The apparent mass murder of civilians in Bucha and other locations in Ukraine has enraged Western public opinion against Russia.

Russia is facing mounting accusations of genocide and its president Vladimir Putin and other senior Russian officials are condemned as war criminals to be prosecuted in international tribunals similar to the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders.

Western media are blaring like foghorns while Russian media and other independent outlets are banned or stifled by the toxic anti-Russia political climate. In this grossly imbalanced situation, propaganda is amplified manyfold. There is a sense that the wholesale shutdown of media prior to the latest alleged massacres in Ukraine is all part of the orchestration.

When the Kiev regime and Western media warn of more massacres to follow in Ukraine that is a sinister prediction.

There are now unprecedented calls for Russia to be denied its seat as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, a seat it has occupied along with having veto powers since the end of the Second World War (prior to 1991 as the Soviet Union). Russia’s veto power, along with China’s, has been a constant bane of the United States and its Western allies who have complained of Moscow’s obstructionism to their foreign wars and other intrigues.

Sanctions are being wielded with unprecedented hostility. The United States and European Union are ratcheting up economic and diplomatic sanctions against Moscow in an unbridled attempt to destroy its economy. The blockade of Russia’s economy would normally be seen as an act of war by the West.

U.S. President Joe Biden has ordered more anti-tank Javelin missiles and other weapons to be sent to Ukraine.

Peace talks underway between Ukraine and Russia are coming under intense pressure to collapse amid the heightened vilification of Russia for “war crimes”. Thus, the war in Ukraine is likely to be prolonged. Notably, the Bucha massacre and other alleged atrocities emerged just when Ukrainian and Russian negotiators appeared to be making progress last week on agreeing to a peace settlement that would involve Ukraine declaring neutrality and renouncing future NATO membership.

What’s more, any attempt by Russia to contest the allegations is dismissed with a torrent of derision and contempt. Normal diplomatic relations have been blocked. A request by its UN envoy Vasily Nebenzia to convene an emergency meeting by the Security Council to discuss the killing of civilians in Ukraine was rejected out of hand by Britain which currently holds the presidency of the council.

Russian diplomats are being expelled pell-mell from Western countries en masse. This week, several European states have banned dozens more Russian envoys.

Russian media outlets have been banned outright across social media channels and the internet across the European Union and Britain. One has to use arcane proxy servers to access such media. Journalists, analysts and academics who question Western media claims are scorned as being “apologists” for a “criminal regime”.

The information war has evolved over many years. Previously, the outpouring of condemnations against Russia in Western media could at least be countervailed with critical, alternative media. When Western media tried to incriminate Russia over the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner over Ukraine in July 2014, there were plenty of critical sources to convincingly challenge those allegations and direct attention to the Western-backed Kiev regime as being culpable.

When Western media cried foul over the alleged Novichok poisoning assassination bids on the Skripals in England in 2018 and again on CIA-provocateur Alexei Navalny in 2020, there was a healthy public skepticism borne out of critical alternative media outlets.

Now though the information war has been optimized by the near-complete shutdown of alternative media. The Western media narrative has no competitor. The media foghorns can blare all they want without hardly a dissenting voice tolerated, let alone heard.

It’s all the more vital to retain a skeptical mind in these times of untrammeled bias where Western news media and government departments openly quote the Nazi Azov Battalion as credible sources of information.

When Russian forces withdrew from Bucha and other locations near the capital Kiev on March 30 they did so as a concession to facilitate the peace negotiations. The mayor of Bucha Anatoly Fedoruk in a video on March 31 celebrated the departure of the Russian military but he did not mention anything about atrocities. Now he is telling Western media outlets about alleged widespread killings.

The images of corpses strewn on streets only emerged on and after April 2, two days after Russian forces withdrew. It was reported that Azov Battalion entered Bucha and locations quickly after Russian forces pulled out. The Azov fighters were openly vowing to carry out “cleansing operations” which can be taken as a grim reference to dealing with people deemed to have collaborated with the Russian military during their brief occupation.

Several analysts cited here have debunked the widely circulated video footage that was put out by the Kiev regime forces purportedly showing corpses of people executed by Russian troops. The videos have strange anomalies such as supposedly dead bodies moving, stage-managed scenes, and the use of attractive female models purporting to be anti-Russian fighters. Cadavers that are supposedly weeks old are actually seen to belong to people who were killed in recent days, quite possibly after the Russian forces withdrew. Furthermore, some of the corpses are shown to have white armbands indicating that they were pro-Russian supporters. That suggests that the real perpetrators of the mass killings were the Azov Battalion and other NATO-backed regiments.

