Rousing the West

North American, European Public: Finally Wake Up, Damn It!

by Andre Vltchek - NEO

June 5, 2019

Year after year, month after month, I see two sides of the world; two extremes which are getting more and more disconnected:

I see great cities like Homs in Syria, reduced to horrifying ruins. I see Kabul and Jalalabad in Afghanistan, fragmented by enormous concrete walls intended to protect NATO occupation armies and their local puppets. I see monstrous environmental devastation in places such as Indonesian Borneo, Peruvian gold mining towns, or the by now almost uninhabitable atoll island-nations of Oceania: Tuvalu, Kiribati or Marshall Islands.

I see slums, a lack of sanitation and clean drinking water, where the boots of Western empires have been smashing local cultures, enslaving people and looting natural resources.

I work on all the continents. I never stop, even when exhaustion tries to smash me against the wall, even when there are hardly any reserves left. I cannot stop; I have no right to stop, because I can finally see the pattern; the way this world operates, the way the West has been managing to usurp it, indoctrinate, and enslave most of the countries of the world. I combine my knowledge, and publish it as a ‘warning to the world’.

I write books about this ‘pattern’. My most complete, so far, being the 1,000 pages long “Exposing Lies of The Empire”.

Then, I see the West itself.

I come to ‘speak’, to Canada and the United States, as well as Europe. Once in a while I am invited to address Australian audiences, too.

The West is so outrageously rich, compared to the ruined and plundered continents, that it often appears that it does not belong to the Planet Earth.

A lazy Sunday afternoon stroll in Villa Borghese in Rome, and a horror walk through Mathare slum in Nairobi could easily exist in two distinct realities, or in two different galaxies.

Even now, after I slightly misspelled “Villa Borghese”, my Mac immediately offered a correction. It is because Villa Borghese does exist. On the other hand, “Mathare”, which I spelled correctly, was underlined red. Mathare ‘is an error’. Because it does not exist. It does not exist, despite the fact that around one million men, women and children lives there. It is not recognized by my MacBook Pro, nor by the great majority of my relatively well-educated readers in the West.

In fact, almost entire world appears to be one big error, non-entity, if observed from New York, Berlin or Paris.

I come and speak in front of the Western public. Yes, I do it from time to time, although with decreasing frequency.

Frankly, to face European or North American crowds feels depressing, even humiliating.

It goes like this: you are invited to ‘tell the truth’; to present what you are witnessing all over the world.

You stand there, facing men and women who have just arrived in their comfortable cars, after having good dinners in their well-heated or air-conditioned homes. You may be a famous writer and a filmmaker, but somehow, they make you feel like a beggar. Because you came to speak on behalf of “beggars”.

Everything is well-polished, and choreographed. It is expected that you do not show any ‘gore’. That you do not call your public ‘names’. That you do not swear, do not get drunk on the stage, do not start insulting everyone in sight.

What you usually face is quite a hard, or at least ‘hardened’, crowd.

Recently, in Southern California, when I was asked, by a fellow philosopher and a friend of mine, to address a small gathering of his colleagues, some people were banging on their mobile phones, as I was describing the situation at the Syrian frontline, near Idlib. I felt that my account was nothing more than a ‘background, an elevator music’ to most of them. At least when I am addressing millions through my television interviews, I do not have to see the public.

When you ‘speak’ in the West, you are actually addressing men and women who are responsible, at least partially, for the mass murders and genocides that are being committed by their countries. Men and women whose standards of living are outrageously high, because The Others are being robbed, humiliated, and often raped. But their eyes are not humble; they are drilling them into you, waiting for some mistake that you might make, so they can conclude: “He is fake news”. For them, you are not a bridge between those who ‘exist’ and those who don’t. For them, you are an entertainer, a showman, or more often than not: a nuisance.

To learn about war, about the terror that the West is spreading, is, for many in my audience yet another type of luxury, high-level entertainment, not unlike an opera performance or a symphony concert. If necessary, they can even pay, although mostly they’d rather not. After a titillating experience, it is back to the routine, back to a sheltered, elegant life. While you, the next day, are often catching a plane back to the reality of the others; to the frontline, to dust and misery.

They, your public (but face it, also most of your readers) came to show how ‘open-minded’ they are. They came ‘to learn’ from you, ‘to get educated’, while keeping their lifestyles intact. Most of them think that they know it all, even without your first-hand experience, they are benevolently doing you a favor by inviting you, and by dragging themselves all the way to some university or a theatre or wherever the hell you are standing in front of them. They did not come to offer any support to your struggle. They are not part of any struggle. They are good, peace-loving, hardworking people; that’s all.

You know, like those Germans, in the late 1930’s; self-righteous, hard-working folks. Most of them love their pets, and recycle their garbage. And clean after themselves at Starbucks.

A few days ago, we stopped the coup in Venezuela. I say we, because, although deep in devastated Borneo Island, I had been giving interviews to RT, Press TV, addressing millions. Even here, I never stopped writing, tweeting, always ready to drop everything just fly to Caracas, if I were to be needed there.

To defend Venezuela, to defend the Revolution there, is essential. As it is essential to defend Syria, Cuba, Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Bolivia, South Africa and other revolutionary and brave nations that are refusing to surrender to the Western diktat.

While the ideological battle for Caracas was raging, I was thinking: is there anything that could still move the Western public into action?

Have they – Europeans and North Americans – become totally indifferent to their own crimes? Have they developed some sort of emotional immunity? Is their condition ideological, or simply clinical?

Here we were, in the middle of a totally open coup; an attempt by the West to overthrow one of the most democratic countries on our planet. And they did almost nothing to stop the terrorism performed by their regimes in Washington or Madrid! At least in Indonesia in 1965 or in Chile in 1973, the Western regime tried to hide behind thin fig leaves. At least, while destroying socialist Afghanistan and the Communist Soviet Union by creating the Mujahedin, the West used Pakistan as a proxy, trying to conceal, at least partially, its true role. At least, while killing more than 1 million people in Iraq, there was this charade and bunch of lies about the ‘weapons of mass destruction’. At least, at least…

Now, it is all transparent. In Syria, Venezuela; and against North Korea, Cuba, Iran, China, Russia.

As if propaganda was not even needed, anymore, it as if the Western public has become totally obedient, posing no threat to the plans of the Western regime.

Or more precisely, the once elaborate Western propaganda has become extremely simple: it now repeats lies, and the great majority of Western citizens do not even bother to question what their governments are doing to the world. The only thing that matters are ‘domestic issues’; meaning – the wages and benefits for the Westerners.

There are no riots like during the Vietnam War. Now riots are only for the better welfare of European workers. No one in the West is fighting in order to stop the plunder abroad, or the terrorist attacks unleashed by NATO against non-Western countries, or against those countless NATO military bases, against the invasions and orchestrated coups.

How much more can the Western public really stomach?

Or can it stomach absolutely everything?

