'They’ll try to shut you down': Meeting Assange & the non-stop 'War on RT'
Last week, while in London, I went to see Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy. We talked off the record of course, so I won’t divulge too much, but will post only what Julian insisted on making public. Before it’s too late. ● Assange shared an enlightening story about a Kurdish TV station that had been shut down in Denmark. The story, like so many others – from diplomatic cables with undiplomatic comments to hundreds of uninvestigated war crimes in Iraq – came to his attention through a leaked cryptogram. Once upon a time there was a Kurdish TV network in Denmark. It would just as happily 'be' anywhere else, but more fitting markets were off limits to the channel. The station, Roj TV, was aimed at Turkish Kurds, and that made the Turkish authorities very angry. Turkish officials pressed their NATO ally Denmark to shut down the TV channel under some plausible pretext. But Denmark was reluctant, saying that multiple inspections didn’t find any propaganda of terrorism and there were no grounds to close it down. Such things weren’t done there; Denmark, after all, is a democracy. 'Democracy' did not prevail for long.