Russia categorically denies the alleged violations, claiming that the videos are part of a false-flag provocation to criminalize Russia in the eyes of the world. Would Russia be so stupidly reckless to commit such crimes?

The same manufactured media methods have been used in the alleged bombing by Russia of the maternity hospital in Mariupol on March 9 and a public theater in the same city. Videos released by one side are broadcast unquestioningly by Western media along with ready-made condemnations by Western leaders. This is reminiscent of the media model used by the NATO-sponsored Jihadists and White Helmets in Syria.

The big difference now, however, is that Western propaganda has near-total dominance because all other critical, independent sources have been silenced or blackballed.

The criminalization of independent journalism as the persecution of Julian Assange prefigured is now bearing evil fruit.

Employment at the self-styled newspaper of record NYT requires a commitment to support imperial rampaging and corporate plunder.

It requires abandonment of support for peace, equity, justice and the rule of law.

It requires a willingness to demonize and otherwise misreport on US invented enemies.

It requires a commitment to fake news over truth and full disclosure, especially on major domestic and geopolitical issues.

The Times is to journalism as night is to day, as wrong is to right, as fakery is to truth-telling.

What’s indisputable shows up in daily fake news editions.

Claiming continued Russian attacks around Kiev and Chernigov on Wednesday after deescalation was discussed the previous day, the Times ignored what came out of Istanbul talks.

Russian delegates discussed a gradual deescalation around the above cities, not a ceasefire anywhere in Ukraine.

Russia’s general staff hasn’t yet announced “what the slowdown or de-escalation (around these cities) will mean exactly,” head of its negotiating delegation, Vladimir Medinsky, explained, adding:

No “ceasefire” was proposed.

Further, Russia will respond militarily to strikes on its forces anywhere in Ukraine.

Self-defense is a fundamental rule of law principle.

The Times ignored all of the above, defying reality instead, saying:

“Moscow (is) in no hurry to end its war (sic).”

Its “advance in those areas already stalled (sic).”

“Moscow’s announcement was less a concession than an acknowledgment of the shortcomings of its military operation (sic).”

“Ukrainian officials say that reports of cases of rape and sexual violence carried out by Russian soldiers against civilians continue to grow (sic).”

Russian forces “destroyed…civil infrastructure…libraries, shopping malls…(residential) houses…bridges (and) civilians (queued in) a bread line (sic).”

The Times cited a fake State Department “do not travel” advisory to Russia, falsely warning that US citizens may be detained because of their nationality (sic).”

Russian forces suffered “heavy losses and logistical issues (sic).”

They’re “unable to fight on more than one front (sic).”

All of the above rubbish turned truth on its head in typical NYT-style, gray lady lies of our times its standard fare.

Indeed a looming food crisis threatens increased hunger, malnutrition and starvation — because of US/Western sanctions war on Russia and what led to its special military operation — what the Times left unexplained.

Between them, Russia and Ukraine produce about a third of world wheat, 20% of its corn and up to 80% of its sunflower oil.

War in Ukraine and banning Russian imports caused energy, food and other prices to skyrocket.

A food insecurity crisis affects US/Western countries and many others, including Ukraine, of course.

The Times falsely accused Russia of bombing civilian ships in the Black Sea, adding:

Russia’s navy is “blocking access to Ukrainian ports to cut off exports of grains (sic).”

In Security Council remarks, Russia’s UN envoy Vassily Nebenzia debunked the above Big Lies, saying:

“Russian armed forces are posing no threat to the freedom of civilian navigations” — in the Black Sea or anywhere else.

According to bozo BoJo regime fake news:

“It is almost certain that the Russian offensive has failed in its objective to encircle Kiev (sic).”

The Times falsely accused Russia of “trying to starve the residents of Mariupol into surrender (sic).”

Its forces continue going all-out to protect the city’s residents from the scourge of remaining US/NATO supported Nazified Ukrainian forces embedded in their neighborhoods, holding them as human shields.

As part of its longstanding war of words on Vladimir Putin, the Times once again defied reality by falsely calling him a “tyrant (sic).”

Infamous for leaving no long ago debunked Big Lie behind, prostitute of the press Thomas Friedman consistently ignores US war on humanity at home and abroad while bashing its invented enemies with managed news misinformation and disinformation rubbish — humiliating himself at the same time.

He lied calling Vladimir Putin a “petro-dictator (sic).”

He perpetuated the global warming/climate change myth.

