JulianAssange – ILANA MERCER

Extradited! Why Assange Fears Being ‘Epsteined’

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 24 Dec 2021 05:53:43 +0000

If America’s so free and fair, why is Julian Assange, innocent in natural law, so terrified of being extradited to the USA? And why must journalist Glenn Greenwald live abroad, after heroically helping whistleblower Edward Snowden, now safely ensconced in Russia? American heroes living abroad for fear of the American Security State? Time perhaps to shut up about China?

In 2010, Snowden had shared internal NSA documents with Mr. Greenwald, the guardian of American freedoms at the British Guardian newspaper.

Facilitated by Greenwald, Snowden divulged that the National Security Agency boasted of having “direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo, PalTalk, YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL, and other servers.” It transpired that, contrary to what you’d been told by officials under oath, “the world’s largest surveillance organization” can and does “obtain targeted communications without having to request them from the service providers and without having to obtain individual court orders.” This is contrary to the Bill of Rights, and the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, in particular, which specifies that “warrants shall issue” only “upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

The federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation. Tellingly, the tools of Big Media and Big Government had not apprised you of these facts. It took Snowden to come forth, in his words, “to reveal the criminality.” In Snowden’s poignant words, “You can’t wait around for someone else to act. I had been looking for leaders, but I realized that leadership is about being the first to act. … I’m neither traitor nor hero. I’m an American,” he summed-up so simply.

“Thank you for your service, Mr. Snowden.”

For his part, a decade before he was broken, an insouciant Assange told the New Yorker that “a social movement to expose secrets could bring down many administrations that rely on concealing reality — including the US administration.” A naïve Assange had vowed to skewer “lying, corrupt and murderous leadership from Bahrain to Brazil.”

With its many epic “data dumps,” Assange’s WikiLeaks enlightened and educated, providing definitive proof that the mass media are lapdogs, not watchdogs. Democratic lapdogs. The colluding quislings of the major American networks and newspapers had actively worked to elect Mrs. Clinton. Thanks to WikiLeaks, Americans also learned of the contempt with which these Democrats hold them.

WikiLeaks’ proprietor has martyred himself in the cause of truth. Without fear or favor, Julian Assange had exposed the workings of business and government alike, Republican and Democrat—from Facebook, Google and Yahoo’s “built-in interfaces for US intelligence,” to the clandestine wheeling-and-dealing of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, to the war-crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan authorized by the neoconservative/neoliberal D.C. establishment. Like no other, Assange showed us that American wars are generally a rich man’s affair and a poor man’s fight.

Assange has given his life in the cause of exposing global state and corporate corruption and the collusion betwixt. He should be thanked for his service, for Assange did not enlist to do The State’s bidding in futile, wicked wars in faraway lands. Rather, he went-up against the Administrative, Warfare, Surveillance State for The People.

Therefore, all state agents—media-military-congressional complex; local and global—want this, the greatest libertarian alive (if barely) to disappear. Never mind that First-Amendment jurisprudence is clear-cut with respect to the guerrilla journalism of WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks operators have committed no crime in publishing what is undeniably true, newsworthy information, with probative value. Besides, why has America any jurisdiction over a foreign entity (WikiLeaks) and a foreign national (Julian Assange)?

Well, America has jurisdiction over Assange because it has simply asserted it based on trumped-up charges equating his journalism with espionage. Which is why Assange now fears being “Epsteined.”

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The Donald Vs. The ‘Deep State’

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 10 Mar 2017 05:22:15 +0000

President Trump has credibly accused Obama of wire-tapping the Trump Tower phones during the 2016 campaign.

Whether the tapping of Trump Tower phones can be traced to Obama; whether it’s true or false—consider the counter-accusations floated by President Donald Trump about Barack Obama as part of a strategy.

The president is in survival mode. He’s backed into a corner and is fighting back with brio, counter-punching at the Machine intent on unseating him. The Donald is destabilizing the destabilizers.

The opinion makers were incensed. “He had no evidence when he smeared his predecessor. Just contemplate the recklessness—the sheer indifference to truth,” yelped the New York Times. “The administration can’t substantiate the wire-tapping claim,” screeched the MSNBC collective. On CNN it’s been incontinent outrage, every hour of each day, since president Trump shot across the bow at Obama.

