A society that prohibits the capacity to speak in truth extinguishes the capacity to live in justice.

This why we are here tonight.Yes, all of us who know and admire Julian decry his prolonged suffering and the suffering of his family.Yes, we demand that the many wrongs and injustices that have been visited upon him be ended.Yes, we honor him for his courage and his integrity. But the battle for Julian's liberty has always been much more than the persecution of a publisher.It is the most important battle for press freedom of our era.And if we lose this battle, it will be devastating, not only for Julian and his family, but for us.

Tyrannies invert the rule of law.They turn the law into an instrument of injustice.They cloak their crimes in afauxlegality. They use the decorum of the courts and trials, to mask their criminality.Thosesuch as Julianwho expose that criminality to the public are dangerous, for without the pretext of legitimacy the tyranny loses credibility and has nothing left in its arsenal but fear, coercion and violence.

The long campaign against Julian and WikiLeaks is a window into the collapse of the rule of law, the rise of what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of "inverted totalitarianism," a form of totalitarianism that maintains the fictions of the old capitalist democracy, including its institutions, iconography, patriotic symbols and rhetoric, but internally has surrendered total control to the dictates of global corporations.

I was in the London courtroom when Julian was being tried by Judge Vanessa Baraitser, an updated version of the Queen of Hearts in "Alice in Wonderland" demanding the sentence before pronouncing the verdict. It was judicial farce. There was no legal basis to hold Julian in prison.There was no legal basis to try him, an Australian citizen, under the U.S. Espionage Act. The CIA spied on Julian in the embassy through a Spanish company, UC Global, contracted to provide embassy security. This spying included recording the privileged conversations between Julian and his lawyers as they discussed his defense. This fact alone invalidated the trial. Julian is being held in a high security prison so the state can, as Nils Melzer, the UNspecial rapporteur on torture, has testified, continue the degrading abuse and torture it hopes will lead to his psychological if not physical disintegration.

The U.S. government directed, as Craig Murray so eloquently documented, the London prosecutor James Lewis.Lewis presented these directives to Baraitser.Baraitser adopted them as her legal decision.It was judicial pantomime. Lewis and the judge insisted they were not attempting to criminalize journalists and muzzle the press while they busily set up the legal framework to criminalize journalists and muzzle the press. And that is why the court worked so hard to mask the proceedings from the public, limiting access to the courtroom to a handful of observers and making it hard and at times impossible to access the trial online.It was a tawdry show trial, not an example of the best of English jurisprudence but the Lubyanka.

Now, I know many of us here tonight would like to think of ourselves as radicals, maybe even revolutionaries.But what we are demanding on the political spectrum is in fact conservative:It is the restoration of the rule of law.It is simple and basic. It should not, in a functioning democracy, be incendiary.But living in truth in a despotic system is the supreme act of defiance.This truth terrifies those in power.

The architects of imperialism, the masters of war, the corporate-controlled legislative, judicial and executive branches of government and their obsequious courtiers in the media, are illegitimate.Say this simple truth and you are banished, as many of us have been, to the margins of the media landscape.Prove this truth, as Julian, Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Hammond and Edward Snowden have by allowing us to peer into the inner workings of power, and you are hunted down and persecuted.

Shortly after WikiLeaks released the Iraq War Logs in October 2010, which documented numerous U.S. war crimes including video images of the gunning down of two Reuters journalists and 10 other unarmed civilians in the "Collateral Murder" video, the routine torture of Iraqi prisoners, the covering up of thousands of civilian deaths and the killing of nearly 700 civilians that had approached too closely to U.S. checkpoints the towering civil rights attorneys Len Weinglass and my good friend Michael Ratner, who I would later accompany to meet Julian in the Ecuadoran embassy, met with Julian in a studio apartment in Central London.Julian's personal bank cards had been blocked. Three encrypted laptops with documents detailing U.S. war crimes had disappeared from his luggage in route to London. Swedish police were fabricating a case against him in a move, Ratner warned, that was about extraditing Julian to the United States.

"WikiLeaks and you personally are facing a battle that is both legal and political," Weinglass told Assange. "As we learned in the Pentagon Papers case, the U.S. government doesn't like the truth coming out. And it doesn't like to be humiliated. No matter if it's Nixon or Bush or Obama, Republican or Democrat in the White House. The U.S. government will try to stop you from publishing its ugly secrets. And if they have to destroy you and the First Amendment and the rights of publishers with you, they are willing to do it. We believe they are going to come after WikiLeaks and you, Julian, as the publisher."

"Come after me for what?" asked Julian.

"Espionage," Weinglass continued. "They're going to charge BradleyManning [as Chelsea was then known] with treason under the Espionage Act of 1917. We don't think it appliesbecause Manning is a whistleblower, not a spy. And we don't think it applies to you either because you are a publisher. But they are going to try to force Manning into implicating you as a collaborator."

"Come after me for what?"

That is the question.

They came after Julian not for his vices, but his virtues.

They came after Julian because he exposed the more than 15,000 unreported deaths of Iraqi civilians; because he exposed the torture and abuse of some 800 men and boys, aged between 14 and 89, at Guantnamo; because he exposed that Hillary Clinton in 2009 ordered U.S. diplomats to spy on UNSecretary General Ban Ki Moon and other UN representatives from China, France, Russiaand the U.K., spying that included obtaining DNA, iris scans, fingerprintsand personal passwords, part of the long pattern of illegal surveillance that included the eavesdropping on UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in the weeks before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003; because he exposed that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the CIA orchestrated the June 2009 military coup in Honduras that overthrew the democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya, replacing it with a murderous and corrupt military regime; because he exposed that George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Gen.David Petraeus prosecuted a war in Iraq that under post-Nuremberg laws is defined as a criminal war of aggression, a war crime, that they authorized hundreds of targeted assassinations, including those of U.S. citizens in Yemen, and that they secretly launched missile, bomband drone attacks on Yemen, killing scores of civilians; because he exposed that Goldman Sachs paid Hillary Clinton $657,000 to give talks, a sum so large it can only be considered a bribe, and that she privately assured corporate leaders she would do their bidding while promising the public financial regulation and reform; because he exposed the internal campaign to discredit and destroy British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn by members of his own party; because he exposed how the hacking tools used by the CIA and the NSA permits the wholesale government surveillance of our televisions, computers, smartphones and anti-virus software, allowing the government to record and store our conversations, images and private text messages, even from encrypted apps.

Julian exposed the truth. He exposed it over and over and over until there was no question of the endemic illegality, corruption and mendacity that defines the global ruling elite. And for these truths they came after Julian, as they have come after all who dared rip back the veil on power. "Red Rosa now has vanished too. " Bertolt Brecht wrote after the German socialist Rosa Luxemburg was murdered. "She told the poor what life is about, And so the rich have rubbed her out."

We have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where we, as citizens, are nothing more than commodities to corporate systems of power, ones to be used, fleeced and discarded. To refuse to fight back, to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet from ecocide, to decry the domestic and international crimes of the ruling class, to demand justice, to live in truth, is to bear the mark of Cain. Those in power must feel our wrath, and this means constant acts of mass civil disobedience, it means constant acts of social and political disruption, for this organized power from below is the only power that will save us and the only power that will free Julian. Politics is a game of fear. It is our moral and civic duty to make those in power very, very afraid.

The criminal ruling class has all of us locked in its death grip. It cannot be reformed. It has abolished the rule of law. It obscures and falsifies the truth. It seeks the consolidation of its obscene wealth and power. And so, to quote the Queen of Hearts, metaphorically of course, I say, "Off with their heads."

See original here:
Revisiting the case of Julian Assange and the reality of the "rule of law" - Salon

When the police arrived, a 13-year-old boy was photocopying classified documents. His 10-year-old sister was cutting the words top secret off each page. It seemed their dad, Daniel Ellsberg, had been caught red-handed.

But the officers were responding to a false alarm and did not check what Ellsberg and his young accomplices were up to. It was a very nice family scene, the 90-year-old recalls via Zoom from his home in Kensington, California. It didnt worry them.

So night after night the photocopying went on, the crucial means that allowed strategic analyst Ellsberg to leak the Pentagon Papers, a secret report that exposed government lies about the Vietnam war. The New York Times began publishing excerpts 50 years ago on Sunday.