Would it accept the direct invasion of Venezuela or Cuba or both? It has already accepted the direct intervention and destruction of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, to name just a few terrorist actions committed by the West in recent history.

So, how much more? Would an attack against Iran be acceptable? Let’s say, 2-3 million deaths?

North Korea, perhaps? A few more millions, a new mountain of corpses?

I am asking; it is not a rhetorical question. I really want to know. I believe that the world has to know.

Has the Western public reached the level of the ISIS (or call them IS or Deash)? Is it so self-righteous, so fanatic, so convinced of its own exceptionalism, that it cannot think, clearly, analyze and judge, anymore?

Would provoking Russia or China or both into WWIII be acceptable to people living in Bavaria or South Carolina, or Ontario?

And if yes, are they all really out of their minds?

And if they are, should the world try to stop them, and how?

I want to know the boundaries of the Western madness.

That there is madness is indisputable, but how massive is it?

I understand, I have now accepted the monstrous fact that the French, Yanks, Canadians, Brits or Germans do not give a shit about how many millions of innocent people they kill in the Middle East, or Southeast Asia, Africa or in ‘places like that’. I accept that they know close to nothing about their colonial history, and want to know nothing, as long as they have football, plenty of meat and 6 weeks vacations on exotic beaches. I know that even many of those who can see monstrous crimes committed by the West, want to blame everything on Rothschilds and ‘Zionist conspiracy’, but never on themselves, never on Israel which its West’s outpost in the Middle East, never on their culture which expresses itself through the centuries of plunder.

But what about the survival of our planet, and the survival of humankind?

I imagine the eyes of those people who come to my ‘combat presentations’. I tell them the truth. I say it all. I am never holding back; never compromise. I show them images of the wars they have unleashed. Yes, they; because the citizens are responsible for their own governments, and because there is, clearly, something called collective guilt and collective responsibility!

Those eyes, faces… I will tell you what I read in them: they will never act. They will never try to overthrow their regime. As long as they live their privileged lives. As long as they think that the system in which they are the elites, at least has some chance of surviving in its present form. They play it both ways, some of them do: verbally, they are outraged by NATO, by Western imperialism and savage capitalism. Practically, they do nothing tangible to fight the system.

What is the conclusion then? If they do not act, then others have to. And I am convinced: they will.

For more than 500 years the entire world has been in flames, plundered and murdered by a small group of extremely aggressive Western nations. This has been going on virtually uninterruptedly.

Nobody finds it amusing, anymore. Where I work, in places that I care about, nobody wants this kind of world.

Look at those countries that are now trying to destroy Venezuela. Look closely! They consist of the United States, Canada, majority of Europe, and mostly those South American states where the descendants of European colonialists are forming majority!

Do we want another 500 years of this?

North Americans and Europeans have to wake up, soon. Even in Nazi Germany, there were soldiers who were so disgusted with Hitler, that they wanted to send him to the dogs. Today, in the West, there is not one powerful political party which believes that 500 years of Western colonialist plunder is more than enough; that torturing the world should stop, and stop immediately.

If Western imperialism, which is the greatest and perhaps the only major threat our planet is now facing, is not decisively and soon dismantled by its own citizens, it will have to be fought and deterred by external forces. That is: by its former and present victims.

[First published by NEO – New Eastern Outlook]

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Four of his latest books are Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism, a revolutionary novel “Aurora” and a bestselling work of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”. View his other books here. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky “On Western Terrorism”. Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter. His Patreon

Denial and Distortion: Misremembering Canadian Genocide(s)

Roméo Dallaire Denies Canadian Genocide and Distorts Rwanda’s

by Yves Engler - Dissident Voice

June 6th, 2019

Is Roméo Dallaire a genocide denier?

After a (question free) talk at Concordia University this week I followed the famous Canadian general out of the room to ask why he still supports ruthless dictator Paul Kagame, (left).

Kagame is the individual most responsible for the mass slaughter in Rwanda in mid-1994 since his forces invaded the country, engaged in a great deal of killing and blew up the presidential plane that unleashed the genocidal violence.

In 1996 Kagame’s forces invaded the Congo to overthrow the government in Kinshasa and when their installed president kicked them out they reinvaded in 1998, causing an eight country war that left millions dead.

According to a 600-page report by the UN high commissioner for human rights, Rwanda was responsible for “crimes against humanity, war crimes, or even genocide” in the Congo.

With Dallaire refusing to answer my question I asked a Radio Canada journalist seeking to interview the former general to ask why he supports Kagame. The reporter was there to question Dallaire about the use of the term “genocide” in the Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. Dallaire said he had “a problem” with the use of the word “genocide” to describe what happened to First Nations.

“Is that an act of genocide? Is it?” he said.

“My definition of genocide, I read it very deliberately at the start of the Rwandan genocide, and it was a deliberate act of a government to exterminate deliberately, and by force and directly, an ethnicity or a group or an entity of human beings.”

Numerous media outlets picked up Dallaire’s comments. A La Presse headline read “Dallaire denounces the use of the term ‘genocide’” while Rebel Media’s The Ezra Levant Show reported on, “Rwandan genocide witness General Roméo Dallaire’s strong denouncement of Justin Trudeau’s agreement that the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women findings indeed constitute a ‘genocide.’”

While Dallaire is opposed to labeling Canada’s dispossession of First Nations a genocide, he has repeatedly employed the term to describe rights violations in enemy states. In recent years he’s compared the situation of Darfur in Sudan and Baha’i in Iran, as well as Syria and Libya, to Rwanda. If Western interventionists are targeting a nation Dallaire is happy to employ the “G” word or “R” comparison.

Interestingly, Dallaire’s criteria for a genocide — “a deliberate act of a government to exterminate deliberately” — better applies to indigenous people in Canada than to the Tutsi in Rwanda. Dispossessed of 99% of their land, indigenous people have faced state-backed efforts to starve and sterilize them. They’ve also been made wards of the state, had their movement restricted and religious/cultural ceremonies banned. Residential schools and other so-called child welfare initiatives sought to eradicate their ways, or in the infamous formulation of the deputy superintendent of the Department of Indian Affairs from 1913 to 1932, Duncan Campbell Scott:

“Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question.”

Prior to confederation, British forces conquered today’s Nova Scotia through terror, putting the heads of Mi’kmaq soldiers on spikes and offering bounties to kill women and children. Founder of the Halifax fort, Lieutenant General Edward Cornwallis led the charge and by the mid-1760s the Mi’kmaq had been largely wiped out in Nova Scotia.

After British forces conquered Quebec General Jeffery Amherst’s forces gave indigenous chiefs in the Great Lakes region blankets and a handkerchief from a smallpox hospital. Commander of British forces in North America, Amherst wrote:

“You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race.”

By the 1820s the Beothuk in Newfoundland were extinct. On the West Coast in 1862 colonial officials are accused of enabling the spread of smallpox among First Nations, which devastated the indigenous population.

