As reports of atrocities and human rights violations in Ukraine mount, corroborated by extensive witness testimony and much tangible evidence (and here), it becomes paramount to consider ways and means of punishing instigators, enablers, and direct perpetrators of these outrages. It is equally important to preserve the legal and historical record of thesе crimes and to administer suitable punishments in order to deter other potential war criminals in the Ukrainian theatre. Finally, the purpose of such a Tribunal would be educational, to impress upon that segment of Ukrainian society which had become swayed by extremist Nazi propaganda the enormity of the misconduct perpetrated in their name and in furtherance of a criminal agenda that, actively or passively, deliberately or unwittingly, some of them may have supported. For, unless there is a sober confrontation with these crimes against humanity by Ukrainians vulnerable to the extremist narrative, and as soon as possible, stability and civility will continue to evade Ukraine for a long time to come.

The first step is to set the framework within which Ukrainian war crimes investigations and trials ought to be conducted. It is possible, of course, to entrust this task to the judicial authorities of Donetsk and Lugansk because obviously they have territorial and subject matter jurisdiction. However, for the impartiality and credibility of the proceedings to be preserved, it would be preferable for Ukrainian war crimes investigations and resultant trials to be conducted under the auspices of an international forum, removed as much as practicable from the parties on the ground.

Clearly, a replication of the founding of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at the Hague (ICTY) in the 1990s is unlikely in the present case. Setting aside technical issues concerning the legitimacy of such a tribunal under the UN Charter, three out of five governments permanently represented on the Security Council are potential suspects for active collusion with and logistical support extended to direct perpetrators of war crimes in the Ukraine. That makes it extremely improbable that this time round they would agree to the establishment of a similar court. The solution, therefore, must be sought elsewhere.

Taking into account the ongoing decline of the global Western hegemonic system, a process which was greatly accelerated precisely by the political, military, economic, and financial fallout of the Ukraine conflict, it would be advisable to look for another way to elevate the Ukrainian war crimes inquiry to the international level. One possible approach would be to place the matter under the auspices of the Collective Security Treaty Organization. CSTO nations are now effectively the global counterpart to the moribund West-centered “international community” which, in the 1990s, was still able to manipulate the UN in furtherance of its political aims, and to a lesser extent is still able to do that today.

Assuming that CSTO could be a viable option to serve as the supranational patron for the Ukraine war crimes tribunal, the next step would be to carefully define the Tribunal’s remit and to devise its procedural rules to avoid ICTY’s errors. In order to blunt inevitable efforts from the West to discredit the new Tribunal, much of the general language found in corresponding ICTY foundational documents should be utilised, always taking great care to identify and discard those provisions of ICTY Statute and Rules of Evidence and Procedure which are not compatible with best legal practice, and substituting for those provisions universally accepted legal principles.

The next important issue that would have to be dealt with is the staffing of the Ukraine International Criminal Tribunal. Recruitment of judges, investigators, prosecutors, and support staff need not, and in fact should not, be confined to personnel from CSTO states. Persons who satisfy the criterion of professional integrity should be encouraged to participate regardless what country they are nationals of.

The Ukraine Tribunal will also have to select a conceptual framework, a set of main legal principles that it will apply in the conduct of its proceedings. Three major concepts or devices come immediately to mind that have been used by ICTY (the “Mechanism,” which is its successor, is included by reference) to secure often questionable convictions. Those concepts are: Joint Criminal Enterprise, Command Responsibility, and Plea Bargaining.

With the likely exception of the pernicious practices of accepting uncorroborated confessions and plea bargaining, which in the form as applied at ICTY have radically undermined rather than promoted the administration of justice, JCE and Command Responsibility could conceivably be reconfigured and preserved in modified form, at least to the extent that they are not in conflict with the tasks of determining objective facts and administering politically neutral justice. For instance, JCE (detached from some of its more absurd variants invented by ICTY judges specifically to facilitate incrimination and conviction by any means) could be a useful tool not only for linking perpetrators acting with criminal intent and in concert, but also for establishing overarching connections between direct on-the-ground perpetrators and their instigators and supporters from beyond the borders of Ukraine.

Another conceptual issue that inevitably will have to be addressed is the scope of the investigations to be carried out beyond the factual matrix of the particular crimes being adjudicated. There is also the further and related question of the nature of broader historical and contextual evidence that should be considered probative and allowed to be presented in court. From the standpoint of securing justice, ICTY’s performance in that regard has been most unsatisfactory, not to say dismal and flagrantly prejudicial to the accused parties.

