Thank heaven Russia Today has provided Chris Hedges the program On Contact in which he frequently conducts in-depth interviews with important guests. Americans won’t see such thought provoking and powerful interviews from the “Fake News” Legacy Media cable TV outlets.

His interview with Wikileaks’ Kristinn Hrafnsson is excellent and he was one of the few journalists to cover Julian Assange’s extradition hearing in court; certainly no one from CNN, MSNBC or Fox was there.

Below is the program in which he interviews Hrafnsson.

And this is the video on his remarks on Julian Assange’s extradition entitled “Media Betrays Assange after Profiting from his Leaks.”

Many opine, especially the American highly paid talking heads, that Russia Today is propaganda, and perhaps by simply stating the truth, Russia Today sheds light on the Oligarchy simply by publishing the facts and is an instrument in asymmetric Hybrid or Fourth Generation War. For Charles Burris recently blogged an excellent analysis on LewRockwell.com in which he noted about the “elites” who control the state: The American Deep Stat... Peter Dale Scott Best Price: $23.25 Buy New $23.06 (as of 09:10 UTC - Details)

In July of 2010, Angelo Codevilla’s magnificent manifesto, “The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It” was published initially online in The American Spectator (and later in book form). It immediately went viral on the Internet and started a widespread national conversation about America’s hubristic power elite and the arrogant way they reign over the rest of us.

When Codevilla’s article appeared, I stated that it was the most important essay I had ever read. I still believe this because it is a superb synthesis of class analysis with keen insights on contemporary power elite relationships regarding today’s rulers and the ruled.

This class division of present-day America into two factions, Court and Country, has absolutely nothing to do with any Marxian view or analysis. It is a reaffirmation of the seminal insights of Bernard Bailyn’s Pulitzer Prize winning volume, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, and Murray N. Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty.

These books demonstrate that the Founders’ world-view saw the crucial struggle of the Revolution as a battle of liberty versus power. Codevilla posits today’s battle in the same dramatic terms.

Hedges warns us about the unbridled power of the Deep State, and its latest victim, Julian Assange; he recently wrote a powerful article on the website TruthDig.com, entitled, “The Coming Show Trial of Julian Assange.” He described what Assange is enduring as a Greek Tragedy:

On Friday morning I was in a small courtroom at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London. Julian Assange, held in Belmarsh Prison and dressed in a pale-blue prison shirt, appeared on a video screen directly in front of me. Assange, his gray hair and beard neatly trimmed, slipped on heavy, dark-frame glasses at the start of the proceedings. He listened intently as Ben Brandon, the prosecutor, seated at a narrow wooden table, listed the crimes he allegedly had committed and called for his extradition to the United States to face charges that could result in a sentence of 175 years. The charges include the release of unredacted classified material that posed a “grave” threat to “human intelligence sources” and “the largest compromises of confidential information in the history of the United States.” After the prosecutor’s presentation, Assange’s attorney, Mark Summers, seated at the same table, called the charges “an outrageous and full-frontal assault on journalistic rights.”

Most of us who have followed the long persecution of Assange expected this moment, but it was nevertheless deeply unsettling, the opening of the final act in a Greek tragedy where the hero, cursed by fortuna, or fate, confronts the dark forces from which there is no escape. The publication of classified documents is not a crime in the United States, but if Assange is extradited and convicted it will become one. Assange is not an American citizen. WikiLeaks, which he founded and publishes, is not a U.S.-based publication. The message the U.S. government is sending is clear: No matter who or where you are, if you expose the inner workings of empire you will be hunted down, kidnapped and brought to the United States to be tried as a spy. The extradition and trial of Assange will mean the end of public investigations by the press into the crimes of the ruling elites. It will cement into place a frightening corporate tyranny. Publications such as The New York Times and The Guardian, which devoted pages to the WikiLeaks revelations and later amplified and legitimized Washington’s carefully orchestrated character assassination of Assange, are no less panicked. This is the gravest assault on press freedom in my lifetime.

“This is the gravest assault on press freedom in my lifetime,” Hedges states; of course it’s a fact and sadly, too few Americans seem to care or understand. Chris Hedges, whether one agrees with his left-wing politics or not, is nevertheless an exceptional true journalist, not a Deep State stenographer, and I can’t recommend these video interviews, along with the quoted piece for TruthDig.com, highly enough to the readers and supporters not only of LewRockwell.com but of liberty and peace, and also all who are concerned about the consequences of the out of control bully that is the American Deep State, recently discussed at LewRockwell.com by Doug Casey.

As Paul Craig Roberts has written, what does it tell us about America if the only outlet that provides a platform to Chris Hedges is not in America, neither The New York Times or the Washington Post, but Russia Today?

RT Link to On Contact Interview with Kristinn Hrafnsson

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