a book review of Ed Snowden’s ‘Permanent Record’

‘Edward Snowden’s Julian Assange is an Unfamiliar Julian Assange;  There is an unquestionable contradiction between Snowden’s opposition to Assange’s arrest and the rhetorical games he plays with Assange’s character in his memoir, Permanent Record, Patrick Anderson, mintpressnews.com, Sept. 27, 2019 (Creative Commons)

“NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks’ former editor Julian Assange have a complicated relationship. On the one hand, they share important similarities: both are perceived as dangerous enemies by the United States government, and both have been documentary subjects of filmmaker Laura Poitras. On the other hand, they clearly disagree when it comes to the means of achieving government transparency and accountability. After all, if Snowden had agreed with Assange about publishing practices, it is likely that he would have followed Chelsea Manning’s example and sent the NSA documents he collected and disclosed in 2013 to WikiLeaks.

The recent publication of Permanent Record, Snowden’s 336-page memoir, takes the Snowden-Assange dynamic to new—and problematic—heights. When Assange was forcibly dragged out of the Ecuadorian embassy in early 2019, Snowden was among the leading voices condemning the arrest of the WikiLeaks founder, calling it a dangerous assault on journalism. But in his memoir, Snowden uses rhetorical tricks to present Assange and WikiLeaks as his deceitful and irresponsible foils in a blatant and seemingly self-serving effort to highlight his own trustworthiness and accountability. Indeed, reviewers at the Washington Post and New Yorker have already seized upon Snowden’s anti-Assange rhetoric to serve their own anti-Assange agendas.

Proponents of press freedom have become accustomed to Pentagon and national security state attacks on Assange, but Snowden’s puzzling claims about the white-haired Australian and his transparency organization are exceptionally dangerous because they come from an otherwise highly respectable and trustworthy source, and at a time when there is otherwise a virtual media blackout on WikiLeaks. To be sure, Snowden deserves recognition as a courageous whistleblower and as a global champion of privacy rights, but in Permanent Record, Snowden appears willing to use a political prisoner for personal gain, deliberately distorting the truth and perpetuating the imperialistic propaganda that threatens not only Assange’s health but also his very life—just like the corporate media and national security state he exposed in 2013.

Snowden first distinguishes himself from Assange in a discussion of hacker handles, or online pseudonyms used by hackers so that they can conduct their online affairs without detection by authorities. When Snowden first made contact with the journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, he used a series of disposable handles, such as “Cincinnatus” and “Citizenfour,” so that he could hide his true identity until he was confident that he could trust them with his cache of classified NSA documents.  “The final name I chose for my correspondence,” Snowden explains, “was ‘Verax,’ Latin for ‘speaker of truth,’ in the hopes of proposing an alternative to the model of a hacker called ‘Mendax’ (‘speaker of lies’)—the pseudonym of the young man who’d grow up to become WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange.”

Snowden’s play on Assange’s youthful handle implies not only that Assange is deceitful but also that Assange intends to be deceitful. This insinuation is curious, given that WikiLeaks’ has published over 10 million documents, all of which have been authenticated. Nevertheless, Snowden’s remark is, ironically, not meant to be truthful; instead, it is meant to establish a rhetorical heuristic between Snowden-as-trustworthy and Assange-as-untrustworthy.

Assange took inspiration for his handle from Horace, a Roman lyric poet from the first century BCE whose writings became extremely popular during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in Europe. Enlightenment philosophers found in Horace’s writings many Latin phrases, such as sapere aude (“dare to know”) and carpe diem (“seize the day”) that proved useful for their time.

Following the Enlightenment philosophers whom he admired so much, Assange adapted one of Horace’s Latin catchphrases to create his online identity. “Every hacker has a handle,” Assange writes in Julian Assange: The Unauthorized Autobiography, “and I took mine from Horace’s splendide mendax—nobly untruthful, or perhaps ‘delightfully deceptive.’ I liked the idea that in hiding behind a false name, lying about who or where I was, a teenager in Melbourne, I could somehow speak more truthfully about my real identity.”