He called for harming Russia by cutting off its oil and gas exports.

He urged Americans to make sacrifices “to win the war against…Putin.”

“Put Putin over a barrel, he roared…What are we waiting for (sic).”

The above and lots more rubbish like it is standard fare in Times editions — at the expense of news fit to print.

According to WaPo fake news, “Russia (may) consider using (nukes) to escalate conflict (sic).”

A previous article explained its clear position on these weapons.

Nothing remotely suggests that its forces will use them in Ukraine — or at any time except in self-defense.

As explained by its armed forces chief General Valery Gerasimov:

“The country’s nuclear policy is purely defensive in nature.”

“Russia reserves the right to use nuclear weapons (only) in response to the use of nuclear and other types of weapons of mass destruction against it or its allies, and in cases of aggression against Russia using conventional weapons when the very existence of the state is threatened.”

And conditions for their possible use is very limited and strictly regulated, he added.

According to WSJ editors — in light of what’s happening in Ukraine — hegemon USA’s bloated military budget isn’t bloated enough.

They urged lots more waste, fraud and abuse than already to counter invented threats. No real ones exist.

At a small fraction of what the US spends, Russia’s super-weapons are greatly superior to the best in the West.

Its hypersonic missiles used to destroy a western Ukrainian base cannot be defended against by US/NATO regimes.

Along with its tactical superiority, Russian super-weapons way outclass the best of US/NATO forces.

Its military is for defense — in stark contrast to alliance forever wars on invented enemies.

Russia didn’t want war in Ukraine.

It spent over seven years trying to resolve Kiev’s aggression on Donbass diplomatically.

It failed because hegemon USA wants perpetual war along its borders.

Left with no other option, Vladimir Putin authorized Russia’s special military operation to demilitarize and deNazify Ukraine — what couldn’t be accomplished another way.

stephenlendman.org

The truth is that it’s the lowest hanging fruit and there is almost no impetus either on the ground or from media bosses to check facts. But what will these journalists do when the truth gets out after the war ends in Ukraine, when they become the focus of opprobrium?

The biggest secret which no journalist ever wants to tell even his own mother is that war reporting is absurdly easy and can actually be carried out by the most stupid numpty in the office who struggles to even operate the photocopier. Sure, the psychological trauma weighs heavily, often after the event and it takes a certain amount of courage and selfishness to put yourself in a conflict zone (selfish if you have a family back home) but in terms of the actual mechanisms of the job, war reporting really is not at all challenging. The day to day events in a conflict are so horrific that really all the reporter needs to do is get to where the action is and take the shots, roll the camera or get the quotes. The stories practically write themselves for the simple reason that many of the normal requisites of reporting don’t apply in conflict zones. The consumer has an unlimited appetite for the same story over and over again. Blood and gore really does stun viewers, particularly in broadcast news, into a sense of shock and morbid curiosity which then metamorphosises into an addiction, an adrenalin rush which the reporters on the front line themselves also fall victim to.

But if you have the courage or are driven by your own sense of self-importance and can put out of your mind your loved ones, the a-b-c of reporting couldn’t be simpler or more rudimentary. The stories literally present themselves packaged and ready to go, with no annoying questions by editors who want to slow down the process by painful fact checking and due diligence.

You never forget the first time a gun is pointed at you. For me it was in the summer of 1992 in Mogadishu, Somalia where the country was being torn apart by a civil war and its capital resembled a hell which not even Ridley Scott could capture in Black Hawk Down. It was a security guard in a compound who wanted me to leave. I resisted and argued with him in Swahili until I heard the definitive click of the hammer on a Colt 45 1911 being pulled back and the muzzle pointed at me. “D’toka sai yee” (get out now) was all he had to say as my heart thumped so hard I was convinced it was jump completely out of its rib cage.

Getting the builders in

You also never forget the first time you hear the distinctive faint whistle noise of a 7.62mm round as it passes your ears. And you defiantly never forget the awkwardness of not knowing what to do when people are actually firing at you which also happened to me in Mogadishu a couple of days later where I was naively confused by parts of the wall next to me exploding. I stupidly thought that the summer heat was making the cement crack or that perhaps workman were drilling it from the other side. What an idiot. Well, I was in my mid 20s.