Unlike the Tutsi in Rwanda, indigenous people in Canada didn’t end up in power after the “genocide”. Nor did Jews in Germany, the Herero in Namibia, Armenians in Turkey, Maya in Guatemala, etc. Rwanda is a peculiar case where the minority — 10% of the population — targeted for extermination ended up ruling after the bulk of the violence subsided.

That’s partly because the genocidal killings were not a long planned attempt to exterminate all Tutsi, which even the victors’ justice dispensed by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) effectively concluded. Instead, it was the outgrowth of a serious breakdown in social order that saw hundreds of thousands slaughtered by relatively disorganized local ‘militias’ fearful of the Kagame-led foreign invasion that eventually conquered Rwanda and drove a quarter of the population out of the country. Probably an equal — and possibly a greater — number of Hutu were killed.

Dallaire has propagated a wildly simplistic account of the tragedy that gripped Rwanda and Burundi in the mid-1990s. He has promoted the Kagame-inspired fairy tale used to justify a brutal dictatorship in Rwanda and its expansionism in the region (as well as Western liberal imperialism).

According to the most outlandish aspect of this story, Hutu extremists murdered the Hutu presidents of Rwanda and Burundi and much of the Hutu-led Rwandan military command, weakening the Hutu government to its most frail point in three decades, and then decided to begin a long planned systematic extermination of Tutsi. In this depiction of Rwanda’s tragedy, the individual most responsible for unleashing the genocidal violence is the hero who ended “the Genocide”.

Dallaire is not innocent of Kagame’s violence. In his 2005 book Le Patron de Dallaire Parle (The Boss of Dallaire Speaks), Jacques-Roger Booh Booh, a former Cameroon foreign minister and overall head of mid-1990s UN mission in Rwanda, claims Dallaire had little interest in the violence unleashed by Kagame’s RPF despite reports of summary executions in areas controlled by them.

Booh Booh says Dallaire turned a blind eye to RPF weapons coming across the border from Uganda and he believes the UN forces under Dallaire’s command may have even transported weapons directly to the RPF, “becoming an objective ally of one of the parties in the conflict.”

Dallaire’s criticism of the Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls is consistent with his political interventions. He has long been a cheerleader for Canadian and Western domination of the world. As I detail in this article, the former general opposed calls to withdraw Canadian soldiers from Afghanistan, supported the overthrow of Haiti’s elected government in 2004 and bombing of Libya in 2011.

He has also called for increased military spending and for Canada to join US ballistic missile “defence”. Now he appears to be denying a genocide perpetrated by a government he represented in the Senate and worked for in the military. Boil it all down and it simply becomes: ‘Our side is good and our enemies are bad.’

But, of course, this is what passes for foreign policy in Canada.

Yves Engler is the author of 10 books, including A Propaganda System: How Canada's Government, Corporations, Media and Academia Sell War and Exploitation. Read other articles by Yves.

Do British Columbians Have the Right to Clean Water?

Do you have the right to clean water in BC?

by Glade Watershed Protection Society

 

June 4, 2019

On Monday, April 1, 2019 - April Fool’s Day - Judge McEwan chose to adhere to a legal principle that makes it difficult for public interest groups to access the legal system. Judge McEwan did this by demanding that the Glade Watershed Protection Society (GWPS) raise the funds necessary to pay the legal costs of losing their case in order to proceed.

 

Glade Watershed Protection Society (GWPS) is a volunteer-based public interest group working to protect its consumptive use watershed. Their work is supported by West Coast Environmental Law and community fundraising. Judge McEwan’s requirement that GWPS raise $15,000 in 60 days to cover the potential costs of legal proceedings for two corporate logging companies effectively excludes them from equal access to the legal system. If the monies cannot be raised, their application for protection under the Drinking Water Protection Act (DWPA) will be dismissed.

Two timber companies have tenure in Glade public forest. On Feb 4, 2019 GWPS sought a temporary injunction against Kalesnikoff Logging Company (KLC) and Atco Wood Products (Atco) until a Forest Practices Review investigation and a judicial review of a DWPA decision could be completed. Both companies argued against the injunction stating that they had invested heavily in the Glade Creek watershed, and that logging would not harm the water. 

 

This contradicts reports prepared by Registered Professionals (Hydrologist, Forester and Forest Ecologist) that assert that water quality and quantity are at risk from planned logging, particularly in this time of climate change. KLC and Atco further asserted that since GWPS is a nonprofit with almost no funds, they would be unable to recoup any costs from them.

The court dismissed GWPS’s injunction application. Judge Tammen, BC Supreme Court, stated that the risk of harm to Glade Creek water does not “rise above the level of speculation.” Ignoring professionals’ concerns about water quantity, he stated that if harm did occur, it could be remedied by additional water treatment and would not be “irreparable.” 

 

Any changes to water flows cannot be remedied by water treatment. This decision also ignores the health risks associated with many forms of treated water and the high costs to install effective water treatment systems. The municipalities of Vancouver and Victoria discontinued logging in their watersheds for these reasons.

In his judgement, Judge Tammen stated that if the injunction were granted, the timber companies would suffer “irreparable” injury due to “obvious economic harm.” Furthermore, these companies would not be able to recover any damages from GWPS. By awarding costs to Atco and KLC because of their “virtual complete success” in the proceeding, the legal system has supported the corporate interests of resource companies, while dismissing societies appearing for the sake of the public good.

In court, Judge McEwan noted: 

 

“Do you have a right to clean water? I’d suggest you don’t… there just is nowhere in the law where you can look and say, there it is - there’s my right. I have a right to clean water.”

Through exploring legislative mechanisms to effectively protect drinking water – GWPS has come to an impasse. Yet climate change is predicted to increase the incidence of both spring floods and fall droughts. Forestry is the single largest greenhouse gas emitter in BC and the ‘business as usual’ paradigm ignores that intact, old forests produce the best water. Judges McEwen and Tammen’s decisions impact public interests across the province.

To assist the Glade Watershed Protection Society in defraying costs, the public can donate via https://www.protectgladewatershed.com.

We are also requesting people write to their local MLA, the Ministers of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development, and the Environment asking for changes to forestry legislation so that water conservation is put ahead of resource development.

Glade Watershed Protection Society 

www.protectgladewatershed.com

 

Silly Goose! How Gina Haspel and the New York Times Made a Sucker of Trump

The New York Times Tries to Get Itself Out of the Duckgate Hole Using a Spade

by Rob Slane - The Blogmire

June 5, 2019

A number of people, including myself, wrote to the New York Times journalist, Julian Barnes, to point out that the piece he and his colleague, Adam Goldman, published on 16th April 2019 about the CIA Director, Gina Haspel, contained a part which unwittingly showed that she had misled President Trump into expelling 60 Russian diplomats in March 2018.

Here were the paragraphs of interest:

“During the discussion, Ms. Haspel, then deputy C.I.A. director, turned toward Mr. Trump. She outlined possible responses in a quiet but firm voice, then leaned forward and told the president that the “strong option” was to expel 60 diplomats.

