By Jonathan COOK

Back in the dark days of the Soviet Union, dissidents risked being locked up – but not, officially at least, on the grounds that they had committed a political crime. In the Soviet regime’s imagination, treason and mental illness were often two sides of the same coin.

Here’s a brief description from Wikipedia of the phenomenon:

The KGB [the Soviet secret police] routinely sent dissenters to psychiatrists for diagnosing to avoid embarrassing public trials and to discredit dissidence as the product of ill minds. Highly classified government documents which have become available after the dissolution of the Soviet Union confirm that the authorities consciously used psychiatry as a tool to suppress dissent.

The weaponization of mental illness by the Soviet Union against internal critics has been described as “punitive psychiatry.”

Vladimir Bukovsky, a Russian human rights activist who spent many years confined to psychiatric hospitals and labor camps, wrote “A Manual on Psychiatry for Dissenters,” together with a Ukrainian psychiatrist, Semyon Gluzman. The pair observed: “The Soviet use of psychiatry as a punitive means is based upon the deliberate interpretation of dissent … as a psychiatric problem.”

The medicalization of dissent was not unique to the Soviet Union, of course. It is a feature of authoritarian and repressive states. An ideological consensus is cultivated in the population by portraying opponents as traitors whose behavior is proof of a mental disturbance or insanity.

Publicizing dissent, and the reasons for it, through criminal trials risks dangerously challenging dominant social assumptions inculcated by propaganda. Instead, the dissenter can quietly be detained for his or her own good without their political ideology getting an airing.

Medicalizing dissent

This is why the growing trend in the West’s supposedly free and open societies towards conflating dissent with treason – and medicalizing its causes – should concern us. It is likely to be a barometer of how authoritarian our liberal democracies are rapidly becoming.

This has not happened overnight. It has been a gradual process that accelerated with the trauma for liberals of discovering that the political system they so revered was capable of spawning a president like Donald Trump. How could the most evolved of the Western democracies – which had defeated the evil Soviet empire ideologically, economically, and militarily – end up electing such a wretch for a leader?

Trump supporters attend a rally in Washington before marching on the U.S. Capitol, Jan. 6, 2021. John Minchillo | AP

The proper conclusion to draw was that Trump was a symptom of an entirely dysfunctional, corrupt Western political system – one with which liberals had closely identified even when it was being led by the right. (U.S. politics had thrown up plenty of other clearly lamentable presidents, such as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, but none exhibited the same degree of vulgarity and vanity that so troubled liberals.)

It should have been a moment for the scales to fall from their eyes. But that would have meant questioning everything liberals held dearest. So Instead they found other reasons to explain the rise of President Trump.

He had to be treated as an aberration, not the exemplar of a system that had long served people very much like Trump: whether it was the billionaire-owned media, the moneyed donors that had captured both political parties, or the corporate lobbies that deprived the public of proper health care and channeled public wealth into endless, devastating wars that enriched a narrow elite.

It’s disturbing how many people are peddling the idea that Nato is a ‘defensive alliance’. It *claims* to be defensive. Actually, Nato is a central pillar of the highly lucrative war industries. This may help clarify: https://t.co/SL2MA1ASMh

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) February 26, 2022

What was needed urgently was a theory that would leave the status quo – and its claim to moral superiority – untouched.

The neatest candidate, for those committed to liberalism – or its modern incarnation as neoliberalism – was the idea that Western democracies had become so open, free, fair, and honest that they had developed an inherent vulnerability – an Achilles’ heel – that could be easily exploited by malicious actors. According to this reasoning, liberal democracy was uniquely susceptible to sabotage.

Fake news ‘threat’

From 2016 onwards, the corporate media was awash with warnings that Trump was the product of dangerous new trends: populism, fake news, Russian disinformation, and online bots. These quickly became shorthand for the same supposed phenomenon.

Paradoxically, these “threats” derived from the rapid technological development of unique forms of popular engagement and more democratic media. Social media leveled the media playing field for the very first time, challenging the traditional top-down model in which state and corporate media – the latter owned and controlled by a fabulously wealthy elite – reserved for themselves an exclusive right to decide what counted as news and how news events should be interpreted and assessed.

There was indeed a problem with fake news on social media, even if it paled in comparison to the much more influential and damaging fake news on corporate media. But the real cause of the proliferation of fake news and wild conspiracies on these platforms could not be genuinely addressed by the corporate elites running our societies – and for good reason.

What it makes me think is: this guy, Alastair Campbell, who helped destroy Iraq’s capital, Baghdad, in a ‘Shock and Awe’ bombing campaign that looked just like this but for real, should be in the dock at the Hague for war crimes https://t.co/7CaRwbeSPQ

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) March 13, 2022

Fake news, like genuine news, thrives in the more democratic environment of social media only because political and media elites have kept so much real information – information that might make them look less virtuous – under wraps. It is the tight secrecy of Western democracies that has encouraged such variety of news and views, informed and uninformed alike, to proliferate.

Social media “conspiracy theories” are not evidence of how a section of the public has fallen under the malign influence of “Russian disinformation.” Rather they are a sign of how a growing number of Westerners have become so deeply distrustful of their elites and what they are concealing that they are ready to believe almost anything about their depravity, however incredible.

‘Russiagate’ born

There were two other, self-interested reasons for the billionaires and the journalists who work for them to vilify users of social media, painting them as either victims of, or colluders in, “Russian disinformation.”

First, social media made it possible for the first time to illuminate the inherent weaknesses of the traditional media’s reporting and analyses. Users could highlight what was being ignored or misrepresented, and the glaring double standards at play. Voices that had been disregarded or actively silenced suddenly had visibility.

My latest: If we seek peace, we need the western media held to account for its mindless jingoism, exaggerations, credulity, double standards and deceptions. But who is going to act as a watchdog on the supposed watchdog of the Fourth Estate? https://t.co/RrDGDCstq3

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) March 4, 2022

And second, those offering a mode of critical thinking that has always been impermissible in the corporate media were positioned to question the foundations of the political and economic systems on which the billionaires – and those they employed – depended for their power and privilege.

The foundations of a political system with which liberals deeply identified were being shaken. As a result, a whole industry sprang up to insulate them from the terrifying thought that maybe Trump both personified, and represented a reaction to, something already unwholesome about the United States and its values.

My latest: The increasingly desperate task of capitalism’s perception managers is to dissociate our economic system from the emerging environmental crisis – to break our understanding of the causal link between the two https://t.co/S4Aby314FX

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) October 25, 2020

And so “Russiagate” was born: the idea that Trump’s electoral success had occurred – could only have occurred – because the U.S. system had been sabotaged from outside and within. Trump must have colluded with the Kremlin to subvert U.S. democracy.

Despite years of investigations, no evidence was ever adduced to support that claim, but nonetheless, it soon had a vise-like hold on the imagination of U.S. liberals.

The subtext was that only those with feeble minds, or perverse and treasonous ideological impulses, could fail to understand that the liberal candidate for president, Hillary Clinton, was far better.

‘Basket of deplorables’

But Trump also provided the perfect opportunity for liberals to start subtly medicalizing their opponents – whether on the left or right. Trump’s narcissism, bordering on personality disorder, was hard to ignore. Those who supported him were therefore readily discredited as a “basket of deplorables” – Clinton’s infamous term for them. (Clinton’s language offered a subliminal message that they were “basket cases” too).

Of course, support for Trump was not the only symptom of the breakdown of the liberal – and neoliberal – order. That consensus was also challenged from the left by Bernie Sanders. He was supposedly a product of fake news and Russian disinformation too. His supporters were dismissed as “Bernie Bros”: a doubly false characterization that they were overwhelmingly male and peddlers of toxic masculinity.

Over in the U.K., similar processes were underway. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was disappeared from view (first in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, then in Belmarsh high-security prison) for revealing war crimes committed by the West’s military-industrial complex – or, as liberals preferred to call it, the “defense industry.”

Assange arrives at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London, April 11, 2019. Victoria Jones | PA via AP

The liberal Guardian exemplified the shift from at first vilifying Assange as a rapist (also, an evidence-free accusation) to portraying him as mentally disturbed: its journalists led the way in spreading fake news that he abused his cat and smeared feces over the walls of what amounted to his cell in the embassy.

The British and U.S. security services knew that by the time they engineered Assange’s seizure from the embassy in 2019, he would fit perfectly the image of the crazed dissident the Guardian had so meticulously crafted. Three months earlier, the CIA had gotten embassy staff to confiscate Assange’s shaving equipment. He was carried out, bearded, disheveled, and pale from lack of sunlight, looking like a mad hermit from Monty Python’s “Life Of Brian.” Or a “demented looking gnome,” as long-time Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore called him.

The actual U.S. charge against Assange, largely overlooked in all the messaging from liberal media like The Guardian, was the true insanity. He was accused of “espionage” for publishing evidence of U.S. war crimes – even though he wasn’t a U.S. citizen, had done none of his work in the U.S., and had not participated in any act, even had he been a U.S. citizen working in the U.S., that could realistically be characterized as spying.

My latest: It is the ultimate, ugly paradox that Julian Assange’s legal and physical fate rests in the hands of two states – the US and UK – that have the most to lose by allowing him to regain his freedom and publish more of the truths they want concealed https://t.co/M7WTKq0ZXf

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) December 17, 2021

Digital gulag

It didn’t end there. Britain had its own version of Bernie Sanders, a left-wing insurgency candidate. But unlike Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn won the contest to become Labour Party leader, riding a wave of support from party members that shocked and incensed the Blairite centrists that had long controlled the party. Naturally, Corbyn’s success also infuriated the corporate media.

He was initially portrayed as a traitor. But soon liberal media like The Guardian were focusing on an entirely concocted charge that Corbyn was either a confirmed antisemite or wilfully indulged a strong antisemitic tendency within the party.

