Death Threats Against Julian Assange

It didn't take long for my post of late November about the grave danger facing Julian Assange, to be confirmed very blatantly. Various politicians and "commentators" have called for imprisonment and worse for Assange. The 1917 "Espionage Act" has been dusted off. This is one of the vicious bludgeons the U.S. uses to crush dissidents. During WW I it was used to imprison socialists, pacifists, and activists of all stripes. So much as questioning the U.S. jumping into WWI was a felony. (One of the Big Lies in America, periodically exposed as a sham, is the myth of free speech, and the Constitutional "guarantee" of same. Guarantee my ass, you lying dogs.)

Various bourgeois figures have even made public threats against Assange's life, calling for his death.

Sarah Palin, who has a lavishly paid perch on Rupert Murdoch's neofascist agitprop channel Fox "News," wants Assange "hunted down." Like a moose or elk, Sarah? We know what U.S. cutthroats do when they "hunt down" people. They either disappear them into secret torture dungeons or kill them.

One of Murdoch's Minions, the deranged liar and bully Bill O'Reilly, calls WikiLeaks "despicable" and the "leaker" "a traitor" and "traitors should be executed or jailed for life."

Tom Flanagan on Canadian TV, (CBC the main channel), said Assange should be assassinated. He even suggested a method for Obana to use- a drone missile strike. Flanagan is a member of rightwing Canadian PM Harper's inner circle and campaign manager for the "Conservatives" in the last two Canadian elections. Unlike here, where the people are either rabid barbarians or politically comatose sheep, in Canada this open call for state murder created an uproar, and Flanagan had to make light of his death call and "apologize," sort of, kind of.

Michael Huckabee didn't threaten Assange specifically, but called for the execution of leakers. "Anything less than execution" for leakers to WikiLeaks "is too kind a punishment."

I wonder if he feels the same about all those anonymous government officials who plant propaganda in the media on a daily basis.

Huckabee is an arch-reactionary, GOP presidential candidate wanna-be in 2008, a pseudo-Holy Man who presents himself as a pious "Christian" to appeal to the backwoods holy rolling speaking-in-tongues primitives that infest Arkansas and so many other U.S. backwaters. He aches to get elected President in 2012. Currently he too is ensconsed in the neofascist stable of evil media czar Murdoch, for handsome pay of course.


One sickening- and unremarked upon- hypocrisy in Huckabee's Tough Guy stance is that as Governor of Arkansas, Huckabee had a bad habit of freeing dangerous, violent felons (but not deserving prisoners, like victims of the drug war) early, against official advice. One of the objects of his kindness went on to murder four police officers in Washington State. This hasn't harmed Huckabee's media standing in the slightest. Unlike what happened to Michael Dukakis, who was held responsible for a rape and assault by Willie Horton, when Horton fled during a work release program. Horton of course never should have been out, but that wasn't Dukakis' personal doing, but rather a dysfunctional work-release program. Even to this day we get reminders of Dukakis-Horton.

You see, reactionaries can do no wrong in the U.S. Another example: G. Gordon Liddy on his radio show- a travesty that that fascist thug has his own radio show!- exhorted people to shoot ATF agent. Didn't cost him a thing in consequences or media esteem. Or when Ann Coulter slimed 9/11 widows, or called for the NY Times to be bombed, that was fine. Even the NY Times has never stopped promoting her. On the other hand, Professor Ward Churchill was swiftly purged from the University of Colorado for writing in an essay that among the dead on 9/11 were "little Eichmanns." Ideological watchdogs quickly pounced, making the comment a national issue of outrage. (I remember all the posts on military.com after 9/11 ghoulishly calling for the nuking of Afghanistan. I think undoubtedly there are many little Eichmanns in America, many in the media, and no doubt some met a deserved end on 9/11. But so did many people who didn't deserve to die. That's the trouble with the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, like when, oh, say, the U.S. bombs Afghan wedding parties, or drops atomic bombs on cities like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Not that two wrongs make a right, just that some LOUD MOUTHED HYPOCRITS ARE MIGHTY ANNOYING IN THEIR MORALISTIC POSTURING.

And oh, Flanagan has a perch as a university professor. You can bet he won't be purged from it.

And funny how the main U.S. "ally" in the war on terrorism is the biggest sponsor of the people the U.S. currently brands "terrorist," namely Pakistan, the country that planned and sponsored the attack on Mumbai, on the Indian parliament, and innumerable other terrorist acts. In fact, the U.S. is grumpy about the fact that the Pakistanis currently provide safe havens for the Afghan Taliban forces. David Rohde, a NY Times correspondent taken hostage by them and kidnapped to Pakistan, has given an account of how his kidnappers were protected by the Paki army. Even after his escape, they did nothing, and this with a Paki military base less than a mile from his kidnappers' lair.

December 4, 2010