A day after dozens of doctors around the world released a statement about their mounting concerns regarding JulIan Assanges health as hes detained in a U.K. prison, Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer spoke with Tariq Ali, a renowned British journalist and co-editor of the recent collection of essays, In Defense of Julian Assange. To Scheer, Ali and the many contributors to the book, the case against Assange boils down to an international effort to suppress press freedoms. Yet as Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States have all co-authored the WikiLeaks founders demise, many other journalists and publishers, including at The Guardian and the New York Times---two publications that published work based on Wikileaks---have refused to defend Assange.

What we did in assembling In Defense of Julian Assange, explains Ali, was to take every single facet of the case and present it before a reading public. And one reason we had to do this is because the [liberal] press have given up on him, having used WikiLeaks, having got their scoops, having raised their own circulations.

Corporate medias abandonment of Assange and whistleblower Chelsea Manning comes at no surprise to Scheer who has spent much of his career defending and working with whistleblowers such as Daniel Ellsberg, John Kiriakou, Edward Snowden and others.

Everyone likes a whistleblower as long as he's blowing the whistle on their opponent, or in some other regime, or so forth, Scheer tells Ali.

A prime example of this hypocrisy is the treatment of the Ukraine scandal whistleblower whos been touted by Democrats and much of the press as a hero. Manning and Assange, on the other hand, are vilified, discredited, ignored, jailed, and in Assanges case, psychologically and possibly physically tortured.

The British government [is]keeping [Assange] in Belmarsh prison, which is a high-security prison where he's [surrounded] either by people who have committed unspeakable murders, or so-called terrorists charged under the Prevention of Terrorism Acts, with very high security; he's been kept in isolation. [Doctors are] worried that he might die in prison.

Listen to the full conversation between Ali and Scheer as they discuss the many facets of the obscene persecution of Julian Assange, a man who, both journalists argue, is solely guilty of exposing war crimes and uncomfortable truths the establishment wanted to keep hidden from the public.

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The Plot to Discredit and Destroy Julian Assange | Scheer Intelligence - KCRW

In the past ten years, we lost hope in American politics, realized we were being watched on the internet, and finally broke the gender binary (kind of). So many of the beliefs we held to be true at the beginning of the decade have since been proven falseor at least, much more complicated than they once seemed. The Decade of Disillusion is a series that tracks how the hell we got here.

Transgender people entered the 2010s quietly and are leaving it as magazine cover stars and TV show protagonists. That increased visibility pushed societys understanding of the gender binary, with many people becoming aware of the existence of trans and non-binary people for the first time.

But the 2010s were also when we learned that mainstream visibility doesnt always equal rights, wealth, or safety. While visibility brought significant rights gains to the trans community over the past decade, it also brought a significant backlash that currently threatens several decades of progress for trans people. Here are the 10 most significant moments marking the steps toward rights and representation, which were also, in many cases, steps back.

Before 2010, the ability to legally transition genders was limited to those with financial means. Both conservative and liberal states legally enforced the gender binary, and only allowed changes to gender markers on legal IDs after a trans person had completed gender reassignment surgery, if at all. And given that coverage for such procedures was generally excluded from most health insurance plans, only trans people who could afford the expensive procedures could even dream of legally changing their genders.

In the U.S., you need valid ID to get a job, apply for housing, deal with the police, and buy alcohol, among other things, so any trans person who presented as one gender but had a legal ID showing another was primed to face discrimination.

In 2010, however, the State Department relaxed its surgery requirement in order to change the gender marker on U.S. passports, triggering a sea change for the trans community. Regardless of which state a trans person lived in, they could access a passport with the correct gender that could be used anywhere. It was the first step in allowing a dignified life for trans people who could not afford surgery.

After releasing classified military documents to Wikileaks in 2010, Chelsea Manning was eventually sentenced to 35 years in military prison. Then, on the eve of her sentencing in 2013, Mannings attorneys released a statement revealing that she is a transgender woman. Her struggle in military prison turned her into a high-profile figure for the trans community and brought attention to the plight faced by trans women within the prison system. In 2016, she won the right to have gender reassignment surgery while incarcerated, a first for the U.S. military correctional system.

In early 2017, Mannings sentence was commuted by President Obama, and she ran an unsuccessful campaign for Senate the following year. In March 2019, however, she was re-jailed for refusing to cooperate with a grand jury subpoena and remains in prison today.

You can almost use her progress in life to track a lot of transgender rights over the last decade, said trans advocate and writer Gillian Branstetter. We as a people entered this decade with immense hope, and now we are leaving this decade with immense fear and immense potential for harm. We started this [period of time] with Chelsea Manning in prison and we're ending it with Chelsea Manning in prison.

Transgender Tipping Point blared a Time magazine cover, alongside a statuesque photo of trans actress Laverne Cox. While the issue argued that the U.S. had reached a sort of tipping point of acceptance, nothing could have been further from the truth.

That might be remembered as the point that cis people discovered us, but we were here all along, and we've been doing the work all along, said Branstetter. The cover did symbolize a new level of representation for trans people in the U.S., resulting in modest gains in legal rights. But with that increased visibility came increased attacks from anti-trans activists and politiciansattacks that the trans community are still dealing with at the end of the decade.

Transgender journalist Samantha Allen revisited and skewered the overly optimistic cover three years later. Imagine a magazine cover today announcing The Transgender Tipping Point. The thought is almost laughable, she wrote. Whatever burst of momentum there supposedly was in 2014 has given way to a seemingly endless war of attrition between civil rights groups and anti-LGBT groups, with lives hanging delicately in the balance. Yes, transgender people are on TV now. But its clearer now than it has ever been that visibility is no silver bullet for transphobia.

When former Olympian and reality-TV star Caitlyn Jenner first announced her transition via a glamorous Vanity Fair covershe became the de facto face of the trans community in mainstream pop culture. But it soon became clear that Jenner was out of her depth in her new role as an advocate for the greater trans community.

Her support for Donald Trumps campaign for president proved disastrous, and early media missteps as well as her initial discomfort with marriage equality cost her much needed credibility with trans people and the LGBTQ community at large. Jenner is a contemptuous figure, and as a former athlete, most of her fans were the kind of people who didnt know much about trans people to begin with. Its easy for cis people to mock both her and her gender identity, leaving many trans people in the frustrating position of defending Jenners womanhood while denouncing, well, nearly everything else about her.

Despite that, Jenner remains the highest profile celebrity to publicly transition, and that alone makes her coming out a milestone in the past decade of trans rights.

In the wake of their loss at the Supreme Court over marriage equality, right wing cultural conservatives turned their ire toward transgender people. Using outlandish caricatures of trans women, conservative media and politicians launched a vast campaign against transgender peoples rights to use the bathroom that matches their gender, arguing that trans women are actually creepy men who threaten the safety of cis women and girls in public restrooms.

The issue hit its nadir in North Carolina, when Republican governor Pat McCrory signed HB2known as the bathroom billinto law. Effectively, it required trans people to use the bathroom that corresponds with the sex on their original birth certificates if the bathroom is government owned, including those in public schools. Backlash against the bill was swift and immediate. Musicians canceled concerts, the NBA and NCAA moved events out of the state, and companies canceled plans to expand into the state. All told, North Carolina lost about $3.76 billion in economic activity before the state finally relented and compromised on a repeal of the bill in 2017.

Importantly, HB2 taught the LGBTQ rights movement how to effectively respond to conservative attacks on trans issues. You can talk to state legislators in any state who will point to this three billion dollar damage done to the North Carolina economy because of the massive outcry over the threat of HB2, said Branstetter. It was a huge, huge turning point because it showed that transgender people are not defenseless. We could not easily be used as culture war fodder or a wedge issue. It showed that we have teeth, that we can fight back in a real way.

Before passage of the Affordable Care Act, a gender dysphoria diagnosis was considered a pre-existing condition by most insurance companies, so trans people were often left without access to even basic health insurance plans for transition-related care. And even if you did have coverage, most insurance companies also specifically excluded transition-related surgeries from coverage plans.

Passage of Obamacare changed that calculus significantly. Not only did the ACA require insurance companies to cover people with pre-existing conditions, the Obama administration put into place a rule to ban healthcare discrimination on the basis of gender identity, ending exclusions of transition-related surgeries.

Suddenly, trans people from all walks of life could afford life-affirming transition surgeries, and hospitals rushed to meet the sudden growth in demand. Earlier this year, however, the Trump administration proposed a rule that would undo the Obama-era rule, threatening access to transition-related care for hundreds of thousands of trans people in the U.S.

While Washington, D.C. was the first U.S. jurisdiction to offer third gender markers on government identification, Oregon became the first state to do so in 2017. It was the first time that people were given an option of legal gender recognition outside of just male or female.

While its an important step in recognizing that gender is more of a spectrum than a binary, some non-binary people have questioned why gender needs to be on identification in the first place. It certainly shows how much society has created a world and bureaucracy where everyone must at all times be sorted as either a woman or a man, said Vin Tanner, a nonbinary writer.