My latest: Corbyn’s election to lead the Labour party didn’t overturn the rigged political system or end the corporate chokehold on power. His victory was an accident, and the system has been fighting back with all its might to correct the error ever since https://t.co/2u0Vyo0qLU

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) July 3, 2019

These confected allegations rarely operated at the political level. The subtext once again was that an enemy of the neoliberal order was unhinged, a man in the grip of irrational prejudice and demons he was incapable of slaying.

Corbyn’s supporters weren’t literally being wheeled off to the psychiatrist’s couch – not quite – but the implication was clear: those who voted or campaigned for him, like those who stood by Assange and his right not to be jailed for telling the truth, were a menace to wider society. They needed to be silenced, put in a digital gulag – enforced through algorithmic changes – as a first stage of containment.

They were to be treated as one would deal with a dangerous illness, rather than a popular movement driven by a political ideology or political grievances.

In an initial move to cure society, Trump was hounded off social media platforms even while he was president. Meanwhile, damaging stories that might question the virtue of his liberal challenger, Joe Biden, in the 2020 election were erased from public consciousness through coordination by the traditional and new corporate media.

But the question remained: was digital containment enough?

Pandemic debates

One of the advantages of having power – especially when it is power over narratives – is that the perception of any real-world event can be shaped in ways that serve the interests of power.

That meant that the arrival at the tail end of the Trump presidency of a global pandemic – a cataclysmic moment with biblical overtones – could be used as yet another lens for liberals to interpret the world, and in terms that posited anyone like them as virtuous and everyone else as dangerous or mentally unsound.

The reality was that COVID offered an ideal opportunity to question some of the most cherished tenets of a neoliberal orthodoxy that had had absolute dominion over Westerners’ lives for more than four decades.

• Was the planet primarily an economic asset to be endlessly exploited?
• Did the individual have more inherent value than the collective?
• Should the value of relationships, and virtue, be measured chiefly in economic terms?
• Ought public health to be at the mercy of profit-driven corporations, from pharmaceutical to food companies?

My latest: The response of leaders like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson to the coronavirus crisis has shed a troubling light on the twisted priorities long cultivated in our societies https://t.co/YNDYawpBbY

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) March 17, 2020

None of these questions – pivotal as they are to our survival as a species – came to the fore during the pandemic, the moment when they had the most obvious relevance and topicality. The corporate media made sure to steer the national debate away from questions so incompatible with a world designed by and for billionaires.

Instead, the problem was quickly reduced to a simpler one: Why were a minority of the population not getting themselves or their children vaccinated? What could be done to deal with this irresponsible section of the population?

Almost immediately this became the obsessive focus of media and popular attention. Proof of vaccination became the only legitimate marker to distinguish between the virtuous and disease-free (the clean), and the selfish and disease-carriers (the unclean).

From the outset, there were lots of problems with this distinction. Scientific evidence, even if it was publicly downplayed, indicated that those who had already caught COVID enjoyed a natural immunity that offered stronger protection than that from vaccination. (Notably, until COVID, natural immunity had always been considered the gold standard of immunity.)

The vaccines, it quickly became clear too, had very short-lived efficacy. They offered personal protection against more severe illness, but they did little to stop the communal spread of the disease, as Omicron’s current rampage through heavily vaccinated populations should underscore.

It could not be stated publicly at the time, but virtue was not the main reason to take the vaccine. Selfishness was.

Fortunately for the health of our public conversation, if nothing else, the arrival of Omicron shattered the liberal consensus that passports and social shunning, if not enforced isolation, were the solutions to what were until then being dismissively labeled the “anti-vaxxers” – those depraved individuals who had failed to take three or more shots of the vaccine, whatever their reasons.

Ukraine survey

It would be a grave mistake to imagine that we are anywhere near the end of this trajectory, just because Trump is gone (for now) and the COVID pandemic looks nearly over.

The framework for our current “debates” has been fixed by the billionaires and the liberals who are their willing accomplices. Political arguments have been subsumed by liberal claims to mental clarity and moral superiority. The implication is that the mentally infirm, those susceptible to the influence campaigns of the enemy, need to be dealt with to stop liberal democracy from being subverted.

As an example of the way this is starting to play out in more overtly Soviet-style terms, consider this recent thread on social media by a New York academic who has quickly gained half a million followers on Twitter by pandering to liberals still in shock at Clinton’s defeat in 2016.

Caroline Orr Bueno is described as “a behavioral scientist who researches social media manipulation, online information warfare, and far-right extremism” – ascribing almost all of it, predictably, to “Russian disinformation.”

In a recent interview, she observed that she had “moderated” her tone on Twitter as her influence has grown:

Because right now so much of what is wrong on the internet is super divisive. It’s hype, and I find that to be not helpful and not productive, and it doesn’t really lead to anywhere good. So I try not to contribute to that cycle.”

Contradicting herself moments later in the same interview, Orr Bueno notes of her critics:

I get a lot of attempts to discredit me or my work through various disinformation campaigns, often emanating from people and organizations with direct links to the Russian government.”

So what comes next can presumably be discounted as “Russian disinformation.”

Orr Bueno highlights a survey whose methodology is itself troubling. A poll of Canadians on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine breaks down the responses on the basis not only of age and gender but whether the respondent has been vaccinated or not. This is now a relevant category for assessing the public’s views, it seems.

The headline Orr Bueno wants to highlight as evidence of a mental infirmity among the unvaccinated is that 26% of them reportedly support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, compared to just 2% of those vaccinated with three shots.

You know how I keep talking about how anti-vaccine attitudes are really a proxy for underlying moral/ideological values? And how I kept warning that bad actors are using vaccines to shift attitudes around seemingly unrelated issues like foreign policy?

So, about that… https://t.co/VMWkNADnIA

— Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D (@RVAwonk) March 21, 2022

Her conclusion, dressed up as academic analysis, is that the unvaccinated are either so incapable of rational and moral thought, or such willing dupes of Russia, that they are susceptible to obvious disinformation campaigns.

Skeptical posture

There is a very obvious problem with this analysis, as answers to many of the survey’s other questions demonstrate. We might assess one marker of sanity – or, at least, mental clarity – vis a vis Ukraine as an unwillingness to provoke a World War III between nuclear powers, especially if such a provocation is actually a way to avoid negotiations to achieve a ceasefire.

So how do unvaccinated and three-shot-vaccinated Canadians square up, based on that yardstick? According to the survey, more than three times as many of the highly vaccinated as the unvaccinated want their government to send Canadian fighter jets and troops to Ukraine. Just over half of all three-shot Canadians surveyed appeared ready to start a war with Russia over Ukraine.

It might be reasonable, using Orr Bueno’s approach, to assume that it is therefore the three-shot vaccinated rather than the unvaccinated who are mentally unsound. But I will resist that temptation.

What we need to do instead is consider the kind of influence peddling that might have led so many vaccinated Canadians to promote what looks like an insane policy.

If it is Russian disinformation to think there may be grounds for Russia to invade Ukraine – and taking a wild stab, I suspect some of the respondents may have regarded it as a justified response to NATO expansion – whose disinformation might have encouraged so many Canadians to conclude that joining a war against Russia is a good idea?

Protests outside of the White House call for NATO military action against Russia, March 6, 2022. Jose Luis Magana | AP

The correct inference here is not, as Orr Bueno concludes, that a minority with infirm minds is susceptible to Russian disinformation, but that there are two population groups that have differing attitudes towards established authority and, as a result, have been exposed to different kinds of information.

Those who have taken three shots of the vaccine are more likely to rely heavily for their information on traditional sources of authority. They are what I have called elsewhere “trusters.” They assume their leaders are well-meaning, if sometimes complacent or incompetent, and that they generally seek to act in the best interests of their societies and the world.  They consume “mainstream” media largely passively – the very media run by and for the benefit of Western oligarchs.

It is therefore hardly surprising that they were keen to take as many shots of vaccine as the government’s medical advisers told them to, and that many of them also believe it makes sense to launch a war against Russia when so many prominent corporate media journalists are telling them that is what is needed.

By contrast, the unvaccinated are more likely to be drawn from those who are suspicious of their governments and major corporations, as well as the structural forces shaping information on the West’s political processes. These “doubters” insist on maintaining a skeptical posture.

My latest: Power needs to be rid of Sanders, just as it earlier rid itself of Corbyn, because they are not chained to the current power paradigm. By refusing to serve the power-cult like most politicians, they threaten to shine a light on its true nature https://t.co/Um9t170547

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) February 25, 2020

Critical thinking

Were we to do more surveys on this basis, we could probably guess a range of other views likely to resonate with the three-shot vaccinated more than the unvaccinated:

• That Assange deserves to be locked up for life for revealing U.S. and U.K. war crimes;
• That social media should be tightly controlled either by governments or by the billionaires of Silicon Valley;
• That the class concerns of the “far-left” are actually cover for a deep-seated antipathy towards Jews;
• And that NATO is a purely defensive organization trying to protect countries from Russian imperialism.

There is nothing in these views that suggests mental clarity or superiority; resistance to disinformation; independence of mind: or even basic critical thinking skills. These just reflect the consensus manufactured by a corporate media that services the interests of the billionaire class. All of these views are useful to those in power and help to maintain the status quo. Which is precisely why these views, rather than others, dominate.

What Orr Bueno and liberals like her are doing is subtly pathologizing those who dissent, just as the Soviet Union did more brashly. They are suggesting a mental infirmity among those who refuse to accept what the political and media class – and the billionaires behind them – declare is true.

The pathologization of dissent is not going away. It will intensify as neoliberalism faces crisis after crisis and social polarization grows. Those who claim to be liberals defending democracy will soon be only too ready to snuff it out.

mintpressnews.com

The New York Times continues to selectively promote news that fits the Establishment narrative. The NYT portrays the nine-year sentence of the Russian “opposition leader” Aleksei Navalny to a high-security prison as a travesty of justice. Was it unjust? If so, justice must be demanded. What I can comment on is a factual inaccuracy by the NYT: Navalny is not the opposition leader. His party has zero seats in the State Duma. The opposition party is the Communist Party of the Russian Federation with 57 seats. Navalny’s party, Russia of the Future, has zero seats. Russia of the Future remains unregistered as a political party. This is an unassailable point for the NYT given that democracy in the US is such that the Communist Party and Communism has been outlawed since the days of president Dwight Eisenhower.

