On December 12th, the New York Times published a storyabout the U.S. drone war in Syriathat should have raised more eyebrows but barely registered with most of the American press. The piece by Dave Phillips, Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti concerned a small unit controlled by Delta Force and 5thSpecial Forces members called Talon Anvil, which sounds more like a metal band created by way of a thesaurus than an operation that engaged in thousands of drone strikes across Syria from 2014 to 2019 at the height of the battle against the so-called Islamic State.

Why the story was important is that it revealed that many of Talon Anvils 1,000s of strikes killed civilians, so many that some of those operating the drones 24 hours a day in three 8 hour shifts refused orders to deploy them in heavily populated areas or against targets that didnt appear armed. Despite this, each year the group operated, the numbers of civilian casualties in Syria went up.

As reported by the Times, even officials with the CIA complained to the Special Operations Command about the strikes. Nonetheless, the bloody drone war was a bipartisan affair that occured over two U.S. presidential administrations.

As Larry Lewis, who was among those who wrote a Defense Department report on civilian casualties in 2018, told the reporters, in terms of the sheer numbers of civilians wounded and killed, It was much higher than I would have expected from a U.S. unit. The fact that it increased dramatically and steadily over a period of years shocked me.

How were Talon Anvil able to get around rules of engagement that might have protected the many civilians said to have been wounded and killed in the strikes? By claiming self-defense. As of 2018,80% of strikesin the chaotic Syrian conflict were characterized this way.

As two unnamed former task force members explained, the claim that almost every strike was carried out to protect U.S. or allied forces, even when they were far from the location where the bombs were dropped, allowed approvals at lightning speed.

The Delta Force and other special forces soldiers ordering the strikes were also accused by Air Force intelligence analysts tasked with reviewing the footage they produced of turning the drones cameras away from their targets before dropping their payloads so that there would be no evidence in the case of a failed strike that resulted in civilian casualties.

This story might not have been told at all if not for anearlier one, also in the Times, about three piloted strikes in a Syrian town called Baghuz on March 18th, 2019, where some of the last IS holdouts were said to be sheltering.

After a drone above the town relayed images of a crowd of people, mostly women and children, next to a river bank, a U.S. F-15 dropped a 500 pound bomb on the group. As those that survived the first bomb searched for cover or wandered in shock, a second and then a third bomb, each weighing 2,000 pounds were dropped, obliterating them. Although we will never know the exact number, at least 70 civilians died as a result.

As also reported byother outlets, confused air operations personnel at a large base in Qatar looked on in disbelief at what was happening in Baghuz, with one officer asking in the secure chat, Who dropped that?

Even though an airforce lawyer flagged the incident as a possible war crime, the U.S. military tried to bury and then deny that it had happened at all. They even went so far as to have coalition forces bulldoze the blast site in a clear attempt to bury evidence of the crime.

The strike was ordered by the group that we now know also controlled Talon Anvil and ground operations in Syria called Task Force 9, a unit so secretive that those at the airbase in Qatar who first drew attention to the strike in Baghuz were unaware of its existence. Both groups are not officially recognized as ever existing by the American government.

The bizarre metric of success for Talon Anvil and Task Force 9 generally seemed to have been sheer numbers of bombs dropped rather than actual militants removed from the incredibly fraught battlefield. Not only the U.S. and its allies, especially Turkey, routinely massacred innocent people, but the Syrian government and its Russian ally showed callous disregard for the lives of civilians as well, especially in flattening East Aleppo, where they killedwell over 400 peoplein the densely populated urban area.

The man at the top of Task Force 9 and other secretive special forces, General Stephen Townsend, faced no repercussions for the alleged war crimes but was instead promoted. He now heads the countrys Africa Command, where special forces and drones are deployed but where there are even fewer influential voices who might put a spotlight on the kinds of crimes that may be occuring in countries like Somalia and Niger, where hostilities havent been officially declared.

Norman Solomanrecently wroteabout how crimes like the one that occured in Baghuz and many other towns and cities in Syria go unpunished but those who reveal these kinds of atrocities on the part of the United States and its allies like Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Norman Hale, a former analyst with the U.S. Air Force, recently sentenced to 45 months in prison for revealing the impacts of U.S. drone warfare, are victimized by the state for their whistle-blowing.

Its important to give mainstream outlets like the Times credit for using the resources at their disposal to make stories like that of Talon Anvil public, even when they are hidden behind paywalls and have to be searched out, but as several commentators including Soloman have noted, there is a tendency to portray the U.S. military and political leadership as meaning well and what amount to war crimes as simple mistakes. Such a position wouldnt be taken in regards to a competitor like China or Russia.

It should also be noted that in almost every case from the torture that took place at Abu Ghraib to Talon Anvils bombing of civilians, every atrocity is placed squarely on the shoulders of the militarys lower ranks when they are made public. This ignores the very rigid hierarchies in place where superiors either order or imply that more and more drone strikes, for example, need to take place in order to create the illusion of some kind of success.

Another fault with the NYTs story is it fails tocredit Hale for his whistle-blowingand doesnt appear to be using its influence to call attention to his imprisonment for revealing the truth of what was going on with the countrys drone war as early as 2015, revelations that were important to the Times stories.

Rather than passing the Build Back Better Act, which would have, among other things, provided pre-kindergarten child care to working people whose lives would be significantly improved by it, one deeply compromised Democratic senator stopped its passage. Arguments about out of control budgets didnt stop the same body from awarding the Pentagon$25 billion more than the president asked forfor their budget which was $768 billion after approval in the countrys Senate.

Subsidizing militarism in search of monsters overseas seems more and more like the American way. With the new focus on near peer competitors like Russia and China, the dangers are only growing.

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Excerpt from:
Talon Anvil, Task Force 9 and the terrible cost of the air offensive in Syria - NationofChange

The young womans face was bruised in multiple places, her long brown hair matted with bits of leaves.

There was a fresh bump on the back of her head and a cut on the left side of her nose. Her tan cardigan and Calvin Klein jeans were streaked with dirt. Abrasions covered her body. Traces of blood and semen were found inside her vagina as well as on her underwear.

She was just 18, a freshman at Syracuse University who had arrived at the adjacent Crouse Irving Memorial Hospital in the early morning of May 8, 1981.

Her name was Alice Sebold. And she had been raped.

The assailant was a stranger, but Ms. Sebold had studied his appearance his small but muscular build, the way he gestured, his eyes and lips.

And so, five months later, when she spotted a man named Anthony Broadwater near a restaurant on Marshall Street, Ms. Sebold knew she had solved her case. She reported him to the authorities, saying that Mr. Broadwater had said to her, Dont I know you from somewhere?

At the trial the following year, Ms. Sebold took the stand and described how she had celebrated the last day of the school year at a friends apartment, then left to head back to her dormitory, following a brick path through Thornden Park.

She testified that a man had grabbed her from behind, punched her, threatened to kill her with a knife, dragged her by her hair, then raped her in what she described as a tunnel.

Is there any doubt in your mind, Miss Sebold, that the person that you saw on Marshall Street is the person who attacked you on May 8 in Thornden Park? the prosecutor asked.

No doubt whatsoever.

Years later, Ms. Sebold would recount in a best-selling memoir that she felt confident justice had been served. She had been sweaty and shaky by the end of her testimony but was bolstered by the words of a bailiff.

Ive been in this business for 30 years, he said. You are the best rape witness Ive ever seen on the stand.

Anthony James Broadwater was born in Syracuse, the fourth of six boys, and lived for a while near Syracuse University, where his father worked as a janitor. He rarely set foot on campus, saying he felt that it was off limits to him and other young Black locals. Instead, he spent time at a community recreation center and the local Boys & Girls Club.

When he was about 5 years old, his mother died of pneumonia. It was he and his brother Wade who discovered her body on the couch in their living room.

Known as Tony, Anthony Broadwater was outgoing and rambunctious, often tussling with his siblings. Wade Broadwater recalled how his brother could get caught up in entertaining a crowd and was once stopped for letting kids ride on the roof of his car. While the police who patrolled the neighborhood were familiar with the brothers, Anthony Broadwater had never been accused of anything serious.

A skilled wrestler at Henninger High School, he dropped out around 17 and was intrigued when a Marine Corps recruiter said he could be on a flight to California within days. I wanted to see the world and try to better myself, he said.

Stationed at Twentynine Palms and Camp Pendleton, he ended up with a cyst on his wrist. He was discharged and received disability for the injury. He returned to Syracuse, where his father was ill with stomach cancer, and eventually took a job installing phones for a telecommunications company.

On Oct. 5, 1981, he and a friend drove over to Marshall Street, a stretch of restaurants and shops that had long served as a gathering place for college students. While his friend was inside a store, Mr. Broadwater recognized a police officer from his younger days. Later, in court, the officer and Mr. Broadwater would each remember calling out to the other, Dont I know you?

The two made small talk, unaware that Ms. Sebold had passed Mr. Broadwater on the street and was watching their exchange.

Days later, Mr. Broadwater was taken into custody. Ms. Sebold had identified him as her rapist.

But when it came time for the police lineup, Ms. Sebold, who is white, looked at the Black men before her and indicated that her attacker was the last person in the row, Number Five. Mr. Broadwater was Number Four. She would insist an hour later that the two men had looked identical to her.

Studies would later show that misidentifications by eyewitnesses, especially those that are cross-racial, make up a large percentage of erroneous convictions.

Mr. Broadwater was charged with eight felony counts, including rape and sodomy. He was 20 years old.

In 1981, Syracuse was a city of 170,000 with a dwindling manufacturing industry. Located in Central New York at the edge of the Finger Lakes region, its economy had grown increasingly dependent on Syracuse University, although a disconnect loomed between students and their surroundings.

Locals, often called townies, were discouraged from going near the campus in the University Hill neighborhood in the center of the city. Black residents made up about 16 percent of the citys population and tended to live in its poorer areas.