Marching in lockstep, media have ruled that Trump’s wire-tapping taunt is unworthy of investigation. At the same time, the RussiaGate conspiracy with which media are hobbling the Trump presidency, and for which no credible proof exists—that’s beyond reproach as a news story.

Fake News’ fantastical idée fixe is that the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin to rob their “beloved” Hillary Clinton of her presidential birthright. To them, that’s what you’d call a perfectly legitimate and logical line of inquiry!

A CORRUPT NEWBORN? COME AGAIN?
Pursuing an investigation of the Trump Administration on the grounds that it’s deeply corrupt is like accusing a newborn baby of stealing a sibling’s toys. Trump’s policy making “past” is a few weeks old; Trump’s political record a few months old. Donald Trump is a political newborn. In the language of law, President Trump has no political criminal record. (Come to think of it, El Chapo has a cleaner criminal record than the last two American presidents. El-C had menaced and murdered fewer people than 43 or 44.)

If anything, the counterclaim against Obama is much more intuitive. Obama has a long, checkered political past, having passed the “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act of 2008. This legislation retroactively legalized the Bush administration’s illegal and unconstitutional surveillance, first revealed by The New York Times in 2005, and indemnified the telecommunications companies for their cooperation in these acts.” (The assessment excerpted is courtesy of Bill Moyers, considered an august force on the Left.)

If a veteran political operative like Obama is considered beyond reproach, incapable of abusing power—all the more so is it irrational, irresponsible and in Third-World style to hound an administration not yet fully assembled or ensconced, for a political past it lacks. Sane people must walk away from Fake News’ Russia Ruse.

Like nobody before, President Trump has threatened the existence of the unelected, extra-constitutional Deep State—the intelligence community included. This fire-breathing monster has taken its first victim (Gen. Michael Flynn). And it plans to take Trump down.

WIKILEAKS VS. THE DEEP STATE
The greatest libertarian alive, a martyr for truth like no other, is Julian Assange of WikiLeaks. Whether fighting visible government or the Deep State; Bush or Obama, Mr. Assange is a hero.

Right now, Our Hero is in the process of blowing the lid off the CIA. Assange’s latest data dump has exposed the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency for the habitual hacker it is. Revealed, too, is the CIA’s modus operandi: For their own cyber-infractions, the agency is, allegedly, in the habit of forensically framing other actors (like Russia?).

“I think the president is absolutely right. His phone calls, everything he did electronically, were being monitored,” ventured Bill Binney, a 36-year veteran of the National Security Agency. Binney, who resigned in protest from the NSA in 2001, told Fox Business that “everyone’s conversations are being monitored and stored.”

During the Bush era, the mantra of DC operatives like Karl Rove was, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”Not much has changed.

THEY CREATE YOUR REALITY
A reality not of the making of America’s entrenched punditocracy, its self-anointed intelligentsia, slick Big Media, slimy politicians, Democrat and Republican, spooks and bureaucrats—will be rejected as rogue. Or, dubbed as conspiracy.

But the Deep State is not a conspiracy; it’s a term. The term has long since been deployed on the Left and by libertarians alike to denote the state within a state, operating, for the most, extra-constitutionally.

The term was explained nicely by an expert solicited by the Public Broadcasting Service’s Bill Moyers. “The Anatomy of the Deep State” inveighed against the Bush-era Deep State apparatus. These observations obtain across party-lines:

“All complex societies have an establishment, a social network committed to its own enrichment and perpetuation. In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global reach, the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself. That said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not so much sinister (although it has highly sinister aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched. Far from being invincible, its failures, such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it is only the Deep State’s protectiveness towards its higher-ranking personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent ineptitude.”

Washington Post writers Dana Priest and William K. Arkin ought to be the first to acknowledge that the use of the concept is perfectly proper. In their special series, “Top Secret America,” the two chronicled “the scope of the privatized Deep State and the degree to which it had metastasized after the September 11 attacks.”

The “deconstruction of the administrative state,” attested Stephen Bannon, assistant to the president and White House chief strategist, is President Trump’s goal. Bannon said so at the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC (CPUKE, before Trump).

