True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 106: #FreeAssange
Aired: 2020-10-08
Duration: 01:44:03


=== Avant's Truanon Update (04:30) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey, welcome to Talking Truanon.
[00:00:02]  My name is Chris Matthews, and I'm here with my beautiful co-host, Vanessa.
[00:00:10]  And we're here with all your Truanon updates, news, some cool perspectives on the episodes.
[00:00:16]  We have interviews with some of the people who work on the show.
[00:00:19]  A lot of people don't understand this, but there's hundreds of people at work in Truanon.
[00:00:24]  What you see up on the silver screen there of the mind is actually the product of work of thousands of Hollywood slaves.
[00:00:33]  And we have one with us today.
[00:00:35]  Her name is Queen Shit.
[00:00:41]  Fuck.
[00:00:42]  Ah, man.
[00:00:43]  I lost it pretty long there.
[00:00:46]  I know.
[00:00:46]  I was thinking I should cut you off and then you just did it for me.
[00:00:49]  I couldn't stop.
[00:00:51]  What is up with.
[00:00:52]  Are there podcasts about podcasts?
[00:00:54]  Is that a thing?
[00:00:55]  Absolutely.
[00:00:55]  Yes.
[00:00:55]  Absolutely.
[00:00:56]  There's podcasts about TV shows.
[00:00:59]  Well, I know that, but I mean, are there podcasts about podcasts?
[00:01:02]  100%.
[00:01:03]  Absolutely.
[00:01:03]  Yes.
[00:01:04]  Yes.
[00:01:05]  I mean, I do talking.
[00:01:06]  I do Talk and Call Her Daddy with some of the guys.
[00:01:11]  Call me Daddy.
[00:01:12]  That's what you call it.
[00:01:12]  100%.
[00:01:14]  The internet was trying to promote to me the other week a podcast by two women from the TV show The Office, where they just talk about the office.
[00:01:25]  They talk about being on the show The Office?
[00:01:27]  Yeah.
[00:01:28]  And like, I guess you're supposed to listen to it, like maybe after you watch an episode or something.
[00:01:32]  Oh, people love that show.
[00:01:33]  I bet that podcast is very popular.
[00:01:35]  A lot of people don't know this, but I was actually the showrunner on The Office Guatemala for quite a while until unfortunately I tried to cast myself in the role of a romantic lead and was unfortunately asked to leave the country by the government and many of the social movements there.
[00:01:54]  So I came back here and I started a podcast.
[00:02:19]  I just thought of something funny.
[00:02:20]  You know how like I, the only talking show I can remember is Talking Walking Dead or whatever.
[00:02:25]  Oh, yeah, Talking Dead.
[00:02:27]  Talking Dead.
[00:02:28]  Yeah.
[00:02:28]  Wait, that guy got got got, right?
[00:02:30]  No, no, he got ungot.
[00:02:32]  Oh, he got ungot?
[00:02:33]  He got ungot, I think.
[00:02:36]  What's his name?
[00:02:36]  Oh, Chris Hardwick from Singled Out.
[00:02:38]  Yeah, which is, I mean, really, he's just one letter off there from having a last name that you cannot say in public.
[00:02:46]  Singled out was great.
[00:02:48]  What's singled out?
[00:02:49]  The MTV show, Singled Out, with Jenny McCarthy.
[00:02:53]  I don't know who that is either.
[00:02:54]  Oh my God.
[00:02:56]  He's a classic.
[00:02:57]  Classic.
[00:02:57]  Well, I'm not big into classics.
[00:02:58]  I'm more into the avant-garde.
[00:03:00]  Oh my God.
[00:03:01]  I mean, the French MTV shows.
[00:03:03]  Sorry, what was that again?
[00:03:04]  The Avant-Garde.
[00:03:07]  Okay.
[00:03:08]  How do you pronounce it?
[00:03:09]  Avant-garde.
[00:03:11]  Well, I'm into the Avant-Garde.
[00:03:12]  It's different.
[00:03:12]  It's more Avant.
[00:03:14]  Avant is like, so say there's a football field.
[00:03:17]  Avant is like three quarters of the way across, like maybe halfway.
[00:03:21]  Avant, you're basically in the bleachers on the other side.
[00:03:24]  I mean, it's so far ahead of the curve that.
[00:03:26]  I mean, this is what the office Guatemala is.
[00:03:29]  It's the Avent avant-garde.
[00:03:30]  Exactly.
[00:03:31]  Yes.
[00:03:32]  It's what I tried to bring to the show in Guatemalan office.
[00:03:36]  And again, like, you know, that didn't go well.
[00:03:39]  But that's what we do here at Truanon.
[00:03:41]  We're Avant.
[00:03:42]  Wait, which one was mine?
[00:03:44]  Wait, Savants?
[00:03:45]  Yeah.
[00:03:45]  Avant.
[00:03:46]  Sorry, I just, the reason I brought up Talking Walking Dead is because I was just thinking about a guy doing a show called Talking Head, where like he reviewed blowjobs he got.
[00:03:59]  He like, he like takes like 30-second clips of blowjobs and like slows them down and like goes deep in.
[00:04:04]  It's like, okay, well, you see what happened here is like the way I was feeling, I mean, this was one of the most emotional scenes in the picture for me.
[00:04:10]  I mean, you can actually see me crying in this and like, you know, there's a lot of liquid going around or whatever, but like those are my tears hitting my thigh.
[00:04:18]  Okay.
[00:04:21]  Welcome to Truanon.
[00:04:24]  My name.
[00:04:26]  Why did you start it like that?
[00:04:28]  Because this is like a serious episode.

=== Julian Assange's Trial: A Strange Proceeding (04:18) ===

[00:04:31]  So there's no, no, none of that.
[00:04:33]  Welcome to Truanon.
[00:04:37]  I'm Brace.
[00:04:40]  Okay, I'm sorry.
[00:04:41]  This is a serious episode.
[00:04:43]  Yeah, apology accepted.
[00:04:46]  I'm Liz.
[00:04:47]  We are joined by producer Young Chopsky.
[00:04:50]  Why is this so funny to me?
[00:04:51]  It's the face you're making.
[00:04:54]  Am I doing a serious?
[00:04:55]  Let me make my picture big.
[00:04:56]  Oh, yeah, I look great.
[00:04:57]  This like serious face.
[00:05:00]  This is the face that most people see.
[00:05:01]  You only see the goof.
[00:05:03]  Oh, well, then it's special.
[00:05:05]  Most people see the poof.
[00:05:07]  Well, hello, everyone.
[00:05:09]  Welcome to Truanon.
[00:05:11]  Like we said, I'm Liz.
[00:05:13]  I'm Brace, joined by producer Young Chop.
[00:05:14]  Are we just doing this again?
[00:05:16]  Yes, I don't know why.
[00:05:18]  We're doing the show a day late today, so we're like off our groove.
[00:05:22]  Everything's off.
[00:05:24]  Yeah, we have an episode today that is, I think, very timely.
[00:05:30]  And it's a sort of big subject to cover.
[00:05:33]  Yeah, there's a lot that we kind of want to hit here.
[00:05:36]  So I think we should kind of, I don't know, maybe we should just get right into it.
[00:05:40]  What we're talking about today is the trial of one Julian Assange of Wikileaks.
[00:05:47]  I'm guessing that everyone listening knows who he is and knows what WikiLeaks is, but we can get that into that a little bit.
[00:05:57]  The reason why we're talking about this, well, there's a lot of reasons why we're talking about this.
[00:06:01]  One of them being that not a lot of people are talking about this.
[00:06:05]  No.
[00:06:06]  But it's quite a big trial that's happening or just happened.
[00:06:10]  Yeah, it's, I mean, like Liz said, we'll kind of get into that more specifically later.
[00:06:15]  But one thing especially notable about this trial is the lack of media coverage and thus sort of lack of, I guess, conversation about it in the general sense.
[00:06:26]  The Assange trial that's going on right now in the UK is not like the trial, you know, he's not on trial for WikiLeaks yet.
[00:06:34]  You know, he's not facing prison from this trial.
[00:06:36]  Well, he technically is.
[00:06:38]  But this is an extradition trial.
[00:06:41]  And for those who don't know what that means, that means that the U.S. is essentially petitioning the UK to send Julian Assange to America to face trial.
[00:06:52]  And, you know, that's a fairly normal proceeding.
[00:06:54]  It happens a lot.
[00:06:55]  It is rather strange that the U.S. is able to petition a British court over an Australian citizen who just until very recently also held Ecuadorian citizenship.
[00:07:07]  But there are a lot of strange things about this trial.
[00:07:10]  Yeah, I think I just want to pause on that for a second.
[00:07:13]  And we're probably going to have to pause and repeat a couple things so people really get it through their head.
[00:07:18]  Julian Assange is not an American citizen.
[00:07:20]  He is not an American journalist.
[00:07:23]  He is not even a British citizen.
[00:07:25]  So he's an Australian citizen, which to be fair, Australia is basically, you know, de facto.
[00:07:34]  I mean, they're a little brother to the US and UK, we'll just say.
[00:07:40]  But, you know, the U.S. is basically demanding the British government extradite a non-U.S. citizen who is a journalist for publishing state secrets, right?
[00:07:53]  Yeah, that's the thing about Julian Assange that I think gets lost in a lot of this is that Assange is not an intelligence agent, although I believe Pompeo called Wikileaks a private intelligence agency.
[00:08:04]  But he is a journalist.
[00:08:05]  I mean, think about what Assange does: he has sources, he has documents, he collects them, and then he publishes them.
[00:08:14]  In no sense, here is Assange the person who's hacking into laptops or who's rifling through filing cabinets or anything like that.
[00:08:21]  What Wikileaks is, is a website that puts information out there.
[00:08:26]  A lot of that information, however, has not been very, well, it's been a little bit embarrassing for the United States government.
[00:08:34]  Yeah, I mean, that's putting it mildly.
[00:08:37]  I mean, it's hard to go over every single thing.
[00:08:43]  I mean, there's just no way.
[00:08:44]  There's no possible way to go over every single thing that WikiLeaks has published, obviously.