Onondaga County did not have a public defenders division, so it relied on a list of volunteers in private practice who worked for a small hourly rate. The Broadwater case was assigned to Steven Paquette, a defense attorney two years into his career who had already represented dozens of clients.

Mr. Paquette, the son of a UPS driver, was the first in his family to attend college and was idealistic about criminal defense work. He often felt that his Black clients could not get a fair shake in a county where jury pools tended to be mostly white and conservative.

He found Mr. Broadwater to be unusual because he was intensely eager about cooperating with the district attorneys office.

He was emphatic throughout that they got the wrong guy, recalled Mr. Paquette, now 66. It was a disbelief coupled with a faith that once the facts were out, justice would be done for him.

Mr. Paquette was one of more than two dozen people connected to Mr. Broadwater, Ms. Sebold or the rape case who spoke to The New York Times.

Times reporters also reviewed hundreds of pages of court documents and exhibits, as well as Ms. Sebolds memoir, for this article.

Mr. Paquette encouraged Mr. Broadwater to opt for a bench trial. The judge, Walter T. Gorman, was considered a thoughtful and competent adjudicator.

The states case was to be presented by William Mastine, a confident prosecutor whose law career would end the following decade after he pleaded guilty to defrauding a client, according to court documents and news reports.

At 6-foot-6, Mr. Mastine usually towered over others in the courtroom and enjoyed facing off against another lawyer on a final stage. Its not a rush, just a satisfaction that what youre doing is right, said Mr. Mastine, now 74.

He had been handed the Broadwater case only a week before, he said. Based upon everything we had in front of us, he was the guy, he said.

The trial began on May 17, 1982, and lasted just two days. DNA analysis was unavailable at the time, but a forensic chemist testified that a pubic hair from a Black person that had been recovered from the rape kit was consistent with the hair sample Mr. Broadwater had submitted.

Hair comparison has since been discredited as an unreliable science that can match little beyond a persons race and is responsible for many wrongful convictions.

Ms. Sebold held firm to her account.

I could not have identified him as the man who raped me unless he was the man who raped me, she testified.

Mr. Broadwater was the last to take the stand, the only witness to testify for the defense. His lawyer asked him to discuss his unique facial markings features Ms. Sebold had never reported, although she had described being a centimeter away from her rapist.

I have a scar underneath my chin, and I had an operation in 74 on my eye, Mr. Broadwater testified. Also, I have a chipped tooth.

In his closing argument, Mr. Mastine, the prosecutor, reminded the court that Ms. Sebold had been a virgin, a detail brought up more than once throughout the case.

Afterward, the defense was startled when Judge Gorman immediately announced he was ready to rule.

He declared simply and with no insight into his decision that Mr. Broadwater was guilty of rape in the first degree.

Mr. Broadwater was taken into custody, departing from a courtroom devoid of any friends or family members. He had not asked anyone to attend the trial, certain that he would walk free.

The Great Read

Here are more fascinating talesyou cant help but read all the way to the end.

Ms. Sebold would go on to write The Lovely Bones, a novel about a 14-year-old girl who is raped and murdered. Published in 2002, it reached the top of the New York Times best-seller list, selling more than 10 million copies before eventually being adapted into a film.

Its success led readers to discover Lucky, the 1999 memoir Ms. Sebold had written about her own rape, in which she had changed the name of her attacker to Gregory Madison.

The raw, personal account of her trauma served as inspiration for many sexual assault victims and impressed those who had already acknowledged her writing talent.

She was a considered person, a deeply honest-to-the-core writer, unstinting and tenaciously unwilling to offer anything but her best, said the poet Tess Gallagher, one of Ms. Sebolds professors at Syracuse, in an email to The Times. Ms. Gallagher had also accompanied Ms. Sebold to the preliminary hearing for the assault case.

I was beside her then and remember how terrified she was in that courtroom, Ms. Gallagher said.

The memoir follows Ms. Sebolds entire journey through the criminal justice system.

In one scene, she recounts how a prosecutor she trusted, named Gail Uebelhoer, told her that the man she identified in the lineup was a friend of Mr. Broadwater and had tricked her by staring menacingly.

According to the book, Ms. Uebelhoer then coached her into explaining away the misidentification in front of the grand jury. When reached by The Times, Ms. Uebelhoer declined to comment.

Even slight or inadvertent nudges during lineups have been shown to influence a victims memory. According to the Innocence Project, lineups should be conducted in a double-blind manner, where the administrator does not know which person is the suspect and the witness is not assured the suspect is present.

Ms. Sebold also described being given a short break while testifying, during which she received a visit from Judge Gorman, who warmly asked about her family. His tone was more gentle than the one he used in court, Ms. Sebold wrote. Judge Gorman died in 2009.

These passages would help illustrate the flaws in Mr. Broadwaters case. But not for two more decades.

While in prison, Mr. Broadwater obtained his G.E.D. and studied the law, trying repeatedly to get his case revisited. At one point he hoped to retain Johnnie Cochran, sending $1,000 saved from his disability payments and custodial job. But the lawyers firm returned the money, informing him it did not handle post-conviction matters.

Mr. Broadwaters father, who believed in his innocence, wanted to help but was undergoing chemotherapy. He died in 1983.

At each parole hearing, Mr. Broadwater refused to admit guilt, despite knowing he would fare better if he expressed responsibility for the crime. He wondered if he would die in prison like the man he watched get fatally stabbed during a fight.

Sixteen years crept by. He was finally released on the last day of 1998. But freedom came with a cage. A sex offender on parole, he had to abide by a curfew and was prohibited from most workplaces.

He relied on temporary gigs, taking a job at a metal plating factory, bagging potatoes, doing yardwork and roofing, mopping floors, scavenging for scrap metal. Night jobs were helpful, because they gave him the alibi he had lacked when police questioned him about Ms. Sebold. He believed he had been home at the time but had no proof.

Whispers that he was a rapist were deafening. Friends were scarce. Mr. Broadwaters computer use had to be monitored after he was released, so he found it easier just to never learn how to work one. Still, he continued to reach out to lawyers.

One disappeared with $1,400. Another failed to obtain Mr. Broadwaters file, which had been sealed. When a car accident left Mr. Broadwater with a neck injury, he set aside most of the $30,000 payout, hoping he could find a lawyer to take his case.

He began dating Elizabeth a year after his release. She was Baptist like him, had a sincere way about her and was a homebody. He wasted no time handing her a file with information about his past.

If youre going to be in a relationship with me, this is what Im going to be fighting all my life, he said. She pored over the papers in tears. I dont know how they did this to you, she said. Im going to be with you.

What happened to her in 1981? In May 1981,Ms. Sebold, who was then a freshman at Syracuse University, had celebrated the last day of the school year at a friends apartment. She was raped in a park as she returned home.

Who is Anthony Broadwater? Five months after her rape, Ms. Sebold, who is white, spotted Mr. Broadwater, who is Black, in Syracuse and told the authorities he was her assailant. At the time, Mr. Broadwater worked for a telecommunications company.

What happened next? Days after Ms. Sebold made her report, Mr. Broadwater was taken into custody. Though she failed to identify him during a police lineup, Mr. Broadwater was found guilty of rape in the first degree. He has always maintained he was innocent.

Why is the case back in the news? Mr. Broadwater, who spent 16 years in prison and was released in 1998, had tried to clear his name for decades. New lawyers took up his cause earlier this year, and argued that the case against him was deeply flawed. On Nov. 22, a state judge exonerated him.

They moved into the dilapidated house his father had left behind. She wanted children, but Mr. Broadwater felt it would be unfair to bring kids into his difficult world.

He learned of Ms. Sebolds memoir around 2006, but he had no interest in reading what he considered his own horror story.

It was in the hands of another convicted felon that the case against Mr. Broadwater began to unravel.

Timothy Mucciante was a disbarred lawyer from Michigan who had gone to prison multiple times for fraud. His most wild scheme was one in which he convinced investors he would buy condoms and latex gloves and trade them in Russia for chickens that would be sold in Saudi Arabia. He pocketed the money instead.

After his last prison stint ended in 2010, Mr. Mucciante hoped to reform himself, he said.

I certainly have a lot to make up for in terms of what I owe the world, he said in an interview.

Earlier this year, Mr. Mucciante was forging ahead in a new career, having started his own film production company. He had joined other producers who were adapting Ms. Sebolds memoir and planning to film it in Toronto. He offered to cover the films entire budget of 6.5 million Canadian dollars.

As Mr. Mucciante read the script and the book, he was struck by how little evidence was presented at trial. He said he began to doubt the memoirs veracity and withheld funding until he was dismissed from the project, which never got off the ground.

But three people who worked on the film said Mr. Mucciante did not raise questions about the memoir, and that his contract was terminated in early June because he failed to deliver the money he had promised, claims Mr. Mucciante disputes.

Court documents show Mr. Mucciante, 62, has filed for bankruptcy on at least a dozen occasions, but he told The Times that he is currently financially stable.

In late June, Mr. Mucciante decided to take a deeper look at Ms. Sebolds trial. He found and hired Dan Myers, a retired detective who had spent 20 years with the Onondaga County Sheriffs Office and was working as a private investigator.

Mr. Myers learned that Gregory Madison from the book was in fact Anthony Broadwater. He told The Times that a police officer who worked on the case had offered him a stunning admission: He did not believe the right man had been caught.

Mr. Myers connected Mr. Broadwater with David Hammond, a criminal defense lawyer he worked with who had served as a judge advocate in the Army. Mr. Hammond also helped represent Chelsea Manning as she appealed her conviction for espionage.

Intrigued, Mr. Hammond reached out to Melissa Swartz, a lawyer at a different firm known for her forensic expertise.

The two were friends and liked to team up. One of their cases was taking years to put together. But as they separately combed through Mr. Broadwaters files, they began feverishly texting each other.

After talking at length with Mr. Broadwater and reading Ms. Sebolds memoir, the lawyers discovered the arguments they could make for exoneration were astonishingly obvious: The flawed hair comparison testimony. The heavy reliance on Ms. Sebold spotting her rapist five months afterward. The misidentification during the police lineup. The fact that Mr. Broadwater had passed two polygraph tests.

