.”

Stella continues:

“Very rarely is it actually punished with prison time, and he finished serving that prison sentence in October 2019. But effectively it’s an indefinite sentence because while he exercises his right to challenge the U.S. extradition request, the U.K. keeps him in Belmarsh at the request of the American government.”

‘Worse Than Death’

Assange’s treatment in the U.S. would be much worse. In 2020, U.K. District Judge Vanessa Baraitser blocked Assange’s extradition to the U.S. because of the risk of suicide under the onerous conditions he would face.

Baraitser’s decision was based on the fact that, if convicted, Assange would likely be moved to the “Supermax” Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX) in Florence, Colorado, home to convicted terrorist Abu Hamza and Mexican drug lord El Chapo.

A former warden of the prison has said: “There’s no other way to say it — it’s worse than death.”

Pre-trial, Assange could also be held under Special Administrative Measures, or SAMs, where inmates spend 23 or 24 hours a day in their cells with no contact with other prisoners.

The U.S. then appealed Baraitser’s ruling, saying it would promise that Assange would not be subject to SAMs or housed in ADX. Crucially, though, the U.S. reserved the right to reverse these promises in case of further violations by Assange, which can be easily invented. 

In December 2021, the U.K. High Court agreed with the U.S. appeal and reversed the lower court decision not to extradite Assange.

Many believe Assange would commit suicide before being put on a plane to the U.S.

Julian Assange outside U.K. Supreme Court in 2011. (acidpolly, Flickr)

“I’m convinced that Julian cannot survive under the conditions the U.S. will put him in,” says Stella. “I have no doubt they will put him in a regime of isolation. The only reason he’s surviving now is because he’s able to see me, to see the children. He has a hope of fighting extradition to the U.S.”

She adds:

“He’s facing trial in the Eastern District of Virginia with a jury that will be composed of people who are either working for or somehow linked to the national security sector, because that is what that area is. That is the jury pool. He faces 175 years under the Espionage Act, under which there is no defence. He cannot explain, he cannot justify, he cannot defend himself from the accusation.”

She pauses. “Under the indictment, Julian is accused of conspiring with a source to publish information: receiving that information from the source, possessing that information and communicating it to the public. That is journalism. And if you define journalism as a crime, then Julian is guilty and he has no defence.”

Due Process

The original ruling which blocked extradition to the U.S. did so on very narrow grounds. Aside from mental health concerns, Judge Baraitser agreed with every dot and comma of the U.S. indictment.

The current appeal by Assange’s lawyers against that original ruling should be heard next year. It is likely to focus on substantive issues of press freedom and the political nature of this prosecution.

Soon after the 2020 decision, David Davis, a former chair of the Conservative Party who served as Brexit minister in 2016-18, told Declassified the U.S.-U.K. extradition treaty is “massively asymmetric”.

He also said Judge Baraitser “got the law wrong” by claiming the treaty included political crimes.

“Parliament made clear in terms that it would not cover political crimes,” Davis said.

“The U.S.-U.K. extradition treaty explicitly prohibits extraditions for political offences,” says Stella.

“So this is one of the very obvious aspects for which the extradition should be blocked. And in fact, when the indictment first came down, there were all these legal commentators I recall at the time, well, one or two, but prominent people, who said, ‘well, this can’t really be a serious extradition effort, because of course it will be blocked.’”

‘Deference to the Intelligence Services’

Protester in San Francisco, 2011. (Max Braun, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Another bizarre aspect of the Assange case is that the state requesting the extradition of the defendant is on record as spying on his privileged conversations with his defence lawyers —and plotting to assassinate him. 

In the Pentagon Papers case in the 1970s, U.S. whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg was charged with leaking a top-secret report on the history of the Vietnam War which eventually helped end that devastating conflict.

Ellsberg’s case was thrown out after it was revealed the Nixon administration had broken into his psychiatrist’s office to find dirt to smear him in the media.

In the Assange case, none of the revelations about the corruption of due process seem to matter. Given the same agency behind the prosecution has plotted to assassinate the defendant, why are we still here? I ask Stella.

“Well, it’s a good question. I try to understand it myself. What’s different from the Pentagon Papers case? I think what’s different is a deference to the intelligence services that even outright criminality is business as usual.”

The Darkness

It should be clear to any independent observer that the U.K. judiciary and penal system has been captured by the state in the Assange case. The evidence is public and extensive.

