Masters of hate locked and loaded
By Pepe Escobar
NEW YORK - There is an
eerie, direct connection between hate rhetoric reaching
a fever pitch in the
United States, the shooting of Arizona Congresswoman
Gabrielle Giffords,
calls to take out WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and the
ninth anniversary of
the infamous US detention facility at Guantanamo in Cuba.
This disturbing
connection should send shivers down the spine of anyone even
remotely concerned with
human rights. Yet it doesn't. At least not in the US.
Assange will be back in
court in London on February 7 for a full two-day
hearing on his possible
extradition to Sweden, connected to the ultra-murky
case of alleged broken
condoms and "sex by surprise", co-starred in by two
Assange groupies in
sultry
Stockholm last August.
Yet Assange's lawyers
wasted no time in getting to the heart of the matter: if
he is extradited to
Sweden, the US government will pull out all the stops to
extradite him to the
US. Assange could then face the death penalty, or its "war
on terror” twin -
forever languishing in legal limbo in Guantanamo. For the US,
the fact that
human-rights treaties prohibit extradition under these conditions
is a minor detail.
Gullible,
well-intentioned souls may remember that US President Barack Obama
promised to close
Guantanamo. That won't happen. The US Congress will destroy
any possibility of
transferring "enemy combatants" to the US mainland so they
can have a proper
trial. The White House is about to condemn at least 40 of
these prisoners to
Guantanamo forever - no formal charge, no trial, just a
black void. And Bagram,
in Afghanistan, will follow the same path. Forget about
the US constitution and
international law.
Human rights had to be
a crucial part of the seven-point Assange defense
strategy - as a
possible extradition violates Article 3 of the European
Convention on Human
Rights. Thus Assange's legal team, in their 35-page
skeleton summary of
their strategy, had to stress the concrete possibility of
Assange being subjected
to illegal rendition and the "real risk that he could
be made subject to the
death penalty. It is well known that prominent figures
have implied, if not
stated outright, that Mr Assange should be executed."
And to press the point
on global public opinion, WikiLeaks itself put out a
press release drawing
the inevitable parallel between the "take out Assange"
rhetoric (former
governor of Alaska Sarah Palin would say "reload", and then
shoot) and the overall
US right-wing hate-master narrative that culminated, for
now, in the shooting of
Giffords. Palin is mentioned as she has urged the Obama
administration to "hunt
down the WikiLeaks chief like the Taliban".
The road ahead spells
radicalization - as hate festers amid a configuration
briefly described by
Assange himself as "Orwellian". As much as the attacks on
WikiLeaks have never
been stronger, so has been the global support. And there's
more to come. Only 2017
US diplomatic cables have been published so far (at
this pace the full
monty won't be released before the end of the decade). Bank
of America is the next
mega-target. And there's still the treasure troves on
China, the United
Nations and yes, Guantanamo.
Although the
partnership between WikiLeaks and some global media publications
seems to have found a
point of equilibrium, in journalistic terms a war is
bound to keep raging
between those who defend the media as - the term spells it
out - mediating
institution, and those who support the WikiLeaks ethos of
unloading slivers of
reality with minimal intervention. Although nothing beats
raw information, some
editing and contextualization is essential. It's up to
the reading public to
compare the raw and the filtered versions.
Much more worrying is
the fact that WikiLeaks' crucial point - if politicians
and media personalities
in the US are promoting homicide they should be legally
pursued for it - does
not resonate in the US as much as in the rest of the
world. Inevitably, as
WikiLeaks argues, if the group continues to be
stigmatized as a sort
of new al-Qaeda, other tragedies similar to Tucson,
Arizona, are bound to
happen.
There's no evidence US
hatemongers festering in the politics/talk show
crossover swamp are
about to be chastised. There's no evidence Republican party
leaders will publicly
take a stand against the "take out" rhetoric. The Arizona
massacre that killed
six people and wounded 14 others is already being
dismissed en masse in
right-wing circles as the usual isolated act of the usual
deranged loner.
Thus, there's no
evidence the graphic, endemic, accelerating rush to fascism in
American society is
about to be seriously addressed. Abandon all hope those who
yearn for an adult,
serene, rational debate in American politics. It's a sorry
affair, and one that
French political thinker and historian Alexis de
Tocqueville predicted
over a century and a half ago, in Democracy in America.
Today it's Giffords.
Tomorrow it could be Assange. But the real target is all
of us.
Pepe Escobar is the
author of
Globalistan:
How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble
Books, 2007) and
Red Zone Blues:
a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book,
just out, is
Obama does
Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MA13Ak03.html
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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