From his own perspective, Assange chose the handle “Mendax” not because he wished to “speak lies” and deceive the public, as Snowden’s interpretation suggests; rather, Assange chose the handle “Mendax” because it described what he conceived of himself doing, namely, disguising his identity to more effectively speak the truth. “Untruthful” applies not to the content of his speech but to his identity as the speaker. After all, a true statement is true regardless who says it, and if true statements can be made more easily by hiding one’s identity, then the motto splendide mendax, to be untruthful for a good cause, is perfectly fitting.

Snowden’s rhetoric, therefore, reveals his ignorance of the true meaning of Assange’s handle. By willfully ignoring the origins and connotations of Assange’s “Mendax,” Snowden transforms Assange into the vicious foil against which he measures his own virtue.

Snowden distinguishes himself from Assange a second time, in his explanation for why he chose not to publish the NSA disclosures through WikiLeaks. Describing the WikiLeaks of 2010—which he claims “operated in many respects like a traditional publisher”—Snowden praises Assange’s organization for partnering with The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel in its reporting on the documents leaked by whistleblower Chelsea Manning.

According to Snowden’s history, however, WikiLeaks lost its way after publishing the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and the U.S. State Department Cables. “Due to government backlash and media controversy surrounding the site’s redaction of the Manning materials, WikiLeaks decided to change course and publish future leaks as they received them: pristine and unredacted.” Because Snowden had already resolved to make sure his NSA documents were redacted to protect sensitive information, he concluded that WikiLeaks’ “switch to a policy of total transparency meant that publishing with WikiLeaks would not meet my needs.”

The first problem with Snowden’s account is that he offers an inaccurate and superficial history of WikiLeaks’ publication practices.

An accurate generalized history of WikiLeaks’ publishing goes something like this: Before the Manning leaks, WikiLeaks largely self-published unredacted materials. But in working with corporate media outlets to publish the Afghanistan War Logs, WikiLeaks came under criticism from the U.S. government, corporate media, and other imperialistic detractors for failing to redact sensitive information. So, when it came to publishing the next batch of Manning documents, the Iraq War Logs, Assange allowed redactions and agreed to hold back a portion of the documents for extra review. A similar policy was used for the Cablegate publications (though, the State Department cables were eventually published in after when a foolish Guardian journalist disclosed the password to the document archive in his book).

Snowden also ignores the fact that the corporate media journalists and editors that WikiLeaks worked with to bring us the news from Manning’s leaked documents were quick to throw him under the bus once they were finished profiting from his document cache. One only need to read the 8,000-word screed that then-New York Times editor Bill Keller published as a means of distancing himself and the “paper of record” from, as he puts it, a smelly, rogue Assange. Not only does he reduce Assange to a “source,” Keller even goes so far as to out Chelsea Manning as the likely culprit for the leak, thus violating the core principles of journalistic ethics.

Such inept, negligent, and self-serving behavior on the part of Keller and others who benefited from Assange’s work only to turn their backs on him is completely absent from Snowden’s account.

The second problem with Snowden’s account is that he completely disregards the principles that inform WikiLeaks’ publication practices.

Assange generally opposes redacting documents for two reasons. On the one hand, Assange views redaction as a form of censorship, “a rather dangerous compromise” and “a very, very dangerous slippery slope.” He observes that corporate news media frequently redact documents not to minimize harm but to either protect people in power from embarrassing revelations or protect themselves from government backlash. In Assange’s view, such self-censorship is the main problem with contemporary news media, and he does not want WikiLeaks to go down that path.


Assange discusses the Stratfor leaks with the press in London, Feb. 27, 2012

On the other hand, Assange opposes redaction because, unlike mainstream journalists who believe that journalists have the skills and the prerogative to decide what the public should know and how they should know it, Assange believes such authority rightfully belongs to the whistleblower, not the journalist. When pressed on the issue, Assange says: “We’d put the weight on the people sending us the material: you exercise your judgment about what you send us, but everything you send us we will publish.”