To persuade Mr. Trump, according to people briefed on the conversation, officials including Ms. Haspel also tried to show him that Mr. Skripal and his daughter were not the only victims of Russia’s attack.

Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children hospitalized after being sickened by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals. She then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were inadvertently killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives.

Ms. Haspel was not the first to use emotional images to appeal to the president, but pairing it with her hard-nosed realism proved effective: Mr. Trump fixated on the pictures of the sickened children and the dead ducks. At the end of the briefing, he embraced the strong option.

The outcome was an example, officials said, of how Ms. Haspel is one of the few people who can get Mr. Trump to shift position based on new information.”

I pointed out to the authors in an (unanswered) email that this was an extraordinary claim, because no children became sick due to poisoning by a toxic chemical, and nor did any ducks die. And so unless they were prepared to correct or retract their piece, there could only be two possibilities:

1. Ms Haspel unwittingly showed false images to no less a person than the President of the United States, supplied to her by the British Government who knew them to be false, which persuaded him to embrace the “strong option”.
2. Ms Haspel knowingly showed false images to no less a person than the President of the United States, which persuaded him to embrace the “strong option”.

It seems that the two journalists have not ignored mine and the many other emails they received about this issue, and they have today corrected their story. The paragraphs of interest now read as follows:

“During the discussion, Ms. Haspel, then deputy C.I.A. director, turned toward Mr. Trump. She outlined possible responses in a quiet but firm voice, then leaned forward and told the president that the “strong option” was to expel 60 diplomats.

To persuade Mr. Trump, according to people briefed on the conversation, officials including Ms. Haspel tried to demonstrate the dangers of using a nerve agent like Novichok in a populated area. Ms. Haspel showed pictures from other nerve agent attacks that showed their effects on people.

The British government had told Trump administration officials about early intelligence reports that said children were sickened and ducks were inadvertently killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives.

The information was based on early reporting, and Trump administration officials had requested more details about the children and ducks, a person familiar with the intelligence said, though Ms. Haspel did not present that information to the president. After this article was published, local health officials in Britain said that no children were harmed.

Ms. Haspel was not the first to use emotional appeals to the president. She and Mr. Pompeo showed Mr. Trump images of children sickened by chemical weapons attacks in Syria, in an earlier presentation. But Ms. Haspel’s strategy in the March briefing was to pair emotional appeals with her hard-nosed realism and it proved effective. At the end of the briefing, Mr. Trump embraced the strong option. [my emphasis]”

Below is Mr Barnes’s explanation on Twitter for the error and the correction:

“I made a significant error in my April 16 profile of Gina Haspel. It took a while to figure out where I went wrong. Initially, I reported that in March 2018, Gina Haspel, then the future CIA director, briefed President Trump about the Skirpal nerve agent attack, showing pictures of sickened children and dead ducks. That was wrong. There are—so far as we know—no pictures of dead ducks or sickened kids. Haspel did show pictures to Trump, but they were about the effects of nerve agents in general, they were not specific to the attack in the UK.

British officials did brief the Trump administration about early reports of dead ducks & sick children. Officials sought more info, believing such intel would be persuasive to Trump, who was skeptical of the proposed expulsion of 60 Russians in response to the attack. But Haspel did not brief the president on that intelligence.

Local UK health officials deny that any animals or children were sickened, as British officials pointed out soon after our story published. (In response to good reporting by @haynesdeborah, @guardian and others.) (link: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/apr/18/no-children-ducks-harmed-novichok-attack-wiltshire-health-officials)

The intelligence about the ducks and children were based on an early intelligence report, according to people familiar with the matter. The intelligence was presented to the US in an effort to share all that was known, not to deceive the Trump administration. This correction was delayed because conducting the research to figure out what I got wrong, how I got it wrong and what was the correct information took time.

I regret the error and offer my apology. I strive to get information right the first time. That is what subscribers pay for. But when I get something wrong, I fix it.”

Here is my response on Twitter to Mr Barnes:

Dear Julian,

Thanks for taking the time to correct your report. However, it unfortunately raises just as many questions as the initial report.

Firstly, you say British officials briefed the Trump administration about early reports of dead ducks & sick children.

Really? Which early reports were these? There were none. The parents of the children who had tests to see if they had been contaminated were only contacted 2 weeks after the incident, and none of them was found to be ill. This is the first report on it, and it confirms the children were given the all clear. And there were never any dead ducks in Salisbury nor any reports of them.

Secondly, you say that “Officials sought more info, believing such intel would be persuasive to Trump, who was skeptical of the proposed expulsion of 60 Russians in response to the attack.” But the fact is that any further (truthful) info could not have persuaded Mr Trump, for the simple reason that no other people were harmed in Salisbury than the three people who were initially harmed. How, then, was he persuaded?

Thirdly, you presumably give the answer to the second point, when you say “Haspel did show pictures to Trump, but they were about the effects of nerve agents in general, they were not specific to the attack in the UK.” So in other words, Ms Haspel couldn’t show any pictures from Salisbury to persuade the sceptical Mr Trump, because there weren’t any to show. So she showed him pictures from other nerve agent attacks, which were presumably sufficiently bad to turn him from his scepticism, to expelling 60 diplomats. Even though nothing like that happened in Salisbury.

Thank you for clarifying that Ms Haspel did indeed wilfully mislead the President.”

Despite NYT’s correction, the question it poses is this: Which is worse:

• The deputy director of the CIA showing a sceptical President some fake pictures of dead ducks and sick children to persuade him to take the strongest action?
• Or the deputy director of the CIA, knowing full well that there weren’t any pictures of the effects of nerve agent on the population of Salisbury because only three people were ever affected, showing some pictures of actual nerve agent victims who were never anywhere near Salisbury to persuade him to take the strongest action?

The answer is they’re both as bad. In both scenarios, an utterly false picture of what happened in Salisbury was given to the sceptical President to twist his arm into taking action he didn’t want to take.

As they say, when in a hole, better stop digging.

Remembering a Different D-Day

D-Day: How the US Supported Hitler’s Rise to Power

by TRNN

June 6, 2019

On June 6, 1944, Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy, France, opening a second front against German fascism. The largest contingents of fighters were British, American, and Canadian. This battle has been depicted in movies and books as the decisive turning point of World War II, a ferocious struggle against a superior enemy.

But as The Real News Network's Paul Jay and author Peter Kuznick discuss, D-Day was also the moment where the United States' opposition to communism could no longer outweigh its tacit acceptance of Nazism, and the U.S. industrialists who helped rearm Germany after World War I could no longer profit from Hitler's Germany.

“In the aftermath of [World War I], there was such strong anti-war sentiment throughout Europe and throughout the United States that people were very, very loath to get involved in another war, and they were willing to tolerate things they perhaps shouldn't have,” Kuznick said.