Now, at the end of the decade, 16 states offer non-binary gender markers on ID. The administrative moves came in response to a massive growth in people identifying outside of the gender binary. According to Pew Research data released earlier this year, 35 percent of people in Gen Z know someone who uses they/them pronouns and several non-binary actors, such as Asia Kate Dillon, now regularly appear on TV and in movies.

With three tweets, President Trump declared that he would order the military to ban transgender servicemembers from serving in the U.S. military. It was one of the few times he actually uttered the word transgender in public, and the ban became the public face for the administrations comprehensive anti-trans agenda.

For some, the attention on the military ban took away from other, more urgent issues for marginalized trans people. It's taking this big, familiar institution, a violent institution, and using it to frame a marginalized group around shared values, explained Branstetter. It was somewhat odd because you saw a lot of advocacy organizations pouring more time and energy into the right of transgender people to be killed in another country than they have ever poured into the transgender people to live in this country.

Still, the ban brought trans rights onto the moral radars of many who hadnt previously been paying attention.The visibility of [the trans military ban] has elevated the visibility of transgender people in the public eye to an unprecedented degree and in a very positive way, said Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

Danica Roem not only defeated one of the most outspoken homophobic delegates in the Virginia legislature, but became the first ever openly transgender person to be elected to state level office. Joining Roem in winning elections that year were Andrea Jenkins and Phillipe Cunningham, who became the first ever openly trans Black trans people to win elections when both won races to join the Minneapolis City Council.

Roems campaign focused on local transportation issues, but didnt shy away from her gender identity. So, her opponents attacks on her trans status seemed petty and unproductive compared to her plan to fix Route 28, a major thoroughfare through her district that needed significant upgrades. Roems issue-focused strategy has provided a blueprint for other trans candidates to win elections in districts all over the country, and her win effectively opened the door for others. There are now 21 openly trans elected officials in the U.S.

The Supreme Court heard the case of trans woman Aimee Stephens, who was fired from her job as a funeral home director and embalmer after informing her employer of her impending gender transition. If the high court rules against Stephens, it will set a precedent for employers to legally fire anyone who they perceive as gender-nonconforming.

Conservative attacks on the trans community are not showing any signs of slowing down, but what weve seen in the past decade is trans people bravely claiming public life, demanding rights and respect, and fighting back in a loud and organized way.

Aimee Stephens has said the reason she decided to sue was, simply, she got mad enough to do something about it. Thats the energy well need for the 2020s.

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Trans Visibility Exploded in the 2010s. But What Did Trans People Actually Gain? - Free

Self-styled liberals believe they are a better class of people than Trump, but are bigger supporters of unjust wars than the so-called deplorables.

The trauma of Donald Trumps presidency has created continued insanity for American liberals. They were never very trustworthy, due to their abiding belief in United States exceptionalism and an imagined right for it to intervene in the rest of the world as it pleased. Liberals could be counted on to protest wars which killed Americans in Vietnam or in Iraq. But by and large they trust in imperialist dictates if someone they like is in charge and who doesnt allow too many of their countrymen to get hurt.

Hence their dilemma with Donald Trump. Trump is their anti-Christ, a bad mannered, proudly stupid, racist who expresses the id of the great unwashed deplorable white masses. There are many reasons to oppose him but liberals generally attack from the right. The same people who remember that the surveillance state lied about the WMD threat from Iraq now parrot every word from the same people if they are anti-Trump. Their earlier opposition to war propaganda was more a result of their anti-Bush, anti-Republican stance than anything else. They didnt really oppose U.S. interventions or stand up for peace. Instead they eagerly wait for a war they can believe in if the rationale is to their liking.

Now this group which labels itself the resistance say nothing about U.S. sanctions that kill Venezuelans and Iranians by depriving their governments of the ability to conduct transactions needed to secure food and medicines. When their favorite news outlets proclaim Evo Morales to be a strongman and make the case for the coup that ousted him they go right along and make the case for imperialism carried out by the president they allegedly dislike so much.

The latest example of the liberal herd mentality comes in the form of love for the military. Liberals dont associate with this institution themselves. They wouldnt think of sending their kids to the army or the navy. But suddenly they have a love for senior officers if they voice disgust with Trump.

Donald Trump is dangerously undermining the military chain of command, criesSlate.com. Apparently the people at Slate missed the day in school which taught that we have a civilian government with the president as commander in chief of the military. No president can undermine the military chain of command. Heisthe military chain of command. The generals and admirals must follow his direction and they always do so quite happily.

They dropped napalm on Korea when ordered to do so. They did the same in Vietnam. They invaded Iraq and as Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange revealed, they mow down innocent people and laugh about their slaughter. This is not a group that liberals usually admire.

But Trump is a shock to their image of themselves and of their country. Most liberals want to be flag wavers as much as conservatives do. So they fantasize about a nation that is basically good with a little injustice that can be fixed when a Democrat is in the White House. The inequality, racism, and international aggression that are at the heart of American history can be forgotten. Trumps overt racism and general buffoonery make a lie of their beliefs and make them vulnerable to lies and propaganda.

The corporate media aid in the confusion. Trumps decision to intervene in the court martial of a Navy Seal convicted of a war crime is a legitimate news story. The resignation of the naval secretary because he opposed the interference was significant. What is questionable is the lack of attention given to Americas continued presence in Iraq in the first place. Suddenly theNew York Timesgives op-ed space to former secretaries of the navy who dont just express disagreement with Trumps decision but also label Trump as a man who doesnt share their values.

If liberals were to be taken seriously they would question military values, question the nearly 20-year long presence of the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan, and question why they get the vapors over anyone in uniform. These wars are the longest in history and are war crimes by definition. That is the point to be made and not that Trump upsets the tradition of letting lower ranked servicemen take the fall for crimes committed with the permission of Congress, presidents and the corporate media.

Trump is proof that appearance makes all the difference. When Obama was president the U.S. bombed an Afghanistan hospital run by Doctors Without Borders and killed 40 people. That act is the inevitable consequence of military occupations, and obviously not a force for good for the dead people. Obamas drone strikes werent opposed by anyone in Washington and Democratic presidential candidates expressed full confidence in Trumps sanctions that are killing Venezuelans.

The idea of American exceptionalism must be discarded completely. When that happens there will be no foolish notions of good and bad military decisions. There will be an appreciation for civilian government and questions about why the U.S. should have 800 military bases around the world. Of course that would mean questioning nearly every premise of political decision making in this country. That is what liberals would do if they were as smart as they think they are.

There is something even more sinister about this newfound affection. The people who could be counted on to protect civil liberties now ask Facebook to be a fact checker. Facebook takes orders from the Atlantic Council, a NATO funded right wing think tank. Fact checking from Facebook leads to censorship of black leftists and Palestinians and anyone else who upsets the established order.

When leftists were targeted as Russian assets and Google began to de-rank websites like Black Agenda Report the liberals didnt say anything then either. They wholeheartedly believed in tales of foreign intrigue that put Trump in office. Now their derangement is so complete they will even support military rule or some other effort to take what is left of our rights. The resistance are a clear and present danger to us all.

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Members of the US Navy conduct joint drills with the South Korean navy on the USS Ronald Reagan. October 19, 2017. (Reuters / Tim Kelly)

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Ever since 2007, when I first started writing for TomDispatch, Ive been arguing against Americas forever wars, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, or elsewhere. Unfortunately, its no surprise that, despite my more than 60 articles, American blood is still being spilled in war after war across the Greater Middle East and Africa, even as foreign peoples pay a far higher price in lives lost and cities ruined. And I keep asking myself: Why, in this century, is the distinctive feature of Americas wars that they never end? Why do our leaders persist in such repetitive folly and the seemingly eternal disasters that go with it?Ad Policy

Sadly, there isnt just one obvious reason for this generational debacle. If there were, we could focus on it, tackle it, and perhaps even fix it. But no such luck.

So why do Americas disastrous wars persist? I can think of many reasons, some obvious and easy to understand, like the endless pursuit of profit through weapons sales for those very wars, and some more subtle but no less significant, like a deep-seated conviction in Washington that a willingness to wage war is a sign of national toughness and seriousness. Before I go on, though, heres another distinctive aspect of our forever-war moment: Have you noticed that peace is no longer even a topic in America today? The very word, once at least part of the rhetoric of Washington politicians, has essentially dropped out of use entirely. Consider the current crop of Democratic candidates for president. One, Representative Tulsi Gabbard, wants to end regime-change wars, but is otherwise a self-professed hawk on the subject of the War on Terror. Another, Senator Bernie Sanders, vows to end endless wars, but is careful to express strong support for Israel and the ultra-expensive F-35 fighter jet. The other dozen or so tend to make vague sounds about cutting defense spending or gradually withdrawing US troops from various wars, but none of them even consider openly speaking of peace. And the Republicans? While President Trump may talk of ending wars, since his inauguration hes sent more troops to Afghanistan and into the Middle East, while greatly expanding drone and other air strikes, something about which he openly boasts.