Somalia was my first conflict. Others followed in East Africa including Rwanda and Southern Sudan in ’94 and then later the former Yugoslavia in ’97 and ’98, Lebanon ’06, Afghanistan ’08. In all those times, I lost count of the whistling bullet noises of the number of times militias pointed guns in my face and how the sight of dead bodies shocks and yet intrigues at the same time. In 1994 in Southern Sudan I was specifically sent to a region which was being bombed by the Khartoum regime from Anthonovs which were barely visible at 18,000 feet. I was sent there to be bombed on and film it which I dutifully did for what is now APTN news in London. The idea today that AP, which is barely a shadow of itself compared to those days, would send a freelance journalist on such a suicide mission is unthinkable.

In all that time though I was aware how the strength of the story more or less dictates your role to document, film, replicate the events for history. What I was to imagine would be the diligence of journalism wasn’t required. There wasn’t really any fact checking as, on a practical level, it was more or less impossible. When you arrived at a site of a massacre, you’re more or less hostage to the anguish and horror and the people who are there to fill in the gaps and put the story together. It’s absurdly easy, a child could do it. One of the things I learnt in all of those places was that the victims, even though they didn’t need to lie, did just that. Even when a massacre happened and it was pretty obvious who did it, there were still plenty of people who survived who sexed up the story when it was so sexed up already that it hardly needed it. The temptation is too much for those who are the victims, but also for the governments, regular armies and aid organisations when a journalist is there on the scene and he has shown that speed is of the essence to get the story processed and sent back. I wonder whether the Marioupol theatre bombing is one of these stories as the facts as they are presented leave more questions than answers and residents claiming that they had been told days beforehand by right wing groups sympathetic to Zelensky that they were going to bomb it themselves as an amoral ruse to draw NATO into the war. We saw exactly this ploy by Muslim groups in Sarajevo in the Yugoslav war who figured that they could bomb their own civilians and western media would point the fingers at the demonized Serbs in the hills – which became the basis of NATO airstrikes against Milosevic.

In the nineties, we relied very heavily on our editors in London to provide a layer of fact checking as we weren’t hooked up to the internet (certainly not in my Africa and Yugoslavia period).

A generation who knew right from wrong

You chose a side. Usually the one which is first of all the more practical to get to; and secondly the one which is going to give you the instantly vivid and horrific pictures. And mostly journalists, certainly not today, ever cross the line between where they are to the group which was the aggressor. I tried to do this in ’92 in Somalia in its capital which was divided by a north-south line and very nearly got shot by Aideed’s thugs who chased after me in the south. I literally ran for my life carrying bulky video equipment which would be in a museum today, it was so heavy. My friend Dan Eldon was not so lucky. Later on in 1993 he rushed to a scene of an attack by a U.S. helicopter and was beaten to death by angry women who made the connection between his pale skin and western imperialism which robbed them of their children.

We were part of a generation of journalist who knew that it was not right just inserting yourself into the mayhem of war with civilians being bombed each day, without reaching out to the other side to at least offer a comment, a response to the news we were producing. But on the ground it often wasn’t possible; only when returning to your home country where calls can be made.

In those days there was more honour amongst all those practicing, whether they be journalists, government officials, defence ministries or even khat-chewing militias. It has taken the Yugoslavian war for all of these groups to wake up to taking advantage of the tricky position journalists find themselves in when covering war. They have seen that the speed to get the gory pictures and file the story with the ghastly details of death caused by modern warfare eclipses the need for due diligence. The ‘embedding’ of journalists, which really started in 1991 with the Gulf War, more or less creates a hostage situation between the powerful army and its facilities and the journalists who are happy to sign up the Stockholm Syndrome type reporting – which, in a nutshell, is a sort of stenography of what generals say at press conferences and a tacit agreement to report on the staged scenes which the army takes you to cover. And it’s the same with militias. Journalists who went to Norther Syria to cover the Syrian war soon found themselves embedded with ISIS and Al Qaeda affiliates who would protect them while taking them to scenes which they wanted covered. There is a certain amount of obligation from the journalist to not do their due diligence and reach out – via telephone and internet – to fact check what they’re being shown as tangible news material as such an act would be considered discourteous to the hosts. And so in this set up, fake news thrives as the incumbents who hold the journalists can barely resist the opportunity to spin stories. They have the journalists as a hostage and he/she is under pressure to write stories each day.

Staged chemical attacks in Syria

And so ‘embedding’ comes in many forms and it merely encourages the polarised set up which all wars now have, which we saw in Yugoslavia and other places. In Syria, we saw the same story where so many big title journalists even succumbed to writing reports based on finding sources on social media in places being bombed. The reporting became so jaded, the process so corrupted that it led, in many cases, false reporting on Assad using chemicals on his own people. In at least one case, there is overwhelming evidence now, for those who wish to examine in on line, to prove without any doubt that one such attack was staged entirely by Al Qaeda affiliates, with local Syrian actors being requested to stage a minor performance for the cameras – video footage shamefully used by the BBC to support a narrative which ticked a box for them and their journalists camped in Beirut.