Similarly, my June 2016 book, “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed,” made the case for “The Donald’s Creative Destruction.” I argued that what you’re witnessing in media and among national and transnational elites is one colossal, ongoing, political grand mal, in response to Trump.Trump is rocking their world.

And not in a good way. The sprawling political apparatus that makes up the D.C. Deep State is now writhing like a fire-breathing mythical monster in the throes of death. Or, so we hope.

Alas, the president is behind enemy lines. A Congress, to whose members he handed victories, in 2016, has reverted to siding with the Democrats and the Deep State against Donald Trump. An FBI riddled with partisan operatives has joined the House and Senate intelligence committees to “investigate” Trump on trumped-up political chargers. One month into Trump’s presidency, and the treasonous Left is calling for his impeachment. Their darling, lifelong megalomaniac John McCain, has dared to call Trump a dictator. On and on.

In this constitutional Mad Max, the post-constitutional candidate is doing what the Forgotten Man had hoped President Trump would do: punch back. Hard.

Understanding President Donald Trump, then, means shifting to process mode. It means jumping a level of abstraction to look, not at a particular Trump tweet, claim, or verbal thrust and parry. Rather, you must consider their combined, devastating effects on oft-subversive, extra-constitutional, Deep State structures.

©2017 By ILANA MERCER
The Daily Caller, Townhall.com, The Unz Review,
Constitution.com, The Libertarian Alliance,
The Liberty Conservative

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The Proof Is NOT IN The Putin

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 16 Dec 2016 00:39:26 +0000

President-elect Donald Trump made another great stride for America—maybe even for mankind, given the CIA’s global reach. Mr. Trump slapped the Central Intelligence Agency down. And hard.

The flurry over the Russia-related misinformation released by the CIA is reminiscent of the ramp-up to war in Iraq, except that, in Bushspeak: “Fool me once, shame on … shame on you. Fool me … You can’t get fooled again!”

The CIA has been asserting, sans proof, that Vladimir Putin had, essentially, elected Donald Trump. This, the Russian ruler is alleged to have done by hacking the emails of the Democratic National Congress and those of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager.

WikiLeaks, the source of October’s epic “data dump,” has denied Russian complicity in enlightening and educating the American people. Why enlightening and educating? Wonderful WikiLeaks provided definitive proof that the mass media are lapdogs, not watchdogs. Democratic lapdogs. The colluding quislings of the major networks and newspapers had actively worked to elect Mrs. Clinton. Thanks to WikiLeaks, Americans also learned of the contempt with which these Democrats hold them.

Distilled, the CIA’s position, shared by the rest of the foreign-policy priestly caste, is that the American people don’t have the right to know what WikiLeaks divulged. Better that Americans elect rotten representatives who hate their guts, than violate the privacy of rogues looking to live-off them.

Were it up to this writer, these mezzanine-level party operatives—Democrat and Republican—would have no privacy on the job. They’re auditioning to go on the people’s payroll! They’re looking to serve the people. As members of the degraded sphere of politics, make party apparatchiks as easy to monitor as parolees.

WikiLeaks’ proprietor has martyred himself in the cause of truth. Without fear or favor, Julian Assange has exposed the workings of business and government alike, Republican and Democrat—from Facebook, Google and Yahoo’s “built-in interfaces for US intelligence,” to the clandestine wheeling-and-dealing of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, to the neoconservatives’ war-crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As another unimpeachable source put it: “Do we believe Snowden and Assange, or John McCain and Lindsey Graham? I would add: Who’s likelier to destabilize his country by going to war? Putin or Graham?

So, too, does the Federal Bureau of Investigation disagree with the CIA’s intemperate charges against Russia. Not that the FBI is more trustworthy than the CIA. Still, the FBI at least is smarting because “Hillary Clinton was not criminally charged for mishandling classified information.”

Above all, the most powerful man in the world, President-elect Donald Trump, has now mainstreamed a truth for which some on the Right were ostracized, 14 years ago. Lest we forget, Mr. Trump ran on disavowing the lie that was Genghis Bush’s war on Iraq. And he continues to properly implicate the CIA in foul-play in that country: “President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team questioned the credibility of the CIA late Friday in response to a report the agency found Russia intervened in the election to boost his prospects. ‘These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,’ the Trump transition team said in a statement.”

