Saturday, January 09, 2021

The truths Julian Assange revealed

Julian Assange won't be extradited to the U.S. (for now), but he remains in prison in England-- and in legal purgatory-- indefinitely. Many of his supporters say that justice was served when he avoided extradition at a hearing this week, but true justice for Assange would actually be a presidential pardon and a ticker tape parade in his honor down New York's Fifth Avenue. Donald Trump's exit from office, however-- and maybe one that arrives even before Joe Biden's inauguration a week from Wednesday-- means that it would be at least four more years before a pardon could be granted. Biden played a key role in the Obama administration in pursuing and harassing Assange. The vice president called him a "high tech terrorist." His aides have been tight-lipped about whether or not he would even continue fighting the failed extradition process so a pardon on his watch, at this point, seems like a stretch.

What Assange provided us, though, via the WikiLeaks Iraq War Logs in 2010, the Afghanistan War Logs, and the uncovering of private and government diplomatic cables and emails subsequently, make our world an infinitely better one even if we all still continue to live under the heel of empire. Upon the occasion of a strong win in court this week, it's worth reviewing everything we've found out about the private actions and communications of the world's financial and political elite thanks to Assange's selfless efforts, and as compiled below by Matt Taibbi, Chris Hedges, and many other tenacious journalists-- mostly from other countries-- that have reviewed the logs.

- The Iraq War Logs, leaked to Assange's organization through the heroism of American soldier Chelsea Manning, revealed the 38-minute, so-called Collateral Murder video-- two Reuters journalists and ten other unarmed civilians being killed indiscriminately and in cold blood by U.S. soldiers in an Apache helicopter. Reuters had demanded an investigation into the deaths, but the U.S. military had privately concluded that the actions of the soldiers were in accordance with the law of armed conflict and its own "Rules of Engagement." The murdering U.S. airmen are laughing in parts of the video, saying things like, "Just fuckin' once you get on 'em, just open 'em up," "All right, hahaha, I hit em," and "Hey, you shoot, I'll talk." When a van arrived on the scene to pick up the wounded, it was fired at too.

--The routine torture of Iraqi prisoners beyond Abu Ghraib. U.S. officials failed to investigate hundreds of reported cases of abuse, rape, torture, and even murder by Iraqi allied soldiers.

--While the Pentagon was saying publicly that no body count existed regarding civilian deaths in Iraq, the leak showed that approximately 66,000 of the 109,000 people killed in the war between 2004 and 2009 (more than 60%) were civilians.

--Grotesque examples of war profiteering, including the use of mercenaries to commit horrific war crimes, such as Blackwater's Nissour Square Massacre in Iraq (for which the murderers just received presidential pardons) while under the lavish financial compensation of U.S. taxpayers.

--The killing of nearly 700 civilians in Iraq that approached too closely to U.S. checkpoints. 

--The 220 documents and 251,287 cables from "Cablegate" in 2011-- U.S. State Department classified cables dating back to 1966--revealed that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in 2009, ordered U.S. diplomats to act as spies on U.S. allies such as UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and German chancellor Angela Merkel. Clinton asked for the leaders' DNA, iris scans, fingerprints, and personal computer passwords. She also requested intelligence on British members of parliament. Further, our diplomats eavesdropped on a previous Secretary General, Kofi Annan, in 2003 during the weeks leading up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

--The U.S. military has been secretly launching bombs on targets in Yemen, leading to the deaths of many civilians. The Yemeni president, however, told General David Petraeus, via cable "We'll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours."

--Saudi's King Abdullah repeatedly urged the U.S. to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities to "cut off the head of the snake." Leaders in Israel, Jordan, and Bahrain also cabled the U.S. to encourage bombing Iran.

--Obama's White House and Clinton's State Department refused to criticize the 2009 military coup of Honduras even after the U.S. embassy provided information to them that the coup was "illegal and unconstitutional." Then the U.S. supported new elections in that country staged by the leader of the coup.

--In Afghanistan, employees of a U.S. government contractor called DynCorp hired child prostitutes to be used as sex slaves. They called the slaves "dancing boys." 

--Though it was contrary to the general opinion being trumpeted to the American people and the world, various cables saw Afghan president Hamid Karzai being called "an extremely weak man who did not listen to facts but was instead easily swayed by anyone who came to report even the most bizarre stories or plots against him."