That is the case because even when ICTY attempts to apply seemingly sound principles it regularly twists them to serve its politically compromised agenda. Background “evidence” presented by ICTY historical, military, media, and other “expert” witnesses had invariably been geared not to shed light on relevant and probative circumstances but to heap maximum discredit upon the targeted parties. The resulting hugely prejudicial reputational damage, that under normal conditions would be inadmissible in a trial court, was designed to impact not just the individual defendant but, even more importantly, the entire ethnic group (at ICTY, in practical terms that meant the Serbs) the defendant happened to belonged to. A particularly obnoxious example were the attempts of ICTY “expert witnesses” to contextually portray verses of nineteenth century Serbian poet Njegoš as no less than the inspiration for the alleged genocide in Srebrenica.

Hopefully, the Ukrainian Tribunal will not have to resort to such pseudo-academic and pseudo-judicial skulduggery because it will operate scrupulously and above board, without fabricating or shaping facts to fit preconceived conclusions dictated by political controllers. That will be its huge moral and professional advantage.

There is no formal reason why the Ukrainian war crimes Tribunal should not be established within the ambit of the judicial systems of the Donbass republics, because such a court would be dealing primarily with criminal conduct in violation of international humanitarian law as it affected the population of those two entities. But it would carry greater weight and would thus be preferable for the task of investigating, apprehending, trying, convicting, and incarcerating offenders to be entrusted to an international body, backed by the legitimacy of recognised and indisputably sovereign nation-states.

Such an approach would make the Ukraine Tribunal’s factual findings and verdicts unquestionably legitimate, which might not entirely be the case with verdicts issued by some local courts. It would serve also an additional important purpose. It would dovetail perfectly with the emergence of the Fair World Order, intended to replace its relatively short-lived “NWO” counterpart. Taking advantage of the convenient opportunity presented by the current crisis, the Ukraine Tribunal could lay the groundwork for a revitalised system of international criminal law, serving as an essential foundational component of a broadly acceptable, inclusive, and viable future global order.

Thousands of people are leaving federal prison this month thanks to a law called the First Step Act, which allowed them to win early release by participating in programs aimed at easing their return to society.

But thousands of others may still remain behind bars because of fundamental flaws in the Justice Department’s method for deciding who can take the early-release track. The biggest flaw: persistent racial disparities that put Black and brown people at a disadvantage.

In a report issued days before Christmas in 2021, the department said its algorithmic tool for assessing the risk that a person in prison would return to crime produced uneven results. The algorithm, known as Pattern, overpredicted the risk that many Black, Hispanic and Asian people would commit new crimes or violate rules after leaving prison. At the same time, it also underpredicted the risk for some inmates of color when it came to possible return to violent crime.

“From the beginning, civil rights groups cautioned Congress and the Justice Department that use of a risk assessment tool to make these determinations would lead to racial disparities,” said Aamra Ahmad, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union.

“The Justice Department found that only 7% of Black people in the sample were classified as minimum level risk compared to 21% of white people,” she added. “This indicator alone should give the Department of Justice great pause in moving forward.”

The rule of unintended consequences

An American flag flies outside the Department of Justice in Washington in March 2019. Andrew Harnik/AP

Risk assessment tools are common in many states. But critics said Pattern is the first time the federal justice system is using an algorithm with such high stakes.

Congress passed the First Step Act in 2018 with huge bipartisan majorities. It’s designed to prepare people in prison for life afterward by offering credits toward early release for working or taking life skills and other classes while behind bars.

Lawmakers like Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and John Cornyn of Texas took inspiration from similar criminal justice reforms in states, which they said led to drops in both prison populations and crime. The senators pointed out that some 9 in 10 people in prison eventually return home, and they contended that preparing them for release made good sense for formerly incarcerated people and for public safety.

Only inmates who pose a low or minimal risk of returning to crime can qualify for the programs, with that risk level determined using the Pattern algorithm.

“The significance of this risk assessment tool is that it divides all federal prisoners essentially into two groups: people who can get credit for doing this programming and get out early, and people who can’t,” said Jim Felman, an attorney in Tampa, Fla., who has been following the First Step Act for years.