Indeed, in the winter of 2002, this writer had perused publicly available CIA reports about Saddam Hussein. These, I reported, “offered no fresh incriminating evidence against Iraq, but a lot of equivocating, inventive bafflegab.” Used by the CIA were vague phrases that amounted to, “Saddam will probably”; “give him time and he will eventually”; “with sufficient weapons-grade fissile material, he’ll doubtless”; “he doesn’t have the capability to develop enriched uranium or plutonium to fuel a nuclear bomb, but hang in there …”

This was obviously not the letter of the CIA text, but it was close enough to its spirit. Unclear was how the CIA could claim to have cobbled evidence for weapons of mass destruction from an “interest in acquiring” or “an effort to procure,” considering its analysts offered no proof of such actions and purchases.

The same vague nomenclature deployed by CIA analysts to take Americans to war in Iraq is evident in the agency’s unsubstantiated claims against Russia. In trying to incriminate absent hard evidence, the CIA, as reported by the Washington Post, alludes to “a secret assessment,” nowhere apparent, identifying only “anonymous sources and individuals” in “closed-door briefing.”

Underpinning the Left’s delayed Russophobia—they’re about a century too late—is a logical fallacy: the argument from authority. Believe the CIA because its intelligence is derived “from multiple sources.” Be impressed since “the intelligence community [has] officially [not informally] accused Moscow.” Bow down because our CIA overlords’ non-specific intelligence makes it “quite clear” that the accusations against Moscow are justified. And if verbiage without evidence leaves you unconvinced, well then, “Democratic leaders in the room unanimously agreed …”

Onward to war.

As I see it, Trump’s daily intelligence briefings are tangentially related to the attempt to incriminate Russia in ridding us of Hillary. Said President-elect Trump to Fox News’ Chris Wallace: “I don’t need to be told the same thing every day, every morning, same words. ‘Sir, nothing has changed. Let’s go over it again.’ I don’t need that. … If something should change from this point, immediately call me. I’m available on one minute’s notice.”

The terminally stupid talking heads are outraged. Economizing always rattles the politicians and the presstitutes (with apologies to honest, hardworking prostitutes). They’re used to creating redundancies and duplication, which are lucrative. But in President-elect Trump, the establishment has a different animal—someone who’s looking to eliminate redundancies; who’s aware of the cost of a scarce resource like time.

More crucially, the daily intelligence briefings likely comprise a good deal of “analysis,” and NOT original intelligence intercepts. Perhaps Mr. Trump is not wild about the quality of “analysis” America has been receiving from 17 highly politicized intelligence agencies. (Talk about redundancies!) I know I’d want to compare the original intelligence intercepts with the analysis rendered by the “experts,” before making life-and-death decisions.

The Daily Caller, Townhall.com, The Unz Review,
Constitution.com, Praag.org, The Libertarian Alliance (image credit).
December 15

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Just Another Mouth in the Republican Fellatio Machine

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 00:26:05 +0000

The symbolic thrust of Hustler’s crude, much-protested, photo-shopped depiction of Rockefeller Republican S.E. Cupp is commendable: Silence this siren of stupidity.

The Hustler make-believe image of Cupp was captioned incorrectly, describing the “conservative” commentator as “someone who had read too much Ayn Rand in high school and ended up joining the dark side.”

Sacrilege. If S. E. Cupp has read Rand’s work, she has internalized none of it.

The problem with the product (or production) called Cupp is not that it is conservative and is being victimized for heralding conservative truths. This was the tired tack adopted by almost all the rightists who’ve rushed to Cupp’s rescue.

On the contrary. Cupp is no conservative. Like a lot of loud idiots, Cupp lacks a coherent ideology.

Dumb distaff abounds on America’s news channels. Cupp is a leader of the pack, a luminary in the Age of the Idiot, rivaled only by Grand Old Party leading lights such as Margaret Hoover and Gretchen Carlson (Bill O’Reilly’s circus clowns, AKA the “Culture Warriors”), Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Carrie Prejean, Noelle Nikpour, and Dana Perino (the Heidi Klum of the commentariat).

