An additional objective of the MSM smear campaign against Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, is to deflect viewers' attention and news coverage away from Wikileaks documents that embarrass government officials and point to malfeasance.
In Glenn Greenwald's Salon article, The merger of journalists and government officials, he analyzes how CNN interviewer Jessica Yellin and former Bush Homeland Security Adviser, Fran Townsend, are in cahoots smearing Julian Assange and Wikileaks.
it's just amazing, to me at least, how so many of these "debates" I've done involving one anti-WikiLeaks political figure and one ostensibly "neutral" journalist ---- entail no daylight at all between the "journalists" and the political figures. They don't even bother any longer with the pretense that they're distinct or play different assigned roles.
However, Glenn missed the ulterior motive of these partners in propaganda: to spend valuable t.v. air time tarnishing Wikileaks and steer his end of the conversation into defending Wikileaks, not discussing the secrets Wikileaks unveiled.
It's the same propaganda formula: a "journalist" makes misleading and false statements vilifying Wikileaks and asks a defender of Wikileaks questions, in which he has to rebut the lies, and then the "journalist" asks a former Bush official to respond, who supports the lie.
2 against 1.
No matter how well Mr. Greenwald disproves the false statements, it's 2 against 1 supporting the lie. The repetitious lies tend to stick in the minds of viewers, and the smear job is done.
But, smearing Wikileaks is not all that is accomplished here, the MSM spends more time discussing Julian Assange and questioning his motives than revealing to the American public the secret documents he uncovered, which are far more threatening to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness than Julian Assange.
CNN's Jessica Yellin asked Glenn Greenwald this highly charged question that attacks Julian Assange's motives, but totally ignores the more newsworthy Wikileaks revelations about killing innocent civilians, torture, improprieties,...
Any qualm about the fact that he is essentially profiting from classified information?
Glenn Greenwald did a superb job answering her leading question:
Well, I would contest the premise of your question. He is not profiting at all off classified information. The legal fees that he is facing already amount to $200,000. It is certain that his legal fees continue to sky rocket. He is clearly the leading target of governments around the world.
The Pentagon in 2008 wrote a classified report about how he should be destroyed and how Wikileaks should be destroyed. So there is no question that even with his $1.3 million book contract, at the end of the day, his legal fees are going to be vastly more than that. What this is a way for him to survive the legal onslaught that governments are launching.
But I would add that every leading American politician, virtually, has got extremely rich off their political careers by writing books, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Sarah Palin. He is not profiting, he is just surviving by writing a book that will let him defend himself from these legal proceedings.
However, the viewer still hasn't learned much about what was found in the Wikileaks documents. The viewer only garners that Julian Assange is under fire and is being defended. The government officials who have a lot to hide can rest easy. Nothing Wikileaks revealed has been questioned, only Julian Assange's integrity.
This Yellin question is so ridiculously biased that it reads like a Saturday Night Live skit:
can you explain for people what is his ultimate goal, beyond embarrassing and disrupting the U.S. government, what good do his supporters really hope will come from everything he is doing?
Again, Glenn Greenwald, does a wonderful job defending Julian Assange and the goal of Wikileaks, but none of the big bad secrets are revealed in any light to viewers, only the debate about Assange:
Well, I don't think embarrassing the U.S. government is his goal. I think what he does is he looks at what has happened to the United States over the course of the last decade and what he sees is that extreme amounts of secrecy are being used by the United States government to hide the vast majority of what it is that it does from the American citizenry.
This is not only a grave threat to democratic values. It's crucial that citizens be aware of what their government is doing, not having them hide behind walls of secrecy, but what we have seen is that it's secrecy that allows the government to engage in all kinds of criminality and corruption.
Its secrecy that led the Bush administration mislead the American people into believing we had to go to war in Iraq to get rid of weapons that Saddam Hussein didn't have establish a world-wide torture regimes.
The founders all recognize when people in power are able to operate in the dark, what they do is they abuse their power and they act deceitfully and corruptively what Julian Assange believes and millions of people around the world believe in is that it is necessary to shine the light on what the world's most powerful factions are doing to prevent this level of abuse of power and corruption.
The next Yellin question is ominous, foreshadowing the ultimate checkmate move in the chess match US officials are playing with international law to corner Julian Assange:
And he should also be prepared to go to jail for what he's done, as other revolutionaries have. No?
Greenwald admirably explains that Assange hasn't broken a law to land him in jail for publishing secrets:
Well, see, you're a journalist, so you should understand better than anybody that publishing classified information about what governments do is not actually a crime. Every day, media outlets like "The New York Times" and the "Washington Post" and CNN publish government secrets. They publish top secrets, in fact.
"The New York Times" exposed the Bush administration's top secret eavesdropping program, the CIA program, Wikileaks has never exposed top secret this is all secret, marked secret, a lower level designation and in the United States, again, journalists should know this better than anybody and should hope that's true
[snip]
It's not a crime to publish classified information.
Undeterred, Yellin tries to mislead the viewers by alleging Assange published stolen material:
Right, we would draw distinction between publishing information that comes to you by -- and then publishing information that's stolen by somebody ostensibly stolen.
Greenwald sets Yellin straight, but the Wikileaks secrets are still hush hush:
No, you're absolutely wrong because the "New York Times" used its sources all the time and take classified information that they are not authorized to disseminate and gives it to the "New York Times" which then publishes it.
Good investigative journalists, maybe CNN doesn't do this, but good investigative journalists work their sources all the time to convince them to give them classified information to inform the citizens of the United States about what the government is doing. That's what journalists do.