The implementation has been rocky. The Justice Department finished the first version of Pattern in a rush because of a tight deadline from Congress.

It then had to make tweaks after finding Pattern suffered from math and human errors.

About 14,000 men and women in federal prison still wound up in the wrong risk categories. There were big disparities for people of color.

“The legislation, I think, came from a good place,” said Melissa Hamilton, a professor of law and criminal justice at the University of Surrey who studies risk assessments. “It’s just the rule of unintended consequences is not really realizing the impediments it was going to have.”

Risk assessment tool “sounds highly technical, but it’s not”

“You use a term like ‘risk assessment tool,’ it has this patina of science, it sounds highly technical, but it’s not,” said Patricia Richman, who works on national policy issues for the Federal Public and Community Defenders. “A risk assessment tool is just a series of policy decisions.”

Those policy decisions are made by determining what counts as a risk factor and by how much.

Criminal history can be a problem, for example, because law enforcement has a history of overpolicing some communities of color. Other factors such as education level and whether someone paid restitution to their victims can intersect with race and ethnicity, too.

In its December report, the Justice Department concluded that some of the disparities could be reduced, “but not without tradeoffs” such as less accurate risk predictions. The department also said using race as a factor in the algorithm could trigger other legal concerns.

Still, it is consulting with experts about making the algorithm fairer and another overhaul of Pattern is already underway.

Attorney General Merrick Garland has directed the department to look for ways to assess racial bias and make the tool more transparent, a spokeswoman said.

One option is to adjust the cutoff points between the risk categories, allowing more prisoners to earn credits for release, which would “maximize access to First Step Act relief while ensuring public safety,” she said.

Ultimately, Garland will have to sign off on a new version. Then, Justice has to reevaluate the 14,000 people in prison who got lumped into the wrong category.

“This is just one example of the ways that harmful artificial intelligence systems are being rolled out in everything from the criminal legal system to employment decisions to who gets access to housing and social benefits,” said Sasha Costanza-Chock, director of research and design for the Algorithmic Justice League, which studies the social implications of artificial intelligence.

Costanza-Chock said the burden is on the Justice Department to prove the Pattern tool doesn’t have racist and sexist outcomes.

“Especially when systems are high risk and affect people’s liberty, we need much clearer and stronger oversight,” said Costanza-Chock.

The Metropolitan Detention Center prison in Los Angeles. David McNew/Getty Images

Looking for resolution

Felman, the Florida lawyer working with the American Bar Association, worried that the tool will continue to put many prisoners of color at a disadvantage.

“We will start to see more prisoners get out early,” he said. “My concern is that the color of their skin will not be reflective of fairness.”

The ACLU’s Ahmad said she’s seen enough.

“There are no technical fixes to these problems that could make Pattern and similar tools safe and fair to use,” Ahmad said. “We would urge the Justice Department to suspend the use of Pattern until it can adequately address these concerns.”

Hamilton, who studies risk assessments, thinks the Pattern tool may be worth saving. Consider the alternative, she said: decisions made by people who have all kinds of biases.

“So that’s the unfortunate thing is, it’s better than gut instinct of the very flawed humans that we all are, and can we improve it more than marginally, and that’s what we’re all working on?” Hamilton said.

npr.org

If there is one thing that is universal about governmental structures across the globe, be they Communist, Western-Style Democracy, Islamic or some other form, it is a 100% assuredness in Technocracy/Bureaucracy as the solution to any and all problems. Perhaps in Western countries where their Constitutions (or Common Law traditions) are supposedly sacred this tendency makes perfect sense. The Founding Fathers built America’s system to be bureaucratic as a defense against the excesses, abuses and whims of a single ruler or ruling party. So, we can be a bit forgiving to the West for falling into this logic trap, because it at least used to work in their favor and to an extent still does. But in Russia (where I reside) due to many historical events no one has any faith in the government, nor do they obey any laws they disagree with, and yet the answer to any tiny problem from Ivan Average is some vague government program. I have heard the same from those living in Italy, China and beyond – that all problems require a legal paperwork solution. But is this really an answer to anything? And why do all “problems” require a governmental solution?

Case in point, it would seem that over recent years numerous religious institutions have been threatened with violence, and some of the threats have become a reality including a hostage situation in Texas that Fox News describes in the following way…

“As Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker was preparing to begin Saturday services on the morning of Jan. 15, 2022, he welcomed a man who had knocked on the window and looked cold inside his synagogue. Cytron-Walker made the man tea and then began his livestreamed Shabbat service. With his back turned to the man, the rabbi recalls hearing a click, turning around, and seeing a gun.

