Losing the Pentagon's Ear: Whited-Out by AFRICOM

AFRICOM Calls for My “Elimination” (From Their Daily Media Reports)

by Nick Turse - TomDispatch

April 21, 2019

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Or to bring this thought experiment into the modern age -- if it happens in the forest, does it stay in the forest?

I ask this question because it has a bearing on the article to come. Specifically, what if an article of mine on the U.S. military appears somewhere in our media world and that military refuses to notice? Does it have an impact? Before I explain, I need to shout a little: AFRICOM! AFRICOM! AFRICOM!

Any media monitoring service working for U.S. Africa Command, the umbrella organization for American military activity on the African continent, would obviously notice that outburst and provide a “clip” of this article to the command.

But just to be safe: AFRICOM! AFRICOM! AFRICOM!

Now, there is no excuse for this article not to appear in AFRICOM’S clips, which are packaged up and provided to the Africa Command’s media relations office in Stuttgart-Moehringen, Germany, on weekdays as the “AFRICOM Daily News Review.” In fact, including Africa Command or its acronym 11 times in the first 200 words of this piece must be some kind of record, the sort that should certainly earn this article the top spot in tomorrow’s review.

But no matter how often I mention AFRICOM’s name, I know perfectly well that’s not going to happen. Let me explain. 

Tomgram: Nick Turse, No Need to Whisper, AFRICOM Isn't Listening In

What is it about the U.S. military and TomDispatch? Last August, I discovered (thanks to a correspondent in that military) that the Pentagon’s computer networks had blocked this website. (The message you received if you tried to get to it: “You have attempted to access a blocked website. Access to this website has been blocked for operational reasons by the DOD Enterprise-Level Protection System.”) And the reason/category for blocking it: “hate and racism.” As I wrote at the time, I could after a fashion understand why our work might fall under that rubric: “TomDispatch has always hated America’s never-ending, ever-spreading, refugee- and terror-producing wars that now extend from South Asia across the Middle East and deep into Africa.” And I added, “Among the authors who have spread TomDispatch’s antiwar gospel of hatred -- now so judiciously cut off by the Pentagon -- Nick Turse, in particular, has long grimly tracked the growth and spread of Washington’s forever wars and of the Special Operations forces, the semi-secret military that has become, in these years, their heart and soul.”

Little did I know how accurate I was, however. Today, TomDispatch regular and Managing Editor Nick Turse explains how he personally got “eliminated” from the attention of AFRICOM, the command he’s covered so assiduously for years in a way that its personnel evidently didn’t find quite flattering enough. In fact, it could be said that when it comes to criticism of American wars, this website has been eerily on target since it began in 2002. And it’s true that if you had read any of our pieces on American war making from 2004 to 2010, 2011 to the piece I posted last week, you might have felt a certain need to stop a moment and think twice about the “forever” that’s been embedded in this country’s twenty-first-century wars since they were first launched in October 2001. And that, of course, would have created obvious problems for a military intent on fighting its “infinite” conflicts to essentially the end of time.

Under the circumstances, if I had been U.S. Africa Command, which now officially plans, for example, to be in Somalia at least until 2026 (and I’m sure that no one at AFRICOM thinks of that as a real end date either), I might have “eliminated” Turse, too. But for those of you still capable of checking him out, here’s a blow-by-blow account of his adventures in AFRICOM-land. Tom

AFRICOM Calls for My “Elimination” 

(From Their Daily Media Reports)

by Nick Turse

The “Elimination” of “Tom’s Dispatch”

“Like every organization that has a role in the public sphere, it is important to maintain awareness of events, incidents, and the atmospherics in order to participate tactically and strategically in the ongoing discussion,” AFRICOM’s present chief spokesman, John Manley, told me when I asked about the command’s media-tracking efforts. 

“We need to monitor events occurring in our AOR [area of responsibility], which is one of the most dynamic and complex regions on Earth, in order to provide the most appropriate and effective counsel for leaders to make informed decisions.”

Who could argue with that? And yet documents I obtained from AFRICOM via the Freedom of Information Act indicate that the command may never know this article even exists, even though it’s already mentioned AFRICOM 15 times.

How could that be? As a start, don’t blame some project manager at the Fairfax, Virginia-based ECS Federal, LLC (now ECS), a military contractor and “leading provider of solutions in science, engineering, and advanced technologies” hired to monitor the media and provide the command with news clips. Presumably, that person had been conscientiously taking your tax dollars in exchange for checking what outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and TomDispatch had to say about AFRICOM -- until, that is, U.S. Africa Command put an end to it.

Yours truly has been writing about the command for TomDispatch since 2012, as well as for The Intercept, Vice News, and Yahoo News, among other outlets.

I’ve exposed a “secret war” in Libya involving more than 550 U.S. drone strikes and reported on a network of African outposts integral to such warfare. I’ve written several pieces on AFRICOM’s even larger network of outposts across the continent. I’ve covered killings and torture by U.S.-backed local forces on a drone base in Cameroon frequented by American military personnel, as well as cold-blooded executions committed by those same Cameroonian forces. I’ve written on the expansion of a drone outpost in the Horn of Africa and its role in lethal strikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria; on the construction of a $100-million drone base in Niger and its quarter-billion-dollar operating costs (as well as skepticism about “U.S. intentions in the region”); on a previously unreported outpost in Mali; on a hushed-up Pentagon Inspector General’s investigation into failures in the planning and carrying out of humanitarian projects; on U.S. missions in Niger, including an October 2017 ambush that killed four American soldiers; on the increasing number of U.S. special-ops missions across Africa; on special-ops activities and outposts in Libya; on a surge in the number of special-ops personnel continent-wide, as well as an even more impressive increase in the number of U.S. military activities there -- and that’s just for a start.

By September 15, 2017, I had already written more than 20 pieces about U.S. military activity in Africa for TomDispatch and had -- just days before -- revealed at the Intercept that the National Security Agency (NSA) had built a network of eavesdropping outposts in Ethiopia. AFRICOM had clearly had enough of me. At 8:10 that morning, someone at the command’s media relations office fired off an email whose subject line was, ominously enough: “Elimination of Author/Sources.” As it happened though, that act proved to have more in common with the proverbial ostrich than a drone strike. The note was, if you’ll excuse the pun, terse. 

It read:

The following outlets should not be included in news clips:

The Intercept

Tom’s Dispatch

Reporter’s not to include:

Nick Turse.

Thanks.

A September 2017 email from the AFRICOM Media Relations Office

calling for the “elimination” of Nick Turse and “Tom’s Dispatch.”

Leaving aside that there’s no publication called “Tom’s Dispatch,” the redacted email to a program manager at ECS Federal made it clear that someone at the Africa Command’s media shop preferred not to know what I was writing about AFRICOM.