Peter Kuznick is a professor of history and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University. He’s the author of The Untold History of the United States, co-written with Oliver Stone, as well as Rethinking the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

American Justice As Collateral Damage in EverWar

Clemency for the Lowly: Free Passes for the Mighty

by Rebecca Gordon - TomDispatch

June 6, 2019 

Memorial Day has come and gone and President Trump did not issue his pardons after all. There was substantial evidence that he was planning to use the yearly moment honoring the country’s war dead to grant executive clemency to several U.S. soldiers and at least one military contractor. All have been accused, and one already convicted, of crimes in the never-ending war on terror. But apparently Trump received enough resistance from serving and retired senior military officers and former soldiers, including presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, to change his mind -- for now.

The Friday before Memorial Day, the president was evidently still undecided but moved, so he told reporters, by his compassion for former fighters who are being “really treated very unfairly.” After all, he explained, “Some of these soldiers are people that have fought hard and long. You know, we teach them how to be great fighters, and then when they fight...” -- well, we’re sometimes cruel enough to hold them to the standards set by U.S. and international law.

Of course, there are those, including ethics students of mine in the Reserve Officer Training Corps, who might argue that part of the training to be a “great fighter” is learning to obey the laws of war, including, for example, the Geneva Conventions.

Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Of Crimes and Pardons

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How about a little round of Auld Lang Syne? After all, when it comes to war crimes, whatever he ends up doing, Donald Trump will still be a johnny-come-lately. Remember, for instance, that top officials in the administration of George W. Bush, including Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, reportedly had methods of torture demonstrated to them in the White House and officially green-lighted such methods in their post-9/11 campaign to, as they put it, “take the gloves off” in the Global War on Terror. Similarly, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, on hearing about stress techniques being used by the CIA on prisoners in the war on terror, complained that they were too timid. "I stand for 8-10 hours a day,” he wrote. “Why is standing limited to 4 hours?" Meanwhile, Justice Department lawyers were promoting what were then being euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques” as anything but torture. They even redefined “severe physical or mental pain or suffering” in the classic legal description of such acts more or less out of existence. An act would not be considered torture, they decided, if “intent” wasn’t there -- and the only way to know about intent would be to ask the potential torturer. (Even then, he or she would need to have “specific intent to cause pain" in mind.)

This was the mentality of the Bush White House as CIA “black sites” (essentially secret torture prisons) spread around the planet, while Guantánamo was set up as the administration’s offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice. The CIA even waterboarded -- in a blunter age, it was known as “the water torture” -- one prisoner 83 times in a single month (a technique banned after Barack Obama came into office). So candidate Donald Trump was in good company in 2016 when he began claiming that he would load up Gitmo "with some bad dudes," while bringing “back waterboarding, and a hell of a lot worse.” In that campaign year, he repeatedly called for its use and swore that, as president, he’d approve it “in a heartbeat” because “only a stupid person would say it doesn’t work... [and] if it doesn’t work, [the terrorists] deserve it anyway, for what they’re doing.” We’re talking, of course, about a candidate without pity who swore that, in fighting ISIS, he would do more than just kill its members. “When you get these terrorists,” he said, “you have to take out their families.”

His rally audiences ate it up and so a man who was openly and preemptively proud of being a future war criminal -- no euphemisms for him -- was elected president of the United States. Think of that as you consider what TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon has to say today about his urge to pardon convicted (or accused) war criminals in the lower ranks of the U.S. military. It’s a small, small world we live in and it's getting smaller every day. Tom

Clemency for the Lowly: Free Passes for the Mighty

by Rebecca Gordon

Trump has already pardoned one war criminal. On May 6th, he granted full executive clemency to Michael Behenna, convicted in 2009 of murdering an Iraqi prisoner named Ali Mansur Mohammed. Behenna served five years of a 25-year sentence and was paroled in 2014. What did Behenna do to Mansur? Guardian columnist Gary Younge offers some details: “On Mansur’s release Behenna was supposed to take him home, but instead took him to a secluded area, stripped him naked and shot him dead, later claiming Mansur had made a lunge for his gun.” Now, Behenna has a presidential pardon and Ali Mansur Mohammed is still dead.

Who else is in line for a possible pardon? The list includes Nicholas Slatten, a former contractor for Blackwater, twice convicted of murder in federal court for his part in the infamous Nisour Square massacre of 14 civilians in Baghdad in 2007. Blackwater, you may recall, was a mercenary outfit owned until 2010 by Erik Prince, a Trump confidant and the brother of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. Also under consideration for pardons:

• Army Major Matthew Golsteyn, a Green Beret accused of murdering an unarmed Afghan
• Navy Special Warfare Operator Chief Edward Gallagher, accused among other things of “stabbing a defenseless teenage captive to death, picking off a school-age girl and an old man from a sniper’s roost,” and “indiscriminately spraying neighborhoods [in Mosul, Iraq] with rockets and machine-gun fire,” according to the New York Times
• A “group of Marine Corps snipers charged,” as the Times also reported, “with urinating on the corpses of dead Taliban fighters”

Trump seems to have taken an interest in Gallagher’s case as early as this March, when he tweeted, “In honor of his past service to our Country, Navy Seal #EddieGallagher will soon be moved to less restrictive confinement while he awaits his day in court. Process should move quickly!” For once, Trump wasn’t lying and soon afterwards he ordered the Navy to release the prisoner from the brig while he awaits trial. Gallagher is now merely restricted to his base.

Small Fry Get Tried, Big Fish Walk

Both military figures and civilians have expressed disgust at Trump’s Memorial Day pardon talk. Some, like Buttigieg, argue that pardons for war crimes endanger those now serving in the military. “If the president blows a hole in” the military justice system, the Democratic candidate for president told the Washington Post, “he is blowing a hole in the military and he is putting troops’ lives at risk” by signaling to adversaries that the United States is not bound by the laws of war, so they needn’t be either.

Other critics point to potential harm to the integrity of the military justice system, which requires that military commanders refrain from seeking to influence ongoing judicial processes. Presumably the category of “military commanders” includes the commander-in-chief. Yet Trump has done just that, most recently by telling reporters he might wait until after the trials are over to consider issuing those pardons, a pretty strong signal to the courts of the outcomes he’d like to see.

Outrageous as these potential and actual pardons may be, even the most outraged of observers continue to avoid a more significant issue: only relatively low-level soldiers and contractors have been held responsible for crimes committed in the war on terror. With all the recent discussion of pardons and war crimes, who’s talking about holding responsible the authors of the policies that put those soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq in the first place? (Or, for that matter, in Syria, Yemen, Niger, or any of the other acknowledged and unacknowledged battlefields in our forever wars?) If the crime is big enough -- like creating or countenancing a U.S. torture archipelago that stretched from Thailand to Poland to Guantánamo Bay, or lying to the world to justify launching an aggressive war on Iraq -- the risk of trial is nonexistent. No pardons required.