Journalists these days in war zones don’t cross the line, even on a technical level with their smartphones such is the new ‘standard’ which all media giants are operating by – which has merely encouraged a new all time low of pseudo journalism from other journalists struggling to make their way up. It reminds me of a CNN producer who, so unable to cope with her assignment in Morocco, had decided on the beginning, middle and end of her report before she even got on the plane to carry out the ‘King clinging on to power’ story which was entirely wrong and planted in her head by her Emirati lover in Washington. The media giants who sent their big named journalists to Ukraine had already decided the story, the narrative that all must abide to which is that Zelensky is some sort of Ce Gevara figure and squeaky clean, that the war is not at all the west’s fault and so no responsibility shall be placed on its leaders since the early 90s and that all Ukrainians are angels and that we should all adopt one, like adorable Labradors. They’ve even invented the perfect explanation how they can carry out this extreme partisan news reporting, which is, conveniently that “Putin is mad”. Or perhaps intel agencies helped them out with this folly.

Journalists became the combatants

What iconic journalists from the UK who hail from a once esteemed investigative news outfit like BBC Panorama won’t be investigating is the worryingly high level of Ukrainians who supported far right fanatical groups there for decades which were funded by the CIA and the State department. The odious John Sweeny will not go against the grain of the newsroom indoctrination and present Zelensky as corrupt, if not more corrupt, than the leader he ousted in his anti corruption campaign which installed him as president. Sweeney, who claims to be an investigative journalist and who shouldn’t be judged on his mental meltdown while filming a doc about scientologists in the U.S. will no doubt do his reporting on the gore which is in front of his eyes but not look to hard for reasons behind it. A German journalist sent to Dresden during the second world war to film the antihalation of the RAF bombers on women and children might take a similar line by not blaming Hitler for invading Poland in 1939.

We should not expect much from Mr Sweeney or the BBC Panorama team who I have actually worked for briefly and know only too well how their own personal careers come before anything which remotely whiffs of raw, vociferous journalism. In 2017, I found Britain’s most wanted gangster who fled the UK in the 1990s after an FBI sting to net him failed. The individual, who was hiding in Greece, was prepared to tell Panorama the names and addresses of the top twenty heroine importers in the UK. I failed to convince the producer, who only wanted her idea of him spilling the beans on UK customs agents’ corruption, to repair a previous poor report she had made have more gravitas. Britain’s biggest ever double agent (heroine importer and paid super grass by the UK government who was protected by Jack Straw) was let go due to personal ambitions, office politics and rank stupidity. So much for BBC Panorama being an investigation team digging deep and finding great stories which set the media agenda. Just politics. People’s own greed and self fulfilment. Corruption.

I have stopped watching TV news from the Ukraine as I can see the A-B-C of how the sloppiest war reporting is carried out without the slightest effort for any western journalists to at least look beyond the bodies and twisted limbs for nuance, which has become the collateral damage of all journalism these days. Recently a number of western journalists have been killed in Ukraine which saddens me of course. But if you begin to understand how journalists have crossed a line and become combatants when they either embed themselves with the governments, armies or even the victims they are writing about, then it’s easier to understand why they have become targets themselves. I once used to feel guilty about not helping people who were suffering. The photo by the South African photojournalist Kevin Carter of the vulture looming over the almost dead infant left on the ground in Southern Sudan by a mother fleeing an attack in 1994 haunts me to this day, as I was there in the same year. But when time has passed and in years to come the truth comes out and we see a more complexed nuanced story about the Ukraine war, the big gun journalists today in Ukraine will feel a shame which will eclipse mine tenfold for being partisan to a over-simplified presentation of a story which will show we have much more blood on our hands in the west than most humble people realise. Western journalists in the Ukraine don’t understand the iconic photograph of the vulture and the dying child in Sudan which Carter took and which gave him nightmares all his life which finally led him to taking his own life in 1993. They wouldn’t miss a heartbeat to stop and help as they have already decided what the story is and their tawdry role in reporting it.

Seems like almost every day now the mass media are blaring about the need for speech on the internet to be controlled or restricted in some way. Today they’re running stories about Joe Rogan and Covid misinformation; tomorrow it will be something else.