All of it illustrated what, Mr. Hammond said, was a travesty hiding in plain sight: Forty years, yet all it took was someone to pick up the trial transcript and, frankly, talk to Anthony and read Lucky.

Soon the same revelations were had by William Fitzpatrick, the Onondaga County district attorney who joined Mr. Broadwaters lawyers in their motion to overturn the conviction. A handful of years ago, he said, he had instructed his staff to review cases that used hair comparison. Mr. Broadwaters name never came up.

Mr. Fitzpatrick said he emailed with Ms. Sebold and asked her about conversations that, as depicted in the memoir, were improper.

Ms. Sebold, he said, told him that a long time had passed by the time she wrote the memoir and that she had written scenes as she remembered them.

On Nov. 22, Mr. Broadwater arrived at a courthouse a block away from the one that had entombed him in a false narrative. He was 61 years old, with gray in his braids and a forehead creased with age.

When the judge announced his exoneration, he let out a gasp, leaned forward and cried.

Ms. Sebold said she had learned a few weeks before Mr. Broadwaters exoneration that the district attorney was re-evaluating the case.

Its hard to unravel a truth I now know to be false and that has been part of my life for forty years and my work for twenty, without my whole understanding of truth and justice falling apart, she said through a spokesman in an email to The Times, adding that she hadnt been able to think about much else.

Every word Ive read that Anthony Broadwater has said has made me see him as a man who, though brutalized, somehow came through it with a generous heart, she said. To go from thinking he was the man who raped me to believing he was an innocent victim is an earth-shattering change.

In an earlier statement posted to Medium, Ms. Sebold said that her goal in 1982 was justice not to perpetuate injustice and that she was now wrestling with the realization that her rapist went free.

She said that Mr. Broadwater had become another young Black man brutalized by our flawed legal system. She added: I am sorry most of all for the fact that the life you could have led was unjustly robbed from you.

Scribner, which published Lucky, has ceased its distribution and will consider along with Ms. Sebold how it might be revised. To do justice to the new reality and all the ramifications of the past would be a huge undertaking, Ms. Sebold said in her email. It might also be amazing.

Fans of the author now find themselves grappling with the news that Mr. Broadwater had been a victim, too.

See more here:
Anthony Broadwater Was Convicted of Raping Alice Sebold. Then the Case Unraveled. - The New York Times

On September 28, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky shared the results of a new study that appeared to confirm the need for mask mandates in schools. The study was conducted in Arizona over the summer, and published by the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report: It found that schools in counties without mask mandates had 3.5 times more outbreaks than schools in counties with mask mandates.

The significance of that finding should have raised eyebrows, according toThe Atlantic's David Zweig. "A number of the experts interviewed for this article said the size of the effect should have caused everyone involved in preparing, publishing, and publicizing the paper to tap the brakes," he wrote in a new article that explores the study's significant flaws. "Instead, they hit the gas."

His article demonstrates quite convincingly that the study's results are suspect:

But the Arizona study at the center of the CDC's back-to-school blitz turns out to have been profoundly misleading. "You can't learn anything about the effects of school mask mandates from this study," Jonathan Ketcham, a public-health economist at Arizona State University, told me. His view echoed the assessment of eight other experts who reviewed the research, and with whom I spoke for this article. Masks may well help prevent the spread of COVID, some of these experts told me, and there may well be contexts in which they should be required in schools. But the data being touted by the CDCwhich showed a dramaticmore-than-triplingof risk for unmasked studentsought to be excluded from this debate. The Arizona study's lead authors stand by their work, and so does the CDC. But the critics were forthright in their harsh assessments. Noah Haber, an interdisciplinary scientist and a co-author of a systematicreviewof COVID-19 mitigation policies, called the research "so unreliable that it probably should not have been entered into the public discourse."

It turns out that there were numerous problems with the study. Many of the schools that comprise its data set weren't even open at the time the study was completed; it counted outbreaks instead of cases; it did not control for vaccination status; it included schools that didn't fit the criteria. For these and other reasons, Zweig argues that the study ought to be ignored entirely: Masking in schools may or may not be a good idea, but this study doesn't help answer the question. Any public officialincluding and especially Walenskywho purports to follow the scienceshould toss this one in the trash.

In other COVID-19 news, the CDC is now recommending the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines over Johnson & Johnson due to the rare blood-clotting issues relating to the later. According to Fox Business:

Regulators eventually decided that the benefits of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine outweighed the risks, but theFDA released new datathis week showing that more cases have occurred in the summer and fall.

Women between the ages of 30 and 49 are most affected by the blood clotting issue at a rate of about 1 in 100,000 shots.

Health officials have confirmed 54 cases of the blood clots, nine of which have been fatal, CDC official Dr. Isaac See said Thursday. Two more deaths are suspected to be related to the blood clotting issue.

The J&J shot doesn't seem to provide much protection against the now-surging omicron variant, in any case.

Speaking of omicron, the latest COVID-19 variant is spreading throughout the U.S., and is already causing a wave of shutdowns on some college campuses, including Cornell University, Stanford University, Georgetown University, New York University, and Princeton University. That these campuses all saw cases spike despite 95 percent vaccination rates likely means that the vaccines are not doing nearly enough to slow and stop infection, though they still seem to offer significant protection against severe disease and death.

That will end up being key: In Washington, D.C., for instance, high vaccination rates meant that while the delta wave did cause a spike in cases, the city's death rate did not increase at all.

Hopefully, we see something similar with omicron, though everyone should prepare for Democratic officials to bring back mask mandates (and maybe lockdowns) in response to rising cases. Mayor Muriel Bowser will probably reinstate D.C.'s mask mandatejust as soon as her own holiday parties are over.

Last week, a British court ruled that Julian Assange could face extradition to the U.S. Assange's legal team has argued that doing so would put Assange's health in grave danger: He has already suffered a mini stroke, and his brother has said, "I have no doubt he will die" if extradited.

For years, the founder of WikiLeaks hid in the U.K.'s Ecuadorian embassy to evade government authorities who want to prosecute him for publishing the Chelsea Manning leaks, which revealed horrific wrongdoings perpetrated by the U.S. military. The effort to punish Assange is a blow to freedom of the press and the First Amendment, and one that all civil libertarians ought to oppose.

One MSNBC columnist, Frank Figliuzzi, is treating the possible extradition of Assange as a potential window intothe Mueller investigation:

Former President Donald Trump already faces a future filled withlegal battlesin multiplefederal, state and local jurisdictions fromGeorgiato theDistrict of ColumbiatoNew York stateandManhattan. And, now, a British court decision againstWikiLeaks founder Julian Assangecould resurrect the two seminal questions from special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation: Did Trump obstruct justice, and did his campaign collude with Russia? Assange, an Australian citizen sitting inHer Majesty's Prison Belmarsh in southeast London, may hold the key that reopens the prosecutive possibilities.

Liberals should be howling about the unjust persecution of Assange, not salivating at the near-zero chance that he would provide new information that would bring back the possibility of criminal charges against former President Donald Trump.

The Republican Party is paying Trump's legal expenses, according toThe Washington Post:

The Republican Party has agreed to pay up to $1.6 million in legal bills for former president Donald Trump to help him fight investigations into his business practices in New York, according to Republican National Committee members and others briefed on the decision.

The party's executive committee overwhelmingly approved the payments at a meeting this summer in Nashville, according to four members and others with knowledge of the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private meeting of the executive committee.

That means the GOP's commitment to pay Trump's personal legal expenses could be more than 10 times higher than previously known.

Last month, the GOP said in campaign-finance filings that it had paid Trump's personal attorneys $121,670 in October. More payments have been made since then. A party official said Thursday that the RNC paid $578,000 in November to attorneys known to be representing both Trump and his businesses.

Original post:
The Study That Convinced the CDC To Support Mask Mandates in Schools Is Junk Science - Reason

Stella Moris, partner of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, makes a statement outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London on December 10. Agence France-Presse/Niklas Hallen

THE pursuit of Julian Assange for revealing secrets and lies of governments, especially the crimes of America, has entered its final stage as the British judiciary upholders of British justice merge their deliberations with the undeterred power of Washington.

I sat in Court 4 in the Royal Courts of Justice in London with Stella Morris, Julian Assanges partner. I have known Stella for as long as I have known Julian. She, too, is a voice of freedom, coming from a family that fought the fascism of Apartheid. Today, her name was uttered in court by a barrister and a judge, forgettable people were it not for the power of their endowed privilege.

The barrister, Clair Dobbin, is in the pay of the regime in Washington, first Trumps then Bidens. She is Americas hired gun, or silk, as she would prefer. Her target is Julian Assange, who has committed no crime and has performed a historic public service by exposing the criminal actions and secrets on which governments, especially those claiming to be democracies, base their authority.

For those who may have forgotten, WikiLeaks, of which Assange is founder and publisher, exposed the secrets and lies that led to the invasion of Iraq, Syria and Yemen, the murderous role of the Pentagon in dozens of countries, the blueprint for the 20-year catastrophe in Afghanistan, the attempts by Washington to overthrow elected governments, such as Venezuelas, the collusion between nominal political opponents (Bush and Obama) to stifle a torture investigation and the CIAs Vault 7 campaign that turned your mobile phone, even your TV set, into a spy in your midst.

WikiLeaks released almost a million documents from Russia which allowed Russian citizens to stand up for their rights. It revealed the Australian government had colluded with the US against its own citizen, Assange. It named those Australian politicians who have informed for the US. It made the connection between the Clinton Foundation and the rise of jihadism in American-armed states in the Gulf.

There is more: WikiLeaks disclosed the US campaign to suppress wages in sweatshop countries like Haiti, Indias campaign of torture in Kashmir, the British governments secret agreement to shield US interests in its official Iraq inquiry and the British Foreign Offices plan to create a fake marine protection zone in the Indian Ocean to cheat the Chagos islanders out of their right of return.