For over 10 hours, this man held Rabbi Cytron-Walker and three other congregants hostage at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas.”

Fox also goes on to mention a few other instances in which those who were attending religious services were actually killed in their houses of worship. Of course, every time some tragedy happens on TV/YouTube our monkey brains impose themselves onto the situation, this tendency is especially true among women but men can and do fall prey to it as well. A sort of “what if this happened to me” reasoning makes the public want to demand action to “prevent this sort of thing from happening again”. We human beings may live in a secular world, yet our monkey brains are still filled with lots of magical thinking. Take a look at Hollywood, which is probably the least religious place on Earth, yet every celebrity’s home is filled with magic crystals and other trinkets of supernatural protection. Many of us, if not most of us, really believe that somehow hate, violence, and other bad parts of life can eventually be completely overcome. Our Medieval ancestors certainly prayed to God to intervene against all the awfulness of their brutal lives as only God could provide the utopia we desire, at the very least after we are dead.

The problem is that today, our God today is the government. They are the utopia makers. The state is supposed to provide an explanation to everything and an answer for everything to demonstrate its omnipotence as the justification for our worship and submission. The God of the Bible was okay with being a bit vague, allowing us to think that “everything happens for a reason” even those that we don’t like, and that there is an eternal battle of good vs. evil happening around us that will go on forever until the End Times.

This older version of God was just fine with having some things go unanswered and as the Father of humanity was, just like a human father, happy to let the kids work stuff out on their own. But our Divine Government that replaced the God of the Bible doesn’t have such a Chad attitude. This authority constantly has to take action and try to solve every issue like a nightmarish helicopter parent the only way it knows how… with legislation.

So the “solution” brought forth by Washington’s human-suit technocrats to the problem of violence (and threats of violence) at religious institutions is the “Pray Safe Act”. The details of which look something like this…

The Pray Safe Act, introduced to the U.S. Senate last week, represents a joint effort on the part of U.S. Sens. Rob Portman (R-OH) and Maggie Hassan (D-NH) to provide faith-based organizations and houses of worship with easy access to security best practices, federal grant programs, and training.

 Cosponsored by U.S. Sens. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Jacky Rosen (D-NV), the legislation would direct the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), working with the Department of Justice, the Executive Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and others as deemed appropriate, to create and codify a federal clearinghouse on safety and security best practices for both faith-based organizations and houses of worship.

 That clearinghouse would be responsible for providing these organizations with safety and security recommendations, as well as providing information on federal resources and grant programs available to that end.

So by this logic, the hostage situation in Texas, if we could turn back time, would have been surely avoided thanks to “safety and security recommendations”, “information on federal resources” and corruption’s best friend “grant programs”. How utterly intellectually insulting this is. This is what spitting in the face to every victim of terrorism in U.S. history looks like. The exploitation of 9/11 for Foreign Policy goals was worse, but that does not excuse this fresh pile of madness.

Rather than accepting that horrific things happen from time to time and that overall, the rate of violence in America is still fairly low in the grand scheme of things, the senators listed above have chosen to exploit a tragedy to bloat the government even further and make grant money dance.

This is not a solution to this supposed “problem”, in fact there is no solution. If someone wants to randomly attack someone and kill them, and they are willing to go to jail or die to do it (possibly due to being insane) then they will do it. This is a fact of life, and the God-Government should really step down from its throne of self-assured omnipotence.

Absolutely nothing needs to be done about these acts of terror at religious institutions as murder is already illegal, as is hostage taking, the police in most nations generally blow the heads off of terrorists anyways immediately (“we don’t negotiate with terrorists”) and the average person knows that if they try something like this, they will surely die. The government, in this case the U.S. government has had all the proper mechanisms in place for this sort of thing since the 1700s. Everyone in society knows that if you commit an act of terror, you’re done.