=== Hard Truths Revealed (15:30) ===

[00:08:49]  But for those people who are not aware, I just want to give maybe like a high-level run-through of some of the, I don't know, the greatest hits we can call them.
[00:09:02]  So in November 2007, they published the U.S. Army manual for a Guantanamo prison camp, which showed the Army kept inspectors and Red Cross officials away from areas where they were torturing, where the U.S. was torturing prisoners, where they were holding prisoners in isolation for up to two weeks.
[00:09:20]  That this was a U.S. Army directive.
[00:09:23]  Another one is the so-called collateral murder video.
[00:09:27]  And for those who haven't seen this, I remember when this came out, I mean, a lot of people were watching this.
[00:09:32]  This is one of the biggest things that WikiLeaks was known for.
[00:09:35]  But maybe for some younger people, you haven't seen this video.
[00:09:38]  Maybe you've heard of it.
[00:09:40]  But it is one of the sort of most grotesque, you know, looking things that I think Wikileaks has put out.
[00:09:47]  It is a rather long video, although there's a shortened version, from the perspective of, I believe, a helicopter gunship, yeah, an Apache helicopter, of an attack in Baghdad that happened in 2007 that killed at least nine people, including, I believe, two Reuters reporters.
[00:10:06]  And the way that this video, when this came out, it turned out to be very different than the U.S. Army's official story about what happened that night, especially the official story that they gave to Reuters.
[00:10:19]  But it's nothing less than these helicopters circling around, shooting people with high-powered weapons, killing a lot of them, and then circling the survivors.
[00:10:30]  You can watch a man sort of crawling, bleeding, like trying to stand up.
[00:10:35]  They're obviously, in their voices, you can hear this desperation for him to pick up a gun.
[00:10:41]  I mean, he's obviously just trying to sort of balance himself on his hand, but they keep saying like, oh, he's going to pick up a gun, pick up a gun.
[00:10:48]  I mean, mind you, these people are in fucking Apache attack helicopters.
[00:10:53]  They're in no danger from any gun that this guy can pick up.
[00:10:57]  And then a rescue minivan or just maybe a minivan of people passing by comes through and starts trying to put the wounded in it.
[00:11:04]  And they request permission to engage and it is given to them.
[00:11:08]  And they annihilate these people.
[00:11:09]  I mean, it's one of the most grotesque videos I've seen.
[00:11:13]  And I've seen a lot of live leaks videos.
[00:11:16]  Yeah, this video came out as like a precursor to what then became the Iraq War Logs, the Afghan War Diaries, and the Afghan war logs, which were published later on in 2010.
[00:11:29]  And this was all, we should say, also all related, and we'll probably get back to this when we start talking about the trial, but this was also all related to the information that Chelsea Manning leaked to WikiLeaks and was then subsequently arrested for For the, you know, related to the classified material about the Iraq war and the Afghanistan war.
[00:11:51]  But these war diaries and war logs were about 90,000 documents related to Afghanistan and 400,000 documents relating to the war in Iraq.
[00:12:02]  And it had a lot more detailed information about the number of civilian deaths and civilians that were being targeted by the U.S. military.
[00:12:11]  And again, I mean, people have to understand that at this time, the way the U.S. was talking about the war in Iraq and the strategy in Afghanistan was, I mean, there wasn't a popular understanding that there even were civilian attacks or that, or, you know, civilian deaths or that the U.S. was targeting civilians.
[00:12:34]  It just was a total revelation at the time.
[00:12:37]  And Wikileaks had worked with media outlets on these like massive documents.
[00:12:42]  We should, that's also an important point to make.
[00:12:44]  Like specifically on this one, they worked with The Guardian and I believe later on with the New York Times as well.
[00:12:52]  So that media outlets could go through these like massive documents and really report on them.
[00:12:59]  Right.
[00:12:59]  And, you know, I mean, this led to fucking Joe Biden, again, the Democratic nominee for president and then at the time, then vice president of the Obama administration to call straight up, call Julian Assange a terrorist for leaking, for publishing this material.
[00:13:16]  He was named a terrorist.
[00:13:17]  That's actually really indicative of the sort of way that Assange has been talked about at almost every part of our government at high levels.
[00:13:25]  A terrorist, an enemy threat.
[00:13:27]  And the language they use is the same language they use to describe people that they kill, right?
[00:13:32]  That they assassinate via drones or, you know, special forces or whoever.
[00:13:37]  And I think that's always been a really important point here because like, okay, you can say Assange, you know, leaked, or excuse me, he didn't leak anything.
[00:13:46]  You can say that he published classified information and a lot of unclassified information too that just wasn't public.
[00:13:53]  But that hardly makes him rise to the level of a terrorist.
[00:13:56]  I mean, that word has pretty specific connotations, if not strict definitions from the American mind.
[00:14:04]  And you can see that the government's ploy all along here is to essentially put Assange among the ranks of the people that we murder from the sky in other video, excuse me, other videos.
[00:14:16]  Well, a little slip there in other countries.
[00:14:18]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:14:21]  I mean, it got even worse for Assange, I'll say, when Wikileaks published the State Department cables, which was about a month after the war logs and war diaries.
[00:14:32]  And that went on for, I mean, this was an extreme, extreme embarrassment for the United States.
[00:14:37]  That was about 250,000 pages of unredacted U.S. diplomatic cables from December 1996 to February 2010.
[00:14:48]  Again, many of these were passed to intermediaries at the New York Times and The Guardian who reported on them.
[00:14:54]  Nothing in these cables was labeled top secret.
[00:14:59]  Many were marked unclassified.
[00:15:01]  And while some, I think, rose to the level of secret, nothing was, yeah, nothing was top secret.
[00:15:08]  Nothing was classified information.
[00:15:10]  Just to set, just to put that out there.
[00:15:14]  But what these, I mean, what's in these cables is it's, like I said, it's really, really embarrassing.
[00:15:21]  First of all, for Hillary Clinton, where there are cables where she is ordering U.S. diplomats to spy on Bon Ki-moon, who's the head of the UN and other top UN officials.
[00:15:34]  She was ordering U.S. diplomats to gather biometric data, including DNA, fingerprints and iris scans, passwords, personal encryption keys for both private and official communications.
[00:15:46]  But it wasn't just directed at like UN officials.
[00:15:51]  This was also like, you know, leaders of foreign nations, famously Angela Merkel.
[00:15:59]  It came out that the U.S. was wiretapping.
[00:16:02]  If people want some of her biometric data, I think I got some on some sheets around here.
[00:16:08]  But it was also, and this is a crucial point, this is a crucial point, that it was revealed in the cables that this entire order was actually written by the National Clandestine Service under the CIA before Secretary Clinton sent out the directive under her name.
[00:16:24]  And that's important because the CIA is not technically allowed to directly instruct the State Department.
[00:16:30]  No, there's supposed to be like a pretty, I mean, even in the trial of Assange that's happening right now, you know, they talk about it as that there's this big, they call it a Chinese firewall, which I'm not really sure, or Chinese wall or whatever.
[00:16:42]  But yeah, there's supposed to be this strict separation between intelligence agencies and the State Department, which, by the way, has never been true.
[00:16:48]  Well, it's also, I mean, we've talked about this on the show before, but it really was during the Obama administration and under Clinton that that wall really like broke down.
[00:16:58]  And like a lot of, and, you know, the State Department becoming more and more affiliated with the CIA was, you know, one thing that kind of changed in that time.
[00:17:08]  But there was other stuff.
[00:17:09]  I mean, there was, this is when we finally got verification of the U.S. war crimes in Yemen and the covert drone strike program and the chain of command that was responsible.
[00:17:21]  You know, there's like a quote that's, you know, there's in the cables, there's, you know, a telling of a meeting between Petraeus and the Yemeni president where he says, we'll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours.
[00:17:36]  Like it's just it's a this is you know this wasn't this wasn't known before any of this was published, right?
[00:17:45]  Liz, that's called loyalty.
[00:17:46]  That's called respect.
[00:17:48]  That's called it's just like sorry, I get like worked up, but it's like hard to overstate like how much information was in these cables.
[00:17:56]  There was, you know, how the U.S. was leveraging threats of spying and withholding aid to get support for the Copenhagen climate accords, which by the way, not by coincidence, made the U.S. emissions pledge the lowest out of any leading nation.
[00:18:13]  Well, it's it's it's just like and I urge people to sort of look through these cables as much as you can, or at least look through maybe collated collections of them, because there is some pretty outstanding stuff in this.
[00:18:25]  I mean, we all know, I mean, most people, I assume, listening to this show knows about the U.S.'s role in the world.
[00:18:32]  But WikiLeaks, one of the most important things it provided is actual, like hard evidence.
[00:18:38]  And reading the cables where they describe doing some of this stuff or they give the orders to do some of this stuff, for me, it really brought home just how evil this country is, really.
[00:18:51]  And really the government's role in the world.
[00:18:53]  Because there's a difference between knowing that the U.S. is helping Saudi Arabia and the former current slash whatever Yemeni government commit essentially mass murder in that country.
[00:19:09]  And then actually reading what they're talking about, because then you realize this state that we're under isn't just like a country of well-meaning people who have different politics than us.
[00:19:21]  It's an entity akin to like the, you know, the Roman Empire or something where it has to keep dominion over these places.
[00:19:28]  And you can really see sort of how the sausage is made here.
[00:19:32]  It's fucking vile.
[00:19:34]  Yeah.
[00:19:34]  And, you know, I will say too that, you know, other things that came out in the State Department cables had to do with the role of massive global corporations and working with the State Department.
[00:19:46]  Like, for example, Deincorp, which, yes, we've talked about a couple of times on this podcast.
[00:19:52]  But, you know, they're a U.S. government, they were a U.S. government contractor.
[00:19:57]  And, you know, their employees in Afghanistan paid for the service of what they called, quote, underage dancing boys, which is, by the way, basically just a euphemism for child prostitution.
[00:20:09]  It's really child sex slavery that they killed.
[00:20:12]  Yeah, those boys were auctioned off by Deincorp employees to be abused by Afghan policemen and some of them kept as sex slaves to participate in events funded by Deincorp.
[00:20:26]  And we should say that when the Washington Post first reported on this story back in July of 2009, right?
[00:20:34]  So this is their reporting before the WikiLeaks published the cables.
[00:20:38]  This is how the Washington Post described the incident.
[00:20:40]  Quote, questionable management oversight in which, quote, Dying Corp employees in Afghanistan hired a teenage boy to perform a tribal dance.
[00:20:49]  Sorry, that was just, that was.
[00:20:52]  Yeah, it's really upsetting.
[00:20:54]  I mean, that's the thing.
[00:20:55]  So this is, and we're going to get into this later, I think, because we're real, you know, we're real fired up for this episode.
[00:21:02]  Yes.
[00:21:03]  But, you know, this is exact proof of what Wikileaks can show us, which is how the press and the media obfuscates and covers for the U.S. for U.S. government power.
[00:21:15]  Well, I'll say that even in this instance is if you take the look at the coverage of Wikileaks itself, which again, we can get more into specifics later.
[00:21:23]  It is just so notable how Assange himself has become the story in so much of this about Wikileaks.
[00:21:30]  And that to me does not seem unintentional.
[00:21:32]  There's no, you know, it's, it's, I can't remember who said that.
[00:21:36]  I don't know if it was John Pilger, somebody like that, is they talked about how WikiLeaks shown this bright light.
[00:21:41]  And what the U.S. government needed to do was blot it out.
[00:21:44]  And what they've done to try to do is they try to blot it out with Assange himself and make him the story and make him into this character that not only overshadows everything that WikiLeaks does, but actually becomes the real story.
[00:21:56]  And it's, I mean, when you take a step back and you realize that in this, in the collateral murder video I talked about earlier, where you see people murdering people, you know, via fucking helicopters, is Assange has been in, and Chelsea Manning got in infinitely more trouble than anybody associated with that.
[00:22:15]  With real life actual murder of journalists, which won't go further with that.
[00:22:26]  But these journalists, they were innocent.
[00:22:29]  Not to mention the FGA, you know, the Iraqi civilians.
[00:22:33]  Exactly, exactly.
[00:22:35]  But it's just so notable how nothing happens to you if you wear the uniform of the United States government and you murder somebody.
[00:22:42]  But I mean, as we've been shown numerous times, especially here during the Trump presidency, sort of garishly, you know, with the case of the Navy SEALs and stuff like that.
[00:22:52]  But just in general, I mean, there's so much just mass death that nothing happens.
[00:22:58]  Nobody is ever punished.
[00:22:59]  And now you have Assange, you know, sitting in a fucking, in a, in a plastic cube in a courtroom, you know, about to be sent to essentially be tortured to death in an American prison.
[00:23:09]  And there's literally in the cables, there's an example of that because there's the U.S. State Department, you know, sending threats and warning Germany of material consequences if the Germans were to enforce arrest warrants against CIA agents who kidnapped a German citizen and held him at a rendition site in Afghanistan for months for no reason.
[00:23:31]  They literally mistook the wrong else.
[00:23:34]  It's the wrong, it was the wrong fucking guy.
[00:23:35]  He was on vacation in, like, I can't remember where.
[00:23:38]  It's just a German Arab guy.
[00:23:39]  He was on vacation and somewhere in the fucking Balkans.
[00:23:42]  And all of a sudden, one day, he's got black bags, fucking earphones over his ears.
[00:23:47]  I mean, imagine if this happened to you, brothers and sisters.
[00:23:49]  Like, you know, you are, you are fucking, you know, totally blacked out, put on a plane by people you don't know who the fuck they are, taken to a fucking black site, tortured.
[00:23:59]  I mean, the guy, the guy eventually went on hunger strike.
[00:24:02]  They realize after a while that it's the wrong guy.
[00:24:05]  And you know what they do?
[00:24:06]  They fucking blackback his ass again and take him back to the fucking Balkans and thought, throw him off the plane.
[00:24:11]  He was caught, I believe, in Albania, wandering around with a suitcase, totally dazed, picked up by the police and who were like, what the fuck are you doing here, brother?

=== Weeping Angel Torture (02:44) ===

[00:24:20]  And you know what they did?
[00:24:22]  They said they'd kill him if he ever told anybody.
[00:24:25]  I mean, it's incredible.
[00:24:26]  You know, I mean, these people are fucking criminals.
[00:24:39]  Well, then then we have then we have something that I think about pretty much every fucking day, which is the vault seven stuff.
[00:24:46]  Yeah.
[00:24:46]  Yeah.
[00:24:47]  This was like basically not covered.
[00:24:50]  I mean, this is like towards the latter part of WikiLeaks tenure in the media.
[00:24:54]  I mean, they're still around, but you know what I'm saying.
[00:24:57]  So this is like 2017.
[00:24:59]  And by this time, I think a lot of people in the media had learned, you know, not to cover a lot of this stuff.
[00:25:09]  Yeah.
[00:25:10]  Some of the most notable shit from these leaks was, I mean, this stuff was leaked by somebody somehow associated with the CIA.
[00:25:19]  I don't know if they actually figure out who it was or anything like that, but some of the most explosive stuff for me in this was something called Weeping Angel, which is developed by the CIA's embedded sprint.
[00:25:33]  Pause on this name for a second.
[00:25:35]  Weeping Angel?
[00:25:37]  It's so scary to me.
[00:25:39]  What are you talking about?
[00:25:40]  That's what I call.
[00:25:41]  Do you know how many weeping angels I've dated?
[00:25:44]  Oh my God.
[00:25:45]  Because I always date angels and they end up doing this weeping shit.
[00:25:48]  Okay, okay.
[00:25:49]  But come on, it's a horror angel.
[00:25:50]  It's fucking, yeah, it's like a gargoyle.
[00:25:52]  It's like calling it Project Gargoyle or something.
[00:25:54]  Like, it's terrifying.
[00:25:55]  A weeping angel is like some shit you see at the top of a building and then you go into the building and a fucking axe cuts off your head.
[00:26:02]  It's horrifying.
[00:26:04]  Yeah, but usually they call stuff like, you know, Operation Smelting Blue or something that does the name.
[00:26:10]  You know, this is like red-pilled Operation.
[00:26:14]  To be fair, it also kind of sounds like an early 2000s WB show.
[00:26:19]  Like a teeny drama.
[00:26:20]  That's true.
[00:26:20]  Or like, or like a supernatural detective show on CW.
[00:26:25]  Or like a really cheap rosé wine.
[00:26:28]  Yes, yes.
[00:26:30]  Or like a chat book that you buy at Cafe Oasis down on down on Haight at like the open mic night.
[00:26:36]  And that place, I gotta say, I love that place.
[00:26:39]  The Ethiopian Lady's Super Sweet.
[00:26:41]  Oh, is that the OA?
[00:26:42]  Well, they're both owned by Ethiopian people.
[00:26:43]  Hate Street Cafe, the one down there.
[00:26:45]  Lady's Super Sweet smells like pee in there all the time.
[00:26:48]  I don't get it.
[00:26:48]  They have a famously, famously does.
[00:26:50]  It smelled like pea since I was like 16.
[00:26:52]  Yeah.
[00:26:53]  Anyways, I bought the Weeping Angel there.
[00:26:55]  Well, so what is Weeping Angel?
[00:26:57]  Weeping Angel is a fucking technique where they can go into your You're gonna love this.

