There has been a touching display of family values in the establishment’s full-throated attempt to roar down the United Nations today.
Joanna Gosling of BBC News won my prize for the news presenter who exuded the highest level of shrill indignation that the UN should dare to query the actions of the British Government. There was not, of course, any acknowledgement by the BBC that she is married to Craig Oliver, Cameron’s spin doctor in chief.
Meanwhile, over at Sky, Joan Smith of London Women against Violence was allowed a mind-numbingly long and uninterrupted interview in order to express her unmitigated certainty of Assange’s guilt. Nobody mentioned that at the time of the war crimes WikiLeaks revealed, she was the long-term partner of the Foreign Office minister, Dennis McShane (subsequently convicted and imprisoned for expenses fraud). Nor that she was appointed to her right-on sounding position by Boris Johnson, to whom she has been close.
To complete the picture Joshua Rozenberg writes as the Guardian’s legal expert. His piece is full of outright lies, including the remarkable one that Assange’s case was predicated on a claim of diplomatic immunity. The Guardian does not mention that Rozenberg is married to Melanie Phillips, the most barkingly right wing columnist in Britain (she still believes, you may recall, that Iraqi WMD lurk in a secret chamber under the Euphrates). Rozenberg shares with her the most ultra of Zionist beliefs.
Neo-con family values. You have to love them.
I didn’t see the BBC or Sky but the Joshua Rozenberg article is amazing!
You expose the links of these media types and their agenda, well done
You’re spot on Craig. Also, add Marina Hyde’s article in the Guardian to that rogues gallery.
My uncle was a British Diplomat – mainly in Africa. I first remember meeting him when I was about 8 years old. My Mum and Dad couldn’t afford a car…but they could afford a moped and a scooter.
He was a real English Gentlemen. I did meet my Scottish relations too – in the same way – kid on the back of a motorbike….They were very posh too.
What has happened since the late 50’s and the early 60’s?
We might have been the poor relations, but us British had massive respect all over the world.
Sure we weren’t perfect – but we had just survived a World War…
I used to play in a bombed out mill in Oldham on my way home from school.
We had had enough of WAR
We did not want to do WAR Ever Again…
Who are these people now in control?
They are Completely INSANE
Tony
Still don’t understand why no one discusses why Assange is so afraid of being extradited to the USA which this contrived sex business is intended to facilitate.
Washington wanted to get him after Gareth Williams went on the warpath over the set up of the Manhattan II, and the unredacted release of the Afghan File for which he was set up to make his murder look like just another UK suicide.
Assange, for his role in all this, had to be worried about ever going under any circumstances to the USA, and his continuing standoff with those who want him disposed of is the best settlement he can hope for.
He isn’t going anywhere in the foreseeable future.
The headline on the Joshua Rozenberg article was enough, but then David Allen Green tweeted about it as the ‘only thing you need to read about this topic’ which kind of nailed it.
Assange freed*
by UN ruling.**
Charges should be dropped.***
*He was never detained
**A UN advisory panel opinion.
***He has not been charged.
The UN once again proving that itself to be a joke. Assange is and always has been free to walk out of the embassy whenever he wants.
Trowbridge H. Ford @ 5 Feb, 2016 – 5:58 pm,
Can you please stop writing the truth…You will get yourself in trouble mate.
I bet you are a right fckin’ character.
Do I know you?
I think my text messages to my “Sis” have been blocked…I was hoping to meet her tonight..Its almost her local pub FFS – and my lad will give her a lift home.
I am going with my wife. We all come from Lancashire – well except the Taxi Driver..
He’s a nice kid – I said I’d give him £20.
He doesn’t drink ..well not tonight. He’s going to be a Dad soon..so maybe he should.
Tony
It is only to be expected of mainstream media.
“There was not, of course, any acknowledgement by the BBC that she is married to Craig Oliver, Cameron’s spin doctor in chief.”
If you think that’s bad you want to find out who Justice Nicholas Phillips associates with at Brooks’s and the Garrick. No women, that’s for sure. How enlightened.
Anon1,
Can you please change your Avatar back to what it was. It really suits you.
I actually like some of the stuff you write.
Tony
“Assange is and always has been free to walk out of the embassy whenever he wants.”
We’ve had plenty of evidence in recent years that the British government cooperates with kidnappers and facilitates torture. Only last week the PM decided to put an end to a long standing investigation of war crimes in Iraq, just as it was being reported that there were grounds for prosecution in several dozen cases.
If Assange were to walk out of the Embassy there is a good chance that he would be arrested, sent to Sweden and, from there, abducted to the United States where he would be tortured before being subjected to a legal process, which is a parody of justice, and sentenced to imprisonment in a prison system in which minor opponents of the state can be held in solitary confinement for decades at a time.
Which, one supposes, Anon would find hilariously amusing, unless someone had set fire to a kitten and reduced him to a tittering jelly.
Thanks, Tony, just what I expected from you.
Don’t worry about getting killed too much at my age, though I don’t plan to make it too easy for the UK’s suicide makers.
Quite a bit like your suspicions, and to find out more, come visit me in New Haven the next time you and yours visit the world’s largest open-air zoo.
While Britain considers whether to leave the EU, perhaps they should vote to leave that nasty UN as well.
The UK can’t let this drag on. When the Embassy is breached – what will be the outcry?
Craig
You have yourself been subject in the past to attack via your wife (“night club hostess”, etc.
It is therefore a little disappointing that you should employ Mary-like tactics for getting at media commenters of whose ways of presenting the news you disapprove. Guilt by association has an ugly face.
But my disappointment is of little importance. To be practical: how would you like the media to “introduce” the two people you mention by name?