This backroom blackballing (about which I then knew nothing) would burst into the open when spokesperson Robin Mack started hanging up on me if I called the press office for information. Not long after, Lieutenant Commander Anthony Falvo, then head of AFRICOM’s public affairs branch, told me bluntly that the command was no longer going to respond to my questions. Any of them. “We don’t consider you a legitimate journalist, really,” he said and then hung up on me.

At the time that directive was written, AFRICOM’s media monitoring efforts were supposedly brand new. 

“The requirement began in August 2017 and was being refined over the next few months in 2017 to ensure the product met the needs of the command,” AFRICOM’s John Manley would explain once we were all talking again and I asked why I had been blacklisted. 

“The stories included in the ‘AFRICOM Daily News Review’ generally come from mainstream media and African local/regional press,” he added. “Because of the volume of published reports in mainstream media, we don’t typically include bloggers and others who write for niche websites and publications.”

His response left me curious, since once upon a time someone at least was looking at my pieces there. After all, a year before I was axed, an email from an AFRICOM media relations officer to fellow spokesperson Samantha Reho referenced a TomDispatch piece of mine, indicating that it was “not going in the clips.” So, in August 2016, there was evidently previous media monitoring and TomDispatch was apparently already being excluded.

AFRICOM’s anti-blog bias also seems strange for a command that once ran its own blog. Similarly, it’s odd that the Intercept was considered an unworthy niche publication when AFRICOM often provides comment to that very same outlet. Wouldn’t the command at least be interested in how its statements were being used?

Admittedly, TomDispatch has long billed itself as a “regular antidote to the mainstream media,” which may have especially rankled AFRICOM due to that command's clear pro-mainstream bias and history of bestowing most-favored-journalist status on marquee cable news and television network journalists. I know this because in October 2017, while attempting to hang up on me, AFRICOM press office personnel accidentally put me on speakerphone, allowing me to listen in on closed-door conversations in their office for roughly an hour.

During that time, while they repeatedly ignored my calls (made from a separate line) or unceremoniously hung up on me, I listened in as they entered into embargo agreements with TV reporters, providing information on background to journalists willing to withhold news about Sergeant La David Johnson, one of the soldiers killed in an ambush in Niger that month. Such arrangements are common enough and entirely understandable when lives may be at stake. Still, I was struck by how well reporters who agreed to play ball with the press office were treated.

Of course, AFRICOM also does include “African local/regional press” outlets like Mareeg.com (an “independent news website” focused on Somalia) in its clips, but this evidently isn’t a hard-and-fast rule -- at least if I’m even tangentially involved. As one ECS Federal employee wrote, “Attached is the daily media monitoring report for Thursday, 21 September 2017. Please note that we left out this piece from a Somali outlet Mareeg that was critical of AFRICOM and U.S. activities in East Africa since it was based off Nick Turse’s recent article in The Intercept” -- one focused on leaked top-secret NSA documents on U.S. electronic surveillance efforts in Ethiopia.

“That’s right,” replied a contact in AFRICOM’s public affairs office, “please omit any Intercept articles, or articles based on Nick Turse’s ‘stories.’” (I must admit that I get a kick out of those scare quotes around “stories”!)

Finally, to confuse things further, I learned that AFRICOM also maintains a double standard regarding my reporting. While my articles from the Intercept and TomDispatch are verboten, those from Vice News are not. “We are aware of your stories that appear in major news organizations (i.e., your VICE story of Dec 12, 2018). Those are included,” Manley wrote me about an article on the U.S. conducting more named military operations and activities in Africa than in the Middle East. “The VICE story appeared in the December 13, 2018 edition of the Daily Media Summary. I might add it was the first story in the Executive Summary, which highlights the five or six most impactful stories of the day.”

It’s unclear, however, why its impact was significantly greater than those articles that got me banned from AFRICOM’s Daily News Review. (An impact in and of itself.) Like dozens of pieces before it, the reporting in that article laid bare much that the command had long kept secret, including that U.S. forces have suffered casualties in Cameroon, Chad, Kenya, Mali, Nigeria, Somalia, and Tunisia in recent years, in addition to those high-profile deaths in Niger in 2017.

Undercover Articles

Since AFRICOM generally avoids my pieces from “niche” outlets, I assume that the command has no idea that I spent an hour listening in on their press office’s mundane conversations, off-color jokes, and screaming fits back in 2017. I published that story (strike one!) at The Intercept (strike two!) just months after AFRICOM formally excised articles of mine from their daily news clips (strike three!). The command may also not know that, about a month later, another Intercept article of mine was accompanied by an audio clip of their then-media chief, Anthony Falvo, deeming me an illegitimate journalist. Then again, the first time that John Manley, AFRICOM’s current press chief, took a call from me, he asked if we were on the record and if I was recording our conversation. So perhaps word had somehow gotten to him.

Suffice it to say that AFRICOM’s press office and I are, for the moment, back on speaking terms and Manley has, in fact, been the very model of a modern military press officer: courteous, responsive, and -- under the extreme limitations of his office -- even helpful. It’s been something of a sea change.

Naturally, then, I briefly wondered whether, after this piece was published at TomDispatch, his attitude toward my future queries might change. Would he stop taking my calls? Hang up on me? Ignore emailed requests for answers to basic questions? Or use any of the other tactics wielded by his predecessors?

Manley’s behavior, as I said, has been commendably professional, but I suddenly realized that I had nothing to worry about anyway -- unless he’s suddenly started reading TomDispatch in his off-hours. As far as I know, this website remains on AFRICOM’s blacklist, which means that this article will never appear on their radar, much less in the executive summary of their Daily News Review. While the command will answer my questions, ignorance is apparently bliss when it comes to what I write (Vice News excepted), no matter what I reveal about, or how many times I mention, AFRICOM in an article. For now, what happens at TomDispatch stays at TomDispatch -- at least when it comes to Africa Command.

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch and a contributing writer for the Intercept. His latest book is Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan. His website is NickTurse.com.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Copyright 2019 Nick Turse

Recognizing and Ameloriating the Effects of Authoritarian Sociopathy

How to Deprogram a Sociopath: A Proposal

by James Corbett - The Corbett Report

April 20, 2019

Davi Barker of The Black Sale joins James Corbett to discuss his book, Authoritarian Sociopathy. They talk about the various psychological experiments that have been done in the past to show people's propensity to obey or disobey authority, and Barker proposes his own experiment that could take this research even further.

Watch this video on BitChute / DTube / YouTube or Download the mp4

SHOW NOTES: The Black Sale

Authoritarian Sociopathy

Davi Barker – Authoritarian Sociopathy – Libertopia 2013

The TSA Is A Milgram Experiment

Interview 1421 – Bruce Levine on Resisting Illegitimate Authority

Exercising Canada's Foreign Policy Muscularity

Canada to Russia: Interference Is Okay If It Destabilizes You but Not the Other Way Around

by Mathew Ehret - SCF

April 15, 2019

In the midst of one of the most de-stabilizing scandals to rock Canada in years, Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland, (left) announced on April 5 that the threat of “Foreign interference” going into the October 2019 elections was at an all-time high.