“There’s an extraordinary conflict of interest that no one can talk about, which is that U.K. government ministers have been extremely hostile to Julian,” says Stella.

“But not just that. They’re involved in secretive groups like Le Cercle, which Declassified has written about. A secret C.I.A.-backed group with U.K. ministers, including current sitting ministers, where you can’t even find out where they meet or when they meet or what’s on the agenda.”

She pauses, exasperated. “Julian has been the victim of a C.I.A. plot to assassinate him.”

In December last year, Declassified published a story revealing eight current Conservative parliamentarians are associated with a secret rightwing group called Le Cercle which a former minister wrote was “funded by the C.I.A.” This includes recent U.K. Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng and Sir Alan Duncan, the foreign minister who orchestrated the arrest of Julian Assange in 2019.

Declassified also revealed that Duncan was a 40-year “good friend” of the High Court judge who green-lighted Assange’s extradition late last year.

“There’s a disconnect between when we talk about democracy and separation of powers and the independence of the judiciary and the executive,” Stella says.

“The reality of it is that the executive is wining and dining with people who are plotting the assassination of my husband. I don’t even know how to approach explaining this reality. In a way, the more you see the darkness of it, the more a kind of classic liberal I become, in the sense that the only thing we have is the insistence of principles of independence and fairness and equity and all these things, because there’s nothing else.”

She continues: “These are concepts, they’re the only thing that stand between us and a complete darkness of raw power where they can just crush you. So I have to stay optimistic that the courts can redeem this situation, because the alternative is that there is just darkness.”

Media Failure

Cartoon by Oisle.

Noticeable during the whole Assange saga is the lack of support from mainstream British journalists. No U.K. newspaper has launched a campaign for his release, and there has not been a single investigation of the legal process in any paper either. This stands in contrast to the media in Italy, Spain, Germany and the U.S.

“It’s a very interesting thought experiment,” says Stella. “If the newspapers, especially the ones that collaborated with WikiLeaks, which isn’t just the Guardian, it’s also the Telegraph, it’s Channel Four, it’s the BBC, the Independent, all of these had agreements with WikiLeaks about publishing those materials. It was a joint venture, a joint publishing venture.

“If they had reported fairly and diligently and critically about this case, would Julian be in Belmarsh prison today? I don’t believe so. I don’t think he would have spent a single day in prison because in many ways, for many years, they enabled the hounding of Julian out of negligence … because WikiLeaks challenged the old order media, the legacy media.”

She adds: “Julian’s profile was also much higher than the editor of the most well-established newspaper in the U.K., for example. Most people don’t know who that is. So Julian was an inconvenience and was changing the landscape. I think there was a lot of jealousy there. But these petty personal issues among journalists, it’s kind of endemic to journalism or to some of the journalists class I’d say, has had such a pernicious effect because Julian is a test case.”

The case has been described as the biggest threat to the first amendment in the U.S. and press freedom globally in generations. Free expression and press freedom groups across the world have condemned the U.S. prosecution — and the British imprisonment.

National security whistleblowers have always been criminalised, but this is the first time a journalist and publisher faces life in prison.

“What is not properly understood, I think, because of their failure to report accurately, critically, or diligently, is that Julian is being prosecuted as a journalist,” Stella says. “They are going after him as a journalist, not as a whistleblower, not as anything else. The activities that they have criminalised are journalistic activities.”

‘War of Attrition’

Nils Melzer. (U.N. Photo)

In 2016, the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found Assange had been arbitrarily detained by Britain since 2010. The U.N. special rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, later accused the British of “torturing” Assange. Both stories were barely covered in the British media.  Stella says:

“For the first nine years, until he was dragged out of the embassy, he was never charged and there was just a complete catastrophic failure to accurately report that. I think right now the press is in a bit of an awkward position because the narratives that they have been furthering for so long just don’t fit the reality. And the public perceives that … There’s a guy in prison for three and a half years who isn’t convicted of anything, and it has to do with publishing war crimes.”

Stella believes it is corrupting the whole body politic. “I think it is a war of attrition,” she says. “I think there are some people within the U.S. and U.K. governments who understand how cancerous this whole affair is, how harmful it is, because it’s corrupting, right?”

She continues: “In order to keep this going, it is corrupting the system at every level. But then there are the short-term interests, for example in the U.S., where they’re thinking, ‘well, as long as he’s in prison in a different jurisdiction, we don’t have to worry about it.’”