--The Podesta email dump belonging to the Democratic National Committee and senior Democratic officials such as John Podesta exposed the donation of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and also identifying both nations as major funders of Islamic State (ISIL/ISIS). 

--Goldman Sachs paid Hillary Clinton $657,000 to give speeches, a sum large enough to only be considered bribery. Eighty pages of her transcripts to Wall Street banks were posted, including her admission within that she was "far removed" from ordinary American life because of the "economic, you know, fortunes that my husband and I now enjoy." 

--Clinton told the financial elite of the United States that she wanted "open trade and open borders," and believed that Wall Street executives were best positioned to manage that economy. This was in contradiction to her campaign statements in Rust Belt states that she opposed open-border trade deals such as NAFTA.

--He exposed that the DNC, rather than fighting against the threat of Donald Trump, made efforts to influence the Republican primaries in 2016 to ensure that Trump was that party's nominee.

--The DNC appeared to favor Clinton over rival Bernie Sanders. The chair of the DNC gave the Clinton campaign debate questions in advance through her connection with the televising cable network.

--He revealed that Clinton was the principle architect of the war in Libya and pursued the war in order to polish her credentials as a presidential candidate.

--One of the first WikiLeaks document dumps revealed that the Thai government's blacklist of internet sites that were purportedly linked to child pornography was actually a list of at least 1,200 websites critical of the Thai royal family.

--WikiLeaks released the Camp Manual for Guantanamo Bay, which revealed that children as young as 15 were being held in the U.S. prison in Cuba, among the many other prisoners that were being held there, often for years, without trial or charge. The army had a policy of keeping some prisoners from Red Cross inspectors and holding new prisoners in isolation for two weeks to make them more compliant to interrogators.  

--He released the financial secrets in the draft charter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

--He incidentally and generally revealed that the United States news media could not be relied upon to tell the truth, to pursue it, or even to report on it when it was revealed plainly to them. We learned about the horrors of Abu Ghraib prison from the corporate-owned media, but there have been hundreds of other Abu Ghraibs. 

Assange has been hounded by the U.S. government for more than ten years. After being held in protective custody and being granted political asylum for much of the time at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, he was eventually arrested by British authorities under the flimsiest of legal justifications. Reports say he hasn't been outside since 2012 and now suffers from extreme ill health behind bars. Chelsea Manning was charged with 22 violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Espionage Act, including aiding the enemy, for whistleblowing the war crimes that were exposed in the Iraq War Logs. Despite the litany of crimes and deceits detailed within these documents, Manning and Assange, the two heroes, are considered by the government to be the two criminals. Assange has been threatened with extradition to the U.S. even though he's never lived here, is not a U.S. citizen, and his news organization has never been based here. He's been threatened with the charge of treason-- a death penalty offense-- even though, again, he's born in Australia and never a citizen or even a resident of the U.S. 

We're being told that Donald Trump is the biggest fascist threat we've faced, but virtually all of these reveals are of crimes or lies committed before he swore the oath of office. America is the fascist threat, and WikiLeaks is the most dangerous opposition to the uniquely powerful brand of American authoritarianism. As a collective nation, we've already possessed for years the Trump instinct to project our own weaknesses onto our opponents. This is how a high-tech terrorist like Joe Biden can label Assange the same. Assange is journalism that is out of compliance with America's tightly-controlled narratives and its extremely violent nature. What's at stake in the Assange case is the future legality of any news that might be perceived as damaging to the state. The next person to report a My Lai massacre is a criminal. There is no "fake news" contained in a WikiLeaks document dump. These are the documents. For all to see. Julian Assange closed what Taibbi calls the information loophole between facts and the citizenry-- and that's considered the worst possible crime you can commit in the United States. Trump is leaving but the lockdown is just starting.

posted by CM @ 3:32 PM 0 comments

Thursday, January 07, 2021

Caracas, January 6th, 2021

By now you’ve seen the image of the armed halfwit raising his fist and sitting at the front of the U.S. Senate Chamber yesterday after he muscled his way in with his insurrectionist pals and exposed bare the double standard of who’s allowed to protest in this country and who’s not. But now imagine that accomplishing simply what he had just done getting past those barriers also made him our new president! If you live in Venezuela or Bolivia, you don’t have to imagine it. That’s what has happened in each of those countries within the last two years-- and with the full backing of the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency and our elected government officials. 