Sitting beside her UK counterpart at a G7 meeting in France, Freeland stated: “Interference is very likely and we think there have already been efforts by malign foreign actors to disrupt our democracy”.

Her warning was echoed by an embattled puppet Prime Minister in Ottawa who stated, it is “very clearly that countries like Russia are behind a lot of the divisive campaigns … that have turned our politics even more divisive and more anger-filled than they have been in the past.”

The Measures to Defend the British Deep State

In order to counteract this “foreign threat”, several Canadian mechanisms have been announced to “keep democracy safe” in alignment with the G7, Five Eyes and NATO. These mechanisms are:

The creation of an “Incident Public Protection Panel” run by five Privy Council bureaucrats under the Clerk of the Privy Council which will exist outside of the authority of the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada, whose job is to maintain the integrity of elections. In defense of this mysterious group, Canada’s Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould stated that “it won’t be one person who will decide what Canadians will be allowed to know” (apparently having five people decide is more democratic). The new Clerk of the Privy Council is Ian Stugart, who served as former deputy minister to Chrystia Freeland until just a few weeks ago.

A Security and Intelligence Election Threats Task Force which will incorporate all of Canada’s intelligence agencies such as the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the RCMP, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) and Freeland’s Global Affairs Canada. All of these agencies are Privy Council organizations.

The Rapid Response Mechanism of the G7 created in June 2018 and headquartered in Ottawa Canada in Freeland’s Global Affairs Office and Privy Council Office.

While Russia is being set up as the scapegoat of the collapsing western liberal establishment, this most recent red alarm by Freeland and Canada’s response to the “danger” is useful for two reasons:

First and foremost, Freeland’s shameless warnings over “foreign interference” have become so loud that an irony has become unavoidable. She has after all been caught red handed behind the destabilization of both Ukraine and Venezuela. Secondly, by reviewing the mechanisms being created by Canada to counter-act this “threat”, a clear insight is provided into the inner workings of the actual foreign influences which infiltrated Canada many decades ago.

Chrystia Freeland: Regime Change Princess of Ukraine and Venezuela

On the first point, Freeland’s role as a co-architect of the nazi-fueled overthrow of a pro-Russian government in February 2014 is now well known. Aside from her family’s Nazi connections going back to her grandfather Michael Chomiak’s leading role as a Nazi collaborator in WWII, and her own mother’s role in helping to draft Ukraine’s neo-liberal constitution, Freeland herself not only befriended leading neo-Nazi collaborators such as Canadian Ukrainian Congress’ president Paul Grod and but has also promoted NATO’s anti-Russian expansion across eastern Europe.

Less well known but equally important is Freeland’s leading role in planning 

for the Venezuelan coup attempt which has been recently halted 

thanks to Russia’s March 23rd intervention.

Working alongside fellow Oxford operative Ben Rowswell (now head of the Canadian International Council/ Chatham House of Canada) during his three year tenure as Ambassador to Venezuela (2014-2017), Freeland set up a program for regime change which involved a two-part formula of 1) mobilizing mass direct support for the overthrow of a government, and 2) gaining international support for said overthrow.

Rowswell’s on-the-ground work was designed to achieve the former as he himself admitted in a 2017 interview saying “We became one of the most vocal embassies in speaking out on human rights issues and encouraging Venezuelans to speak out”. Before leaving his post to become the head of the Chatham House of Canada, he tweeted “I don’t think they (anti-Maduro forces) have anything to worry about because Minister Freeland has Venezuela way at the top of her priority list”.

Working on fulfilling the 2nd part of the formula, Freeland directed the creation of the “Lima Group”. A Global News article of January 24 described the group in the following terms: “Playing a key role behind the scenes was Lima Group member Canada, whose Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland spoke to Guaido the night before Maduro’s swearing-in ceremony to offer her government’s support should he confront the socialist leader”.

It shouldn’t be too surprising in our day and age that a nation with such a high reputation as “polite Canada” is actuality, an active agency for regime change and global governance. Canada’s very Prime Minister did assert in 2016 that “Canada is the world’s first post national-state nation”. What may surprise some readers is that Canada itself was infiltrated by a foreign player many years ago and what we will briefly see is that Canada can only be called the “world’s first post national-state nation” because it never really became a genuine nation in the first place, but was always manipulated by a foreign power... although not the one you think.

The “Foreign Influence” Controlling Canada

While a longer presentation is needed to do this story justice, it is enough to note for now that neither Freeland, nor Rowswell are operating on behalf of Canada’s interests, but are rather both operatives run by an entity that took over Canada many decades ago and are currently directed by two interlocking organizations: The Privy Council Office and the Rhodes-Milner Round Table Group.

The Privy Council Office

The Privy Council office was set up in 1867 in order to act as the British hand guiding its newly formed confederacy (Canada nearly became a part of Lincoln’s America in the wake of the Civil War. The only thing stopping that outcome was Britain’s creation of a confederation. The full story is told in the Imperial Myth of Canada’s National Policy.). While its power was always great, there was still room for independent policy making by nationalistic elected officials when the international conditions were favorable.

This was nearly entirely destroyed during the reign of technocratic golden boy Pierre Elliott Trudeau during his 1968-1973 reform of the Federal Government under the guidance of the OECD’s Sir Alexander King. It was during this time Sir King’s Club of Rome (Ottawa branch) was set up in Ottawa under the guidance of Trudeau and his clerk of the Privy Council Michael Pitfield, and other neo-Malthusian technocrats such as Privy Council President Michel Lamontagne, Maurice Strong, and Governor General Roland Mitchener. It was from this control point in Ottawa in 1971 that the work later to become known as Limits to Growth was funded by tax payers and which became the bible for the new Malthusianism and blueprint for the “post-industrial society”. It is from this cybernetics central node that the web of governance both in Canada and also across other British infiltrated territories in the Trans-Atlantic system is coordinated under the directives of London.

Sir Alexander King, working through the Club of Rome advanced 

the Malthusian revival known as “Carrying Capacity” which presupposed 

a world of fixed resources and discounted the parameter of human creativity

The current President of the Privy Council is Justin Trudeau’s childhood friend Dominic Leblanc, son of former Governor General (i.e.: Head of State of Canada) and co-controller of the Canada 2020 think tank which created Justin as an Obama-modelled puppet in 2006. Following in the footsteps of Pierre Trudeau’s Limits to Growth, it is this very network which is at the heart of the Green New Deal now being pushed internationally. Another leading member of Canada2020 is Facebook Canada’s Kevin Chan who will be working closely with the Freeland’s Security and Intelligence Election Threats Task Force.

The oath of every member of the Privy Council member (which includes both private individuals and also every cabinet minister of government) is: “I, [name], do solemnly and sincerely swear that I shall be a true and faithful servant to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, as a member of Her Majesty's Privy Council for Canada.” Additionally to becoming a Privy Councillor, the Prime Minister must additionally give another oath stating: “I, [name] do swear (declare) that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada, Her Heirs and Successors.