War, in other words, is our new normal, Americas default position on global affairs, and peace, some ancient, long-faded dream. And when your default position is war, whether against the Taliban, ISIS, terror more generally, or possibly even Iran or Russia or China, is it any surprise that war is what you get? When you garrison the world with an unprecedented 800 or so military bases, when you configure your armed forces for whats called power projection, when you divide the globethe total planetinto areas of dominance(with acronyms like CENTCOM, AFRICOM, and SOUTHCOM) commanded by four-star generals and admirals, when you spend more on your military than the next seven countries combined, when you insist on modernizing a nuclear arsenal (to the tune of perhaps $1.7 trillion) already quite capable of ending all life on this and several other planets, what can you expect but a reality of endless war?

Think of this as the new American exceptionalism. In Washington, war is now the predictable (and even desirable) way of life, while peace is the unpredictable (and unwise) path to follow. In this context, the United States must continue to be the most powerful nation in the world by a country mile in all death-dealing realms and its wars must be fought, generation after generation, even when victory is never in sight. And if that isnt an exceptional belief system, what is?

If were ever to put an end to our countrys endless 21st-century wars, that mindset will have to be changed. But to do that, we would first have to recognize and confront wars many uses in American life and culture.

A partial list of wars many uses might go something like this: war is profitable, most notably for Americas vast military-industrial complex; war is sold as being necessary for Americas safety, especially to prevent terrorist attacks; and for many Americans, war is seen as a measure of national fitness and worthiness, a reminder that freedom isnt free. In our politics today, its far better to be seen as strong and wrong than meek and right.Current Issue

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As the title of a book by former war reporter Chris Hedges so aptly put it, war is a force that gives us meaning. And lets face it, a significant part of Americas meaning in this century has involved pride in having the toughest military on the planet, even as trillions of tax dollars went into a misguided attempt to maintain bragging rights to being the worlds sole superpower.

And keep in mind as well that, among other things, never-ending war weakens democracy while strengthening authoritarian tendencies in politics and society. In an age of gaping inequality, using up the countrys resources in such profligate and destructive ways offers a striking exercise in consumption that profits the few at the expense of the many.

In other words, for a select few, war pays dividends in ways that peace doesnt. In a nutshell, or perhaps an artillery shell, war is antidemocratic, anti-progressive, anti-intellectual, and anti-human. Yet, as we know, history makes heroes out of its participants and celebrates mass murderers like Napoleon as great captains.

What the United States needs today is a new strategy of containmentnot against communist expansion, as in the Cold War, but against war itself. Whats stopping us from containing war? You might say that, in some sense, weve grown addicted to it, which is true enough, but here are five additional reasons for wars enduring presence in American life:

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The delusional idea that Americans are, by nature, winners and that our wars are therefore winnable. No American leader wants to be labeled a loser. Meanwhile, such dubious conflictssee: the Afghan War, now in its 18th year, with several more years, or even generations, to gocontinue to be treated by the military as if they were indeed winnable, even though they visibly arent. No president, Republican or Democrat, not even Donald J. Trump, despite his promises that American soldiers will be coming home from such fiascos, has successfully resisted the Pentagons siren call for patience (and for yet more trillions of dollars) in the cause of ultimate victory, however poorly defined, farfetched, or far-off.

American societys almost complete isolation from wars deadly effects. Were not being droned (yet). Our cities are not yet lying in ruins (though theyre certainly suffering from a lack of funding, as is our most essential infrastructure, thanks in part to the cost of those overseas wars). Its nonetheless remarkable how little attention, either in the media or elsewhere, this countrys never-ending war-making gets here.

Unnecessary and sweeping secrecy: How can you resist what you essentially dont know about? Learning its lesson from the Vietnam War, the Pentagon now classifies (in plain speak: covers up) the worst aspects of its disastrous wars. This isnt because the enemy could exploit such detailsthe enemy already knows!but because the American people might be roused to something like anger and action by it. Principled whistle-blowers like Chelsea Manning have been imprisoned or otherwise dismissed or, in the case of Edward Snowden, pursued and indicted for sharing honest details about the calamitous Iraq War and Americas invasive and intrusive surveillance state. In the process, a clear message of intimidation has been sent to other would-be truth-tellers.

An unrepresentative government. Long ago, of course, Congress ceded to the presidency most of its constitutional powers when it comes to making war. Still, despite recent attempts to end Americas arms-dealing role in the genocidal Saudi war in Yemen (overridden by Donald Trumps veto power), Americas duly elected representatives generally dont represent the people when it comes to this countrys disastrous wars. They are, to put it bluntly, largely captives of (and sometimes on leaving politics quite literally go to work for) the military-industrial complex. As long as money is speech (thank you, Supreme Court!), the weapons makers are always likely to be able to shout louder in Congress than you and I ever will.

Americas persistent empathy gap. Despite our size, we are a remarkably insular nation and suffer from a serious empathy gap when it comes to understanding foreign cultures and peoples or what were actually doing to them. Even our globetrotting troops, when not fighting and killing foreigners in battle, often stay on vast bases, referred to in the military as Little Americas, complete with familiar stores, fast food, you name it. Wherever we go, there we are, eating our big burgers, driving our big trucks, wielding our big guns, and dropping our very big bombs. But what those bombs do, whom they hurt or kill, whom they displace from their homes and lives, these are things that Americans turn out to care remarkably little about.

All this puts me sadly in mind of a song popular in my youth, a time when Cat Stevens sang of a peace train that was soundin louder in America. Today, that peace trains been derailed and replaced by an armed and armored one eternally prepared for perpetual warand that train is indeed soundin louder to the great peril of us all.

Heres the rub, though: even the Pentagon knows that our most serious enemy is climate change, not China or Russia or terror, though in the age of Donald Trump and his administration of arsonists its officials cant express themselves on the subject as openly as they otherwise might. Assuming we dont annihilate ourselves with nuclear weapons first, that means our real enemy is the endless war were waging against Planet Earth.

The US military is also a major consumer of fossil fuels and therefore a significant driver of climate change. Meanwhile, the Pentagon, like any enormously powerful system, only wants to grow more so, but whats welfare for the military brass isnt wellness for the planet.

There is, unfortunately, only one Planet Earth, or Spaceship Earth, if you prefer, since were all traveling through our galaxy on it. Thought about a certain way, were its crew members, yet instead of cooperating effectively as its stewards, we seem determined to fight one another. If a house divided against itself cannot stand, as Abraham Lincoln pointed out so long ago, surely a spaceship with a disputatious and self-destructive crew is not likely to survive, no less thrive.

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In other words, in waging endless war, Americans are also, in effect, mutinying against the planet. In the process, we are spoiling the last, best hope of earth: a concerted and pacific effort to meet the shared challenges of a rapidly warming and changing planet.

Spaceship Earth should not be allowed to remain Warship Earth as well, not when the existence of significant parts of humanity is already becoming ever more precarious. Think of us as suffering from a coolant leak, causing cabin temperatures to rise even as food and other resources dwindle. Under the circumstances, whats the best strategy for survival: killing each other while ignoring the leak or banding together to fix an increasingly compromised ship?

Unfortunately, for Americas leaders, the real fixes remain global military and resource domination, even as those resources continue to shrink on an ever-more fragile globe. And as weve seen recently, the resource part of that fix breeds its own madness, as in President Trumps recently stated desire to keep US troops in Syria to steal that countrys oil resources, though its wells are largely wrecked (thanks in significant part to American bombing) and even when repaired would produce only a minuscule percentage of the worlds petroleum.

If Americas wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen prove anything, its that every war scars our planetand hardens our hearts. Every war makes us less human as well as less humane. Every war wastes resources when these are increasingly at a premium. Every war is a distraction from higher needs and a better life.

Despite all of wars uses and abuses, its allures and temptations, its time that we Americans showed some self-mastery (as well as decency) by putting a stop to the mayhem. Few enough of us experience our wars firsthand and thats precisely why some idealize their purpose and idolize their practitioners. But war is a bloody, murderous mess and those practitioners, when not killed or wounded, are marred for life because war functionally makes everyone involved into a murderer.

We need to stop idealizing war and idolizing its so-called warriors. At stake is nothing less than the future of humanity and the viability of life, as we know it, on Spaceship Earth.

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Want to Stop Climate Change? Start With the US Military - The Nation

In May 2019, President Trump pardoned former 1st Lt. Michael Behenna for crimes committed while deployed in Iraq. Behenna, who had served less than five years in prison by that point, had executed an unarmed Iraqi he believed was responsible for an attack that killed two of his troops. In November, the president followed up his historic act of executive clemency with two more. He pardoned former 1st Lt. Clint Lorance (also convicted of murder in combat, this time in Afghanistan). Andafter much public commentaryhe pardoned former Special Forces Maj. Mathew Golsteyn, who had been charged with killing a detainee and associated offenses, but who had not yet faced trial by court-martial.

