by William Skink

Will the lawless US Empire get the revenge it desires against Julian Assange? A big step toward achieving vengeance happened today when Ecuador’s president allowed British authorities to enter the embassy and arrest Assange. Here is what the previous president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, had to say in a scathing tweet:

The greatest traitor in Ecuadorian and Latin American history, Lenin Moreno, allowed the British police to enter our embassy in London to arrest Assange.
Moreno is a corrupt man, but what he has done is a crime that humanity will never forget.

Ouch.

What I find to be particularly disgusting is having to watch the same media that spent the last two years peddling bullshit leaks from anonymous sources in order to feed the xenophobic, anti-Russia hysteria now shift gears to report on Assange’s fate. Do any of those well paid faces and voices have any understanding of the potential impact silencing Assange will have for press freedom? I’d ask some real journalists, like Gary Webb and Michael Hastings, but they’re dead.

While it seems obvious to me I’ll still go through the motions by pointing out that the behemoth corporations that have steadily consolidated their control of the media haven’t done so in order to protect or promote press freedom, quite the opposite.

Even well-funded upstarts like the Intercept, who made their name thanks to Edward Snowden’s leaked disclosures about the privacy-destroying expansion of the surveillance state, is moving in the opposite direction of transparency by shutting down the Snowden archives after only publishing around 10% of the material Snowden leaked. Here is some speculation on why the Intercept is shutting down the archive, and it’s not the “budget constraint” reasoning offered by Greenwald:

A more compelling reason for why the Snowden archive failed to retain its value to the Intercept in the eyes of Greenwald, Scahill and Reed lies in the troubling government and corporate connections of their benefactor Pierre Omidyar, who — as the sole shareholder of First Look Media — pays their enormous salaries.

As journalist Tim Shorrock recently wrote at Washington Babylon, a likely motive behind the decision to shut down the Snowden archive was related to “the extensive relationships the Omidyar Group, the billionaire’s holding company, and the Omidyar Network, his investment vehicle, have forged over the past decade with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and other elements of the national security state,” as well as “the massive funds Omidyar and his allies in the world of billionaire philanthropy control through their foundations and investment funds.” MintPress has recently published several reports on both aspects of Omidyar’s many connections to the national security state and the non-profit industrial complex.

Journalist Tim Shorrock goes further with his speculation in the following direct quote:

The Snowden collection had become problematic to Omidyar as he positioned himself as a key player in USAID’s ‘soft power’ strategy to wean the world from ‘extremism’ with massive doses of private and public monies. The classified NSA documents may not have been a problem under the Obama White House, where Omidyar enjoyed privileged status. But under Trump, whose Justice Department has gone beyond Obama’s attacks on whistleblowers by pursuing Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, holding on to the Snowden cache may had become a liability.”

So what is corporate media going to do? Wikileaks was a significant card in the house of cards known as Russiagate, despite evidence the was mostly ignored by the MSM, like Craig Murray standing up and saying he knew for a fact Russia wasn’t behind the leaked Clinton/Podesta emails. This was first reported by the Daily Mail all the way back in 2016:

A Wikileaks envoy today claims he personally received Clinton campaign emails in Washington D.C. after they were leaked by ‘disgusted’ whisteblowers – and not hacked by Russia.

Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and a close associate of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, told Dailymail.com that he flew to Washington, D.C. for a clandestine hand-off with one of the email sources in September.

‘Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,’ said Murray in an interview with Dailymail.com on Tuesday. ‘The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.’

Who are you going to believe? Murray and Wikileaks, or a third party–Crowdstrike–HIRED by the DNC to evaluate their servers? Remember, the FBI never analyzed the servers the emails were taken from.

I doubt there will be any significant domestic outcry over the fate of Assange. Democrats and the herd that follows them think Assange is a Russian asset who deprived their Queen from the throne, while Republicans and the herd that follows them don’t appreciate that America’s war machine was exposed as the lawless, corrupt, tax-sucking monster that it is, a monster that can’t even win a war against the Taliban after nearly two decades.

Whatever happens to Assange, after today, anyone in this country who thinks there is such a thing as a “free press” is seriously deluded.