To take Rozenberg: would you like the media to introduce him as follows; “Joshua Rozenberg, the ultra-committed Zionist”? Or, perhaps as follows: “Joshua Rozenberg, who is married to Melanie Phillips, the most barkingly right wing columnist in Britain”?
For Joanna Gosling of BBC News, how about: “Joanna Gosling, who is married to Craig Oliver, Cameron’s spin doctor in chief.”?
But I’m sure you could find better introductions that the above examples and it would be interesting to hear what they are.
And a last question: would you like all media people’s personal (for example) beliefs and spouses to be brought forward for the attention of the public?
The Assange situation is, a prime example, of media bias in Britain. The giant media wheel sputters into action, steam spewing from all orifices. Like a 19th century steam roller, it rolls over all information related to a particular event that doesn’t suit the narrative.
The media machine isn’t adverse to twisting the truth, or even lying to get its point across. It can and frequently does wheel out gatekeepers and seasoned lickspittles, to add a touch of gravitas to the misdirections or outright lies.
Bevin
“If Assange were to walk out of the Embassy there is a good chance that he would be arrested, sent to Sweden”
______________________
It is not a “good chance” but a certainty. That’s what European Arrest Warrants are about.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“and, from there, abducted to the United States”
______________________
That, on the other hand, is pure speculation (I leave aside the emotively silly word “abducted”): the US either would – or would not – ask the Swedish judicial authorities to extradite him and if the US did so request then the Swedish judicial authorities would either agree or disagree in accordance with the Swedish legal procedures.
Habbabkuk, I think there’s little doubt that the US would request extradition; they’ve convened a Grand Jury against Assange. And Sweden would very likely comply, or they’d have given Assange the assurances he sought.
Indeed Craig – I note BBC Radio 4 PM (Eddie Mair) quoted a Swedish lawyer saying the UN decision was ‘disgusting’…
In simple terms I apply this adj to the cover-up and wholesale killing of tens of thousands of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq exposed by WikiLeaks in leaked Diplomatic Cables which vividly reveal a ruthless lack of respect for International law by the UK and US authorities.
Those doubting the degree of ruthlessness so called ‘cyber-terrorist'(J (Biden) Assange can expect if extradited should remember the forcing down of the Bolivian president’s plane in 2013, wrongly believed to be carrying Edward Snowden.
Over the last decade the US Justice Department has contrived charges for which Julian can be indicted which are “espionage”, “conspiracy to commit espionage”, “conversion” (theft of government property), “computer fraud and abuse” (computer hacking) and general “conspiracy”. Indeed the Espionage Act has life in prison and death penalty provisions.
I believe it was Lord Goldsmith who advised the US State department to declare the WikiLeaks case a state secret. Subsequently a federal court in Washington blocked the release of all information about the “national security” investigation against WikiLeaks, because it was “active and ongoing” and would harm the “pending prosecution” of Assange.
The UK Intelligence and Security Committee have clearly prepared, in my opinion, an intention to undermine WikiLeaks by destroying the central trust by threats of exposure and criminal prosecution, very much in the same vein as the onslaught against our host Craig Murray in his exposure of torture witnessed by the British intelligence services and now proven by the brave disclosures from Shaker Aamer held by the United States in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba for more than thirteen years without charge.
Conflict of interest appears to be a prerequisite for employment these dark days.
Clark
“little doubt” … “very likely”
Those are just your opinions: you do not – can not – know, and others could say the opposite with equal legitimacy.
Remember when Marina Hyde wrote off Sean Hoare’s convenient death, the key source in the NoW’s phone hacking scandal, as a hopeless drunk who knew nothing about such matters, and ultimately drank himself to death.
Little wonder she has no understanding of persons she has never been able to exploit.
Absolutely right. But once you realise that the mainstream media are actually a very sophisticated public relations machine for the establishment, with Cameron as their chief executive, it all begins to fall into place.
One of the most dangerous things happening today is the complete abuse of gender issues by politics, the media, and state-funded charities. And so many of us just ignore it, or are ignorant of such issues.
How many times have we heard Clinton identify herself as a woman, as if that makes her anti-establishment, progressive or somehow morally superior. Every time she opens her mouth, I’m reminded of the girl in The Exorcist, and I just want to wretch. It’s frightening how many people are duped by phony gender-based arguments, all the while they think they got their heart in the right place.
What is the most persuasive way to blacken someone’s name these days? Accuse of them of sexual misconduct or violence toward women. You’ll get the full weight of the 100-odd women’s charities against that person in an instant, and on top of that you’ll get the full weight of the slimy international press and a lynch-mob. (But of course the real violence toward women, and men and children, is kept in the shadow, and therefore worsened.)
Nobody seems to read To Kill A Mockingbird any more. Seems like one of the most relevant books today, in the face of the fabricated allegations that males face, if they are the wrong color or happen to be dissidents.
But you don’t even have to be a dissident. You can just be a nice guy whose marriage breaks down. If mom decides to take up the Woman’s Aid advice to accuse you of something or another, that is the death of the relationship with your kids, and therefore the death of the most important thing in your life. This, of course, all suits the status quo really very well.
It’s amazing to think the crimes that the state will commit in the name of preserving that status quo. How did we ever let this happen? We had a tiny glimpse of a better world after the Second World War, with health care and education considered rights. All those rights are eroded now.
It is strange that Mr Rozenberg does not make a single mention of Assange’s ulterior motive for avoiding extradition – removal to the USA.
I guess the Guardian and its commentators loath Assange because he has embarrassed the US, UK, Israel and other “close friends”.