The reasons for the need to control online speech change from day to day, but the demand for that control remains a constant. Some days it’s a need to protect the citizenry from online disinformation campaigns by foreign governments. Sometimes it’s the need to guarantee election security. Sometimes it’s the need to eliminate domestic extremism and conspiracy theories. Sometimes it’s Covid misinformation. The problems change, but the solution is always the same: increased regulation of speech by monopolistic online platforms in steadily increasing coordination with the US government.

It’s actually pretty comical at this point, once you notice it. It’s like if you had an expensive Prada bag that your friend really coveted and she was always making up excuses to try and take it home with her. “Gosh I’m carrying all these small objects and I have nothing to carry them in!” “You’re going on vacation? I’ll look after your Prada bag for you!” “Oh no you slipped and now you’re clinging to a cliff’s edge! Quick! Throw me your Prada bag!” Once you know what they’re actually after, their attempts to obtain it look clownish and silly.

Caitlin Johnstone: The Obedient Censors at Meta https://t.co/M2ewa4zK1A
A monopolistic Silicon Valley mega-corporation deleting political speech about an important historical figure because Washington says he was a terrorist is a notably brazen act of censorship. pic.twitter.com/JooPenFZfY

— Consortium News (@Consortiumnews) January 7, 2022

Whenever I talk about how the immense power structure which the mass media serves and protects has a desperate need to control online speech, I’ll always get a few people objecting that the powerful don’t care about what ideas and information the ordinary riff raff share with each other on internet forums. They just do what they want regardless of public opinion, like Greek gods on Mount Olympus.

And really nothing could be further from the truth. Controlling the thoughts we think about our nation and our world are of paramount importance to our rulers, because it’s only by controlling what we think that they can control how we vote, how we act, and whether or not we get fed up with being exploited and oppressed by a loose alliance of unelected plutocrats and government operatives. There is nothing, literally nothing, that these people would not do to maintain this control. Their very survival depends on it.

Michael Parenti summed this up perfectly in his 2015 book “Profit Pathology and Other Indecencies” with this passage that was recently shared by Louis Allday:

“But they don’t care about what we think. They turn a deaf ear to us,” some people complain. That is not true. They care very much about what you think. In fact, that is the only thing about you that holds their attention and concern. They don’t care if you go hungry, unemployed, sick, or homeless. But they do care when you are beginning to entertain resistant democratic thoughts. They get nervous when you discard your liberal complaints and adopt a radical analysis. They do care that you are catching on as to what the motives and functions of the national security state and the US global empire are all about at home and in so many corners of the world. They get furiously concerned when you and millions like you are rejecting the pap that is served up by corporate media and establishment leaders.

By controlling our perceptions, they control our society; they control public opinion and public discourse. And they limit the range and impact of our political consciousness. The plutocrats know that their power comes from their ability to control our empowering responses. They know they can live at the apex of the social pyramid only as long as they can keep us in line at the pyramid’s base. Who pays for all their wars? We do. Who fights these wars? We do or our low-income loved ones do. If we refuse to be led around on a super-patriotic, fear-ridden leash and if we come to our own decisions and act upon them more and more as our ranks grow, then the ruling profiteers’ power shrinks and can even unwind and crash — as has happened with dynasties and monarchies of previous epochs.

We need to strive in every way possible for the revolutionary unraveling, a revolution of organized consciousness striking at the empire’s heart with full force when democracy is in the streets and mobilized for the kind of irresistible upsurge that seems to come from nowhere yet is sometimes able to carry everything before it.

There is nothing sacred about the existing system. All economic and political institutions are contrivances that should serve the interests of the people. When they fail to do so, they should be replaced by something more responsive, more just, and more democratic.

Preventing their replacement with a system that is more responsive, just and democratic is precisely why our rulers are so keen on controlling the way we think, act and vote. They exert this control with their total domination of the mass media and mainstream education systems, with Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, and with the rapidly increasing normalization of internet censorship.

The dawn of the internet sparked great hope for those who knew that the ruling power structures of our day retain supremacy by controlling and manipulating people’s access to and understanding of information; the possibility of billions of human minds freely spreading awareness of what’s going on in our world and sharing revolutionary ideas to address our problems spelled beautiful things for our future to anyone with a lucid understanding of the obstacles we face.

