Truth
and Free Speech Are Being Taken Away From Us
By Paul
Craig Roberts
December 10, 2018 "Information
Clearing House"
-
Free speech and the ability to speak truth are
being shut down. It is happening with the
complicity of the print and TV media, the
liberal/progressive/left, the US Department of
Justice (sic), the law schools and bar
associations, Congress, and the federal
judiciary.
The
attack on Julian Assange is the arrow aimed at
the heart of the ability to publish the truth.
If a journalist can be indicted for espionage
for publishing leaked documents that a corrupt
government has classified in order to conceal
its crimes, the First Amendment is dead.
Moreover, as the claim is that government was
harmed by Wikileaks publishing the truth,
Assange’s secret indictment sets the precedent
that truth is harmful to government. This
precedent will be extended to include the
publication of any information or opinion,
classified or not, that the government regards
as harmful. The media then officially becomes
what it mainly already is in effect—a Ministry
of Propaganda for the government and those who
control it.
As a
person who has held high security clearances, I
can say with confidence that no more than one
percent of classified information falls in the
realm of national security. Most classification
is simply to prevent the people and Congress
from knowing what is going on. Classification
allows the various components of government to
put the spin where they want it. “National
security” has always been an excuse accepted by
patriots for the government to conceal its wrong
doings and hidden agendas.
Give
thought to the alleged harm done by Wikileaks
publishing the information leaked by Bradley
Manning and the Clinton emails that were
downloaded onto a thumb drive and not hacked as
security experts have proved. Give thought to
the documents proving the warrantless and
thereby illegal spying by the NSA that Edward
Snowden revealed. How was government hurt by the
information? Government should have been hurt,
but it was not. The presstitutes did not take up
the issue. No one in government was punished for
the war crimes, lies, and illegal and
unconstitutional acts that the publication of
the leaked documents revealed. None of
Washington’s vassal governments renounced its
vassalage on the basis of the information that
revealed they were spied on and deceived.
Washington’s vassal governments already knew
that Washington lies and deceives them. The
Chancellor of Germany simply accepted that
Washington listens to her private telephone
calls. Vassals simply accept indignities as a
consequence of their vassalage. The only people
punished were those who revealed the truth—Maning,
Snowden, and Assange.
Washington imprisoned Manning and seeks to
imprison Assange for damage that Washington did
not suffer.
As a
country loses its liberty, legal scholars who
formerly would have protected liberty turn
against it in order to curry favor with power.
Recently, I read a specious legal argument that
the First Amendment did not really protect
Ellsberg and the New York Times when the
Pentagon Papers were published, but that no
president wanted to be the first one to break
the tradition of extending such protection. The
author claims that Assange is not protected by
the First Amendment even though he is a
journalist. The author of the article did not
realize that his argument means that journalists
have squatters’ rights in First Amendment
protection. For the Justice Department to bring
a case against Assange means overturning a right
that is ensconced in common law as well as in
the Constitution.
Washington has shown that it is not interested
in any rights but its own to do what it wants.
The George W. Bush regime overturned the
Constitutional protection of habeas corpus when
the regime declared that it could detain
citizens indefinitely in prison without
presentation of evidence to a court. The Obama
regime destroyed due process and the
Constitutional right to life when the regime
declared that it could assassinate citizens on
suspision alone. Both regimes ignored statutory
and Constitutional prohibitions on torture and
only punished those who revealed the torture. If
Bush and Obama had the right to torture, what
was the point of prosecuting those who revealed
that torture happened?
As the
truth revealed by Wikileaks has had no adverse
consequence for Washington, what is the point of
Washington’s assault on Assange? In part it is
revenge on an individual brazen enough to stand
up to Washington, and in part it is to
criminalize the telling of truth that is
critical of the government.
Once
there was a time when the media would have been
up in arms in defense of Assange and press
freedom. That was before the media was illegally
concentrated in a few hands by the Clinton
regime and before the media became concentrated
ideologically. The media hates Donald Trump and
thereby hates Assange for publishing the Hillary
emails that the media believes cost Hillary the
election. The media is much more intent on
helping the Deep State deep-six Assange than the
media is in defending its First Amendment
protections.
The liberal/progressive/left sees it the same
way. The politics of the
liberal/progressive/left is Identity Politics,
and Identity Politics hates white fly-over
America that elected Trump. This is why the
media and the liberal/progressive/left are
helping the military/security complex tie
Assange to Trump, Putin, and “Russiagate.” The
Guardian newspaper has destroyed what little
credibility it still had by publishing obviously
false information concocted to connect Assange
to “Russiagate.” See:
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/11/30/the-guardian-is-a-professional-liar-not-a-newspaper/
and
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50715.htm
The military/security complex planted on its
media assets the fiction that Assange fled to
the Ecuadorian Embassy to escape prosecution for
rape.The presstitutes consistently repeat the
lie, as Harriet Alexander in the UK Telegraph
does, that “Mr Assange fled to the embassy to
avoid charges of rape, sexual molestation and
coercion. All charges were dropped by May 2017”
(http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50716.htm
).
There
were never any such charges filed against
Assange. Assange took asylum in the embassy,
because it was clear that he was going to be
extradicted to Washington where he would get a
show trial as a spy. It is not possible that
Harriet Alexander and the editors at the
Telegraph do not know this. Nevertheless, they
repeat the lie, the purpose of which is to put
Assange in a bad light that will aid his
conviction on false charges.
Washington knew that it could tell this lie
about Assange raping women because Washington
knew that #MeToo and other radical feminists
believe that that is what men do, and that #MeToo
would be delighted to have yet another celebrity
provided for their denunciation.
Washington also knew that its media whores hated
Assange for having the integrity and courage
that they do not have and that they would
willingly stomp him to death with their
hobnailed boots.
The US
Justice (sic) Department knows it has concocted
a false case and intentionally kept it secret,
but has no worry because insouciant Americans
will believe its indictment regardless.
The
judiciary will permit the false case to be tried
in a federal court because every judge wants to
be elevated rather than criticized and even
framed, and the jury will be too afraid to go
against Assange’s public conviction in the media
to find him innocent.
The
jury’s guilty verdict will murder the First
Amendment, but the jury will be able to go home
to their neighborhoods without being ostracized.
It is not only the government that is attacking
free speech. Free speech is under full scale
attack by everyone who claims to be “offended,”
by the invention of “hate speech” to control
what can be said about “victim groups,” by the
Israel Lobby that is having laws passed that
prohibit the boycotting of Israel for its
mistreatment of Palestinians and by equating
criticism of the Israeli government with anti-semitism.
( See, for example,
https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-film-the-israel-lobby-does-not-want-you-to-see/5661958
). Twitter, Facebook, and Google are all active
in deciding what can and cannot be said. (See,
for example,
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/11/30/stating-the-fact-that-men-are-not-women-gets-feminist-banned-from-twitter/
). Public forums are denied to people who are
disapproved of by other people.
A
population that does not respect and defend free
speech, debate, and truth will not long have the
liberty that results from free speech, debate,
and truth. This website respects truth, and it
requires your support.
Dr.
Roberts is making his quarterly request for your
support.
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/pages/donate/
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of
the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate
editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was
columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News
Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many
university appointments. His internet columns
have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts'
latest books are
The Failure of Laissez Faire
Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West,
How America Was Lost,
and
The Neoconservative Threat to
World Order.
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