Perhaps there is that mental health crisis in America that bloggers talk about. Some say that Feminism has had a brutal affect on men, creating the incel culture that is often at the heart of mass shootings. So perhaps there are means by which we could turn back the clock to a time before the idea of random public mass murder was even fathomable. But this would never SOLVE the problem, only reduce it to an absolute bare minimum, to a level of extreme rarity. I don’t mean to say that truly nothing can be done to defuse these events before they happen, but it is truly impossible to make over 300,000,000 people never commit some form of Terrorism including making threats. You can only punish them afterwards or Judge Dredd them on the spot if they don’t surrender, both of which local, state and federal authorities have already been doing properly since the beginning.

Piling on new legislation, programs, packages, assistance and whatever other buzzwords you can think of onto the legal system as a response to acts of Terror is an insult to the intellect of the American populace and an exploitation of those who were the victims of it. Literally, doing nothing in response would be better than exploiting the dead for political masturbation. We are all trapped in an endless loop of demanding to have more and more bars put around the cage of technocratic imprisonment for “our safety”. If we begin to accept that life will never be a utopia, that it could be better, but will never be perfect, then we can finally be free of this truly universal “logic” that affects everyone, not just America.

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

The New York Times should give Daniel Hale proper credit and call for Biden to immediately pardon him. As long as he’s in prison, there is no justice.

By Sam CARLINER

The New York Times recently came through with a display of reporting that should be commended. On December 18, the paper announced its release of hundreds of the Pentagon’s confidential reports of civilian casualties caused by U.S. airstrikes in the Middle East. This followsits high profile investigations into the U.S. drone murder of the Ahmadi family during the Afghanistan withdrawal, and an American strike cell in Syria that killed dozens of civilians with airstrikes.

Daniel Hale joined the fight to hold the Pentagon seriously accountable. He joined years before the New York Times did, and was treated like a criminal for it.

Many journalists will, rightfully, praise the New York Times for its reporting on U.S. airstrikes and the civilian cost. Far fewer will point out how the inhumanity of U.S. airstrikes were first revealed in 2013 by whistleblower Daniel Hale.

Hale used his first hand experience identifying targets for the drone program to highlight how it relies on faulty criteria, and as a result, kills civilians. Later, Hale worked for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, where he had access to documents on how the drone program operates. Hale provided those documents to the Intercept which published them as The Drone Papers in 2015. While Hale’s documents were not as comprehensive as the trove recently published by the New York Times, they did provide much of the same core revelations, particularly the faulty nature of how intelligence is gathered and the high civilian-toll of air campaigns. Most notably, Hale’s documents revealed that 90% of the drone program’s victims were not the intended targets. Up until the recent reporting by the New York Times, Hale’s revelations were the most comprehensive proof of how U.S. air warfare functions.

To be fair, the Times’ reporting on the brutal nature and high civilian cost of U.S. airstrikes is not insignificant. Americans could have easily ignored the Pentagon’s violence now that the “boots on the ground” approach to intervention has largely ended with Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal. In fact, the use of airstrikes was championed by Obama so as to avoid anti-war sentiments from Americans. The Times actually highlights this, writing:

“The air campaign represents a fundamental transformation of warfare that took shape in the final years of the Obama administration, amid the deepening unpopularity of the forever wars that had claimed more than 6,000 American service members. The United States traded many of its boots on the ground for an arsenal of aircraft directed by controllers sitting at computers, often thousands of miles away.”

Still, as much as the Times’ reporting already seems to be provoking conversation around U.S. air warfare, it is concerning that this conversation comes with the risk of Hale’s own heroic actions being disregarded. The Times makes no mention of Hale’s actions, even as they receive accolades for supposedly breaking to the world the violence of U.S. airstrikes. More damning is how little the Times has commented on the fact that Hale was sentenced to nearly four years in prison earlier this year for exposing the drone program. Aside from a standard article about his sentencing published in July, Daniel Hale is absent from the New York Times’ pages. Azmat Khan, the reporter behind the “Civilian Casualty Files” has not mentioned Daniel Hale once on Twitter.

It’s not like there have not been updates in Hale’s story since he was sentenced. After his sentencing, Hale was kept languishing in a jail for over two months even though he was supposed to be transferred in a matter of weeks. Once finally transferred, Hale’s situation was made worse. He was supposed to be sent to a prison that would provide care for his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder diagnosis, but instead he is now being held in a communication management unit (CMU). CMU’s are designed for terrorists and “high-risk inmates” and detainees have highly restricted contact with the outside world. The American Civil Liberties Union has called on the U.S. government to end its use of CMUs, arguing that these “secretive housing units inside federal prisons in which prisoners are condemned to live in stark isolation from the outside world are unconstitutional, violate the religious rights of prisoners and are at odds with U.S. treaty obligations.”