“For the U.K.,” she adds, “it’s, ‘well, we can blame this on the U.S. and we keep him silenced with this excuse that he’s a flight risk if he’s released.’”

Stella says the persecution of her husband hampers the ability of the U.K. and the U.S. to project themselves internationally within institutions. “For example, if the U.S. and the U.K. start really undermining the U.N. system and the international legal system in such a flagrant manner. Then the whole thing falls apart. And of course, these are empires.”

The corruption started years before, Stella contends. “The undermining of these systems became institutionalised and systematic during the so-called War on Terror. Initially it was outward looking — black sites in other countries and torture regimes through carve-outs — but now they’ve basically internalised that into the U.K. system, into the U.S. system.”

She adds:

“If Julian gets extradited to the U.S., they are basically doing away with the First Amendment, and the First Amendment is the one thing that distinguishes the U.S. from every other superpower. It actually has a strong free speech principle that has worked. The U.K. less so. But as a principle, it is a counterbalance to the kind of raw, dark aspects of the state. If you start weakening that and undermining that, which is what is happening both in the U.S. and the U.K., by keeping Julian imprisoned, then you are fundamentally corrupting the entire system.”

‘Enough is Enough’

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, second from left, meets with Australian Opposition Party ;eadership, including Austalian Labor Party Leader Anthony Albanese, second from right, in Melbourne in February.  (State Department/Ron Przysucha)

In May, a new progressive administration was elected in Australia under Anthony Albanese. It held out hope that Assange’s home country could finally exert some diplomatic pressure to force his release. 

Albanese, as leader of the Labor Party, said in February 2021: “Enough is enough. I can’t see what is served by keeping Julian Assange incarcerated.” The previous prime minister Scott Morrison was close to the Trump administration, allegedly having former C.I.A. Director Mike Pompeo on speed dial for two years. 

“It is a shift from the previous government in the sense they were in complete lockstep with the U.S.,” Stella says. “There was no questioning of what was going on, there was no effort to find a solution. With the new Australian government, there is a position that they want to find a solution and their position, as they’ve expressed it, is enough is enough, and so on. How that translates into reality? Julian isn’t free yet, and that’s the only measure.”

She continues:

“I don’t have insight into what is happening or if it’s happening, but there has been no result, and it’s been already many months that they’ve been in government. The other aspect is how can it be that an Australian citizen in the U.K. is wanted for extradition by the U.S.? I think it has to do with citizenship in practice becoming weaker and almost irrelevant. I think it was Australia that expressed that they had something like joint sovereignty with the United States at the security state level of these Five Eyes.”

The Five Eyes intelligence alliance comprises Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Britain and the U.S.

“There is something else going on that is shaping changing states as we traditionally understand them. If you have these five countries operating as a single brain that dilutes citizenship in each of those countries in ways that we don’t even understand, and I think that’s part of the equation.”

Hope

The odds seem stacked against Stella and her husband. The forces ranged against them do not come more powerful. But she cautions against hopelessness.

“I think that there’s a real risk in this sense of powerlessness,” she says. “I don’t agree with it at all that people are powerless. In a way, when you have such a stark injustice as in Julian’s case, it has to be a motivator, not a de-motivator, to take action.”

She continues:

“Our democracy, our society, these principles that we believe in, in order to live in the fairest, best society we can live in, they’re incredibly fragile. They have to be fought for, and every generation has to fight for them again, because there are constant forces in the opposite direction that are trying to eat up our rights. Julian’s case represents a real turning point. And we are agents in the society we live in. It is not just a moral imperative, but a practical imperative to stand up and take action.”

The level of attacks on Assange by different elements within the Anglo-American establishment has been ferocious since 2010.

“The purpose has been to silence support for him because he’s fighting a political case,” says Stella.

“In a political case, you need political support. That’s why there was such a relentless attack on him in the lead up to his imprisonment. And since then, there has been a deliberate silencing of Julian. He’s not even allowed to go to the hearings in person. For the last year and a half, he hasn’t been given permission to go. So, he’s been kind of silenced and made invisible. But at the same time, the longer this goes on, the more obvious it is to everyone.”

She adds: “This is a defining case of our times, just like other cases have been defining cases of their times. This is it for us.”

The Future

Stella Assange addressing supporters on Oct 28, 2021, during the U.S. appeal hearing in London. (Don’t Extradite Assange Campaign)

Do you sometimes allow yourself to daydream about your husband being free and what your life would look like? I ask.