Contemporaneously, Trump reversed a Navy admirals decision to grant convicted Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher limited clemency: what had been a reduction in only one pay grade became a full restoration of his rank as a chief petty officer. Further sparking outrage was Trumps order to foreclose the Navy Special Warfare Commands administrative review process that could have stripped Gallagher of his SEAL status before his retirement. Defense Secretary Mark Esper fired Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer for his behind-the-scenes attempt to block the president from interfering in this process.

The Behenna, Lorance and Golsteyn pardons and the Gallagher relief were the first instances of a president pardoning or granting extraordinary clemency to a soldier for an offense constituting a war crime. But Trump is not the first president to grant clemency to service members who have violated norms, codes of conduct and criminal law through their actions in combat. President Lincoln famously interjected his vision of justice in cases of Union soldiers accused or convicted of the grave wartime offense of desertion, stopping scheduled executions to the chagrin of commanding generals. President Andrew Johnson granted general amnesty and pardoned the vast majority of ex-Confederates during the Reconstruction era. President Nixon did not pardon Lt. William Calley after Calleys conviction for the My Lai Massacre, butwith significant public supportNixon moved Calley out of prison and into house arrest during his appeals, eventually resulting in an early release after a handful of years for the person chiefly responsible for the deadliest war crime in American history. President Obama controversially commuted the sentence of former Army private Chelsea Manning, who had been sentenced to 35 years in prison for a massive leak of classified and sensitive documents related to the global war on terror to Wikileaks.

Though Trumps acts of judicial mercy on service members may not be wholly original, they have made him the first president to pardon soldiersin this case, officersalready convicted of having committed offenses that violate the international law of war. Like most presidential pardons, his acts have garnered both applause and substantial criticism.

One notable source of criticism has been from within the current and former ranks, or those who know something of the traditional military ethos. Naval War College and Naval Postgraduate School ethics professors recently wrote: "The pardons of our war criminals by Trump, and his interference in and disrespect of our own military justice system is unprecedented and should trouble all Americans. We will not pull punchesthey are shameful and a national disgrace."

Another representative example is retired Lt. Gen. David Barno, who argues that President Trump did not give sufficient consideration to the views of his advisers, the unambiguous results of due process under military law, the collateral consequences for our soldiers on the battlefield or obligations under the law of war. This argument is not overstating the facts. When the presidents defense amounts to sanctifying brutal acts of soldiers he thinks are trained as, and expected to be, killing machines, it is difficult to believe the president has given that due consideration. Rather, it seems to many as if he is pushing the buttons of government indiscriminately, a real-world illustration of his claims that Article II of the Constitution allows him to do whatever he wants.

The nature of these combat-incidental crime pardons should give caution to presidents claiming their moral duty or constitutional prerogative to grant clemency at will and without judicial or congressional review. First, war crimes (at the very least those of which Behenna, Lorance and Golsteyn were accused) implicate the well-known and universally accepted expectations, duties and rights of international law. Rules founded on basic principles of humanity, chivalry and honor regulate who may use force, against whom such force may be used, what places or things may be attacked, and what weapons may or shall not be used in those attacks and use of force. How Americansas a nation through public discourse and as a military on the battlefieldaddress violations of these rules will signal something to the larger international community of current and potential allies, partners, competitors and enemies. It signals the tactical and political valuation by the United States of humanitarian practices and standards in conflict.

Second, war crimes implicate not just actions deemed criminal by customs, treaties and domestic military law. They also violate core customs, traditions, and standards of conduct and ethics that (when obeyed) further positive goals of self-regulation within the profession of arms.

Third, the president as the militarys commander-in-chief has a different moral, legal and practical standing in relation to both the military offender and the war crime offense itself. The president is the ultimate superior in the chain of command. The service member convicted of war crimes could not have acted when and where he did but for the presidents express order or tacit acceptance of the military operation within which the service member dutifully executes a mission. While the president is clearly not legally complicit in the wrongful act, his constitutional duties imply a moral responsibility for the enabling context of the wrongful act. In that sense, pardoning a war criminal of ones own military appears to be a conflict of interest, broadly understood. President George H.W. Bush was condemned roundly for pardoning his former White House colleagues for their role in the Iran-contra affairactions that likely happened with Bushs situational awareness while he was serving as vice president, and which he defended as being motivated by their patriotism.

A possible consequence of failing to properly balance these legal and practical realities and authorities is a strong disagreement between the military agent and the civilian political principal who pardons. When this disagreement reflects fundamental differences over what is morally-permissible conduct on the battlefield, the civilian political leaders right to be wrongif exercised over the objections of four-star service chiefs of staff and the civilian service secretariesrisks at least four considerable penalties and costs. First, it risks alienating those in uniform or who have been in uniform who believe such conduct was immoral or illegal and therefore beneath them, damaging the institution and its professional reputation. Second, it risks undermining the confidence the military agent has in the civilian principals knowledge, intentions and good faith. Third, it risks signaling civilian disregard for the very military due process for which the commander-in-chief is responsible for managing as a specialized criminal justice system. And fourth, it risks signaling preapproved permission to engage in similar acts with similar intentions to those in uniform who are facing or who may face circumstances risking moral injurywhat a recent New York Times editorial called the signature defining injury of the global war on terrorism. This combination of risks is too strong for a civilian principal to ignore.

For all these reasons, presidents ought to restrain their impulses when certain conditions are present. Call it the combat-incidental crime pardon exception.

But how to deny a president the power to pardon service members accused or convicted of war crimes by courts-martial? The most obvious route would be to amend the Constitutionbut this is, of course, highly improbable. Instead, the method most respectful to the principle of separation of powers is to amend not the Constitution, but the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), which could be done by Congress. This course of action recognizes that criminal activity by service members and their combat actions (especially when they arise from the same facts) raise the interests of both Congress and the commander-in-chief, both of whom have constitutionally prescribed responsibilities for the regulation and use of those service members. The Supreme Court has repeatedly acknowledged that military justices unique elementsprimarily the role of the commander, exercising both prosecutorial and judicial functionsjustify different applications of civil liberties and generally do not violate constitutional protections. With this in mind, it is not impossible to imagine a UCMJ amendment that imposes a limited restraint on presidential discretion and passes the Supreme Courts muster.

Nevertheless, the probability of amending the UCMJ over a likely presidential objection is near zero. With a formal legal mechanism implausible, the better way to understand this restraint is as a presidential self-denial of otherwise unilateral discretion.

But this denial is conditional and triggered by various presumptions. As Immanuel Kant wrote, the right to pardon is certainly the most slippery of all rights of the sovereign .... [It] can demonstrate the splendor of his majesty and yet thereby wreak injustice to a high degree. Presumptions in favor of granting a pardon (or not to) should depend on the timing of the possible pardon decision relative to where it would occur in the military justice process. This conditional framework accounts for the fact that pardons for individuals actions during combat implicate not only the presidents Article II pardon power but also a presidents Article II role as commander-in-chief, the presidents role in executing the congressionally enacted and regulated military justice system under Article I, the principal-agent character of the civil-military fiduciary relationship, andcriticallythe duties and rights the United States has subscribed to under the international law of war. Pardoning a civilian for something like obstruction of justice, tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions or even murder is categorically and normatively different from pardoning a war criminal. Assuming there is a rational, nonarbitrary calculus, this decision ought not to be colored predominantly by the moral judgment of the president as chief magistrate of the lawsmuch less by the judgment of how such a pardon might be politically advantageous.

Under normal conditions, pardons may be used by a president to provide clemency to a person who might yet be tried for, or has already been convicted of, a federal offense. It is a plenary and totally discretionary act, shielded from any external review other than the opinion of the electorate. A pardon deletes the conviction from the record or prevents the possibility of conviction, but the facts of the crime do not disappear; there is simply no longer a legal consequence for them. It is an act of official forgiveness from the senior representative of the entire U.S. population. That absolution or legal forgiveness is not meant to, nor does it in practice, reverse the general deterrence purpose behind that criminal prohibition or its specific prosecution in that pardon petitioners case. Rather, according to the seminal 1866 Supreme Court decision Ex parte Garland, the pardon releases the punishment and blots out of existence the guilt, so that, in the eye of the law, the offender is as innocent as if he had never committed the offense.

Military crimes and their sanctions, established by Congress in the UCMJ and managed by the president down through individual judicial and prosecutorial discretion of subordinate commanders, are fundamentally different from other crimes and sanctions. They apply to a specific and narrow community employed for specific purposes. These criminal proscriptions are only constitutionally lawful, even when they seemingly breach constitutional norms or otherwise sacrosanct civil liberties, to the extent that they ensure that this specialized community is able to accomplish its mission on behalf of the nation.