In other words, WikiLeaks has given us real news about those who govern us and take us to war, not the preordained, repetitive spin that fills newspapers and television screens. This is real journalism; and for the crime of real journalism, Assange has spent most of the past decade in one form of incarceration or another, including Belmarsh prison, a horrific place.

Diagnosed with Aspergers syndrome, he is a gentle, intellectual visionary driven by his belief that a democracy is not a democracy unless it is transparent, and accountable.

Yesterday, the United States sought the approval of Britains High Court to extend the terms of its appeal against a decision by a district judge, Vanessa Baraitser, in January to bar Assanges extradition. Baraitser accepted the deeply disturbing evidence of a number of experts that Assange would be at great risk if he were incarcerated in the USs infamous prison system.

Professor Michael Kopelman, a world authority on neuropsychiatry, had said Assange would find a way to take his own life the direct result of what Professor Nils Melzer, the United Nations Rapporteur on Torture, described as the craven mobbing of Assange by governments and their media echoes.

Those of us who were in the Old Bailey last September to hear Kopelmans evidence were shocked and moved. I sat with Julians father, John Shipton, whose head was in his hands. The court was also told about the discovery of a razor blade in Julians Belmarsh cell and that he had made desperate calls to the Samaritans and written notes and much else that filled us with more than sadness.

Watching the lead barrister acting for Washington, James Lewis a man from a military background who deploys a cringingly theatrical aha! formula with defence witnesses reduce these facts to malingering and smearing witnesses, especially Kopelman, we were heartened by Kopelmans revealing response that Lewiss abuse was a bit rich as Lewis himself had sought to hire Kopelmans expertise in another case.

Lewiss sidekick is Clair Dobbin, and the 11th of August was her day. Completing the smearing of Professor Kopelman was down to her. An American with some authority sat behind her in court.

Dobbin said Kopelman had misled Judge Baraister in September because he had not disclosed that Julian Assange and Stella Morris were partners, and their two young children, Gabriel and Max, were conceived during the period Assange had taken refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

The implication was that this somehow lessened Kopelmans medical diagnosis: that Julian, locked up in solitary in Belmarsh prison and facing extradition to the US on bogus espionage charges, had suffered severe psychotic depression and had planned, if he had not already attempted, to take his own life.

For her part, Judge Baraitser saw no contradiction. The full nature of the relationship between Stella and Julian had been explained to her in March 2020, and Professor Kopelman had made full reference to it in his report in August 2020. So the judge and the court knew all about it before the main extradition hearing last September. In her judgement in January, Baraitser said this:

[Professor Kopelman] assessed Mr Assange during the period May to December 2019 and was best placed to consider at first-hand his symptoms. He has taken great care to provide an informed account of Mr Assange background and psychiatric history. He has given close attention to the prison medical notes and provided a detailed summary annexed to his December report. He is an experienced clinician and he was well aware of the possibility of exaggeration and malingering. I had no reason to doubt his clinical opinion.

She added that she had not been misled by the exclusion in Kopelmans first report of the Stella-Julian relationship and that she understood that Kopelman was protecting the privacy of Stella and her two young children.

In fact, as I know well, the familys safety was under constant threat to the point when an embassy security guard confessed he had been told to steal one of the babys nappies so that a CIA-contracted company could analyse its DNA. There has been a stream of unpublicised threats against Stella and her children.

For the US and its legal hirelings in London, damaging the credibility of a renowned expert by suggesting he withheld this information was a way, they no doubt reckoned, to rescue their crumbling case against Assange. In June, the Icelandic newspaper Stundin reported that a key prosecution witness against Assange has admitted fabricating his evidence. The one hacking charge the Americans hoped to bring against Assange if they could get their hands on him depended on this source and witness, Sigurdur Thordarson, an FBI informant.

Thordarson had worked as a volunteer for WikiLeaks in Iceland between 2010 and 2011. In 2011, as several criminal charges were brought against him, he contacted the FBI and offered to become an informant in return for immunity from all prosecution. It emerged that he was a convicted fraudster who embezzled $55,000 from WikiLeaks, and served two years in prison. In 2015, he was sentenced to three years for sex offenses against teenage boys. The Washington Post described Thordarsons credibility as the core of the case against Assange.

In the High Court, Lord Chief Justice Holroyde made no mention of this witness. His concern was that it was arguable that Judge Baraitser had attached too much weight to the evidence of Professor Kopelman, a man revered in his field. He said it was very unusual for an appeal court to have to reconsider evidence from an expert accepted by a lower court, but he agreed with Ms Dobbin it was misleading even though he accepted Kopelmans understandable human response to protect the privacy of Stella and the children.

If you can unravel the arcane logic of this, you have a better grasp than I who have sat through this case from the beginning. It is clear Kopelman misled nobody. Judge Baraitser whose hostility to Assange personally was a presence in her court said that she was not misled; it was not an issue; it did not matter. So why had Lord Chief Chief Justice Holroyde spun the language with its weasel legalise and sent Julian back to his cell and its nightmares? There, he now waits for the High Courts final decision in October for Julian Assange, a life or death decision.

And why did Holroyde send Stella from the court trembling with anguish? Why is this case unusual? Why did he throw the gang of prosecutor-thugs at the Department of Justice in Washington who got their big chance under Trump, having been rejected by Obama a life raft as their rotting, corrupt case against a principled journalist sunk as surely as Titantic?

This does not necessarily mean that in October the full bench of the High Court will order Julian to be extradited. In the upper reaches of the masonry that is the British judiciary there are, I understand, still those who believe in real law and real justice from which the term British justice takes its sanctified reputation in the land of the Magna Carta. It now rests on their ermined shoulders whether that history lives on or dies.

I sat with Stella in the courts colonnade while she drafted words to say to the crowd of media and well-wishers outside in the sunshine. Clip-clopping along came Clair Dobbin, spruced, ponytail swinging, bearing her carton of files: a figure of certainty: she who said Julian Assange was not so ill that he would consider suicide. How does she know?

Has Ms Dobbin worked her way through the medieval maze at Belmarsh to sit with Julian in his yellow arm band, as Professors Koppelman and Melzer have done, and Stella has done, and I have done? Never mind. The Americans have now promised not to put him in a hellhole, just as they promised not to torture Chelsea Manning.

And has she read the WikiLeaks leak of a Pentagon document dated 15 March, 2009? I recommend this document, for it foretells much of what has happened. US intelligence, it says, intended to destroy WikiLeaks and Julian Assanges centre of gravity with threats and criminal prosecution. Read all 32 pages and you are left in no doubt that silencing and criminalising independent journalism was the aim, smear the method.

I tried to catch Ms Dobbins gaze, but she was on her way: job done.

Outside, Stella struggled to contain her emotion. This is one brave woman, as indeed her man is an exemplar of courage. What has not been discussed today, said Stella, is why I feared for my safety and the safety of our children and for Julians life. The constant threats and intimidation we endured for years, which has been terrorising us and has been terrorising Julian for 10 years. We have a right to live, we have a right to exist and we have a right for this nightmare to come to an end once and for all.

DissidentVoice.org, December 12. John Pilger is an internationally renowned investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker.

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A day in the death of British justice - newagebd.net

Holding a glass, center right, Nym CEO Harry Halpin with Chelsea Manning, now security auditor for Nym, and supporters from Matter.VC and the LEAP Encryption Access Project at an afterparty for a pitch at Google NYC, 2017.

Working to make the internet more private, Nym Technologies recruited former U.S. Army intelligence analyst and whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who used privacy software Tor to leak thousands of classified documents in 2011. Now, with a fresh $13 million capital injection, valuing the three-year old Neuchtel, Switzerland-based company at around $270 million, Nym is gearing up to accelerate the advent of the private web powered by blockchain.

Revealed exclusively to Forbes, the Series A financing round was led by Silicon Valley monolith Andreessen Horowitz (a16z Crypto). Other investors include Barry Silberts Digital Currency Group, Tayssir Capital, Huobi Ventures, HashKey, Fenbushi Capital, and more than two dozen operators of validator nodes, or servers responsible for verifying transactions on the startups network.

Following a $2.5 million seed investment led by Binances VC arm and incubator in 2019 and a Polychain Capital-led $6.5 million raise which closed this July, Nyms latest round signals the growing interest in privacy preserving technologies, no longer a niche avail of the paranoid and the criminal. And the world at large is paying attention.

Encryption is becoming an incredibly important component of the internet today, says Ali Yahya, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and Nym provides privacy at the very bottom layer as a foundation for other private solutions to be built on top.

The Nym blockchain uses a mix network, or mixnet, where nodes are rewarded with tokens to shuffle internet traffic. If needed the nodes can inject dummy packets of data to make it harder for adversaries to decode information even at the highest level. Nym CEO Harry Halpin, who had worked at the World Wide Web Consortium with Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee prior to founding the firm in 2018, says this approach, offering what he calls network level privacy, can defeat even nation-state level mass surveillance, unlike VPNs or the Tor network.

That said, Nym is not trying to directly compete with Tor. We do recommend people use the Tor Browser, Halpin notes, but for bitcoin and Layer 2 solutions I think, we would be a better fit. In fact, Nym has been rewarding its network node operators with bitcoin. In the long run, he hopes Nyms technology could be integrated with protocols like Lightning, an additional layer built on top of the bitcoin network for instant, high-volume micropayments.

Prior to founding Nym in 2018, Harry Halpin had worked with World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners Lee.

Chelsea Manning, who is now working closely with Halpin on client side security, told Forbes Nym has demonstrated it has secured its mixnode process to a degree worthy of investment."

While not every privacy startup uses crypto, those that do have found renewed success raising capital, says Halpin, who in 2017 managed to raise only a few thousand dollars for a similar idea that didnt use blockchain. By contrast, Nyms network, which is now operating in test mode with approximately 5,000 nodes and 30 validators, is expected to go live at full capacity by the end of this year.