Should pictures surface of you tormenting Iraqis in some foreign prison like Iraq’s Abu Ghraib, as Army reservists Charles Graner and Lynndie England did, you might indeed end up in jail for a while and become the possible object of a presidential pardon. If, however, you’re Major General Geoffrey Miller, who ran the Guantánamo prison for then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- well, you’re a hero. In 2003, Rumsfeld dispatched Miller from Cuba to take charge of U.S. military prisons in Iraq, especially Abu Ghraib, and to “Gitmo-ize them,” which he certainly did. And if you’re Donald Rumsfeld himself, who approved the use of torture at Guantánamo in an infamous December 2002 memo requested by Miller, you’re an elder statesman and honored philanthropist.

War Crimes and Cover-Ups

Of course, the war on terror isn’t the first American conflict in which higher-ups have escaped responsibility for war crimes. I was only 17 in November 1969, but I still remember when investigative reporter Seymour Hersh broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. He recounted the events of a day of horror in March 1968 when a small band of U.S. soldiers, led by Lieutenant William Calley, systematically murdered somewhere between 350 and 570 Vietnamese civilians, all of them old men, women, or children. It would later emerge that, in addition to shoving Vietnamese peasants into ditches and machine gunning them, executing people kneeling outside a temple, setting fire to homes, and shooting people as they ran out to escape the flames, soldiers raped many women and girls.

A witness told Hersh, “They didn’t put up a fight or anything. The women huddled against their children and took it. They brought their kids real close to their stomachs and hugged them, and put their bodies over them trying to save them. It didn’t do much good.”

Alone among the 26 servicemen tried for My Lai, Lieutenant Calley was convicted in 1971 of murder. All the rest were acquitted. Calley was sentenced to life in the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, later reduced to 20 years. However, in a move that would presage Donald Trump's order to release Eddie Gallagher, the day after Calley's conviction, President Richard Nixon arranged for him to be moved to Fort Benning, Georgia, where he lived under house arrest until his parole a mere three-and-a-half years later.

As Nick Turse revealed in the Nation 40 years later, My Lai was no aberration. It was part of a larger operation called Speedy Express, conceived at the highest military levels, involving civilian murders committed across a wide swath of South Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. As Turse wrote in 2008:

“From December 1968 through May 1969, a large-scale operation was carried out by the Ninth Infantry Division, with support from nondivision assets ranging from helicopter gunships to B-52 bombers. The offensive, known as Operation Speedy Express, claimed an enemy body count of 10,899 at a cost of only 267 American lives. Although guerrillas were known to be well armed, the division captured only 748 weapons.”

Quoting an anonymous sergeant who in 1970 wrote a 10-page letter to Army Chief of Staff General William Westmoreland, Turse added that,

"these killings all took place for one reason: 'the General in charge and all the commanders, riding us all the time to get a big body count. Nobody ever gave direct orders to "shoot civilians" that I know of, but the results didn’t show any different than if... they had ordered it. The Vietnamese were dead, victims of the body count pressure and nobody cared enough to try to stop it.'"

No one was ever prosecuted for the crimes of Operation Speedy Express and only William Calley was ever convicted for the horrors of My Lai, themselves but one example of what Westmoreland’s anonymous correspondent called, “a My Lay [sic] each month for over a year.” Indeed, the expression “a Lieutenant Calley” came to signify a low-level scapegoat for war crimes ordered (however implicitly) by higher ups who managed to keep their hands -- and their legacies -- clean of the taint of atrocity.

Of course, no high-ranking officer, cabinet-level official, or U.S. president would ever stand trial for the crimes of the Vietnam War. Not for the extensive use of the incendiary napalm against defenseless civilians; not for the CIA’s infamous Phoenix Program in which between 20,000 and 40,000 Vietnamese were murdered (often after being tortured); not for the carpet bombing of parts of North Vietnam and significant parts of South Vietnam; not for the deaths of as many as two million civilians in North and South Vietnam.

Remember Nuremberg?

The United States was not always so reluctant to put national leaders on trial for their war crimes. That’s exactly what this country, along with the other three “Great Powers” of World War II -- France, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union -- did when they tried high-ranking Nazis and their enablers at Nuremberg.

In his opening remarks at the first Nuremberg trials in 1945, Robert Jackson, the chief prosecutor for the United States (and an associate justice of the Supreme Court), issued a warning: “We must not forget that the record on which we judge the defendants today is the record on which we will be judged tomorrow.”

As it turned out, he was wrong. The practices established at Nuremberg, and the understandings behind them, later codified in the 1950 Nuremberg Principles, have not proved to be the record by which U.S. actions in war, whether in Vietnam or in today’s never-ending war on terror, have been judged. Nonetheless, it’s worth taking a look at those ideas, because they provide an excellent basis for assessing just who are the real war criminals still walking among us.

Nuremberg established the principle that the international laws of war are real laws and that breaking them is a real crime. That’s what the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, was created to adjudicate -- even though the United States quickly removed itself from the ICC in 2002, the year it began functioning. It was then that President George W. Bush’s top officials started getting nervous about their new CIA torture program. And lest we think of that as ancient history, remember that it was John Bolton, President Trump’s current national security advisor, who delivered the news to the United Nations that the U.S. was leaving the court.

Under the Nuremberg Principles, even heads of state or other high government officials are not immune from prosecution for war crimes or crimes against humanity, nor can anyone be exonerated for them on the sole grounds of a superior’s orders. (That defense was nevertheless used by the My Lai killers and some of those President Trump is now thinking about pardoning.)

Before the Nuremberg tribunals could begin, the organizers had to decide what the charges would be. They settled on three major kinds of offense, which still frame the way we think about war crimes today. The first (which generated the most disagreement among the four Great Powers) was “crimes against peace” -- in other words, involvement in launching a war of aggression. The French and the Soviets were dubious about trying Nazi officials for a crime that wasn’t explicitly identified in international law when the war started. Ironically, in view of this country’s twenty-first-century wars, it was Robert Jackson, backed by Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who in 1945 argued that all the rest of Germany’s war crimes sprang from this initial crime of waging an unprovoked war of aggression. In short (and logically enough), no war, no war crimes.

“War crimes” -- violations of the laws of war such as mistreatment, torture, or execution of prisoners, or disproportionate harm to civilians -- formed the second category. The third was, like the first, a new kind of crime made necessary by the unprecedented genocide of the Holocaust, and it was called “crimes against humanity.”

As I argued in my book American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes, there’s a sense in which most of the crimes of the U.S. war on terror -- the tortures, the drone assassinations, the hundreds of thousands of pointless civilian deaths, the millions of people displaced and turned into refugees -- sprang from the determination of then-Vice President Dick Cheney and his coterie of neocons to commit a crime against peace by invading Iraq. (Some of his acolytes like Elliott Abrams and John Bolton have ominously resurfaced in the Trump administration and have been doing their best lately to gin up new wars of aggression against Venezuela and Iran.)