=== Smart Devices and Surveillance (06:40) ===

[00:27:04]  You know how like you like it basically puts TVs into like a fake version of like off mode, off mode, or just like it fakes them being off.
[00:27:14]  And and so the owner, like, you know, they you think it's off and it's actually not.
[00:27:19]  What they're really doing is that they are, they're, they're operating your TV as a bug and they can hear everything you say.
[00:27:25]  And they can do this with all of your devices too.
[00:27:27]  That's the crazy thing.
[00:27:28]  It's like, I don't know if people understand.
[00:27:30]  It's like they can just like listen to your phone.
[00:27:33]  Like, yeah, yeah.
[00:27:35]  Well, I think two things to note here is that one, they can do it with pretty much any, they have back doors, not just to iPhones, Androids, Windows phones, whatever phones.
[00:27:48]  Despite what some people think about the tech companies and whatever, the CIA absolutely has backdoors.
[00:27:54]  But also to any smart device.
[00:27:58]  So smart toaster, smart washer and dryer, smart dishwasher, smart.
[00:28:06]  They're making they have smart light bulbs, which by the way, what is that?
[00:28:09]  What do you need?
[00:28:11]  Why do you need Bluetooth in your light bulb?
[00:28:13]  What is that?
[00:28:14]  There was actually a really funny instance of, you know, when Europe put in that like privacy act about cookies or whatever?
[00:28:19]  I can't remember what it's called.
[00:28:20]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:28:22]  Every smart light bulb in Europe stopped working for a while.
[00:28:25]  Really?
[00:28:25]  And like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:28:26]  And sometimes you need, what's that?
[00:28:29]  What's there's like that account called like internet of shit or whatever.
[00:28:32]  Oh, yeah, yeah.
[00:28:32]  That like is pretty good at like show.
[00:28:34]  I mean, I have zero smart devices in my phone, excuse me, in my home besides my phone.
[00:28:41]  And I just don't get it.
[00:28:43]  Like they seem expensive.
[00:28:45]  Remember the Juice Arrow?
[00:28:46]  Let's not get into this.
[00:28:47]  Remember that fucking thing?
[00:28:49]  Juice Arrow.
[00:28:50]  That was a great moment.
[00:28:51]  Yeah, that was.
[00:28:53]  I lost so much money on that.
[00:28:58]  But yeah, it's incredible.
[00:28:59]  And like, that's the thing.
[00:29:00]  That's the thing is, like, and they showed that they can get into WhatsApp and Signal.
[00:29:04]  I mean, it's like, that's like what I want to stress to people.
[00:29:08]  It's like a lot of people, you know, I have like smart tech friends that like tell me like, oh no, you actually can't get into Signal because of the encryption like this.
[00:29:15]  Like, no, baby.
[00:29:17]  Believe me, I don't care if like people think they can't or whatever.
[00:29:20]  First of all, Signal's got some pretty funky origins financially.
[00:29:24]  But like, if it's on your phone or if it's on your computer, you should just never say anything sketchy on it or near it or in the fucking same room as it.
[00:29:35]  Like, that's just it.
[00:29:36]  That's, that's it.
[00:29:37]  I think I just, also, I want to make clear too that, like, so people at home might be like, hey, wait, we knew about this because of Edward Snowden.
[00:29:46]  No, this is different.
[00:29:48]  So Ed Snowden was talking about the NSA.
[00:29:50]  And what the CIA has done is basically created its own NSA within the CIA, right?
[00:29:56]  And one of the things that WikiLeaks published with this Vault 7 is an actual, I mean, you can see the like hierarchy at the CIA and you can see the chain of command and how this is broken down in this like, you know, basically hacking division, what they call the Center for Cyber Intelligence.
[00:30:20]  And, you know, look, it's in the Vault 7.
[00:30:23]  I'm just going to put it out there.
[00:30:24]  The CIA engages in false flag cyber attacks where they portray other countries as the assailants.
[00:30:31]  They collect and maintain a substantial library of attack techniques stolen from malware produced in other states.
[00:30:38]  Keep that in mind.
[00:30:41]  And one of the things that really, this really like made me pause is that as of October 2014, right?
[00:30:50]  As of six years ago.
[00:30:52]  My 18th birthday.
[00:30:54]  The CIA was looking at infecting.
[00:30:57]  That's what they call it, by the way, when they hack something.
[00:30:59]  They call it infecting.
[00:31:01]  So they infect devices and they infest, infect and infest.
[00:31:06]  Anyway, was looking at infecting the vehicle control systems used by modern cars and trucks, because remember, those are all now little smart devices that was basically permitting the CIA to engage in nearly undetectable assassinations.
[00:31:23]  Now, you know, the journalist Michael Hastings, who I don't know if people know this or if they're up to date, but you might recall it was a big deal that he basically destroyed the career of Stanley McChrystal in 2010, who was like, you know, the entire military fucking hated Michael Hastings because of it.
[00:31:45]  In 2013, he was killed by a quote, out of control car.
[00:31:51]  And, you know, if that sounds crazy, just know that Richard Clark, yes, Richard Clark, who was the counterterrorism chief for Clinton and Bush, told the Huffington Post that the Hastings crash looked consistent with a car cyber attack.
[00:32:08]  So I'm just putting that out there.
[00:32:11]  That's what really like it's this stuff and the Snowden stuff and just sort of the general, I mean, all the stuff that we talk about on the show and just like the general way the world is going.
[00:32:22]  It makes me so like if you kind of zoom out, you know, and look out, you know, maybe 20, 30 years down the future, when so much of the stuff, like right now, I can pretty much avoid most of the time smart devices, right?
[00:32:35]  Like, I don't really have any in my home, again, besides my computer or my phone.
[00:32:39]  But when like you go to like a restaurant or a bar or like anybody's house or your own house, like your landlord buys the smart devices, you know, I know that in San Francisco, at least, they were buying nest doorbells for a while that have the cameras in them.
[00:32:54]  By Google.
[00:32:55]  Yep.
[00:32:56]  And who, by the way, is a military contractor.
[00:33:01]  And it's, it's like, you won't be able to avoid this stuff.
[00:33:05]  And like there's no stopping any of these agencies from just like seeing every single thing that you do and from not only seeing what you do, but with some of these devices actually like controlling what you do.
[00:33:20]  You know what I mean?
[00:33:21]  Like they could, they'll really be able to fuck with you in ways that right now would seem absurd.
[00:33:25]  You know what I mean?
[00:33:26]  But like, it's, it's, it's, yeah, it's just terrifying to think about.
[00:33:31]  Again, like people, you know, people kind of make fun of me for being so anti-technology, but like, Jesus Christ, man, like, we're heading towards like a fucking prison state with this kind of shit, a prison planet, even with this kind of shit.
[00:33:42]  And it's, it's, it's terrifying.

=== Shout Out to Journalists (03:12) ===

[00:33:45]  Yeah.
[00:33:46]  Well, so that's just like a, that's just some highlights.
[00:33:49]  I mean, that's not even touching like the breadth of work that Wikileaks has published.
[00:33:55]  And I don't think that it is like hyperbolic to say that Wikileaks should is deserving of multiple, multiple awards for publishing and journalism.
[00:34:07]  They're deserving of accolades and critical support.
[00:34:10]  And Julian Assange, absolutely.
[00:34:13]  And instead, what's happening is they're being completely, you know, I mean, Assange himself being prosecuted, but WikiLeaks also, I mean, they've been turned into pariahs by the mainstream media.
[00:34:27]  But before we get into that, let's talk about the actual trial because this whole affair, there's a lot going on and it's a bit confusing.
[00:34:38]  And so I want to kind of like, you know, make things clear for our listeners so they have a good idea of what's going on here.
[00:34:45]  Part of the reason why it's so confusing is that there's basically zero journalists covering the trial.
[00:34:51]  Yeah, yes.
[00:34:52]  Yeah.
[00:34:53]  I mean, there's been really good work by John Pilger.
[00:34:58]  Yeah, we should give a special shout out, though, to the journalists who are covering it.
[00:35:03]  And in particular, Craig Murray from the UK, who you can read at craigmurray.org.uk, and Kevin Gustola of Shadowproof, who is both of whom have been reporting on the everyday of the trial and developments of the trial.
[00:35:20]  We should say that both of those guys, they rely and their journalism relies on independent public support.
[00:35:28]  And if you can, I would highly urge you guys to think about supporting their work.
[00:35:33]  And we're going to put links to that in the show notes.
[00:35:38]  So I just want to give those guys a shout out.
[00:35:40]  Other people, of course, at the Gray Zone have been covering this.
[00:35:43]  Max Flumenthal and Ven Norton.
[00:35:46]  And, you know, certainly more, I will say, UK journalists than anyone in the United States.
[00:35:52]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:35:53]  I mean, it's just the way this story has been ignored in the U.S., or at least a lot of angles for the story have been ignored in the U.S.
[00:36:01]  And the actual story of the trial itself is crazy.
[00:36:04]  But about the trial, so he's facing 18 charges.
[00:36:10]  And by the way, let me interrupt myself here.
[00:36:13]  The judge is named.
[00:36:14]  Check this out, baby.
[00:36:15]  The judge is named, well, her name isn't District Judge, but she's District Judge Vanessa Barrister.
[00:36:24]  I know.
[00:36:25]  I don't think that's how you say it, but I always say it that way when I say- Well, how could you?
[00:36:29]  No, no.
[00:36:29]  So it's B-A-R-A-I-S.
[00:36:32]  B-A-R-A-I-T-S-E-R.
[00:36:35]  Yes, it would be Barrett, sir.
[00:36:36]  Barrett, sir.
[00:36:37]  But it's like the same thing.
[00:36:38]  It just sounds like you're mispronouncing it.
[00:36:39]  She's Barrister.
[00:36:40]  I know.
[00:36:41]  She shoots me up every time.
[00:36:43]  Yeah.
[00:36:43]  I like to judge her.
[00:36:44]  Guilty.
[00:36:46]  Yeah.
[00:36:47]  I don't know.
[00:36:47]  What's up with the barrister?
[00:36:49]  I don't know.
[00:36:50]  They wear the wig.
[00:36:50]  Do they make the women wear the wigs?
[00:36:53]  Do you have to wear the wig on Zoom?
[00:36:56]  I don't know.

