Ray McGovern on Julian Assange

Robert Knight interviews Ray McGovern on Five O'Clock Shadow on WBAI 99.5FM.

[AUDIO]

Audio of  the interview can be heard at http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/60926

RK: We turn now to the case of Julian Assange. In a followup to our previous conversation with attorney Michael Ratner  and continue to keep our eyes on the ecuadorian Embassy in London where Julian Assange  remains. At this date he is seeking political asylum  and fighting extradition to Sweden, or possibly the US. 

Ray McGovern has been long been working with the Assange team and the wikileaks team and manyy other organizations, including his former officership in the CIA where he was an analytic officer. He has most recently published on Constortium News the overnight article titled: Julian Assange's Artful Dodge, which begins saying: "Barring a CIA drone strike on the Ecuadorian embassy in London, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s sudden appeal for asylum there may spare him a prison stay in Sweden or possibly the United States. Assange’s freedom now depends largely on Ecuadorian President Rafael Vicente Correa Delgado, a new breed of independent-minded leader like Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez."

Welcome to Five O'Clock Shadow, Ray.

Ray: Thank you Robert, glad to be here.

Julian Assange seeks asylum in Ecuadorian Embassy

Robert Knight interviews Michael Ratner of The Center for Constitutional Rights on Five O'Clock Shadow WBAI 99.5FM

The interview can be heard at http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/60912

RK:  People around the world woke up today to the surprise announcement that the Editor in Chief of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, who had been under house arrest in England, was now at the Ecuadorian Embassy to the United Kingdom, where he  is seeking asylum, because he fears for the conditions he will face if he is extradited to Sweden and then probably to the United States. To help clarify these breaking developmens, we're happy to be joined by Julian Assange's American lawyer Michael Ratner. 

Welcome back, Michael.

MR: Robert Knight, it's always good to be with you. You've been doing a great job as usual. I was as surprised as you were when I got a text from someone saying that Julian Assange has just gone to the Ecuadorian Embassy and is asking for political asylum, And so I've been trying figure out how to sort it out and of course I have a good understanding of it and I think you summarized it pretty well.
Broadly stated what was gonna happen to him was he had lost all his appeals against going to Sweden through the English courts.

Where the fuck is Lawrence Gilliard?

Where the fuck is Wallace?


A love letter to Lawrence Gilliard Jr.

I've just finished watching Season One of The Wire, and I'm distressed. Let me explain. When it comes to watching a TV series, I'm a perrenial late-comer.  Shows have already come and gone and won their awards and accolades before I ever get to them.  Sometimes this works great - it's an excellent screening device to someone with too few hours and too much to see. But the downside is that I'd miss out on all the excitement of a great new show.

And thus it was with The Wire, which I'm just now discovering as it is  currently being aired on HBO's On Demand Series.

Occupy Harvard: Egghead uprising in progress

Harvard’s Lamont Library is Occupied
Feb12 by occupyharvard
 
Dear friends and community members,
 
Lamont Café is occupied. We intend for it to remain occupied until Friday at 10p. At a time when the University is restructuring the library, we are working to change what a library is understood to be. Take a break. Think. The New Harvard Library Working Group of Occupy Harvard has opened a persistent community space for critical thought, engaged learning, and insistent action in the Lamont Library Café.
 

Turn off your televisions

Turn off your televisions. Ignore the Newt-Mitt-Rick-Barack reality show. It is as relevant to your life as the gossip on “Jersey Shore.” The real debate, the debate raised by the Occupy movement about inequality, corporate malfeasance, the destruction of the ecosystem, and the security and surveillance state, is the only debate that matters. You won’t hear it on the corporate-owned airwaves and cable networks, including MSNBC, which has become to the Democratic Party what Fox News is to the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party. You won’t hear it on NPR or PBS. You won’t read about it in our major newspapers. The issues that matter are being debated, however, on “Democracy Now!,” Link TV, The Real News, Occupy websites and Revolution Truth. They are being raised by journalists such as Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. You can find genuine ideas in corners of the Internet or in books by political philosophers such as Sheldon Wolin. But you have to go looking for them. 

Voting will not alter the corporate systems of power. Voting is an act of political theater. Voting in the United States is as futile and sterile as in the elections I covered as a reporter in dictatorships like Syria, Iran and Iraq. There were always opposition candidates offered up by these dictatorships. Give the people the illusion of choice. Throw up the pretense of debate. Let the power elite hold public celebrations to exalt the triumph of popular will. We can vote for Romney or Obama, but Goldman Sachs and ExxonMobil and Bank of America and the defense contractors always win. There is little difference between our electoral charade and the ones endured by the Syrians and Iranians. Do we really believe that Obama has, or ever had, any intention to change the culture in Washington?

In this year’s presidential election I will vote for a third-party candidate, either the Green Party candidate or Rocky Anderson, assuming one of them makes it onto the ballot in New Jersey, but voting is nothing more than a brief chance to register our disgust with the corporate state. It will not alter the configurations of power. The campaign is not worth our emotional, physical or intellectual energy.

Read More...

This Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit

Look, I understand that some people find the notion that we've become an oligarchy — with all that implies about class relations — disturbing. But that's the way it is.
Paul Krugman

McKenzie Wark (bio)

I'm a worker. I go to work every weekday. I get paid. Most of that money goes to support my family. There's a little left over for fun. There's some for small acts of generosity. This makes possible a pretty good life. Will my students get to have that life? Or my kids?

Occupy Boston College

← Destroy paramilitary tapes say Boston researchers

Wipe terror tapes and close US archive, its authors urge

Wipe terror tapes and close US archive, its authors urge
BY LIAM CLARKE, POLITICAL EDITOR
Belfast Telegraph
4 January 2012

A CONTROVERSIAL US project which contains the testimonies of Troubles era terrorists should now be wound up, according to the men who founded it.

The three men involved in the oral history project have said Boston College’s decision to hand over material to the US authorities after requests from the PSNI has betrayed the trust of those involved.

Investigative journalist Ed Moloney is the former director of the project that aimed to document the conflict through the eyes of those involved. Dr Anthony McIntyre interviewed former IRA members, while Wilson McArthur spoke to former loyalist paramilitaries for the archive under promise of confidentiality until death.

Shadow Anniversary: 'Persistence of War' - Correctly predicts Obama's Afghan War lies

Shadow Anniversary: 'Persistence of War' - Correctly predicts Obama's Afghan War lies
 
http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/56813
 
PERSISTENCE OF WAR
Series:
Subtitle:
Program Type: Daily Program
Featured Speakers/Commentators: Barack Obama; Fred Branfman; Jo Cumberford;
Freda Payne; Robert Knight
Contributor: Robert Knight [Contact Contributor]
Broadcast Advisory: No Advisories - program content screened and verified.

Summary:
A "Five O'Clock Shadow" anniversary special on "The Persistence of War,"
compiled from The Shadow's premiere broadcast in late 2010, featuring:
President Barack Obama's then-most-recent 30,000 troop "surge" -- and his false "promise to withdraw them " in Afghanistan (committing a combined TWICE as many troops [70,000] as President George W. Bush before him), and his false "promise of withdrawal by... JULY, 2011;
 
Fred Bronfman, first reporter to reveal the secret US bombing of Laos during the Vietnam war, discussing current WikiLeaks revelations of clandestine US bombing in Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan;
 
Barack Obama's 2009 speech incresing US military presence in Afghanistan, with false commitment to withdrawal by July 2011;
 
Jo Cumberford, executive director of the National Priorities Project, discussing
federal spending alternatives and the cost of war in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan; and

Legendary singer Freda Payne, discussing her anti-Vietnam war background and the US military banning of her music, including her famous anti-war song "Bring the Boys Home"; and

Freda Payne - "Bring the Boys Home (Bring Them Back Alive)."
 
Credits:
Anchor: Robert Knight
Producer: Kristin Prest
Engineering: Michael G. Haskins
Origin: WBAI/Pacifica
 
-Robert Knight
Senior National Correspondent
"Five O'Clock Shadow"

WBAI . 99.5FM . wbai.org
We Are the 99.5!

Contextualizing the Bradley Manning pre-trial hearings

with Robert Knight and Jeff Paterson
On Five O'Clock Shadow, WBAI (99.5FM)

RK: A Military Tribunal on Bradley Manning has just come to a close.Today the concluding arguments were held in an Article 32 hearing at Fort Meade for Private Bradley Manning. who is accused of releasing confidential cables and other content to WikiLeaks.  The hearing has been a contentious one and it follows 18 months of imprisonment. We're now joined live by Jeff Patterson, who has been following the case, and works with bradleymanning.org. Jeff. can you bring us up to date on the state of the case against Bradley Manning?

JP: Well for the last week i've been in the court room at Fort Meade Md. right next door to the National Security Agency.  And the prosecution has outlined a pretty thorough case of leaking - of Bradley Manning  downloading this information and transferring it to the WikiLeaks website. That didn't realy come as news to me-- 18 months ago when we started the Bradley Manning  website, we did go on the assumption that Bradley Manning is probably the person who released this information but We're supporting Bradley not because we think he's innocent, but because we actually think he did it, and it was a great thing that he did. The prosecution made no attempt to show that anybody was actually harmed from the information, they made no attempt to claim that Bradley Manning  received any kind of benefit for releasing the information. And the prosecution's own documents lay out a motive of a young man wanting to change the world for the better, who seeing these things in the course of doing his job as an intelligence analysis, made the decision to probably  break certain military guidelines for sharing information, but felt that we as the public needed to see this information,  to paraphrase Bradley Manning  in the chat logs,  to make informed decisions as a real democracy. And if we don't act upon this information and demand reforms, then we're doomed. And that's another paraphrase that's been attributed to Bradley Manning.

NDAA Set To Become Law: The Terror Is Nearer Than Ever

 
David Seaman, Credit Card Outlaw | Dec. 14, 2011, 6:27 PM | 120,196 | 112
http://www.businessinsider.com/ndaa-set-to-become-law-the-terror-is-nearer-than-ever-2011-12

It turns out that destroying the American democratic republic was easy to accomplish, historians will write someday. Simply get the three major cable news networks to blather on about useless bull**** for a few days, while legislators meet in secret behind closed doors to rush through the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA), and its evil twin sister, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which is a clever name for an Internet censorship bill straight out of an Orwellian nightmare.