The Milner-Rhodes Trust Group

Coordinating closely with the Privy Council office for over 100 years is an organization known as the Round Table Group (c.1902) which was created with funds from South Africa’s “race patriot” and diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes who wished to use his wealth in order to advance a “church for the extension of the British Empire” and “the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire, the inauguration of a system of Colonial representation in the Imperial Parliament which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire.”

Upon Rhodes’ death in 1902, Lord Alfred Milner directed Rhodes’ trust and created the Round Table Movement across all British Territories. The trust was also directed towards the creation of the Rhodes Scholarship system designed to indoctrinate talented young minds around the world in Oxford before deploying them back into their countries of origin in order to infiltrate all public and private fields of influence. The Roundtable groups (dubbed the Council on Foreign Relations upon its creation in the United States in 1921), changed its name several times and today is known as the Royal Institute for International Affairs/Chatham House in the UK and the Canadian International Council (CIC) in Ottawa*.

Regime Change disciple Ben Rowswell’s presidency as head of the CIC and Chrystia Freeland’s status as an Oxford Rhodes Scholar (having been brought into Liberal politics via Rhodes Scholar/Canada2020 controller Bob Rae in 2013) should give any thinker a moment of grave pause.

The Strategic Issue at Hand

As ugly as this picture may appear to some, it should not cause sadness or even anger.

Only pity mixed with a dose of hope are appropriate, since we are in fact witnessing the desperate death rattle of a Monarchical system of empire which has too long poisoned the well of human civilization and which must now give way for something better. Although this imperial system may be deploying every asset and dirty trick it has in opposition to the new paradigm now emerging under the guiding leadership of Russia and China, it is becoming increasingly clear that this empire cannot win. Its regime change plans have failed, its Green New Deals are failing and even the irrational aesthetical traditions underlying this system of post-modernism are giving way to an optimistic artistic sensibility that seeks to re-unite beauty with truth evidenced by the renewed interest in classical art and music during the recent Belt and Road Musical Festival on March 24, 2019.

Russia and China’s leadership have not only consolidated a partnership of nations across Eurasia and Africa around this new paradigm, but they have also found what no one thought was possible just a few years ago: a potential ally in an America which is returning to its nationalist sensibilities under the surprising leadership of Donald Trump.

During Trump’s two first years as President, the long British infiltration of America has finally begun to fall apart with the collapse of the Mueller investigation and the exposure of the British-run deep state that Mueller was a part of.

The question now remains: With the impending meltdown of the trans-Atlantic financial system, and olive branch of cooperation which China has offered to the west via the Belt and Road Initiative and the World Landbridge which can bring this system of development into the Americas and Africa, will America join hands as an ally and will Canada follow suit in order to become a true sovereign nation freed of all foreign imperial influence once and for all?

* Original research on the Roundtable/Rhodes Trust infiltration of North America can be found in the Canadian Patriot #18 (British Roots of the Deep State Exposed), Canadian Patriot #19 (Green New Deal vs New Silk Road) and volumes 2-4 of the Untold History of Canada.

One Year After: Dissecting Nicaragua's Political Upheaval

NicaNotes: “Live From Nicaragua: Uprising Or Coup?”

by Staff - Afgj.org 

via Popular Resistance

April 20, 2019

As we stand here today on the brink of the one year anniversary of the spasm of violence and confusion that engulfed Nicaragua last year, it is time to tell the truth and correct the historical record about what actually happened during three months of violence.

The Alliance for Global Justice, with contributions by over 20 co-authors plus editors, photographers, videographers, and folks who lived the terror of those times, has produced a free electronic book available in pdf and electronic book formats.

Live from Nicaragua: Uprising our Coup? is a reader with both original articles and reprints of articles written during the troubled times.



Photo: María Rodríguez?Flickr

In 2018, Nicaragua suffered its worst political violence and upheaval since the end of the US backed Contra war of the 1980s. Extremely polarized controversy persists about what caused this conflict, how it developed and what is means for Nicaragua’s people now.

This book brings together material completely excluded from mainstream coverage of events in Nicaragua. The book has been produced by people with an unquestionable and long demonstrated commitment to grass roots democracy and community development in Nicaragua and the region based on an anti-imperialist vision of peace and justice for all.

The book challenges the mainstream and much of the alternative media coverage of events in Nicaragua over the last year. It is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand those events.

The book will be available from midday Thursday April 18th 2019

Extracts from Gabriela Luna’s Prologue

The geographical position, extraction of natural resources, exploitation of cheap labor and possibility of building an inter-oceanic canal have been the axes of imperialist interest in Central America. This has bathed the region’s history in blood and resistance, which is why the desperate migrant caravan from the northern triangle of the isthmus is in fact the offspring of U.S. imperialism.

Since 2007, hope and life have been redefined with the return of the Sandinista Front to government. The absolute number of undernourished people in the country has been reduced by half, access to free education and health care has been guaranteed to rural communities, maternal mortality has been reduced by 60% and infant mortality by 52%, while access to electricity has been increased from 54% to 96% of the country’s population.

Nicaragua is the safest country in Central America, and is in sixth place globally for women’s participation in public and civic spaces. Life in the countryside has recovered dignity, thanks to a policy that prioritizes and values the family economy, making it possible to reduce food imports and become 100% self-sufficient in beans, corn, eggs, milk, fruits, onions, peppers, tomatoes and beef.

The attempted coup was intended to eradicate not only the Sandinista Front from political power in Nicaragua but also to tear Sandinismo from the heart and historical memory of the people. The practices of desecrating and burning historical sites of the Sandinista Front, of stripping, beating, torturing, kidnapping and publicly murdering Sandinistas, or publicly burning people, is not new in the history of Nicaragua or Central America.

These practices stem from the Spanish conquest that publicly tortured indigenous rebels. They were then applied by U.S. soldiers in military interventions, by the Somoza dictatorship, and were part of the US’ counter-insurgency handbook, applied during more than 30 years in Guatemala and El Salvador to stop the advances of peoples’ revolutions in these countries.

The CIA’s Contra armies applied these practices in peasant communities during the 1980s

The opposition’s death roadblocks were mostly manned by socially-excluded poor people who were paid to create chaos and pain. They were politically supported by young upper middle-class university students, who, from the comfort of their homes in gated communities, misunderstood the reality of the roadblocks, and consumed the mainstream media’s version of the crisis.

These media outlets are dominated nationally by the oligarchy. US-owned social media companies provided platforms for a strategy that activated hundreds of young people previously trained by USAID and NED to create a dominant narrative. The coup’s media blitzkrieg used the advertising pages of Facebook to spread lies, foment hatred and encourage violence—accusing the Sandinistas of the violence against Sandinistas.

The first sector to break the psychological and horror siege was the moral reserve of the Sandinista Front: its historic rank-and-file membership. In the face of systematic violence against Sandinista families, the only option was local organizing for the protection of families, neighborhoods, towns and cities. Barricades were formed in the neighborhoods and public institutions to prevent arson attacks and assassinations.

