[Peace-discuss] Notes

[J.B. Nicholson]

Notes for items to discuss on News from Neptune. Have a good show guys. 
Happy new year!

Theme: The beatings will continue until morale improves.

-J



Assange: ‘Assange said, I’m slowly dying here’ – Friend recounts Christmas 
Eve call with WikiLeaks founder

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjQgED7mulI -- RT interview extracts
https://cdnv.rt.com/files/2019.12/5e0a358085f54063ac3beb15.mp4 -- Full RT 
interview
https://on.rt.com/a85u -- RT article

RT remains one of the few places one can get drumbeat updates on Assange's 
status. Corporate-friendly media (including Democracy Now) simply don't 
bother to keep up with his court hearings, health status, insider (possibly 
leaked) video, and therefore you can tell this is not an important case for 
them. This case might well be something they'd rather you didn't know about 
at all.

RT interviewed British journalist Vaughan Smith who is also Julian 
Assange's friend. Smith received a Christmas Eve call from Assange who is 
still in Belmarsh prison (a maximum security prison) being held in solitary 
confinement for 23 hours a day. Smith noted that the WikiLeaks founder had 
trouble speaking. Assange's extradition hearing is pending and expected to 
last a couple of weeks. Given the reports of the obviously biased judge 
he's dealt with so far, this hearing is not expected to go well for Assange.

Here's what Smith said:

(Text from the YouTube-hosted video which has interview responses extracted 
from the other rt.com-hosted video):
> Julian rang me because he spent Christmas with me and my family in 2010
> while on bail all that time ago. I think he wanted simply a few minutes
> of escape and to talk to us because of the memories he had of that happy
> memory. His speech was slurred, he was speaking slowly; now, Julian is a
> highly articulate, very clear person when he speaks. And he sounded
> awful and it was very upsetting to hear him. The idea of him being
> sedated has come from several people who visited him who had clearly
> been told. And the British government have been asked about it and they
> refuse to address that matter. What they say is they're not mistreating
> him but clearly he's being kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a
> day. He sounded awful and he said to me that "I'm slowly dying here". He
> said that also to my wife, not, of course, to my children. His father
> keeps telling us this. His father is telling us this too. You know, we
> must stop this. What I find so depressing, as a country, is that clearly
> we harbor political prisoners, we have political prisoners because
> that's exactly what he is. I didn't think that we were the sort of
> country that mistreated them in this way.

https://on.rt.com/a88c --  ‘US is torturing Chelsea Manning’: Top UN 
official says her treatment is ‘cruel and degrading’

> Chelsea Manning is being subjected to cruel, inhumane and degrading
> treatment, constituting torture by the US government over her refusal to
> testify against whistleblower website WikiLeaks, a top United Nations
> official has said.
> 
> UN special rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer accused the government of
> torturing Manning in a November letter, which was just released on
> Tuesday. In the letter, Melzer wrote that Manning is suffering “an
> open-ended, progressively severe measure of coercion” which fulfils “all
> the constitutive elements of torture.”
> 
> Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst, was arrested on May 16
> after she refused to testify against WikiLeaks before a grand jury. She
> is still being detained at the Alexandria Detention Center in Virginia
> and is facing fines of $1,000 a day.

Nils Melzer tweeted https://twitter.com/NilsMelzer/status/1211819067503521792
> Just out: My official letter to #USGovt of 1 Nov 2019 explaining why
> continued detention of @xychelsea is not a lawful sanction but an
> open-ended, progressively severe coercive measure amounting to torture &
> should be discontinued & abolished without delay

https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/TMResultsBase/DownLoadPublicCommunicationFile?gId=24925 
-- Nils Melzer's letter




Media: Democracy Now executive director and host Amy Goodman repeat 
corporate talking points, miss several countervailing points while Goodman 
reiterated her now years-old speech about the media and media responsibility.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpGgvLZpeV4 -- About 3 weeks ago Amy 
Goodman was the subject of an "Intercept" interview with Intercept 
co-founder and former Democracy Now journalist Jeremy Scahill. Part of the 
interview concerned the media:

> Jeremy Scahill: It's kind of fascinating the evolution or devolution,
> however you want to view it, of the way journalists and large news
> organizations handle these situations because you will have on any given
> day on cable news many many Democrats -- politicians, pundits, whatever
> a Democratic strategist is -- and they're all talking about how we can't
> trust anything that the Trump administration says. And then you have,
> oh, when it comes to Israel policy, or certain issues around Saudi
> Arabia, or now Iran, where you have very prominent Democrats who claim
> to believe that Trump is the greatest threat ever to American democracy
> who are actively promoting this administration's case for war. And you
> do see some news organizations picking up on that and saying 'Yes, he's
> dangerous, but on this issue it's about our national security'.
> 
> Amy Goodman: The media, obviously, is extremely critical of Trump on a
> number of issues. And I think you should be critical of those in power,
> holding those in power accountable. The reason they found their backbone
> is because he's directly attacking them and he has from the beginning of
> his presidency, you know, 'the media is enemy of the people', he keeps
> intoning and he names the news organizations, he names journalists, and
> he targets them. So they're standing up, as they should. Except when it
> comes to foreign policy. When President Trump bombs Syria, you know, you
> had the networks CNN and MSNBC, when he dropped that MOAB -- the Mother
> of All Bombs -- in Afghanistan that was developed by Bush that was not
> dropped by Bush or Obama, within a few weeks Trump is dropping this in
> Afghanistan with no clear reason why and you have both Brian Williams on
> MSNBC and Fareed Zakharia on CNN in these cases saying that's when he
> became president.
> 
> [We hear clips of Zakharia saying this is "when [Trump] became President
> of the United States, I think this was actually a big moment" and
> Williams saying "we see these beautiful pictures at night from the decks
> of these two US Navy vessels in the Eastern Mediterranean. I am tempted
> to quote the great Leonard Cohen 'I am guided by the beauty of our
> weapons']
> 
> Amy Goodman (continues): They cannot diverge from the President even as
> try to protect themselves from him attacking them.
> 
> Jeremy Scahill: Well, I would add another issue to that: the issue of
> the targeting of journalists and journalistic sources. I mean, it was
> like a national scandal when Jim Acosta had his valuable press pass
> taken away for, you know, some days. And it was drumbeat coverage of
> this on CNN. And yet you have had record numbers of prosecutions of
> journalistic sources beginning with Reality Winner; this administration
> has gone after The Intercept. And you had Daniel Pail, the alleged drone
> whistleblower, facing 50 years in prison. Julian Assange, 18 criminal
> counts alleging espionage, could spend more than a century and a half in
> prison if he ends up being extradited to the United States. And you see
> no solidarity there. If Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers
> today, many many news organizations, journalists, media figures,
> politicians would all be talking about the crime that he committed, and
> he needs to pay the price for what he's done. And yes, I understand
> this, but there are official channels to go through. I mean it's
> remarkable, I don't care how many movies Tom Hanks is in about the
> Pentagon Papers, the fact of the matter remains that largely in this
> country there remains no journalistic solidarity when it's happening in
> realtime.
> 
> Amy Goodman: It is a critical issue that there is press solidarity. I
> mean that makes the difference, because how do people learn about the
> world if they don't know something personally about a country or a
> person? They learn about it through the media and that's why it's so
> critical. It can't just happen once. It's the drumbeat, front page
> coverage that matters. And in this case, this matters enormously.
> Whether it's Julian Assange, or Chelsea Manning, who remains in jail;
> we're talking about a whistleblower, we're talking about a publisher.
> And everyone has to take a stand cause it isn't even only about them
> it's about everyone. The media is essential to the functioning of a
> democratic society. The media's releasing information is about people's
> right to know. When the media releases information, people can, when
> they know something, do something about it. And that's why it's so
> critical. Yes, it is critical that the media not act as a conveyor belt
> for the lies of an administration, the lies so often take lives, but
> exposes mean that people live.