Like these low-watt women, Lolita’s forte is to gesture wildly and grimace, while parroting talking points disgorged by every other Bush bootlicker before her.

In one MSNBC clip, so typical of a Cupp appearance, S. E. showcases her feel for American liberties by making a weak case for the right of a man to hire a lawyer, in the USA—a pathologically litigious country, which jails more individuals than any other. During that debut on “Now” With Alex Wagner, Cupp desperately latched onto a catchy phrase (“precipice politics”) the host had floated, and repeated it again and again to help conceal her discursive meandering. By contrast, Naomi Wolf was oracular.

On Dylan Ratigan’s confused, MSNBC slot, Cupp embarrassed herself even more than usual. Her considered opinion was that when you give corporations bailout money, and they then blow the cash abroad, this is an example of the free market at work. Live with it, Cupp counseled.

Another memorable appearance, this time on David Asman’s “America’s Nightly Scorecard,” saw bobbing head Cupp team-up with Jedediah Bila, who is also misrepresented as a conservative, to call Julian Assange of the WikiLeaks fame, a rapist. Cupp seconded the opinion with … vigorous nods of the noggin.

Recall, Assange was “condomed” in Swedish law for having consensual sex sans condom. Swedish sexual-harassment law is more diabolical than anything that radical American feminist jurist Catharine Mackinnon could dream-up in her sweetest dreams—Mackinnon’s baleful influence on American and Canadian jurisprudence cannot be underestimated. Bila and Cupp, two “conservatives,” were on Sweden’s (and Mackinnon’s) side.

Lolita’s problem is that her mouth spouts mind-numbing banalities and fatuities. And The Mouth shows no signs of letting up.

Granted, Cupp is nowhere near as off-putting as the licentious, self-adoring and dense Meghan McCain, but she’s up there with Krystal Ball, a Democratic TV twin, whose voice sounds as though it has been squeezed from the other end of her anatomy (to borrow a Greg-Gutfeld analogy I’ve refined).

Ball is famous for a failed run for Congress and for Internet photos in which she’s seen “fellating a reindeer dildo nose,” as New York Magazine described it. These credentials have, no doubt, helped Ball procure plum positions on the idiot’s lantern.

Still, Ball is not as studiously dumb and brazen as Cupp. Likewise, Democrat Kirsten Powers might be dreadfully dull, without an idea of her own, but she’s ladylike. I’ll also take Imogen Lloyd Webber, a British import (Andrew Lloyd Webber’s daughter), over Cupp anytime. Once a member of the Fox News moron menagerie, Lloyd Webber’s most original line, blurted out with great conviction on “The Factor,” was: “We must build bridges with Islam.” She now reserves her syrupy idealism for MSNBC. Unlike the American competition, Imogen possesses a modicum of self- knowledge. “I’m not particularly bright and I put myself under a lot of pressure to do well,” she once confessed, disarmingly.

Nevertheless, “Big Media,” left and right, came together unequivocally to defend the dishonored S.E. Cupp (who has been honored for her vomitous prose on C-SPAN’s Book TV, and was called on to speak at CPUKE 2012). Taki’s Kathy Shaidle surmised that this was so, because Cupp is “Big Media. And Big Media cares first and foremost about itself and its own.”

I disagree.

The very same colluding quislings more often than not stick it to Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin, who are the quintessential, conservative, Big-Media babes.

Here’s the real reason behind the establishment’s affection for this member of the Republican fellatio machine:

Major Media feeds on mediocrity. Coulter and Malkin are not mediocre; they’ve got talent.

Cupp is part of an implicit program of fem affirmative action.

For the political establishment, intellectual equilibrium is optimally maintained when the Cupps outnumber the Coulters.

Sidekick Cupp is on TV, weighing in on weighty matters, because however hard she and her ilk try, they cannot outsmart their hosts (O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Dylan Ratigan, Martin Bashir).

Major Media is like a big amorphous amoeba. This simple, single-celled organism will instinctively act in unison, in order to preserve its integrity.