Some (myself among them) have argued that the invasion of Afghanistan was also a crime against peace. Starting what has become the longest war in U.S. history was not the only option available to the Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks. It could have, for example, treated them as a horrendous crime, rather than an act of war, and used international channels like the International Criminal Court to prosecute those responsible. It could have continued its negotiations with the Taliban government for the extradition of Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders. After all, the Trump administration is talking to the Taliban now. How many lives might have been saved with a little more patience in 2001?

In any case, U.S. war crimes, including torture, sprang from the desire to invade Iraq. Within a few days of the al-Qaeda attacks of 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz were already pushing for a war against Iraq, according to George W. Bush’s autobiography. At a Camp David "war council" held four days later, Bush wrote, Rumsfeld told him that “dealing with Iraq would show a major commitment to antiterrorism.”

As many of its victims have reported, one of the original purposes of the CIA’s infamous torture program (and its archipelago of “black sites” around the planet) was not to prevent further attacks on the United States, but to get someone, anyone, to admit to a connection between Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks. (There was none, of course.)

One of those prisoners was a Libyan named Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi who was shipped to Egypt and waterboarded until he agreed to the proposition that, as President George W. Bush put it in an October 2002 speech to the nation, “Iraq has trained al-Qaeda in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases.” In the same speech, Bush even explained where he got this “information,” saying, “Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda.” Secretary of State Colin Powell then repeated this claim in an infamous speech to the U.N. Security Council justifying the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Al-Libi later recanted, saying his statement implicating Iraq had been forced out of him under torture, but by then, of course, Washington’s war in Iraq was well underway.

The Other War Criminals

If the United States had been judged by the standard set at Nuremberg, people of much higher position than Eddie Gallagher would be lining up today for Trump pardons. The list would be long indeed, but would certainly include President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, CIA Director George Tenet, Attorneys General Alberto Gonzales and John Ashcroft, and Zalmay Khalilzad, who was Bush’s ambassador to both Afghanistan and Iraq and is presently serving as U.S. special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation.

Meanwhile, our current criminal president contemplates pardoning the small fry, even as he orders an investigation into the agencies that had the temerity to investigate the Russian hacking of the 2016 election. We can only hope that one day soon he also finds himself in need of a pardon -- like the one President Gerald Ford gave Richard Nixon after he avoided impeachment by resigning from office.

Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. Her previous books include Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States and Letters from Nicaragua.

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 Rebecca Gordon

Dropping Justice: Breaking Down UK Law and Assange Sentence

Miscarriage of Justice: Why Assange's Belmarsh Sentence is Wrong

by Nina Cross - 21st Century Wire

June 4, 2019

The statement by UN Special Rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, on the psychological effects on Julian Assange of years of state-sponsored abuse by self-professed democratic countries, exposes an evident breakdown of international law. 

One of the signs that there is a collective persecution is the flagrant lack of proportionality in the way the law is applied to Julian Assange by countries involved.

It is increasingly apparent that the sentence passed by Judge Deborah Taylor on 1st May at Southwark Crown Court is a critical part of the ‘systematic judicial persecution‘ of Assange by the UK.

Judge Taylor gave Assange effectively a year in Belmarsh Category A prison for skipping bail in 2012. Assange was required to prove he had good reason to skip bail:

Under s. 6(3) of the Bail Act 1976, it is for the defendant to prove that he had a reasonable cause for failing to surrender.

Taylor dismissed Assange’s mitigating reasons for jumping bail, citing the previous judges’ rejection. This is a collective dismissal of what has been a very public aggression towards Assange by the US government and its allies. Examples of threats to Assange, which appeared in his statement, are seen here, here, here and here.

The question we must ask in the case of Assange is what type of mitigating proof (threats of assassination, torture and abuse aside) would have stood up in Taylor’s court? Had Assange had a note from Mike Pompeo threatening capital punishment or a life sentence without parole in a high security prison for exposing US war crimes, signed prior to June 2012, would that have got Assange into a B Category prison for 6 months instead?

Taylor dismissed Assange’s fear of persecution by the US, sentencing him to 50 weeks in Belmarsh prison, where his condition, already identified as deteriorating, has worsened to the extent he is now in the prison health ward. Her reason was that Assange had a choice:

“Whilst you may have had fears as to what may happen to you, nonetheless you had a choice…”

This may be technically true. An individual chased by their attacker may have the choice of hiding, if they can, to avoid being attacked; if their attacker hangs around they can choose to come out and risk being hurt or stay out of sight. This ‘choice’ has been presented as an illusion of freedom, and in turn, an illusion of due process.

This reality of the ‘choice’ facing Assange has been summed up by Melzer in a response to Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s denial of UK abuse on Twitter:

This is wrong. Assange chose to hide in the embassy and was always free to leave and face justice. The UN Special Rapporteur should allow British courts to make their judgements without his interference or inflammatory accusations. https://t.co/s0UtMN5pU0

— Jeremy Hunt (@Jeremy_Hunt) May 31, 2019

And so roll on barely three weeks after Taylor’s dismissal of Assange’s pleas, and we see a fresh spate of indictments by the US of 18 charges against him, including espionage charges that have been widely regarded an attack on journalism. Not only are these politically driven, but they bring with them a sentence of 175 years in prison. Most reasonable and fair people would see this risk to his life as the mitigating reason Assange took asylum in 2012, which his proof supports.

What we have in British courts so far could only be described as hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil, where US political interests are clearly at stake.

What Assange has been left with is a severe prison sentence passed on the premise there were no mitigating circumstances and that he had no reasonable cause for failing to surrender to bail. The courts systematically dismissed his fear of extradition to the US, now in play, and the fear of politically driven charges being issued, and life in prison. There’s also no guarantee that future charges won’t result in the death sentence.

Regarding the Assange situation, the British courts have so far failed to show a shred of humanity, proportionality, or common-sense.

Nor have they shown any deference to international law. Assange’s Belmarsh sentence from Taylor should be seen in the context of Melzer’s comments on the rule of law:

“Mr. Assange has been deliberately exposed, for a period of several years, to progressively severe forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, the cumulative effects of which can only be described as psychological torture.“

In giving Assange this sentence, Taylor has placed a vulnerable political prisoner, of which the world can now bear witness, in an environment designed to crush him. This punishment is likely to make him more vulnerable to his persecutors, to force him to give up hope.

Melzer points out that Assange’s sentence in Belmarsh also strips him of the ability to defend himself against his US persecutors through the lack of access to his case files and documents, and limited frequency and duration of lawyers’ visits. The needless isolation of Assange in Belmarsh has achieved this deprivation at this most crucial and dangerous stage, making him more vulnerable.

The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (UNGWAD) has condemned Taylor’s sentence:

The Working Group is further concerned that Mr. Assange has been detained since 11 April 2019 in Belmarsh prison, a high-security prison, as if he were convicted for a serious criminal offence. This treatment appears to contravene the principles of necessity and proportionality envisaged by the human rights standards

In sentencing Assange, Taylor discredited UNGWAD. She could not credit the human rights experts because it would mean conceding the UK had acted in contravention to human rights law for several years, including the previous judges’ rulings on Assange, given the 2015 opinion by the UNGWAD that Assange was being held in arbitrary detention. Taylor described that opinion as:

“…underpinned by misconceptions of fact and law.”