=== Wig and Wigs: The Judge's Tale (15:44) ===

[00:36:57]  I mean, I assume so.
[00:36:58]  It's like part of the, it's like part of, it's like putting on your Joker makeup.
[00:37:02]  It's like no, you got to wear a suit and then you got to put the wig on with your suit.
[00:37:07]  The wigs are so fun.
[00:37:08]  I saw a picture, I think Canadian Supreme Court, and their costumes are like Santa Claus.
[00:37:13]  I will say.
[00:37:14]  They just got to slap the wig on their normal hair.
[00:37:17]  So it's not, there's no wig cap.
[00:37:18]  They don't use like a wig cap.
[00:37:20]  They don't hide the normal hair.
[00:37:22]  It's just wig on top of hair, which is very, very confusing.
[00:37:26]  Well, people don't understand.
[00:37:27]  I'm sure that you're familiar with the phrases like snatching wig.
[00:37:30]  He snatched a wig or like, you know, like wig.
[00:37:33]  Exclamation point.
[00:37:34]  A lot of people don't know.
[00:37:35]  Those are actually British legal terms.
[00:37:37]  Yes, absolutely.
[00:37:38]  For when you, for when you're objecting to something the judge say, you say wig.
[00:37:43]  And if you successfully do that, the opposing lawyer on the defense of the prosecution has to say, oh, he snatched her wig or she snatched his wig, you know, whatever it may be.
[00:37:52]  Sure, sure.
[00:37:53]  So that's just a little, that's a little Belden fact right there.
[00:37:56]  So Assange is facing 175 years in prison.
[00:38:00]  And now, a lot of people remember, you know, like we said before, he was torn out of the embassy by American police.
[00:38:07]  And originally, he was just charged with one thing, which was essentially helping Chelsea Manning break into this database.
[00:38:15]  And there was some talk about whether he helped her try to figure out a password.
[00:38:19]  Now, by the way, this charge is incredibly sketchy.
[00:38:23]  Like, there's no real evidence of this.
[00:38:26]  You know, there's like, and at the end of the day, like, you know, the very worst thing he possibly could have done was to be like suggest something and have it fail.
[00:38:37]  So, like, it's, it's, it's, uh, and by the way, a big, a big part of the reason that Chelsea Manning is returning to jail is because she refuses to rap on Assange, which is, which is, I think, very extremely honorable.
[00:38:51]  Yeah.
[00:38:52]  But, but he was hit with 17 more charges right after that, uh, related to the documents that he released about the illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
[00:39:02]  Um, so one count, uh, one count of conspiracy to hack a computer to disclose classified information, which by the way is punishable for up to five years.
[00:39:11]  And then in May, 17 other charges all relating to the Espionage Act.
[00:39:16]  Um, now, now you might be like, huh, that's that's crazy.
[00:39:20]  I'm like, what espionage did he do?
[00:39:22]  You would be correct, my friend.
[00:39:24]  Julian Assange very clearly did not engage in any act of espionage here.
[00:39:30]  This is a total stitch-up.
[00:39:32]  And if he did engage in espionage, he'd be given a fucking medal.
[00:39:36]  Well, the thing about the Espionage Act is that it's quite broad.
[00:39:41]  And so, you know, famously, of course, that was, it was Julian and Ethel Rosenberg who were tried under the Espionage Act.
[00:39:49]  And I believe it's, you know, anyone who is attempting to, you know, like undermine the U.S. government through, you know, publishing or selling state secrets, whatever.
[00:40:01]  It's very, very broad.
[00:40:03]  But it really wasn't used that much until up until the Obama presidency.
[00:40:12]  And his administration charged or convicted eight people under the act, including Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, which is actually more cases under the Espionage Act than all previous administrations combined.
[00:40:28]  You want to hear something funny?
[00:40:29]  So the closest thing to the Assange, Assange indictment, or between Assange being charged under this, or the closest recent analog is from 2005, when two guys from one of this show's sponsors, APAC, passed along a ton of American classified and unclassified information to Israel about the U.S.'s disposition towards Iran.
[00:40:53]  Of course, those charges were dropped.
[00:40:58]  No, it's just such a farce.
[00:41:00]  It's such a farce.
[00:41:01]  The Espionage Act also has never been used against a media company, which is basically what they're doing with WikiLeaks and Assange, right?
[00:41:10]  Yeah.
[00:41:12]  This is completely unprecedented, Which makes the kind of, let's say, soft response or muted response from the U.S. media apparatchiks that much more interesting, we'll say.
[00:41:29]  Yeah, because like to be clear about these charges is these are charges related to Julian Assange putting out not just classified information, but unclassified information too.
[00:41:41]  And if a media company is being charged with putting out unclassified information, you know, that sets a hell of a precedent in American law, right?
[00:41:51]  And to put that in perspective, what that could mean is that like, first of all, all of the people who publish this, any of the Afghan war diaries, you know, the New York Times, et cetera, they could be arrested for any of this, which they won't.
[00:42:03]  Of course they won't.
[00:42:04]  But like, really, essentially, this puts like a huge amount of journalism and really any journalism that goes against the interests of the United States or is dedicated to keeping the United States accountable, which I don't believe is an actual possibility, but some people seem to think it is, it essentially makes it illegal.
[00:42:24]  And that's not to say that all those people will be prosecuted, but the threat of prosecution hangs over each and every one of those people's heads.
[00:42:31]  Well, also, and this is something I really, really want to stress.
[00:42:34]  Wikileaks has never published false information ever.
[00:42:38]  The U.S. government has never contested anything that Wikileaks has published.
[00:42:44]  Every single thing that Wikileaks has published is true.
[00:42:48]  Every single thing.
[00:42:49]  Nothing has been doctored.
[00:42:51]  There has been, they've never contested that or even suggested it.
[00:42:55]  So now what the only route they have to shut it down and to shut him down or what we'll see will be, I mean, basically kill him, is through this sort of legal maneuvering about what constitutes correct, like basically constitutes the correct way of getting information to publish or what you're supposed to publish versus what you're not supposed to publish.
[00:43:19]  And like, I got to say that the media play when Assange was first arrested or the first charges that came out, which was just with the hacking charge with Chelsea Manning, right?
[00:43:31]  All these fucking journalists came out and were like, well, I don't know.
[00:43:34]  I could see that, you know, perhaps that was not very good, what he did, hacking and journalistic ethics and blah, Basically like, you know, shading the whole thing and being wishy-washy.
[00:43:46]  And then of course, more of the charges come out and they look like absolute dipshits, the dipshits that they are.
[00:43:52]  Absolutely.
[00:43:53]  And like, and I think a large part of this comes from the fact that Wikileaks just puts it out there.
[00:43:57]  And a lot of people have said, oh, that's irresponsible to do that.
[00:44:01]  Like, oh, you could put people's lives in danger.
[00:44:04]  Or like, you could actually damage, you know, maybe the national security of the United States of America.
[00:44:08]  Oh, no.
[00:44:09]  Yeah.
[00:44:10]  Heaven fucking forbid.
[00:44:13]  And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that it's essentially gatekeeping, right?
[00:44:16]  Like he's not the one, he's not the arbiter of this information or like, excuse me, you know, he, he's not the one sort of like putting out in dribs and drabs or the people need to hear this or they need to read this part.
[00:44:27]  It's like he just puts it all out there.
[00:44:30]  And my God, I mean, you know, like Liz said before with the example of the Dying Corps Dancing Boys, you know, it's like we can't trust the media to give us this kind of stuff.
[00:44:41]  I mean, think about the, think about the environment that the WikiLeaks, especially a lot of the Iraq war stuff came out on, is we had been led into this war by the charge of almost our entire national media apparatus who were complicit in the lies and the deception that led to the, you know, to the to the mass slaughter of Iraqis and the destruction of that nation.
[00:45:02]  You know, it's like, my God, why would you trust them?
[00:45:06]  You know?
[00:45:07]  Yeah.
[00:45:08]  And, you know, I'll go even further.
[00:45:09]  It's not just gatekeeping and it's not just that he exists outside the like social, you know, social circles of Manhattan media or whatever.
[00:45:19]  It's that he threatens basically the practice that is, and this is, this is like what, this is how journalism functions now.
[00:45:29]  The New York Times, Washington Post, what have you, that, you know, before you publish something that relates to U.S. government activities, you let the government know.
[00:45:40]  And if they see anything that they'd rather you not publish, you take it out.
[00:45:45]  Yeah.
[00:45:46]  And that practice is completely threatened by someone saying, actually, no, I'm just going to publish it all.
[00:45:53]  I think a lot of American officials would like it to, America has similar laws to the UK, where in the UK, if you do something like that, they tell you to take it out, you actually legally have to take it out.
[00:46:04]  In America, that practice is just, you know, informal or whatever, but certainly is enforced by a huge apparatus of access, and of career and just the social aspect.
[00:46:20]  And also, you know, sometimes more direct involvement from the government besides that.
[00:46:26]  And yeah, like you're saying, like Assange totally bypasses that and totally threatens that mode of journalism.
[00:46:33]  And so, I mean, it's astounding.
[00:46:35]  I mean, look at how the Guardian turned on him, you know?
[00:46:38]  It's incredible to have seen this transformation as journalism as a whole writes off this guy and writes off his work.
[00:46:50]  And even when their own supposed interests are being in grave danger from the outcome of this court case.
[00:46:58]  Yeah.
[00:46:58]  So we should say, too, so all this we laid out are the U.S. charges.
[00:47:03]  So what, you know, again, this is an extradition hearing.
[00:47:08]  And like Brace mentioned earlier, the UK will not extradite people for political reasons.
[00:47:16]  So that's kind of where the case hinges.
[00:47:19]  Now, talking about the trial, the trial lasted 22 days.
[00:47:24]  And something to understand about this particular, the way this particular court functions is that the prosecution does not have to make their case.
[00:47:33]  That actually the burden lies on the defense.
[00:47:36]  And the defense has to prove that Assange should not be extradited based on a flip of the usual way.
[00:47:48]  Yeah.
[00:47:48]  Yeah.
[00:47:48]  And so it makes it incredibly more difficult is what I'm saying.
[00:47:52]  Right.
[00:47:54]  And the thing is, too, like, like Liz said, for political reasons, because the U.S.-UK Extradition Treaty, I don't know if I mentioned this earlier, forbids extradition for political crimes, which, by the way, every single thing he's being charged with fits the bill of perfectly.
[00:48:09]  Yeah.
[00:48:10]  So in addition to all of that, basically, as you could imagine, this entire thing is a fucking farce.
[00:48:17]  It is an absolute, this is a show trial to end a show trial.
[00:48:21]  It is a to it's like Orwellian, first of all, also because of COVID and also because of the kind of changes in the, in the UK courts, which is too much to get into for this podcast.
[00:48:30]  Like it is the most Orwellian looking fucking thing in the world.
[00:48:34]  Assange is being trotted out in a fucking glass box, which is horrifying.
[00:48:40]  And everyone is tuning in via Zoom because of COVID.
[00:48:44]  I mean, it looks like a fucking black mirror episode.
[00:48:48]  I mean, that's the thing is, is listeners, you know, think about this.
[00:48:52]  In 25 years, when the tribunals draw you up for having, you know, tweeted something incorrectly 25 years ago and you're on trial to get gelded or whatever, you're going to be in the glass box.
[00:49:07]  Everyone else is going to be looking through their little fucking bugman eyes and Zoom at you.
[00:49:10]  I mean, it's like, if this is a taste of the future, then poof, baby, I want out.
[00:49:15]  Yeah.
[00:49:16]  So basically, you know, in addition to all of that, the defense was basically railroaded, as you can be expecting.
[00:49:22]  Absolutely.
[00:49:22]  Yeah.
[00:49:24]  And, you know, there's so much to get into.
[00:49:29]  Again, if you guys are really interested in the details of what happened in these 22 days of court proceedings, check out those blogs we mentioned, which, again, we'll link to in the show.
[00:49:38]  But just to kind of like give you guys a taste.
[00:49:42]  So for example, the judge, like we mentioned, Judge Barrett, sir.
[00:49:50]  I'm never going to say that right.
[00:49:52]  Well, it's saying in British television.
[00:49:55]  Judge Vanessa.
[00:49:57]  I will say, that's a hot girl name.
[00:49:59]  Yeah, you mentioned it at the top of the show.
[00:50:01]  You always go with Vanessa.
[00:50:03]  I always go with Vanessa.
[00:50:04]  I've gone with Vanessa as like my go-to fake girl name since I was like 13.
[00:50:08]  Yeah, I've noticed it.
[00:50:10]  I've made a mental note.
[00:50:11]  Okay, anyway, Judge Vanessa.
[00:50:14]  So basically, she mentions like during the trial that the defense gave her 300 pages of opening argument in the context of doubting the need for actual evidence on behalf of the defense.
[00:50:27]  Incredible.
[00:50:28]  So like they gave, she's like, oh, you guys gave too much defense.
[00:50:32]  She's saying, no, I already have all of this.
[00:50:34]  We don't need to have witnesses.
[00:50:36]  Maybe this is too much.
[00:50:37]  You don't actually need to sum it up because you've already given me 300 pages.
[00:50:43]  She, the judge was completely resistant to any exposition by witnesses before cross-examination.
[00:50:50]  Basically, any witnesses giving any kind of context for the, like, what they were, you know, testifying to in defense of Assange, arguing that evidence was already in their statements.
[00:51:04]  And so they didn't need to say anything else.
[00:51:06]  That basically what she was, what they were trying to do, what the court was trying to do was get every single witness to read off and enter a statement into the ledger.
[00:51:16]  And that being it, no cross-examination, no political context, no follow-up questions, which is just a complete farce.
[00:51:25]  I mean, it's a complete and total joke of anything that is remotely related to the fundamental right to bear witness.
[00:51:35]  Something that's something that's so absurd to me is, and I know we're doing a fucking, you know, podcast.
[00:51:40]  You can't really see what I'm talking about here.
[00:51:43]  But picture this.
[00:51:44]  You know, you got the judge at the front of the room.
[00:51:46]  You've got Assange in the back.
[00:51:49]  By the way, in a glass box, his lawyers ahead of him with his wife next to them.
[00:51:55]  He has to crawl.
[00:51:56]  So he cannot confer with his lawyers, by the way.
[00:51:58]  He was asked, he asked if he was able to sit with his lawyers, which seems like a pretty fucking basic ask.
[00:52:04]  He asked if he could sit with them and that request was denied.
[00:52:08]  He goes, he has to crawl on his hands and fucking knee.
[00:52:11]  This is from the John Pilger testimony.
[00:52:14]  I witnessed a testimony of it I read.
[00:52:15]  He had to crawl on his hands and knees in order to be able to talk to them.
[00:52:19]  He's banging on the side of this fucking glass box.
[00:52:21]  Yeah, he can't even hear anything because he's all the way in the back.
[00:52:24]  It's absolutely absurd.
[00:52:26]  And then instead of like, you know, you're picturing your law and order courtroom or whatever.
[00:52:30]  No, you have somebody either go up to the front of the room and look down at a piece of paper that they've been, that's basically been edited for them that they can say and read it off, or they just have somebody read it off entirely because the person couldn't be there.