The papers, a study of US involvement in south-east Asia from 1945 to 1967, revealed that president after president knew the war to be unwinnable yet continued to mislead Congress and the public into an escalating stalemate costing millions of lives.

After their release Ellsberg was put on trial for espionage and faced a potential prison sentence of 115 years, only for the charges to be dropped. Once branded the most dangerous man in America, Ellsberg is now revered as the patron saint of whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.

So, half a century on, is he glad he did it? Oh, Ive never regretted for a moment doing it from then till now, he says, wearing dark jacket, open-necked shirt and headphones against the backdrop of a vast bookcase. My one regret, a growing regret really, is that I didnt release those documents much earlier when I think they would have been much more effective.

Ive often said to whistleblowers, dont do what I did, dont wait years till the bombs are falling and people have been dying.

Ellsbergs own experience in Vietnam was formative. In the mid-1960s he was there on special assignment as a civilian studying counter-insurgency for the state department. He estimates that he and a friend drove about 10,000 miles, visiting 38 of the 43 provinces, sometimes linking up with troops and witnessing the war up close.

By two years in Vietnam, I was reporting very strongly that there was no prospect of progress of any kind so the war should not be continued. And that came to be the majority view of the American people before the Pentagon Papers came out.

By 68 with the Tet offensive, by 69, most Americans already thought it was immoral to continue but that had no effect on [president Richard] Nixon. He thought he was going to try to win it and they would be happy once hed won it, however long it took.

But the other side of it was that Vietnam became very real to me and the people dying became real and I had Vietnamese friends. It occurs to me I dont know of anyone of my level or higher any deputy assistant secretary, any assistant secretary, any cabinet secretary who had a Vietnamese friend. In fact, most of them had never met a Vietnamese.

Only recently, as he prepares for the 50th anniversary, has Ellsberg dwelled on how doubts about the war went higher in the political hierarchy than is widely understood. The Pentagon Papers are always described as revealing to people how much lying there was but there was a particular kind of lying thats not revealed in the Pentagon Papers.

Yes, everybody was lying but for different reasons and for different causes. In particular, a very large range of high-level doves thought we should get out and should not have got involved at all. They were lying to the public to give the impression that they were supporting the president when they did not believe in what the president was doing.

They did not agree with it but they would have spoken out at the cost of their jobs and their future careers. None of them did that or took any risk of doing it and the price of the silence of the doves was several million Vietnamese, Indochinese, and 58,000 Americans.

But Ellsberg did break the silence. Why was he, unlike them, willing to risk life imprisonment for a leak that he knew had only a small chance of ending the war? He says he was inspired by meeting people who resisted being drafted into military service and, unlike conscientious objectors, did not take alternative service.

They didnt go to Sweden. They didnt get a deferment. They didnt plead bone spurs like Donald J Trump. They chose a course that put them in prison. They could easily have shown their protests in other ways but this was the strongest way they could say this war is wrong and its a matter of conscience and I wont participate in it.

That kind of civil courage is contagious and it rubbed off on me. That example opened my eyes to the question, what can I do to help end this war, now that Im ready to go to prison?

In 1969 Ellsberg was working as a Pentagon consultant at the Rand Corporation thinktank in Santa Monica, California, and still had access to the secret study of the war, which by this time had killed about 45,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. He decided to take the plunge.

I said Ive got in my safe at Rand 7,000 pages of documents of lies, deceptions, breaking treaties, hopeless wars, killing, et cetera and I dont know whether itll have any effect to put it out but Im not going to be party to concealing that any more.

Ellsberg had a friend whose girlfriend owned an advertising agency with a photocopier, or Xerox machine. Over eight months he spent many nights making copies of the Pentagon Papers, twice with the help of his 13-year-old son Robert.

He explains: He was going to hear that his father had gone crazy or was a spy or was communist and I wanted him to see that I was doing this in a businesslike way because I thought it had to be done. And also to leave him with the precedent in his mind that this is the kind of thing he might have to do some time in his life and that there were times you had even to go to prison, which I thought would happen shortly.

The owner of the agency often mis-set the office alarm and so often the police would come, including twice when Ellsberg was at work. But he kept his cool. The first time I was at the Xerox machine. I look up at the glass door, theres knocking on it and two police outside. Wow, these guys are good, how did they get on to this?

But I remember covering the top secret pages with a magazine and I closed the Xerox cover where I was copying these things and opened the doors and, What can I do for you? But there were a few seconds there of thinking, Well, this is over.

Ellsberg tried and failed to persuade members of Congress to put the papers in the public domain. On 2 March 1971 he made contact in Washington with Neil Sheehan, a New York Times reporter he first met in Vietnam. After Sheehans death aged 84 earlier this year, the Times published a posthumous interview with him suggesting that Ellsberg had felt conflicted over handing over the documents.

Ellsberg responds: He seemed to believe, according to that story, that I had been reluctant to give it to the Times. Its hard to imagine that he believed that but maybe so. At any rate, that was not the case. I was very anxious for the Times to print it.

The New York Times did so on 13 June 1971. The night before, Ellsberg had gone to the cinema with a friend to see Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford. We stayed up and saw the early morning edition around midnight and so that was marvelous.

The Nixon administration obtained a court order preventing the Times from printing more of the documents, citing national security concerns. But Ellsberg leaked copies to the Washington Post and 17 other newspapers, prompting a legal battle all the way to the supreme court, which ruled 6-3 to allow publication to resume.

This stirring showdown over press freedom retold in Steven Spielbergs 2017 film The Post, in which Ellsberg is played by the British actor Matthew Rhys had a bigger impact that the Timess first article. The initial reaction was nil on the Sunday when they came out, Ellsberg says. The Times was baffled and dismayed. Nobody reacted at all.

It was Nixons fatal decision to enjoin them and the willingness across the country to commit civil disobedience and publish material that the attorney general and the president were saying every day, This is dangerous to national security, we cant afford one more day of it. Nineteen papers in all defied that. I dont think there was any other wave of civil disobedience like that in any respect I can think of by major institutions across the country.

But the government wanted revenge. Ellsberg spent 13 days in hiding from the FBI but eventually went on trial in 1973 accused of espionage, conspiracy and stealing government property. The charges were dismissed due to gross governmental misconduct and illegal evidence gathering against him crimes which ultimately contributed to Nixons downfall.

The high-profile trial had ensured huge media coverage of the Pentagon Papers. But Ellsberg says: The effect on Nixons policy was zero. The war went on: a year later, the biggest bombing of the war and then, at the end of that year, 18 months later, the heaviest bombing in human history.

So as far as one could see, as I said at the time, the American people at this moment have as much influence over their countrys foreign policy as the Russian people had over the invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Nixon resigned over Watergate in 1974 and the Vietnam war ended the following year. In the decades since, Ellsberg has continued to champion Manning, Assange, Snowden and others charged under the Espionage Act. The climate, he warns, has become more restrictive and punitive than the one he faced 50 years ago.

The whistleblowers have much less protection now. [President Barack] Obama brought eight or nine or even 10 cases, depending on who you count, in two terms, and then Trump brought eight cases in one term. So sources are much more in danger of prosecution than they were before me and even after me for 30 years.

Last month the nonagenarian Ellsberg returned to the fray by releasing classified documents showing that US military planners pushed for nuclear strikes on mainland China in 1958 to protect Taiwan from an invasion by communist forces, a scenario that has gained fresh relevance amid rising US-China tensions.

It is a dare for prosecutors to come after him again. If they do, he wants to see the Espionage Act tested by the supreme court. He argues that the government is using it much like Britains Official Secrets Act even though America, unlike Britain, guarantees freedom of speech through the first amendment to the constitution.

We dont have an Official Secrets Act because we have a first amendment but that has not been addressed by the supreme court, says Ellsberg, still going strong after an hour-long interview. So Im willing to see this case go up to the supreme court. Not that I have any desire to go to prison or not. And it would have to move fairly fast to get me in prison in my lifetime.

Read the original here:
Ive never regretted doing it: Daniel Ellsberg on 50 years since leaking the Pentagon Papers - The Guardian

For the family of Julian Assange, it was news that could be labelled very welcome indeed.