In other words, the UNWGAD panel, of which each member is an authority on international law, and which answers to the UN Human Rights Commission, and is considered authoritative by the European Court of Human Rights, drew their opinion from ignorance and stupidity. Taylor’s view would appear to lack proportionality.

A further reason Taylor gave for the crushing sentence in Belmarsh was the money the Home Office squandered on surveillance while Assange was in the Ecuadorian embassy:

“… your continued residence in the Embassy has necessitated a concentration of resources, and expenditure of £16 million of taxpayers’ money in ensuring that when you did leave, you were brought to justice. It is essential to the rule of law that nobody is above or beyond the reach of the law. Orders of the Court are to be obeyed.”

Following Taylor’s logic, we must believe that the British government sees skipping bail as the worst crime imaginable, and will fund up to 150 police officers to stand at the front door of every bail skipping perpetrator. At least that is what Taylor wants us to think.

Between 2012 and 2016 some 48,340 people skipped bail in the UK. For argument’s sake let’s say they, like Assange, they were all accused, not charged or convicted, of some crime. Moreover, as in Assange’s case, let’s also assume they had actually been given bail, as he was in 2010, on the basis he was considered cooperative and likely to be acquitted – suggesting he was not considered a risk to the public.

Are we to believe there would be proportionality or a limit in how taxpayers’ money would fund each one of these cases, or could they each potentially ratchet up a surveillance budget of £16 million, as Taylor’s reasoning infers?

To give this further context, if we take the number of bail skippers in 2016 (7,586) and use that to estimate figures for 2017 and 2018, we arrive at an estimated 63,512 people skipping bail in the UK between 2012 and 2018, roughly representing the time Assange spent in the embassy. If we apply this figure to the total cost of just overt surveillance for Assange, £16 million, we arrive at just over a budget £1 trillion in public funds.

To show the scale of this disproportionate use of taxpayers’ money on just one bail skipper, we should consider the UK public sector borrowing figure which, between April 2012 and April 2019, totaling almost £490 billion. In other words, such an expenditure applied evenly and proportionately to all bail skippers would have potentially bankrupted the United Kingdom.

A further question, if we follow Taylor’s reasoning further, would be to ask if all these individuals would be sent to Belmarsh prison for helping to bankrupt the country.

For anyone weighing up whether there has been any kind of bias against Assange, the spectacular availability of funds for police surveillance should be a clue. Taylor’s disproportionate sentencing of Assange is based on this questionable and disproportionate use of surveillance, as well as the categorical dismissal of any threat to his human rights, only Assange and his legal team are now vindicated by the confirmation of the threat of extradition to a US authority (outraged over his revelations of their own war crimes).

The inclusion of Judge Taylor’s claim during the sentencing of that the state was over-burdened with having to spend £16 million on police surveillance on Assange, should be recognised for what it is: completely arbitrary, and supportive of politically-driven government narratives. It relates in no way to any other case of bail skipping surveillance in the country’s history, and seems to be accepted for no reason other than the fact the individual skipping bail was Julian Assange.

Why should Assange be any more accountable to policing costs than any other of the 63,511 bail skippers, some of whom were inevitably considered a serious risk to the public? Do all bail skipping sentences come with a tariff of prison time reflecting policing costs? This disproportionate use of UK law in the case of Assange must be recognised as a violation of the spirit of the law, and of human rights.

State Sponsored Abuse

We can see the UK establishment is tightly pulling rank to save collective necks and faces, while serving its foreign master, the US. We know Assange is being abused because we can see it happening; this is not some mysterious case taking place behind closed doors. We are sitting in a huge public gallery and we are witnesses.

The ruling by a Swedish district court on June 3, 2019, against the issuing of a European Arrest Warrant (EAW) against Assange, already imprisoned and posing no flight risk, was a source for relief. The Swedish judge decided it was disproportionate to have an arrest warrant on Assange who is already detained in Belmarsh high security prison. Swedish prosecutors will instead question him in person in the UK over their renewed sexual allegations case, as was always requested by Assange. It suggests there are some courts holding on to their integrity, applying proportionality.

What this latest Swedish decision also revealed is that the UK bail order appears to have been based on an illegitimate issuance of a European Arrest Warrant by Sweden in late 2010. As former diplomat Craig Murray reported previously, the original Swedish extradition order was followed by an EAW that had not been issued by a judge, which would have been the normal legal due process, but rather by a Swedish prosecutor. Put simply, judges represent legal authority, while prosecutors often represent political interests. Such a quandary is far from trivial. Murray explains:

“… the original European Arrest Warrant for Julian Assange from Sweden was not issued by any court but by a prosecutor; that this was upheld in the UK Supreme Court despite the Court’s open acknowledgement that this was not what the UK Parliament had intended by the phrase that the warrant must come from a “judicial authority”; and that the law had been changed immediately thereafter so it could not be done again.”

Murray went on to note that it should be no surprise that when eight years later, “the European Arrest Warrant request for Assange was finally put before a Swedish court, the court refused to issue it. In other words, that is what should have happened back in 2010 if things had been done legally, and not politically. Here Assange’s defense team can rightly argue that the UK original bail order on Assange in 2012 was based on an abuse of Sweden’s own due process. Based on this analysis, the initial EAW should never have been issued, which means Assange would not have been forced to claim asylum with Ecuador in order to avoid being extradited to the US, nor would he be detained in Belmarsh now.

Meanwhile, the UN rapporteurs continue to make a courageous stand by condemning the unlawful and immoral behaviour of supposed enlightened democratic countries. It is no surprise leaders, such as Jeremy Hunt, would attempt to vilify and discredit them as this is the tactic they have used against Assange. This is how they treat people who expose the truth.

This week, Secretary Hunt announced for the benefit of the US government, that he would not block an extradition ruling of Assange if selected as the next Prime Minister. This indicates that under his premiership, the UK may well descend into further lawless chaos, given Hunt’s brazen disregard for human rights and international law.

The risk to Assange is very great if extradited, as expressed by Melzer:

“My most urgent concern is that, in the United States, Mr. Assange would be exposed to a real risk of serious violations of his human rights, including his freedom of expression, his right to a fair trial and the prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”

Assange cannot be extradited; it would result in the extraterritoriality of the US justice department, the criminalisation of journalism and the possibility of Assange’s death. British prosecuting services and courts have so far shown they are willing to cross that line. However, we must now see them exercise proportionality and demonstrate human rights and freedom of the press have a chance.

We are the witnesses to state crimes against Julian Assange and press freedom.

Author Nina Cross is an independent writer and researcher, and contributor to 21WIRE. To see more of her work, visit her Nina’s archive.

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