These defense barricades, set up over weeks in the cities, towns and neighborhoods of Nicaragua, were made up of members of the Sandinista Front from various generations…but with one common denominator: these barricades were made up of Nicaragua’s workers. In practice, everyone learned from everyone, and natural leaders emerged from the heart of the neighborhoods who often were not part of any of the official structures of the Sandinista Front.

This was political education in practice: young people learned what it means to be a Sandinista, the principles and values of the historic militancy, the historical burden behind their actions. These young people respected and valued the bravery and knowledge of the old guard, while elders respected the strengths of the young people and their understanding of the impact of social media. Since the highways were shut down by rightwing roadblocks, Sandinistas across the country organized themselves to distribute locally sourced food.

The elite in Nicaragua has long believed that the people are ignorant, or “innocent” as the oligarchy’s newspaper, La Prensa, puts it. They assumed that if denied their ability to live normally and safely, Nicaraguans would demand a new government. The plan backfired, and the Sandinista Front mobilized more people in the street from April to September of 2018 than in any other period in its history.

During this period, Nicaraguans saw themselves in a new light and were forced to reckon with the strengths and weaknesses of the political process, of living in a capitalist country with a socialist government, under the shadow of the United States. Above all, those three months of resistance clearly demonstrated the immense courage of the people of Nicaragua, especially those without land, without a car, the workers from the inner-city neighborhoods. History again demonstrated the Nicaraguan people’s capacity for resistance and survival, dignity and strength. It was the people’s wisdom that defeated the coup.

How to obtain Live from Nicaragua: Uprising or Coup?

The book is available free online in both e-book format and as a PDF
The e-book version offers the .epub and .mobi formats.

For the e-book version
– Click on the link to save the file to your device, then
open the .zip file to access the version you want.

For a Kindle hand-held device
– Open the compressed e-book file on your computer and
connect the Kindle device to your computer
– Use your mouse to move the ‘Kindle content’ folder in the opened e-book file to the ‘documents’ folder on the Kindle device
– Once copied, disconnect the Kindle. ‘Live from Nicaragua’ should appear on its home page.

For the PDF version
– Click on the link and save the file to your device

Nipping the Pink Tide Neap: Battle for the "Backyard"

The Battle for Latin America: How the U.S. Helped Destroy the “Pink Tide”

by T.J. Coles - CounterPunch

April 19, 2019 

After sponsoring juntas well into the 1990s, the US went after Central and South America with “free trade” deals before again working with extremists. The recent elections of Argentina’s Mauricio Macri and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro are major blows to socioeconomic and cultural progress. The recent decision of Ecuador’s President Lenín Moreno to allow British police arrest Julian Assange, dragging him from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he was granted asylum, is further indication of that country’s alignment to US elite interests.

In the recent past, the US attempted to hook Latin America into the “free trade” paradigm. From the viewpoint of the US neoliberal project, a devastating turn of invents took place in the late-1990s to early-2010s. A number of left(ish) governments came to power in Central and South America, a region traditionally thought of by US elites as their “backyard.”

Photograph Source Presidencia de
la Nación Argentina – CC BY 2.0

NOT TOO FAR LEFT…

 The governments included: Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Álvaro Colom of Guatemala, Leonel Fernández of the Dominican Republic, Mauricio Funes of El Salvador, Evo Morales of Bolivia, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, Lula da Silva of Brazil, Luis Guillermo Solís of Costa Rica, and Manuel Zelaya of Honduras.

Together, these representatives pushed backed against decades of US corporate and military domination.

US analysts did not consider these governments to be as radical as “communists” (red), hence they described them as “pink.” The drift towards progressive leftish-centrism was nicknamed the “pink tide.” Like European governments after the signing of the Maastricht Treaty 1992, “most members of the [pink] tide … worked to address social welfare concerns within the general confines of market mechanisms,” says Latin America specialist, Craig Arceneaux. He also writes that “although exasperation over neoliberalism spurred the political change, free markets are hardly endangered in Latin America.” Interestingly, the pro-“free market” Frazer Institute gave Latin America 5.3 out of 10 for neoliberalism in 1990, with much of US-sponsored violence still raging; 6.5 in 2000, during recovery; and 6.6 in 2008. Latin America specialist, Katherine Isbester, says that “most Pink Tide countries have compromised the neoliberal structuring of their political economy and the insertion of their nations into globalization.” Isbester also writes that NAFTA, CAFTA and the World Trade Organization have the effect of “locking in neoliberalism, [so] the room for deep reform to the organization of the economy is limited.”

But this should be understood within the context of where we are today, politically speaking. The fact that the US and its allies have moved so far to the right, economically, means that they perceived their “backyard” to be drifting too far to the left. US efforts to impose a “free trade” bloc came in the form of the US-led Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). But CAFTA did not prevent widespread social investments, such as Lula’s Bolsa Família, which lifted tens of millions out of poverty for the first time in the region’s tortured history.

HONDURAS

The events in Honduras presaged a return to the not-so-distant past. President Zelaya undermined CAFTA by guaranteeing a minimum wage, working more closely with the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) bloc, and calling for a national Constituent Assembly. Zelaya was overthrown in a US-backed military coup in 2009. Regional specialists José Briceño-Ruiz and Isidro Morales write that the coup “did away with the relationship between Honduras and the Bolivarian axis.”

The new leader, Porfirio Lobo, “intensified and accelerated efforts to conclude the negotiations of a free trade agreement with Canada,” America’s neoliberal neighbor which has also signed a multilateral “free trade” agreement with the European Union, namely the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (EU-CETA).

In her book, Hard Choices (2014), US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, expressed her fear of democracy by belittling Honduras, “home to about 8 million of the poorest people in Latin America. Its history has been marked by a seemingly endless parade of discord and disasters.” Clinton omits the US role. She describes Zelaya in racist terms, as “a throwback to the caricature of Central American strongman, with his white cowboy hat, dark black moustache, and fondness for Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro.” Evoking the old colonial and disparaging language, Clinton feared that the US would look “isolated in our own backyard.” The wretched President Trump caused a corporate media storm with his “shithole countries” statement. The same media were silent over Clinton’s words.

Interestingly, the following passage, in which Clinton admits US involvement in the post-coup, was removed from the paperback edition of Hard Choices: “We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot and give the Honduran people a chance to choose their own future”. Clinton says she “began looking for a respected elder statesman who could act as a mediator.” She chose Óscar Arias of Costa Rica, who was “respected” because he followed US orders, unlike the allegedly pro-Chávez Zelaya. Unlike the rest of the region’s nations, Costa Rica “has one of the highest per capita incomes and greenest economies in Central America,” says Clinton. She neglects to mention that it’s also the regional country subject to fewest US invasions and proxy wars.