=== Assange's Confinement (15:49) ===

[00:52:42]  It's like, this is the definition of a fucking show trial in your so-called democratic UK.
[00:52:49]  Yeah.
[00:52:50]  I mean, the way that the witness testimony worked was so terrible.
[00:52:54]  So the defense called up, for example, Patrick Coburn to give testimony on basically what Assange published in relation to revelations about the Iraq war, right?
[00:53:07]  Patrick Coburn is a Middle East specialist.
[00:53:12]  I think he worked for the Financial Times and the Independent.
[00:53:17]  I mean, he's a complete and total expert.
[00:53:20]  And he probably could have been pretty given about a day and a half worth of testimony to give the kind of political context of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs.
[00:53:33]  And basically, a sixth of what he could have said was read rapidly, as quickly as possible, into the court record.
[00:53:42]  And that was it.
[00:53:43]  Like having statements tapped, tapped, tapped to put online somewhere will absolutely never, ever, ever have the impact of witnesses like Patrick Coburn standing in the box and expounding on it and being cross-examined and holding their, you know, holding to their fucking guns when the state comes after them and questions them.
[00:54:06]  I mean, this is just a complete, this is a complete incubator.
[00:54:09]  You can't even call this a trial.
[00:54:10]  I mean, it's not.
[00:54:12]  It's like no trial I've ever seen before in my life.
[00:54:15]  I mean, evidence was edited to remove elements which the U.S. government wished to challenge and then basically entered into the court record uncontested with what they called the gist.
[00:54:26]  They kept saying that the gist read out in court.
[00:54:30]  Yeah, when, and we'll believe me, baby, we'll get to this later.
[00:54:34]  When two agents of UC Global, a CIA contractor who spied on Julian Assange in the embassy, when their statements were read out, I mean, it's literally, this thing is like four pages long because it has to be the gist of it.
[00:54:49]  And they're talking about an actual CIA planned operation or at least a balanced about operation about killing or kidnapping Julian Assange.
[00:54:59]  And that's the crazy thing to me is like, is, and again, we'll expound on this, but like, you know, the CIA, mind you, was spying on Assange the entire fucking time here.
[00:55:10]  And so especially very much so in the past two years, his lawyers' offices have been broken into meetings he's had with the Ecuadorian government, you know, laptops have been stolen.
[00:55:21]  And every time, you know, his lawyers would come in the embassy, their fucking phones would have all their information downloaded.
[00:55:26]  There would be microphones talking, listening to every single thing they said.
[00:55:30]  So the prosecution already knows the defense's case, every single part of it.
[00:55:35]  And I can think of no, no even variation of justice where this court case would be allowed to continue after this stuff was out there in the court.
[00:55:45]  And this stuff is out there in the court in the Spanish Supreme Court, for example.
[00:55:50]  And the judge knows this.
[00:55:52]  The judge knows that the prosecution is fully aware of every single legal maneuver, every single trick, every single piece of evidence, every single everything that the defense has and still allows this travesty of a political trial of a political prisoner to go on.
[00:56:09]  Yeah.
[00:56:10]  I mean, basically, this is the playbook for the prosecution for every defense witness.
[00:56:16]  They basically, they would undermine any of their credentials, academic, journalist, whatever, as not precisely relevant.
[00:56:24]  So don't mention them.
[00:56:25]  They would humiliate them by repeating memory test questions for precise phrasing of obscure regulations that no one would know.
[00:56:35]  They would totally denigrate and disparage any like political relevance.
[00:56:41]  They would humiliate witnesses to repeat like X, like basically what was allowed in UK courts.
[00:56:51]  Are you allowed to say this?
[00:56:52]  Are you not allowed to say this?
[00:56:54]  To repeat from memory.
[00:56:55]  They would run through lists of qualifications and government positions relevant to the subject the witness was testifying on and make the witness say one by one that they've never held those positions as a way of denigrating the witness.
[00:57:10]  They would claim testimony is biased or worthless because it doesn't include government assertions to counter what the witness was saying.
[00:57:20]  I mean, it's just complete and total bullshit.
[00:57:22]  And none of it has anything to do with the fact that, like I said, they're not arguing against the truth of anything.
[00:57:30]  They cannot do that.
[00:57:31]  Everything that Assange has published is true.
[00:57:33]  So they're moving around all of that.
[00:57:35]  They're not even touching it.
[00:57:37]  It's a fucking snake.
[00:57:38]  I mean, one of the witnesses, because there's been a few witnesses called about possible torture because it's very clear that Assange has been tortured in Belmarsh prison, where he's at now.
[00:57:49]  And it will undoubtedly, a lawyer from a guy who's who, a guy whose client is actually in the Supermax prison that Assange will be in the United States testified to the torture that his client received there.
[00:58:01]  You know what the U.S.'s sort of rebuttal to that was?
[00:58:04]  Was actually the U.S. has lower suicide rates than UK prisons.
[00:58:08]  You know, it's absolutely, it's a fucking, I don't know how to stress this enough.
[00:58:14]  And I know because of the way this has been presented, a lot of stuff, a lot of people don't like Julian Assange and like think that like this is, you know, well, like he's a shitty person.
[00:58:24]  Shitty things happen to shitty people.
[00:58:26]  It's like, shut the fuck.
[00:58:27]  This is insane, this shit that's happening, Dan.
[00:58:30]  Yeah, I mean, the prosecution and the judge basically worked together to ban two witnesses who could have testified to the conditions at the ADX, Colorado, which by the way is the Supermax where he's going to be held, to say like, these are impossible conditions.
[00:58:46]  The state of U.S. prisons is horrible.
[00:58:49]  He will be tortured.
[00:58:50]  He will be in isolation.
[00:58:52]  They banned two witnesses who could testify to this and then castigated the other defense witnesses for not having firsthand knowledge of ADX Colorado.
[00:59:03]  I mean, it's just a complete and total farce.
[00:59:07]  And this process is absolutely 100% completely divorced from any genuine attempt to find justice.
[00:59:15]  Yeah, 100%.
[00:59:18]  It's like show trial of the fucking century, baby.
[00:59:21]  I mean, it's just so absurd that this is happening and that this isn't like, I mean, this is major news.
[00:59:29]  The U.S. government is basically in public, you know, railroading a guy, you know, in plain view.
[00:59:35]  Well, not even a plain view of everybody, but in plain view of some people.
[00:59:39]  And then this is essentially, you know, a lot of these aspects are essentially ignored.
[00:59:57]  I want to get into, because we mentioned it, and I do think it's really important for people to understand this before we kind of rail against the press coverage, is what exactly, you mentioned the CIA bugging Assange.
[01:00:11]  And I think probably people hear that and they go, okay, yeah, that's to be expected.
[01:00:15]  The CIA is going to bug everyone.
[01:00:16]  We just learned that from what Assange told us.
[01:00:19]  Yes.
[01:00:20]  But this was like actually a huge operation that basically accidentally got uncovered because of a suit in Spain, like you mentioned.
[01:00:30]  And this is just a fucking crazy story.
[01:00:32]  So this story has been covered extensively in the Spanish press, especially especially El Pais.
[01:00:38]  I don't know how to pronounce that.
[01:00:39]  El Paiz.
[01:00:40]  People always get mad at me for being from California and not knowing how to pronounce things like Pais, but look at me doing it now.
[01:00:46]  They did some really wonderful reporting on this.
[01:00:48]  Blumenthal has done good reporting on this too, but it really not extensively covered in the U.S. press.
[01:00:56]  I think most of the major publications, or at least some of the major publications, had about one story each on it.
[01:01:01]  But this is really explosive stuff.
[01:01:06]  As you know, Assange had to take refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy for seven years.
[01:01:11]  Not refuge asylum.
[01:01:12]  Let's be clear.
[01:01:13]  He claimed he was supposed to.
[01:01:15]  That's another thing that people have to understand about this case is that the UK and the US are basically completely and totally throwing into contest the entire conception of asylum and political asylum.
[01:01:27]  Absolutely.
[01:01:28]  And have completely and totally undermined it.
[01:01:30]  Anyway.
[01:01:31]  100%.
[01:01:32]  Well, yeah, I mean, it's a fucking joke.
[01:01:37]  But during that time, a Spanish firm was contracted by the Ecuadorian government to take over.
[01:01:44]  They were called Undercover Global, which this story is so insane.
[01:01:49]  I'm sorry.
[01:01:50]  I'm laughing.
[01:01:50]  I feel bad I'm distracting Bryce because I'm laughing because the story is so fucking insane.
[01:01:55]  I mean, it's it really is like a it's a it's a trip, baby.
[01:01:58]  I mean, it's a fucking wild story.
[01:02:01]  So, okay, you know, that happens in a lot of different places.
[01:02:04]  I mean, that's like I get jobs for security contracting, like on Facebook and stuff, because I think Facebook's algorithm thinks I'm a mercenary.
[01:02:13]  And so, I get like ads for like shooter jobs and all this stuff.
[01:02:16]  And sometimes I like, I look at them, not like take them, but just to like, I don't, I don't have the qualifications for them.
[01:02:21]  Not that I would do them anyways, but I look at them, you know, to see what's what's going on here.
[01:02:25]  I look at the depressives commenting, like, oh, I just got out of the army.
[01:02:28]  Like, can I do this?
[01:02:29]  It's like, no, buddy.
[01:02:30]  Just become an alcoholic.
[01:02:32]  And, and, and, you know, a lot of those like guardian embassies, you know, these are, these are essentially non-state contractors.
[01:02:39]  And a lot of the times the CIA or different corporations, or excuse me, different governments, different governments, intelligence agencies use these contractors too.
[01:02:47]  They don't have to necessarily be from the same country.
[01:02:49]  It is a little weird that Ecuador maybe couldn't provide their own security, but who knows?
[01:02:53]  Maybe Undercover Global is just really good at it.
[01:02:56]  Anyways, so, you know, there were cameras all over the embassy.
[01:03:00]  Obviously, it's a fucking embassy of a major government.
[01:03:03]  And there's cameras in Assange's flat too.
[01:03:07]  The thing about those cameras is that they were supposed to not record audio.
[01:03:11]  And originally, they didn't.
[01:03:13]  But in 2017, something changed.
[01:03:17]  Employees of UCSL, Undercover Global, came to the embassy under the pretext of fixing the cameras or just messing with them, doing an update and install audio in them.
[01:03:31]  In fact, they didn't just install audio in the cameras.
[01:03:33]  They installed tiny microphones all around Assange's area.
[01:03:38]  So when Assange talked to his lawyers, he actually used like a voice distorter device, which apparently might not have worked so great.
[01:03:47]  But when he really wanted to have a private conversation with somebody, he went intelligently, I think, into the women's bathroom, thinking of, well, there's no cameras in here.
[01:03:56]  You know, they can't see what I'm saying or whatever.
[01:03:59]  Of course, Undercover Global did put microphones in the women's bathroom there, which is a real, you know, and real rock and rollers will know what I'm talking about.
[01:04:08]  That's a real Chuck Berry move.
[01:04:12]  And it's not just that they had the cameras.
[01:04:14]  You know, they provided the security guards at the embassy too.
[01:04:18]  And famously, Assange did not have very good relations with the security guards at the Ecuadorian embassy.
[01:04:24]  They often tried to prevent him from seeing guests.
[01:04:26]  And it's said that that's like, obviously, this isn't actually true, but that was one of the pretexts for kicking him out of there is because of his poor relationship with the security.
[01:04:34]  But when you went in the embassy to visit Assange, you would have to leave your cell phone.
[01:04:38]  You'd have to leave your iPad.
[01:04:39]  You'd have to leave your laptop.
[01:04:41]  And the security guards had a very select set of duties that they were supposed to carry out in relation to Assange, who referred to him as the guest.
[01:04:51]  They had to monitor his movements, his meetings, his conversations, and his moods.
[01:04:55]  This would mean writing all of those things out in a logbook.
[01:04:59]  They carried out handwriting examinations.
[01:05:01]  And in fact, one time, they fucking took the diaper, dirty diaper of a baby, in order to test the feces to see if Assange was the father.
[01:05:10]  Now, if you think that's very weird, how can you do that?
[01:05:12]  You cannot do that.
[01:05:13]  And so they just ended up, they just had some shit with them.
[01:05:17]  They took apart everyone's, not everyone, but almost everyone's cell phone and downloaded all the data from them.
[01:05:23]  And this includes, and this is what makes the journalist, or excuse me, the press coverage so just insane, is this includes like reporters from the Washington Post and stuff.
[01:05:32]  I mean, they downloaded everything from these people's phones.
[01:05:35]  They downloaded everything from people's laptops.
[01:05:37]  They took pictures of people's passports.
[01:05:39]  I know Glenn Greenwald had his passport photographed.
[01:05:43]  Apparently, they were supposed to especially watch out for visitors from Russia because there were zero visitors from Russia during that entire time Assange was there.
[01:05:51]  They, in fact, just started taking pictures of when people had been to Russia, like their visas and stuff like that.
[01:05:57]  And they'd also open up their cell phone cases to get the IMEI number, which is like a, apparently it's a unique code that like every cell phone has on it that makes hacking into those cell phones much easier.
[01:06:10]  Now, all of this information was sent via FTP, a file transfer protocol, to the Undercovered Global server in southern Spain.
[01:06:19]  This is from one of the reports, if I can read out loud, El Pius reported this.
[01:06:23]  Great exaltation and nervousness by the guest after receiving news about the sentence commutation for Chelsea Manning.
[01:06:28]  Julian is providing a lot of information.
[01:06:30]  The guest keeps writing his agenda.
[01:06:32]  You can still feel the tension in the room.
[01:06:34]  The guest hides his agenda, that means his notebook, with his hands at all times.
[01:06:38]  Stella peeks out the door thinking someone could be listening in, which actually makes me kind of sad to think about because, you know, they're very excited.
[01:06:45]  They're talking, you know, this really wonderful thing has happened.
[01:06:49]  And, you know, she's like peeking out the door to see if someone could be listening in.
[01:06:52]  But that's just not the way how it works now.
[01:06:54]  This is another report.
[01:06:55]  This is from January 2017.
[01:06:58]  3.30 p.m. to 6.28 p.m.
[01:07:00]  Pamela Anderson.
[01:07:01]  They exchange information through notes.
[01:07:03]  They take pictures inside the meeting room.
[01:07:04]  The voice distortion device is on at all times.
[01:07:07]  And yeah, it's every single guest every single way.
[01:07:11]  And remember, this includes his lawyers, right?
[01:07:14]  Yeah.
[01:07:15]  You know, Assange, from what I've read in here, Assange seems pretty careful about covering his notebook with, you know, there's a way to do that where essentially you just cover each word as you write it with a different piece of paper.
[01:07:25]  Right, right.
[01:07:26]  But again, like, you can't be so careful all the time.
[01:07:30]  And it's just astounding.
[01:07:32]  Yeah, so basically the day before Assange was arrested, WikiLeaks revealed this entire operation that was taking place in the embassy.
[01:07:41]  And strangely enough, someone in Spain basically tried, basically said they had all of the video footage, the photographs, all of Assange's strategy, and that they basically were going to make the information public unless they were paid 3 million euros.
[01:08:01]  So they tried to blackmail him.
[01:08:02]  Yeah, they basically tried to blackmail.
[01:08:04]  And so the Spanish police arrested a journalist and a computer hacker for that extortion attempt, who apparently were part of a wider network.
[01:08:13]  But that's where now a lot more information about this entire operation comes to light is through the Spanish case.
[01:08:24]  Yeah, so the case goes all the way up to like the Spain's highest court.
[01:08:28]  And they seem pretty insistent on kind of chasing this down.