The Framers gave the power to regulate conduct by its military members to Congress but provided the power to use the military members as an armed force to accomplish security and defense objectives to the president. The resulting justice system reflects Congresss judgment about what conduct is criminal, and Congress by law delegates to the president the authority to control the court-martial procedure and prescribe punishments for violations, and even act as a court-martial convening authority as if he were a senior uniformed commander. (This is not a role the president plays in any other criminal justice system.) Congress has provided the military chain-of-command discretion in individual cases to determine whether some conduct is service-discrediting or prejudicial to good order and discipline to the extent that it should be criminally prosecuted, even if it could never have been in an ordinary criminal court. The Supreme Court has validated (with some exceptions) the militarys determination about what sort of conduct might be so proscribed. Congress and the president have given military commanders a role in investigating potential crime, in deciding when to prosecute certain crimes and how, and in approving some sentences.

This criminal law system also deliberately and self-consciously incorporates international humanitarian law (also known as the law of war, or the law of armed conflict). Under the combatants privilege, international humanitarian law permits nations and individuals to engage in some conduct that would be impermissible and criminalized even under the UCMJ. But this body of law imposes additional layers of duties and prohibitions that apply only in the context of armed conflict.

For this reason, what constitutes a war crime under military justice is highly contextual. Because of the general default presumption of combatant immunity, that context is even more relevant than the context associated with typical issues of excuse and justification that shape criminal prosecutions. The actions that could be labeled as criminal are often taken under extraordinary pressures of time, responsibility for the lives of others, a mission dictated by a superior chain-of-command, and possibly being engaged by a hostile force at the time the decision in question is made or in the immediate aftermath of such decisions. Moreover, the action (or failure to act) that could constitute a crime could not have been committed but for the fact that the service member was in a particular place, doing a particular job, under the lawful authority, responsibility and direction of the president.

If law holds individual agency to be a key factor in determining a persons criminal culpability, behavior in combat reflects a kind of shared agency. This shared agency does not diminish the soldiers culpability. Rather, it accentuates the political leaders role for the express purpose of diminishing that leaders unilateral discretion to forgive and remove the stain of that culpability.

As a nation, the United States has by law and policy subscribed to these duties and prohibitions under international law, and the U.S. holds its military to those standards and rules. They are cemented in doctrine and reinforced through training. One of those duties is to investigate and hold accountable those responsible for violations of international humanitarian law. The process and substance of the criminal law system in the military is fundamentally distinct from any other criminal justice system.

All this means that the decisions for pardoning war crimes should be distinct from those that guide pardons of any other crime in a civilian justice system, or even pardons for another non-war crime offense under the UCMJ. One of the main purposes of pardons is to erase or preclude punishment when the criminalization of behavior is unjustand in the modern context, this has proved especially true when that behavior carries mandatory minimum punishment. But in the context of a war crime, virtually nobody can say that it is unjust to criminalize the killing of unarmed detainees without due process, and most military crimes carry no mandatory minimum sentence. Such a categorical distinction is reasonable because the pardons consequence signals that the president as commander-in-chief has validated, excused or justified the particular conduct that was so highly contextualized in the military combat domain. And that conduct was possible only because the president ordered the service members participation in that context.

The risk of such a pardon is that other service members facing similar contextual facts, operating under similar pressures and constraints, may view that validation as permissive precedent. The community may not view it as a singularly unique instance in which a president, as chief law enforcement official, decides in the interest of justice to undo a civilian conviction or preclude a civilian trial. Rather, the pardon communicates an unexpected endorsement of behavior that is expected to be deemed morally and criminally wrong. Not only that, but such pardons go beyond merely disrespecting the law of war. They actively undermine well-known customary practice and treaty law-imposed duties to investigate and hold responsible parties accountable for violations.

The following set of additional factors ought to guide presidents in exercising their Article II power to pardon when the beneficiary of that clemency is a service member accused or convicted under the UCMJ for crimes proscribed by the law of war:

If the service member has been convicted by court-martial and the appellate process through the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces (CAAF) is complete (any remedy for the soldier has been granted or denied by the judicial process), do not pardon.

If the service member has been convicted, but the appellate process is not yet complete, presume no pardon. Grant only if an objective and prudent person, knowing the relevant facts, would likely not think that the United States tolerates conduct that constitutes a war crime under international humanitarian law; and the rationale for clemency outweighs the recommendations of the relevant civilian and military chain-of-command; and if an objective and prudent military commander would agree that an enemy belligerent, under similar circumstances, would deserve a pardon from his or her own government for conduct committed against a U.S. civilian or service member.

If the service member has been charged, but court-martial adjudication at trial is not yet complete, presume no pardon. Grant only if doing so satisfies any of the three conditions above.

If not yet charged, do not grant a pardon, and do not engage in or seek to influence the UCMJ disposition decision. Doing so raises the specter of undue influence, if not unlawful command influence that unjustifiably taints the publics perception of the systems fairness and due process.

Per Congresss direction in Article 33 of the UCMJ, the president and the secretary of defense have published disposition guidance to military commanders exercising their prosecutorial discretion under the UCMJ, which includes a handful of inappropriate considerations not to be taken into account when weighing a potential prosecution. Likewise, there are inappropriate pardon considerations: rank of the service member; character of the service members combat experience; previous professional awards or recognition for performance of duties; results of the combat incident that served as context for the offense; collateral misconduct by the service member unconnected with the conduct constituting a war crime; the range of potential punishments available to the court if convicted; the actual punishment adjudged by the trial court or affirmed by the appellate court; and probability or promise of partisan political support from the military at large or specific individuals. The presumptions against granting combat-incidental crime pardons, unless certain conditions exist, recognize but also balance the presidents plenary power to pardon, his duty to faithfully execute the laws, his role as a civilian commander-in-chief for the military, and the nations ever-present duty under international law of armed conflict.

Ultimately, the difficulty of pardoning war crimes lies in that most people do not consider it a difficult question at allthe president clearly has plenary, unilateral discretion to grant a pardon. Alexander Hamilton, writing in Federalist #74, called clemency a benign prerogative and argued a wise president would wield this authority as a matter of case-by-case compassion to mitigate unfortunate guilt, or as a means to put the cork back in a potentially explosive public passion. The irony is that President Trumps most recent pardons were not meant to provide compassionate relief for unjust prosecutions or to douse the fires of public outcry. The pardoned conduct has long been criminalized under the law of war because it lacked the necessary humanitarian compassion international law requires as a constraint on the means and methods of war. And the pardons actually inflamed public passion.

In light of implications raised by international law of war, norms of professionalism and health of stable civil-military relations, and the standing of the president relative to the offense and the offender, the presidents use of his Article II power to pardon war crimes raises fundamental issues of the rule of law. The exercise of power should be limited by laws, not enabled by the whims of individuals. These laws require citizens and those in power to obey certain rules, but they also create mechanisms for deliberate, transparent rule- and decision-making; they ought to account for a diversity of interests, not just opinions. If there is no possibility of a constitutional amendment or a restraint imposed via the UCMJ, then presidents ought to engage in deliberate self-restraint when it comes to pardoning American war criminals in a way that acknowledges the plurality of interests involved.

War crimes are faulty mirrors of normal crimes. Just as images are distorted by physical gravity, we see and understand war crimes as shaped by their severity and their weighty implications for professionalism, civil-military relations and obligations under international law. Following the rule of law means acknowledging the distinction between typical criminal offenses and war crimes: Their differences also demand that the decision to pardon those crimes be justified or denied in a different way.

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Should There Be a War Crime Pardon Exception? - Lawfare

FILE In this May 2, 2018, file photo, Chelsea Manning attends a discussion at the media convention "Republica" in Berlin. Former Army intelligence analyst Manning has been released from a northern Virginia jail after a two-month stay for refusing to testify to a grand jury. Manning was released Thursday, May 9, 2019, from the Alexandria jail after 62 days of confinement on civil contempt charges after she refused to answer questions to a federal grand jury investigating WikiLeaks. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, File)

WASHINGTON Former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning says shell refuse to testify on Thursday before a second grand jury investigating WikiLeaks.

But if a judge finds her in contempt of court again, she could wind up back in jail.

Manning spent seven years in prison for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks. She walked free in May 2017 after President Barack Obama commuted her 35-year sentence.

Recently, she spent two months in jail for refusing to answer one grand jurys questions about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Now, a second grand jury has subpoenaed her.

She told CNNs Reliable Sources on Sunday that she has nothing more to offer than what shes already provided in her own case.

See more here:
Manning refusing to testify at grand jury probing WikiLeaks - Stock Daily Dish

David Rovics sings his new song (Nov.12), Behind These Prison Walls, in front of Belmarsh Prison, Britains Guantanamo Bay Prison where the US tortures prisoners as it does whistleblower Chelsea Manning in a Virginia prison. At Belmarsh, US partner UK tortures the worlds most important whistleblowing journalist Julian Assange

By Ron Ridenour

On June 12, 1987, the greatest president in the history of the United States of America (according to US opinion polls), Ronald Reagan, challenged Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. Twenty-nine months later, November 9, 1989, the communist party leaderships of the DDR and Soviet Union, complied and opened the wall.