I think that the above does not represent a fair analysis of either 
Goodman's recent journalism or how her show has changed around the time of 
the 2016 US presidential election.

During 2003 and the run-up to the war in Iraq, her show was easily 
recommendable. She'd repeat the New York Times' front page lies and then 
immediately debunk them by quoting people who knew better such as the IAEA 
(International Atomic Energy Agency), Hans Blix's group, who clearly said 
that the narrative of Iraqi WMDs was untrue and did not reflect their 
experience from on-the-ground inspections. During the early part of that 
invasion, Democracy Now told the audience they were running reports from 
"unembedded" journalists -- journalists who didn't go with the militaries 
that invaded and occupied Iraq -- and this set DN apart from the corporate 
media which took pride in their "embedded" reports, showing us only what 
the establishment (courtesy of the military) wanted us to see.

Around and after the 2016 election, things at DN changed. Goodman started 
repeating talking points that avoided making the Democratic Party (and 
Hillary Clinton's campaign) look bad without any counternarrative. It would 
be up to guests to debunk a corporate-friendly narrative (such as Glenn 
Greenwald debunking Russiagate stories). I don't give DN much credit for 
that because DN is a live show which means guests don't speak for the show 
and live airing makes editing out counterspeech obvious and clumsy. The 
headline segments are another matter entirely: in the headline segments you 
get nothing but what DN wants you to know.

Some points in this Intercept interview require some unpacking because the 
interview leaves out salient details that could help us reach a different 
conclusion than this non-challenging interview would have us believe:

* Scahill mentioned Reality Winner -- Winner was an intelligence contractor 
accused of leaking classified NSA documents about alleged Russian meddling 
in the 2016 election, leaked information to The Intercept. About an hour 
after The Intercept's publication of these NSA documents, the Justice 
Department announced it had arrested Winner charging her with violating the 
Espionage Act. How did the documents come to be identified as coming from 
Winner? Someone at The Intercept vetted the documents' veracity by sharing 
unredacted documents with the government and asking the US government if 
the documents were theirs.

In June 2017 the New York Times published a few paragraphs on this which 
explain the situation.

 From 
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/06/business/media/intercept-reality-winner-russia-trump-leak.html
> The Intercept said it did not know the identity of its source, who
> mailed the document in a plain envelope. But an F.B.I. affidavit
> released on Monday described a series of actions by the news outlet,
> such as sharing a copy of the document with the National Security
> Agency, that allowed the document’s provenance to be quickly deduced.
> 
> “I haven’t seen a mistake this consequential before,” said Barton
> Gellman, who reported for The Washington Post on the leaks provided by
> Edward J. Snowden.
> 
> In an interview, Mr. Gellman said The Intercept’s scoop was “a really
> good story” from a professional organization that “knows a lot about
> this stuff — they have arguably the best operational security experts in
> journalism over there.”
> 
> “So it’s baffling that they didn’t make use of them,” he added.
> 
> National-security reporting is specialized, but journalists in the field
> said Tuesday that The Intercept had appeared to ignore some basic
> tenets.
> 
> Sharing an original document when asking questions of government
> officials, as The Intercept appears to have done, can expose metadata
> and high-tech watermarks that may reveal a leaker’s identity. And an
> affidavit asserts that The Intercept revealed to a second contractor
> that the document was mailed from Augusta, Ga., where Ms. Winner
> resides.

Barton Gellman should become more familiar with WikiLeaks' setup; there's 
only one organization to leak to, according to CIA whistleblower John 
Kiriakou, that's WikiLeaks.

As to the likelihood Gellman and the NYT has the correct story here: it's 
plausible. Printer microdots are tiny dots on the backside of a printed 
page coming out of a modern laser printer. These dots can be found (if one 
looks for them) and used to identify a specific print job ID. Looking up 
the print job ID in the print logs can identify which user printed the job, 
on which printer, and at which time. So it's possible that Winner used her 
office's printer to print the leaked documents and then sent those 
documents in a plain envelope to The Intercept. And then The Intercept 
revealed way too much information in its hamfisted method of authenticating 
the documents.