=== David Morales' Arrest (15:46) ===

[01:08:31]  The owner of the firm is a guy named David Morales.
[01:08:35]  And he is arrested a little bit after the blackmailers were.
[01:08:42]  He is a member of the Spanish military currently on leave.
[01:08:47]  He's in the Spanish Marine Corps Special Infantry Operations Unit.
[01:08:52]  Now, as you well know, this podcast stands firmly against all operators all across the world.
[01:09:01]  We hate special operations.
[01:09:04]  And so I have a feeling, baby, that this guy might not be super on leave necessarily from all of his duties.
[01:09:11]  Yeah, probably not.
[01:09:13]  But the court case in Spain brought forth several whistleblowers from his organization.
[01:09:18]  He obviously did not have everyone on board.
[01:09:20]  I suspect it's because it was clear that he's receiving the lion's share of the funds that were basically paid for these services.
[01:09:28]  Yeah, probably.
[01:09:29]  There was about, I think it was like three protected witnesses and they spoke under conditions of anonymity.
[01:09:34]  And so we don't know their identity.
[01:09:37]  But they basically said that David Morales bragged that he worked for U.S. intelligence.
[01:09:44]  He couldn't shut the fuck up about it.
[01:09:46]  Couldn't shut the fuck up.
[01:09:47]  He basically said, I am a mercenary and I make no bones about it.
[01:09:50]  I mean, it's almost like, I mean, at this point, it's almost comical if it weren't so serious.
[01:09:55]  He keeps saying, I've gone over to the dark side, too.
[01:09:58]  I mean, for God's sakes.
[01:10:00]  So here's the thing, is that David Morales actually did really, very much did work for the CIA.
[01:10:07]  Yeah, like, in fact, without a shadow of the doubt, he worked for the CIA.
[01:10:12]  So something changed in 2017 when he went to a conference, a security conference in Las Vegas, where they often have these kind of things.
[01:10:22]  Yeah.
[01:10:23]  This thing didn't stay in Vegas.
[01:10:26]  No, it certainly did not.
[01:10:28]  Although it did maintain a special connection.
[01:10:31]  No, don't worry, baby.
[01:10:31]  I still love you.
[01:10:34]  It certainly kept an umbilical connection to that sacred place for long after.
[01:10:39]  He runs into a guy he kind of knows in Las Vegas, a guy he's met before named Sheldon Adelson.
[01:10:44]  Okay.
[01:10:45]  Or at least members of Sheldon Adelson's security team.
[01:10:48]  Soon after this, Undercover Global is contracted for exorbitant amounts of money to start providing security for Mr. Adelson's yacht when it visits the Mediterranean.
[01:11:01]  Now, other employees at Undercover Global who are not the owner note that the amount that they're being paid to provide security on a fucking yacht far outweighs like basically the amount of money they're paid for basically anything else.
[01:11:14]  Like it's almost like it's laundering money or something.
[01:11:16]  I mean, they're getting paid an incredible amount of money.
[01:11:19]  David Morales starts getting paid $200,000 a month.
[01:11:24]  By using his wife's Instagram, because she couldn't stop posting, they were able to see how often he visited Las Vegas in New York.
[01:11:33]  And apparently, while he was in Las Vegas, he was contracted by a member of Sheldon Adelson's security team to, who was an ex-CIA agent, and he was the head of Adelson's security, like in total, asked him to perhaps start spying on Julian Assange for maybe his old employers.
[01:11:56]  And by that, I mean the CIA.
[01:11:57]  Yeah, women be Instagramming.
[01:12:00]  Yes.
[01:12:00]  Just to back up for a second, Sheldon Adelson, I mean, we should say that like, so he's the CEO of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation.
[01:12:09]  I think it's the corporation.
[01:12:10]  I can't remember.
[01:12:11]  Majority shareholder in Truanon as well.
[01:12:13]  Yeah, he's worth about, I think it's like $32 billion.
[01:12:18]  This dude is a major player.
[01:12:20]  And like Bryce and I were joking earlier this week.
[01:12:23]  It was like, this dude, okay, you are a billionaire in Las Vegas that you run a fucking casino.
[01:12:29]  Imagine the shit this dude's seen.
[01:12:31]  Exactly.
[01:12:32]  Every casino is basically a CIA cutout.
[01:12:35]  Like, let's be real.
[01:12:36]  And like, between original Black Sides.
[01:12:39]  Yeah, seriously.
[01:12:40]  Like, between the mob and the CIA, like everything that happened in Las Vegas.
[01:12:44]  Like, you know, that dude was like at a fucking, I don't know, some kind of like review, showgirl review with like, you know, with old Blue Eyes and Jay Edgar with like two tramps on my knees or whatever.
[01:12:58]  Like the stories this dude must have.
[01:13:01]  I mean, he's about 100 years old.
[01:13:03]  I guarantee that the amount of, I mean, I can't imagine a guy who's worked in Vegas for that long being a boss.
[01:13:11]  I cannot imagine how many bones he knows are buried out in the sands of the desert there.
[01:13:15]  I mean, Jesus Christ.
[01:13:20]  But this wasn't the first time that the Sands Corporation had actually done work for the CIA.
[01:13:27]  One of their casinos in Macau, Chinese officials were basically being blackmailed and videotaped while they're gambling with public money.
[01:13:35]  And the Chinese intelligence agencies were very much not happy with this kind of stuff.
[01:13:40]  And they essentially accused the SANS of working for the CIA.
[01:13:44]  We're, by the way, correct.
[01:13:46]  So the way this happened was that David Morales gave access to all of Undercover Global's servers to the Americans.
[01:13:57]  And the whistleblowers at Undercover Global, who went to the Spanish court and then later to Assange's trial, were able to prove this by the IP address logs that were logged into the server.
[01:14:08]  And one of them came from a contractor who contracts security in America with the FBI.
[01:14:15]  And so I wouldn't be surprised if this was done from cutout to cutout to cutout or anything like that.
[01:14:20]  I don't think this is being done from the actual CIA offices.
[01:14:23]  I will note that Morales's IP address was very often logged in from Alexandria, Virginia, which is not a happy place.
[01:14:35]  It's an exotic locale for him.
[01:14:37]  Exactly.
[01:14:37]  He's taking his house.
[01:14:38]  By the way, I try to go to his wife's Instagram.
[01:14:41]  It says her Instagram name in here.
[01:14:43]  It just belongs to a Malaysian 13-year-old now.
[01:14:45]  I don't really care.
[01:14:45]  Yeah, she deleted.
[01:14:47]  She got on that real quick.
[01:14:48]  Yeah, I mean, let's sum it up: is that basically the CIA was running an op to completely bug and surveil Assange at all times with help from the Ecuadorian embassy.
[01:15:03]  Yeah, and from Undercover Global, rather.
[01:15:06]  And the thing is, is that the Ecuadorian government didn't actually know about this, at least until Lenin Marino, I think, came into power, at which point I think that they might have figured it out.
[01:15:17]  Because eventually they fired Undercover Global.
[01:15:21]  But I mean, they monitored his every single move.
[01:15:26]  So that's what I'm saying.
[01:15:27]  It's like his entire court case that he was laying out with his defense was known to the CIA, has been known to the CIA for years.
[01:15:35]  You know, there was at one point going to be an attempt to give him a diplomatic passport to get him out of the embassy by the Ecuadorian government.
[01:15:42]  That was essentially squashed by the American ambassador to Ecuador, who started threatening the Ecuadorian government, you know, without any of this being officially public knowledge or anything like that.
[01:15:52]  And so, you know, where we're at now with this is that Morales, again, I said, was arrested.
[01:15:59]  He was arrested last September and then released on bail.
[01:16:02]  You know, the Spanish police searched the UC, the Undercover Global offices and took a bunch of documents and hardware, found $20,000 in Euros or excuse me, in cash and a couple of guns with scratched off serial numbers.
[01:16:16]  And so the whistleblowers are now under police guard.
[01:16:20]  And the judge in charge of this case In the Spanish high court, it's a guy named Jose de la Mata, which I really like saying.
[01:16:28]  De la Mata has got a great ring to it.
[01:16:31]  And he's trying to get judicial cooperation from U.S. authorities.
[01:16:34]  They are denying, not only denying him any help, but now the CIA and I believe the DOJ are demanding the names of the whistleblowers.
[01:16:42]  Spanish court is also now looking for Zohar Lahav, which is, by the way, very Israeli sounding name, who is the CIA man on Adelson's security team, or an Adelson security team, rather.
[01:16:55]  But that brings us to now.
[01:16:56]  And actually, a couple of, like we mentioned earlier in the episode, statements were read out by the Undercover Global or written by the Undercover Global employees at the Assange trial, and they contain some pretty explosive stuff.
[01:17:10]  Yeah, I mean, we should just say, like, if you guys found that entire story a little confusing and like we didn't go into enough detail, the defense was given 20 minutes for two witnesses from Undercover Global.
[01:17:24]  Again, their identities were, you know, protected.
[01:17:28]  20 minutes for them to give the, again, the gist of their testimony.
[01:17:34]  That's it.
[01:17:34]  20 minutes to explain the entire CIA operation of monitoring Assange.
[01:17:43]  And something that I really think that should be noted is that their testimony contains something that I believe should be pretty explosive.
[01:17:51]  And I'm just going to read from it real quick.
[01:17:54]  I recall that on one occasion in Jerez de la Frontera at the UC Global Headquarters around December 2017, David said that the Americans were desperate and that they had even suggested that more extreme measures should be employed against the guest to put an end to the situation of Assange's permanence in the embassy.
[01:18:13]  Specifically, the suggestion that the door of the embassy could be left open, which would allow the argument that this had been an accidental mistake, which would allow persons to enter from the outside of the embassy and kidnap the asylum.
[01:18:26]  Even the possibility of poisoning Mr. Assange was discussed.
[01:18:31]  All of these suggestions, Morales said, were under consideration during his dealing with his contacts in the United States.
[01:18:39]  Obviously, we employees were shocked at these suggestions and commented among ourselves that the course that Morales was embarked on was beginning to become dangerous.
[01:18:49]  So the United States had a plan to kill Julian Assange at the embassy.
[01:18:54]  Yeah, and to be clear, that essentially all of the other statements by these witnesses here, by the whistleblowers from Undercover Global, have been corroborated and have been proven to be true.
[01:19:07]  And so I have absolutely no reason to doubt that this is the case.
[01:19:26]  So another angle of this case that really has been discussed, I think, I don't think it's been discussed whatsoever, is the relationship that this case has to the ICC investigation into Afghanistan.
[01:19:42]  I was.
[01:19:43]  I was helped out on this by a beautiful source that I am very thankful for because I myself will one day be hopefully up there in the Hague.
[01:19:51]  People always talk about going to The Hague like it's like heaven or something.
[01:19:54]  I cannot fucking wait.
[01:19:55]  Prison sounds great.
[01:19:56]  It's in Europe.
[01:19:56]  I've got to get to the PlayStation.
[01:19:58]  All right, all right.
[01:20:00]  So as we were talking about, well, actually, let me back up a bit.
[01:20:06]  Starting in November 2017, the ICC began collecting evidence and it's the International Criminal Court began collecting evidence and victim statements relating to the crimes against humanity and just various war crimes done by essentially most of the factions in Afghanistan.
[01:20:22]  You know, we're talking about the Taliban and the Afghan army, but also war crimes perpetrated by the United States Armed Forces and the CIA, not only in Afghanistan, but in Poland, Romania, and Lithuania.
[01:20:35]  And you know what's there?
[01:20:37]  Black sites, baby.
[01:20:38]  Yeah.
[01:20:39]  So this was not popular with the American government, as I'm sure many people know.
[01:20:45]  Actually, maybe you don't know, but you know, it's always funny when people talk about, oh, send Henry Kissinger to the Hague.
[01:20:50]  It's like, I'm sorry, but you actually literally can't.
[01:20:54]  No, guess what?
[01:20:55]  That's illegal.
[01:20:56]  It's illegal.
[01:20:58]  In fact, if the ICC arrests an American soldier, the U.S. military has actual no-shit real-life plans to invade the fucking Hague.
[01:21:07]  Yeah, and they press, I mean, that's what they will do.
[01:21:09]  They don't even need approval.
[01:21:10]  They'll just do it.
[01:21:12]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:21:13]  But, I mean, the extent of the war crimes perpetrated by this country in Afghanistan and in the nations that the CIA operated in, well, they operate in every nation, but in these ones specifically, are so vast, so manifold, and so vile that the ICC opened this investigation.
[01:21:33]  However, much of their investigation, by the way, hinged on stuff that was corroborated via WikiLeaks.
[01:21:41]  So it's stuff that they knew happened, but to like prove, you know, to build this case, they needed a lot of these documents that were taken, excuse me, released by Wikileaks and published by WikiLeaks.
[01:21:53]  So on April 11th of 2019, Assange is arrested.
[01:22:00]  The next day on April 12th, the International Criminal Court pretrial chamber declines the prosecutor's request to open an investigation.
[01:22:09]  The reason for that is, is that so much of their evidence was corroborated by WikiLeaks cables.
[01:22:16]  And Assange himself was needed for providence.
[01:22:18]  And now to have provenance, that means that you need to have somebody there who can essentially testify to the veracity of the documents.
[01:22:26]  He can say, like, oh, we didn't make these up, blah, blah.
[01:22:29]  It's like a chain of evidence, like, you know, whatever.
[01:22:32]  And so without Assange, they have no case because they have no case without the corroboration from the cables released by WikiLeaks, correct?
[01:22:40]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:22:42]  And, you know, if you think that's sort of conspiratorial, that is an astounding coincidence then, that the day before this was going to be ruled on by the pre-trial chamber, Assange is really hurriedly whisked out of that embassy.
[01:22:56]  Now, the U.S. fucking hates the ICC and thought they actually did think they were going to go forward with the investigation.
[01:23:04]  However, this year, the pre-trials chamber over appeals chamber, so you know, the pre-trials chamber is for four.
[01:23:11]  This is the appeals chamber now, overturns that rejection and lets the case go ahead.
[01:23:18]  Immediately, the chief prosecutor for the ICC, a woman named, I'm not going to pronounce this right, but Fatua Bensuda, and the jurisdiction guy for the ICC, a guy named Paxio Mochkochko.
[01:23:31]  I can't do it.
[01:23:33]  They are both hit with sanctions by the U.S. government.
[01:23:35]  And now this was reported on, but it's not really, I don't think people really understand the U.S.'s relationship with the ICC, which is essentially one of not being a participant of, but of being essentially like an outside, like the neighborhood bully.
[01:23:49]  They're like a pressure group.
[01:23:50]  Yeah, yes.
[01:23:51]  They're pushing the ICC left.
[01:23:54]  You know what else is funny, though, is that the U.S., when he did it, excuse me, when the U.S. did it, their explanation was that the ICC was too harsh in the U.S. and its allies.
[01:24:07]  However, the only ally that joined the U.S. in boycotting the ICC and in sanctioning its topic.
[01:24:16]  Yeah, give it to me, baby.

