Assange and Posada in the Propaganda System

[Octafish]

Spot the terrorist:

Mixed Media

Assange and Posada in the Propaganda System

By EDWARD S. HERMAN and DAVID PETERSON
CounterPunch
January 26, 2011

EXCERPT...

Posada, now 82, is a self-confessed terrorist, Bay of Pigs veteran, School of the Americas graduate, and CIA operative who has been credibly placed at two meetings where the plan was hatched for the October 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed all 73 civilians aboard. He also has been implicated in numerous other terrorist acts in which people were killed or injured and property destroyed, and he played a role in the United States' arms-smuggling network in Central America that eventually came to light in the Iran-Contra investigations.

"The CIA taught us everything," Posada told the New York Times in 1998. "They taught us explosives, how to kill, bomb, trained us in acts of sabotage." Posada was a star pupil. But as a longtime CIA asset and, until the past decade, the "most notorious commando in the anti-Castro underground," the U.S. justice system has never charged Posada with a crime related to terrorism or the death of civilians, even though a former FBI counterterrorism expert who investigated the Cuban airliner bombing claims that Posada was "up to his eyeballs" in its planning. Surely this is because his killings and bombings were carried out against targets of U.S. policy, and because he almost certainly would have implicated the CIA.

SNIP...

Julian Assange, by contrast, has not killed anybody, or so far even broken any law, and key U.S. military officials have denied claims that information released into the public realm via WikiLeaks has resulted in anybody's death. In early August 2010, a Pentagon spokesman told theWashington Post that "We have yet to see any harm come to anyone in Afghanistan that we can directly tie to exposure in the documents," and as late as November 28, a different Pentagon official who "didn't want to be named because of the issue's sensitivity" told the McClatchy newspapers that the "military still has no evidence that the leaks have led to any deaths." Even Secretary of Defense Robert Gates admitted that though WikiLeaks has proven "embarrassing" and "awkward," its "consequences for U.S. foreign policy (are) fairly modest."

Assange is nominally under attack in Britain because of allegations against him in Sweden that led to a European arrest warrant being served on him in London for questioning in relation to "rape, sexual molestation and forceful coercion," and for which he now faces an extradition hearing on February 7. But these charges increasingly appear to be a cover for a political assault on WikiLeaks, helped along by the now-pliable right-wing Swedish political establishment, and they have been convincingly exposed as such. (See, e.g., Al Burke, "Sweden, Assange and the USA," Nordic News Network, December 28, 2010.) Assange's real crime is the "exposure and embarrassment of the political class," as John Pilger put it. That and the threat that WikiLeaks will keep doing this.

CONTINUED...

http://counterpunch.org/herman01262011.html

Hermann and Peterson write about the big picture stuff and what it means to democracy. IMFO: The public's right to know includes knowing who's a terrorist, especially when on the U.S. Government payroll. So, where's the vaunted Washington press corpse?

[Octafish]

1. How Posada ties to BFEE

Poppy’s CIA warned about terror plots and did not stop them

[Octafish]

2. Why BFEE wants to shut up Assange

Swiss ex-banker hands files to WikiLeaks.