Those Who Support Internet Censorship Lack Psychological Maturity

“The danger of government-tied monopolistic tech platforms controlling worldwide speech far outweighs the danger of whatever voice you might happen to dislike at any given moment.”https://t.co/6M7FKYw668

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) January 3, 2022

Unfortunately, our rulers understood the significance of that moment too. They’ve been working tirelessly to ensure that the internet serves as a net positive for themselves and a net negative for the rest of us, manipulating the large-scale movements of information so that dissident voices are increasingly marginalized and inconsequential while giving themselves the ability to funnel propaganda into public minds far more rapidly and efficiently than ever before. If they succeed in their objectives, ordinary people will wind up no better at sharing unauthorized ideas and information than they were before the internet, while our rulers will be far more effective in controlling the way we think at mass scale.

That they will succeed is by no means guaranteed. We are living in an entirely unprecedented moment in human history with many large-scale systems on the precipice of failure while technological advancement creates many other unpredictable factors; gaps could open up at any time to let light shine through in the massive movements that humanity is poised for. There is no way to accurately predict the future in a situation the likes of which we’ve never seen before, where patterns are crumbling and narrative is hitting white noise saturation point.

Anything can happen. Win or lose, this is a hell of a time to be alive.

caityjohnstone.medium.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

As the Biden administration weighs the insane option of arming Ukrainian insurgents to wage civil war in a country on the border of Russia — think about how the US would feel if Russians armed pro-Moscow contras in Mexico — the US military continues making strides in winning the culture war against conservatives and normies in its ranks.

The US Air Force has now authorized, but not required, the disclosure of personal pronouns in the signature block of official correspondence. Here’s a link to the full memo. This, of course, is a trial balloon. Give permission for this for internal communications, and after people get used to it, make it mandatory for all communications.

The memo designates three pronouns — he/him, she/hers, and they/them — but of course this bigotry will not long be tolerated. Give it a year or two, and zirs will have their way. At least this practice will prepare senior officers for their post-retirement life working for Raytheon, McDonnell Douglas, and other woke defense contractors. I guess you can drop bombs by drones on innocent Third World people with a clean conscience, as long as you use people’s preferred pronouns.

This might seem like a small thing, but it’s a condensed symbol of the US military’s capitulation to wokeness, including the madness of gender ideology. We are losing awareness of the gender binary, one of the most fundamental principles of life on earth. We are tearing our society apart, and the US military is joining the attack by institutionalizing the lie that maleness and femaleness are arbitrary categories that have nothing to do with biology.

Of course this insanity is spreading wide in our society, but the fact that it is now taken up by the armed forces is a sign of how deeply entrenched this ideology is.

What about sailors, soldiers, and airmen who refuse to live by these lies? Who refuse to say that a biological male who presents as a female is truly a woman? Too bad for them, I guess. Our military has no use for bigots like that.

What is this regime that rules us? The governmental part of the regime commits our country to ruinous wars of choice, and now it’s speculating, via a leak to the CIA’s favorite Washington journalist, about starting a proxy war with Russia on Russia’s border. It is ruining the US military. The non-governmental part of the regime is forcing a racist and gender-crazy ideology on everybody else, and nobody in the Republican Party troubles themselves to commit to stopping it.

What has captured our country and its people? What madness? What demoralization?

Live Not By Lies — now, more than ever. We might not be able to turn back the insanity — though God knows we should try, and hope that the GOP stops lying prostrate before Big Business and the Pentagon — but whatever comes, we have to be prepared to live through this soft totalitarianism until reality finally intervenes, and it collapses of its own stupidity.

theamericanconservative.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.

Help Us Cover the Assange Case! 

“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

By John PILGER

“Let us look at ourselves, if we have the courage, to see what is happening to us” –-  Jean-Paul Sartre.

Sartre’s words should echo in all our minds following the grotesque decision of Britain’s High Court to extradite Julian Assange to the United States where he faces “a living death”. This is his punishment for the crime of authentic, accurate, courageous, vital journalism.

Miscarriage of justice is an inadequate term in these circumstances. It took the bewigged courtiers of Britain’s ancien regime just nine minutes on Friday to uphold an American appeal against a District Court judge’s acceptance in January of a cataract of evidence that hell on earth awaited Assange across the Atlantic: a hell in which, it was expertly predicted, he would find a way to take his own life.

Volumes of witness by people of distinction, who examined and studied Julian and diagnosed his autism and his Asperger’s Syndrome and revealed that he had already come within an ace of killing himself at Belmarsh prison, Britain’s very own hell, were ignored.

The recent confession of a crucial F.B.I. informant and prosecution stooge, a fraudster and serial liar, that he had fabricated his evidence against Julian was ignored. The revelation that the Spanish-run security firm at the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where Julian had been granted political refuge, was a C.I.A. front that spied on Julian’s lawyers and doctors and confidants (myself included) – that, too, was ignored.