Daniel Hale deserves freedom for revealing proof of the very crimes the New York Times is now being praised for exposing. His support team and anti-war activists have been working hard to grow concern and action for his cause, but that is a daunting task considering Hale is a person who the U.S. government, and U.S. military in particular, want silenced. But as the Times has shown with its own reporting of U.S. airstrikes, they have a platform that can cut through Pentagon-imposed silence. A single editorial calling for Hale’s release would do wonders for his cause.

Presumably, the Times reporters who have been investigating the violence of U.S. airstrikes are doing so because they believe the victims of U.S. air campaigns deserve justice. The Pentagon’s refusal to hold anyone accountable for their deadly Kabul airstrike in August signals that it will be an uphill battle holding anyone accountable for the newly-exposed airstrikes. Daniel Hale joined the fight to hold the Pentagon seriously accountable. He joined years before the New York Times did, and was treated like a criminal for it. The New York Times should give Daniel Hale proper credit and call for Biden to immediately pardon him. As long as he’s in prison, there is no justice.

commondreams.org

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

The indictment by Special Counsel John Durham of Igor Danchenko for lying to the FBI demonstrates conclusively the Steele dossier was wholly untrue. Clinton paid for the dossier to be created and Clinton people supplied the fodder. Steele, working with journalists, pushed the dossier into the hands of the FBI to try to derail the Trump campaign. When that failed, the dossier was used to attack the elected president of the United States. The whole thing was the actual and moral equivalent of a Cold War op where someone was targeted by the FBI with fake photos of them in bed with a prostitute.

Start with a quick review of what Durham uncovered about the most destructive political assassination since Kennedy.

Christopher Steele, paid by the Clinton campaign (after Clinton’s denial, it took a year for congressional investigators to uncover the dossier was commissioned by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, working for the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, paid through the Perkins-Coie law firm) did no investigative work. Instead, his reputation as a former British intelligence officer was purchased to validate a dossier of lies and then to traffic those lies to the FBI and journalists.

Durham’s investigation confirms one of Steele’s key “sources” is the now-arrested Danchenko, a Russian émigré living in the U.S. Steele was introduced to the Russian by Fiona Hill, then of the Brookings Institute (Hill would go on to play a key role in the Ukraine impeachment scam.) Danchenko completely made up most of what he told Steele about Trump-Russian collusion. What he did not make up himself he was spoon fed by Charles Dolan, a long-time Clinton hack and campaign regular. Ironically, Dolan had close ties not only to the Clintons but to the Russians as well; he and the public relations firm where he worked represented the Russian government and were registered as foreign agents for Russia. Dolan is credited with, among other things, making up the pee tape episode. Dolan also fed bogus info to Olga Galkina, another Russian who passed the information to Danchenko for inclusion in the dossier. Galkina noted in e-mails she was expecting Dolan to get her a job in the Hillary administration. Steele, a life-long Russia and intelligence expert, never questioned or verified anything he was told.

In short: Clinton pays for the dossier, Steele fills it with lies fed to him by a Clinton PR stooge through Russian cutouts, and the FBI swallowed the whole story. There never was a Russiagate. The only campaign which colluded with Russia was Clinton’s. And Democrats, knowing this, actually had the guts to claim it was Trump who obstructed justice.

That the dossier was a sham was evident to anyone who ever read a decent spy novel. It was a textbook information op and The American Conservative, without any access to the documents Durham now has, saw through it years ago, as did many other non-MSM outlets. See here (2/5/2018). Here (2/15/2018). Here (6/15/2018.) Here (3/25/2019.) Here (12/11/2019) and more. What was obvious from the publicly available information was, well, obvious to everyone but the FBI.

The dossier was the flimsy excuse the FBI used to justify a full-on investigation unprecedented in a democracy into the Trump campaign. That included electronic surveillance (obtained by the FBI lying directly to the FISA court and presenting Steele’s lies as corroborating evidence,) the use of undercover operatives, false flag ops with foreign diplomats and case officers, and prosecution threats over minor procedural acts designed to legally torture low level Trump staffers (Carter Page, who the FBI knew was a CIA source, and George Papadopoulos)  into “flipping” on the candidate.