Notably, this is at least the fifth blockchain-related privacy investment for the rounds lead investor Andreessen Horowitz. Others include cloud computing firm Oasis Labs, zero-knowledge private applications platform Aleo, blockchain and software development company Orchid Labs, and infrastructure builder for private data on Ethereum, Keep. Since 2018, when Nym was established, funding for privacy startups has picked up: more than two thirds of the total $3.1 billion raised by companies in the field has come in the past four years, according to Crunchbase.Not to mention, many privacy-focused cryptocurrencies have proven to be sound investments this year, with several quietly outperforming bitcoin during the current bull market.

Ahead of its mainnet launch, Nym has already begun deploying fresh capital for new hires, expanding the original eight-member team to 30. Among them is Nyms cofounder George Danezis, who briefly left the project to help design Facebooks controversial digital currency Libra when another company he cofounded, Chainspace, was acquired by the social media giant. Danezis rejoined Nym in October. Additionally, Halpin says Nym will be giving out grants to independent third party developers starting next year.

Nym team at their first in-person meeting during the Covid-19 pandemic in Crete, Greece, Oct. 2021.

Last week, the team rolled out a wallet for node miners, through which they can pledge tokens to join the Nym network, earn reputation and, consequently, more tokens, based on the amount and quality of mixing the internet traffic. This helps ensure that the quality of service is sufficient for the network to remain usable and incentivizes miners to do the work correctly, Halpin explains. Though much of Nyms tokenomics is still in the works, he believes these economic incentives combined with mixnets potential will help Nym to make privacy real on the scale of the entire internet.

Continued here:
Andreessen Horowitz Leads Investment In Privacy Startup Integrating With Bitcoin - Forbes

I recently learned this is Transgender Awareness Week. In San Francisco, Massachusetts, and other places, its actually Trans Awareness Month. What?

I was unaware Lambda Legal has been marking the event since 2013, the year I came out. Its even been a thing at Yale University since 2004!

But why do we need trans awareness anything? If you were to rely purely on my own reporting, Dave Chappelle, Texas Republicans, and their far-right Christian conservative compatriots in nine other states certainly seem to be well aware of trans people. If thats what awareness brings, Id rather be ignored than be in their crosshairs.

And it turns out, I am not alone in becoming newly aware of this awareness week.

I didn't know there was a Trans Awareness Week until this month, Terra Field told The Daily Beast. Field, a software engineer at Netflix, is on voluntary medical leave and pursuing unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board along with another trans woman who was fired following last months Chappelle shitshow.

Even though Field said shell join fellow members of the streaming services trans employee resource group for Saturdays commemoration of the annual International Trans Day of Remembrance, she has no plans for trans awareness week. So, apparently I had missed the memo. You know, I do think I maybe have to update the address for all of my official trans cabal emails.

As do I, apparently.

Field is the out trans woman who Netflix suspended after she publicly critiqued the companys decision to stream Chappelles transphobic special. Netflix claimed her tweeting the names of all the trans people murdered in 2021 had nothing to do with her suspension. Her bold action garnered more than 51,000 likes.

Field said shes been tempted to retweet that thread, not for awareness week, but given last weeks controversial comments by executives at the BBC. They echoed Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos infamous message to employees: There will be things on Netflix that you dislike. That you even find to be harmful.

The BBCs outgoing head of news Fran Unsworth made eerily similar remarks, reportedly warning LGBTQ employees to be prepared to hear content you dont personally like and see things you dont likethat's what the BBC is, and you have to get used to that.

Uh, no, they dont. As The Daily Beast reported, at least five BBC employees quit in protest. Not an ideal solution, Ill admit.

But lets be aware of one thing above all, the overarching problem for the trans community right now is not that our feelings are hurt. We are exhausted from having to fight inequity and inequality at every turn, in every part of life that cisgender people take for granted: the workplace, across social media, in mass entertainment media and even in everyday commerce, where simply insisting upon our pronouns being respected makes us a target for ridicule.

Were not offended. Were trans people that exist on the internet. We are well beyond offended. Nothing is going to offend us, Field explained. When I saw the BBC use that, I dont know how to better articulate that offended is not what were talking about here.

What were talking about is, enough is enough. Its time for trans people across America to take action that will demonstrate that were past awareness, to show that were not going to put up with our civil rights being endangered and outlawed. Were not waiting to be rounded up when Trump-loving Republicans are once again in charge of our government. Author and activist Brynn Tannehill foresees an epoch of rage and despair is coming. The dam will break eventually, she tweeted.

Out trans civil rights attorney Chase Strangio expressed his own exasperation on Twitter.

I am a little over awareness, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer tweeted Saturday. When is our week of solidarity and mobilization?

Not everyones ready to march, of course. Chelsea Manning, the out trans former U.S. Army intel analyst who leaked classified documents to WikiLeaks, responded to Strangio: We need time to heal and reconnect some time.

Pioneering trans journalist Gwendolyn Ann Smith, who created the forerunner of TDOR 22 years ago, said these times demand action, with at least 46 trans and gender nonconforming individuals murdered so far in 2021, according to the Human Rights Campaign.

I feel like awareness week is milquetoast. Its soft-edged, and made palatable for the masses, she told The Daily Beast. It just feels like it doesnt do much more than a ribbon magnet. Smith said she is 100 percent with Chase on this.

So what does Smith suggest as an alternative? She advocates for self-defense classes for trans women, and more: I wish that, rather that awareness, there were real things. Address the issues that lead someone to be honored for TDOR, she said. Provide concrete resources, strike back against the hatred and prejudices. Provide assistance to our trans siblings in need.

"People understand our story better, not just us, focusing inward on how bad things are, Field added. Were making other people aware of what we've lost because our community is not valued by people outside of our community."

Thats the mission of trans activist Alex Petrovnia, president of the Step Up 4 Trans Kids Trans Formations Project to enlist opponents to anti-trans legislation across the U.S. He told The Daily Beast awareness cannot be the end goal.

My group is really about raising the understanding of what's going on and trying to get people to contact their representatives, not because that is the only thing that needs doing, because I think thats the place to start, he said. Awareness is the first step. You cant stop there.

With Monica Roberts gone a year and a month, I fear we have no general to stand up and lead this movement in the direction of action. According to Strangio, the ACLUs trans legal eagle, awareness is the last thing we need:

The right-wing legislatures that introduced over 100 anti-trans bills in 2021 are aware of usand they want to eradicate us. The right-wing media is aware of us and are using a campaign of weaponized misinformation to compromise our survival. So many people are aware and organized to hurt us while so many of our supposed allies are aware and doing nothing remaining complicit in this moment of complete violence.

Please turn your awareness into action, into love, into being a co-conspirator, concluded Strangio in an Instagram post. We are about to witness new levels of assault on trans survival. Fight with us.

A new year will bring even more anti-trans legislation, which the Biden administration and ACLU are already challenging. But it wont be enough without cisgender people taking a stand, with us and for us.

So, now youre aware. The question is: What are you going to do about it?

Read more here:
'Trans Awareness Week' Sounds Nice, but We Need Action - The Daily Beast

M.I.A.is still riding the NFT train.

The British artists previously unreleased song and video Babylon,teased earlier this week, is now part of a non-fungible tokenauction via Foundation, along with 10 othertracks from her 2010 mixtapeVicki Leekx. The winning bidders will receivethe mastered audio of the songs as well asexclusive high-resolution visuals directed by M.I.A.

Vicki Leekx will reportedly hit streaming platforms at a later date.

Profits from the 24-hour auction, which kicked off at 3 p.m. ETFriday,will support the Courage Foundation, an international organization that supports whistleblowers rights andfreedom of the press, as well as the release ofJulian Assange, the embattled WikiLeaks founder who inspired theVicki Leekx tape. Assange is accused of conspiring with ex-U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to obtain and publish secret government documents. He was ultimately hit with over a dozen criminal counts, including violations of the Espionage Act.

In a 2019 interview with Al Jazeera, M.I.A. spoke about her opposition to Assanges extradition to the United States, and described him as an icon on a scale weve never had.

I dont think [the U.S. has] got it right, this big conspiracy with Assange, or for thinking Assange is the big cause of all the shitin the world, she told the outlet. Assange is not the problem. He demonstrated an alternative solution, turning up at a time when we needed it most. Persecuting him wont solve any of the problems we have as humanity going forwards.

You can watch the full Babylon video on M.I.A.s OHMNI website.

See the original post:
M.I.A. Shares Previously Unreleased Song and Video Babylon, Which Is Being Auctioned as NFT - Complex

Friday, 5 November 2021, 3:50 pmPress Release: David Swanson

By US Peace Memorial Foundation

The 2021 US Peace Prizehas been awarded to World BEYOND War for exceptionalglobal advocacy and creative peace education to end war anddismantle the war machine.

Michael Knox, Chair ofthe US Peace Memorial Foundation, thanked World BEYOND Warand its members for years of outstanding and prolificantiwar actions and extensive peace educational projectsinvolving many people and organizations. We appreciate yourleadership and the significant impact your members andprograms have had throughout the world.

Uponlearning of the award, David Swanson, Executive Director,said, World BEYOND War has grown so large that this prizeneeds to be shared among hundreds of thousands of people,not just in the United States but around the world. We aredeeply honored to be placed in the company of the amazingindividuals and organizations who have previously receivedthe US Peace Prize and are grateful for all the work done bythe US Peace Memorial Foundation to advance demilitarizationand the building up of a culture of peace in the worldsleading war-making nation.

WBW President LeahBolger remarked, I am thrilled that World BEYOND War isthe recipient of the 2021 US Peace Prize! I believe thatWorld BEYOND War is doing some tremendous work, and it is sogratifying to have that work recognized and lifted up by theUS Peace Memorial. Winning this years US Peace Prize isquite an honor and validation that WBW might just be ontosomething! The publicity and attention this award will bringwill only help broaden our international network workingtogether to abolish war forever.