On Monday, it was announced that Reality Winner, a former US intelligence official who leaked crucial information to the media about Russias efforts to interfere in the 2016 election, was being released from prison to serve the remainder of her sentence at home.

News of the release of the 29-year-old many consider an important whistleblower, came as Attorney General Merrick Garland met with representatives of several major media outlets, after it had emerged that the Department of Justice (DoJ), which he now heads, had under Donald Trump secretly obtained the phone records of reporters from the New York Times and CNN, to try and squash leaks.

It also came midway through a nationwide speaking tour by Julian Assanges father and brother, John and Gabriel Shipton, to try and draw awareness to the case of the WikiLeaks founder, and to urge the Biden administration to end Washingtons efforts to extradite him to the US to face charges under the Espionage Act.

Were feeling the momentum really build here, with the press that were getting, with all the people were getting speaking on our panels, and with this action in the DoJ, Gabriel Shipton, 39, told The Independent, from Columbus, Ohio, after events in New York and Washington DC. I think were feeling the momentum, and hopefully theres a change.

Earlier this year, Julian Assange, 49, appeared before a court in London to defend himself against an extradition request from the US, where he faces 18 charges of espionage and hacking computers.

He both denied the charges and contested the attempt to bring him to the US, where he could face a total punishment of 175 years imprisonment.

Supporters said Mr Assange, whose WikiLeaks site had published graphic details about the deadly nature of the US war on terror in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan, said he deserved the same protections afforded to more traditional journalists.

They said the US was trying to both silence him for publishing the material passed to him by former US army intelligence officer Chelsea Manning, and to send a message to try and frighten other potential whistleblowers and journalists writing about issues of national security or human rights.

Julian Assange protest: Father speaks of son's 'arbitrary detention'

In January, a British judge rejected the USs request to extradite Mr Assange, but ordered that he remain in Londons Belmarsh jail, while the US seeks to appeal the judgment.

His brother said many Americans could not understand why the Biden administration had not simply dropped the case.

He said many said they were particularly surprised given the US presidents purported support of journalists, and his administration speaking out over incidents such as the forced diversion last month of a Ryanair passenger plane by Belarus, in order to detain a dissident journalist.

I think for Joe Biden and his administration, theyre facing all these problems now that theyre preaching freedom of the press. Joe Biden said himself that what DoJ was doing under Trump, trying to subpoena journalists, to find out their sources was wrong, said Mr Assanges brother.

The other angle is that its going to confront him abroad. What were seeing when hes confronting China, is Chinas foreign affairs spokesman coming back and saying what about Assange.

Gabriel and John Shipton speak to media over case of Julian Assange

(Getty Images)

Reality Winner was in 2018 sentenced to five years and three months in prison for violating the Espionage Act. The 29-year-old, who had been employed by the National Security Agency, had been arrested after leaking a top secret document about Russian hackers targeting US election systems to The Intercept news site. She had pleaded guilty, after changing her plea.

Her attorney Alison Grinter Allen confirmed her release to The Independent. She said she remained in custody and was in a residential reentry process in Texas.

Her release is not a product of the pardon or compassionate release process, but rather the time earned from exemplary behavior while incarcerated, Ms Allen said in a statement. The young womans family has asked Mr Biden to issue a pardon.

Reality has served a lot of time and gone through quite a bit of trauma to fight for essentially one mans feelings about his elections validity, said Ms Allen.

(Getty Images)

Supporters of Mr Assange have also suggested Mr Biden could issue a pardon to him, even without the need for a guilty plea or a trial. Among those to point this out was whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The 37-year-old in 2013 leaked huge amounts of classified material about the USs surveillance operations, to The Guardian and other news organisations. He currently lives in Russia, cautious of returning to the US, where he faces two charges under the Espionage Act.

In 2020, in reference to questions about a possible pardon for Mr Assange, Mr Snowden tweeted: In the US, the pardon power is absolute. It is rare, but pardons have been issued even in the absence of charges, much less a trial or conviction.

On Monday, others said it was too early to determine whether there had been a definite change in policy by the Biden administration when it came to whistleblowers.

Veteran human right activist Medea Benjamin said the decision to release Winner from prison was to be welcomed.

However, she added: Her release from prison is great but it would have been much better if the government had pardoned her.

Nathan Fuller, an activist who heads the Courage Foundation, a group that supports a number of whistleblowers, including Ms Manning, Mr Snowden and Mr Assange, called on Mr Biden to act in support of the first amendment of the US constitution which protects the right to free speech.

He should protect the first amendment and stop this Trump-era assault on it, he said. This is a Trump-era case. He has every opportunity to drop it right now.

He said the president had said he wished to end the two-decade long war in Afghanistan, and close the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, both vestiges of the so-called war on terror, the abuses of which Mr Assange, Ms Manning and others had exposed.

He added: He could drop it right now and close the chapter.

More here:
'We're feeling the momentum': Julian Assange family says Reality Winner's release raises fresh hope - The Independent

It is Memorial Day again. Some will celebrate. Some will drink too much. Some will march in parades. Some will rally around the flag. Some will go shopping. Some will mourn. I am among the mourners.

I mourn mostly for those we have killed and I mourn for those we havent killed yet, but will in the days ahead. I mourn for all of the mothers and fathers who put their children to bed at night and wonder if this will be the night that they are killed by a drone attack.

I mourn for the 500,000 Iraqi children dead because of U.S. foreign policy. The official policy as described by Madeleine Albright on 60 Minutes was that we think the price was worth it. Worth it to whom? Not to the mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, grandmothers and grandfathers of those children.

I mourn the execution of Pvt. Eddie Slovik the gentle soldier who was too moral to kill. He refused to fight. On January 31, 1945, the U.S. executed him before a firing squad. He is the only U.S. soldier, that we know about, who was executed during World War II. In recent years has friendly fire been used against some who refuse to kill?

I mourn for all the unarmed civilians slaughtered by U.S. troops in Korea. The massacre at No Gun Ri is one of many war crimes.

The results of recent elections show that more than 90 percent of United States voters support the foreign policy of the Democratic/Republican Party. That includes support for war, torture and imprisonment without due process. More than 90 percent of the people, as evidenced by their votes, are not peace makers. Supporting crimes against humanity is not an option for people of conscience. Any vote for any Democrat or Republican candidate is a vote for war. Those voters are complicit in war crimes because they enable crimes against peace. Electing peace makers to the Congress would save lives and money. As a nation, none can compare with the United States when it comes to the ability to slaughter innocent civilians. Remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The United States is the only nation to have used nuclear bombs to kill.

Now we can kill from the comfort of our own neighborhoods at no risk to our own safety. Some believe that the use of drones is a cowardly approach to warfare. Some argue that the use of drones is a war crime. No matter how one feels about drones, it is certain that drone warfare has raised the killing of civilians to a new level. The slaughter of little girls walking to school is a crime against humanity.

Do the drone operators who sit at a computer thousands of miles away from any danger deserve our admiration? Their safety is not at risk. Should they be thanked for their service? Does wearing a uniform give anyone the moral or legal right to kill unarmed civilians? Does wearing a uniform make anyone a hero? Is killing by remote control really an example of heroism?

How can heroism be defined? Heroism is the willingness to stand alone in opposition to evil and injustice.

We have many heroes. Julian Assange, Ed Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Hammond, John Kiriakou, Aaron Swartz are just a few of many. Archbishop Oscar Romero took on the entire power structure in El Salvador. With grace and dignity he defended the poor and disenfranchised. He was assassinated while saying Mass.

When I think about heroes, I always think about my friend, Elliott Adams. During the 60s, Adams volunteered for the Army. He fought in Vietnam, he was a paratrooper. He was wounded. After hospitalization, he was redeployed to Korea, and then Alaska. All of those things might make Adams seem like a hero to most people, but that is not why I think of him as a hero. Adams is a former president of Veterans for Peace, but that also is not why he is a hero to me. More than anyone I have known, Adams has dedicated his life since being discharged from the military to working for global peace. He has gone to Gaza with Physicians for Social Responsibility. In solidarity with the prisoners at Gitmo, Adams went on a hunger strike. Adams has been at the forefront of the protests against the use of drones at Hancock Air Base near Syracuse, N.Y. Adams was arrested while participating in peaceful protest.