I call upon the prime minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson, to do the same at Belmarsh Prison where political prisoners, such as Julian Assange, are held to languish up to eternity. I call upon President Donald Trump to rescind the extradition order, and to release Chelsea Manning.

Realizing that these state war criminals will not do so, I urge Brits to vote into power a decent labor-unionist, anti-war politician, Jeremy Corbyn, who would (I believe) release this brave human being as he would also stop allying Britain with US wars of aggression. Regardless of where we stand on the political spectrum, we must at least vote for some sanity. I am a socialist revolutionary and never vote for The Establishment, but I would vote for Corbyn precisely because he opposes aggressive wars and incarcerating truth-tellers. Those two concerns must be the litmus test for any electoral strategy and voting. Ill let leftists living in the US to decide what they will do about the 2020 election campaign.

I also call upon every self-identifying old-time liberal, progressive, leftist, conservative for human rights, activist for human rights, activist and journalist for a free press and free speech to ACT against this legalized murder of the worlds most important publisher of information that reveals war crimes of any and all governments and government crimes against human rights.

Protest and resist, including with civil disobedience where you can, especially where Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning are held captives as political prisoners. Once turned away, return the next day. Learn from the brave demonstrators in Ecuador (home of US assassin-partner President Lenin Moreno) where they resist higher costs of living and police murderers. As you protest, sing along with David Rovics newest song, Behind These Prison Walls

Behind these prison walls, in solitary confinementIn a land of rolling hills and royalty and other such refinementIs someone who is a hero to whistleblowers everywhereWho helped them tell the world of the crimes of Tony Blair

Behind these prison walls you will find a mortal manThe reason why we know what happened in AfghanistanWhen the soldiers of the empire whose sun set long beforeWere torturing civilians in their terror war

Behind these prison walls is a part of WikileaksAn eloquent orator, but you wont hear him speakLocked away in silence, one who knows too wellHow those in power act when theres another war to sell

Behind these prison walls is one who stands accusedOf exactly what offenses, the US has refused to sayA person being tortured, as we stand here nowFor revealing the war crimes - why, when, where, how

Behind these prison walls, our very right to be informedOf what the hell is going on is the teacup in this stormWith knowledge there is power, so the solution by the CrownA 24-hour-a-day, indefinite lockdown.

What they say:

Lenin Moreno: Ecuador President terminated the diplomatic asylum granted to Mr. Assange in 2012 [because he and/or his organization Wikileaks] leaked Vatican documentstherefore involved in interfering in internal affairs of other states.

Rafael Correa: Ecuador former president described Moreno as the greatest traitor in Ecuadorian history after Assange was arrested, and then Moreno gave the US Assanges material.

Jeremy Corbyn: The extradition of Julian Assange to the US for exposing evidence of atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan should be opposed by the British government.

Hillary Clinton: Cant we just drone this guy? she asked US State Department brass at a November 2010 meeting.

Donald Trump: I love Wikileaks.

Bernie Sanders: It is a disturbing attack on the First Amendment for the Trump administration to decide who is, or who is not a reporter for the purposes of a criminal prosecution.

Tulsi Gabbard: The fact that the Trump administration has chosen to ignore how important it is that we uphold our freedomsand go after him, it has a very chilling effect on both journalists and publishersand also on every one of us as Americansa warning callsaying, Look what happened to this guy.We have got to address why [Snowden] did things the way that he did them, she said. You hear the same thing from Chelsea Manning, how there is not an actual channel for whistleblowers like them to bring forward information that exposes egregious abuses of our constitutional rights and liberties, period.

John Pilger: To the chagrin of many in authority and the media, WikiLeaks has torn down the facade behind which rapacious western power and journalism collude. This was an enduring taboo; the BBC could claim impartiality and expect people to believe it. Today, war by media is increasingly understood by the public, as is the trial by media of WikiLeaks founder, and editor Julian Assange.

Doctors: More than 60 doctors have written an open letter saying thatJulian Assanges health hasdeteriorated so much that the WikiLeaks founders life is in danger inside a British jail.

The medical experts wrote to British Home Secretary Priti Patel saying they had concerns about Mr. Assanges fitness to go through theextradition hearings set for next February. Assange requires urgent expert medical assessment of both his physical and psychological state of healthWere such urgent assessment and treatment not to take place, we have real concerns, on the evidence currently available, that Mr. Assange could die in prison. The medical situation is thereby urgent. There is no time to lose.

New Zealand independent journalist Suzi Dawson recently told broadcaster Jimmy Dore ten reasons why the whole world, sans the 1% with its war machines and CIA Mafia, should view Assange and Snowden [and I add Chelsea Manning] as heroes for finding and telling us the truth about the warmongers. For her tenacious findings she is also now in Moscow seeking asylum, a victim of The Establishment seeking to stop her work.

Top Ten Edward Snowden Rev a 13-minute interview with Suzie Dawson on the Jimmy Dore show:

1) Wikileaks has been keeping the historical record intact, and is actually combating the digital loss as web pages and websites are constantly being taken down from the internet by the powers that be. In this current paradigm theyre actually scrubbing entire websites and domains at every opportunity. Theyre trying to erase information from our living history

2) Wikileaks enables victims of persecution to have admissible evidence to fight their cases in court. 40,000 cases around the world have had Wikileaks documents submitted as court evidence.

3) Theyve maintained a 100% accuracy record over ten years of publishing.

4) Wikileaks is still publishing despite the full force of the Empire being used against them. Intelligence agencies, financial service providers, hostile media and law fare, and of course now Julian Assanges solitary confinement, we still see Wikileaks releases being published.

5) It established a digital library of over 10 million documents, containing pristine datasetsCurrent news stories can be further informed by doing a key word search to see what Wikileaks archives contain about topics or persons or places that may be relevant to that news story.

6) Wikileaks has established a whole new way of doing journalism [including] the first anonymous drop boxes a similar technology is being used by media outlets across the globe.

7) Wikileaks has become the vanguard of press freedomthat is incredibly important because as they are pushing those boundaries further and further out, it allows independent media and citizen media to fill that space in between. We can go further and do more significant things because Wikileaks is out there taking the heat for us.

8) Wikileaks has published leaks on every country in the world without geopolitical bias.

9) Wikileaks leaves no source behind, and not only do they go above and beyond to support their sources, theyve actually established other organizations to support other at-risk journalists and whistleblowers, such as the Courage Foundation, and we now have proven that Julian Assange was involved in the establishment of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

10) Julian saved the life of Edward Snowden, who is renowned as the greatest whistleblower of our generation, and was brought to you by Wikileaks. Julian Assange should be getting a Nobel Prize, not being persecuted.

Sweden Drops Extradition Request to Please the US

Last week, Sweden dropped its extradition request with the sole purpose of asking Assange what happened when he had sex with two Swedish women. There never were charges of rape as mass media persist in fraudulently repeating. (Note: Assange had already been interrogated by Swedish police and released. He knew if he went to Sweden again, once the issue was brought up yet again, he would be turned over to the US for possible life imprisonment.)

UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer stated in an official letter to the Swedish government that the investigation was the primary factor that triggered, enabled and encouraged the subsequent campaign of sustained and concerted public mobbing and judicial persecution against Mr. Assange in various countries, the cumulative effects of which can only described as psychological torture.

Oscar Grenfell informed us of that letter, and added, The complete discrediting of the Swedish investigation, which played such a linchpin role in the US-led vendetta, exposes the utterly lawless character of the entire operation against Assange, adding, Despite never coming close to the issuing of criminal charges, the Swedish investigation was used to embroil Assange in the legal system and was the chief mechanism for enforcing his arbitrary detention.

It was Britains backing for Swedens unprecedented request that Assange be extradited merely to answer questions that forced him to seek political asylum in Ecuadors London embassy in 2012. The Swedish case provided the bogus rationale for Britains siege of the embassy and its threats that it would arrest Assange if he set foot outside the building.

Assange is charged under the 1917 Espionage Act, a long-ignored (until the Obama administration) Red Scare-era law signed by President Woodrow Wilson which was designed to punish US citizens or resident spies or supporters for US war enemies, namely Germany. Assange is neither a spy, citizen or resident of the US, albeit the current charges can result in his imprisonment for 175 years.

The United Nations has consistentlycondemned the actions of the U.S., Britain and the Swedish governments, and called for Assanges immediate release.

When Assange was imprisoned for 50 weeks for failure to appear in a British court, June 2012, UNs Melzer visited Assange with two doctors. They confirmed that Assange has been deliberately exposed, for a period of several years, to progressively [more] severe forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, the cumulative effects of which can only be described as psychological tortureThe collective persecution of Julian Assange must end here and now!.

Melzer recently added, In my view, this case has never been about Mr. Assanges guilt or innocence, but about making him pay the price for exposing serious governmental misconduct, including alleged war crimes and corruption.

