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We're in the final countdown to British Home Secretary Priti Patel's decision on the fate of Julian Assange, with the WikiLeaks founder's extradition to the United States due to be approved or rejected by the end of the month. Joe Lauria has an article out with Consortium News on the various pressures that Patel is facing from both sides of this history-making issue at this crucial time.
And I can't stop thinking, as this situation comes to a boil, about how absurd it is that the U.S. empire is working to set a precedent that essentially outlaws information-sharing that the U.S. doesn't like at the same time Western news media are full of hand-wringing headlines about the dangerous threat of "disinformation."
Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) has an article "'Disinformation' Label Serves to Marginalize Crucial Ukraine Facts" about the way the mass media have been spinning that label to mean not merely the knowing distribution of false information but also of information that is true but inconvenient to imperial narrative-weaving.
"In defense of the U.S. narrative, corporate media have increasingly taken to branding realities inconvenient to U.S. information goals as 'disinformation' spread by Russia or its proxies," writes FAIR's Luca Goldmansour.
Online platforms have been ramping up their censorship protocols under the banner of fighting disinformation and misinformation. Those escalations always align with narrative control agendas of the U.S.-centralized empire.
Just the other day we learned that Twitter has a new policy which expands its censorship practices to fight "misinformation" about wars and other crises, and the Ukraine war (surprise surprise) will be the first such situation about which it will be enforcing these new censorship policies.
Then there's the recent controversy over the Department of Homeland Security's "Disinformation Governance Board," a mysterious institution ostensibly designed to protect the American people from wrong think coming from Russia and elsewhere.
The board's operations (whatever they were) have been "paused" pending a review which will be led by Michael Chertoff, a virulent swamp monster and torture advocate. Its operations will likely be resumed in one form or another, probably under the leadership of someone with a low profile who doesn't sing show tunes about disinformation.
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