By the end of January 2017, at least 123 Honduran environmental and land activists had been murdered by gangs, police, and the military. The Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) is an organization comprised of 200 ethnic Lenca communities. COPINH was led by Berta Cáceres, one of the country’s leading environmentalists. Cáceres organized against the Agua Zarca Dam. The Dam, funded by European companies (Voith Hydro and Siemens), risks desiccating the Gualcarque River and harming farming communities. In 2013, soldiers close to the Honduran company overseeing the Dam opened fire on peaceful demonstrators, killing indigenous leader, Tomás García. Cáceres was murdered in her home in 2016.

REFUGEES AND THE COLOMBIA EXCEPTION

Trump is brutal and inhuman towards refugees and immigrants, but Obama was not far behind. The New York Times ran the headline, “Obama’s Death Sentence for Young Refugees,” referring to the closed-border policy which most mainstream news ignored, until Trump cranked it up a notch. The paper reported that US President Obama and Mexican President Peña Nieto agreed to intercept Central American refugees trying to make it into the US via Mexico. Reporter, Nicholas Kristof, says: “In effect, we have pressured and bribed Mexico to do our dirty work, detaining and deporting people fleeing gangs in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.” Kristof concludes: “The American-Mexican collusion began in 2014 after a surge of Central Americans crossed into the U.S., including 50,000 unaccompanied children.”

This coincided with the end of the Pink Tide and the rise of the old death-squad and drug-gang politics in many countries. When journalist Juan Gonzáles quizzed Clinton about her involvement in the coup and future plans for Honduras, Clinton replied:

“I think we need to do more of a Colombian plan for Central America, because remember what was going on in Colombia when first my husband and then followed by President Bush had Plan Colombia, which was to try to use our leverage to rein in the government in their actions against the [Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)] and the guerrillas, but also to help the government stop the advance of the FARC and guerrillas, and now we’re in the middle of peace talks. It didn’t happen overnight; it took a number of years. But I want to see a much more comprehensive approach toward Central America, because it’s not just Honduras.”

This is an astonishing statement, given what Plan Colombia actually involved, namely stepping up US aid and training to the military, which in turn trains the murderous paramilitary forces. “Peace talks” came after years of intensified counterrevolutionary violence against civilians, three-quarters of which is the responsibility of state forces and their related gangs. For decades, Colombian elites used the military and paramilitaries to crush land reformers, student unions, environmentalists, and the leftist FARC.

Since the 1980s, British special forces, along with US forces, have armed and trained the Colombian military. In 2001, the British Parliament revealed the true scope of Plan Colombia and its human rights consequences: “the United States in its push for a military solution will waive Plan Colombia’s human rights preconditions for military aid to the army for the second time when the plan is reviewed … effectively sanctioning more massacres, displacements, assassinations, torture and disappearances of the unarmed population.”

CONCLUSION

These and other events set the scene in Latin America for the imposition of so-called market systems that benefit US corporations by undermining the social mobility of tens of millions of poor people. These cases demonstrate that peoples all over the world have to be vigilant in the face of US corporate globalization and the iron fist of militarism that enforces it. Any small political progress in the direction of social and economic equality can be easily undermined in fragile societies by a combination of overt violence and the imposition of “free trade” deals that shape economies in financially violent ways.

This article is an excerpt from my new book, Privatized Planet: “Free Trade” as a Weapon Against Democracy, Healthcare and the Environment (2019, New Internationalist).

Dr. T. J. Coles is director of the Plymouth Institute for Peace Research and the author of several books, including Voices for Peace (with Noam Chomsky and others) and the forthcoming Fire and Fury: How the US Isolates North Korea, Encircles China and Risks Nuclear War in Asia (both Clairview Books).

More articles by:T.J. Coles

Re: Deepwater - How Manning and WikiLeaks Could Have Saved Lives

Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, and The Deepwater Horizon

by Greg Palast - GregPalast.com

April 11, 2019

This article was first published by VICE on April 3, 2013. If the the U.S. jails Julian Assange, they should jail me, and my colleagues at The Guardian and New York Times. We all used the Manning / Assange / WikiLeaks emails, as I did in this story. Shame on The Times for taking awards while applauding prison terms for their sources. — Greg Palast, April 11, 2019

Five years ago this month, on the 20th of April, 2010, the BP Deepwater Horizon drilling rig blew itself to kingdom come.

Soon thereafter, a message came in to our office’s chief of investigations, Ms Badpenny, from a person I dare not name, who was floating somewhere in the Caspian Sea along the coast of Baku, Central Asia.

The source was in mortal fear he’d be identified, and with good reason.

Once we agreed on a safe method of communication, he revealed this: 17 months before BP’s Deepwater Horizon blew out and exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, another BP rig suffered an identical blow-out in the Caspian Sea.

Crucially, both the Gulf and Caspian Sea blow-outs had the same identical cause: the failure of the cement “plug”.

To prevent blow-outs, drilled wells must be capped with cement. BP insisted on lacing its cement with nitrogen gas, the same stuff used in laughing gas, because it speeds up drying.

Time is money, and mixing some nitrogen gas into the cement saves a lot of money.

However, because BP’s penny-pinching method is so damn dangerous, they are nearly alone in using it in deep, high-pressure offshore wells.

The reason: nitrogen gas can create gaps in the cement, allow methane gas to go up the borehole, fill the drilling platform with explosive gas, and boom, you’re dead.

So, when its Caspian Sea rig blew out in 2008, rather than change its ways, BP simply covered it up.

Our investigators discovered that the company hid the information from its own shareholders, from British regulators and from the US Securities Exchange Commission. The Vice-President of BP USA, David Rainey, withheld the information from the US Senate in a testimony he gave six months before the Gulf deaths. (Rainey was later charged with obstruction of justice on a spill-related matter.)

Britain’s Channel 4 agreed to send me to the benighted nation of Azerbaijan, whose waters the earlier BP blow-out occurred in, to locate witnesses who would be willing to talk to me without getting “disappeared”. (They didn’t talk, but they still disappeared.)

And I was arrested. Some rat had tipped off the Security Ministry (the official name of the Department of Torture here in this Islamic Republic of BP). I knew I’d get out quick, because throwing a reporter of Her Majesty’s Empire into a dungeon would embarrass both BP and the Azeri oil-o-crats.

The gendarmes demanded our film, but I wasn’t overly concerned: Before I left London, Badpenny handed me one of those Austin Powers camera-in-pens, on which I’d loaded all I needed. But I did fear for my witnesses left behind in Azerbaijan ”“ and for my source in a tiger cage in the USA: Pvt Chelsea Manning.

Manning could have saved their lives

Only after I dove into deep water in Baku did I discover, trolling through the so-called “WikiLeaks” documents, secret State Department cables released by Manning. The information was stunning: the US State Department knew about the BP blow-out in the Caspian and joined in the cover-up.

Apparently BP refused to tell its own partners, Chevron and Exxon, why the lucrative Caspian oil flow had stopped. Chevron bitched to the office of the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice. (George Bush’s cabinet member should not be confused with the 129,000-tonne oil tanker “Condoleezza Rice”, which Chevron named after their former board member.)