Below is Adams sentencing speech as he delivered it to the court. This is one of the most articulate anti-war statements I have ever heard.

I appreciate the benchs effort to understand the arguments made arguments involving local law, international law and, even the principles of civil disobedience.

My experience in war has taught me that in life we periodically get tested to see if we can stand up to the pressures of socially acceptable procedural norms which push us to work within the little laws and instead comply with the requirements of International Humanitarian Law. I cannot condemn others when they fail that test for I have failed it myself. But those who do fail it are condemned to live with the horrendous cost society pays for their failure. I believe this court failed that test. The court may not have felt an unavoidable compulsion to comply with International Humanitarian Law, but it certainly was given the justifications it could have used to stand up and comply with International Humanitarian Law. But being here in DeWitt near an epicenter of war crimes couched in the humdrum of civilian life, the bench may find it is tested again and again.

I believe that my co-defendants and I did what is right morally, but more relevant to this court, what is required by the law, the big law, that law that deals with thousands of lives, not the little law that deals with disorderly conduct. If the court had chosen to decide on the big law it would have found us innocent. But since the court chooses to rule on the little law, the law about orderly conduct, then it must not only find me guilty but guilty to the fullest extent, with no mitigation.

As the court stated, there will always be consequences for pursuing justice through changes made by actions outside the socially acceptable procedural norms. Among other life experiences I have over 15 years in local elected public office and it became apparent to me that abiding by the socially acceptable procedural norms can only lead to more of the same injustice, indeed those norms are there to prop up those injustices.

I am proud to accept the consequences of my acts and any jail time. I do not want any suspended sentence. If you give me one, also please let me know how I can violate it before I leave the courtroom. I do not have money to pay a court; I spend what little money this old man has trying to bring about justice. My community service has been doing the duty that the courts shrink from calling attention to war crimes and trying to stop war crimes. Standing in this court a community service, it is the little I can do for society.

Rosemarie Jackowski writes from Bennington. The opinions expressed by columnists do not necessarily reflect the views of the Brattleboro Reformer.

More:
Jackowski: On Memorial Day, mourn the victims of war and honor the heroes who stand against it - Brattleboro Reformer

Israel is one of Americas staunchest allies, a beacon for democracy struggling to do right while surviving in a tough neighborhood. Hamas is a U.S.-designated terror organization, a thuggish kleptocracy whose only language is violence. But follow the conversation unfolding in the halls of Congress, on the pages of the worlds most respected media outlets, and among the innumerable hot takes on Twitter, and one could be forgiven for believing its the other way around.

Take, for instance, the stark difference in how the two actors wage war.

When Israel launches airstrikes in Gaza, it is to neutralize militants, weapons caches, and rocket launchers. The Israel Defense Forces take the extraordinary and unprecedented step to send text messages, make phone calls, and drop leaflets to warn civilians to evacuate, compromising the element of surprise in order to minimize casualties. Tragically, some civilian casualties are inevitable. And when there are operational mistakes, rigorous and transparent investigations seek to address the root cause. As an American who served as a combat soldier and commander in the IDF, I can attest to the importance the military places on its code of ethics and international law.

Conversely, when Hamas fires rockets indiscriminately at cities across Israel, every single projectile is intended to murder and terrorize Jews. When Hamas releases booby-trapped party balloons across the border into adjacent towns, they are meant to maim and kill curious Jewish children. And when Hamas operates out of hospitals, schools, and mosques, it is committing a war crime. Yet Hamas knows it scores a tactical victory if Israel hesitates to retaliate, and a public relations victory if Israel does not.

Rare is a dichotomy in warfare so clear. Yet these days, truth is under siege. New voices in Congress now accuse Israel of murdering Palestinian children. Israel is the terrorist, if you are to believe Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and her boosters on Twitter. And in a New York Times story published last week, one of the papers Middle East correspondents even credited Hamas with ingenuity for its ability to manufacture rockets.

What about how Jews and Palestinians respectively treat members of the other ethnic group?

There are nearly two million Palestinian citizens of Israel with full civil rights and one of the regions highest standards of living. At about 20 percent of the countrys population, they serve as ministers in government, justices on the supreme court, anchors on television, and are present in just about every other facet of Israels pluralistic society.

(A narrative emerged in recent weeks that Israel was unlawfully trying to evict several Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in Jerusalem to pave way for Jews. But as legal scholars Avi Bell and Eugene Kontorovich have compellingly demonstrated, the discrimination in this affair actually runs in the opposite direction.)

Hamas, meanwhile, is a genocidal, anti-Semitic, homophobic organization whose founding charter calls for the elimination of the Jewish people. A Hamas leader recently called upon Palestinians to buy knives and cut off the heads of Jews. Things arent much better under the Palestinian Authority (PA), where the sale of land to Jews is punishable by death. PA President Mahmoud Abbas has gone on record saying he does not want a single Israeli living in a future Palestinian state. State media and textbooks notoriously espouse anti-Jewish stereotypes.

Read the news or open your newsfeed these days, though, and guess which side is painted as the ethnic cleanser? Israel. Chelsea Manning and Susan Sarandon, who together have well over a million followers on social media, took to Twitter to denounce Israels ethnic cleansing. The Daily Beast, MSNBC, and Washington Post elevate voices that do the same. Extending the nonsense, the BuzzFeed books editor, an MSNBC columnist, and politicians across the West actually accuse Israel of genocide. Not only are these accusations completely unmoored from reality, they are also in fact the opposite of what is true.

How could this be? How can such a backward narrative be elbowing its way into the mainstream?

Its hard to miss the parallels with the emergent woke ideology, which correlates power with evil and powerlessness with virtue no matter how inappropriate the fit. Israel is powerful relative to the Palestinians. That's all you need to know. Every other detail of this conflict is then rammed through this false paradigm until terrorism is justified, self-defense is excoriated, anti-Semitism is excused, and propaganda becomes fact. Israeli Jews become the white colonizers and Palestinian Muslims the brown colonized. Nevermind that Jews are indigenous to the Land of Israel; Israel emerged as a consequence of decolonization; the goal of Zionism has always been self-determination rather than economic exploitation; and the majority of Israeli Jews are actually brown, having escaped persecution at the hands of Muslim states.

Of course, as with any conflict, there is always room for a more nuanced discourse. Israel is far from perfect, and one must not paint all Palestinians with the same brush. But at a time when the public square is being polluted with lies, this moment calls for moral clarity, not equivocation.

Zach Schapira is executive director of the J'accuse Coalition for Justice. He previously served as a deputy platoon commander in Israel's Special Air Forces. Twitter: @zachschapira.

Image:Cars go up in flames after a rocket launched from the Gaza Strip landed nearby, in Ashkelon, southern Israel May 11, 2021. Reuters/Nir Elias.

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There Is No Equivalence in How Hamas and Israel Wage War - The National Interest

One of the most harmful effects of Chinas cyber espionage and from whistleblowers who publish classified information is the bureaucratic response that it triggers. Most agencies double down on secrecy. They install software to track access, monitor online behavior, and frequently attempt to entrap staff with honeypots and fake spearfishing bait to see who violates the rules. Those caught up in this morass of hi-tech security are usually singled out, with career reckoning implications. The purpose of these actions is to reinforce a culture of secrecy inside the organization.

Such bureaucratic behavior is predictable and understandable, at least to a degree. But it comes with a price. It sends a message that idea sharing and brainstorming with outsiders isnt consistent with the values of the organization.

Contact with people in other departments and outside organizations is necessary for innovation. Theres a tension then, between secrecy and innovation. And we need to acknowledge this tension because were in a long-term competition, where innovation is such a critical part of American strategy.

For real innovation, people in different technology fields need to exchange ideas with one another, and with those in operational commands. Secrecy gets in the way of this conversation. Without an exchange of viewpoints with those outside of departmental lines, the tendency will be to think inside the box defined by the official security procedures and systems. The result is like Walter Lippmann once said, When everyone is thinking alike, then no one is thinking.

Security procedures, monitoring software, clearances, etc. have two roles. One is to protect critical information from falling into the hands of foreign enemies and preventing untrustworthy or criminal individuals from getting inside the security apparatus.