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Assange Is Us

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Judge Andrew Napolitano, the anchor of Fox Business’ “Freedom Watch,” has expressed his doubts as to whether Army soldier Pfc. Bradley Manning could have single-handedly gained access to, and released to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks, close to a million classified documents, among which are military field reports about Afghanistan and Iraq.

I disagree. The military is government. The military works like government; is financed like government, and sports many of the same inherent malignancies of government, chief of which is its liberalism. Like the government, the military is freighted with pathological political correctness. Its recruits are often a product of a selection process aimed at group affirmation.

Every time I turn around, the generals and the political planners at the Pentagon are holding workshops on how to make the military hospitable to homosexuals — having already worked mightily to ensure that the ranks have been thoroughly feminized, and that the fraternizing that accompanies a coed Army is generously accommodated. Why, just the other day, a top official in the Defense Department went weak at the knees over the Dream Act. This bipartisan amnesty effort for the kids of illegal aliens; a “multi-billion-dollar illegal alien student bailout,” was deemed by Clifford Stanley, the Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, as “an obvious way to attract more high-quality recruits to the armed forces.” The FoxNews.com report featured images of low-quality, sneering Hispanic student demonstrators, whose hate-filled faces made the mug of the Jihadi who committed fratricide at Fort Hood look sweet by comparison; and “Bradass87” (Manning’s email handle), positively cherubic.

Oddly enough, after softening educational and other requirements for military recruits, the top brass seem surprised when their sub-standard enlistees are incapable of abiding by a code of secrecy, a contract; or, conversely, cannot refrain from killing colleagues (as in the case of the aforementioned Major Nidal Malik Hasan).

One can’t expect members of a liberal organization—in structure and philosophy— to adhere to strict codes of conduct. Liberalism is about license and lenience. Disciplined, buttoned-up soldiers are bound to become an anomaly among America’s progressive fighting forces.

The law, understandably, is not on Manning’s side. This military malfeasant will, in all likelihood, face court martial. What is top-secret to some, however, is open-source for others. First-Amendment jurisprudence is just as clear-cut with respect to the great guerrilla journalism of WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks operators have committed no crime in publishing what is undeniably true, newsworthy information. Antsy America has no jurisdiction over a foreign entity (WikiLeaks) and its proprietor (Julian Assange).

The Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog confirmed that US law looks upon WikiLeaks as “a passive recipient of the material.” “Most First Amendment lawyers would say that preventing the publication of material is justified only where absolutely necessary to prevent almost immediate and imminent disaster. It’s an extremely high standard,” Jack Balkin, a First Amendment expert at Yale Law, told the WSJ.

Nevertheless, Attorney General Eric Holder is hounding Assange, and has been conducting “an active, ongoing criminal investigation,” tracked by Wikipedia. Holder is even contemplating charging this foreign national under the U.S. 1917 Espionage Act, which “prohibited any attempt to interfere with military operations, to support America’s enemies during wartime, to promote insubordination in the military, or to interfere with military recruitment.” (Recall, Bush by his lonesome declared the unconstitutional wars currently being prosecuted by Obama.)

Still, the Republicans and their Fox News phalanx are unhappy with Holder’s efforts, so far, to stifle the free-flow of information. John Ensign, a member of one of this country’s atrophied deliberative bodies, told Judge Napolitano that he and Senators Scott Brown and Joe Lieberman would be sponsoring a Bill to allow the Federal government “to crack down on websites and other publications that print the names of US military informants.” Clearly, Republicans would sooner sic the state on private citizens than deal with the military’s manifest inadequacies (and size).

A pumped-up Assange told the New Yorker in June that “a social movement to expose secrets could bring down many administrations that rely on concealing reality — including the US administration.” He has vowed to skewer “lying, corrupt and murderous leadership from Bahrain to Brazil.” Sounds good to me.

What doesn’t sound so good is the collectivist impulse among so many of freedom’s so-called defenders to condemn a man who took a great personal risk so as to expose the workings of the U.S. Empire. Why has this individual become the enemy? Should Americans not have an inkling, by now, of what it’s like to live at the mercy of the federal government’s imperially imposed edicts? Aren’t we all being treated as potential terrorists at the nation’s federally controlled airports, by the TSA, an arm of the government now stalking Assange?