Collage of UC Global surveillance photos made for C.I.A. inside Ecuador embassy.  (Cathy Vogan)

Each of these “matters”, as lawyers like to say, was enough on its own for a judge upholding the law to throw out the disgraceful case mounted against Assange by a corrupt U.S. Department of Justice and their hired guns in Britain. Julian’s state of mind, bellowed James Lewis, QC, America’s man at the Old Bailey last year, was no more than “malingering” – an archaic Victorian term used to deny the very existence of mental illness.

To Lewis, almost every defence witness, including those who described from the depth of their experience and knowledge, the barbaric American prison system, was to be interrupted, abused, discredited. Sitting behind him, passing him notes, was his American conductor: young, short-haired, clearly an Ivy League man on the rise.

Nine Minutes of Infamy

In their nine minutes of dismissal of journalist Assange’s fate, two of Britain’s most senior judges, including Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett (a lifelong buddy of Sir Alan Duncan, Boris Johnson’s former foreign minister who arranged Assange’s brutal police kidnapping from the Ecuadorean embassy) referred in their summary judgment to not one of a litany of truths that had struggled to be heard in a lower court presided over by a weirdly hostile judge, Vanessa Baraitser.

Her insulting behaviour towards a clearly stricken Assange, struggling through a fog of prison-dispensed medication to remember his name, is unforgettable.

What was truly shocking Friday was that the High Court judges – Lord Burnett and Lord Justice Timothy Holroyde, who read out their words – showed no hesitation in sending Julian to his death, living or otherwise. They offered no mitigation, no suggestion that they had agonised over legalities or even basic morality.

Their ruling in favour, if not on behalf of the United States, is based squarely on transparently fraudulent “assurances” scrabbled together by the Biden administration when it looked in January like justice might prevail.

These “assurances” are that once in American custody, Assange will not be subject to the Orwellian SAMS – Special Administrative Measures – which would make him an un-person; that he will not be imprisoned at ADX Florence, a prison in Colorado long condemned by jurists and human rights groups as illegal: “a pit of punishment and disappearance”; that he can be transferred to an Australian prison to finish his sentence there.

Stella Moris, Julian Assange’s partner, addressing his supporters on Oct 28, during the U.S. appeal hearing in London. (Don’t Extradite Assange Campaign)

There are abundant examples of the U.S. doing just that. As investigative journalist Richard Medhurst revealed last month, David Mendoza Herrarte was extradited from Spain to the U.S. on the “promise” that he would serve his sentence in Spain. The Spanish courts regarded this as a binding condition.

“Classified documents reveal the diplomatic assurances given by the U.S. Embassy in Madrid and how the U.S. violated the conditions of the extradition,” wrote Medhurst. “Mendoza spent six years in the U.S. trying to return to Spain. Court documents show the United States denied his transfer application multiple times.”

The High Court judges, who were aware of the Mendoza case and of Washington’s habitual duplicity, describe the “assurances” – not to be beastly to Julian Assange – as a “solemn undertaking offered by one government to another.”

The Imperial Way

This article would stretch into infinity if I listed the times the rapacious United States has broken “solemn undertakings” to governments, such as treaties that are summarily torn up and civil wars that are fueled. It is the way Washington has ruled the world, and before it Britain: the way of imperial power, as history teaches us.

It is this institutional lying and duplicity that Julian Assange brought into the open and in so doing performed perhaps the greatest public service of any journalist in modern times.

Julian himself has been a prisoner of lying governments for more than a decade now. During these long years, I have sat in many courts as the United States has sought to manipulate the law to silence him and WikiLeaks.

This reached a bizarre moment when, in the tiny Ecuadorean embassy, he and I were forced to flatten ourselves against a wall, each with a notepad in which we conversed, taking care to shield what we had written to each other from the ubiquitous spy cameras – installed, as we now know, by a proxy of the C.I.A., the world’s most enduring criminal organization.

Look at Ourselves

This brings me to the quotation at the top of this article: “Let us look at ourselves, if we have the courage, to see what is happening.”

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote this in his preface to Franz Fannon’s The Wretched of the Earth, the classic study of how colonised and seduced and coerced and, yes, craven peoples do the bidding of the powerful.

Who among us is prepared to stand up rather than remain mere bystanders to an epic travesty such as the judicial kidnapping of Julian Assange? What is at stake is both a courageous man’s life and, if we remain silent, the conquest of our intellects and sense of right and wrong: indeed our very humanity.

consortiumnews.com