The US Ambassador in Baku got Chevron the answer: a blow-out of the nitrogen-laced cement cap on a giant Caspian Sea platform. The information was marked “SECRET”.

Apparently loose lips about sinking ships would help neither Chevron nor the Azeri President Ilham Aliyev, the beneficiary of millions of dollars in payments of oil company baksheesh.

So what about Chelsea Manning?

Manning has been charged with “aiding the enemy”, a crime punishable by death.

But Manning’s sole and only purpose was to get out the truth. It wasn’t Manning who wrote the cover-up memos, she merely wanted to get them to the victims: us.

And since when did the public become “the enemy”?

Had Manning’s memos come out just a few months earlier, the truth about BP’s deadly drilling methods would have been revealed, and there’s little doubt BP would have had to change its ways. Those eleven men could well have been alive today.

Did Manning know about this particular hush-hush cable about BP’s blow-out when she decided she had to become Paul Revere and warn the planet?

That’s unlikely, in the thousands of cables she had. But she’d seen enough evidence of murder and mendacity in other cables, so, as Manning, under oath, told a court, she tried to give it all to the New York Times to have knowledgeable reporters review the cables confidentially for life-saving information.

The New York Times immediately seized on this extraordinary opportunity to ignore Manning. The Times only ran it when the Guardian was going to scoop, and embarrass, the New York hacks.

Though there are limits. While reporter David Leigh put the story of BP’s prior blow-out on page one of the Guardian, neither the New York Times or any other major US news outlet ran the story of the blow-out and oil industry cover-up. No surprise there, though, the most “prestigious” US news programme, PBS Newshour, was sponsored by, Chevron Corporation.

Hanging their source while taking his applause

As a working journalist, and one whose head is likely to be in the foggy gun-sights of some jet jockey or a dictator’s goon squad, I have more than a little distaste for toffs like New York Times‘ former executive editor, columnist Bill Keller, who used Manning’s documents to cash in on a book deal and land star turns on television while simultaneously smearing his source Manning as, “troubled”, “emotionally fractured”, “vague”, “inchoate” and, cover the children’s ears, “gay”.

Furthermore, while preening about their revelations from the Manning documents, the Times had no problem with imprisoning their source. I do acknowledge that the Times and Keller did editorialise that a sentence of life imprisonment without parole would be “overkill”. How white of them.

When it was mentioned that Manning is no different from Daniel Ellsberg, the CIA operative who released the Pentagon Papers, Keller reassured that the Times also told Ellsberg he was “on his own” and did not object to their source being charged as a spy.

And the Times' much-lauded exposure of the My Lai massacre? My late good friend, the great investigative reporter Ron Ridenhour, who gave the story to Seymour Hersh, told me that he and Hersh had to effectively blackmail the Times into printing it.

Manning: aid to the enemy?

Times man Keller writes that Manning, by going to “anti-American” WikiLeaks, threatened the release of, “information that might get troops in the field or innocent informants killed”.

Really?

This is the same Bill Keller who admits that he knew his paper’s reports in 2003 that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction were completely false, but that he, as editor, covered up his paper’s knowledge their WDM stories were simply bogus. Those stories validated the Bush propaganda and helped tip the political balance to invade Iraq. Four-thousand US soldiers died. I guess the idea is that releasing information that kills troops is criminal, but that dis-information that kills troops is quite acceptable.

Maybe I’m just cranky because I wouldn’t have seen my own sources vanish and my film grabbed if the Times had only run the Manning facts about BP and Caspian when they had the chance.

Look, I’m only picking on the New York Times and PBS Newshour because they are the best in America, God help us.

What other lives could have been saved by the Manning revelations? Lots.

Watch this space: I promise more aid to the enemies of the state, which is YOU.

* * * * * * * *

Greg Palast investigated the BP Deepwater Horizon deaths for Channel 4 Television UK . Those dispatches are contained in his highly acclaimed book Vultures’ Picnic, named Book of the Year 2012 on BBC Newsnight Review.

His other books are the New York Times bestsellers Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse.

Visit the Palast Investigative Fund’s store or simply make a contribution to keep our work alive!

For media requests contact us.

Subscribe to Palast’s Newsletter and podcasts.
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www.GregPalast.com

Charges Dropped for Fourteen Arrested at Gidumt'en Access

Civil charges dropped against fourteen people arrested at Gidumt'en Access Checkpoint 

by Billie Pierre - Media Co-Op

April 15, 2019

In January, RCMP acting on Coastal Gaslink’s Temporary Injunction breached the Gidumt’en Access checkpoint to clear the way for preliminary work on the LNG Pipeline in Unist’ot’en

On April 15, 2019, contempt of court charges against 14 people arrested at the Gidumt’en Access Checkpoint on unceded Wet’suwet’en territory last January 7 were dropped.

RCMP acted on Coastal Gaslink’s interim injunction and raided the Gidumt’en Access Checkpoint, making the arrests in order to clear the path for the pipeline company to begin preliminary work for the pipeline project.


Gidumt'en Spokesperson Molly Wickham and House
Chief Dinize Madeek give celebratory interview outside
Prince George courthouse. Photo: Wet'suwet'en Access
Point on Gidumt'en Territory Facebook page video April 15, 2019

Gidumt’en clan spokesperson Molly Wickham said:

“This morning the civil charges dropped against all fourteen people and the way that that happened was that Crown council reviewed all of the evidence and determined that there wasn’t enough evidence for a likely conviction in criminal charges. And the test for civil charges is the same as criminal charges and so the Coastal Gaslink lawyer council advised not to proceed with civil charges because they would not win.”

Chief Madeek of the Gidumt'en Clan said:

“I was surprised they got this far. Because they didn’t have a leg to stand on when they started. And the way the proceeded, it was unlawful. They had no right to do what they did. But it turned out to be in our favour today,”

Molly Wickham also stated, “They tried to tell us we couldn’t wear our Wet’suwet’en Strong T-shirts in the courtroom and we won that one too! We’re just all around winners today!”

In December, the Gidumt’en Access Checkpoint which is 20 km from the Unist'ot'en camp, and acts as the first line of defense against attempts to enter Unist’ot’en, where the C’ihlts’ehkhyu /Big Frog Clan built a cabin at Talbits Kwah at Gosnell Creek and Wedzin Kwah (Morice River) to defend their territory from seven proposed pipelines nine years previously.

This took place after, Coastal Gaslink LNG pipeline project received a temporary injunction to begin preliminary work on the 670 kilometre pipeline that has been approved to be built from Dawson Creek BC to Kitimat BC.

Coastal Gaslink has applied for an injunction in order to build their planned pipeline, however, for years, the five traditional clans of the Wet’suwet’en nation have been unanimously opposing all pipeline projects on Wet’suwet’en territory.