Page in particular was a nobody with nothing, but the FBI needed him. Agents “believed at the time they approached the decision point on a second FISA renewal that, based upon the evidence already collected, Carter Page was a distraction in the investigation, not a key player in the Trump campaign, and was not critical to the overarching investigation.” They renewed the warrants anyway, three times, due to their value under the “two hop” rule. The FBI can extend surveillance two hops from its target, so if Carter Page called Michael Flynn who called Trump, all of those calls are legally open to monitoring. Page was a handy little bug used for a fishing expedition.

What’s left is only to answer was the FBI really that inept that they could not see a textbook op run against them or that the FBI knew early on they had been handed a pile of rubbish but needed some sort of legal cover for their own operation, spying on Trump, and thus decided to look the other way at the obvious shortcomings of Steele’s work.

“The fact pattern that John Durham is methodically establishing shows what James Comey and Andrew McCabe likely knew from day one the Steele dossier was politically-driven nonsense created at the behest of the Clinton campaign,” said Kevin Brock, the FBI’s former intelligence chief. “And yet they knowingly ran with its false information to obtain legal process against an American citizen. They defrauded not just a federal court, they defrauded the FBI and the American people.”

The 2019 Horowitz Report, a look into the FBI’s conduct by the Justice Department Inspector General, made clear the FBI knew the dossier was bunk and purposefully lied to the FISA court in claiming instead the dossier was backed up by investigative news reports, which themselves were secretly based on the dossier. The FBI knew Steele, who was on their payroll as a paid informant, had created a classic intel officer’s information loop, secretly becoming his own corroborating source, and gleefully looked the other way because it supported their goals.

How bad was it? At no point in handling info accusing the sitting president of being a Russian agent, what would have been the most significant political event in American history, did the FBI seriously ask themselves “So exactly where did this information come from, specific sources and methods please, and how could those sources have known it?” Were all the polygraphs broken? The FBI learned Danchenko was Steele’s primary source in 2017, via the Carter Page tap, and moved ahead anyway.

From the FBI’s perspective, turning a blind eye was not even that risky a gambit. They were so certain they would succeed (FBI agents and illicit lovers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page exchanged texts saying “Page: “Trump’s not ever going to become president, right? Strzok: No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.”) and Hillary would ascend to the Oval Office that they felt they would have top cover for their evil. After Trump won and the FBI’s coup planners shifted to impeachment, they held on to their top cover as James Comey presented himself as the man on the cross, aided by a MSM which cared only about a) ending Donald Trump and b) cranking up their ratings with dollops of the dossier’s innuendo. A mass media that bought lies about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and then promised “never again” did it again. 

If a genie granted me a wish, I would want a conversation with Robert Mueller under some sort of truth spell. Did Mueller “miss” all the lies in his lengthy investigation, hoping to protect his beloved FBI? Or did he see himself as a reluctant white knight, having realized during his investigation the real crime committed was coup planning by the FBI and thinking that by ignoring their actions but clearing Trump he would bring the whole affair to its least worst conclusion?

I suspect Mueller realized he had been handed a coup-in-progress to either abet (by indicting Trump on demonstrably false information) or bury. He could not bring himself to destroy his beloved FBI. But the former Marine could also not bring himself to become the Colin Powell of his generation, squandering his hard won reputation to validate something he knew was not true. Mueller split the difference, and kept silent on the FBI and left Trump to his own fates.

This is the third indictment by Durham. Danchenko’s indictment, Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann’s, and FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith’s depict criminal efforts to get Trump. The arrest of Danchenko makes clear Durham knows the whole story. What will he do with it? Will he walk his indictments up the ladder ever-closer to Hillary? Will he proceed sideways, leaving Hillary but moving deeper into the FBI? Maybe see if Fiona Hill connects the failed Russiagate coup she played a pivotal role in with the failed Ukrainegate impeachment she played a pivotal role in? Or will he use the stage of Congressional hearings as a way to bypass Joe Biden’s Justice Department and throw the real decision making back to the voters?

History will record this chapter of America’s story as one of its more sordid affairs. Only time however will tell if the greater tale is one of how close we came to ending our democracy via an intelligence agency coup, or whether Russiagate was just a nascent practice run by the FBI, on a longer road which led to our demise a president or two later. For those who belittled the idea of the Deep State, this is what it looks like exposed, all pink and naked.

wemeantwell.com