...
And Julian's definitely not taking it lying down... nossirree.
For his part, Assange remains defiant. “The NSA and its U.K. accomplices show no respect for the rule of law,” he told The Intercept. “But there is a cost to conducting illicit actions against a media organization.” Referring to a criminal complaint that the group filed last year against “interference with our journalistic work in Europe,” Assange warned that “no entity, including the NSA, should be permitted to act against a journalist with impunity.”He was already expressing his displeasure fairly clearly, and this is proof it has merit.
Assange indicated that in light of the new documents, the group may take further legal action.
“We have instructed our general counsel, Judge Baltasar Garzón, to prepare the appropriate response,” he said. “The investigations into attempts to interfere with WikiLeaks’ work will go wherever they need to go. Make no mistake: those responsible will be held to account and brought to justice.”
I don't know if anyone in our judicial system or the military gives even part of a shit that illegally obtained evidence was used against Chelsea Manning, but any Americans left extant definitely do.
...
Ya know, everybody at DN! sounds to me like Noam Chomsky in drag. One might think this a mark of erudition, if not distinction, but it grates on my nerves something awful. And, I have to say that all these people speaking to the public as though 9/11 were an attack by a bunch of guys with box cutters is much worse than grating. It's horse shit and every fucking one of them knows it full well and they all keep going on in that vein as though they are completely decent fellows and there is some level of attention from intelligence agencies anywhere that might be deemed an incarnation of probity.
I do not, at this point, have the capability to emit the appropriate noise here to communicate how I revile this.
Even as you have seen me give the excuse for this behavior, don't get the idea it is bearable for me. I just understand it. I hate it to bits. It is harder to bear among people like this than other mainstream types, but I have to stay cognizant that they are, still, at the core, mainstream types.
I get the willies, too, hearing people who aren't U.S. citizens talking about our government agencies and Constitution as though they are theirs. James Corbett drives me nuts with this, a Canadian resident of Japan, but he is by no means the only one. Even the fact that Glenn lives in Rio and gets to, or has to, be one of our only real journalists bugs the snot out of me.
That I must root for an Australian who is a better American than most Americans frequently makes me want to scream. And even as I, personally, am about as global in spirit as a human gets, the hitch is simply that a Global Elite and its Enslaved Masses is so unacceptable to me my insides buck at this stuff. I can't count how many times I have come untrained on self-styled "progressives" who go on about tearing down barriers to global citizenship as though it were humanitarian.
Fuck you!
FUCK YOU.
You're on this planet? You belong.
[Unless you were not born on Earth.]
[Still, you're in this universe? You belong.]
See, you are on the point of ceding to psychopaths not that America gives everyone, regardless, Constitutional protections, which was what we always did, but do not anymore, just as though that's always been the case, but that America is the Washington DC of Planet Earth, the special zone that isn't a state so it can be seen as everyone's governor. That is not okay. And that is not merely empire. As it stands, that is a Global Elite and its Enslaved Masses.
I don't like countries and borders. They're preposterous. They're even mostly evil. But they are the only things standing between us and utter abjection to a tyranny from which there, literally, is no escape... at all... ever in your life. Ever. All of us. All of us.
So, while I do not hold with the cynicism and hysteria and vanity of people like the eyelash batter, or the idealism of twats who dig their heels in about 9/11 Truth despite any other consideration whatsoever, I am not blind to how all of this is setting humanity up for The Fall.