In Bolivia, where their lithium is prized, and in Venezuela, where the desired natural extraction is crude oil, the presence of a Socialist president loyal to the interests of the indigenous population cannot be tolerated by U.S. business henchmen. As Henry Kissinger once asserted of the neighboring country of Chile, "I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves." Times they do not change. 

A very similar scene as yesterday played out in Bolivia in November of 2019. Fascist mobs took over public institutions during the bloody coup that switched out then-president, Socialist Evo Morales, with a brutal right-wing regime set to satisfy the greed of foreign investors. 

In Venezuela, only eight months earlier, the fascist cretin who, in a prescient image to yesterday, literally hopped the fence of the seat of government to become what Donald Trump called the "true and legitimate president of Venezuela." He wore a blue sport coat rather than the tri-cornered hat, beaver pelts, and antler horns favored by the Trump army, but he was Juan Guaido, an unelected right-wing leader opposed to the democratically-elected Nicolas Maduro, and U.S. lawmakers gave him a standing ovation when Trump dropped his name during the 2020 State of the Union address. Another fascist leader there named Carlos Vecchio encouraged violence and attacks on government buildings, then was welcomed as Guaido’s ambassador in Washington, shaking hands and having his picture taken with Nancy Pelosi, an American politician who has been publicly hyperventilating over the threat of foreign election meddling for the better part of four years. 

In February of 2019, yesterday’s hero of democracy, Mike Pence, made a claim to the lap dogs in the American news media that Maduro loyalists had turned on their own people, setting fire to a truck filled with food and medicine meant for the Venezuelan people. A subsequent New York Times investigation, however, revealed that the stunt for the cameras was actually orchestrated by the Maduro opposition. It’s how the CIA conducts business and always has. There was the fabricated Gulf of Tonkin attack designed to trigger war with Vietnam. There were the false claims that Saddam Hussein was ripping babies out of incubators in Kuwait. Then the lie about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq a decade later. CNN and National Public Radio lied to the world about the truck in Venezuela. And it didn’t end there. Power outages and chronic supply shortages there are blamed on Maduro when they’re most certainly a result of crippling and illegal U.S. sanctions against the country. As is increasingly the case within the United States, the news media only sees an election as fair and legitimate if their favored candidate wins. 

These events of Wednesday are mostly without precedent in the United States, but they’re the modus operandi of the CIA beyond our borders, and when they’re employed, it’s always with much more violence than what we just witnessed here, particularly in South and Central America. In addition to the coups in the aforementioned nations, there was Chile, with the assassination of the democratically-elected Salvador Allende in 1973. There were regime changes in Honduras, Nicaragua, and Guatemala during the ‘80s. It’s a lengthy list-- Paraguay and Brazil also. Haiti, El Salvador, Panama, Argentina, the Dominican Republic. When the CIA-backed interventions take place, always to the financial benefit of the American ruling class, politicians here and the subservient news media cheer the developments. There’s no hand-wringing like we saw yesterday, rushes to label "domestic terrorism," "sedition," or "treason." There are no heartfelt odes from commentators about the fragility of democracy. In the Brown Americas, we simply welcome the new marionette of the multinationals and back up the truck. 

We’ve also learned from the debacle of Iraq not to let partisanship keep stepping in the way. Leaders of both parties championed the "humanitarian" intervention of the United States in Venezuela and Bolivia. For Maduro and Venezuela, the choices provided by the U.S. were to be removed by force or for the president to leave peaceably. The self-rule of the people of Venezuela is nobody’s choice in Washington. Liberals don’t care. Rachel Maddow, champion of all things progressive, went on MSNBC after the coup to embrace John Bolton, the militarist who has proclaimed that “this is our hemisphere.” She launched into a tirade about how President Trump had obstructed Bolton’s efforts to topple Maduro. To her, Venezuelan self-determination is just another victory for Vladimir Putin. Nevertheless, the Venezuelan people prevailed. They returned Maduro’s party to power in 2020.

Venezuelans have seen it, and they had a strong message for Americans yesterday, translated… 

The Government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela expresses its concern with the acts of violence that are taking in the city of Washington, United States.

Venezuela condemns the political polarization and the spiral of violence that only reflects the deep crisis that the political and social system of the United States is going through. 

With this unfortunate episode, the United States is suffering the same thing that it has generated in other countries with its policies of aggression. Venezuela hopes that soon the violence will cease and the American people can finally open a new path towards stability and social justice. 

Caracas, January 6th, 2021

posted by CM @ 11:36 AM 0 comments