Snowden, of course, sides with mainstream journalism against Assange on this issue. As he explains in one interview: “I was very careful when I came forward to make sure that I never revealed a single secret. This I believe quite strongly is the role of a free press in our society. This is why the First Amendment is first. They’re charged with making these decisions about what we should know, when, and how. They should contest the government’s monopoly on controlling information, particularly in classified spaces.”

There are two problems with Snowden’s view. The first problem is the assumption that journalistic prerogative to decide “what we should know, when, and how” is sanctioned by the First Amendment. It isn’t. The First Amendment prohibits the government from interfering with journalists’ work, but it does not give them the power to determine what the public should know, when, and how. Though Snowden suggests otherwise, there is nothing in the First Amendment that favors his emphasis on journalists over Assange’s emphasis on whistleblowers.

The second problem with Snowden’s position is that he doesn’t seem to actually believe it. If Snowden truly accepted the principles that journalists were empowered to decide “what we should know, when, and how,” then he would support the decision of Bill Keller, the former New York Times editor who covered up the NSA spying program STELLARWIND in 2004. But he doesn’t. In fact, Snowden cites Keller’s decision as the very reason he did not contact the Times when blowing the whistle in 2013.

By criticizing Keller and the Times, Snowden is forced to adopt a different principle: the principle that sometimes a private citizen (himself) knows better than the press (Keller) what should be disclosed. But Snowden claims to reject this same principle when it is offered by Assange: the principle that sometimes a private citizen (the whistleblower) knows better than the press (Assange) what should be disclosed. Snowden’s anti-Assange rhetoric, then, paints him into an incoherent corner.

Principled disagreement about the role and prerogatives of journalism is perfectly acceptable, but Snowden’s discussion of WikiLeaks’ publishing practices and the principles that inform them is not intended to be principled. Instead, just as with the hacker handles, Snowden’s rhetoric distorts the truth, positioning Assange as the irresponsible antithesis to his own conscientious conduct.

Snowden does praise one person associated with WikiLeaks, and that is Sarah Harrison, the investigative journalist who helped Snowden earn asylum Ecuador and who accompanied him on his way there before he was stranded in Moscow. Praising “her integrity and her fortitude,” Snowden expresses his sincere gratitude for her help and support and for her friendship.

To be sure, Harrison’s efforts to help Snowden are nothing less than heroic, and she deserves our respect and admiration. But in an effort to balance his close relationship with Harrison with his antipathy for Assange, Snowden also takes pains to artificially distance Harrison from Assange.

Though Harrison has long been a close advisor to Assange, Snowden insists on her radical independence from Assange’s personality. Implying that Assange oversees WikiLeaks in an authoritarian manner, Snowden praises Harrison as “one of the few at WikiLeaks who dared to openly disagree with Assange.” He also explains that Harrison “was motivated to support me out of loyalty to her conscience more than to the ideological demands of her employer. Certainly, her politics seemed less shaped by Assange’s feral opposition to central power than by her own conviction that too much of what passed for contemporary journalism served government interests rather than challenged them.”

Snowden’s attempt to distance Harrison from WikiLeaks is curious. For one thing, Harrison’s assistance to Snowden may have been partly motivated by personal reasons, but it was also an institutional effort on the part of WikiLeaks. There is no apparent difference between Harrison’s and WikiLeaks’ attitudes regarding Snowden’s safety. Furthermore, Snowden believes that Assange wanted to help him to freedom not for selfish reasons but on the principle that whistleblowers should be protected. As Snowden writes, “It’s true that Assange can be self-interested and vain, moody, and even bullying—after a sharp disagreement just a month after our first, text-based conversation, I never communicated with him again—but he also sincerely conceives of himself as a fighter in a historic battle for the public’s right to know, a battle he will do anything to win.”

