Fucking hell - and Fuck The Guardian

An open letter to The Guardian Editorial Board

by Terry5135

Well, I for one, think it's pretty fucking strange to post an editorial and then say comments will be welcome the next day. Is that so the writer will have time to get out of town?

This editorial (to loosely use the word) has to be one of the most specious pieces of crap I've ever seen in any major media organization that has an iota of credibility (which qualification doesn't leave very many). To even respond to any of its elements is to further a fantasy being furthered by yet another of the multitude of storybook characters who want to believe in their fairy tale world; who want to reside in a reality of things being as they would wish rather than how they are; who want to use Orwellian logic to believe that the map is the territory.

The plain fact is that none of these events have anything to do with any Swedish procedures, persons, concepts of law, or political and/or legal desires. This is about Assange and Amerika. One can argue, as the author feebly attempts to do at the very end of his smear piece, that Assange's reasoning is faulty, but this piece is not that argument. The sole patronizing concession (something had to be there, to at least provide a pretense of desiring credibility) to that argument is this statement:

Yet there is no serious evidence that Washington plans to start such proceedings [i.e., "that if he goes to Sweden he will face extradition to the US to be prosecuted for treason"]; and if it ever did, the political and public opposition in Sweden as well as Britain and across the world would be massive.

Well, to start, the last half of that statement - that the world would object - is hysterically funny to ears of grief on the face of it. Where has this bozo been for the last 11 years? (Indeed, I'd say for the last 31 years, but we'll leave that aside for the moment.) To suggest with a straight face that the US really cares what the world's public, be they in Sweden or Britain or anywhere else, thinks about anything it does at all takes that old, trite metaphor about heads in sand to new depths of absurdity. Sure, even if her own citizens care, they can drift off to a free speech zone five miles from where anyone will see them and make their sentiments known to each other. Hello? Hello? The lights are on but no one is home! Even before we start compiling the list, we can start with the two at the top: America is launching aggressive wars, which crime Justice Robert Jackson called the mother of all crimes (or was it the 'father'?); and America has become a nation that officially tortures (but calls it something else, which probably endears the US to the author of this tripe above).

The first half of the statement is a bald assertion of something [i.e., "there is no serious evidence that Washington plans to start such proceedings"] that is just plain false. I'm not going to dignify some hack at this junction, in order to engage in the bottomless lilliputian version of sophism, but the plain fact is that there is ample evidence of that very thing. I will not outline those things in plain sight that this author has obviously long ago tightly shut his eyes against. We need look no further than Jose Padilla who was driven out of his mind before even entering into "such proceedings" or Bradley Manning who was treated to two years of the most horrific mind shattering treatment before being able to enter into such "due process" - which, incidentally, the attorney general of the USA has pronounced as not necessarilty being "judicial process". Need we look further than gitmo to see that people the army long ago had determined not to be a threat or of having a terrorist connection which the US still holds after a decade?

I think Assange has plenty to worry about from that country, besides "criminal proceedings for treason", which specific horrors the anonymous author of this piece assures us could not take place because of international public opinion in the first place (pardon me while I seach for the airsick bag).

But perhaps the gravest sin of all is the egregious insult to the one player who seems to escape notice here entirely - Ecuador. What is it about British fascists that engenders the kind of arrogance that assumes that little brown people have no ability to discern matters for themselves? It should be patently obvious that Ecuador is not about to extend asylum to some mere perpetrator of sexual assault so that he can evade even so much as questioning about such matters as a person of interest. No matter what one thinks of Ecuador - and this author obviously thinks precious little of them - it's a risky, lose/lose situation for that country and that president. So obviously, rightly or wrongly, they are granting asylum from the political persecution of the USA. If the Guardian editorial staff wishes to make a convincing argument that Ecuador is acting incorrectly and from faulty conclusions, then the paper should make that argument.

Julian Assange: the balcony defence

Miss A and Miss W are at the heart of this story, however inconvenient it may be for the WikiLeaks founder's supporters

• Editorial
• guardian.co.uk, Sunday 19 August 2012 15.47 EDT
• 
  
• Amid the estimated 100 protesters, 50 police, a noisy helicopter and rained-on press corps gathered in Knightsbridge on Sunday afternoon, two women were missing. They are referred to as Miss A and Miss W – that is, when they are mentioned at all in the hullabaloo over Julian Assange. Yet Miss A and Miss W are at the heart of this story, however convenient it may be for Mr Assange's supporters to elide them.

Editorial is here.