None of this is mentioned in Scahill & Goodman's interview.

* Goodman said "you should be critical of those in power, holding those in 
power accountable" but she's been that "conveyor belt for the lies of an 
administration" on Russiagate (repeating and never debunking the lies of 
Russiagate which lead to, among other things, Russian sanctions which help 
injure and kill people as sanctions do everywhere else the US imposes them: 
Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, etc.). Goodman also repeatedly hosts Marcy Wheeler, 
a Russiagate repeater whom former DN journalist Aaron Mate has interviewed 
and debunked during his brief tenure at The Real News.

Goodman also echoes and never debunks reports of what happened in the 
Skripal poisonings (in Salisbury, England in early March 2018). Similar 
poisonings also later happened in the same city which killed one person. 
There are many questions worth raising there but you're not likely to hear 
them on Democracy Now. All DN offers are a series of 1-paragraph headline 
stories (8 mentioning "Skripal") none of which incentivize the audience to 
ask about the details of the story such as why the attacks occur so close 
to a British chemical lab (like the one needed to formulate the alleged 
"nerve agent"), what involvement the Russian state has in this versus other 
non-state Russians such as the Russian mafia (as Seymour Hirsch told RT). 
DN offers enough information on this to support the Russiagate narrative 
and nothing to challenge that narrative.

Goodman also echoes a corporate-compatible line on the recent alleged gas 
attack in Douma, Syria. Evidence at the time suggested that attack never 
happened, and the leaked reports from OPCW (Organization for the 
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) engineers say that the official OPCW 
report was untrue -- the gas canisters found on the scene were most likely 
"manually placed" and not dropped from the air. WikiLeaks has helped convey 
this OPCW information to us, and RT has been far more forthcoming with this 
story as it unfolds than Democracy Now.

The mishandling of both the alleged Douma gas attack and Russiagate were 
cause for Aaron Mate to quit his job at DN. Mate would also leave The Real 
News and The Intercept for comparable reasons. Today he publishes with The 
Grayzone Project (with Ben Norton, Anya Parampil, and Max Blumenthal) on 
his own YouTube show "Pushback with Aaron Mate" and has won an Izzy award 
for his Russiagate debunking.

None of this is mentioned in Scahill & Goodman's interview.

* Jeremy Scahill mentioned "the issue of the targeting of journalists and 
journalistic sources". but left out what CNN's Jake Tapper told Ruth Marcus 
of the Washington Post on-air: "the Obama administration has used the 
Espionage Act to go after whistleblowers who leaked to journalists ... more 
than all previous administrations combined". Neither Obama's name nor his 
alarming statistic come up in this interview but this clip could have been 
found and the audio replayed (as The Intercept did for other portions of 
this interview). Goodman doesn't bring this up either.

* Jeremy Scahill goes on to mention the 2018 kerfuffle involving CNN's Jim 
Acosta but it's not quite clear that Acosta's brief loss of press 
credentials pales in comparison to RT's under-pressure loss of capitol 
credentials in December 2017. Also, RT gets no mention in this Intercept 
interview, despite Goodman and Scahill agreeing that realtime "journalistic 
solidarity" is critical.

RT was threatened with a FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act) violation. 
You may have heard of FARA in the context of Russian gun rights activist 
Maria Butina who was smeared by the US government, charged with and 
convicted of a FARA violation. Butina recently finished serving prison time 
for her conviction and was deported to Russia.