A clearcut travesty of justice is the case of the political prisoner Julian Assange. He is imprisoned for having carried out his job as a publisher at WikiLeaks: informing the public by publishing facts. WikiLeaks has a publication record which under normal circumstances would make the NYT green with envy: WikiLeaks is “perfect in document authentication and resistance to all censorship attempts.” But the NYT is not about accuracy in publication.

WikiLeak’s perfect publication record includes revealing the war crimes of the United States; for this, the US Establishment placed a target on Assange’s back.

NYT, which once collaborated with WikiLeaks to publish stories, notes that Navalny — who was tried and convicted — has been held in captivity for more than a year.

Assange — who has been tried and convicted of breach of bail stemming from fraudulent Swedish charges; since Sweden refused to guarantee non-extradition to the US, Assange sought asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy, subsequent events have borne out Assange’s fear — has been under one form of incarceration or another since January 2011.

In 2017, Navalny was found guilty at a retrial for embezzlement and given a five-year suspended prison sentence. He was later imprisoned for breaching the terms of his probation. In his latest trial, he was again found guilty of having embezzled people’s money. The NYT, however, paints the verdict as a move to extend Navalny’s time in prison.

Assange has only been found guilty of the relatively minor violation of breaching bail. Nonetheless, the period of his detention began with bogus charges of rape and sexual molestation cooked up by Swedish authorities. It is not difficult to join the dots and arrive at the logical conclusion that were it not for the initial fraudulent allegations against him, Assange would never have been placed into detention in the first place, and he would not be facing extradition to the US where he could sit in prison for as much as 175 years — for doing something for which he should be saluted by humanity: exposing war crimes.

Assange represents another nail in the coffin of the worthlessness of the Nobel Peace Prize, an award that has previously been conferred upon war criminals and other miscreants.

NYT is not focused on the miscarriage of justice against Assange even though the abuse of justice in Assange’s case puts its own “journalists” at risk of persecution should they reveal grave crimes of state.

Russia, the US-designated ennemi du jour, is an easy target for the NYT. Therefore, even though Navalny is a convicted criminal, he is deemed worthy of support by the NYT. Navalny is an enemy of an enemy, that plus his animus against Russian president Vladimir Putin makes him a friend for the US Establishment. Given this cozy arrangement, the NYT is free to cast aspersions on the Russian judge, Margarita Kotova, insinuating that her recent promotion is linked with the judicial finding against Navalny.

Emma Arbuthnot, who presided over Assange’s extradition case from late 2017 until mid-2019 was accused of a conflict of interest since her husband is “a former Conservative defense minister with extensive links to the British military and intelligence community exposed by WikiLeaks.” She did not recuse herself, and the legal Establishment in Britain did not have her removed from the case. In one ruling, Arbuthnot showed her true colors by dismissing a United Nations working group’s assessment that Assange was being arbitrarily detained.

Arbuthnot’s subordinate, judge Vanessa Baraitser, took over the Assange case and ruled that he should not be extradited for reasons of mental harm. However, she also stated that she believed Assange to be guilty, providing an opening for an American appeal, which the US won.

Assange’s appeal of that appeal was rejected. It seems that the appellate court accepted the Biden administration’s pledge not to confine Assange under the austerest conditions reserved for high-security prisoners and, should he be convicted, to allow him to serve his sentence in his native Australia.

Returning to Navalny, the NYT asserts there is “substantial evidence” that the Russian government was responsible for poisoning him in August 2020. And if one follows the link embedded for the “substantial evidence,” one comes to another NYT article wherein it is stated “Navalny’s revelations about his poisoning — not all of which have been independently verified.” The source of the “substantial evidence” is Navalny. In fact, there appears nothing at all that is compelling or substantial. But an investigation to determine the authenticity of Navalny’s claims would be in order.

On the other hand, there is verifiable evidence that the assassination and kidnapping of Assange was discussed at the highest levels of the CIA.

The NYT does not point out the discrediting of the rape allegations against Assange. The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, destroyed the rape allegations against Assange and accused the authorities of psychological torture against the WikiLeaks publisher.

Expressing sympathy for Navalny, the NYT rued that he might be “moved to a higher-security prison farther from Moscow, making it harder for his lawyers and family to visit him.”

Meanwhile Assange, unaccused of any violent offense, is being held in the maximum security Belmarsh prison in England — about 15,000 km away from his birthplace in Australia.

The NYT mentions concerns for the life of Navalny. This concern is ostensibly missing for Assange’s incarceration in Belmarsh. Given that the British judge found imprisonment a mental health danger for Assange, it is a stark contradiction to keep him in prison where his mental health would remain at risk while awaiting the justice system’s outcome. It speaks clearly to the travesty of justice Assange has endured.

The Ripple Effect

The NYT’s shoddy journalism emerges again and again. Only recently it had to admit it had suppressed the story of what’s on the laptop of president Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. What was initially dismissed as Russian disinformation turned out to be Russiagate disinformation.

It shines a spotlight on who overwhelmingly provoked the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Grotesquely, the mother of all rogue nations, the US, led/cajoled its subservient Canadian, European, Japanese, South Korean, among other accomplices to sanction Russia (unilateral sanctions have been denounced by independent UN human rights experts who declared the right to development “an inalienable human right”) while the instigator goes unsanctioned.

Navalny deserves justice as much as any other person on the planet. If an injustice has been meted out to Navalny, then that must be corrected. The present thesis examines who the NYT deems worthy or unworthy of propping up. NYT’s “opposition leader” in Russia is without any party members in the Russian State Duma. Navalny compares in many respects to the hapless Juan Guaidó, a wannabe president of Venezuela, who the US backs and recognizes as president of Venezuela. To bring about a government amenable to American dictates in Venezuela, president Obama declared Venezuela a national security threat and sanctioned seven Venezuelan officials in 2015. Human rights expert Alfred de Zayas, who is highly critical of NYT coverage of Venezuela, estimated that at least 100,000 Venezuelans having died because of US sanctions. Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs contend that the US sanctions “fit the definition of collective punishment of the civilian population as described in both the Geneva and Hague international conventions, to which the US is a signatory.”

One victim who has not been found worthy of mention in the NYT is 16-year-old Palestinian Nader Rayan who was gunned down by Israeli border police troops. Israel’s Haaretz had the gumption to publish a piece describing the corpse of Nader Rayan:

strewn with deep, bleeding bullet wounds, his flesh is bare, his brain is spilling out, his head and face are perforated. Border Police troops shot him with pathological madness, in a rage, savagely, without restraint. His father counted 12 bullet wounds in his son’s body, all of them deep, large, oozing blood. Head, chest, stomach, back, legs and arms: There’s not a part of his son’s body without a large, gaping hole in it.

Nothing can justify this repeated shooting of a teenager who was running for his life, certainly not once he was hit and lay wounded on the road. Not even if the initial Border Police account, which for some reason was magically altered the following week – that the youth or his friend shot at the troops – is correct. Nothing can justify such unhinged shooting at a youth.

One can glean an understanding for NYT’s concern or lack of concern for humanity by comparing how it feted and eulogized genocidaire and former US secretary-of-state Madeleine Albright who blithely agreed with half a million Iraqi kids serving as sacrificial lambs for US policy objectives.

Russians, according to the NYT, have responded with insouciance to Navalny’s predicament.

Conversely, Julian Assange has garnered worldwide attention and support. Despite this, he is being subjected to a slow-motion assassination. As long as Assange draws air, there is still time for a tidal wave of humanity to drown out the injustice. It may seem unfair that one political prisoner, Julian Assange, has so much of progressivists’ attention focused on his release, but Assange is crucial in making known the crimes of state and revealing the plight of other people wrongfully imprisoned or unjustly targeted by the state.

How to stop the extradition of Assange? For instance, shutting down any airport that would seek to fly Assange to the US. Protestors in Hong Kong managed to shut down their airport, so it can be done. If enough people would surround Belmarsh prison preventing entry or exit, such a mass movement signal would be a signal. The trucker convoy with its supporters disrupted Ottawa and borders in Canada for weeks, and it had an effect because soon afterwards many provincial governments relented on the mandates. So it can be done. The protests caused the Canadian government to resort to an extremely draconian Emergencies Act and siphon people’s bank accounts. Forcing the state to turn to repressive measures is contradictorily a victory for protestors. The battle for justice will not and must not be over until Assange and all others falsely imprisoned are released. Conscience demands it.

dissidentvoice.org

By  LOWKEY

Today, Watchdog host Lowkey is joined by investigative journalist Matt Kennard to discuss how the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has infiltrated foreign media in an attempt to export obedience to the United States government and promote Washington’s interests around the world.

In the late twentieth century, the CIA developed an infamous reputation, both inside and outside the United States, as scandal after scandal hit the agency. COINTELPRO quietly infiltrated and subverted all manner of domestic democratic movements, including the student movement, the civil rights campaign, the hippie movement and the Black Panthers. The Church Committee, chaired by Sen. Frank Church (D-ID), revealed to the public that the CIA had also infiltrated hundreds of the largest and most important domestic media outlets in order to shape public discussion. Meanwhile, abroad, the CIA had funded death squads in Central America and organized the overthrow of several foreign leaders.

The National Endowment for Democracy was the Reagan administration’s solution to the storm of negative publicity. Established in 1983 as a semi-private company, the NED’s job was to be the group to which the U.S. government outsourced its dirtiest work. This was done almost completely openly. “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” NED co-founder Allen Weinstein proudly told The Washington Post.

The NED quickly went to work undermining the governments of Eastern Europe in the name of democracy and freedom of speech. Yet, as Kennard told Lowkey, once the Communist-era regimes fell, it actually expanded its scope to act as a worldwide force for projecting U.S. government interests everywhere.

