Interview with Jesse LaGreca, freelance writer for the Daily Kos under the name MinistryOfTruth, at the Oct. 5th Solidarity March with Occupy Wall Street. Jesse’s interview with a FOX News Reporter has been exploding on the internet…but for some reason FOX never aired it. Hmmmmmm.
Jesse’s original unaired Fox News interview
October 9th, 2011
No one can watch this and not decide that either President Obama is ranked high among the worst politicians in history, or he got essentially what he wanted.
August 3rd, 2011
February 24th, 2011
Nice to see someone in the US corporate media talking frankly. I guess being attacked helps open the eyes. In any case, these comments are very welcome.
February 9th, 2011
New York Times reporters were arrested and witnessed the routine torture. If the revolution fails, this will be the fate of the brave thousands:
2 Detained Reporters Saw Secret Police’s Methods Firsthand
By Souad Mekhennet and Nicholas Kulish
CAIRO — We had been detained by Egyptian authorities, handed over to the country’s dreaded Mukhabarat, the secret police, and interrogated. They left us all night in a cold room, on hard orange plastic stools, under fluorescent lights.
But our discomfort paled in comparison to the dull whacks and the screams of pain by Egyptian people that broke the stillness of the night. In one instance, between the cries of suffering, an officer said in Arabic, “You are talking to journalists? You are talking badly about your country?”
A voice, also in Arabic, answered: “You are committing a sin. You are committing a sin.”
We — Souad Mekhennet, Nicholas Kulish and a driver, who is not a journalist and not involved in the demonstrations — were detained Thursday afternoon while driving into Cairo. We were stopped at a checkpoint and thus began a 24-hour journey through Egyptian detention, ending with — we were told by the soldiers who delivered us there — the secret police. When asked, they declined to identify themselves.
Captivity was terrible. We felt powerless — uncertain about where and how long we would be held. But the worst part had nothing to do with our treatment. It was seeing — and in particular hearing through the walls of this dreadful facility — the abuse of Egyptians at the hands of their own government.
For one day, we were trapped in the brutal maze where Egyptians are lost for months or even years. Our detainment threw into haunting relief the abuses of security services, the police, the secret police and the intelligence service, and explained why they were at the forefront of complaints made by the protesters.
Many journalists shared this experience, and many were kept in worse conditions — some suffering from injuries as well.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, over the period we were held there were 30 detentions of journalists, 26 assaults and 8 instances of equipment being seized. We saw a journalist with his head bandaged and others brought in with jackets thrown over their heads as they were led by armed men.
In the morning, we could hear the strained voice of a man with a French accent calling out in English: “Where am I? What is happening to me? Answer me. Answer me.”
This prompted us into action — pressing to be released with more urgency, and indeed fear, than before. A plainclothes officer who said his name was Marwan gestured to us. “Come to the door,” he said, “and look out.”
We saw more than 20 people, Westerners and Egyptians, blindfolded and handcuffed. The room had been empty when we arrived the evening before.
“We could be treating you a lot worse,” he said in a flat tone, the facts speaking for themselves. Marwan said Egyptians were being held in the thousands. During the night we heard them being beaten, screaming after every blow.
We were on our way back to Cairo after reporting about the demonstrations from Alexandria for The Times. We were traveling with journalists from the German public television station ZDF, a normal practice in such conditions — safety in numbers.
At the outskirts of Cairo, we were stopped at what looked like a civilian checkpoint.
We had been through many checkpoints without problems, but after the driver opened our trunk a tremendous uproar began. They saw a large black bag with an orange ZDF microphone poking out. In the tense environment, television crews had been attacked and accused of creating anti-Egyptian propaganda. We had been in the middle of a near-riot with the same crew the day before.
The crowd shouted and banged on the car, pulling the doors open. The ZDF crew in the other car managed to drive off, while we were stuck. Instead of dragging us out as we expected, two men pushed their way into the backseat. We were relieved that they were taking us from the crowd, until one pulled out his police identification. Rather than helping us escape, he was now detaining us.
The officer gave the driver directions to an impromptu police station in the Sharabiya district of Cairo, on the roof of a lumber warehouse. The officer in charge there, who identified himself as Ehab, said they were the secret police.