In 1997, the Supreme Court of Canada acknowledged that Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs had never relinquished jurisdiction over their 22,000 square kilometres of their territory in the infamous Delgamuukw decision.

Presently there's a call to help with new projects and the building of infrastructure on Wet’suwet’en territory for May 6-May 31.

TO DONATE TO UNIST’OT’EN LEGAL FUND: https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/unistoten-camp-legal-fund 

DONATE TO GIDIMT’EN ACCESS POINT: https://www.gofundme.com/gitdumt039en-access-point

Unist’ot’en Camp: https://www.facebook.com/unistoten/

Wet’suwet’en Access point on Gidimt’en territory: https://www.facebook.com/wetsuwetenstrong/
Sovereign Likhts’amisyu and Namoks: https://www.facebook.com/likhtsamisyu/

Tsayu Land Defenders: https://www.facebook.com/Tsayu-Land-Defenders-145084489749640/

Unist’ot’en Website: http://unistoten.camp/

Gidimt’en Website: https://www.yintahaccess.com/ ADDITIONAL IMPORTANT UPDATES

FOR SUPPORTERS: If you are planning a fundraising event or campaign make sure to read the newly released fundraising protocols: Unist’ot’en: http://unistoten.camp/fundraiserprotocols/ 

Gidimt’en: https://www.yintahaccess.com/fundraisingprotocol

SIGN THE PLEDGE Join hundreds of organizations and 13,843 individuals in signing the pledge to support UNIST’OT’EN and the WET’SUWET’EN: https://goo.gl/forms/GE5bfm5ITDTyNPy12 

#UNISTOTEN #WETSUWETENSTRONG #WEDZINKWA #NOPIPELINES #NOTRESPASS

Lost In The World? Like Me!

Are You Lost In The World Like Me?

by Moby & The Void Pacific Choir

October  2016

Watch In This Cold Place, the new video from Moby & Steve Cutts, here: http://mobyandthevoidpacificchoir.com/ 

Taken from These Systems Are Failing- the debut album from Moby & The Void Pacific Choir- out now: http://moby.la/mvpcthesesystemsarefai... 

You can listen to all of the music from Moby & The Void Pacific Choir here: http://moby.la/mobyvpcplaylistYo 

 

Animation by Steve Cutts

More US Charges Await Assange - Report

US preparing more charges against Julian Assange

by Kristina Betinis  - WSWS

19 April 2019  

On Wednesday, CNN reported US federal prosecutors confirmed there is an “ongoing criminal investigation” of Julian Assange, the 47-year-old founder of WikiLeaks.

Prosecutors also indicated “affiliates” of Assange are under investigation, this according to another newly unsealed document.

According to the CNN report, at least one document related to this investigation has been withheld from the public due to “ongoing activity.”

The revelation, CNN reported, “confirms CNN and other news outlets’ reporting in recent days that WikiLeaks is connected to at least one probe that could result in more criminal charges.”

The report confirms the warnings made by the WSWS and others that the charges related to computer hacking leveled against Assange are merely a pretext for his extradition to the United States, after which additional charges would be brought against him.

On April 11, Assange was expelled from the Ecuadorian embassy in London and arrested by British officials on the public charge of conspiracy to bypass a password. That charge dated back to events in the 2011 WikiLeaks’ publication of the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs. Chelsea Manning turned over more than half a million documents exposing US war crimes and corruption to WikiLeaks for publication.

The expulsion and arrest of Assange has been accompanied by an unrestrained campaign of media vilification aimed at transforming Assange into a non-person, undeserving of democratic rights.

But since Assange has been imprisoned in the maximum-security Belmarsh prison, public comments made by leading Democrats and US media officials indicate that charge was not the primary aim of the US investigation.

Democratic Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer tweeted,

“Now that Julian Assange has been arrested, I hope he will soon be held to account for his meddling in our elections on behalf of Putin and the Russian government.” 

Democratic chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Eliot Engel tweeted that Assange “time after time compromised the national security of the United States and our allies by publicly releasing classified government documents and confidential materials related to our 2016 presidential election.”

US, British and Ecuadorian governments have claimed Assange’s extradition is proper because the US is indicting on a single charge: attempting to help Chelsea Manning bypass a password. But this has now been revealed to be only the pretext. The real reason the US wants custody of the whistleblower was stated by Schumer and Engel.

On April 15, the WSWS wrote that these statements demonstrate the extradition proceedings are being conducted under false pretenses:

“The single public charge is a cover. The government is planning to interrogate Assange, compel him to provide testimony and further prosecute him for exposing US war crimes.” (“Stop the extraordinary rendition of Julian Assange!”)

In December 2017, US prosecutors told a federal judge they wanted to keep secret the charges Assange might face because learning of them might have caused him to flee the Ecuadorian embassy.

According to CNN, the recently unsealed documents indicate that a grand jury in Virginia indicted Assange in 2018 and prosecutors again demanded the charges be kept secret for the same reason, and added their worries about evidence tampering and witness intimidation.

Cassandra Fairbanks, of the right-wing outlet the Gateway Pundit, visited Assange more than once during his imprisonment in the London embassy offices. She confirmed her visits with Assange have been the subject of the recent investigation.

She told the World Socialist Web Site,

“I was informed on Monday that there is a secret grand jury against Julian and two witnesses were questioned about me meeting with him, though they have not subpoenaed or questioned me directly.

“The witnesses told me that they were both asked, separately, if they knew any US persons who had met with Assange. When they didn’t really answer the question, they were asked specifically about me and also a list of other people who have visited Assange.”

Since Assange’s arrest, CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, who was prosecuted by the Obama administration in 2012 for exposing the torture of detainees, has taken to social media to emphasize that Assange has no chance of a fair trial in the US.

“A fair trial in the Eastern District of Virginia, under Judge Leonie Brinkema, is utterly impossible. They don’t call EDVA the ‘Espionage Court’ for nothing,” he wrote.

It Can happen Here (and twice as fast!): Canada Faces Climate Disruption Realities

Canada is Warming at Twice the Rate of the Globe, Says New Report 

by TRNN

April 20, 2019  

Earlier this week, officials from Environment and Climate Change Canada, a department of the Canadian federal government, presented the results of a study on warming in Canada. Their study concluded that Canada is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world and that northern Canada is warming even more quickly, nearly three times the global rate.

The officials also reported that three of the past five years have been the warmest on record in this country.

Their study is the first of its kind. Entitled Canada’s Changing Climate Report, the study has been in the works for years and is the first of a series aimed at informing policy decisions and increasing public awareness and understanding of Canada’s changing climate.

Greenpeace Canada analyst hopes study serves as a wake-up call for Trudeau government, but says "You can't wake up a man who's only pretending to be asleep" on climate change.

Keith Stewart is a Senior Energy Strategist with Greenpeace Canada and part-time instructor at the University of Toronto. He has a Ph.D. in Political Science from York University and has worked as a climate policy researcher and advocate for 19 years. He joins us today from Toronto.