Snowden seems quite determined to say almost anything to distance himself from Assange and WikiLeaks. In the Acknowledgements, Snowden expresses gratitude for being “welcomed into an extraordinary and ever-expanding global tribe of journalists, lawyers, technologists, and human rights advocates to whom I owe an incalculable debt.” Though he expended WikiLeaks’ resources to help Snowden to safety, Assange is apparently not a member of that tribe.

There is, then, an unquestionable contradiction between Snowden’s opposition to Assange’s arrest and the rhetorical games Snowden plays with Assange’s character in his memoir. If Snowden truly believes that Assange’s arrest and persecution pose a grave threat to journalism, why does Snowden offer his readers the same image of Assange that the corporate media use to justify that arrest and persecution? The corporate media unflinchingly approved of Assange’s arrest when he was charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, but once the Espionage Act charges against Assange were unsealed, the same corporate media came to his defense in the name of shallow self-interestedness. Where does Snowden fall in all of this?

In the end, Permanent Record offers a very strange tale of heroes and villains. Snowden’s primary nemeses are the likes of Bill Keller (who canned a 2004 story about the NSA surveillance program STELLARWIND), James Clapper (who lied to Congress about NSA surveillance programs), Michael Hayden (who was a leading critic of Snowden after the 2013 revelations), and the Bush and Obama administrations that together coordinated sixteen years of illegal wars, drone assassinations, and secret mass surveillance. From this perspective, Snowden has the same enemies as Assange.

Nevertheless, as soon as Assange enters the narrative, the plot changes. Now Snowden—wittingly or unwittingly—takes up the same rhetoric as Keller, Clapper, Hayden, and Obama, implying that the WikiLeaks founding editor is a deceitful and irresponsible player in the geopolitical publishing game. He uses Assange as a foil in a rhetorical attempt to position himself as a responsible, honest, and humble figure.

Sadly, Snowden does not need to disparage Assange to appear responsible, honest, and humble—unless, of course, his audience is not the global millions of his adoring supporters but instead the same national security state functionaries he exposed six years ago. If this is the case, perhaps Snowden isn’t as far removed from the United States’ imperialistic project as many of us had hoped.

 Patrick D. Anderson is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Grand Valley State University. His research and teaching interests include Political Theory, Africana Philosophy, and Digital Ethics. He also writes for Black Agenda Report. He can be reached at anderpat@gvsu.edu.
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A few thoughts on P. Anderson’s review:

First, I love it, and thank him profusely for reading the book, analyzing it, and publishing his review.  Second, he’s quoted Snowden here in an interview as saying: “I was very careful when I came forward to make sure that I never revealed a single secret.”…but then Patrick doesn’t parse for readers what in hell’s name Snowden might have meant.  Is it due to the fact that he and Glenn Greenwald noted that they’d always sent their NSA revelations to the military and intelligence agencies for vetting prior to publication?

Third, I’m struggling to sit on my fingers (in the main) to bring some Snowden quotes on the NSA (he and GG are both libertarians) that I know, but cannot prove.  Fourth:

Patrick Anderson’s link I’ve bolded above here: ‘when a foolish Guardian journalist disclosed the password to the document archive in his book’, goes to ‘Guardian journalist negligently disclosed Cablegate passwords’, 1 September 2011, wikileaks.org, explaining at length what hell the Guardian had created in their abject abjectness.

“Over time WikiLeaks has been building up, and publishing, the complete Cablegate “library”–the most significant political document ever published. The mammoth task of reading and lightly redacting what amounts to 3,000 volumes or 284 million words of global political history is shared by WikiLeaks and its partners. That careful work has been compromised as a result of the recklessness of the Guardian.

Revolutions and reforms are in danger of being lost as the unpublished cables spread to intelligence contractors and governments before the public. The Arab Spring would not have started in the manner it did if the Tunisian government of Ben Ali had copies of those WikiLeaks releases which helped to take down his government. Similarly, it is possible that the torturing Egyptian internal security chief, Suleiman–Washington’s proposed replacement for Mubarak–would now be the acting ruler of Egypt, had he acquired copies of the cables that exposed his methods prior to their publication.