In recent years, high-profile cases have highlighted this danger. Chinese hackers have stolen vast amounts of U.S. intellectual property and weapons secrets. On a different front, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and Nidal Hasan (the Fort Hood shooter) clearly showed what can happen if untrustworthy individuals get inside the system. Solutions to these problems have been the main focus of most agencies in recent years. A huge effort is now devoted to online security by the U.S. government. Moreover, as a recent RAND study describes, advanced tracking methods based on artificial intelligence checking of individual behavior is used to cope with the threat. There can be little doubt that monitoring of employees is increasing. It is becoming continuous, so that nearly all online and much offline behavior is monitored. The sophistication of this individual monitoring is increasing, as the RAND study indicates.

But the security system has a second, different role as well. Companies, and government agencies, use it as a competitive tool to protect a monopoly on key technologies, to hide embarrassing failures, and to increase the profitability of a program by keeping out competitors. Security clearances often are used as a deterrent to entry, to limit competition, and to block substitute, better products from consideration.

To understand how the security system of clearances and tightly controlled access impacts innovation, I will use a simple theory taught in every business school in the United States: the Five Forces Model. This model was originally developed by Professor Michael Porter at Harvard Business School. Variations of it are the basis of most management consultancies like McKinsey, BCG, and others.

The model uses five factors to characterize an industry. It breaks competition down into logical parts. The five factors are: the degree of competition, supplier power, threat of entry, buyer power, and the threat of substitute products.

Lets examine how each of these factors works in defense and intelligence.

The degree of competition in an industry like intelligence collection, cybersecurity, electronic warfare, cloud computing, or helicopters can be described qualitatively. For example, it could range from low to medium to high. Competition could also be described quantitatively. Standard measures here are profit, EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization), or ROI (return on investment). The dynamics in any industry are a jockeying for a position where, ideally speaking, competition is low, and therefore where profits are high. This maneuvering for position is described in terms of the other four factors.

Supplier power is the ability of companies to restrict supply to drive up prices, or to preserve some other advantage, like protecting a long-term contract. Strong supplier power quashes innovation because a dominant supplier has little reason to innovate beyond doing barely enough to protect their position.

Small, incremental innovations characterize competitive situations with strong supplier power. There are many areas of defense, and especially intelligence, where a long-term contract is held. Examples include the operation of a satellite collection system, or AI support services to a command. Government generally is afraid of entertaining new ways of doing things by talking with innovators outside of existing suppliers who might do it better because lack of security clearances block this conversation from ever happening. Government buyers cant discuss matters with firms that dont possess these clearances. Individuals in government are even fearful that talking informally with outsiders with new ideas could get them in trouble. Security monitoring systems might pick up such contacts. Workers understand only too well the values and attitudes of their employer. Going against the grain, even to try to find a better product, may not be appreciated, or worseit may be flagged as a security violation, with career implications.

This all works to keep suppliers in their dominant position. It also discourages them from innovating. They will ask: Why bother to do expensive research and development (R&D) if were assured of keeping the contract anyway?

Threat of entry describes the likelihood that a new player will enter a market. A new entrant obviously increases competition, and thereby lowers profits for those already in that market. High barriers to entry keep potential rivals from bidding because they cant easily assemble the necessary skills and information for writing a competitive proposal.

A good example is Amazon Web Services (AWS) entering the Central Intelligence Agencys cloud computing competition in 2013 and beating IBM. The largest barrier to entry that AWS faced was getting qualified experts with the necessary clearances to know enough to write the proposal. For the intelligence market, finding such individuals is especially critical. The added difficulty in intelligence is getting the special access clearances, which creates very high barriers to entry and keeps potential rivals (like AWS) away from a market (like the CIA cloud). The security system constrains a government agencys ability to freely speak with innovators who do not have the appropriate clearances. This, obviously, reduces innovation since potentially knowledgeable companies are kept out of the picture.

The AWS win over IBM in 2013 is an especially interesting case. It required the significant financial backing of a giant company, Amazon, to win the contract. It is doubtful that a small- or medium-sized company could have ousted IBM since it had been a dominant supplier for a long time. Even with superior cloud technology, a medium- or small-sized firm would have found it difficult to pay the steep price needed to enter this market. Amazon had deep pockets and could do this.

Buyer power deals with the ability to dictate terms to suppliers. The ultimate buyer in defense and intelligence markets is a single entity, the Pentagon, or a three-letter intelligence agency. In theory, buyer power is high because the government is a monopsony, that is, theres a single buyer.

However, in practice, buyer power is limited because government is not a smart buyer. Government is hemmed in by complex federal regulations. Those inside the government find it difficult to even speak with outside companies if they arent adequately cleared. This dynamic shields existing firms from new competition, but the situation is actually worse: It directs the innovation strategies of established companies not to new technology, but to legal, procedural, and political actions to protect their market position. Most of them have huge staffs that are experts in protesting contract awards and keeping up with government regulatory changes. It is doubtful that such administrative schemes really add much to national defense.

Substitute products are alternative ways to meet a need or requirement. Uber, to use an example, is an alternative product to automobile ownership. Likewise, streaming video substitutes for a cable TV subscription. Defense examples include drones as a substitute for manned aircraft. Cyber attacks can neutralize a target instead of a missile strike, and so forth.

Today, substitution is especially important for innovation because there are many possibilities arising from new technologies. To analyze substitution potential, one has to know enough about these different technologies. The widespread use of black programs built on special-access, code-word clearances makes such an analysis almost impossible. In some instances, a manager would literally be breaking the law if she tried to compare different products for a mission need. Indeed, there are wasteful duplicate programs in some highly classified programs like space and cyber because of the impenetrable security walls separating the different black programs.

The current security system is built on a need-to-know basis, for an era when technologies operated in distinct vertical silos. Today, the worldand governments needshave changed with networked technologies. There are many different (substitute) ways to meet a mission requirement.

Two major conclusions come from this analysis. First, the security system of clearances and access control has two roles. This must be understood from the outset. It is used to protect national securityand to advance narrow business advantage. These two roles can have a deadly effect on innovation because clearances block the horizontal discussions necessary to develop new technologies and approaches. At the same time, the security system is strongly biased to protect existing dominant players. It discourages new players from entering the defense market.

Second, barriers to innovation from the security system will become a much bigger problem in the future for two reasons. First, the defense and intelligence system of the United States is becoming more interconnected. Networks are the name of the game now. To plug into these networks, one needs to know about the interfaces that link the different subsystems. These are highly classified. Cyber is the most highly classified area in defense today, like nuclear weapons design was in the 1950s. This situation gives a strong bias to supplier power advantage, and it makes deterrence to entry much greater. Quite simply, the dominant players have little reason to innovate, or to pay a fair price for the acquisition of small companies.

The second reason that clearances will dampen innovation in the future is that the locus of defense innovation has shifted to a great degree to small- and medium-size enterprises. These are the small firms in Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, Austin, and around Bostons Route 128.

These firms are technology focused, and they have a limited ability to discover new defense applications for their work because they dont have a breadth of knowledge or the clearances to work outside of their narrow domain. Larger defense companies will leverage their informational advantage against them and use clearances to squeeze them. The big firm says to the small one, Look, we dont care how great your technology is. Weve cornered the clearances and access to the National Security Agencyand you havent. Drop your priceor youre out of this contract. Especially in a networked world, the small firm needs the larger one as its the only gateway they have to participate in large projects.

For a long time, Ive urged the Department of Defense to do a study that asks a simple question: Do large defense companiesthe lead systems integratorstake too much? Are they crushing innovation in the lower-tier suppliers? Ive never found any interest by DoD in this, the most fundamental question of innovation: Who gets what?

As to designing a new security system for the 21st century, there are several possibilities. The first is simply to appreciate just how damaging the current security system is for defense innovation. Congressional hearings on over-classification, abusive use of clearances to protect markets, and wasteful duplication arising from an inability to compare substitute products would garner a lot of attention.