Professor Melzer condemned the relentless abuse of Assange and concerted efforts to extradite him to the U.S. under the fraudulent Espionage Act. Assange, in an indictment that for a long time was sealed and kept secret, is charged with 17 violations of the Espionage Act for leaking 750,000 confidential military and diplomatic documents (evidence of war crimes and acts of terrorism), including revealing important information about U.S. complicity in the war on Yemen, where at least 80,000 Yemeni civilians have been killed.

Human rights lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, and one of Assanges barristers, stated:

It is the first time in US history the Espionage Act is being used against a journalist and publisher and, asThe New York TimesandWashington Posthave made clear (and as we have warned since 2010), his indictment criminalizes journalistic practices used by those newspapers to report in the public interest.

Inside the Embassy, Assange was spied on and all his communications, including with his lawyers, were being intercepted by a Spanish security company hired by the C.I.A. There apparently was also a C.I.A. plan to kidnap Assange. In a normal court in a civilized country, the government case would have been thrown out on constitutional and legal grounds, but that was not the case in this instance.

The company Robinson refers to is UC Global with headquarters in Cdiz, Spain. It was originally hired by Senain, the former Ecuadorian intelligence service. UC Global owner, David Morales, installed a video streaming service direct to US and the CIA. Later the Ecuadorian firm, Promsecurity, surveilled Assange.

Chelsea Manning imprisonment is double jeopardy

Since March the eastern district court in Virginia has incarcerated Chelsea Manning for refusing to testify yet again about her relationship with Wikileaks and journalist-publisher Julian Assange. With the exception of one week, Chelsea has been confined in jail, often in solitary. She faces up to one year more, at least, and fines of $1000 per daya total of half a million dollars by time of her possible release.

Although Chelsea is constitutionally protected from double jeopardyfrom being charged twice for the same crimeher right to silence has effectively been stripped away by the duplicity of the grand jury totalitarian procedure. She already testified during her court martial about her relationship with Wikileaks and Julian Assange, for which she served seven hard years in a military prison, often in isolation and under torture, as defined by United Nations experts on what torture means.

Chelsea explained her decision thusly:

I will not comply with this, or any other grand jury. Imprisoning me for my refusal to answer questions only subjects me to additional punishment for my repeatedly-stated ethical objections to the grand jury system.

The grand jurys questions pertained to disclosures from nine years ago, and took place six years after an in-depth computer forensics case, in which I testified for almost a full day about these events. I stand by my previous public testimony.

I will not participate in a secret process that I morally object to, particularly one that has been historically used to entrap and persecute activists for protected political speech.

We are in one anothers hand. Take your hands, brothers and sisters, and raise your fits of passionate solidarity: fight for the lives of our brave imprisoned and tortured brother and sister.

Free Assange! Free Manning!

As I write this commentary, Denmark national Radio/TVs leading editor Lotte Stensgaard, admitted that a November 19 story it ran about Swedens dropping rape charges against Assange was a mistake, which she regrets and has corrected. I hope that readers will also challenge the perpetual mistakes (lies) that the mass media in Denmark, the UK and the US continually perpetrate to confuse us, and to prevent us from taking action against the corrupt Establishment.

Ten years and ten million documents exposed, including Collateral Murder. This is what it is really all about.

RON RIDENOUR, a US expatriate journalist living in Denmark, contributed this article toThisCantBeHappening.net. Rons latest book Winding Brook Stories is available atAmazonand Lulu. His other work can be found atronridenour.com

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Mr. Johnson, Tear Down This Wall! - ThisCantBeHappening!

Trumps war crime pardons: Cultivating a fascistic base in the military 27 November 2019

The extraordinary and repeated interventions by President Donald Trump in the case of Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher, culminating in Sundays firing of Navy Secretary Richard Spencer, has further laid bare the deep-going crisis at the heart of the US capitalist state and its massive military apparatus.

Gallagher was charged by his fellow SEALs with war crimes and acts of sadistic violence that stood out as egregious even in the bloodbath unleashed against the Iraqi city of Mosul, where, according to one estimate, as many as 40,000 people were killed. He was accused of picking off civilians, including a young girl, with a sniper rifle and stabbing to death a wounded teenaged Iraqi fighter, even as a SEAL medic was treating him. He then texted out a photo of himself with the corpse, along with the caption, Got him with my hunting knife. Not coincidentally, Gallaghers nickname among fellow SEALs was Blade.

In spite of, or rather because of, these crimes, Gallagher was lionized by the extreme right, Fox News and the US president himself. Trump first ordered the Navy to release him from the brig where he had been placed in advance of his court martial for threatening to kill members of his unit who had testified against him. After he was convicted only on the lesser charge of posing with the corpse of his victimthanks to the change in testimony of the SEAL medic, who now faces perjury chargesTrump pardoned him and ordered the Navy to withdraw its minimal penalty of reducing him by one rank and cutting his pay accordingly.

Finally, in the action that led to the Navy secretarys firing, Trump demanded that a routine review board to determine whether Gallagher should be removed from the SEALs be called off. With the president as his champion and a defense team made up of close associates of the Trump Organization and Trumps personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, Gallagher, who is to retire before the end of the month, felt free to publicly berate his senior officers.

Trumps unprecedented micro-managing and overruling of the military justice system has escalated tensions between the White House and the Pentagon command, which were already strained by his abrupt and abortive order for a partial troop withdrawal from Syria.

Gallagher is one of four members of the US military charged with war crimes whom Trump has pardoned over the last few months, two of them for summarily executing unarmed prisoners and then trying to cover up their crimes by burning the bodies, and one for ordering troops to fire upon and kill Afghans who he knew were unarmed.

Speaking to the White House press corps on Monday, Trump hailed Gallagher as one of our ultimate fighters and insisted, I have to protect my warfighters. He declared that he was sticking up for our armed forces.

He went on to compare his behavior to that of his predecessor, Barack Obama, whom he falsely accused of issuing pardons for Army Sgt. Bowe Berghdahl, who walked away from his unit in Afghanistan and was held prisoner by the Taliban for five years, and Chelsea Manning, the courageous US Army soldier who leaked the historic exposures of US war crimes published by WikiLeaks in 2010.

Trump railed against Berghdahl during his campaign for the presidency, suggesting he should have been executed, and denounced Manning as a traitor. Berghdahl was sentenced by a court martial to a reduction in rank and dishonorable discharge. Mannings sentence was commuted by Obama on his last day in office after she had served seven years of a 35-year sentence. She has been imprisoned again since May for refusing to testify before a grand jury convened against WikiLeakss Julian Assange.

Trumps lionizing of convicted war criminals and denunciation of two former soldiers who opposed Washingtons criminal warsan opposition that is widely shared among the nearly three million veterans of Afghanistan and Iraqhas an unmistakable political logic.

With the case of Gallagher and the other pardoned war criminals, he is feeding a narrative that the warfighters have been held back by a politically correct political establishment and even an insufficiently bloodthirsty Pentagon command.

It is a variation on the stab-in-the-back myth propagated by the right wing in Germany in the wake of World War I, blaming the countrys defeat on the betrayal of the army by civilians, particularly socialists and Jews. This myth became a central ideological pillar of the so-called Freikorps, armed militias comprised of ex-soldiers, which were unleashed against the German working class, killing thousands in order to crush revolutions. It likewise was an essential component of Nazi ideology.

Trump has reportedly told his closest advisers that he wants the war criminals he has pardoned to join him on the campaign trail in 2020 and even play a starring role in the Republican convention. Clearly, the aim of these pardons is not only to encourage war crimes abroad, but to build up right-wing forces to be used against the working class at home. He is encouraging the creation of a Freikorps, American style.

The timid opposition to Trumps actions expressed in statements by Democrats and in mealy-mouthed editorials in the New York Times and the Washington Post has nothing to do with countering a growing threat to basic democratic rights. On the contrary, they are aimed at defending the authority of the military high command, while promoting the pretense that what is at stake is the US militarys operating according to the laws of war and observing a higher standard.

What nonsense! For nearly 30 years, ever since the Stalinist bureaucracys dissolution of the Soviet Union, the US military has been engaged in wars of aggression, the principal crime for which the surviving leaders of the Third Reich were tried at Nuremberg. The victims of these wars number well over a million, while much of the Middle East has been laid waste. The war crimes pardoned by Trump are the inevitable byproduct of the far bigger war crimes pursued by every administration, Democratic and Republican alike, for three decades.

The Democratic Partys opposition to Trump is of an entirely tactical character, bound up, as the congressional impeachment hearings have shown, with the drive by sections of the US intelligence apparatus and the State Department to escalate a military confrontation with Russia that could end in nuclear war. Within this reactionary political operation, the assault on democratic rights, the destruction of social programs and the vicious attack on immigrants are not even issues.

Both major parties defend an American capitalist system within which the massive concentration of wealth by the richest one percent and unprecedented levels of social inequality are wholly incompatible with traditional democratic forms of rule.