“I always picture us being in a park or on a mountain or something like that, because that’s what Julian hasn’t had for over a decade,” she says. “He just needs to be treated like a human being and be allowed to be a human being and not denied his dignity and his humanity, which is what has been done to him for years and years.”

Stella’s life now revolves around answering questions about her husband. But with two little boys to look after, and the power of the world’s most powerful state bearing down on her, she is herself living in very difficult conditions. How is she doing?

“It’s been difficult, but Julian is the one in the more difficult situation, obviously, and I just want him to be free. The clarity of that goal doesn’t just make it bearable, it makes me have a burning fire to get him out and to continue fighting. There’s a lot of support for him and the awareness and the goodwill and solidarity is there and it’s growing and it’s undeniable. So, I’m just going to keep going until Julian’s free.”

Stella and Julian have two sons, Gabriel and Max, born while he was confined in the Ecuadorian embassy. What do you tell them about their dad’s situation? I ask.

“They speak to him over the phone and they see him about once a week and they understand that bad people are keeping their father away from them and that their father wants to come home and that this strange place that we go to is keeping him from coming home,” she says. 

“But I don’t tell them about the extradition. There’s no way they can conceptualise that. So there’s no point. There’s also no point in casting this dark prospect in their horizon. But they enjoy seeing him. They’re happy 3- and 5-year-olds. They just want to play.”

Matt Kennard is chief investigator at Declassified U.K.. he was a fellow and then director at the Centre for Investigative Journalism in London. Follow him on Twitter @kennardmatt

This article is from Declassified U.K.

 

17 comments for “Stella Assange: ‘Corrupting the System at Every Level’

  1. robert e williamson jr
    November 14, 2022 at 08:33

    What has happened to Julian should strike fear into the hearts of everyone.

    I have no need to list the individuals who are celebrating his plight, we all know who these monsters are.

    American is traveling down the road of demise unless it’s “leadership” comes to it’s senses.

    Eternal prison for those who speak truth to power is now here the world over, time for a gut check folks.

    After this election it seems the youth are telling us where they stand.

    Hey Joe if you had a decent bone in your body your will let this man go free. Other wise rot in hell yourself!

  2. Ben Evanston
    November 14, 2022 at 03:29

    Watching all of this one can understand the hysteria and election-rigging by elite US and UK circles that greeted figures like Sanders and Corbyn. It was only marginally about economic and social policy. The real issue was there was a risk of such non-corrupt leaders ending—or even God forbid *punishing*—well-documented criminality of the kind that enabled the US and UK’s rampage of murder and torture in Iraq.

    The crooks, thugs, and lying finks at CIA and in British intelligence know they are busted,—courtesy real journalists like Julian Assange everyone knows what they did and do—and that the only thing keeping them out of the horrific dungeons they have set up for their usual victims is the fact the leadership of the US and UK remain their collaborators in absolute corruption.

  3. November 13, 2022 at 10:46

    “The Australian Parliament’s gagging of debate on Julian Assange – the Elephant in the Room” (14/11/22) hxxps://candobetter.net/admin/blog/6499/australianParliamentGagsDebateOnAssangeTheElephantInTheRoom started out in response to this article.

    The elephant in the room that seems to have been missed by the author and by Stella Assange, Jennifer Robinson, John Shipton, Gabriel Shipton and every other high-profile supporter of Julian Assange that I can think of, is this:

    Although, there are 39 members of the Bring Julian Assange Home Parliamentary Support Group (or 41 if current Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and former Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce are included[1]), those in control of the major parties – the now Government Labor Party and the now Opposition Liberal/National Coalition – have prevented them from ever once holding to account, successive Australian governments for their failure to end the monstrous and illegal treatment of Julian Assange by the governments of Sweden, the UK and the US.

    Since 2020, there have been at least 3 attempts that I know of to move motions in support of Julian Assange, but they have all been blocked by arcane rules that don’t allow motion, which is not supported by the major parties, to be put, even if as many as 39 MPs support that motion and want that motion to be put. The most recent attempt was made by Tasmanian independent Andrew Wilkie, almost one year ago, on 2 December 2021.

  4. Eric Arthur Blair
    November 13, 2022 at 05:51

    Orwell said that speaking Truth in an Empire of Lies was an act of treason.
    Putin said that the USA is an Empire of Lies.
    Who is the world’s greatest Truth teller?
    Julian Assange, who is now accordingly being punished for such treason.