In recent years, the NED has been funneling money to protest leaders in Hong Kong, carrying out dozens of operations against the government of Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, attempting to overthrow the Cuban government, and has even organized rock concerts inside Venezuela in an effort to destabilize the country.

But Kennard’s latest research shows that the NED is also conducting influence operations in the United Kingdom. The agency is quietly funding British journalistic outlets and press organizations to the tune of $3.5 million. As Kennard told Lowkey today:

From our research, it is quite clear that democracy and freedom are not the priorities of the NED because we could not find even one grant given in any of the six U.S.-backed Gulf dictatorships (Saudi Arabia, Oman, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait). Not one pro-democracy group in those countries received an NED grant that we could find. So it is effectively about projecting American power rather than freedom and democracy.

A former reporter for The Financial Times, Kennard is now chief investigator at Declassified UK, an investigative journalism outlet concentrating on British foreign policy, military and state power. He is deeply concerned about his findings, and the presupposition that U.S. actions inside Britain are benevolent, telling Lowkey:

If even a tiny percentage of this came out about Russia it would be a massive scandal – that journalists and press freedom groups were being funded by Russia. But because it is the United States, it is assumed that this is OK. It is assumed that we [the U.K.] are a vassal of the U.S. and our discourse can be distorted by the U.S. and it is not a problem. And for me and anyone who cares about the principles of press freedom and journalism, that is not something we should accept.

Lowkey and Kennard also chatted about how British journalists and being fed stories by U.S. intelligence, the shady backgrounds of senior Conservative politicians like Rory Stewart and Boris Johnson, and the treatment of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

mintpressnews.com

How many journalists are capable of doing what Julian Assange did to expose the criminality of the powerful? Not many. How many are both capable and willing? Fewer still. How many of those are now willing after seeing what’s being done to Assange? Even fewer. And that’s what his persecution is all about.

* * *

Americans: healthcare please

US government: Sorry did you say send 100 tons of weaponry to Ukraine?

Americans: no, healthcare

US government: Alright, you drive a hard bargain, but here’s those 100 tons of weapons to Ukraine you asked for.

* * *

A Ukraine war is very easily avoidable and anyone suggesting otherwise is a lying shitstain who you should hate intensely and never forgive.

* * *

“Kids, a nuclear war has started and we’ll all be dead soon.”

“Oh no! Why??”

“I don’t really know. Something about NATO open doors and needing to confront Putin in eastern Ukraine? Couldn’t understand it but I trust that it was worth it.”

* * *

Our foreign policy establishment is writing checks that our ability to tolerate nuclear radiation can’t cash.

* * *

Free speech matters because dissent from the status quo is how the status quo gets changed. If voices which oppose the status quo are consistently denied access to mainstream platforms and are algorithmically suppressed online, they’re unable to change the status quo. They don’t have free speech in any meaningful sense, because they’re actively obstructed from using free speech to do what free speech is supposed to do: challenge existing consensus, norms, systems, and power structures.

If the only way to get your voice into a position of influence is to support the status quo, then as far as the actual reasons free speech is considered an important right are concerned, it’s functionally the same as having no speech at all. It’s like saying “You have free speech; you can say anything you want into this hole in the ground!”

It doesn’t matter what you’re free to say if nobody hears you say it. If those who support the status quo are loudly amplified on all media while those who oppose it are denied access to mainstream audiences and algorithmically censored, dissenting views have no effect. They might as well not exist. An environment where everyone has “free speech” but only those who support the status quo get heard is functionally indistinguishable from an environment where no one has free speech and only authorized state propaganda gets heard.

Which is of course the idea. A tremendous amount of effort goes into keeping the public from awakening to and freeing themselves from the injustices of status quo systems while still giving them the illusion of freedom. Whoever controls the narrative controls the world.

“Nobody’s obligated to give you a platform” is a nonsense argument if all platforms with any meaningful influence are depriving a voice to literally everyone who wants to significantly change the status quo. And they are.

“Nobody’s obligated to give you a platform” is a nonsense argument if all platforms of any influence are heavily intertwined with and supportive of status quo power structures. And they are.

“Nobody’s obligated to give you a platform. If you want to oppose the status quo you are free to oppose it quietly, on your own, where no one can hear you, while those who support the status quo are loudly amplified on new media and traditional media so everyone can hear them. This is what free liberal democracy looks like.”

* * *

Maybe get okay with the fact that literally any strategy for revolutionary change is going to look like a long shot. Because the system is just that entrenched and the public is just that propagandized. Ignore anyone who dismisses an idea for facilitating healthy change as a long shot. They’re all long shots.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

Nils Melzer, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, is one of the very few establishment figures to denounce the judicial lynching of Julian Assange. Melzer’s integrity and courage, for which he has been mercilessly attacked, stand in stark contrast to the widespread complicity of many human rights and press organizations, including PEN America, which has become a de facto subsidiary of the Democratic National Committee.

Those in power, as Noam Chomsky points out, divide the world into “worthy” and “unworthy” victims. They weep crocodile tears over the plight of Uyghur Muslims persecuted in China while demonizing and slaughtering Muslims in the Middle East. They decry press censorship in hostile states and collude with the press censorship and algorithms emanating from Silicon Valley in the United States. It is an old and insidious game, one practiced not to promote human rights or press freedom but to envelop these courtiers to power in a sanctimonious and cloying self-righteousness. PEN America can’t say the words “Belarus,” “Myanmar” or the Chinese tennis star “Peng Shuai” fast enough, while all but ignoring the most egregious assault on press freedom in our lifetime. PEN America only stopped accepting funding from the Israeli government, which routinely censors and jails Palestinian journalists and writers in Israel and the occupied West Bank, for the literary group’s annual World Voices festival in New York in 2017 when more than 250 writers, poets and publishers, many members of PEN, signed an appeal calling on the CEO of PEN America, Suzanne Nossel, to end PEN America’s partnership with the Israeli government. The signatories included Wallace Shawn, Alice Walker, Eileen Myles, Louis Erdrich, Russel Banks, Cornel West, Junot Díaz and Viet Thanh Nguyen. To stand up for Assange comes with a cost, as all moral imperatives do. And this is a cost the careerists and Democratic Party apparatchiks, who leverage corporate money and corporate backing to seize and deform these organizations into appendages of the ruling class, do not intend to pay.

PEN America is typical of the establishment hijacking of an organization that was founded and once run by writers, some of whom, including Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer, I knew. Nossel is a former corporate lawyer, listed as a “contributor” to The Federalist Society, who worked for McKinsey & Company and as Vice President of US Business Development for Bertelsmann.  Nossel, who has had herself elevated to the position of the CEO of PEN America, also worked under Hillary Clinton in the State Department, including on the task force assigned to respond to the WikiLeaks revelations. I withdrew from a scheduled speaking event at the 2013 World Voices Festival in New York City and resigned from the organization, which that same year had given me its First Amendment Award, to protest Nossel’s appointment. PEN Canada offered me membership which I accepted.

Nossel and PEN America have stated that the prosecution of Assange raises “grave concerns” about press freedom and lauded the decision by a British court in January 2012 not to extradite Assange. Should Nossel and PEN America have not taken this stance on Assange it would have left them in opposition to most PEN organizations around the world. PEN Centre Germany, for example, made Assange an honorary member. PEN International has called for all charges to be dropped against Assange.

But Nossel, at the same time, repeats every slanderous trope and lie used to discredit the WikiLeaks publisher facing extradition to the United States to potentially serve a 175-year sentence under the Espionage Act. She refuses to acknowledge that Assange is being persecuted because he carried out the most basic and important role of any publisher, making public documents that expose the multitudinous crimes and lies of empire. And I have not seen any direct appeals to the Biden administration on Assange’s behalf from PEN America. “Whether Assange is a journalist or WikiLeaks qualifies as a press outlet is immaterial to the counts set out here,” Nossel said. But, as a lawyer who was a member of the State Department task force that responded to the WikiLeaks revelations, she understands it is not immaterial. The core argument behind the U.S. effort to extradite Assange revolves around denying him the status of a publisher or a journalist and denying WikiLeaks the status of a press publication. Nossel parrots the litany of false charges leveled against Assange including that he endangered lives by not redacting documents, hacked into a government computer and meddled in the 2016 elections, all key points in the government’s case against Assange. PEN America under her direction has sent out news briefs with headlines such as: “Security Reports Reveal How Assange Turned an Embassy into a Command Post for Election Meddling.” The end result is that PEN America is helping to uncoil the rope to string up the WikiLeaks publisher, a gross betrayal of the core mission of PEN.

“There are some things Assange did in this case, or is alleged to have done, that go beyond what a mainstream news outlet would do, in particular the first indictment that was brought about five weeks ago focused specifically on this charge of computer hacking, hacking into a password to get beyond the government national security infrastructure and penetrate and allow Chelsea Manning to pass through all of these documents. That, I think you can say, is not what a mainstream news outlet or a journalist would do,” Nossel said on The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC on May 28, 2019.

But Nossel did not stop there, going on to defend the legitimacy of the US campaign to extradite Assange, although Assange is not a US citizen and WikiLeaks is not a US based publication. Most importantly, left unmentioned by Nossel, is that Assange has not committed any crimes.

“The reason that this indictment is coming down now is because Assange has been holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London for years trying to escape his extradition request,” she said on the program. “He faces an extradition request to Sweden where he has been charged with sexual assault and now this huge indictment here in the US and that proceeding will play out over a long period. He will make all sorts of arguments about why he faces a form of legal jeopardy that should immunize him from being extradited, but there are extradition treaties. There are legal assistance treaties where countries are able to prosecute nationals of other countries and bring them back to face charges when they have committed a crime. This is happening pursuant to that. There are US nationals who are charged and convicted in foreign courts.”