Indeed, it is one of the indelible stains on Hillary Clinton that she personally set course to forewarn dozens of corrupt leaders, including Hosni Mubarak, about some of the most powerful details of WikiLeaks’ revelations to come.

Now from the 37-page pdf on the additional charges against Assange under the Espionage Act wiklieaks had provided, I’d copied this section, but I can’t find it again:

Prior to his publication of the unredacted State Department cables,

ASSANGE claimed that he intended “to gradually roll [the cables] out in a safe way” by partnering vrith (sic) mainstream media outlets and “reading through every single cable and redacting identities accordingly.” Nonetheless, while ASSANGE and WikiLeaks published some of the cables in redacted form beginning in November 2010, they published over 250,000 cables in September 2011, in unredacted form, that is, without redacting the names of the human sources.

Wow.How.Ironic.

pg 10:

  1. On August 20, 2010, for instance, WikiLeaks tweeted that it had distributed an encrypted “‘insurance’ file” to over 100,000 people and referred to the file and the people who downloaded it as “our big guns in defeating prior restraint.”  [the Dead  Man’s Switch?]

count 15: Afghanistan

Now I may be wrong, but I remember that Julian/Wikileaks gave Greenwald and Snowden time to publish the name of the nation that was using NSA information to target bombs. He’d finally named Afghanistan, as GG and Snowden claimed that naming if would ‘hurt the US war effort’.

But then, consider this:

Kevin Reed reviewed the book for wsws.org on Oct, 12, 2019: ‘Edward Snowden: The man who exposed the electronic surveillance of everyone by US intelligence’

Knowing how dedicated Oscar Grenfell and others at the site defend Julian Assange globally, even with reporters on the ground to do interviews, I’d reckoned Reed’s might be similar to Patrick Anderson’s.  But as far as I could tell in his extremely long homage to Snowden for technical savvy, bravery, and developing moral compass…I’d seen Julian Assange’s name mentioned once.  Interesting comments, though.

(cross-posted from Café Babylon)

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Cassiodorus's picture

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/10/12/snow-o12.html

Snowden is of course not a political radical. If he were, he wouldn't have made it up through the NSA's hierarchy of IT specialists as he did.

Snowden also made it out, which means that (unlike Manning or Assange) he will survive for longer. If you want to share the secrets of the kingdom, you have to have some means of fighting back against the kingdom. As Reed points out in his review, unfortunately Snowden thinks the solution is pleading before the king, rather than replacing the kingdom with a genuine democracy.

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

wendy davis's picture

@Cassiodorus

i should have bolded the link i'd provided (and will). but well said, including your translation of reed's "Snowden thinks the solution is pleading before the king, rather than replacing the kingdom with a genuine democracy."

i got bored even scanning it, myownself. but then i think snowden's libertarian (and GG's) politics suck. "I don't want to burn down the NSA; there are some serious bad guys out there', and so on. "I just wanted to have a conversation about it."

but of course, he'd posed for this, hadn't he?

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Cassiodorus's picture

@wendy davis Unfortunately it's a bit too late to change Snowden's politics, for to change his politics you'd have to find him -- and if you found him that would tip him off that he was doing something wrong....