Second, the current security systems performance in actually protecting secrets isnt effective. The recent SolarWinds and Microsoft hacks, and Chinese and Russian penetration into major weapons systems, make it clear that the enemy has deep inroads into American government organizations and systems. The current clearance system is not really stopping them. If it were, then we might be understandably reluctant to tamper with it. But this is far from the case. In truth, the current security system has few supporters other than those who are in charge of checking clearances, monitoring employee behavior, and auditing visits with outside groups.

A third action would be to establish a national commission on secrecy and innovation. In recent years, commissions have analyzed AI, hypersonic missiles, space, and cyber. They have all come up with useful recommendations. Most often these include calls to increase government R&D, expand education, and create a White House czar to drive change.

But these recommendations are offset by a security system designed in the 1950s when the danger was one of spilling secrets from silos built around nuclear weapons, missiles, and aircraft. Now, this old security system is applied to new technologies like space, cyber, hypersonic missiles, and AI. This is very different from the closed innovation silos of the Cold War. Innovation requires going outside of the silos to bring in fresh ideas from different technical fields.

Theres a tension between secrecy and innovation. I dont think this tension line is even recognized in todays debates about whistleblowers and cyber espionage. To juice up defense innovation, we need to recognize the dual role of the system: security and innovation. We need to move the needle toward the innovation side of the ledger. Otherwise, a secrecy first culture will strangle innovation. This system has to change if the United States is to leverage its immense technological potential into real military advantage.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a non-partisan organization that seeks to publish well-argued, policy-oriented articles on American foreign policy and national security priorities.

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The Tension Between Secrecy and Innovation - Foreign Policy Research Institute

When George W Bush launched an illegal invasion of Iraq in a vain search for weapons of mass destruction, there was no shortage of cheerleaders in the US media.

The Guardians trenchant criticism of the war would have had little impact across the Atlantic were it not for the power of the internet to demolish national boundaries. As it was, Americans paid attention in their millions.

A host of political bloggers have pointed to the British medias more sceptical coverage of the run-up to the Iraq war and wondered why American reporters cant be more impertinent, noted the Columbia Journalism Review in 2007. These bloggers regularly link to stories in the Guardian, the Independent, and the Times, driving waves of US traffic to their websites.

Suddenly, a third of the Guardians readers were in North America, seemingly attracted by its lack of deference to authority, its global outlook at a moment when many US newspapers were cutting costs and turning inward, and its informal tone and irreverent wit.

The breakthrough hinted at a potential to become a force in the US in ways that would have been unimaginable to the papers founders in Manchester 200 years ago.

It was not plain sailing. The Guardian lacked the financial muscle for an immediate and aggressive expansion into the US. An attempt to buy the website domain name guardian.com foundered when Guardian Industries, a company in Auburn Hills, Michigan, refused to sell.

Still, the news organisations free, open-access model and liberal values built a loyal audience, and its focus on the national security state, racial injustice, voting rights and environmental protections struck a chord.

Sidney Blumenthal, a former White House official who became familiar with the paper in the 1980s and continues to write for it, says: The Guardian was within my conception of what journalism was and should be and it was not like the New York Times. It was more stylish, it took more chances, it was more analytical.

By the end of 2020, the website had a record 116 million unique US browsers, with a daily average of 5.8 million. It has never built a paywall, but after years of boom-bust cycles, reader contributions have turned it into a profitable business in the US.

But it has been a long and sometimes rocky road to get where it is today, and the paper has not always embodied the values that strike a chord with progressive Americans. For all the values it espouses today, the Guardian has sometimes found itself on the wrong side of history.

The Manchester Guardian was founded in 1821 by the journalist John Edward Taylor, the son of a cotton merchant, with financial backing from cotton and textile traders some of whom would almost certainly have traded with cotton plantations that used enslaved labour.

(Last year, as the Black Lives Matter movement forced a worldwide reckoning over historical injustices, the Scott Trust commissioned independent researchers to investigate any potential links between the Guardian and the transatlantic slave trade.)

As such, in the early decades, the paper often aligned its views with those of big cotton, repeatedly siding with mills and manufacturers against workers refusing to handle cotton picked by enslaved people during the American civil war.

The paper had always denounced slavery, but was unconvinced that victory for the north would end it. It ran hostile editorials about Abraham Lincoln, dismissing his time in office as a series of acts abhorrent to every true notion of constitutional right and human liberty.

As it had long supported self-determination movements around the world, it also believed that the south had every right to establish independence.

The Guardian of today took shape when Taylors nephew, CP Scott, took over in 1872 at the age of 25. Committed to social justice, his 57-year editorship transformed it into a standard-bearer for independent liberal journalism. Scott had a private meeting with Woodrow Wilson when the US president visited Manchester in 1918.

But news from the US was still sporadic. Years passed with no regular correspondent there at all. For the first half of the 20th century, the paper relied on busy American journalists already working for US titles, who were discouraged from filing too often because of the cost of cables.

It wasnt until after the second world war that the Guardian really began to cover the US properly.

Alistair Cookes reporting on the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco helped land him a job as a full-time correspondent in New York. But in the 1960s, Cookes relationship with his counterpart in Washington, the Canadian Max Freedman, was so strained that they never spoke, and editorial planning had be done through the Manchester office more than 3,000 miles away.

Freedman, who worked from a room in the Washington Post office, quit the Guardian suddenly in 1963, leaving the biggest story of the decade to fall to Cooke.

He had been invited to cover John F Kennedys trip to Dallas, Texas, by a member of White House staff, but having taken 82 flights in just over two months, turned down the offer. Although this denied him the historic dateline, it allowed him to file faster than reporters on the spot who, 13 cars behind Kennedy, were taken to a separate location with no idea of what happened.

Cookes daughter, Susan Cooke Kittredge, who was 14 at the time, recalls: We were all discharged from school early and my memory of New York City is that there was no sound thats probably because there was so much going on in my head. When I walked into the apartment, it was the opposite of that: we had two televisions, which was unusual at the time, and late into the night I monitored two stations and Daddy had one in his study.

I remember so clearly the way one has important memories embedded in the brain the phones ringing all the time. I have a vision of Daddy being in his bathrobe and it was maybe 10.30 at night and the phone rang and he stood there and screamed into the telephone: We are doing the best we can!

Nearly five years later, Cooke was in the room when Kennedys brother, Bobby, was shot and killed in Los Angeles while running for president and filed a report from the scene. He was completely stunned by the experience, his daughter says. He hadnt taken his typewriter even and had to file copy on a piece of scratch paper.

Hammering a typewriter in his 15th-floor apartment overlooking New Yorks Central Park, Cooke would hold his position until 1972 on a salary of $19,000 a year, covering a vast range of topics while also making TV programmes and the BBC radio series Letter from America.

But he was challenged by the then Guardian editor, Alastair Hetherington, over whether he was giving too little coverage to race relations in the south. In the early 1960s the paper sent William Weatherby to cover the civil rights movement, and according to a New York Times obituary, he developed lifelong friendships with James Baldwin, Bayard Rustin and other major figures.

Guardian reporters covered the twists and turns of the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon in the 1970s. Michael White, Washington correspondent from 1984 to 1988, witnessed the re-election of Ronald Reagan and his second term at the White House.

He had this knack of lighting up a room and you couldnt dislike him because even when he was shot he made a joke, says White, 75. The difference between Reagan and [Donald] Trump was that Reagan appealed in important respects to the sunny side of human nature, and thats quite important. You could get very cross and very scornful towards Reagan, but he was a hard man to hate.

A day after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the papers front page carried the headline A declaration of war above a near-full-page photo of the twin towers in flames. A leader column urged the US to keep cool.

An even greater unilateralism, even a growing siege mentality, is to be avoided at all costs. It would be a victory for the terrorists. Likewise, American overreaction, especially of the military variety, must be guarded against. The temptation right now is to make someone pay. And pay and pay and pay. Take a deep breath, America. Keep cool. And keep control. Guardian leader, 12 September 2001

But there were moments of overreach. In 2004 the Guardian launched a campaign encouraging concerned non-American readers to lobby undecided voters in Clark County, Ohio, a swing state in the election between Bush and John Kerry. There was uproar over what many saw as foreign interference in American democracy long before disinformation was a twinkle in Vladimir Putins eye.