WikiLeaks released U.S. military war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq, a cache of 250,000 diplomatic cables and 800 Guantanamo Bay detainee assessment briefs along with the 2007 “Collateral Murder” video, in which U.S. helicopter pilots banter as they gun down civilians, including children and two Reuters journalists, in a Baghdad street. The material was given to WikiLeaks in 2010 by Chelsea Manning, then private first class Pfc. Bradley Manning. Assange has been accused by an enraged U.S. intelligence community of causing “one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States.” Mike Pompeo, who headed the CIA under Donald Trump, called WikiLeaks a “hostile intelligence service” aided by Russia, rhetoric embraced by Democratic Party leaders.

Assange also published 70,000 hacked emails copied from the accounts of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, and earned the eternal hatred of the Democratic Party establishment. The Podesta emails exposed the sleezy and corrupt world of the Clintons, including the donation of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and identified both nations as major funders of Islamic State [ISIL/ISIS]. They exposed the $657,000 that Goldman Sachs paid to Hillary Clinton to give talks, a sum so large it can only be considered a bribe. They exposed Clinton’s repeated dishonesty. She was caught telling the financial elites that she wanted “open trade and open borders” and believed Wall Street executives were best positioned to manage the economy while publicly promising financial regulation and reform. The cache showed that the Clinton campaign interfered in the Republican primaries to ensure that Donald Trump was the Republican nominee, assuming he would be the easiest candidate to defeat. They exposed Clinton’s advance knowledge of questions in a primary debate and her role as the principal architect of the war in Libya, a war she believed would burnish her credentials as a presidential candidate.

The Democratic Party, which blames Russian interference for its election loss to Trump, charges that the Podesta emails were obtained by Russian government hackers. Hillary Clinton calls WikiLeaks a Russian front. James Comey, the former FBI director, however, conceded that the emails were probably delivered to WikiLeaks by an intermediary, and Assange has said the emails were not provided by “state actors.”

“A zealous prosecutor is going to look at someone like Assange and recognize that he’s a very unpopular figure for a hundred different reasons, whether it’s his meddling in the 2016 elections, his political motivations for that, or the blunderbuss nature of these disclosures,” Nossel said on Leher’s program. “This is not a leak that was designed to expose one particular policy or effectuate a specific change in how the US government was going about its business. It was massive and indiscriminate, while in the beginning they worked with journalists to be careful about redacting names of individuals. I was actually working at the State Department during the WikiLeaks disclosure period, and I was briefly on a task force to respond to the WikiLeaks disclosures and there was really a sense of alarm about individuals whose lives would be in danger, people who had worked with the US, provided information, human rights defenders who had spoken to embassy personnel on a confidential basis. There is a problem of over classification, but there is also good reason to classify a lot of this stuff and they made no distinction between that [which] was legitimately classified and not.”

Any group of artists or writers overseen by a CEO from corporate America inevitably become members of an updated version of the Union of Soviet Writers where the human rights violations by our enemies are heinous crimes and our own violations and those of our allies are ignored or whitewashed. As Julian Benda reminded us in “The Treason of the Intellectuals,” we can serve privilege and power or we can serve justice and truth. Those, Benda warns, who become apologists for those with privilege and power destroy their capacity to defend justice and truth.

Where is the outrage from an organization founded by writers to protect writers about the prolonged abuse, stress and repeated death threats, including from Nossel’s former boss, Hillary Clinton, who allegedly quipped at a staff meeting, “Can’t we just drone this guy?” (and didn’t deny it later) or from the CIA which discussed kidnapping and assassinating Assange?  Where is the demand that the trial of Assange be thrown out because the CIA through UC Global, the security firm at the embassy, secretly taped the meetings, and all other encounters, between Assange and his lawyers, obliterating attorney-client privilege? Where is the public denunciation of the extreme isolation that has left Assange, who suffered a stroke during court video proceedings on October 27, in precarious physical and psychological health? Where is the outcry over his descent into hallucinations and deep depression, leaving him dependent on antidepressant medication and the antipsychotic quetiapine? Where are the thunderous condemnations about the ten years he has been detained, seven in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and nearly three in the high-security Belmarsh prison, where he has had to live without access to sunlight, exercise and proper medical care? “His eyes were out of sync, his right eyelid would not close, his memory was blurry,” his fiancé Stella Morris said of the stroke. Where are the demands for intervention and humane treatment, including an end to his isolation, once it was revealed Assange was pacing his cell until he collapsed, punching himself in the face and banging his head against the wall? Where is the fear for his life, especially after “half of a razor blade” was discovered under his socks and it was revealed that he called the suicide hotline run by the Samaritans because he thought about killing himself “hundreds of times a day”? Where is the call to prosecute those who committed the war crimes, carried out the torture and engaged in the corruption WikiLeaks exposed? Not from PEN America.

Melzer in his book “The Trial of Julian Assange,” the most methodical and detailed recounting of the long persecution by the United States and the British government of Assange, blasts those like Nossel who blithely peddle the lies used to tar Assange and cater to the powerful.

When Assange was first charged, he was not charged with espionage by the United States. Rather, he was charged with a single count of “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion.” This charge alleged that he conspired with Manning to decrypt a password hash for the US Department of Defense computer system. But as Melzer points out, “Manning already had full ‘top secret’ access privileges to the system and all the documents she leaked to Assange. So, even according to the US government, the point of the alleged attempt to decode the password hash was not to gain unauthorized access to classified information (‘hacking’), but to help Manning to cover her tracks inside the system by logging in with a different identity (‘source protection’). In any case, the alleged attempt undisputedly remained unsuccessful and did not result in any harm whatsoever.”

Nossel’s repetition of the lie that Assange endangered lives by not redacting documents was obliterated during the trial of Manning, several sessions of which I attended at Fort Meade in Maryland with Cornel West. During the court proceedings in July 2013 Brigadier General Robert Carr, a senior counterintelligence officer who headed the Information Review Task Force that investigated the impact of WikiLeaks disclosures on behalf of the US Department of Defense, told the court that the task force did not uncover a single case of someone who lost their lives due to the publication of the classified documents by WikiLeaks. As for Nossel’s claim that “in the beginning they worked with journalists to be careful about redacting names of individuals” she should be aware that the decryption key to the unredacted State Department documents was not released by Assange, but Luke Harding and David Leigh from The Guardian in their book WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy.

When the ruling class peddles lies there is no cost for parroting them back to the public. The cost is paid by those who tell the truth.

On November 27, 2019, Melzer gave a talk at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin to dedicate a sculpture by the Italian artist Davide Dormino. Figures of Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, cast in bronze, stood on three chairs. A fourth chair, empty, was next to them inviting others to take a stand with them. The sculpture is called “Anything to Say?” Melzer stepped up onto the fourth chair, the hulking edifice of the US Embassy off to his right. He uttered the words that should have come from organizations like PEN America:

For decades, political dissidents have been welcomed by the West with open arms, because in their fight for human rights they were persecuted by dictatorial regimes.

Today, however, Western dissidents themselves are forced to seek asylum elsewhere,  such as Edward Snowden in Russia or, until recently, Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian  embassy in London.

For the West itself has begun to persecute its own dissidents, to subject them to draconian punishments in political show trials, and to imprison them as dangerous terrorists in high-security prisons under conditions that can only be described as inhuman and degrading.

Our governments feel threatened by Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Julian  Assange, because they are whistleblowers, journalists, and human rights activists who have provided solid evidence for the abuse, corruption, and war crimes of the powerful, for which they are now being systematically defamed and persecuted.

They are the political dissidents of the West, and their persecution is today’s witch-hunt, because they threaten the privileges of unsupervised state power that has gone out of control.

The cases of Manning, Snowden, Assange and others are the most important test of our time for the credibility of Western rule of law and democracy and our commitment to human rights.

In all these cases, it is not about the person, the character or possible misconduct of these dissidents, but about how our governments deal with revelations about of their own misconduct.

How many soldiers have been held accountable for the massacre of civilians shown in the video “Collateral Murder”? How many agents for the systematic torture of terror suspects? How many politicians and CEOs for the corrupt and inhumane machinations  that have been brought to light by our dissidents?

That’s what this is about. It is about the integrity of the rule of law, the credibility of our  democracies and, ultimately, about our own human dignity and the future of our children.

Let us never forget that!

Nils Melzer, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture

The tenuous return to power of the Democratic Party under Joe Biden, and the specter of a Republican rout of the Democrats in the midterm elections next year, along with the very real possibility of the election in 2024 of Donald Trump, or a Trump-like figure to the presidency, has blinded human rights and press groups to the danger of the egregious assaults on freedom of expression perpetrated by the Biden administration. The steady march towards heavy handed state censorship was accelerated by the Obama administration that charged ten government employees and contractors, eight under the Espionage Act, for disclosing classified information to the press. The Obama administration in 2013 also seized the phone records of 20 Associated Press reporters to uncover who leaked the information about a foiled al-Qaida terrorist plot. This ongoing assault by the Democratic Party has been accompanied by the disappearing on social media platforms of several luminaries on the far right, including Donald Trump and Alex Jones, who were removed from Facebook, Apple, YouTube. Content that is true but damaging to the Democratic Party, including the revelations from Hunter Biden’s laptop, have been blocked by digital platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Algorithms have since at least 2017 marginalized left-wing content, including my own.  The legal precedent set in this atmosphere by the sentencing of Assange means that anyone who possesses classified material, or anyone who leaks it, will be guilty of a criminal offense. The sentencing of Assange will signal the end of all investigative inquiries into the inner workings of power. The pandering by press and human rights organizations, tasked with being sentinels of freedom, to the Democratic Party, only contributes to the steady tightening of the vice of press censorship. There is no lesser evil in this fight. It is all evil. Left unchecked, it will result in an American species of China’s totalitarianism capitalism.