=== U.S. And Israel's ICC Dilemma (05:09) ===

[01:24:17]  Is it Israel?
[01:24:18]  Oh, it's Israel.
[01:24:20]  In fact, the U.S. Pompeo, who, by the way, said, said, referred to the ICC as a little more than a political tool employed by unaccountable international elites, which, by the way, there's none of those in the U.S. government.
[01:24:34]  He also said, given Israel's robust civilian and military legal system and strong record of investigating and prosecuting wrongdoing by military personnel, it's clear the ICC is only putting Israel in its crosshairs for nakedly political purposes.
[01:24:50]  So Israel somehow is a no-go also for the U.S., which, yeah, I can't imagine.
[01:24:55]  So This has actually been testified to in the case.
[01:24:59]  I can't remember which witness talked about this on the stand, but Assange's team was very vocal about how Assange's arrest came partially because of the Afghanistan trial in the ICC.
[01:25:13]  And so, if this trial actually does go ahead or the prosecution proceeds with this, I think we're going to see a lot of other death and destruction and self-driving cars driving off the road over there.
[01:25:23]  And this is not covered hardly at all.
[01:25:25]  I shouldn't be having to be fucking talking about this.
[01:25:27]  Yeah, to be honest, I didn't even know about this until last night talked about it.
[01:25:32]  And I'm pretty, I mean, not to whatever, but I try to keep up with a lot of this stuff and I had no idea.
[01:25:37]  And it makes total sense, you know.
[01:25:40]  And, you know, the U.S. isn't going after a journalist because they're a journalist and they're a nuisance.
[01:25:45]  I mean, that's part of it, right?
[01:25:47]  That he embarrassed a bunch of people.
[01:25:49]  But it's also because he's key to indicting the United States on war crimes that they actually committed and them actually having to on the world stage admit to criminal acts.
[01:26:02]  That's something the United States will never do.
[01:26:04]  A lot of these, a lot of these pocket square wearing motherfuckers, no disrespect, Jon Chomsky, you know, they always, they're always puffing up their chest and they talk about how journalism is about holding power accountable to the people.
[01:26:16]  But when it actually comes down to the wire and this man actually did or had the, had the, had the possibility through the ICC of holding power accountable via these cables that he published, that he published just like a journalist publishes, they fucking back off because that's what it looks like.
[01:26:33]  Actual consequences.
[01:26:35]  Actual consequences.
[01:26:37]  Prison.
[01:26:38]  You know?
[01:26:39]  It's not just prison.
[01:26:41]  He will be killed.
[01:26:41]  They're killed.
[01:26:42]  No, I mean consequences for power.
[01:26:45]  But yeah, no.
[01:26:46]  Well, that's true too.
[01:26:47]  I mean, we didn't really go into this that much, but yeah, Assange will die during all of this.
[01:26:51]  Yeah.
[01:26:52]  I mean, yeah, we didn't get into this.
[01:26:53]  Sorry, this episode is about two hours because this is so important.
[01:26:57]  Like, Assange is at this moment a shell of himself.
[01:27:01]  Yeah.
[01:27:02]  He is mentally deteriorated to the point of basically not being able to communicate.
[01:27:09]  He's been tortured.
[01:27:10]  He's been in isolation.
[01:27:12]  God knows what kind of torturing they've done to him, to be honest.
[01:27:17]  He is.
[01:27:18]  He's new kinds.
[01:27:19]  He's lost a tremendous amount of weight.
[01:27:22]  He looks nothing like you've seen.
[01:27:25]  And, you know, to be honest, like, I've seen people who, you know, some photos came out of him that were making fun of it, even journalists.
[01:27:32]  And I just couldn't fucking believe it.
[01:27:33]  Like, this man is in a fucking cell as a journalist being tortured because he fucking dared to unveil, to reveal the U.S. war crimes.
[01:27:45]  You know, I just couldn't believe it.
[01:27:48]  I mean, Pilger, Pilger, John Pilger on his website wrote this: Consider this daily routine of Julian Assange, an Australian on trial for truth-telling journalism.
[01:27:57]  He was woken at five o'clock in his cell at Belmarsh Prison in the bleak southern sprawl of London.
[01:28:02]  The first time I saw Julian in Belmarsh, having passed through half an hour of security checks, including a dog snout in my rear, I found a painfully thin figure sitting alone wearing a yellow armband.
[01:28:12]  He had lost more than 10 kilos in a matter of months.
[01:28:15]  His arms had no muscle.
[01:28:16]  His first words were, I think I am losing my mind.
[01:28:20]  This next part really gets me.
[01:28:22]  For the months, he was denied exercise and held in solitary confinement, disguised as health care.
[01:28:28]  He once told me he strode off the length of his, he strode the length of his cell back and forth, back and forth for his own half marathon.
[01:28:34]  In the next cell, the occupant screamed through the night.
[01:28:38]  At first, he was denied his reading glasses, left behind in the embassy brutality.
[01:28:42]  He was denied the legal documents with which to prepare his case, and access to the prison library and the use of a basic laptop.
[01:28:48]  Books sent to him by a friend, the journalist Charles Glass, himself a survivor of hostage taken in Beirut, were returned.
[01:28:55]  He could not call his American lawyers.
[01:28:59]  And this is the part that, like, first of all, is very familiar with me, for me, as also somebody who has been held against their will in strange places.
[01:29:06]  He has been constantly medicated by the prison authorities.
[01:29:09]  When I asked him what they were giving him, he couldn't say.
[01:29:13]  The governor of Belmarsh has been awarded the order of the British Empire.