See photos andmore details at: http://www.USPeacePrize.org.

Inaddition to receiving the US Peace Prize, our highest honor,World BEYOND War has been designated as a Founding Member ofthe US Peace Memorial Foundation. WBW joins previous USPeace Prize recipients Christine Ahn, Ajamu Baraka, DavidSwanson, Ann Wright, Veterans For Peace, Kathy Kelly,CODEPINK Women for Peace, Chelsea Manning, Medea Benjamin,Noam Chomsky, Dennis Kucinich, and Cindy Sheehan.

TheFoundation honors Americans who stand for peace bypublishing the US Peace Registry, awarding the US PeacePrize, and working to promote and raise funds for the USPeace Memorial in Washington, DC. We celebrate these rolemodels to inspire other Americans to speak out against warand work for peace.

https://worldbeyondwar.org/us-peace-prize-awarded-to-world-beyond-war/

Videoof Presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtvcZp_FP8E

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US Peace Prize Awarded To World BEYOND War | Scoop News - Scoop.co.nz

"What has Ressa done, indeed?"

It is truly appalling to witness how our so-called intelligentsia class vigorously came to the defense of an alien claiming to be Filipino against one who denounced the award intended to slander the government and its people. They never bothered to see that the award was meant to denigrate their own kind by one who has his own literary genre.

F. Sionil Jose has his accolades, not from foreign literary guilds, but in recognition of his own talent and made a niche in the field of literature. The local media, instead of analyzing how society works and how people interact, chose to remain aloof and treated themselves as apart from the common sentiment of our people. They remain arrogant, howling in concert, why Jose came out with such outrageous commentaries against a foreign stooge.

He was branded as one fighting a lost cause. The hypocritical mainstream media were almost unanimous in their condemnation of Jose and equating his denunciation of the Nobel Peace Prize as in defiance to the norm of civil society. Worse, he was denounced for it seems his statement appears in conformity with the Duterte administration.

Objectively, Jose was simply true to his word, which is to speak of the truth in opposing those who blindly tow to falsities. For this, the media committed a blunder because that pushed them into the precipice of being on the defensive to tell the truth. The hypocrites started mudslinging Jose --that betrays all their pretension of decency. They accused him of being an old man who allegedly had lost his cause.

They cannot disparage him the way they do the politicians. He is a literary giant ajudged by his class that made him a Sionil. Maybe next to Jose Rizals Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, no Filipino writer has achieved that feat of having written 14 novels translated into 28 languages.

Those who could not hold their tongue took the occasion to praise the award without directly attacking Jose. It was their way of atoning for all these years they are collaborating with the US to meddle in our internal affairs.

But if one may ask, what accomplishment has Ressa done to be accorded an award? Maybe the literary accomplishments of Jose were personal to him, but that is something nobody can deny unless he earned it through malfeasance and other forms of shenanigans.

In the award given to Ressa, the fundamental question is: What has she accomplished? If the committee cannot point to any accomplishment she achieved, it can also be called a kind of flattery. Nonetheless, the Nobel Peace Prize is now used as an instrument to malign the government. It is on this score why Jose is unforgiving in hitting hard on Ressa.

Ressa, as a foreign correspondent, went beyond the limits of news reporting. Her site wrote narratives that Duterte is crook, a mad killer and a foul-mouthed bully. But that manifests how these hypocrites carry on with their faith.

Moreover, the condemnation by Jose is his blunt disapproval of the mainstream medias role of their being an apologist of US imperialism. Jose knows that the awardee is an operator of US propaganda in this country. His criticism was to debunk the falsities peddled by Rappler. The award is funded by the US and from the National Endowment for Democracy, a new outfit for the dreaded CIA.

Those who came to defend Ressa did not mind that they are in fact in alliance with the communists, unmindful that the local CPP, NPA and NDF have been branded by the US authorities as terrorist organizations. Their synchronized political line goes all the way to the US State Department, the Nobel Peace committee and to the EU and NATO.

It was the tabloid of Ressa that showed pictures of CPP/NPA atrocities but shifted instead to show drug dealers killed in encounter by our law enforcement authorities. Often the tabloids caption states that the dead person was extrajudicially executed but no evidence is shown that he was indeed extrajudicially executed. In fact, one picture showed an alleged widow embracing the body of her dead husband for a reenactment of Mother Dolorosa.

What is strange is that there were other persons who put their lives on line to campaign for freedom and democracy. Yet, not a word was mentioned about them. The Western concept of freedom and democracy is a weaponized propaganda adjusted to suit the brokers interest. It can be interpreted as an act to topple the government that refuses to tow their line. This explains why the local media has been reduced to that of bullhorn for US propaganda. They have no choice, for often, the local media like Rappler is funded by American media oligarchs like Pierre Omidyar. This explains why Jose is furious at Ressa because she is the personification of a capitalist slave.

The contempt of Sionil for Ressa is not borne out of jealousy but of innate patriotism reacting to how she treats our President and still considers our government a colony of the US. People could not even recall what sort of peace she brokered. This is asked because the Nobel Peace award is given to one that helped to bring about peace to our land.

Those involved are engaged in historical distortion to mislead our people yet they accuse their enemies of what they call historical revisionism. Most importantly, the award is intended to create a hero to one who refuses to identify as belonging to us. In the first place, people are asking why she was given an award when the tabloid she is operating is wholly dedicated to disparaging the Duterte administration. Others believe the scheme was meant to pressure the court to make legal the operations of Rappler. Maybe Omidyar is banking that giving her that stature, it could recalibrate the public opinion in their favor.

There are people from different countries fighting for freedom. Each has his own motivation and objective. Take the case of Julian Assange. He is accused by the US government of publishing secret communications of US officials involving the commission of war crimes. He counters that exposing a crime cannot be considered a crime. In the case of Ressa, she is committing almost daily the crime of sedition for slandering and maligning the government.

Another is the case of Edward Snowden. It involved his bringing with him secret and coded files from the US the National Security Agency. He exposed the web eavesdropping activities of the US, revealing that practically nobody is immune from the NSAs spying activities, and violation the privacy of communications and correspondence from the President down to the ordinary citizens who might be the target of the government harassment.

Another is Chelsea Manning. He leaked to the media how a US helicopter gunship mercilessly gunned down several young and unarmed Iraqi civilians. More than 10 civilians were killed in a hail of machine gun fire. No investigation was ever conducted nor an acknowledgement was made on that multiple murder. It was later learned that the incident was carried by civilian employees contracted by the defense department known as Black Water which has become notorious for committing indiscriminate atrocities to civilians in US- occupied territories like Iraq and Somali.

All of them are called whistleblowers. In the case of Ressa, she cannot be considered a whistleblower but more appropriately an agitator who can be charged of sedition, espionage or operating a mass media outfit without permit from the SEC.

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Refusing to go with the current - manilastandard.net

Imagine meeting the love of your life but not being able to tell a soul. Then having his children, and not being able to confide in your closest friends who the father is because it may endanger the family. And finally revealing all to the world but only to help prevent him being extradited from Belmarsh prison in London to America where he faces a jail sentence of up to 175 years under the Espionage Act.

Stella Moris has had a tough time of it. Her face is pale, her voice little more than a whisper, and she barely makes eye contact. The pauses between words are sometimes so long, you fear shes having a breakdown mid-sentence. And yet there is such defiance in her language, such certainty in the rightness of her cause. A defiance and certainty not unlike that shown by her fiance, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the worlds most famous publisher of classified information. Now she is fighting for his life and her future. And thats not all. In a couple of weeks at the Royal Courts of Justice, the US government will appeal against an earlier decision not to send Assange to America. If Assange loses, Moris believes the very concept of a free press will be under threat.

Moris says there is another reason she couldnt tell people about her relationship with Assange, who has spent the past 11 years in captivity of one kind or another holed up in a Norfolk stately home, the Ecuadorian embassy, and Belmarsh. Her story had simply become too fantastical the kind you might find in a melodramatic spy novel. I couldnt explain the situation to friends because my circumstances had become quite unrelatable. It emerged last April that Moris and Assange had two children while he was in hiding at the embassy. By then, Gabriel was almost three and Max was one. The story came out only because Assange had tried to secure bail with his new family at Moriss home. Even by Assanges standards, it was an astonishing revelation. They had managed to keep their relationship from the public for six years.

Moris talks out of the side of her mouth, barely moving her lips, like a character in a 1950s film noir. I was in an embassy where the authorities were hostile to Julian and threatening to throw him out; where there was a security company secretly working for the CIA; where I was told not to bring my baby in because it wasnt safe; where my mom was followed. How do you sit down and have a martini and discuss this with your best friends?

We meet at the Frontline Club, the London private members hotel and bar for journalists, and the scene of Assanges early triumphs. This is where he held press conferences to discuss the release of the Afghan war logs, a compendium of more than 91,000 reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010, and described by the Guardian at the time as the biggest intelligence leak in history.

Stella Moriss life has changed beyond recognition over the past decade. When she first met Assange in 2011, she was a 28-year-old lawyer known as Sara Gonzalez Devant. She had been excited by the work of WikiLeaks, believing the nonprofit media organisation was exposing corruption and war crimes in a way never seen before. She mentions one of its most famous scoops a horrifying video called Collateral Murder that showed the crew of two Apache helicopters firing on a group of Iraqi civilians with the callous insouciance of video game players. After the lead helicopter fired, one of the crew shouted, Hahaha. I hit em and another responded, Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards.

In April 2010, Assange released the video at a press conference in Washington DC. Overnight, WikiLeaks which he had founded four years previously became a household name. If Collateral Murder hadnt been published, those innocent people who were mown down in a war crime would have for ever remained in terms of the official story enemy combatants engaged in a war battle and legitimately killed, Moris says. And that was only one of the stories.