Blimey, wrote the then features editor, Ian Katz. I think I have an idea as to how Dr Frankenstein felt. By the beginning of this week, a quixotic idea dreamed up last month in a north London pub had morphed into a global media phenomenon complete with transatlantic outrage, harrumphing over journalistic ethics, grave political predictions and thousands of people from every corner of the planet writing personal, passionate letters to voters in a tiny American district few outside Ohio had heard of 10 days ago.

In the end, Bush won Clark County by a bigger margin than he had in 2000, prompting speculation about a Guardian effect that backfired spectacularly. Did Guardian turn Ohio to Bush? pondered a BBC headline.

But by this time a paradigm shift was taking place: the internet changed everything.

By 2007 the Guardians online presence was pulling in about 5 milllion unique browsers a month in the US, prompting the launch of a dedicated US-based website. It was branded Guardian America, its headquarters were two blocks from the White House, and its founding editor, Michael Tomasky, was American.

In 2007 the idea of a British newspaper trying to become an American media outlet was new and strange and something that people couldnt quite wrap their heads around, says Tomasky. I would say that in two years, the world had changed enough that it was no longer strange to people, and the Guardian in addition to the Independent and others was an acknowledged and accepted part of the media landscape.

In 2011, the site relaunched as Guardian US, this time from New York even as a succession of big scoops helped put it on the map. In 2010 it was among five newspapers worldwide to make public US diplomatic cables provided by Chelsea Manning, a US army intelligence analyst, to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks.

In 2013 it published documents leaked by Edward Snowden detailing mass surveillance by the National Security Agency, a story that dominated news cycles and boosted its profile immeasurably. The Guardian and Washington Post shared a Pulitzer prize for public service.

It also broke new ground by compiling a national database of people killed by police and telling the stories of more than 3,600 healthcare workers who died after contracting the coronavirus on the frontline.

Today the Guardian has offices in New York, Washington and Oakland, California, and further correspondents elsewhere: a team of more than a hundred editorial and commercial staff that dwarfs most other British newspaper operations in the US.

Its ever evolving insider-outsider viewpoint continues to resonate with readers such Debbie Twyman from Independence, Missouri. When she and her husband, Craig Whitney, a fellow teacher, taught civics and government, they set up a homespun website that included the Guardian in its list of reliable news sources.

Twyman says: You guys have really stepped up your coverage of issues in the US and, in particular, youve followed politics so closely over the last few years. Sometimes you guys scoop US papers; sometimes you get there before they do.

But sometimes you cover things that they arent even covering at all, and one of the reasons we put the Guardian link on our webpage is we want kids to have an international perspective. The Guardians a reliable, responsible, well-sourced newspaper. Youre trustworthy.

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200 years of US coverage: how the Guardian found its feet stateside - The Guardian

Pastor ruling delays Alabama execution

ATMORE, Ala. -- An Alabama inmate won a reprieve from a planned lethal injection after the U.S. Supreme Court said the state must allow his personal pastor in the death chamber.

Thursday's scheduled execution of Willie B. Smith III was called off by Alabama officials after the justices maintained an injunction issued by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, saying he could not be executed without his pastor present in the chamber.

Department of Corrections spokeswoman Samantha Rose said the execution would not proceed given the ruling. Alabama has maintained that non-prison staff members should not be in the room for security reasons.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote in an opinion joined by three other justices, including Amy Coney Barrett, that "Alabama has not carried its burden of showing that the exclusion of all clergy members from the execution chamber is necessary to ensure prison security."

[CORONAVIRUS: Click here for our complete coverage arkansasonline.com/coronavirus]

Smith was convicted of abducting a woman at gunpoint from an ATM in 1991, stealing $80 from her and then taking her to a cemetery where he shot her in the back of the head.

The case was the latest in a series of legal fights over personal spiritual advisers at executions. If the execution had gone forward, it would have been the first by a state in 2021 and one of the few at the state level since the start of the covid-19 pandemic last year.

Year's Mardi Gras message: Stay away

Crowds usually welcome and even encouraged in tourist-dependent New Orleans in the days leading up to Mardi Gras are being warned to stay away as the final weekend of the 2021 season began Friday amid efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

Police Chief Shaun Ferguson held a news conference with state police and the New Orleans sheriff to drive home the point, saying a bar closure order that took effect Friday would be enforced through Fat Tuesday, the end of the annual pre-Lenten festivities.

All parades in the city have been canceled.

Mardi Gras celebrations last year are now believed to have contributed to an early surge of infections in Louisiana.

Ferguson emphasized that Bourbon Street would be closed to cars and pedestrians from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m. each day, with access limited to residents, business employees, hotel guests and restaurant patrons. Restaurant capacity will be limited as it has been throughout the pandemic. And bars, including those that have temporary food permits enabling them to operate as restaurants, will be closed -- not just in the French Quarter but throughout the city -- until Ash Wednesday.

Mississippi kills, revives Rx pot tax bill

JACKSON, Miss. -- The Mississippi Senate did an about-face on a proposal to set a 7% sales tax on medical marijuana, first killing a bill and then reviving it hours later in an unusual session after midnight.

The first vote happened Thursday night, and the second one happened early Friday.

Mississippi residents voted by a wide margin in November to adopt Initiative 65, a constitutional amendment that authorizes medical marijuana in the state.

The initiative requires the state Health Department to create a program so marijuana can be available later this year to people with "debilitating" medical conditions. The long list includes cancer, epilepsy and sickle cell anemia.

However, the Mississippi Supreme Court is set to hear arguments April 14 in a lawsuit that is seeking to block the medical marijuana program.

Republican state Sen. Kevin Blackwell of Olive Branch said his proposal would be a backup in case a court blocks Initiative 65. The proposed sales tax is a new aspect, though. Initiative 65 did not include a tax.

Members of the state Board of Health said Feb. 3 that regulations for a medical marijuana program in Mississippi would be in place by a July 1 deadline, but they cautioned that it's unclear how soon marijuana might be available to patients.

Assange extradition still Justice's plan

The U.S. Justice Department is still seeking to move forward with the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whose transfer to the United States to face espionage charges was blocked by a British court.

British Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled last month that while the case against Assange was sound, his fragile mental health put him at "substantial risk" of committing suicide in a U.S. prison.

Justice Department spokesman Mark Raimondi confirmed that the United States has appealed Baraitser's ruling, meeting a Friday deadline. The filing is not public.

Assange is accused of helping former Army private Chelsea Manning obtain and leak classified information on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation and other civil liberties organizations also wrote asking the Biden administration to abandon the prosecution.

Under the Trump administration, officials argued that Assange was not a journalist but a freelance intelligence operative who sought to undermine the United States for political reasons.

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The nation in brief - Arkansas Online

President Trump was the most aggressive prosecutor of whistleblowers of any president in American history. The previous record was set by President Obama, but the Trump administration launched as many prosecutions in four years as Obama did in eight.

President Biden, as part of his campaign to undo many of his predecessor's worst policies, should pardon most of these folks, or at least commute their sentences. Disclosing classified information that the public deserves to know does not deserve a lengthy prison sentence.

Of all the candidates for a pardon, Reality Winner's case is most obviously convincing, though as yet has not gotten the wide attention it deserves. She did indeed leak classified documents to The Intercept (which horribly botched its security protocols and basically handed her to the FBI, though she probably would have been caught eventually), which is against the law. But the exposure of these documents did not even slightly harm national security.

Here's what seems to have happened. Winner listened to the Intercepted podcast in early 2017, including one episode in which former Intercept co-founder and journalist Glenn Greenwald expressed skepticism about the idea that Russia had hacked the DNC and John Podesta to boost Donald Trump in the 2016 campaign. Therefore she sent the publication classified material showing the NSA had evidence that not only was Russia behind those hacks, it had actually successfully hacked into an election software vendor. For that she was sentenced to five years and three months in prison. It was the longest sentence in history for simply leaking to the press and very obviously related to Trump's desire to punish people who pointed out his connection to the Russia hack.

