On April 22nd, 2017  The Washington Post, to its credit,  published a letter written by this writer of this Argentum Post, which corrects and defends the magnificent and heroic work the brilliant, dedicated, courageous founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange has been carrying out as a veritable public service to humanity.

Said letter was published in the digital version of The Washington Post as well as in newspaper version of it.

It is reproduced infra.

“The April 17, 2017 two letters to the editor of The Washington Post titled  “Mr. Assange’s arrogant claims” were erroneously and hence unjustly very critical of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. They claimed that Mr. Assange “seeks refuge” (in the Equatorial Embassy in London) when in reality he has essentially been under house arrest in London.

Mr. Assange has carried out a service to humanity by exposing egregious wrongdoing in a wide field of misdeeds by government officials.

Mr. Assange exposed, inter alia, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr.’s lie to Congress when he denied that the National Security Agency was collecting data on millions of Americans. Mr. Assange also exposed the Democratic National Committee’s sabotage of Bernie Sanders’s candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination.”

To add huge and dishonest insult to injury, Trump’s CIA director Mike Pompeo accused WikiLeaks of being a “hostile nonstate intelligence agency” and declared cryptically that “It ends now”…

For Trumps nominees to attack the innocent and to defend the guilty is nothing new.

Trump’s nominees have hyperbolically and inflammatorily stated  that Iran is a “global threat”, a non-sensical absurdity which is outrageous when one takes into consideration that it was the U.S. and Britain which in 1953 crashed the democratically elected Tudeh (socialist) party government of Mossadegh and then supported the installation of the dictatorship of the tyrannical Shah Reza Pahlavi who used his terrorizing Savak secret service to apprehend dissident intellectuals and workers and engaged in torture, incarcerations without due process, and extra judicial executions.

Iran has not invaded any nation, but for 8 years it was victim of Saddam Hussein’s aggression in war on Iran in which the U.S. embraced Saddam Hussein, metaphorically as when former secretary of defense Rumsfeld shook hands with  him, and literally as when the U.S. secretly, during the Reagan presidency, provided Saddam Hussein with weaponry to destroy Iran.  Rumsfeld backed Saddam even after he used chemical weapons, as the London Independent reported on December 24, 2003

Essentially such hate and fear mongering is originated calumniatingtly  by the Zionist misleadership of Israel as a propagandistic diversionary tactic from its power structure’s horrific oppression of the Palestinians in violation of international law and alarmingly such falsehoods are also propagated by politicized,  agenda driven,  corrupted and/or ignorant by the directors of government agencies picked by Trump, as well as, by corrupted neoconservative and neoliberal members of Congress.

There is a plethora of academics which have exposed documentably and denounced such lies but time and again organizations of the Fourth Estate (i.e. mainstream media) buy into such fake news as well.   There are exceptions, of course, such as when The Washington Post published this writer’s letter to its editor, or as when The New York Times to its credit published on April 16, 2017 an op-ed by Marwan Barghouti titled “ Why We Are On Hunger Strike in Israel’s Prisons “ which is an account of the barbaric treatment of Palestinian political prisoners which number about 6,500 and which are include children as young as 12 years of age, who are rounded up by the military and incarcerated for years without a proper trial.

Incidentally, it is important to note that the Israeli power structure highly criticized the New York Times for its commendable publication of the article by Marwan Barghouti.  It is recommended that readers go to the very objectively grounded progressive and well known website called “Mondoweiss” to read about the reality of Marwan Barghouti’s background given that the Israeli narrative about him is extraordinarily tendentiously biased against him, as one would expect.   In Mondoweiss  Jonathan Ofir wrote and published on April 21, 2007 a very objective account of the dedicated, courageous, and principled background of Marwan Barghouti.

Towards the end of said Ofir article in Mondoweiss, the following is stated :

“During his detention, Barghouti managed to publish an op-ed in Washington Post (2002) titled “Want security? End the occupation”.  Here he wrote:”

“And while I, and the Fatah movement to which I belong, strongly oppose attacks and the targeting of civilians inside Israel, our future neighbor, I reserve the right to protect myself, to resist the Israeli occupation of my country and to fight for my freedom. If Palestinians are expected to negotiate under occupation, then Israel must be expected to negotiate as we resist that occupation. I am not a terrorist, but neither am I a pacifist. I am simply a regular guy from the Palestinian street advocating only what every other oppressed person has advocated — the right to help myself in the absence of help from anywhere else.”

Another excellent source which debunks mythology is “ Global Research”.

In one of its articles debunking said mythology it states the following :

“ Israel’s Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar recently admitted (boastfully) that the Israeli government had succeeded in distracting the attention of the entire world away from the Palestinians to the Iranians. Dr.Zogby’s argument that Iran is “the real danger to its neighbors” shows that Mr.Sa’ar is, indeed, justified in boasting about the fantastic success of Israel’s policy of distraction. Instead of blaming the US-Israeli axis of aggression for the never-ending and escalating turbulence in the Middle East, Dr.Zogby blames Iran!