Assange certainly wasnt a conventional journalist. He had started out as a hacker, and in 1991, at the age of 20, was caught breaking into the Melbourne master terminal of Nortel, a Canadian multinational telecommunications company. Five years later, he pleaded guilty to 24 charges, was ordered to pay reparations of A$2,100 (1,125) and released on a good behaviour bond (the equivalent of probation). But that was a lifetime ago. Now he was the editor and publisher of WikiLeaks, encouraging the worlds whistleblowers to come to him anonymously.

He had an intense gaze, didnt do small talk, wanted to know where I was coming from. The day we met, we spoke for two hours

In the case of Collateral Murder, that whistleblower was a US army soldier stationed in Iraq called Bradley Manning (later Chelsea Manning after transitioning). In early 2010, horrified by the behaviour of colleagues, Manning disclosed nearly 750,000 classified, or unclassified but sensitive, military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks, including the Afghan war logs, the Iraq war logs and more than 251,000 US state department cables written by 271 American embassies and consulates in 180 countries that became known as Cablegate.

Assange teamed up with five major newspapers (the Guardian, New York Times, Der Spiegel, El Pais and Le Monde) who collaborated on publishing the shocking exposs. This meant they shared the work, the risk and the credit, a way of reporting that is now commonplace with mass leaks, such as the Panama and Pandora papers. As for Manning, she was now in jail. She had confided to a former hacker, who reported her to the US authorities. Three years later, she went on trial, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 35 years imprisonment. Meanwhile, Assange became a rock star in the rapidly evolving new media world. And he played the part to perfection: bobbed white hair, leather jacket; Jagger-esque swagger. To many, he was a hero the pugnacious Aussie who gave America a good hiding by revealing what the US military had really got up to in Iraq and Afghanistan. Others regarded him as an egomaniacal information thief. In December 2010, he won the online readers vote for Time magazines person of the year.

But by then he, too, was in prison. In August 2010, only a few days after WikiLeaks and its media partners started to publish the Afghan war logs, the Swedish prosecutors office issued an arrest warrant following allegations from two women, one of rape and one of molestation. Assange said that in both cases the sex was consensual and the allegations were unfounded. After nine days in jail, he was bailed to Ellingham House, the stately home owned by his friend Captain Vaughan Smith, a WikiLeaks supporter who served in the British army before founding the Frontline Club.

***

Sara Gonzalez Devant first met Assange at Frontline Mews, a property owned by Smith, where Assange initially lived when under house arrest. An expert in international law, she was hired as part of Assanges legal team to help fight his case against extradition to Sweden. She officially changed her name to Stella Moris in 2012 to protect herself and her family while working with Assange. She chose a common surname (albeit with an unusual spelling) and Stella because she liked it. Nowadays, she says, everybody calls her Stella except her parents.

They found they had much in common. Both were freedom of information champions and had experienced nomadic childhoods. Assange has said he lived in more than 30 Australian towns and attended 37 schools before settling down with his mother and half-brother in Melbourne. She was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and lived in Botswana, Lesotho, Sweden and Spain before going to university in the UK. Moriss parents were part of the Medu Art Ensemble, which played a significant role in the struggle against apartheid. Her father, a Swede of Cuban heritage, is an architect/town planner and artist; her mother is Spanish and a theatre director. By chance, Assanges mother ran a theatre company and his biological father was an architect. I thought this was a nice coincidence, Moris says. Its not a combination one often comes across.

Moris attended an international school in Lesotho, which is why she speaks with an American accent today. She did a degree in law and politics at Soas in London, an MSc at Oxford in refugee law, and a masters in Madrid in public international law. She was a top scholar and in her mid-20s won a place on a prestigious leadership course in Canada. It is Canadas equivalent of the Rhodes scholarship, she says. A year after completing it she went to work with Assanges legal team.

Moris says she found him fascinating from the off. He had a very intense gaze. He didnt do small talk. He wanted to know where I was coming from. The day I met him, we spoke for two hours. I told him about my life. Julian is unlike anyone I have ever met. Her face lights up; she looks like a teenager in love. He is very direct, engaging, clever, curious.

Before even meeting him, she says, she was convinced he was the victim of an elaborate sting. I had read all the documents and it was clear that this was a political case and that he was innocent. The Swedish authorities were behaving in a way that was inexplicable, refusing to question him. Then it came out that they were being advised by the Crown Prosecution Service not to question him in England. The CPS was pushing for Julian to be extradited, which was also inexplicable. She shows me a document obtained through a freedom of information request in which a senior CPS lawyer tells his Swedish counterpart not to get cold feet over the extradition.

Why would they do that? Moris asks. Assange refused to return to Sweden because he believed that he would be more likely to be extradited from there to America, where he would be prosecuted under the Espionage Act.

In May 2012, the UKs supreme court ruled he should be extradited to Sweden. In June, Assange entered the Ecuadorian embassy, where he could not be arrested because of the international legal protection afforded diplomatic premises, and refused to come out. In doing so, he breached his bail conditions. Two months later, Ecuador granted Assange political asylum, stating that they feared his human rights would be violated if he were extradited.

By now, Assange had fallen out with former colleagues at WikiLeaks and collaborators at mainstream news organisations. His relationship with the Guardian soured over the decision to bring the New York Times into the collaboration, and he was angered that the Guardian investigated the Swedish allegations, rather than supporting him unquestioningly. He was also furious about details published in a Guardian book, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assanges War on Secrecy. Meanwhile, all five media partners condemned his decision to publish Cablegate unredacted, potentially endangering the lives of thousands of activists and informers in countries including Israel, Jordan, Iran and Afghanistan. The situation could not have been messier.

He fell out with so many people: WikiLeaks staff, his lawyer Mark Stephens, the writer Andrew OHagan, who had been contracted to ghost a book out of him, which Assange never delivered. Laura Poitrass film about Assange, Risk, is particularly poignant because she had started the project as a fan. In it, Assange comes across as vain, sexist, arrogant and messianic. The allegations of hypocrisy were most damaging: Poitras reveals that Assange told her the film was a threat to his freedom and demanded scenes be removed. He was really angry and he tried to intimidate, Poitras told me at the time of Risks release.

James Ball, global editor at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and former Guardian journalist, briefly worked for WikiLeaks. He talks about the incredible intensity of his time at Ellingham House. We were in the middle of nowhere in Norfolk, and we couldnt bring phones because they could be tracked, so we were cut off from friends and family. Ball challenged Assange when he was asked to sign a nondisclosure agreement, with a 12 million penalty clause, that would have prevented him saying anything about WikiLeaks for two decades. Julian basically told everyone not to let me go to bed till I agreed to sign, Ball says. Eventually, he did get to bed without signing. I was woken up by Julian who was sitting on my bed, pressuring me again. He was prodding me in the face with a cuddly toy giraffe. I managed to get out, and then I got really angry for several months. A friend suggested I look into cult deprogramming. I dont think Julian necessarily meant to build a cult, but WikiLeaks did operate like one.

Moris dismisses all the criticism of Assange as character assassination. Does she think his reputation for being difficult is fair? How many publishers, editors, CEOs have a reputation for being nice and agreeable? she asks. Julian doesnt like people who are deceitful, Julian doesnt like opportunists, and he can be quite direct. Also people who are on the autism spectrum dont score particularly high on the agreeableness scale. (A psychiatrist confirmed a diagnosis of Asperger syndrome in last years extradition hearing.)

After Assange entered the embassy in 2012, he and Moris became close. I spent a lot of time with him. I got to know him, she says. When did she realise she was falling in love with him? 2014, two years later. Did she resist it? Initially, yes, because it made things more complicated. But in the end, no. Did Assange see the difficulties? Hes a romantic. Which is a no. Its such a miracle when you do fall in love, Moris says, when you find someone youre compatible with.

We set up a tent for privacy, but the cameras multiplied until there was nowhere to go without one hanging over you

How difficult was it to conduct a relationship in the embassy? We knew where the cameras were. She laughs, high-pitched and happy, like a whistling kettle. By now she was more campaigner than lawyer, and often stayed late into the night or overnight. We set up a tent for privacy and escapism it was quite cosy. The cameras multiplied over time. Eventually there was nowhere to go without one hanging over your head. The Times ran a story that strongly suggested that there was intimate footage of us being shopped around. When she found out she was pregnant, they had to be even more discreet. We never showed affection in front of people. Some conversations we had on paper, like when I told him I was pregnant.

In the end, Assange spent seven years at the embassy. Towards the end, the atmosphere became progressively more hostile, Moris says. They began to suspect that UC Global, the Spanish security company there to protect him and the embassy, was spying on him for the Americans. At an extradition hearing, the court heard that microphones were concealed to monitor Assanges meetings with lawyers, his fingerprint was obtained from a glass, and there was even a plot to obtain a nappy from a baby whod regularly visited the embassy.

The unnamed baby was Moris and Assanges elder son, Gabriel. She believes the security firm had hoped to obtain DNA from the nappy to discover whether Assange was Gabriels father, but the plot was thwarted. A security guard approached me in December 2017 and told me not to bring Gabriel in any more, Moris says. It was the guard who had been instructed to steal the nappy. I guess it was a sense of moral disgust. It was no surprise when allegations were made in court about plots to kidnap or poison Julian. It was like a black site in the middle of London. Complete lawlessness.

Surely she and Assange must have feared bringing children into that environment? Well, from that point when we heard of the nappy, yes. But, she says, back when she got pregnant, things were more hopeful: to Moris, it seemed only a matter of time before Assange would be freed. I was 32, 33 and we decided to start a family. Sure, not the ideal circumstances, but it felt right. She pauses. It was right. She hid her pregnancy by wearing baggy clothes and saying she had put on weight. When did she tell her parents about her relationship with Assange? When I was pregnant. Were they like: I knew it was him all along! My mom was, yeah! How did she know? Moms know! She tells me how much her parents admire Assange.

How did she manage to keep the children secret from everybody else for so long? It was very stressful and very difficult. I ask if she had to lie a lot. Theres a big pause, even by her standards. Yep. Had she lied a lot previously? No, I found it very difficult. It wasnt so much lying as saying: Im not going there when people asked, Whos the dad?Which I felt bad about.