ScheerPost via counterpunch.org

By Doctors For Assange

The letter begins by commending Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce for his recent statements calling for the U.S. extradition request against Julian Assange to be dropped. It continues:

“We are concerned that Mr. Assange’s apparent mini stroke [reported in the Daily Mail on 11 December] may be the tip of a medical iceberg. Indeed his symptoms suggest as much. It is therefore imperative that Mr. Assange be released from prison, where his health will otherwise continue to deteriorate and where his complex medical needs cannot be met.” Continued incarceration, the doctors warn, will place Julian Assange’s life at risk.

In appendices to the letter, the doctors have released all former correspondence with the Australian Government – including previously unpublished material – in which they warned of cardiovascular pathology, such as that reported in the Daily Mail.

They write, “perhaps our concerns were previously dismissed by your colleagues as hyperbolic. They are not. On the issue of cardiovascular pathology, we have been proven right. We do not wish to be proven right on the issue of Mr. Assange’s survival.”

The authors note that they had previously cautioned the Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Marise Payne, “should Mr Assange die in a British prison, people will want to know what you, Minister, did to prevent his death.”

In their letter the doctors reject U.S. assurances, accepted by the High Court, that prison conditions in the U.S. would be humane. They note that the U.S. “retains the power to impose Special Administrative Measures on Mr. Assange, and to assign him to ADX Florence, two of the harshest, most brutal prison conditions in the U.S.. Both facilities violate the Convention Against Torture, to which Australia is a party.”

They conclude, “we implore you, as Deputy Prime Minister, to intervene with the U.K. Government to seek Mr Assange’s immediate release on urgent medical grounds. We reiterate that he is an Australian citizen innocent in the eyes of the law, and guilty of and charged with nothing in the U.K.” 

consortiumnews.com

By Joe LAURIA

On Nov. 25, 2013,  The Washington Post reported that after a lengthy investigation, the Obama administration was unlikely to indict WikiLeaks‘ publisher Julian Assange.

“The Justice Department has all but concluded it will not bring charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing classified documents because government lawyers said they could not do so without also prosecuting U.S. news organizations and journalists, according to U.S. officials,” the Post reported.

The newspaper quoted “officials” saying that “although Assange published classified documents, he did not leak them, something they said significantly affects their legal analysis.”

The Post reported:

“Justice officials said they looked hard at Assange but realized that they have what they described as a ‘New York Times problem.’ If the Justice Department indicted Assange, it would also have to prosecute the New York Times and other news organizations and writers who published classified material, including The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.”

In the Embassy 

Assange at the time was living and working in the Embassy of Ecuador in London with political asylum granted just 15 months before. He and his legal team were faced with the question: Was the heat really off and could he leave the embassy without fear that the U.S. would seek his extradition?

Hindsight, of course, sees perfectly clearly. It is very easy now for anyone to ask whether Assange would have been better off leaving the Embassy after the U.S., in this Post report, said it would not seek his indictment and extradition. Had he left, British police would have arrested him on the spot on a minor charge of skipping bail, which he committed to get asylum.

There was also an active European arrest warrant for Assange, who was wanted for questioning in Sweden on allegations of sex crimes.  Assange had lost his appeal to the U.K. Supreme Court to overturn an extradition order to Sweden, after which he sought refuge in the embassy in June 2012. He feared onward extradition from Sweden to the U.S.  Sweden wanted to drop the case, but just weeks after the Post story the British Crown Prosecution Service pressured it not to.

Had he left the embassy after the Post story he would have, after serving his bail skipping sentence, been sent to Sweden. Even if after questioning he was not charged, Assange may well have still feared that Sweden would then extradite him to the U.S. despite the Post story.

If he served the bail conviction in Britain, was cleared of the sex crimes allegations, and the Post was right and the U.S. did not seek his extradition from Sweden, he would then have been free before the end of Obama’s term in January 2017.  As a free man, Assange could have then left for a country that has no extradition treaty with the U.S., where he could have continued his work as publisher and editor of WikiLeaks. 

There are 75 countries that have no extradition deal with Washington. There are two in Europe, with non-stop flights from the U.K., where family and friends could have easily visited him: Montenegro and Andorra. There are several Asian and African countries too, but none in Latin America. Russia has no extradition agreement with the U.S. but it was politically out of the question. It would have tainted everything WikiLeaks did going forward, however irrational the U.S. and its allies are about that country.

Little Reason to Trust Them

Despite the Post article, it was not unreasonable that Assange did not trust the Obama administration to risk leaving and believed there was a faction in the administration that wanted him indicted. This might have included Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who had left office before The Washington Post story but was secretary of state for more than two years after the Obama administration first considered an indictment in December 2010. Clinton had condemned Assange’s diplomatic cables release as “not just an attack on America’s foreign policy; it is an attack on the international community.”

The Pentagon was certainly against him for his revelations of U.S. war crimes.  Gen. Mike Mullen, the then chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, in July 2010 said: “Mr. Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.” (The U.S. would later admit the WikiLeaks releases harmed no one, though it remains in Assange’s indictment.)

A press release published by the Department of Defense on July 29, 2010 has since been deleted, but was retrieved via archiving services. It shows that the Pentagon wanted the F.B.I. on Assange’s case leading possibly to his indictment:

“Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced he has asked the FBI to help Pentagon authorities investigate the leak of the classified documents published by WikiLeaks. … Calling on the FBI to aid the investigation ensures that the department will have all the resources needed to investigate and assess this breach of national security, the secretary said, noting that use of the bureau ensures the investigation can go wherever it needs to go.”

The CIA

On Oct. 27, 2010, the Obama Central Intelligence Agency refused to confirm or deny that it had a plan to assassinate Assange.

The C.I.A. under Obama’s Director John Brennan, who led the agency from March 2013 to January 2017, had also contemplated taking extrajudicial measures against Assange. A little noticed line in the Yahoo! News story in September about C.I.A. consideration of plans to assassinate or kidnap Assange says: “While the notion of kidnapping Assange preceded Pompeo’s arrival at Langley, the new director championed the proposals, according to former officials.” The article curiously leaves that hanging without further details or analysis of the fact the Obama administration considered abduction.

So even if Assange had managed to move to a country without an extradition treaty with the U.S. and then published, for instance, Vault 7, the largest agency leak in history, fear that the long-arm of the C.I.A. might have gotten him could not be easily dismissed.

Legitimate Skepticism 

The Post article also makes clear that a final decision on whether to indict hadn’t been made and that the case ominously remained open. “The officials stressed that a formal decision has not been made, and a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks remains impaneled, but they said there is little possibility of bringing a case against Assange, unless he is implicated in criminal activity other than releasing online top-secret military and diplomatic documents,” the Post reported.

Assange’s lack of trust of the Obama administration’s intentions was also clearly spelled out in the piece:

“WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said last week that the anti-secrecy organization is skeptical ‘short of an open, official, formal confirmation that the U.S. government is not going to prosecute WikiLeaks.’  Justice Department officials said it is unclear whether there will be a formal announcement should the grand jury investigation be formally closed.

‘We have repeatedly asked the Department of Justice to tell us what the status of the investigation was with respect to Mr. Assange,’ said Barry J. Pollack, a Washington attorney for Assange. ‘They have declined to do so. They have not informed us in any way that they are closing the investigation or have made a decision not to bring charges against Mr. Assange. While we would certainly welcome that development, it should not have taken the Department of Justice several years to come to the conclusion that it should not be investigating journalists for publishing truthful information.’”

Changes in Government

July 20, 2019: U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, left, with Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno, in Guayaquil, Ecuador. (State Department, Ron Przysucha)

But here was an opportunity that may have never come again.  Obama could only have stayed in office for another three years and who knew then who would follow him? The Ecuadoran government of President Rafael Correra, which granted asylum to Assange, would also not remain in power forever. Assange could not have contemplated staying the rest of his life in the embassy.

As it turned out, changes of government in both the United States and Ecuador conspired to put Assange in the dire situation he now finds himself in:  under indictment with his health rapidly deteriorating in Belmarsh Prison, where he remains on remand until the final decision on extradition.

In retrospect, the period after The Washington Post story and before the onset of the Trump administration and the new Ecuador government of Lenin Moreno (which lifted the asylum and allowed his arrest) was the very best opportunity for Assange to be free. A lot had to fall into place: he had to be cleared after questioning in Sweden and the U.S. officials quoted in that story had to be sincere that no prosecution would take place.

Given all the U.S. forces arrayed against him, that the grand jury remained active and considering the generally duplicitous ways in which governments often act, it is understandable that Assange did not take the chance. But given where he is now, with his life in danger and his extradition looking extremely likely, it may well have been the best chance he ever had.

consortiumnews.com

By Chris HEDGES

Let us name Julian Assange’s executioners. Joe Biden. Boris Johnson. Scott Morrison. Theresa May. Lenin Moreno. Donald Trump. Barack Obama. Mike Pompeo. Hillary Clinton. Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett and Justice Timothy Victor Holroyde. Crown Prosecutors James Lewis, Clair Dobbin and Joel Smith. District Judge Vanessa Baraitser. Assistant U.S, Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia Gordon Kromberg. William Burns, the director of the CIA. Ken McCallum, the director general of the U.K. Security Service or MI5.

Let us acknowledge that the goal of these executioners, who discussed kidnapping and assassinating Assange, has always been his annihilation. That Assange, who is in precarious physical and psychological health and who suffered a stroke during court video proceedings on Oct. 27, has been condemned to death should not come as a surprise.

The 10 years he has been detained, seven in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and nearly three in the high-security Belmarsh prison, were accompanied with a lack of sunlight and exercise and unrelenting threats, pressure, anxiety and stress.  “His eyes were out of sync, his right eyelid would not close, his memory was blurry,” his fiancé Stella Morris said of the stroke.

His steady physical and psychological deterioration has led to hallucinations and depression. He takes antidepressant medication and the antipsychotic quetiapine. He has been observed pacing his cell until he collapses, punching himself in the face and banging his head against the wall. He has spent weeks in the medical wing of Belmarsh. Prison authorities found “half of a razor blade” hidden under his socks. He has repeatedly called the suicide hotline run by the Samaritans because he thought about killing himself “hundreds of times a day.”