But let us examine Dr.Zogby’s allegation in light of reality: (1) Iran has not invaded (or threatened invasion of) any country for over 250 years. (2) Iran was invaded in 1980 by Saddam Hussein, which culminated in the devastating 8-year war—a war that was instigated, supported and sustained by Western powers and their proxy regimes in the Persian Gulf region. (3) The “Arab Gulf States,” headed by the Saudi kingdom, are collaborating with the US-Israeli axis of aggression in their efforts to destabilize and overthrow the Iranian government. (4) The “Arab Gulf States,” not Iran, serve (literally) as military bases of Western powers that support Israel and its policies of settlements and occupation.

Against this background, Dr.Zogby’s claim that Iran is a “meddlesome menace” is obviously counterfactual and preposterous.”

In fact, nowadays when it comes to inciting hate and fear on the nations of the season, mostly Iran, Russia, China,  and at the moment North Korea, there is an appalling lack of historical background and proper contextualization given by any mainstream media organization, and this reflects the deranged and hence dangerous mindset of the present U.S. misadministration which is erratically contradicting itself as well as engaging in provocative macho bravado threats against these nations, something which has the sometimes latent and at other times brazen support of the establishments neocons and neolibs.

All the while though, the truly dangerous , destabilizing, oppressive, and even murderous regimes of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt, and Israel in its international law violating horrific and lethal repression of Palestinians, are characterized brazenly and bizarrely as  our “allies” and hence recipients of military aid and/or purchasers of military equipment in deals which are extremely lucrative for that “military- industrial complex” which former President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the American people about in his farewell speech.

To wit, when it comes to the involvement of neoliberals which buy into this support of the guilty offending governments named supra we can point to former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton who supported the war on Iraq on false claims and who had the temerity to characterize the ruthless, and murderous 30-year dictator of Egypt, namely Hosni Mubarak, as being someone she regards as “ a friend of the family”.

Hillary Clinton made this statement on ABC, in the same year of 2009 when she pressed, unfortunately successfully, President Obama to not characterize the Honduran violent coup against democracy as a what is was, namely a coup.  This coup  against the popular and democratically elected President Zelaya was carried out by right-wing thugs who abducted President Zelaya in the middle of the night to overthrow him, and this is the same right-wing clique of thugs who have been engaged in lethal repression in Honduras against labor organizers, environmental and human rights activists such as Berta Cáceres who was murdered by them.   But none of this reality mattered since Hillary Clinton stressed that the U.S.  has “interests” ( in contrast to principles ), because it has the Palmerola military air force base in Honduras.

The same applied to the killing of Arab spring democracy activists by the despotic decadent misleadership of Bahrain which asked for Saudi Arab military intervention to put down the peaceful demonstration, again because Clinton succeeded in pressing our “interests” in the embodiment of our Fifth Naval Fleet base in Bahrain.  The autocratic oppressive minority Sunni Bahraini misleadership, to add insult to injury, jailed medical personnel for treating the democracy activists who were injured by the Bahrainis and their ally, Saudi Arabia.

In a total lack of the most fundamental elements of rationalism, humanism, and honesty,  the U.S. power structure continues to support militarily the decadent and most autocratic state of the Middle East, namely Saudi Arabia and its massacre of mostly unarmed innocent civilians in the poorest country in the Middle East region, namely Yemen.  The Saudi  Arab bombardment of Yemen has cost the lives thus far some 10 thousand people, 40 thousand are injured, and 10 million need urgent assistance – according to UN humanitarian aid office.

There seems to be no end to this horror show, and no end to the hypocritical double standards when it comes to protecting the guilty and offending the victims.

It brings to mind the perverse and cynical question raised by  President “W” (Bush) when the Bush/Cheney et al. junta had the temerity to ask, after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 on fabricated claims,  “why do they hate us” ?

The invasion of Iraq unleashed the chain of events which has lead to the catastrophe we continue to observe today, 14 years later.

Well, thanks to such heroes as Julian Assange and the Wikileaks organization he founded and directs, as well as thanks to such superb, brilliant, principled investigative journalists as Glen Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, Seymour Hersh, John Pilger, Alan Nairn, Gideon Levy, Ilan Pappe, and such academics as Stephen F. Cohen, Chris Hedges, and countless many, many others, and also thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden, and thanks to our U.S. Constitution which guarantees our freedom of speech and the freedom of the press, as well as to the gloriously professional and ethical federal judges who are blowing the whistle on egregious attempts by the present administration to usurp powers it does not constitutionally have, “we the people” have the right and the confidence and hope that at the proverbial end of the day we shall prevail and regain respectable, progressive governance which will allow us to be all we can be to inspire but not “lead”, but rather to thereby inspire others by the power of example and not by the example of power.