They searched the ZDF bags and found much more than just a camera. “We have a woman with a German passport of Arab origin and an American in a car with camera, satellite equipment and $10,000,” he said. “This is very suspicious. I think they need to be checked.”
Anxiety turned to anticipation when we were driven to a military base. The military had been the closest thing Egypt had to a guarantor of stability and we thought once we explained who we were and provided documentation we would be allowed to go to our hotel.
In a strange exchange that only made sense later, Ms. Mekhennet asked a soldier, “Where are you taking us?” The soldier answered: “My heart goes out to you. I’m sorry.”
After driving to several more bases we were told we were being handed over to the Mukhabarat at their headquarters in Nasr City.
It was sundown when they had us bring everything in from the car. The items were inventoried, from socks and a water bottle to a band of 50 $100 bills. Our cellphones, cameras and computers were confiscated.
We were taken to separate rooms with brown leather padded walls and interrogated individually. Mr. Kulish’s interrogator spoke perfect English and joked about the television show “Friends,” mentioning that he had lived in Florida and Texas.
The Mukhabarat has had a working relationship with American intelligence, including the C.I.A.’s so-called rendition program of prison transfers. During our questioning, a man nearby was being beaten — the sickening sound somewhere between a thud and a thwack. Between his screams someone yelled in Arabic, “You’re a traitor working with foreigners.”
Egyptian journalists had a freer hand than many in the region’s police states, but the secret police kept a close eye on both journalists and their sources. As the protests became more violent, a campaign of intimidation against journalists and the Egyptians speaking to them became apparent. We appeared to have stumbled into the middle of it.
Ms. Mekhennet asked her interrogator, “Where are we?” The interrogator answered, “You are nowhere.”
We were blindfolded and led to the blank room where we would spend the night and into the next afternoon on the orange plastic chairs. The screams from the torture made it nearly impossible to think.
We were not physically abused. Ms. Mekhennet explained that she had been sick and a man appeared with a blood-pressure gauge, but she declined the offer. One officer gave each of us Pepsi and a small package of cookies. It was after 10 o’clock at night, and we had not eaten since breakfast, but the agonizing screams instantly stilled our appetites.
We were told we could go in the morning, and starting at 6 a.m. we asked repeatedly to be released.
Marwan first appeared around 11 a.m. He became visibly annoyed by our requests, complaining that thousands of Egyptians civilians were in detention. He did not appreciate our sense of entitlement.
That was when he opened the door and showed us our handcuffed, blindfolded colleagues from international news outlets. He said that he was exhausted, but would find our cellphones and computers.
About an hour later, we were given back our belongings. Our greatest fear, that the innocent driver would be kept for “processing,” did not come to pass.
We left together, with pangs of guilt as we saw our blindfolded, injured colleagues again, and new people led in, past guards with bulletproof vests and assault rifles.
Were we going to a hotel? we asked.
“You don’t get to know that,” a guard answered.
They put us in our car with orders to put our heads down. “Look down, and don’t talk. If you look up you will see something you don’t ever want to see.”
They left us that way for 10 minutes. The only sounds were of guns being loaded and checked and duct-tape ripping.
An interrogator appeared and asked our driver, “What did you do in Tahrir Square?” He said we weren’t there. The interrogator said to the driver, “So you’re a traitor to your country.”
In Arabic, Ms. Mekhennet, a German citizen with Arab roots, kept telling the questioner that we are journalists for The New York Times. “You came here to make this country look bad,” the interrogator said.
We were told we would be driving out in our car, but escorted by a man with an assault rifle. Again, we were told to look down.
Finally, after a while, our escort ordered the driver to stop the car and got out. “You can go now.”
The driver began yelling “Alhamdulillah” or “Praise be to God.” We looked around and realized we were alone, somewhere in the middle of Cairo, but away from the protests, the normal street traffic slowly moving past.
February 4th, 2011
Just a reminder that you can watch Aljazeera‘s live English feed from Egypt here. This is world class coverage of world-shaking events. Aljazeera shows yet again why it is the world’s best news network.
January 30th, 2011
The former New York Times who bears partial responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands in the war based on the WMD lies she peddled criticized Wkileaks’ Julian Assange today as a “bad journalist”.