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

wendy davis's picture

@Cassiodorus

imo. commenter juliania just reminded us that i was correct in the day when covering the aukland town hall, GG, snowden, kim dotcom, et.al. lauding dotcom's internet party opposing john key. assange was on a megatron screen by skype behind them, and when the first two had called him 'the bad whistleblower' (not journalist) for his sins, they were unable to see how not amused julian was.

juliania also said that she'd caught this part of a multi-part interview on DN! with snowden hawking his new book, in which he actually defended the 'anonymous intelligence whistleblower' that's led to ukraine-gate. swear to gawd.

it opens:

AMY GOODMAN: On Tuesday, the HuffPost ran an article headlined “The Trump whistleblower Scandal Is Proving Edward Snowden Right.” In the piece, Nick Baumann writes, quote, “Now, a whistleblower inside the intelligence community is trying to do what Snowden claimed he couldn’t. So far, that person has been effectively silenced by the Trump administration’s refusal to provide the complaint to Congress as required by law. It’s possible that the administration will eventually comply with its legal obligations. But the political system has already sent a clear signal: Even intelligence community whistleblowers who follow the law can’t be confident their concerns will be heard.” Can you respond to this, and the decision you made to go a very different route, Ed?

and he does, at length. partisan much, amy and ed? of course, she loved the (al qaeda) White Helmets, as did the Intercept. sheesh.

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When the subject of Russia-gate came up Snowden supported the claim, and how did he back up that belief? Not by revelations from cables, no Snowden quoted from the New York Times, Joe McCarthy Central.
I didn't listen any longer from that point even tho it was near the end of the interview and unless it happened in the last minutes just like any other interview I watched like the Democracy Now! show,Julian Assange's name was never mentioned once.

Edward Snowden is just trying to cover his own butt and to do that he is disassociating his name as much as possible from that of Julian Assange, the very person to whom he owes whatever freedom he does have and for that he has lost my respect.
I appreciate what he did but minus wikileaks/Assange's work his flight from the US would've ended in an arrest in Hong Kong and he would've been in our version of Belmarsh prison, under torturous conditions awaiting a very long sentence to be handed down from the federal' kangaroo court'.
Also had he given the information to wikileaks it would've been released to the world, not locked away from further exposure to the Public by 'The Intercept'.

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wendy davis's picture

@aliasalias

where was the interview w/ joe rogan, please? i'd thought i'd done due diligence, but apparently not, save for the fact that i'm locked out of the NYT again. '10 free hits', my ass!

but the rest of your comment is excellent +, and to this:

Also had he given the information to wikileaks it would've been released to the world, not locked away from further exposure to the Public by 'The Intercept'.

i'd add that pierre omidyar now owns the snowden docs. those who'd called snowden's revelations and documents (and i was wild for them at my.firedoglake back in the day) a 'limited hangout' were right. the intercept not long ago shut down the documents after bringing something like a hundredth/thousandth? of them to light, then opened up/revealed a few nothingburgers a few months later.

thanks so much, aliasalias. and all this #Snowjob while julian is dying in belmarsh gitmo.

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@wendy davis https://youtu.be/efs3QRr8LWw

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wendy davis's picture

@aliasalias

almost 3 hours? thank you, but as joss would have it, the interview came in on the popular resistance newsletter with commentary cum partial transcript.

Edward Snowden on the Joe Rogan Podcast – Says US Government Could Have Prevented 9/11, October 23, 2019, wakingtimes.com, vic bishop

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@wendy davis The beginning is like he is reading his book, I wasn't interested in his childhood or school days so I jumped ahead in places.

That aside I think Consortium News did their best Julian Assange discussions in a long time and I'm wondering if you saw it and if so what was your impression of that episode.
I also don't know that it wasn't discussed on this site already and I happened to miss it, so I thought I'd ask you. Thanks.

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/10/25/watch-ep-15-of-cn-live-special-on-...

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wendy davis's picture

@aliasalias

and no, i hadn't watched it. i simply haven't the time for such lengthy videos or audios, besides not retaining auditory messages well. here's the video, though.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=19&v=jdz6CmwJazA]

now i did read thru the comments, and it seemed as though some of this gut-wrenching information may have been covered; i did scroll thru the 66 comments, and hadn't seen your screen name there, but i could have missed it. 'how much longer can Julian even survive?, wendy davis, 10/22/2019

i will say that i've come to have negative feelings for consortium news, though, for a variety of reasons post-robert parry, may he rest in power. but one of the reasons is that they rarely let my comments in, especially the ones in which i note that wsws or others had added this or that information. as if they OWN the news on julian, IOW! wsws has reporters all love the world they interview for support vigils, and the SEP sets up many in various locations around the globe. jakarta? who'd have thunk?

thank you, aliasalias, for caring so much and adding to the discussion.