Then Yellin plays a video of Vice President Biden calling Assange a high-tech terrorist and asks the former Bush official to concur with this assessment...which she indubitably does. The stage has been set to arrest Assange, extradite him to the U.S., where he can be detained indefinitely as an enemy combatant without due process, which should be unconstitutional, but in our bizarro post 9/11 world, has become as acceptable as water boarding and other forms of torture.
During this CNN interview, Assange is attacked, defended, attacked, etc., like a diverting tennis match, all eyes on the ball bouncing from court to court, but not one Wikileaks secret document has been covered. We think we have seen a free press discussing both sides of an issue on which they have made us focus: Julian Assange's integrity, not the integrity of the US government, but what we have seen is a diversion from the secrets Wikileaks has revealed that put into question the misdeeds of our government and a concerted attempt to massage the American public's consciousness into accepting their goal of jailing Julian Assange as a "high-tech terrorist" enemy combatant in much the same way they brainwashed Americans to accept war with Iraq and are trying to brainwash Americans to go to war with Iran.
The following is pure propaganda:
YELLIN: Fran, you have the gist of what's saying. Is it fair to call him a terrorist?
FRANCES FRAGOS TOWNSEND, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CONTRIBUTOR: Well, look there is no question, let's be clear, your initial question was is he profiting from the commission of a crime and the answer to that is yes. Nobody care who had Julian Assange was until the Wikileaks came out with these tens of thousands of documents, of classified documents. So what he seeks to do now is to profit from that the notion of equating him to public servants and elected officials who publish auto biographies after their government service and profit from that that is purely outrageous.
This is a guy who committed a crime. He did not do what your standard journalist do and by the way, when your other guest refers to "New York Times," even the "New York Times," when they have very sensitive classified information, would come to the government and redact it. David Sanger went on NPR after this and talked about instances where the "New York Times" redacted classified information from their reports because to not do so would have been irresponsible.
During the following repartee, in which Yellin tries to persuade viewers that Assange should go to jail, Glenn scores big.
YELLIN: Shouldn't he, again, be prepared to go to jail in defense of his beliefs here?
GREENWALD: People should go to jail if they are charged with a crime and then they are convicted of that crime in a court of law. Fran Townsend can talk all she wants about how he has committed a crime. Many people believe that her boss has committed lots of crimes, but he hasn't been convicted of anything.
YELLIN: Of course, he hasn't been convicted of a crime.
GREENWALD: Neither has Julian Assange. He has not been charged with a crime and he has not been convicted of a crime in connection with these leaks and that's because you can say it all you want, but as a lawyer, I will tell you, and you ask any lawyer if this is true, it is not a crime in the United States to leak classified information if you don't work for the government.
The "New York Times" publishes secrets far more sensitive, a far higher level of secrecy, than anything Julian Assange has ever published and in fact, the Bush administration repeatedly threatened to prosecute the "New York Times" for doing things like exposing the illegal surveillance program.
For exposing the banking program that tracked people's banking information, classified information, publishing classified information is what journalists do and I can't believe that anyone in the field of journalism, such as yourself would say he should go to prison for doing what reporters are supposed to do, which is inform people about what the government is doing.
When Townsend tried to mislead the audience that Assange indiscriminately dumped secret documents, Greenwald ate her lunch.
GREENWALD: That's totally false. That's just a lie. He has published less than 1 percent of the 250,000 diplomatic cables that he came into possession of, less than 2,000 of the 250,000.
So, for you to say that he just indiscriminately dumped these documents without assessing what they are and making decisions about what should be withheld and what should be redacted is factually false. Why are you telling that to the viewers?
Not to let facts get in her way, Townsend continued to promote the lie that Assange committed a crime:
TOWNSEND: He has threatened to publish much more than he has and there isn't any - the notion we should be grateful he didn't commit a larger crime than he has already committed is ridiculous.
Wikileaks is being attacked on the MSM in much the same way the MSM sold America the Iraq War: through an intense constant repetition of lies. The "impartial" journalist asks a question that impugns Wikileaks with a misconception to Glenn Greenwald, who does his best to counter the lie with the truth. Then the "impartial" journalist asks an "impartial" expert, who is actually a former Bush staffer, who repeats the lie with "authority."
Even though Glenn Greenwald masterfully rebutted many of these falsehoods against Wikileaks in this CNN clip, you can see how the MSM does its shtick such that the viewer may believe the lie, not Glenn's logical retorts.
We should talk about the video of American soldiers gunning down innocent civilians, not Assange.
We should hear more about what our government is really doing in our names that is bankrupting us as a nation and robbing so many people of their lives, liberty, and happiness, not Assange.
I call the MSM (mainstream media) the Special Interest Controlled Media (SICM). I prefer this acronym, because it sounds like Sic 'em, which is exactly what they are doing - biting into the truth and truth tellers like a pack of attack dogs.
The media that lied to us about Iraq WMDs, yellowcake, and mushroom clouds is at it again disinforming and misdirecting our attention from the truth Wikileaks uncovered...for the same reason: the special interests who control the media want us to buy into their wars, and their enemy is the truth.
Glenn Greenwald won the Assange smear skirmish here, but the way our government bullies other countries to not prosecute US torture and war crimes and other alarming revelations that Wikileaks uncovered were lost in the scuffle.
I hope the next time Glenn Greenwald or even Julian Assange himself is interviewed they mention a few of the Wikileaks revelations the special interest controlled media is desperately trying to drown out with anti-Assange propaganda so that this subversive secrecy does not triumph the next time.