The threat of fascist reaction and dictatorship is not merely the product of the criminal mind of Donald Trump. It is bound up with the frightened response of the US ruling establishment to the eruption of the class struggle in the US and the mass working class upheavals internationally.

The working class, against whom these threats are directed, is the only social force capable of conducting a fight against them, uniting its struggles across national boundaries against their source, the capitalist system.

Bill Van Auken

2019 has been a year of mass social upheaval. We need you to help the WSWS and ICFI make 2020 the year of international socialist revival. We must expand our work and our influence in the international working class. If you agree, donate today. Thank you.

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Trump's war crime pardons: Cultivating a fascistic base in the military - World Socialist Web Site

Culture/Media November 28, 2019 Barbara Harriss-White

The more I pursued the question of why Assange has so little public support, the more disturbing the story became.

I follow the blog written by Craig Murray, a former British Ambassador with long experience of the UKs deep state. When he wrote recently about the deteriorating state of health of Julian Assange, the Australian publisher of WikiLeaks, currently detained in solitary in high-security Belmarsh prison, with inadequate access to documents and lawyers to defend himself against extradition to the USA, I decided to join the rally supporting him in Trafalgar Square, London. Hardly anyone showed up on Saturday, November 16th at best 60 people.

This non-news is itself news. The more I pursued the question of why Assange has so little public support, the more disturbing and complicated the story became. If you want to follow this up with a single further source, I recommend prize-winning, independent journalist Jonathan Cooks blog.

In 2006, Assange established WikiLeaks, a platform for whistle-blowers. By leaking US war logs and hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables supplied in 2010 by army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, he exposed human rights abuses, atrocities and war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. WikiLeaks, the self-proclaimed intelligence agency of the people, protected Mannings anonymity (correct journalistic practice). The platform undermines Western powers control over information.

Assange is accused in the US of leaking confidential information and putting lives at risk. A Swedish prosecutor also alleged that he had unprotected sex with two women in Sweden (an offence under Swedish law).

Assange was told he was free to leave Sweden and one of the two women dropped her complaint. In late 2010 Assange surrendered to the British police for other alleged sex offence and was released on bail. In 2012, when a British court ruled that he should be extradited to Sweden, Assange breached his bail and was granted asylum on political grounds in Londons Ecuadorian Embassy. By then he feared he would be extradited to the USA directly or via Sweden.

In the increasingly Me Too era, WikiLeaks and the alleged sex offences have been entwined by no fewer than six states.

In 2012, the UK government approved Assanges extradition to Sweden based on a European Arrest Warrant that had not been signed by any judicial authority and despite the lack of assurance from the US that he would not be extradited to the US from Sweden. The UK government was forced to amend the law later to prevent such abuse in future.

From 2012 to 2019, the Ecuadorian Embassy was surrounded by a costly British police force. Furthermore, the UK government periodically threatened to order police into the embassy to arrest Assange.

In 2016, the UK ignored the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions ruling that Assange was being detained unlawfully by the UK and Sweden, alleging falsely that the UN Group was not composed of lawyers. A Freedom of Information (FoI) request from an Italian journalist also showed that the British Crown Prosecution Service had pressured Sweden not to agree to question Assange in London in 2010 and 2011. The CPS was also found to have destroyed documents to hinder FoI requests, and those not destroyed show the UK also putting pressure on Sweden to seek extradition.

In 2018, Assanges lawyers sought to get the British arrest warrant annulled because the Swedish authorities had dropped the case, because of his valid reasons for asylum (given the US wish to extradite him), and because the time spent in the Ecuadorian embassy was equivalent to time served for infringing bail. However, the presiding judge, Emma Arbuthnot, rejected the appeal.

In April 2019, after Ecuadors political relationship with the USA had changed, and after the UK had given Ecuador assurances that Assange wouldnt be extradited to a country with the death penalty, British police entered the Ecuadorian embassy and forcibly arrested him for the old bail violation. The US promptly laid seventeen new charges under the Espionage Act of 1917 implying a possible jail sentence of up to 170-180 years and sought his extradition to the US.

Meanwhile, Assange has been kept in Belmarsh jail under conditions that the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture has described as cruel treatment amounting to psychological torture. Craig Murray describes him at first hand as a shambling and incoherent wreck.

In June 2019, UK home secretary Sajid Javid had signed and certified Julian Assanges extradition to the USA but left the final decision with the courts. According to Murray, the prosecution, instructed by five representatives of the US government, opposed considering whether the charge was a political offence and thus excluded by the extradition treaty. They pressed for a rapid timetable that defence lawyers say they cannot meet and a location for the hearing Belmarsh Magistrates Court where there are but six seats for the public.

In pressing extradition under the Espionage Act where political offences are excluded from the extradition treaty the US Justice Department has to treat routine journalistic practices (the receipt and publication of leaked material protected under press freedom laws) as a criminal conspiracy. Extraditing Assange to the USA is thought by some US editors to raise high-stakes questions of freedom and democracy in both the UK and USA. The prosecution WikiLeaks puts the New York Times and the Guardian at risk of prosecution.

Assange sought and was granted asylum in Londons Ecuadorian embassy (when Ecuador was battling media Moghuls and hostile to the USA). During his seven years in the embassy, Assange is thought to have been denied medical and dental treatment. In turn, Assange is accused of abusing asylum by operating business as usual from his sanctuary. In 2019, after Assanges asylum was revoked, the embassy allowed US officials to seize Assanges computer and his legal and personal documents from the embassy.

During Assanges years of confined asylum, the Australian state weighed in by threatening to strip Assange of his citizenship until this was revealed to be illegal.

The liberal mainstream media such as The Guardian which had earlier published some of the WikiLeaks files but then fell out with Assange over the publication of unredacted documents have argued this year that Assange should be extradited to Sweden to stand trial for rape there.

But the Swedish women concerned did not allege rape when they made police statements. Subsequent media hype and procedural irregularities led to the cancellation of the Swedish investigation. The torn condom produced by one woman in evidence of sexual misconduct had no trace of the DNA of either her or Assange, and he was allowed by Sweden to return to the UK.

Despite this, Interpol issued a Red Notice (normally restricted to dangerous criminals and terrorists). For six years, until 2016, the second Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny refused to interview Assange in London and, when she eventually did, Assanges Swedish lawyer was not permitted to be present. Ny closed the investigation in May 2017. There are no charges. Yesterday, Sweden dropped the rape investigation on Julian Assange.

It is left to a handful of independent journalists to chronicle these events. They understand that what is happening is a punitive assault on press freedom outside US borders, on the First Amendment guaranteeing press freedom in the US, and on the global publics right to information. Noam Chomsky comments:

Julian Assange has committed the grave crime of exposing power to sunlight.

Murray says the campaign of demonisation and dehumanisation whose success drives the lack of public support means he can be slowly killed in public sight. The next public meeting for Assange is on November 28, 2019, in London. The Belmarsh court case is currently timetabled for February 2020.

This article was first published in the Madras Courier; republished with permission.

Barbara Harriss-White is Emeritus Professor of Development Studies at Oxford University and a Visiting Professor at JNU. Her latest books include Dalits and Adivasis in Indias Business Economy (Three Essays); Middle India and Urban-Rural Development (Springer); Indian Capitalism in Development (Routledge); and Mapping Indias Capitalism: Old and New Regions (Palgrave).

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The Sword, The Pen and The Law On Julian Assange - The Bullet - Socialist Project

Claim

After having Chelsea Manning imprisoned for refusing to comply with a subpoena, United States Attorney General William Barr also refused to honor one.

Reporting

A widely-shared graphiccontrasting jailed whistleblower Chelsea Manning with United States Attorney General William Barr misinterprets the circumstances behind Mannings incarceration.

Now seems a good time to point out the attorney general who ordered Chelsea Manning back to prison for refusing to comply with a subpoena is refusing to comply with a subpoena, the caption states.

The graphic itself has been shared thousands of times on social media:

In reality, it was federal judge Anthony Trenga who ordered Manning to be re-incarcerated in May 2019, after she refused to testify to a grand jury in connection with an investigation into the classified media disclosure site Wikileaks.

The order a week came after Manning a former Army intelligence officer who had previously served seven years in prison for providing information to the site had been released following a separate eighteen-month stint in jail for refusing to comply with a grand jury. In August 2019, Trenga also ordered that Mannings latest contempt sentence could not exceed eighteen months.

According to federal law, Trenga was able to use his discretion on whether to jail Manning, who was considered a recalcitrant witness and told the judge that she would rather starve to death than cooperate with a grand jury. Had Trenga felt that jailing Manning would be punitive, rather than a means to coerce testimony from her, she would not have been jailed.

While Barr did not order Manning to be jailed, however, he has also refused to comply with a subpoena related to United States President Donald Trumps push to add a question related to citizenship and documentation to the 2020 census. In July 2019, the House of Representatives voted to hold both Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt for their failure to comply.

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Comparing William Barr and Chelsea Manning's Refusal to ...