My fellow Englishmen: tonight our country, that which we stand for, and all we hold dear,
faces a grave and terrible threat. This violent and unparalleled assault on our
security will not go undefended... or unpunished. Our enemy is an insidious
one, seeking to divide us and destroy the very foundation of our great nation.
- Norsefire Party Chancellor Adam Sutler
In a stunning reminder of exactly why the founding fathers told the tyrannical King George to stick his empire up his big fat ass the British government is about to go after The Guardian on “terrorism” charges. The state ire has been generated due to the ongoing production of stories on the NSA-GCHQ abuses of their surveillance machine to inform a public that the elite who run the system view with contempt. This has actually been coming for a good while now and the dye was pretty much cast when government goons forced the destruction of computer hard drives in the basement of the paper's London headquarters. A subsequent public hearing had the heads of the Queen's intelligence services spewing talking points on how the actions of a free press aided and abetted terrorism in a manner so ridiculous that it could have been on any of our own Sunday morning gab fests. Now it is escalating as the stories continue and the criminal governments jack up the pressure before the dam truly bursts - in testimony before parliament besieged Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger stated that the paper has published only 1 percent of the files leaked by former U.S. government contractor Booz Allen employee Edward Snowden. Rusbridger predictably faced accusations impugning his patriotism and love of country in a manner that mimicked the sort of conduct that is standard in the fascist inquisitions of domestic politicians the likes of Mike Rogers and the swinish terrorist supporter Peter King. A totally heavy handed crackdown more befitting of the fictional Norsefire party of V For Vendetta as any serious ruling government.
While the concept of freedom of the press in the U.K. is somewhat less than what is enjoyed here where most Americans simply could not give a rat's ass about anything other than the results of sporting events or the weekly finalists of Dancing With the Stars the crackdown is coming here as well. Rest assured that given the servile, duplicitous and venal swine in the U.S. Congress that every tool in the shed is going to be used by the usurpers of what was once a vibrant and free democracy until it was hijacked by the swine. NSA Stasi commandant Keith Alexander has already openly called for the government to halt any and all reporting on the NSA and the wheels are in motion to do exactly that, and it will be pretty much bipartisan or what passes for it.
The standard tactics would be to just smear and destroy journalists in the state-corporate media to trash their credibility and this is currently escalating with the ongoing plethora of preemptive hit pieces on former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald. The intentions of the man who has shaken the run amok NSA and the government that protects it to the roots has faced a fusillade of propaganda from many of the same recycled Bush era hacks (David Frum, Fran Townsend) who so loudly shilled for the ruinous Iraq war. Greenwald wisely left The Guardian just ahead of the Norsefire goons takedown of the paper to enter into a yet undisclosed new journalism venture with EBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar along with other serious reporters determined to get their stories out. In the America of old something like this would be praised as a great example as to the possibilities of capitalism but now the establishment, terrified of the truth and potential of any accountability decry the parlaying of one's skills into more lucrative and successful ventures. Success as it is defined in The Homeland only matters to those who can curry favor and buy influence. The most extensive attack on Greenwald and one that has been parroted was written by some douchebag named Mark Ames for something called Pando. I always have to give Greenwald credit for not letting any character assassinations go unanswered and he followed through with a blistering counter-attack against the establishment hack:
The other day I referred to those who "evince zero interest in the substance of the revelations about NSA and GCHQ spying which we're reporting on around the world", but "are instead obsessed with spending their time personally attacking the journalists, whistleblowers and other messengers who enable the world to know about what is being done." There are dozens of examples, one of whom is the author of a post this week at Pando.com which accuses me and Laura Poitras of having "promptly sold [the Snowden] secrets to a billionaire", Pierre Omidyar, and claims we made "a decision to privatize the NSA cache" by joining Omidyar's new media organization and vesting it with a "monopoly" over those documents.
I've steadfastly ignored the multiple attacks from this particular writer over the years because his recklessness with the facts is so well-known (ask others about whom he's written), and because his fixation is quite personal: it began with and still is fueled by an incident where The Nation retracted and apologized for an error-strewn hit piece he wrote which I had criticized (see here and here).
But now, this week's attack has been seized on by various national security establishment functionaries and DC journalists to impugn our NSA reporting and, in some cases, to argue that this "privatizing" theory should be used as a basis to prosecute me for the journalism I'm doing. Amazingly, it's being cited by all sorts of DC journalists and think tank advocates whose own work is paid for by billionaires and other assorted plutocrats: such as Josh Marshall, whose TPM journalism has been "privatized" and funded by the Romney-supporting Silicon Valley oligarch Marc Andreesen, and former Bush Homeland Security Adviser and current CNN analyst Fran Townsend ("profiteering!", exclaims the Time Warner Corp. employee and advocate of the American plundering of Iraq).
The entire thing with links is here.
The worst NSA stuff is still coming and the only way to prevent it is a jack-booted full blown Nazi crackdown. When it does come out and it will despite government thugs across the pond launching the first fusillade which will soon be followed in The Homeland it is going to come out that not only does this NSA surveillance have very little to do with actual terrorism but the history will be equally stunning. When people realize that this monstrosity had its roots in the Reagan administration and that in 1981 none other than the Gipper himself set it into motion with Executive Order 12333 and that what Snowden has revealed is just the culmination of years of government criminality enabled by today’s technology all hell will break loose. The backstory is in a way even more important than the ongoing abuse as it will provide context and reveal that all of this could have been stopped at numerous junctures were it not for our thoroughly corrupt political class and their on the payroll cronies.
And they all know it which is why the heavy hand of the fascist state is about to take off the velvet glove.
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