RT was put in a tough spot which is both unfair and requires extra work 
from them seemingly because they're Russian and they challenge the US 
Russiagate narrative. If RT didn't comply -- including RT America which is, 
as Redacted Tonight's host Lee Camp tells us at the start of every show 
since being threatened with FARA violation, "Where Americans in America 
covering American news are called foreign agents" -- RT would lose all 
credentials to be in the briefing sessions with other press. If they did 
comply, more work awaits them. Meanwhile other state-owned foreign news 
outlets (the BBC and France 24, to name a couple) were not similarly 
threatened or forced to do what RT does. RT explained:

 From https://on.rt.com/91l2
> Concerned that Americans may be watching “foreign propaganda” (or
> something different than what is offered on the mainstream media menu)
> Representatives Seth Moulton (D-MA) and Elise Stefanik (R-NY) introduced
> the Countering Foreign Propaganda Act.
> 
> In practice, it would force RT to do even more reporting to the US
> government than it currently does under the Foreign Agents Registration
> Act (FARA) and will also force it to broadcast every 30 minutes a
> message saying it is funded by, and is “under editorial control” of, a
> foreign government. Apparently, the Federal Communications Commission
> (FCC) will also be the arbiter of who is under editorial control and who
> is not, because the BBC and France 24 would not be forced to disclose
> the origins of their funding, according to Foreign Policy (FP) –
> presumably, because their messaging is simply accidentally, sort of, in
> line with that of the British and French governments respectively.
> 
> RT’s stance on a potential crackdown in the US was summarized by its
> editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan: “When the high from FARA is no
> longer hard enough, the representatives switch to even harder
> legislation.”

This unfair approach to foreign so-called "agents" and propaganda continues 
to this day. You can see this announcement of foreign control and the 
increased logging requirements at the start of other RT America shows such 
as Chris Hedges' program "On Contact" and "Redacted Tonight".

In https://on.rt.com/8um6 RT wrote:
> Dave Lindorff, investigative journalist and founder of the news website
> This Can’t Be Happening, believes that evicting RT from the US Congress
> serves only to further demonize Russia, and that Russia will likely
> remain the only victim.
> 
> “I think this is all focused on demonizing Russia and it has to do with
> the military-industrial complex wanting to have an enemy and people
> getting tired of the war on terror, so why not to have the revival of a
> sort of Cold War. That’s a great way to get money for weapons systems,
> like, really expensive ones,” Lindorff said.
> 
> Since Russia is such a convenient scapegoat, Lindorff suggested that
> pushing the anti-Russian narrative may come in handy for US Congress
> members from both sides of the aisle, as it “allows a congressperson
> without having really to do anything to go back to their voters and say:
> 'Oh, I’m taking a tough stand against this Russian interference in our
> democratic system.'”
> 
> The continuing anti-Russian hysteria has also been fueled by the
> Democratic leadership, which is still “trying steer people away from the
> idea that they blew away the election by pushing the nomination of
> Hillary Clinton who then blew the elections,” Lindorff argued.

Amy Goodman and Democracy Now present no information about nor challenge to 
the inequities of Russiagate, RT's additional burdens, and thus offer no 
journalistic solidarity with the journalists of RT.

* In regard to Trump calling the media the enemy of the people, Trump has 
more of a point than Goodman describes in this interview. Let's not forget 
that the vast majority of the corporate media repeatedly predicted that 
Hillary Clinton would win the presidency in 2016. She lost and few in the 
media bothered to explain either that they were woefully wrong or tell 
their audience that they'd understand why the public would have so little 
trust for their methods. This alone represents a huge problem for anyone to 
conclude that Trump's media disdain is entirely without merit; every time 
we're reminded that he's POTUS versus what we were all told while he was a 
candidate is a sharp reminder of the failure of so much of the media.

Right now, Bernie Sanders is getting less coverage on MSNBC than Amy 
Klobuchar despite his polling 7 times higher than Klobuchar. Kyle Kulinsky 
(known as "Secular Talk" on YouTube) posted about this in 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9tnDuqJu2o -- a recent research project 
(the GDELT project) which tracked the number of mentions each Democratic 
Party presidential candidate received from December 16, 2019 through 
December 22, 2019 and compared the results to their polling popularity and 
their share of MSNBC mentions, and then listed the difference.