A former New York Times reporter assailed for her incorrect reports about Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction is criticizing Julian Assange for being a “bad journalist.”
Judith Miller took on the WikiLeaks founder during an appearance on Fox News Watch Saturday, arguing that Assange was a bad journalist “because he didn’t care at all about attempting to verify the information that he was putting out, or determine whether or not it hurt anyone.”
In doing so she follows the standard Republican SOP of criticizing one’s critics for one’s own flaws. Psychoanalysts would call it projection, if it isn’t deliberate deceit.
From Raw Story:
As the Crooks and Liars blog points out, Miller once defended her reporting with the argument that it is not a journalist’s job to verify — only to report inform readers of what they had been told.
“[M]y job isn’t to assess the government’s information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of the New York Times what the government thought about Iraq’s arsenal,” she said.
January 2nd, 2011
I recently post Bianca Jagger’s piece on the Guardian‘s article on the Swedish criminal complaint against Julian Assange. Now Nick Davies has written a response. Out of fairness I post it here as well, so readers can form their own judgment.
The Julian Assange Investigation — Let’s Clear the Air of Misinformation
By Nick Davies
Bianca Jagger last week launched a fierce attack on the Guardian for carrying my story about the evidence collected by Swedish police who have been investigating the claims of sexual assault by the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange.
At the heart of her attack is a repeated claim that we failed to publish exculpatory evidence contained in the police file. Those who have read her piece will have noticed that she does not cite one single example of this missing information. There are two reasons for this. First, she does not know what is in that police file, because she has not read it. Second, if she had, she would know that her claim is simply not true.
The Guardian went out of their way to include exculpatory material, not just from the police file but also from previous comments made by Assange and his lawyers. They also sent Assange’s lawyer a list of all the key points and delayed publication for days so that he had a chance to respond. Our story contains literally hundreds of words whose sole purpose is to reflect Assange’s position.
Jagger also insists that she has a right to know who leaked the file to the Guardian and says that the leak was part of “an obvious effort to conduct a smear campaign” against Assange. Setting aside for a moment the head-splitting hypocrisy that a supporter of WikiLeaks wants to hunt down the source of a leak, there are two similar problems with this claim. First, Jagger has no idea who leaked that file (and made no attempt to find out). Second, if she did know, she would discover that the source had no intention of smearing Assange in any way.
I am not going to serve up that source’s identity to satisfy Jagger’s temper. A police file like that gets widely distributed. It happened to make its way quite legitimately into the hands of somebody I have come across in the past. This person has absolutely no connection with the Swedish prosecutor or the Swedish police or any other individual or organization with any kind of antipathy to Assange. The source passed it on, and I got it translated.
Assange’s UK lawyer tried very hard to persuade us to suppress the file. He argued that since Assange had been a source for our stories, we should ‘protect’ him. I reckon that that is an invitation to journalistic corruption, to hide information in order to curry favor with a source. We were right to publish.
Jagger calls this ‘trial by media’. I call it an attempt to inject some evidence into a global debate which has been fueled by speculation and misinformation. On August 21, when this story first broke, Assange used Twitter to spread the idea that the two women who had gone to the police were engaged in ‘dirty tricks’. His lawyer subsequently claimed that a ‘honeytrap’ had been sprung. Assange’s celebrity supporters have announced to the mass media that the allegations are ‘without foundation’, that ‘there is no prima facie evidence’. These statements have gone around the world. Millions of well-meaning people have been persuaded to believe them. The two women, who have been identified on the Internet, have had their reputations ruined by the claim that they cruelly colluded to destroy an innocent man. The Swedish police and prosecutors have been held up to ridicule as corrupt and/or incompetent partners in the plot.
Our story showed: first, that the Swedish police have found no evidence of any such dirty tricks (which would not surprise the conspiracy theorists); second, that in his interview with Swedish police on August 30, Assange himself never began to suggest that the allegations were any kind of dirty trick; third, that Assange’s supporters in Stockholm had tried to find evidence and come up empty, concluding, as the Swedish WikiLeaks coordinator put it to us: “This is a normal police investigation. Let the police find out what actually happened. Of course, the enemies of WikiLeaks may try to use this, but it begins with the two women and Julian. It is not the CIA sending a woman in a short skirt.”
