November 1, 2019
For about 70 years the CIA has been undermining a free press. It began with Operation Mockingbird, a Cold War operation against communism. The CIA recruited journalists into a propaganda network. The CIA paid journalists to write fake stories or to publish stories written by the CIA in order to control explanations that served the agency’s agendas. Student and cultural organizations and intellectual magazines, such as Encounter, were suborned into the CIA’s propaganda network. Thanks to the German journalist, Udo Ulfkotte, we know that every European journalist of any significance is a CIA asset. In 1977 Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame wrote in Rolling Stone that the CIA “has secretly bankrolled numerous foreign press services, periodicals and newspapers—both English and foreign language—which provided excellent cover for CIA operatives.” Like most other people, Western journalists were all too willing to sell out their integrity for money. The few who were not were blackmailed into submission.
The few honest journalists who remain have been forced out of the “mainstream” or “presstitute media” onto Internet websites. Wikileaks is by far the best news organization of our time. To bring this organization to heel Washington, using its Swedish, British, and Ecuadoran vassals, has persecuted Wikileaks’ founder, Julian Assange, for years. The CIA’s media vassals, including the New York Times and The Guardian, both of which published the material leaked to Wikileaks that is being used to destroy Assange, have joined wholeheartedly in the persecution of the World’s Best and Most Honest Journalist.
Currently Assange is being tortured, apparently to death, while bring held in solitary confinement in a maximum security British prison awaiting his extradition to the US on false charges. As the CIA cannot be certain it has suborned all the federal judges, Washington is just as happy if Assange dies in a British prison as there is no valid case against him under current US law. Probably the absence of a valid case doesn’t matter as the rule of law in the US is very difficult to find.
The lack of any valid case against Assange is the reason the distinguished documentary film maker John Pilger describes Assange’s persecution as a Stalinist Show Trial.
What is astonishing about the CIA’s destruction of Julian Assange is the silence of American law schools and bar associations, the silence of universities, the absence of student and labor union protests, the absence of any protection of Assange’s rights from courts as the last news organization willing and capable of holding governments accountable for their crimes is destroyed openly in full view of the law schools, intellectuals, bar associations, courts, and print and TV media.
The CIA’s control over explanations is as complete as the control Big Brother has in George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984. And this doesn’t bother the citizens of the US, UK, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Europe. Only a few individuals speak out for Assange, and they, too, are demonized in turn.
The Age of Tyranny has now descended upon the Western World.
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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog, Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