The executioners have not yet completed their grim work. Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led the Haitian independence movement, the only successful slave revolt in human history, was physically destroyed in the same manner, locked by the French in an unheated and cramped prison cell and left to die of exhaustion, malnutrition, apoplexy, pneumonia and probably tuberculosis.

Assange committed empire’s greatest sin. He exposed it as a criminal enterprise. He documented its lies, callous disregard for human life, rampant corruption and innumerable war crimes. Republican or Democrat. Conservative or Labour. Trump or Biden. It does not matter.

April 5, 2010: Julian Assange addressing National Press Club in Washington about WikiLeaks’ release of “Collateral Damage” video showing the wanton killing of civilians by U.S. air attacks in Baghdad on July 12, 2007.  (Jennifer 8. Lee, Flickr)

The goons who oversee the empire sing from the same Satanic songbook. Empires always kill those who inflict deep and serious wounds. Rome’s long persecution of the Carthaginian general Hannibal, forcing him in the end to commit suicide, and the razing of Carthage repeats itself in epic after epic. Crazy Horse. Patrice Lumumba. Malcolm X. Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Sukarno. Ngo Dinh Diem. Fred Hampton. Salvador Allende.

If you cannot be bought off, if you will not be intimidated into silence, you will be killed. The obsessive CIA attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, which because none succeeded have a Keystone Cop incompetence to them, included contracting Momo Salvatore Giancana, Al Capone’s successor in Chicago, along with Miami mobster Santo Trafficante to kill the Cuban leader, attempting to poison Castro’s cigars with a botulinum toxin, providing Castro with a tubercle bacilli-infected scuba-diving suit, booby-trapping a conch shell on the sea floor where he often dived, slipping botulism-toxin pills in one of Castro’s drinks and using a pen outfitted with a hypodermic needle to poison him.

The current cabal of assassins hide behind a judicial burlesque overseen in London by portly judges in gowns and white horse-hair wigs mouthing legal Alice-in-Wonderland absurdities. It is a dark reprise of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado with the Lord High Executioner drawing up lists of people “who would not be missed.”

I watched the latest installment of the Assange show trial via video link on Friday. I listened to the reading of the ruling granting the appeal by the United States to extradite Assange. Assange’s lawyers have two weeks to appeal to the Supreme Court, which they are expected to do. I am not optimistic.

Friday’s ruling was devoid of legal analysis. It fully accepted the conclusions of the lower court judge about increased risk of suicide and inhumane prison conditions in the United States. But the ruling argued that U.S. Diplomatic Note No. 74, given to the court on Feb. 5, which offered “assurances” that Assange would be well treated, overrode the lower court’s conclusions. It was a remarkable legal non sequitur. The ruling would not have gotten a passing grade in a first-semester law school course. But legal erudition is not the point. The judicial railroading of Assange, which has eviscerated one legal norm after another, has turned, as Franz Kafka wrote, “lying into a universal principle.”

The decision to grant the extradition was based on four “assurances” given to the court by the U.S. government.  The two-judge appellate panel ruled that the “assurances” “entirely answer the concerns which caused the judge [in the lower court] to discharge Mr. Assange.” The “assurances” promise that Assange will not be subject to Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) which keep prisoners in extreme isolation and allow the government to monitor conversations with lawyers, eviscerating attorney-client privilege; can, if the Australian his government agrees, serve out his sentence there;  will receive adequate clinical and psychological care; and, pre-trial and post trial, will not be held in the Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX) in Florence, Colorado.

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“There is no reason why this court should not accept the assurances as meaning what they say,” the judges wrote. “There is no basis for assuming that the USA has not given the assurances in good faith.”

And with these rhetorical feints the judges signed Assange’s death warrant.

None of the “assurances” offered by Biden’s Department of Justice are worth the paper they are written on.  All come with escape clauses. None are legally binding. Should Assange do “something subsequent to the offering of these assurances that meets the tests for the imposition of SAMs or designation to ADX” he will be subject to these coercive measures.

And you can be assured that any incident, no matter how trivial, will be used, if Assange is extradited, as an excuse to toss him into the mouth of the dragon. Should Australia, which has marched in lockstep with the U.S. in the persecution of their citizen not agree to his transfer, he will remain for the rest of his life in a U.S. prison.

But so what? If Australia does not request a transfer it “cannot be a cause for criticism of the USA, or a reason for regarding the assurances as inadequate to meet the judge’s concerns,” the ruling read. And even if that were not the case, it would take Assange 10-to-15 years to appeal his sentence up to the Supreme Court, more than enough time for the state assassins to finish him off.

I am not sure how to respond to assurance No 4, stating that Assange will not be held pre-trial in the ADX in Florence. No one is held pre-trail in ADX Florence. But it sounds reassuring, so I guess those in the Biden DOJ who crafted the diplomatic note added it. ADX Florence, of course, is not the only supermax prison in the United States that might house Assange. Assange can be shipped out to one of our other Guantanamo-like facilities.

Light projection plea for U.S. President Joe Biden to pardon Daniel Hale on East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, June 26. (Backbone Campaign, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

Daniel Hale, the former U.S. Air Force intelligence analyst currently imprisoned for releasing top-secret documents that exposed widespread civilian casualties caused by U.S. drone strikes, has been held at USP Marion, a federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, in a Communications Management Unit (CMU) since October. CMUs are highly restrictive units that replicate the near total isolation imposed by SAMs.

The High Court ruling ironically came as Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced at the virtual Summit for Democracy that the Biden administration will provide new funding to protect reporters targeted because of their work and support independent international journalism. Blinken’s “assurances” that the Biden administration will defend a free press, at the very moment the administration was demanding Assange’s extradition, is a glaring example of the rank hypocrisy and mendacity that makes the Democrats, as Glen Ford used to say, “not the lesser evil, but the more effective evil.”

Assange is charged in the U.S. under 17 counts of the Espionage Act and one count of hacking into a government computer. The charges could see him sentenced to 175 years in prison, even though he is not a U.S. citizen and WikiLeaks is not a U.S.-based publication.

If found guilty it will effectively criminalize the investigative work of all journalists and publishers, anywhere in the world and of any nationality, who possess classified documents to shine a light on the inner workings of power. This mortal assault on the press will have been orchestrated, we must not forget, by a Democratic administration. It will set a legal precedent that will delight other totalitarian regimes and autocrats who, emboldened by the United States, will gleefully seize journalists and publishers, no matter where they are located, who publish inconvenient truths.

There is no legal basis to hold Julian in prison. There is no legal basis to try him, a foreign national, under the Espionage Act. The CIA spied on Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy through a Spanish company, UC Global, contracted to provide embassy security. This spying included recording the privileged conversations between Assange and his lawyers. This fact alone invalidates any future trial.

Assange, who after seven years in a cramped room without sunlight in the embassy, has been held for nearly three years in a high-security prison in London so the state can, as Nils Melzer, the UN special rapporteur on torture, has testified, continue the unrelenting abuse and torture it knows will lead to his psychological and physical disintegration. The persecution of Assange is designed to send a message to anyone who might consider exposing the corruption, dishonesty and depravity that defines the black heart of our global elites.

Dean Yates can tell you what U.S. “assurances” are worth. He was the Reuters bureau chief in Baghdad on the morning of July 12, 2007, when his Iraqi colleagues Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh were killed, along with nine other men, by U.S. Army Apache gunships. Two children were seriously wounded. The U.S. government spent three years lying to Yates, Reuters and the rest of the world about the killings, although the army had video evidence of the massacre taken by the Apaches during the attack. The video, known as the Collateral Murder video, was leaked in 2010 by Chelsea Manning to Assange. It, for the first time, proved that those killed were not engaged, as the army had repeatedly insisted, in a firefight. It exposed the lies spun by the U.S. that it could not locate the video footage and had never attempted to cover up the killings.

The Spanish courts can tell you what U.S. “assurances” are worth. Spain was given an assurance that David Mendoza Herrarte, if extradited to the U.S. to face trial for drug trafficking charges, could serve his prison sentence in Spain. But for six years the Department of Justice repeatedly refused Spanish transfer requests, only relenting when the Spanish Supreme Court intervened.

The people in Afghanistan can tell you what U.S “assurances” are worth. U.S. military, intelligence and diplomatic officials knew for 18 years that the war in Afghanistan was a quagmire yet publicly stated, over and over, that the military intervention was making steady progress.

The people in Iraq can tell you what U.S. “assurances” are worth. They were invaded and subject to a brutal war based on fabricated evidence about weapons of mass destruction.

The people of Iran can tell you what U.S. “assurances” are worth. The United States, in the 1981 Algiers Accords, promised not to interfere in Iran’s internal affairs and then funded and backed The People’s Mujahedin Organization of Iran (MEK), a terrorist group, based in Iraq and dedicated to overthrowing the Iranian regime.

The thousands of people tortured in U.S. global black sites can tell you what U.S. “assurances” are worth. CIA officers, when questioned about the widespread use of torture by the Senate Intelligence Committee, secretly destroyed videotapes of torture interrogations while insisting there was no “destruction of evidence.”

The numbers of treaties, agreements, deals, promises and “assurances” made by the U.S. around the globe and violated are too numerous to list. Hundreds of treaties signed with Native American tribes, alone, were ignored by the US government.

Assange, at tremendous personal cost, warned us. He gave us the truth. The ruling class is crucifying him for this truth. With his crucifixion, the dim lights of our democracy go dark.

consortiumnews.com

British justice is advertised by its proponents as upright, historically different to the savages upon which it sought to civilise, and apparently fair.  Such outrages as the unjust convictions of the Guilford Four and Maguire Seven, both having served time in prison for terrorist offences they did not commit, are treated as blemishes.