=== The Media's Complicity (14:36) ===

[01:29:26]  So let's talk about our friends in the media, baby.
[01:29:30]  Yeah, we should, we've got to wrap up, you know, but not before we come after these guys.
[01:29:34]  I got to say that, like, you know, we can't call it a complete blackout, but we can call it a gray out or a muted black, a soft blackout of what's happening to Assange.
[01:29:49]  I mean, it's been noticeable in the U.S. press, I'll just say.
[01:29:53]  I think the case the New York Times is a really good one to take with this because, I mean, and keep in mind here, the New York Times worked extensively using Wikileaks, you know, publication, or excuse me, documents that Wikileaks published for the Afghanistan War Diaries and for various other stories.
[01:30:11]  Certainly got a lot of other DNC leaks.
[01:30:14]  This is the way they've covered the trial.
[01:30:16]  Their latest story was in mid-September with an article titled, At Assange's Extradition Hearing, Trouble Tech Takes Center Stage.
[01:30:24]  And now, when I read that at first, I was like, well, you know, sometimes they have silly headlines like this, but then the article is more in-depth.
[01:30:30]  But no, the article is actually literally just about technical difficulties during Assange's trial.
[01:30:37]  It's insane.
[01:30:38]  They don't cover any testimony, only covers the circumstances.
[01:30:41]  But they do write, for instance, that Daniel Ellsberg's testimony went well because there were no technical difficulties, nothing about what he said.
[01:30:50]  The previous article before that was on September 7th about demonstrators outside the court courthouse.
[01:30:55]  And there was another article that same day about the start of the trial, which detailed testimony from a single person and wasn't really particularly in-depth.
[01:31:02]  Certainly wasn't really really able to certainly or willing to communicate the gravitas of the situation.
[01:31:09]  Before that, the last article was from July 21st.
[01:31:12]  In fact, the last two articles.
[01:31:14]  One was Vivian Westwood climbs into Cage to Support Julian Assange.
[01:31:18]  The other, Vivian Westwood dresses like a canary to support Julian Assange.
[01:31:24]  Insane.
[01:31:25]  I mean, it's such a joke.
[01:31:26]  I, you know, it's not like the quote-unquote liberal press has been any better, you know?
[01:31:33]  Like, no.
[01:31:35]  I mean, I was just, you know, I remember like, it's so funny.
[01:31:39]  Like, these guys are so fucking concerned about like the attack on free press, you know, and they keep talking about that, the attack on free press and journalists can't do anything, you know, blah, And like, you know, it's like, I remember like a couple of weeks ago or something, Chris Hayes tweeted out something about like some crazy guy running for Congress who had like this funny like home movie kind of ad where he was like Attila the Hun and he was attacking journalists.
[01:32:08]  I think it was Marjorie Taylor Greene, if I'm not mistaken.
[01:32:10]  Oh, really?
[01:32:11]  It was a guy.
[01:32:11]  But for some reason, she wasn't Attila.
[01:32:13]  I don't really get yeah, I don't know.
[01:32:15]  Anyway, it was a pretty good ad.
[01:32:17]  Yeah, it was like a home.
[01:32:18]  It was kind of goofy, you know, whatever.
[01:32:20]  And he was like, you know, you know, that like snarky liberal, like, snarky liberal voice or whatever that's like, you know, wait a minute.
[01:32:32]  Is this someone from Congress threatening to kill journalists?
[01:32:38]  Like that kind of thing.
[01:32:39]  And like, he's tweeted all that kind of shit before.
[01:32:41]  And like, you know, I was curious.
[01:32:43]  I was like, I wonder what this guy cares about with Assange.
[01:32:47]  So I was like looking around and most of his tweets about Assange pretty much only had to do with in relation to the Podesta emails and the DNC league, which was of course a big fucking embarrassment to his political class or to his journalist class, right?
[01:33:03]  Because those revealed not just, not that they would fucking say any of this, but it's in the fucking emails.
[01:33:10]  It revealed total literal witch hunt, total collusion between Hillary Clinton and a ton of journalists on crafting positive press and attacking Bernie Sanders.
[01:33:21]  And without like a shadow of a doubt, not even like disguised or anything.
[01:33:25]  Yes, I mean journalists taking marching orders from Hillary Clinton and the DNC.
[01:33:30]  Yeah, I mean, it's right in there.
[01:33:31]  I mean, the D, don't get me started.
[01:33:34]  It's insane how that was covered in the liberal press.
[01:33:37]  I mean, at first they tried to say they were fake, then they said they were real, but they don't say anything.
[01:33:41]  I mean, it was just total bullshit.
[01:33:43]  Well, they always make fun of like, well, I can't believe the police are investigating themselves.
[01:33:47]  It's like, motherfucker, what do you think you do?
[01:33:50]  Yeah, seriously.
[01:33:52]  So I was like looking through it and I was like, let me see what else he's got in there.
[01:33:55]  And, you know, so the last tweet he had about Assange was over a year ago, May 23rd, 2019, which by the way was the second, was when the Espionage Act charges came out.
[01:34:09]  And he wrote, the espionage indictment of Assange for publishing is an extremely dangerous frontal attack on the free press.
[01:34:15]  Bad, bad, bad.
[01:34:17]  Okay.
[01:34:18]  But what's weird is that when Assange was first arrested, what he tweeted was, hold on, currently writing a one-act play set in a federal prison with Assange and Avenati as cellmates.
[01:34:28]  Hmm.
[01:34:30]  First of all, I don't know if that's supposed to be funny, but it's certainly pretty glib about his fellow journalists being arrested and the, quote, attack on the free frontal attack of the free press.
[01:34:40]  Bad, bad, bad.
[01:34:42]  Yeah, like, who do they think is like, okay, yeah, there's a frontal attack on the free press.
[01:34:48]  Well, it's like, are you helping them or harming them?
[01:34:50]  You know, are you helping that effort?
[01:34:51]  Are you harming that effort?
[01:34:53]  And the way I see it, a lot of these people, by tacitly agreeing essentially not to talk about this and to let this sort of like, you know, to go by, it just shows that they aren't.
[01:35:03]  I mean, there is no neutrality in this, right?
[01:35:05]  Like you either support Assange's side in this or you support the government's side.
[01:35:10]  And I think a lot of these journalists pretend that they can waffle or they can be like, well, this is, you know, I don't have to support Assange to know this is bad.
[01:35:17]  It's like, no, there is a man at the center of this, right?
[01:35:20]  Who is being tortured to death in front of your eyes?
[01:35:22]  Like, it's, it's, it's, it's if, and, you know, these same people have no problem praying for Trump or whatever when he gets fucking coronavirus.
[01:35:30]  But like, you know, to see a man thrust in this, in the back of a courtroom in a fucking glass box as he starves to death and goes insane is like, I mean, I don't, I don't, it just, it blows my fucking mind, sweetheart.
[01:35:45]  Well, that's the thing.
[01:35:45]  It's like so many of these journalists and media personalities over the past four fucking years have been wailing about all this shit.
[01:35:51]  Democracy Dies in Darkness or the Trump admins war on journalism.
[01:35:56]  And, you know, it's like they faint, you know, they have all this outrage now, like you say.
[01:36:01]  They feint this outrage.
[01:36:02]  Oh, this is bad, bad, bad, bad.
[01:36:04]  Meanwhile, it's been a year and a half that he said anything about the Assange trial or mentioned anything about Assange.
[01:36:12]  But, you know, it's like there was never any support back then.
[01:36:17]  When these leaks came out, there was never any support.
[01:36:20]  There was never, you know, it was completely blacklisted.
[01:36:23]  And there's always been, like you say, a convenient reason to disparage Assange and WikiLeaks, either because of shifting goalposts, like we said, about the meaning of journalism and, you know, whether or not he's publishing or a journalist or what that means or all this kind of like bullshit or his own political views or gossip about his personal life or whatever the fuck.
[01:36:44]  And all of it, all of those, all of that shit, all it does is doing the work of state power to delegitimate WikiLeaks and turn Assange into a pariah, which has happened.
[01:36:57]  You know, none of it has anything to do with the fact, like we keep repeating, that every single thing he has published is true.
[01:37:04]  The same cannot be said about anybody at MSNBC, the New York Times, Fox News, CNN, or the Washington Post.
[01:37:10]  So apparently, there is no solidarity for political prisoners of the state.
[01:37:15]  But this is what fucking gets me.
[01:37:17]  None of these cowards are going to be persecuted.
[01:37:21]  None of them.
[01:37:21]  All these people that are shaking in their boots.
[01:37:23]  Chris Hayes, you're shaking in the boots.
[01:37:25]  You're fine.
[01:37:26]  Who's going to prosecute you?
[01:37:27]  The fucking government that you parrot the lines of?
[01:37:31]  The government that you continue to let have advance notice of the story that you're saying in case there's anything that they wouldn't like you to publish?
[01:37:38]  The anonymous intelligence sources you continue to give cover to?
[01:37:43]  The bullshit partisan hackery you spit out night after night after night.
[01:37:47]  What state secrets are you revealing?
[01:37:49]  What actual journalistic work are you doing?
[01:37:52]  Like, this is why we call journalists scum.
[01:37:55]  Like, motherfucker, you are the mouthpiece of the state.
[01:37:59]  The government needs you to sell their lies.
[01:38:03]  You are the one who obfuscates power.
[01:38:05]  You aren't expendable.
[01:38:07]  You are the one who is necessary.
[01:38:09]  You aren't going anywhere, you fucking tool.
[01:38:12]  And these assholes, the ones who guarantee their prime time TV slot by molding their views and their voice to what the networks and their corporate overlords and the bankers and the US government and all its spooky apparatchiks want you to hear.
[01:38:27]  These are not the people who will be persecuted.
[01:38:30]  No, they get promotions.
[01:38:32]  They get awards.
[01:38:33]  They get celebrated.
[01:38:34]  They get retweeted and liked and byline and byline and byline.
[01:38:38]  They climb the ranks and they shape the shit that is now permanently lodged in your fucking brain that they pathetically sell to you as the news and you've pathetically convinced yourself is the truth.
[01:38:50]  No, the people who get persecuted are anyone who dares question the United States war machine, who dares reveal any of the coups, the assassinations, the inner workings of the security apparatus, the well-funded networks of fucking so-called democratic political power, the abuse that millions suffer at the hands of the U.S. military and all the paid-off NGOs, the corporations, the warlords, the cartels, the sexual abuse,
[01:39:17]  the rape, the murder, the towns that we bomb to oblivion, the countries that we sell off to the highest bidder, and all the governments that we demolish.
[01:39:27]  Like what we do every day, every day, every day.
[01:39:32]  And those are the people that will be prosecuted.
[01:39:35]  You know, people like Chris Hayes have fucking secured their spot.
[01:39:39]  They're not going to be attacked.
[01:39:40]  He is not going to be arrested.
[01:39:42]  Like, and now they sit back and they fucking fake concern for Assange.
[01:39:47]  Oh, what this means for the free press?
[01:39:49]  Oh, no, what this means.
[01:39:50]  Like, this has nothing to do with Assange or Wikileaks or anything Wikileaks has revealed.
[01:39:56]  This is about the media's precious industry, which is dying, ironically, because of the very corporations that they continue to cover for.
[01:40:04]  They're eating the newsrooms alive.
[01:40:06]  And you know what?
[01:40:07]  The public is right to fucking despise you.
[01:40:10]  Like, they are right to despise you for the obvious bootlicking and all your brazen careerism for years of covering up all the lies and all the obfuscation of how real power operates in this country.
[01:40:24]  Like, selling the wars and the PR campaigns of the State Department and running fucking interference for the bankers and all the politicians bought off by the bankers who stole all the jobs and all the homes and all the fucking futures out from under the world.
[01:40:39]  Like, how many bloggers who are now, well, I don't know, they call themselves aspiring journalists or I guess what you now call professional opinion havers.
[01:40:49]  How many out there look up to Chris Hayes or the Chris Hayes of the world and their career arc?
[01:40:55]  How many stare longingly at the fucking New York Times op-ed page, at the shiny bylines and the prestige publishers, at the fucking social power that comes with the fawning adulation of their peers, jealous of their little positions in the clout hierarchy of the media machine?
[01:41:13]  How many of these content producers, editors, self-appointed political tastemakers, take havers, tweeters, and guess what?
[01:41:21]  Yes, fucking podcasters.
[01:41:24]  How many of them just want these precious fucking spots?
[01:41:28]  Like, what would they do?
[01:41:29]  What would they do?
[01:41:31]  What do you think they would do?
[01:41:32]  What do you think they would sell you to get one of those spots?
[01:41:37]  Do they even fucking realize when they do it?
[01:41:40]  But how many of them now actually look to the man?
[01:41:44]  How many will even fucking publicly support the guy who is literally currently being tortured, who will die of starvation, or maybe madness, or maybe he'll just simply be kicked in the fucking skull in the damp basement of a supermax prison in the middle of fucking nowhere because he dared to temporarily embarrass our highest ranking officials and mildly inconvenience the functionaries of the American Empire's unstoppable machine.
[01:42:14]  Who are you gonna fucking look to?
[01:42:29]  Alright, I'm spent.
[01:42:30]  Yeah, me too.
[01:42:32]  Yeah, I feel like, yeah.
[01:42:35]  I mean, whatever.
[01:42:36]  Look, we weren't supposed to do two hours.
[01:42:38]  There's so much to talk about with this.
[01:42:40]  You know, there's so much we actually didn't even talk about.
[01:42:42]  And I don't know, my heart goes out.
[01:42:44]  I don't know.
[01:42:45]  Like, he's gonna die.
[01:42:47]  And this is like such a fucking tragedy.
[01:42:50]  And I don't know.
[01:42:52]  I don't know.
[01:42:53]  You know, a lot of fucking journalists listen to our show.
[01:42:56]  I actually know that.
[01:42:58]  And like, what are you guys doing, man?
[01:43:01]  What are you fucking doing?
[01:43:03]  Like, yeah, I don't know, man.
[01:43:08]  I really don't know.
[01:43:11]  If any journalists are listening to this show, I'm ready to quit and join your blog if you want.
[01:43:17]  I could do like social reporting or something.
[01:43:20]  I don't know.
[01:43:20]  I could do like the woke.
[01:43:22]  I could either be pro-woke college or anti-woke college.
[01:43:24]  I'm ready to do it.
[01:43:26]  Whatever it is.
[01:43:28]  Just pay me $40,000 a month or excuse me, a year, and let me put freelance writer and then like a link tree with a link to a website that has like two pieces I wrote about, like, is, you know, is, I can't even think of a stupid fucking.
[01:43:44]  I'm so tired and hot.
[01:43:45]  I know.
[01:43:45]  Let's just fucking end this.
[01:43:47]  All right.
[01:43:47]  I would never abandon you unless someone paid me.
[01:43:53]  Okay, on that note, I'm Liz.
[01:43:55]  My name is Brace.
[01:43:56]  We are joined, of course, by producer Young Chomsky.
[01:43:59]  And we're Truan.
[01:44:01]  And hopefully, we'll see you next time.