    • ray Peterson
      November 13, 2022 at 09:17

      Eric Blair isn’t that George Orwell’s non-pen name? A perfect
      circle of today’s darkness

  5. Steve
    November 13, 2022 at 01:45

    It is obvious that the UK are weasels and a vasal state of the US. It is time to free Assange, but how long would it be before the CIA or others finished this sorry saga. I’m still amazed how many people when you mention Julian Assange respond with – who? Just shows how complicit the MSM is in Julian Assange’s ongoing torture.

  6. JonT
    November 12, 2022 at 16:52

    “The reality of it is that the executive is wining and dining with people who are plotting the assassination of my husband… ”

    I find these words very moving. They will not however penetrate the thick skulls of the so called ‘executive ‘ who are impervious to reason.

  7. Valerie
    November 12, 2022 at 16:02

    Terrific interview with Stella Assange. Many aspects revealed which were previously unknown to the general public.

  8. ray Peterson
    November 12, 2022 at 15:36

    Marriage and the Family, a major belief of the evangelical nominal
    Christians in both the U.S and U.K., along with the pope and the
    bishop of Canterbury, all Catholics and Protestants, but where are
    their voices to support this mother, father and their children as they
    hold fast to the Christian message in truth: “If the world hates you,
    know that it has hated me before it hated you” (John 15.18).

  9. Vera Gottlieb
    November 12, 2022 at 14:14

    US/UK = the Asses of Evil….cancers of our world.

    • R, Billie
      November 13, 2022 at 16:23

      XS of evil.

  10. JohnB1
    November 12, 2022 at 11:12

    Good to have role models like Stella and Julian, so many others. Such dark times we live in.

  11. Vesa Sainio
    November 12, 2022 at 02:58

    The Assange case is one big factor in the process i have begin to really hate Britain. Before all of this, i kind of liked it although i have never liked their master the US.
    It has been quite shocking for a westerner like me to realize that the evil axis is in fact here in the west and not in places like Russia, China, Iran etc.

    • Vera Gottlieb
      November 12, 2022 at 14:15

      You hit the nail right on the head. Our Western so-called ‘civilized’ world is rotten and corrupt to the core.

  12. This Land is Your Land
    November 11, 2022 at 23:54

    “Corrupting the System”

    I only disagree with the tense. The ‘system’ has been at maximum corruption for quite some time. The comment that preceded mine points out the corruption of 20 years ago, and yet acts surprised that the system is corrupt today. Did anything occur between the Cheney’s Iraq War and Biden’s World War III to make one believe that some reform had occurred in the days between?

    Yes, they are all accomplices in massive crimes of fraud, swindling, and mass murder. They all live in luxury. You won’t find Judy Woodruff on a street corner holding a cardboard sign. But she might ride past in a limo. Most of the people on your screens make 7-figure salaries, and at least 6-figures. A quick internet search says Ms. Woodruff earns 6-figures a year and is a millionaire. Nice work, if you can get it, and don’t have a conscience.

    They are all doing quite well for themselves. Not one of them gives a dang about anybody else. And not one bit of that is in the least ways new or recent or even something that has occurred in this century.

  13. CNfan
    November 11, 2022 at 18:56

    The corruption is indeed deep and wide-ranging. I monitor the PBS Newshour and NPR radio news, as well as several independent news sources. I notice that centrally important facts about our life & death situations which are covered on the various independent news outlets are consistently omitted on PBS and NPR.

    They have had plenty of time to learn these facts, so it cannot be that they are unaware of them. The only conclusion to me is that they are deliberately and intentionally deceiving their audiences.

    For example, Judy Woodruff at PBS and Jen White at NPR know we were lied into the trillion dollar boondoggle of the Iraq-Afghanistan war, yet they ignore the overwhelming evidence that the Ukraine war is another such boondoggle. And their staffs and guests under their direction do the same.

    I wonder what is going through all these people’s minds. Do they not see they are accomplices in massive crimes of fraud, swindling, and mass murder, all for somebody’s ill-gotten gains? Do they not see their censorship is destroying America’s democracy? Do they not see they are appendages to Big Brother?

    • J Anthony
      November 13, 2022 at 06:48

      If any of those media-flaks you speak of have a conscience, I hope they are tortured by it the rest of their lives, for they are complicit. And so are citizens who refuse to take a side. When Stella said of the national “security” agencies, “outright criminality is just business-as-usual”, she nailed it. That’s the crux of the problem, and it seeps into every aspect of modern life.

Comments are closed.