Moris says that over the past decade she has necessarily become increasingly private. Anyone in Julians vicinity was exposed to being approached openly or covertly by agents. She stops and laughs at herself. Agents! It sounds so conspiratorial! But, basically, people were spying on Julian. I didnt want to put friends in a position where they might risk exposing him.

When the relationship with the embassy was good, Moris says, it was a sociable place. Assange was visited frequently by friends, who would stay late working, chatting around the dinner table and watching movies. But after Gabriel was born, she says the atmosphere had changed. There were periods when I thought, maybe irrationally, that they could kill me just to get at Julian, or attack me. I was thinking when I went home at night people were following me, and were going to beat me up. They were trying everything they could to drive Julian out of the embassy. Who are they? The Ecuadorian authorities, but implicitly with the US.

While Assange was being spied on at the embassy, Ecuadors then president, Lenn Moreno, accused him of spying on other states from the embassy, and said this violated asylum conditions. As happened so often in Assanges life, there was a loss of trust and the relationship disintegrated. In October 2018, Assange was given a set of house rules by the embassy and further restrictions were introduced Moris and the few designated visitors were allowed access only during specific visiting hours, and not at weekends. She believes the embassy was trying to suffer Julian out of the embassy. Assange accused the embassy of violating his fundamental rights and freedoms and said he was launching legal action against the government of Ecuador.

In November 2018, Moris stopped going into the embassy altogether. She was heavily pregnant with their second son, Max, and feared that if discovered, it would be used as a pretext to expel Assange from the embassy. She tried to see him after Max was born, but wasnt allowed in. The next time she saw him was in Belmarsh prison, five months later.

On April 11th, 2019, Ecuador withdrew its diplomatic asylum and the Metropolitan police entered the embassy. Assange was detained for failing to surrender to the court over a warrant issued in 2012 and sent to Belmarsh. In May, he was sentenced to 50 weeks in jail for breaching bail conditions.

Soon after Assange was arrested at the embassy, he was indicted on 17 charges for violating the Espionage Act by publishing classified information, and one charge of conspiring to hack into a secret Pentagon computer network. If found guilty, he faces a maximum 175 years in jail. In November 2019, Sweden dropped the rape investigation (the deadline for bringing charges on the sexual assault allegation expired in 2015). But it provided little comfort for Assange. By now America was set on extraditing him.

***

Its no surprise that Moris looks stressed. I ask her what its been like to bring up the children as a single parent. I called in my family to help out. It would have been impossible otherwise. It is exhausting. And it is incredibly stressful. When somebody you love is being hurt, it hurts you, too. Is she getting therapy? No. Ive thought about it. But on the other hand Im not sure I want to open that door to somebody else.

She talks about how difficult it has been to take the boys to visit their father in prison under Covid restrictions. Between March 2020 and June this year, they saw him three times, and even when they saw him he wore a face mask and visor so they couldnt see him properly. Now at least the kids can hug him and I can hug him. The children are very affectionate with him so natural.

Gabriel and Max are now four and two respectively. Has she explained the concept of prison to them? She shudders and says no, they are too young. I tell them,We are going to visit the big place where Daddy is. Its not Daddys home, but its the big house that Daddys in. I say that there are some people who dont want him to come, but there are many more who do want him to. Its becoming increasingly difficult to make sense of the situation to them.

Moris says she knows he will be a good father to them. In Belmarsh, he reads the kids childrens stories. He teaches them. Theres a little tuck shop in the prison, and they opened it for the first time since March 2020 last week. We bought some chocolate, and he was giving them a Malteser one at a time and he said, If you eat it slowly, you get two. He was teaching them that if they ate them slowly theyd be rewarded. They liked that game. Did it work? Yeah, it did. Julian is a good father. He was like a tiger mom for his eldest son. Assanges oldest son Daniel is 31. (His former WikiLeaks colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg wrote in his book Inside WikiLeaks that Assange would often boast about having at least four love children , saying: He seemed to enjoy the idea of lots and lots of Julians, one on every continent.) In what way was Assange a tiger mom to Daniel? He put him in the best schools, and he was a single father. He taught him how to code at a young age. They would perform a Greek tragedy, the two of them together. She pauses. I dont know whether he wants me to tell this story. Ill probably get it wrong.

Moris is wearing a diamond engagement ring. I ask if she had to buy it herself. Yeah, she says. Was it a happy or sad occasion? Happy! I consulted with Julian. I described it to him. For the first year or so, I was wearing my moms engagement ring. There have been stories that they will get married in Belmarsh. Has that plan been frustrated? No, its just paperwork.

I ask how Assange is keeping. Hes very unwell. Hes struggling a lot. Mentally or physically? Both. In his wing, one of his closer friends killed himself, then someone else slit his throat. She makes no secret of the fact she fears Assange may take his own life. Indeed, it formed the major plank of his first hearing against extradition.

Its now a year and a half since he completed his 50-week sentence for jumping bail. And this is where the Julian Assange story gets even stranger if possible. Despite the fact there are no new charges against him in the UK, he is still in the category A prison Belmarsh, where he has spent much of his time in solitary confinement.

January this year, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled at the Old Bailey that he should not be extradited. She had taken into account his history of depression and his autism, and ruled that extraditing Assange would increase the risk of his suicide. US president Bidens department of justice challenged the ruling, claiming that expert evidence about Assanges risk of suicide had misled the court because it had concealed the fact that Assange had fathered two children during his time in the embassy.

For Moris, none of it makes any sense: the UK government should have simply ruled out extraditing Assange on espionage charges. Espionage is a political offence by definition. Open any international law textbook and it will give you espionage, treason and sedition as the clearest examples of political offences. And the US/UK extradition treaty forbids extradition for political offences.

As for the indictment, she says it is nonsense. Julian is being prosecuted for journalistic activities, pure and simple receiving, possessing and communicating to the public information that he received from a journalistic source. The indictment also asserts that Assange conspired with Chelsea Manning to hack into US government computers. Assanges team contends that he simply offered to help her find a different username so she could not be easily be traced something the indictment actually acknowledges. In other words, the Department of Justice is accusing Assange of trying to protect his off-the-record source as any decent journalist would. For all his criticism of Assange, James Ball doesnt believe he has a case to answer. If they are saying hes acting utterly beyond the role of a journalist, why can they not offer an indictment showing that?

Media organisations around the world, including the Guardian, have expressed grave concerns about the implications of extraditing Assange. The Guardian has called on Joe Biden to pardon Assange and said the charges against him in the US undermine the foundations of democracy and press freedom.

Alan Rusbridger, who edited the Guardian when it worked with Assange, believes that extraditing him to the US has worrying implications. Its quite a disturbing thing that we should send somebody to another country for supposedly breaking their laws on secrecy America prosecuting an Australian journalist for writing things in London, he says. The danger is that this sets some kind of judicial precedent. What would happen if the Israeli or Pakistani authorities didnt like somebody writing about their nuclear programmes in America and said, Thats against our laws, so were going to extradite an American journalist under the Assange precedent to prosecute them?

Rusbridger says the Assange case is particularly dangerous because it comes at a time when so many countries are legislating to outlaw reporting about national security. Boris Johnson has dismissed a Law Commission recommendation that the public interest should be a defence under the Official Secrets Act and has proposed that the government would no longer have to prove that harm had been done by any disclosures. In other words, investigative journalism could be recast as spying.

***

Few journalists who worked with Assange will defend everything he has done. However, virtually all of them, including those he had feuds with, have now come out fighting for him. A New York Times editorial concluded: With this indictment, the Trump administration has chosen to go well beyond the question of hacking to directly challenge the boundaries of the First Amendment. Mr Assange is no hero. But this case now represents a threat to freedom of expression and, with it, the resilience of American democracy itself.

Moris says she is sick of these mealy-mouthed defences. She suggests that mainstream news organisations jumped at the opportunity of working with WikiLeaks, then distanced themselves from him as soon as the going got tough. There is no question that there were people who saw Julian as a cash cow, and they didnt care about what happened to him.

Isnt it more honest of journalists who worked with Assange to admit their relationship was difficult while saying that is irrelevant in defending him against an unjust prosecution? But it isnt irrelevant, she says. People are instinctive about things and if they think someone is a good, courageous, nice person, they are more inclined to defend that person. Julian has been in prison for two and a half years, with him facing 175 years for publishing arguably the most significant publications in journalistic history, for doing his job, and there are still these ambiguous, half-hearted defences She trails off, despondent. They should just stick to the principle and all the personal issues with Julians agreeableness can be discussed once hes released.

Moris admits she is angry and says its important for her to control it. What matters is saving Julians life and there not being a precedent set and used against the rest of the press. The future of living in a free and open society is at stake. She looks tearful, and sounds desperate. One of the main planks of Assanges argument at the appeal will again be that he is a suicide risk if extradited, but this time his family will also argue that because Moris has indefinite leave to remain and the children are British, he has a right to family life in the UK.

Moris is exceptionally bright. But at times she also seems naive as much the disciple of Assange as his partner. Her loyalty to him is absolute and, like him, she demands that others loyalty is absolute. Its hard to know what will happen if and when Assange is released. Although Moris and the boys have the right to stay in the UK, Assange could still be deported to Australia.

I notice she is wearing a necklace with three tiny hearts on it. They are for the three men in my life. Julian and the two boys.

She shows me a photograph of the children. Both of them are dead ringers for Assange. Does she see him in them? Oh yeah. They are stubborn. Strong-willed. But I guess that probably applies to me as well. I see a lot of him in them. On balance, is she happy with the way life has worked out? Im happy with the decisions Ive taken. She smiles. They havent been the easiest decisions. Im happy that Julian and I started a family and that we have each other. Does she believe they will be able to live together as a family? Yep. I mean I cant envision anything else. For once she looks me in the face. I cant afford to envision anything else. Guardian

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Stella Moris on her secret family with Julian Assange: Hes unlike anyone I have ever met - The Irish Times