And by publishing our story, we achieved something: Julian Assange was forced to admit, in interviews with the London Times and with the BBC, that there is no evidence of a honeytrap. That matters very much. The news media don’t want to report that — there’s a much better story in the dirty tricks. Some of the most active tweeters and the bloggers have not picked up on it — they are much too happy with their conspiracy theories. The celebrity disciples like Bianca Jagger don’t mention it. They simply move on to insist that there must be another conspiracy at work in the legal process. But the honeytrap story is dead: our story killed it. Whether or not Assange is guilty of a crime is a separate matter: the facts are not yet finally established, the law is not yet finally interpreted. At some point in this coming year, a court will decide that.
There is one final point lurking in the background. Assange has been suggesting — for example, in his interview with David Frost on Al Jazeera — that all this is something to do with the fact that he and I fell out. It is true that at the beginning of August, I cut off contact with him in order to protest at several things he had done — the first time I have cut off a source in 34 years as a reporter. This was nothing to do with the sex allegations in Sweden.
His supporters tried to brief newspapers that it was an act of vengeance on my part to go out and find this police file. That fell at the first fence, because the file came to me: I never spent a single second looking for it. As an alternative decoy, Assange suggested in his interview with David Frost, that some malign force, possibly an intelligence agency, chose me as an outlet for the file, knowing that I could be relied on to write a negative story. That also falls at the first fence. The reality is that I didn’t write the story which the Guardian published. The copy which I filed was completely re-written in the Guardian office, a commonplace event in a newsroom.
Finally, I should mention what Jagger does not — that I was the journalist who took it on himself back in June to track down Julian Assange and to persuade him not to post his latest collection of secrets on the WikiLeaks website but to hand them over to the Guardian and other news organizations. The publication of the Afghan and Iraqi war logs and then the diplomatic cables all flowed from that initiative. I did that because I think journalists should tell the truth about important things without being frightened, for example, by the government of the most powerful state on the planet.
In exactly the same way, I think it was right to publish our story about the Swedish police file without being frightened by Julian Assange’s lawyer or indeed by the clear prospect of being attacked online by people like Bianca Jagger. There are millions of them out there. They have come to a conclusion about Assange and the sex claims in Sweden and they are not interested in evidence. They tweet and blog in the most eye-wateringly aggressive tone and often, like Bianca Jagger, they do so without even the slightest connection to the truth.
It has been a depressing experience to see some of those who were most furious at the global propaganda run by Bush and Rumsfeld now leading the cheers for a new campaign of misinformation, happy to be manipulated, content to recycle falsehood and distortion no matter what damage they may do.
December 30th, 2010
Bianca Jagger writes on the “trial by newspaper” of Julian Assange:
Trial by Newspaper
By Bianca Jagger
What was missing in “10 days in Sweden: the full allegations against Julian Assange”(The Guardian, Nick Davies, 17 December 2010):
I was surprised to read the article, “10 days in Sweden: the full allegations against Julian Assange” because I hold the Guardian in high esteem and I cannot fathom why such a credible publication would publish a prejudiced and unfair article. I object to the Guardian’s decision to publish selective passages from the Swedish police report, whilst omitting exculpatory evidence contained in the document.
Julian Assange has the right to a fair and impartial trial in a court of justice; instead, in denial of due process, he is being subjected to a ‘trial by newspapers,’ in an effort to discredit him. This tactic is not new. As Justice Felix Frankfurter said in 1961, ‘inflammatory’ news stories that prejudice justice are ‘too often’ published. For those that remember Daniel Ellsberg’s leak of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 to the New York Times, this seems to be a case of history repeating itself. Like Assange, who has been hailed a ‘terrorist’ by US Attorney General Eric Holder, Ellsberg was subjected to a malicious media campaign, in which he was branded ‘the most dangerous man in the world.’
It is deplorable the Swedish police files have been given unlawfully to the Guardian and other newspapers. By whom I wonder? We have the right to know who is behind this obvious effort to conduct a smear campaign. According to Assange’s legal team there is a lot of exonerating evidence in the police file, and material which they supplied to the Guardian, including a copy of the chronology of events, and the press statement of the initial chief prosecutor Eva Finne. This important evidence was omitted from the article. The statement by Ms. Finne, “The decision which up to this point has been established is that Assange is not suspected of rape and he is therefore no longer wanted for arrest” is nowhere to be found.