See https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EMnRI-HXUAAMvkk.jpg for this chart.

The largest difference is 11.9 points for Bernie Sanders -- Sanders got 238 
mentions, making up 9.9% of MSNBC coverage but is polling at 21.8%, second 
only to Joe Biden at 30.4%. Most other candidates are within 4 points of 
difference between their polling and mentions on MSNBC (Buttigieg had 6.5 
points difference and Klobuchar had 7 points difference). There's a reason 
people are using the "#BernieBlackout" hashtag on Twitter, and part of that 
is not just how he's being treated now but how this echoes his treatment by 
corporate media in 2016 (in other words, this isn't new and it's not 
surprising).

Other examples include Russiagate stories like the Washington Post article 
claiming Russians are taking over the US electrical grid via a Vermont 
power station, virtually every episode of the Rachel Maddow show since 
Trump was duly elected (Aaron Mate in his Intercept article showed that 
Russigate stories make up the majority of Maddow's show's focus), the 
widespread repetition of various lies stemming from the debunked Steele 
dossier including that Trump urinated on a Russian prostitute while having 
extramarital sex, and the recent admissions from the Inspector General's 
report on 2016 FBI spying on Trump campaign members (spying which Trump has 
long alleged to be true but those with Trump Derangement Syndrome have 
argued never happened).

The recent publication of the Afghan papers from the Washington Post 
clearly state that the Bush and Obama administrations had no idea who our 
Afghan enemies were, where they were, and yet we're now in our third 
administration to continue that war at the cost of billions every year. 
This WaPo report is only getting real coverage in the alternative media. A 
separate report about trillions of dollars which are unaccounted for in the 
first-ever Defense Dept. audit also gets covered only in alternative media 
(except for DN). These points also go to why so many people have no reason 
to believe the mainstream media when they tell us the US can't afford 
something (a counterpoint never raised to justify killing people).

The Intercept has undergone a transformation as well: when it began it had 
a much smaller writing staff, they published far less frequently, and their 
publications were something to look forward to because each story was of 
high quality and stood up to inquiry. As the writing staff grew it became 
clear they were hiring people whose work was of a  lesser quality; the kind 
of articles one finds in the New York Times (which still enjoys a largely 
undeserved good reputation). In https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsY70_uIXNc 
or 
https://theintercept.com/2018/02/21/intercepted-podcast-russiamania-glenn-greenwald-vs-james-risen/ 
Glenn Greenwald and Jim Risen debate the Trump/Russia investigation and the 
article where Risen wrote:

https://theintercept.com/2018/02/16/trump-russia-election-hacking-investigation/
> But if a presidential candidate or his lieutenants secretly work with a
> foreign government that is a longtime adversary of the United States to
> manipulate and then win a presidential election, that is almost a
> textbook definition of treason.

Which Greenwald, a Constitutional lawyer, called "Not just wrong but 
dangerously wrong" and then Greenwald explained clearly why he found Risen 
to be so wrong (pointing to the excellent article from James Vladeck 
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/americans-have-forgotten-what-treason-actually-means-how-it-can-ncna848651 
). Despite the facts Greenwald raised in this debate, despite Vladeck's 
clear counterpoint to Risen's aforementioned assertion, Risen continues to 
defend Russiagate today. Greenwald said early on in this debate that Risen 
is "one of my heroes in journalism" but the devastating evidence to the 
contrary Greenwald brought is unignorable -- we are given ample reason to 
discount what Risen wrote, dismissing his input just as we do with so many 
other Russiagators.

President Trump lies on important issues quite a bit. But this isn't unique 
to Trump; remember Obama's "If you like your doctor you can keep your 
doctor"? That was a lie Obama took on tour across the country. The media 
most Americans are exposed to every day is riddled with what Trump famously 
calls "fake news". That term, fake news, has staying power precisely 
because it's not that hard to find fake news. But to listen to Amy Goodman 
in this Intercept interview you'd think that Trump's low opinion of the 
corporate media is entirely unjustified.

-J