Fox News led its reports on the latest leaked documents with headlines calling to “designate WikiLeaks a foreign terrorist organization.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seconded the sentiment: “The Leaks tear at the fabric of government,” she lamented.

Good. The “fabric” of such a government must be torn and shorn.

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The Warbots, The FLOTUS & Other Terrifying Things

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

ISLAM, THY NAME IS TERROR. Hillary Rodham Clinton delivered a heartfelt tribute to the 10 medical aid workers who were executed in the northern Badakhshan Province of Afghanistan. Experts say the culprits were likely a splinter, freelancing gang, calling itself the Taliban. Six of their victims were American. Had a gang of Jews or Christians perpetrated these acts against such saintly do-gooders ─ members of the murdered International Assistance Mission had wrapped up a cataract clinic and where on their way to improve dentition in another remote locale ─ Hillary would not have needed to reassure her countrymen about the peacefulness of the Jewish and Christian faiths. Alas, as anyone who has heard of Hamas, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, Sirhan Sirhan, Al Qaeda, Mohamed Atta, Hezbollah, and Chechnya will know ─ terror, thy name is Islam. So, out came a variation on the magic mantra. “Terror has no religion,” promised the Secretary of State. Whatever you say. Just so long as Christians driven by the love of Jesus Christ scrutinize the travel advisory you issue, Madam Secretary, on the State Department’s website, for Americans bound to Afghanistan. Following lengthy descriptions of the mess and misery one can expect in that country, the traveler is informed that Islam informs every aspect of life in Afghanistan. Fair enough.

WARBOTS ON THE WARPATH. More insights into the influence of America and its cowed and coerced allies in that blighted and benighted region came to us courtesy of WikiLeaks, cyberspace’s answer to the Empire. Veteran war correspondent Eric Margolis put it well:

“The facts revealed by WikiLeaks are indeed shocking: wide-scale killing of civilians by US and NATO forces; torture of prisoners handed over to the Communist-dominated Afghan secret police; American death squads; endemic corruption and theft; double-dealing and demoralization of Western occupation forces facing ever fiercer Taliban resistance. … WikiLeaks has done the world a service by confirming what critics of the Afghan War have long been saying.”

Presidents Barack Obama and George Bush, aided by their lapdogs in Congress and among the media, are responsible for stationing American soldiers in Afghanistan ─ first to find Osama Bin Laden, and when that mission failed, to introduce a tribal society to the joys of gay marriage, the ballot box, and female emancipation. These are the people to blame when Afghans and Americans come to harm. WikiLeaks has simply pulled back the curtain to reveal what the cozy military-media-industrial-congressional complex is doing in your name (sorry, “for you freedoms,” to parrot Palin). Yet, instead of ending this 300 billion dollar disaster of an occupation, the warbots want to quash the WikiLeaks uprising, arrest its founder, Julian Assange, and kill the leaker, Private Bradley Manning. The last recommendation was made by US Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.). Rogers wants Manning executed. Republicans don’t seem to give a fig about the corruption and collateral murder in which the military has become mired in the course of prosecuting the “AfPak” war.

PIMP MY FLOTUS. A world away from her husband’s dirty little war was the First Lady’s ostentatious sojourn to Spain. I must say that the Marie Antoinette metaphor for Michelle did not do it for me. Despite the motorcades and the session with the Spanish monarchs at their Marivent Palace — the mental imagine that I got was made in America; it came from Reality TV or MTV. Shades of the shows “Pimp my Ride” and “Cribs” came to mind. Coloring my imagination was a vivid, prior mental image of the “sedate” soiree the first lady held for Mexican President Felipe Calderon, down to the disco ball, and the half-nude, pelvis-grinding Beyonce. (Bibi Netanyahu was confined to the cellar.)

Still sillier were demands our patrician pundits made (at least one of whom has touted one-time porn star Kim Kardashian as a role model because she does not imbibe) for Mrs. Obama’s dollars to be spent stateside, so as to boost the American economy. Michelle Obama’s income comes from taxpayers. The first family doesn’t produce anything; it only consumes American wealth. Somewhere in the US, productive activities have already been suspended in order to fund the POTUS, the FLOTUS and their lavish lives. It matters not where the first family spends the loot.

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