I am aware that Assange’s legal team failed to respond to theGuardian on time when invited to publish a response to the article prior to its publication. However, the point here is not about the defense. The issue is the choices theGuardian made when presenting the facts contained in the police dossier, and the overriding duty of any credible news publication to present a fair rendition of events, particularly when due process is at stake.
There is information in the public domain, including Tweets, SMS messages and statements to friends, from the two complainants. Although there are vague references to this correspondence, the content is conspicuously absent from the narrative the Guardian has woven.
If the media insists in engaging in this reprehensible method of publicly trying Julian Assange, the least they could do is publish an accurate account. The Guardian has reversed the presumption of innocence by only publishing allegations against him, and not his account of events or the mitigating evidence in the police dossier. Although the article alludes to his objections to the allegations, his account, contained in the police file, is not directly quoted.
From a molehill, a mighty mountain of innuendos has been made to cast Julian Assange as some kind of rapist. I refuse to be drawn into passing judgment on the case, however, we should all remember, Assange is innocent until proven guilty.
I condemn and abhor rape and as an advocate of women rights, I will denounce any man who forces his sexual attention on women. I have found the sequence of events in the case against Assange, disturbing to say the least. At the end of the day, the issue here is justice and due process for all. Denying justice for men will not achieve justice for women.
Assange has been criticized for not being willing to return to Sweden to prove his innocence. It is hardly surprising he has reservations, given Sweden’s human rights record. Anyone acquainted with it will remember the cases of Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad Alzery, two Egyptian asylum seekers who were, according to Redress, ‘removed from Sweden to Egypt by the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency in cooperation with the Swedish authorities and outside of any legal process, ‘ on charges of terrorism in 2001. The deportation was carried out by American and Egyptian personnel on Swedish ground, with Swedish servicemen as passive onlookers.
In 2005, in Agiza v. Sweden (Communication No. 233/2003), the UN Committee against Torture found that Sweden had violated the Convention against Torture. The following year, in Mohammed Alzery v. Sweden (Communication No. 1416/2005), the UN Human Rights Committee found Sweden to have violated the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Alzery was released without charge after two years in prison however, ‘he continues to suffer physically and psychologically as a result of his torture and ill-treatment.’ Agiza was sentenced to 15 years in prison in a military tribunal. The process was not fair, and there is doubt as to the men’s guilt.
Redress has stated:
Mr. Agiza and Mr. Alzery remain at a real risk of torture and ill-treatment as a result of Sweden’s violations of the Convention against Torture. These cases epitomise the recent attempts by states to circumvent the absolute principle of non-refoulement enshrined in the CAT in the name of counterterrorism.
Given this precedent, one can appreciate why Julian Assange is apprehensive about being extradited to Sweden. In the Today Show on December 21st, Assange revealed that Sweden has requested that if he returns and is arrested, he is to be held incommunicado, and his Swedish lawyer is to be given a gag order.Having grown up under a dictatorship in Nicaragua, I am very sensitive to any attempts to weaken our democracy. Although I do not agree with everything WikiLeaks has done, I feel compelled to defend freedom of speech, freedom of the press and due process. I was in court last week, not, as has been reported to pledge surety for Assange’s bail, but to voice my support for the founder of WikiLeaks, because I suspect that what is on trial here is not Julian Assange’s alleged sexual misconduct, but freedom of speech guaranteed in Art 19 of The Universal declaration of Human Rights, The First Amendment to the United States Constitution and Art 10 of The European Convention on Human Rights. This trial has far reaching implications for all of us who believe in the core values of our democratic system. I fear that Mr. Assange is being punished for releasing information, which reveals the misuse of power by the US and other governments. He is on trial for holding governments to account.
It is my hope that justice will be served in the British judicial system. In the meantime, I hope readers will have the insight to suspend judgment until all evidence is available. Julian Assange is innocent until proven guilty.
I am pleased to learn that the Guardian will be publishing an interview with Julian Assange.
December 26th, 2010
Assange responds to many of the silly and despicable things — such as “high-tech terrorist” — being said about him and Wikileaks:
December 24th, 2010
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