Any reasonable American should favor her release because the public has a right to know when U.S. intelligence agencies think a hostile foreign power is trying to compromise America's electoral machinery. At bottom, she was simply doing what the NSA is supposed to do protect the country. Indeed, as Kerry Howley (a journalist who has been following the Winner story closely) points out, when The Intercept published its story on the leak, the federal agency in charge of assisting state election authorities put out a bulletin informing state governments what had happened for the first time. Several states were outraged that they hadn't been informed earlier, and justifiably so. It's not the first time that intelligence agencies' compulsive secrecy and over-classification has gotten in the way of doing their purported jobs.

In any case, all the important details Winner leaked were later published in the Mueller report. Her action was carried out in good faith; she did no harm and at least some good. And anyone who simply believes in proportional punishment must agree that, even on the harshest possible reading of events, Winner has already paid for what she did and then some. She should be pardoned immediately.

Edward Snowden's case may be less convincing for many. He, of course, is the former NSA contractor who leaked details of the agency's then-dragnet surveillance to Laura Poitras, Greenwald, and other reporters at The Guardian back in 2013. That was a more traditional whistleblower-style activity of exposing a program that was legally and constitutionally dubious, but nominally dedicated to protecting national security.

In reality, intelligence agencies later admitted in classified documents that the dragnet program was basically useless. Snowden's revelations led a U.S. court to declare the program illegal, and helped lead to NSA reform becoming law proving beyond question the public value of what he did. And once again, seven years being exiled in a rather dangerous foreign country (he has been stuck in Russia since 2013) is severe enough punishment on its own. He should be pardoned and allowed to return home.

Julian Assange is a more noxious personality, but the current U.S. effort to extradite and prosecute him should be dropped (following Obama administration precedent, which Biden so far has refused to do). Assange may have actively assisted Russia in its efforts to hack Democrats' emails in 2016, and he did push the disgusting Seth Rich conspiracy theory, but the Trump administration's moves against Assange had nothing to do with those things. Instead he is being prosecuted mostly for publishing classified material from Chelsea Manning a decade ago which, if successful, would blast a hole in the First Amendment and would put other journalists who do the same thing in every major news publication at risk.

There are at least five more people in jail, on probation, or facing some other punishment for clear whistleblower activity under Trump:

- John Fry is a former IRS employee who leaked Suspicious Activity Reports (a document in the Treasury department detailing suspect bank transactions) involving Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen, and recently got five years probation. Revealing corruption among the ex-president's associates is good and he should be pardoned.

- Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards is a former Treasury employee who leaked SARs detailing suspect transactions from Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort to BuzzFeed News, and faces possible prison time. She should be pardoned for the same reason as Fry.

- Daniel Hale is a former intelligence analyst who leaked documents about drone warfare to The Intercept, and faces years in prison if convicted. The American people deserve to know about the operations of the U.S. military. He should be pardoned.

- Terry Albury, who was the only Black FBI agent in a detail assigned to look into the Somali-American community, sent documents about endemic racism in the agency to The Intercept, and was sentenced to 4 years in prison in 2018. The problem of racism in law enforcement speaks for itself these days; he should be pardoned.

- Navy Captain Brett Crozier commanded an aircraft carrier and was fired for desperately pointing out the fact his ship had a massive COVID-19 outbreak, which embarrassed Trump. He should get his job back.

President Trump wildly abused his pardon power deploying it mainly to protect his criminal friends from prosecution. President Biden could make a clean break with Trump's horrible reign by putting the pardon back to its intended use, and ending the U.S. government's war on whistleblowers.

The rest is here:
End the war on whistleblowers - The Week

Near the end of one of the character Vito Corleones iconic scenes in the movieTheGodfather(1972), he talks to his son Michael about how other mafia families will organize and come after the new don intending to murder him. With political correctness in mind, the scene still has much to teach those whove had this whole, unified rotten political and economic system coming at them for a very long time.

How will neoliberal Democrats and far-right fascists of the Republican Party come at the political left following the reenactment of the Reichstag fire (1933) at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021?

Had the forces of reaction had an organized Il Duce (For those still sensitive about labels, the idea of a Fhrer is also well suited for the role.) at its helm anytime from election day November 2020 on, then those of us on the left would have been in deep shit. We lucked out as a bumbling narcissist was in control.

Had protesters from the Black Lives Matter movement, or the left demonstrated at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 in large numbers with the intent of making a strong statement against the power elite, the result would have been obvious.

Those on the left know that our rights have been hammered away since the attacks of September 11, 2001. Our voices were silenced earlier by the destruction of the Vietnam Syndrome, or the hesitancy of those in the US to back war. Edward Snowdens revelations about the National Security Agencys collection of the phone data of ordinary US citizens got him a one-way ticket to Russia, the alternative being a long prison sentence in a maximum security US federal prison. Readers need only look as far as former Army member Chelsea Manning to learn how the government will come at those who choose to inform the public about what is going on behind the scenes of US endless wars.

We on the left need to know about the most extreme cases of censorship, but our own experiences over decades inform us about how censorship and self-censorship work in limiting what the mass media will air. When was the last time thatMSNBC, CNN, CBS, PBS, NPR,or theNew York TimesorWashington Postaired or wrote a major piece about public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky or Chris Hedges? Dont hold our collective breath until those media outlets run and air stories about the left or a critical analysis about the right. The fire is burning amid the ashes of republican democracy, but dont ask for rational assessments about the military-industrial-financial class of immensely wealthy elites to happen soon.

Over the past several years, the march to privatize and censor some on the Internet has moved along with many sites such as the one on which I write these words harder to find during a search of topics on search engines. Just as the algorithms of consumerism are in place when a consumer looks for a pair of sneakers, so are algorithms in place to steer those on the Internet away from critical commentary and information.

We know the propaganda machine behind the erroneous claim that Russia was behind Hillary Clintons loss to Donald Trump in 2016 and that the US only has noble designs for its part in the war in Syria. Even some media outlets on the left will throw in their support with the noble cause of the endless proxy war in Syria.

What we dont know with any level of certainty is how many members are on the far right and how many of those people are armed and ready to carry out attacks against innocent people Homeland security warns of heightened domestic terror threat after US Capitol attack,Guardian, January 27, 2021):

The US Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday issued a national terrorism bulletin warning of the lingering potential for violence from people motivated by anti-government sentiment after Joe Bidens election.

The bulletin suggests the riot by a mob of Donald Trump supporters at the US Capitol on 6 Januay [sic] may embolden extremists and set the stage for additional attacks.

We know that some on the left have voiced sympathy with the Capitol marauders in a kind of I feel your pain missive. The left needs to be cognizant of fatal contradictions before taking up the cause of people who have lethal military-style weapons and ammunition and are ready to implement deadly plans against innocent people. One popular program that airs on the Internet recently featured an interview with a self-identified member of the far-right Boogaloo Boys. A semi-automatic rifle stood against the wall of the room in which the interviewee sat, located just to the left of a backpack. The insanity of the US gun culture and its melding with the far right could be easily identified from that scene (Jimmy Dore Boogaloo Boys Interview Sparks Outrage Among Critics: Youre a Sucker,Newsweek, January 25, 2021).

Glen Ford of theBlack Agenda Reportwrites:

The U.S. corporate ruling class finally has its Reichstag fire to justify suspension of constitutional liberties under cover of national emergency. (Democratic Fascists Prepare to Drop the Hammer, January 28, 2021).

It cant happen here? The Red Scare and McCarthyism are proof that it can! A splintered, weak, and divided left would have been no match for an organized assault that continued after January 6, 2021. The assault of the foot soldiers of the right will regain strength as long as real and imaginary injustices go unanswered and as long as there are those who plan and enjoy murder and spread hate (Its endemic: state-level Republican groups lead partysdrift toward extremism.Guardian, January 31, 2021). The equation of white supremacists, anti-Semites, anti-immigrant louts, Islamophobes, misogynists, radical-right insurrectionists, with a nation-wide elected political base and millions of supporters does not point to the survival of republican democracy. That inequality has grown since the move toward a deindustrializedsociety since the 1970s is fodder for the far right (An Emboldened Extremist Wing Flexes Its Power in a Leaderless G.O.P.,New York Times, February 1, 2021). Many are dedicated to the Medieval premise of anti-science.

The late singer-songwriter Phil Ochs had it right inCrucifixion: But ignorance is everywhere, and people have their way.

Excerpt from:
How Are They Going to Come at Us? - CounterPunch.org - CounterPunch