In recent memory, fewer blemishes can be more profound and disturbing to a legal system than the treatment of Australian citizen and WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange.  The British legal system has been so conspicuously outsourced to the wishes of the US Department of Justice and the military-industrial complex Assange did so much to expose.  The decision of the UK High Court, handed down on December 10, will go down in the annals of law as a particularly disgraceful instance of this.

From the outset, extradition proceedings utilising a First World War US statute – the Espionage Act of 1917 – should have sent legal eagles in the UK swooping with alarm.  17 of the 18 charges Assange is accused of have been drawn from it.  It criminalises the receipt, dissemination and publication of national security information.  It attacks the very foundations of the Fourth Estate’s pursuit of accountability and subverts the protections of the First Amendment in the US constitution.  It invalidates motive and purpose.  And, were this to be successful – and here, the British justices seem willing to ensure that it is – the United States will be able to globally target any publisher of its dirty trove of classified material using an archaic, barbaric law.

It should also have occurred to the good members of the English legal profession that these lamentable proceedings have always been political.  Extraditions are generally not awarded on such grounds.  But this entire affair reeks of it.  The US security establishment wants their man, desperately.   With the coming to power of President Donald Trump, one counterintelligence officer, reflecting on Assange’s plight, made the pertinent observation that, “Nobody in that crew was going to be too broken up about the First Amendment issues.”

The original decision by District Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser was hardly grand.  It was chastising and vicious to journalism, cruel to those revealing information that might expose state abuses and an offense to the sensibility of democratic minded persons.  The point was made that security and intelligence experts, however morally inclined or principled, were best suited to assessing the merits of releasing classified information.  Journalists should never be involved in publishing such material.  Besides, thought the Judge, Assange was not a true journalist.  Such people did not purposely go out to disclose the identities of informants or propagandise their cause.

The only thing going for that otherwise woeful judgment was its acceptance that Assange would well perish in the US legal system.  Noting such cases as Laurie Love, Baraitser accepted that the prosecution had failed to show that Assange would not be placed in a position where he could be prevented from taking his own life.  Should he be sent across the Atlantic, he would face Special Administrative Measures and conclude his life in the wretched cul-de-sac of the ADX Florence supermax.  Any extradition to such conditions of sheer baroque cruelty would be “oppressive” given “his mental condition”.

The prosecution had no qualms trying to appeal and broaden the arguments, citing several propositions.  Contemptibly, these focused on Assange the pretender (suicidal autistics cannot give conference plenaries or host television programs), expert witnesses as deceivers (neuropsychiatrist Michael Kopelman, for initially “concealing” evidence from the court of Assange’s relationship with Stella Moris and their children), and the merits of the US prison system: matronly, saintly, and filled with soft beds and tender shrinks.  Why, scolded the prosecutor James Lewis QC in October, had the good judge not asked the US Department of Justice for reassurances?  Assange would not face the brutal end of special administrative measures.  He would not be sent to decline and moulder in ADX Florence.  He could also serve his sentence in Australia, provided, of course, the Department of Justice approved.

In reversing the decision to discharge Assange, the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales Ian Burnett, and Lord Justice Timothy Holroyde were persuaded by two of the five grounds submitted by the prosecutors.  Sounding astonishingly naïve (or possibly disingenuous) at points, the justices accepted the prosecution’s argument that undertakings or assurances could be made at a later stage, even during an appeal.  Delays by a requesting state to make such assurances might be tactical and stem from bad faith, but not entertaining such assurances, even if made later, might also result in “a windfall to an alleged or convicted criminal, which would defeat the public interest in extradition.”

Judge Baraitser should have also been mindful of seeking the assurances in the first place, given how vital the issue of Assange’s suicide risk and future treatment in US prisons was in making her decision against extradition.

It followed that the justices did “not accept that the USA refrained for tactical reasons from offering assurances at an earlier stage, or acted in bad faith in choosing only to offer them at the appeal stage.”  Diplomatic Note no. 74 contained “solemn undertakings, offered by one government to another, which will bind all officials and prosecutors who will deal with the relevant aspects of Mr Assange’s case now and in the future.”

This meant that Assange would not be subjected to SAMs, or sent to ADX Florence, and that he would receive appropriate medical treatment to mitigate the risk of suicide.  (The justices erred in not understanding that the assurance to not detain Assange ADX “pre-trial” was irrelevant as ADX is a post-conviction establishment.)  He could also serve his post-trial and post-appeal sentence in Australia, though that would be at the mercy of DOJ approval.  All undertakings were naturally provisional on the conduct of the accused.

As the original judgement was premised upon Assange being subjected to the “harshest SAMs regime”, and given the significance of the evidence submitted by Kopelman and Dr Quinton Deeley on Assange’s suicide risk in “being held under such harsh conditions of isolation”, the justices were “unable to accept the submission that the judge’s conclusion would have been the same if she had not found a real risk of detention in those conditions.”

Such narrow reasoning served to ignore the ample evidence that such diplomatic assurances are unreliable, mutable and without legal standing.  In terms of solitary confinement, the US legal system is filled with euphemistic designations that all amount to aspects of the same thing.  If it is not SAMs, it is certainly something amounting to it, such as Administrative Segregation.

Previous diplomatic assurances given by US authorities have also been found wanting.  The fate of Spanish drug trafficker David Mendoza Herrarte stands out.  In that case, a Spanish court was given an assurance that Mendoza, if extradited to the US to face trial, could serve any subsequent prison sentence in Spain.  When the application to the US Department of Justice was made to make good that undertaking, the transfer application was refused.  The pledge only applied, it was claimed, to allow Mendoza to apply for a transfer; it never meant that the DOJ had to agree to it.  A diplomatic wrangle between Madrid and Washington ensued for six years before the decision was altered.

And just to make such undertakings all the more implausible, the “solemn assurances” were coming from, as Craig Murray pointedly remarked, “a state whose war crimes and murder of civilians were exposed by Julian Assange.”

The justices also failed to consider the murderous elephant in the room, one that had been submitted by the defence at both the extradition hearing and the appeal: that US government officials had contemplated abducting and assassinating the very individual whose extradition they were seeking.  This was a view that held sway with former US Secretary of State and CIA chief Mike Pompeo.

In the United States, talking heads expressed their satisfaction about the glories of the US justice and prison system. Former Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill told MSNBC that, “This was really a guy who just violated the law”.  Concerns by Assange’s defence team that his “safety in [US] prison” would be compromised showed that “they really don’t have perspective on this”.

It is fittingly monstrous that this decision should be handed down the same day the Nobel Peace Prize was being awarded to two journalists, Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov.  Or that it should happen on Human Rights Day, which saw US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s boast that “we will continue to promote accountability for human rights violators.”  Except one’s own.

Inevitably, these cruel, gradually lethal proceedings move to the next stage: an appeal to the Supreme Court.  As the paperwork is gathered, Assange will muse, grimly, that the entire period of his discharge never saw him leave Belmarsh Prison.

counterpunch.org

The Assange case is the most powerful government in the world defending its right to lie to you.

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Q: What’s the difference between how the US deals with journalists it hates and how Saudi Arabia deals with journalists it hates?

A: Speed.

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The US is currently building a network of long-range missile systems on a chain of islands near China’s coast for the explicit purpose of threatening China. You can tell who is the aggressor in US-China tensions by asking yourself what would happen if this situation was reversed.

Per Washington’s own logic it would be perfectly reasonable, and indeed responsible, for China to set up military arsenals along both US coastlines to “contain” it and “deter” attacks on Latin American nations, as the US has an extensive history of launching such attacks and will surely try to again. But we all know what the US response to such behavior would be.

* * *

It’s a bit annoying living in a world that’s ruled by a dying empire whose increasing desperation to retain control could lead it to initiate a dangerous military confrontation with a major power at any time.

The rise of China crashing into the Washington doctrine that US unipolar hegemony must be preserved at all cost is an unstoppable-force-meets-immovable-object situation that could very easily end in nuclear armageddon.

If the preservation of US unipolar hegemony requires continually escalating military brinkmanship against nuclear-armed Russia and China as well as powerful forces like Iran, then the claim that US unipolar hegemony makes the world a more peaceful place is plainly false.

* * *

You currently have a much higher chance of dying as a result of a nuclear war instigated by your government or its allies than as a result of someone else refusing to take a Covid vaccine. You hear about the latter threat but not the former because the mass media exist to protect imperialist agendas from scrutiny.

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You know you’re getting scammed when your government ends a long and expensive war and then the military budget goes up.

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There is no sector of US government policy more significant and consequential than the command of the most powerful military force ever assembled. There is also no sector of US government policy with less oversight, accountability, or press scrutiny.

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Besides a brief window after 9/11 the US has never really been able to sell the narrative that governments it wants to ramp up aggressions against are about to attack its easily-defended shores. So instead it does ridiculous things like claiming those governments are about to invade Ukraine and Taiwan.

The US empire never attacks, it only “defends”. All its aggressions are always about “defending” freedom and democracy, “defending” human rights, “defending” nations that can’t defend themselves, etc. Often it even “defends” preemptively, before the attacker has done anything. Sometimes the attacker is the last to find out that they were planning an attack.

* * *

Ever since getting our eviction notice I’ve struggled to be creative because my mind is so focused on the daunting task of finding a nice yet affordable place for my family to live, and it really makes me feel for everyone for whom housing security is a chronic creativity drain. All to pay for the privilege of living on the fucking planet we were fucking born on.

I mean, think about how much creativity and innovation our species is missing out on because our dopey, primitive societal models force people to spend so much brainpower just figuring out how to stay fed and housed. That brainpower could have gone toward improving our world.

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Really I’m just a mother. I’m just a mum who wants a healthy planet and a healthy society for her kids, and I advocate the things I believe will facilitate that. You can add whatever -ists and -isms you want on top of that, but my true ideology is motherhood.

* * *

Right now being smart and informed is a detriment to happiness because things are shitty and the more you understand the harder it is to be happy. Once we create a healthy world this will reverse; the more you understand about the world the more uplifted and optimistic you’ll be.

caityjohnstone.medium.com