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@wendy davis and I almost never comment on CN posts but you wouldn't know that because my real name is used instead of the one I started with on DKos.
I also think you might like the last guest, the clinical psychologist and her discussion on the effects (long term) of solitary confinement.
She also talks about the importance of human contact for the reason of maintaining one's sanity, something Assange is missing while those locked up for crimes like murder and other horrible crimes still have a social life in jail.
They can interact with other inmates, but not Julian Assange.
Not Julian Assange, when he is being moved anywhere the hallways must be cleared with everyone going into their cell until Assange is gone.

One last note, in the past I've had problems with comments being posted and read others complaining about some of their comments that never appeared but those bugs seem to have been straightened out because now a comment doesn't have to go thru moderator limbo period.
Having an exchange with another person was pointless before when you might not see anything you post appearing for hours, and sometimes I saw it the next day but that doesn't seem to be the case now.
thanks

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wendy davis's picture

@aliasalias

the 'Emmy' named in the comments under the video on youtube? or lissa johnson as per my retweet of Julian's mama?

well, regardless, we know how wretched isolation is, and that he's dying ever-more-quickly in belmarsh gitmo.

as to comments, i kinda disagree, as a few of mine have made it thru initially, but were then deleted not long afterward. one they'd deleted was asking them please to do an homage to the great william blum (RIPower) who'd died a whole week before i'd asked. robbert parry had always carried his worthy commentaries and exposés. joe lauria? meh; parry's son chose him from some MSM i've long forgotten.

and yes, he's being treated far worse than murderers and other evil miscreants. he'll die there, i expect, and never even make it virginia. and fuck snowden and the five or more other fearless intercept journalists for their help in causing all this.

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@wendy davis @wendy davis and she talked about her observations.
As for me that is the only regular program that is so focused on Julian Assange's plight. I'd welcome references to any other programs out there to follow that have the same central focus on Julian Assange.
Along with Joe Lauria I find co-host Elizabeth Vos ask very good questions of the many varied,knowledgeable guests like Ray McGovern, including some people well versed in international law, as well as federal law experience like (among others) frequent guest John Kiriakou,or from journalists like Patrick Henningsen, and/or John Pilger.

So for me it works, and even tho on twitter I follow a lot of Julian Assange supporters, including his mother and father, they are just blips of pleas and calls for support in raising awareness of this blatant miscarriage of justice. Too short and often buried in a blizzard of other unrelated tweets.

So CN is the best I've been able to find so far but I would truly appreciate any information about any other program out there that I can add to my 'watch list', and it is because of what you've written that I addressed this particular subject with you.

No reply is needed I just wanted to express why I like the program and hope to find more like it, but better is always welcome.

Thanks again.

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wendy davis's picture

@aliasalias

"programs", as in video interviews, i guess i don't know any. but for other first-hand reporting in text, i'd go to the ones who've been to see him in person at belmarsh, knew him beforehand, or were in court with him. i usually start at wsws, though, and try to check w/ wikileaks on twitter when i know key dates are at hand. many sources are in the link above.

vos may be disobedient media, she's kinda off my radar. but craig murray, caitlyn johnstone, cassandra fairbanks (gateway pundit), jen robinsson, @assange legal, and so on. dunno if anything's scheduled earlier than the Big Kangaroo Court Date om feb. 25, though.

but i'm glad you can like and get so much news out of those very long programs. i don't even pay any attention to interviews on the real news network if they don't have transcripts, but since sharmini preres and paul jay seem to have been deleted as interviewers there (WTH?), to me it's lost a lot of its former luster and radical thought.

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